James Anthony Froude FRSE (/fruːd/ FROOD;[1][2] 23 April 1818 – 20 October 1894) was an English historian, novelist, biographer, and editor of Fraser's Magazine.

From his upbringing amidst the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement, Froude intended to become a clergyman, but doubts about the doctrines of the Anglican church, published in his scandalous 1849 novel The Nemesis of Faith, drove him to abandon his religious career.

Froude's brother Richard Hurrell had been one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement, a group which advocated a Catholic rather than a Protestant interpretation of the Anglican Church.

Froude's experience living with an Evangelical clergyman in Ireland conflicted with the Movement's characterisation of Protestantism, and his observations of Catholic poverty repulsed him.

[7] He increasingly turned to the unorthodox religious views of writers such as Spinoza, David Friedrich Strauss, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Goethe, and especially Thomas Carlyle.

However, he found himself unable to credit the accounts of Neot or any other saint, ultimately considering them mythical rather than historical, a discovery which further shook his religious faith.

The Nemesis of Faith in particular raised a storm of controversy, being publicly burned in Oxford, at Exeter College, by William Sewell,[12][13] and deemed "a manual of infidelity" by the Morning Herald.

The couple moved first to Manchester and then to North Wales in 1850, where Froude lived happily, supported by his friends Arthur Hugh Clough and Matthew Arnold.

XXXIII & XXXIV; "Bouverie's Act"), which permitted priests and deacons to resign from Holy Orders, Froude was finally able to officially rejoin the laity.

The lectures, widely discussed, raised the expected controversy, with opposition led by the Dominican friar Thomas Nicholas Burke.

Opposition caused Froude to cut his trip short, and he returned to England disappointed both by his impression of America and by the results of his lectures.

[37] On his second trip to Southern Africa in 1875, Froude was an imperial emissary charged with promoting confederation, a position which conflicted at times with his habit of lecturing on his personal political opinions.

[38] In the Cape Colony, his public statements advocating the use of forced labour on the indigenous Xhosa people were particularly controversial given that the Cape Colony was under the rule of the relatively inclusive Molteno-Merriman Government, whose stated policy to treat its Xhosa citizens as "fellow subjects with white men" Froude accused of being "rabid in its anti-Imperialist stance".

"Chameleon-like, his politics assumed the colour of his surroundings," was how the Cape Argus newspaper described his strategy.The Cape Colony was by far the largest and most powerful state in the region, and Froude thus sought audience with its prime minister, John Molteno, to convey Carnarvon's request that he lead the region's states into Carnarvon's confederation scheme.

However, Molteno rebuffed Froude, telling him that the confederation attempt was premature, that the country was "not ripe for it" and that his government would not support it in the politically volatile region.

[41][42] He made the additional point that any federation with the illiberal Boer republics would endanger the rights and franchise of the Cape's black citizens,[43] and that overall "the proposals for confederation should emanate from the communities to be affected, and not be pressed upon them from outside.

On his return to London, Froude announced, If anybody had told me two years ago that I should be leading an agitation within Cape Colony, I should have thought my informant delirious.

In 1876 he was appointed to two Royal Commissions, the first into the "Laws and Regulations relating to Home, Colonial, and International Copyright"[51] and the second "into various matters connected with the Universities of Scotland.

The conflict discouraged Froude from continuing his biography of Carlyle, as he wrote in 1881, "So much ill will has been shown me in the case of the other letters that I walk as if on hot ashes, and often curse the day when I undertook the business."

Among the strongest critics of Froude's biographical work was novelist Margaret Oliphant, who wrote in the Contemporary Review of 1883 that biography ought to be the "art of moral portrait painting" and described the publication of Jane Carlyle's papers as the "betrayal and exposure of the secret of a woman’s weakness."

[61] The controversy persisted for so long that in 1903, nearly ten years after Froude's death, his daughters decided to publish My Relations with Carlyle, which their father had written in 1887; in this pamphlet Froude attempted to justify his decisions as biographer, yet went further than his official biography had by speculating, based on "gossip and rumor" circulated by Geraldine Jewsbury,[62] that Carlyle's marriage was unconsummated due to impotence.

[64] Crichton-Browne later corroborated that after one of Jane's illnesses, her personal doctor Richard Quain sent word to Carlyle that he could "resume marital relations with his wife.

"[66] Following completion of the Life of Carlyle, Froude turned to travel, particularly to the British colonies, visiting South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and the West Indies.

From these travels he produced two books, Oceana, or, England and Her Colonies (1886) and The English in the West Indies, or The Bow of Ulysses (1888), which mixed personal anecdotes with Froude's thoughts on the British Empire.

Froude intended with these writings "to kindle in the public mind at home that imaginative enthusiasm for the Colonial idea of which his own heart was full".

[69] On the death of his adversary Edward Augustus Freeman in 1892, Froude was appointed, on the recommendation of Lord Salisbury, to succeed him as Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford.