Froude described his father as "an excellent parish priest of the old sort" who "had a taste for books, books especially of history and antiquities." Though "irregularly educated," the archdeacon had some talent as an amateur artist--drawing in the vein of J. M. W. Turner's early sketches--in addition to collecting a valuable library. A country gentleman and a landowner of consequence, the Reverend Mr. Froude was nevertheless a cold, hard, practical man who never spoke of feeling or sentiment, even in his own home. His wife, Margaret Spedding, died several months before Anthony's third birthday, leaving her youngest son to grow up in a stern, reserved, very masculine environment.
Richard Hurrell, the eldest son fifteen years Anthony's senior, was the family's acknowledged genius: "We adored Hurrell. He was sparkling brilliant, moved as a sort of king in the element which surrounded us." With John Henry Newman, John Keble, and Edward Pusey, Hurrell Froude became one of the chief figures in the conservative High Anglican revival called the Oxford Movement. Begun as a protest against what they considered an increasing threat to the church from temporal politics, the movement developed an antiliberal, antirational credo asserting for the church authoritarianism in matters of faith.
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