I have already referred to his defence of the horrible Boiling Act which disgraced the reign and the parliament of Henry VIII.

The account of Mary Stuart's old and wizened face as it appeared when her false hair and front had been removed after her execution may be set down as an error of taste.

But what is to be said, on the score of humanity, for an historian who in the nineteenth century calmly and in cold blood defended the use of the rack?
Even here Freeman's ingenuity of suggestion did not desert him.

After quoting part, and part only, of Froude's sinister apology, he writes, "To all this the answer is very simple.

Every time that Elizabeth and her counsellors sent a prisoner to the rack they committed a breach of the law of England."+ Any one who read this article without reading the History would infer that Froude had maintained the legality, as well as the expediency, of torture.