It was deeds of chivalry and endurance that he held up to the admiration of mankind.
The hero of his History, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, was not a man of brilliant gifts or dazzling attainments, but a sober, solid, servant of duty and of the State.

To most people Burghley is a far less interesting figure than his haughty and splendid sovereign, or the beautiful and seductive queen against whom he protected her.
Froude judged Burghley, as he judged Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart, by the standards of political integrity and personal honour.
The secret of Froude's influence and the source of his power is that beneath the attraction of his personality and the seductiveness of his writing there lay a bedrock of principle which could never be moved.
Professor Sanday, who preached the first University sermon at Oxford after Froude's death, referred to his "fifty years of unwearied literary activity." The period of course included, and was meant to include, The Nemesis of Faith.
"We all know," continued Dr.Sanday, "how the young and ardent Churchman followed his reason where it seemed to lead, and sacrificed a Fellowship, and, as it seemed, a career, to scruples of conscience ....

Now we can see that the difficulties which led to it were real difficulties.

It was right and not wrong that they should be raised and faced." It is the fashion to regard scruples of conscience as morbid, and the last man who troubled himself about a test was not a young and ardent Churchman, but Charles Bradlaugh.
Froude was "ever a fighter," who wished always to fight fair.

He preferred resigning his Fellowship to fighting for it on purely legal grounds, and holding it, if he could have held it, in the teeth of the College Statutes.