Froude's account of Becket's appointment to the Archbishopric of Canterbury, his scruples, and how he overcame them, is described by Freeman as "pure fiction." It was taken from William of Canterbury, and, though open to doubt upon some points, is quite as likely to be true as the narrative preferred by Freeman.

The most serious error, indeed the only serious error, attributed by Freeman to Froude is the statement that Becket's murderers were shielded from punishment by the King.
Freeman alleges with his usual confidence that they could not be tried in a secular court because their victim was a bishop.

It is doubtful whether a lay tribunal ever admitted such a plea, and the Constitutions of Clarendon, which were in force at the time of Becket's assassination, abolished clerical privileges altogether.
Here Froude was almost certainly right, and Freeman almost certainly wrong.
But Freeman was not content with making mountains of mole-hills, with speaking of a great historian as if he were a pretentious dunce.

He stooped to write the words, "Natural kindliness, if no other feeling, might have kept back the fiercest of partisans from ignoring the work of a long-forgotten brother, and from dealing stabs in the dark at a brother's almost forgotten fame." The meaning of this sentence, so far as it has a meaning, was that Hurrell Froude composed a fragment on the Life of Becket which the mistaken kindness of friends published after his own premature death.

If Froude had written anonymously against this work, the phrase "stabs in the dark" would have been intelligible.