§ 1. I trust you will not think it inappropriate if I begin these lectures by paying my humble tribute of reverence and gratitude to the memory of the great historian who, since my appointment to this post of Ford’s Lecturer, has been taken from us. I believe that to him I am very largely indebted for the honour of appearing before you to-day[1]; and if that were so, it would only be of a piece with the many acts of kindness and encouragement which he showed me; encouragement sometimes couched in that humorous form which he loved, and which was occasionally misunderstood by those who had not, like himself, the saving gift of humour. It is not easy to measure the greatness of his loss. He was unquestionably one of the most learned men in Europe; one of the few who could venture to assert an historical negative. If he declared ‘there is no authority for such a view or statement,’ you knew that there was nothing more to be said. But even more wonderful than the extent of his learning was the way in which he could compress it, and bring it all to bear upon the particular point with which he was dealing. I daresay it has happened to you, as it has often happened to myself, to read other books and authorities, and to fancy that one had gained from them fresh facts and views, and then to go back to Stubbs and find that all our new facts and views were there already; only, until we had read more widely ourselves, we had not eyes to see all that was written there.

§ 2. But with all this, history was never to him mere erudition. It was, on the one hand, the record of human experience, a record ‘written for our learning,’ and rich with unheeded lessons; on the other, it was the gradual unfolding to human view of the purposes of God, working themselves out not only in spite of, but often by means of the weakness and waywardness of the human agents. And so he views the characters and the course of history, not, as so many historians do, merely from the outside, but, if I may so speak, from within. The characters of history are no mere puppets, to be dressed in picturesque costumes, and made to strut across the stage of the world; they ‘are men of like passions with’ us, tempted and sinning, and suffering, as we are tempted, sin, and suffer; aspiring and achieving, as we too might aspire and achieve. ‘History,’ he says, ‘cannot be well read as a chess problem, and the man who tries to read it so is not worthy to read it at all[2].’ And so we have in the Prefaces to Hoveden, Benedict of Peterborough, the Itinerarium Ricardi, and Walter of Coventry, those wonderful studies of the characters of Henry II, Richard I, and John, which must always remain as masterpieces of historical portraiture. In the same way the course of history at large is no mere complex of material and mechanical laws; it yields no countenance to that ingenious philosophy which is ‘so apt,’ as he contemptuously says, ‘to show that all things would have been exactly as they are if everything had been diametrically opposite to what it was[3].’ ‘The ebb and flow of the life of nations is seen,’ he says, ‘to depend on higher laws, more general purposes, the guidance of a Higher Hand[4].’ And so we have those wonderful summaries which conclude the second and third volumes of his Constitutional History, the finest specimens I know of historical generalisations controlled by an absolute mastery of all the facts.

§ 3. And here we find the secret of his unfailing hopefulness. The last words of that same second volume must, I think, have dwelt in the hearts of all who have ever read them; where, after speaking of the luxury, the selfishness, the hardness of the fourteenth century, and the lust, the cruelty, the futility of the fifteenth, he concludes: ‘Yet out of it emerges, in spite of all, the truer and brighter day, the season of more general conscious life, higher longings, more forbearing, more sympathetic, purer, riper liberty.’ While those who remember the Commemoration Sermon which he preached at the late Queen’s first jubilee will know that he brought the same wise spirit of hopefulness to the history of our own day. There was much in the tendencies of modern thought and of modern society which, to a man of his strong convictions as a Christian and a Churchman, was justly repugnant. But in his case ‘experience,’ and history, the record of experience, had ‘worked hope.’ Some of us may perhaps remember how in one of his public lectures he himself quoted the Psalmist’s words: ‘I said, It is mine own infirmity: but I will remember the years of the right hand of the Most Highest.’

§ 4. It is only of his character as an historian that I have a right to speak to you from this place; but perhaps you will forgive me if, as a Churchman, I just briefly put on record my sense of the loss which the Church of England has suffered in his death; though only the rulers of the Church can fully estimate the value to the Church in these anxious days of that ripe judgement, based on so unique a mastery of the history both of Church and State. We should be false to his own wise spirit of sober hopefulness if we did not trust that others may be raised up in turn to take his place.

With these few words of introduction, I turn to the proper subject of these present lectures.