Samuel Rawson Gardiner

"Ranke is cold and unenthusiastic; and, in judging individuals, it is well to be cold and unenthusiastic. But is there no room for warmth of feeling in recounting the efforts and the struggles of the race? Is it not possible to do for history what Darwin has done for science? Ranke, at all events, did not do it. He knew of the influence upon individuals of great waves of feeling and opinion; but he does not seek for the law of human progress which underlies them. He does not rejoice in that progress, or grieve at failure. Hence, perhaps, in part his preference for writing the history of many nations during the same period, rather than the history of one nation consecutively. To say this, however, is only to say that there is no finality in scientific progress. Whatever shape the histories of the future may take, they will assuredly be built on the foundations which Ranke has laid down with unerring hand."

"England, it has been said by one who, in our own days, has exhibited the old Puritan virtues to a world which had well-nigh forgotten them, has been saved by its adventurers—that is to say, by the men who, careless whether their ways are like the ways of others, or whether there may not be some larger interpretation of the laws by which the world is governed than any which they have themselves been able to conceive, have set their hearts on realising, first in themselves and then in others, their ideal of that which is best and holiest. Such adventurers the noblest of the Puritans were. Many things existed not dreamed of in their theology, many things which they misconceived, or did not even conceive at all; but they were brave and resolute, feeding their minds upon the bread of heaven, and determined within themselves to be servants of no man and of no human system."

"It has not, I hope, been for nothing that many years ago, as a young and unknown writer, I deliberately refrained from selecting a subject more attractive in its own nature than the reign of James I. could possibly be. It seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, that it was the duty of a serious inquirer to search into the original causes of great events rather than, for the sake of catching at an audience, to rush unprepared upon the great events themselves. My reward has been that, whether the present work is well or ill done, it is at all events far better done than it could have been if I had commenced with the tale of the Puritan Revolution itself."

"To the historian no more interesting period can be found than one in which men of virtue and ability strove with one another in seeking the solution of the highest problems at a time when the old chain of precedent had been violently snapped, and when all things seemed possible to the active intelligence."

"Whatever the future may have in reserve, this present work has constantly reminded me by how deep a gulf we are separated from the time when I commenced my labours, now some twenty-two years ago. Macaulay and Forster were then in possession of the field. The worship of the Puritans was in the ascendant, and to suggest that it was possible to make out a reasonable case for Bacon and Strafford was regarded as eccentric. All this is changed now. Few are to be found to say a good word for Puritanism, and the mistakes of the Long Parliament are unveiled with an unsparing hand. A dislike of agitation and disturbance has in some quarters taken the place of a dislike of arbitrary power, whilst reverence for culture has often left little room for reverence for liberty."

"Certainly the politics of the seventeenth century, when studied for the mere sake of understanding them, assume a very different appearance from that which they had in the eyes of men who, like Macaulay and Forster, regarded them through the medium of their own political struggles. Eliot and Strafford were neither Whigs nor Tories, Liberals nor Conservatives. As Professor Seeley was, I believe, the first to teach directly, though the lesson is indirectly involved in every line written by Ranke, the father of modern historical research, the way in which Macaulay and Forster regarded the development of the past—that is to say, the constant avowed or unavowed comparison of it with the present—is altogether destructive of real historical knowledge."

"The statesman uses his imagination to predict the result of changes to be produced in the actually existing state of society, either by the natural forces which govern it, or by his own action. The historian uses his imagination in tracing out the causes which produced that existing state of society."

"The more of a student he is—and no one can be a historian without being a very devoted student—the more he is removed from that intimate contact with men of all classes and of all modes of thought, from which the statesman derives by far the greater part of that knowledge of mankind which enables him to give useful play to his imaginative power for their benefit."

"Unless the historian can feel an affectionate as well as an intelligent interest in the personages with whom he deals, he will hardly discover the key to the movements of the society of which they formed a part. The statesman, too, will be none the worse if, in studying the past, he is reminded that his predecessors had to deal with actual men and women in their complex nature, and if thereby he learns that pity for the human race which was the inspiring thought of the New Atlantis, and which is the source of all true and noble effort."

"What may be fairly demanded alike of Cromwell's admirers and of his critics is that they shall fix their eyes upon him as a whole. To one of them he is the champion of liberty and peaceful progress, to another the forcible crusher of free institutions, to a third the defender of oppressed peoples, to a fourth the asserter of his country's right to dominion. Every one of the interpreters has something on which to base his conclusions. All the incongruities of human nature are to be traced somewhere or other in Cromwell's career. What is more remarkable is that this union of apparently contradictory forces is precisely that which is to be found in the English people, and which has made England what she is at the present day."

