Froude pursued his studies, reading all the collections of original documents in Strype and other chroniclers.  Why, he asked himself should Henry, this bloody and ferocious tyrant, have been so popular in his own lifetime?  Parliament, judges, juries, all the articulate classes of the community, why had they stood by him?  No doubt he could dissolve Parliament, and dismiss the judges.  But to submit without a struggle, without even protest or remonstrance, was not like Englishmen, before or since.  When Erasmus visited England he found that the laity were the best read and the best behaved in Europe, while the clergy were gluttonous, profligate, and avaricious.  No historian ever prepared himself more thoroughly for his task than Froude.  Sir Francis Palgrave, the Deputy Keeper of the Records under Sir John Romilly, offered to let him see the unpublished documents in the Chapter House at Westminster which dealt with the later years of Wolsey’s Government, and to the action of Parliament after the Cardinal’ s fall.  He examined them thoroughly, and accepted Parker’s proposal that he should write the history of the period.  But he had to leave Plas Gwynant.  The London Library, which Carlyle had founded, sufficed for contributions to magazines.  History was a more serious affair, and it was necessary for him to be, if not in London, at least near a railway.  He returned to his native county, and took a house at Babbicombe, from which, after three years, he moved to Bideford.  He made frequent visits to London, where he was the guest of his publisher, John Parker, at whose table he met Arthur Helps, John and Richard Doyle, Cornewall Lewis, Richard Trench, then Dean of Westminster, and Henry Thomas Buckle, once famous as a scientific historian.  He called on the Carlyles at their house in Chelsea, and began an intimacy only broken by death.  Carlyle himself was an excellent adviser in Froude’s peculiar field.  He had the same Puritan leanings, the same sympathy with the Reformation, the same hostility to ecclesiastical interference with secular affairs, unless, as in the case of John Knox, the interference was directed against Rome.  Froude considered him not unlike Knox in humour, keenness of intellect, integrity, and daring.  History was the one form of literature outside Goethe and Burns for which he really cared.  He had translated Wilhelm Meister in 1824, and it was probably at his suggestion that Froude translated Elective Affinities for Bohn’s Library in 1850.  Scottish history and Scottish character Carlyle knew as he knew his Bible.  His assistance and encouragement, which were freely given, proved invaluable to Froude.