"By those who stand aloof from us we are represented as grasping at wealth and territory, incapable of imaginative sympathy with subject races, and decking our misconduct with moral sentiments intended to impose on the world. From our own point of view, the extension of our rule is a benefit to the world, and subject races have gained far more than they have lost by submission to a just and beneficent administration, whilst our counsels have always, or almost always, been given with a view to free the oppressed and to put a bridle in the mouth of the oppressor."

"Whatever we may say, we are and have been a forceful nation, full of vigorous vitality, claiming empire as our due, often with scant consideration for the feelings and desire of other peoples. Whatever foreigners may say, we are prone, without afterthought, to place our strength at the service of morality and even to feel unhappy if we cannot convince ourselves that the progress of the human race is forwarded by our action. When we enter into possession, those who look on us from the outside dwell upon the irregularity of our conduct in forcing ourselves into possession; whilst we, on the contrary, dwell upon the justice and order maintained after we have once established ourselves."

"With Cromwell's memory it has fared as with ourselves. Royalists painted him as a devil. Carlyle painted him as the masterful saint who suited his peculiar Valhalla. It is time for us to regard him as he really was, with all his physical and moral audacity, with all his tenderness and spiritual yearnings, in the world of action what Shakespeare was in the world of thought, the greatest because the most typical Englishman of all time. This, in the most enduring sense, is Cromwell's place in history. He stands there, not to be implicitly followed as a model, but to hold up a mirror to ourselves, wherein we may see alike our weakness and our strength."

"Freeman and Macaulay are alike in the high value they set upon parliamentary institutions. On the other hand, when Macaulay wants to make you understand a thing, he compares it with that which existed in his own day. The standard of the present is always with him. Freeman traces it to its origin, and testifies to its growth. The strength of this mode of proceeding in an historian is obvious. Its weakness is that it does not help him to appreciate statesmanship looking forward and trying to find a solution of difficult problems. Freeman's attitude is that of the people who cried out for the good laws of King Edward, trying to revive the past."

"The most important works for the period are by the late Samuel Rawson Gardiner and Charles Harding Firth... Gardiner's History of England, 1603–42, 10 vols., 1883–4; History of the Great Civil War, 1642–9, 4 vols., 1893; and History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, 4 vols., 1903, cover the period from 1603 to 1656 with unexampled thoroughness. Even after the lapse of fifty years, it is difficult to add substantially to, or to make more than minor corrections of, this narrative, which is, however, mainly confined to political and constitutional history, with no attempt to treat systematically the economic or social life of the period."

"His best memorial is his history. Its pages reveal the thoroughness of his workmanship and his single-minded devotion to truth. The book was based on a mass of materials hitherto unknown or imperfectly utilised, and those materials were weighed and sifted with scientific skill. Each new edition was corrected with conscientious care as fresh evidence came to light. In his narrative minute accuracy and wide research were combined with sound judgment, keen insight, and a certain power of imagination. Earlier historians of the period, and some of Gardiner's own contemporaries, had written as partisans. Gardiner succeeded in stating fairly and sympathetically the position and the aims of both parties. He did not confine himself to relating facts, but traced the growth of the religious and constitutional ideas which underlay the conflict. No side of the national life was neglected. He won the praise of experts by his accounts of military and naval operations, elucidated continually the economic and social history of the time, and was the first to show the interaction of English and continental politics. The result of his labours was to make the period he treated better known and better understood than any other portion of English history. A narrative which fills eighteen volumes and took forty years to write is necessarily somewhat unequal as a literary composition. Many critics complained that Gardiner's style lacked the picturesqueness and vivacity of Macaulay or Froude; others that his method was too chronological. There was truth in both criticisms; but the chronological method was chosen because it enabled the historian to show the development of events far better than a more artificial arrangement would have done. He sought to interest his readers by his lucid exposition of facts and the justice of his reflections rather than by giving history the charms of fiction, and was content with the distinction of being the most trustworthy of nineteenth-century historians."

"Everybody who now writes about Cromwell must, apart from old authorities, begin by grateful acknowledgment of his inevitable debt to the devoted labours of Mr. Gardiner, our master historian of the seventeenth century."

"[Gardiner's works] constitute the standard authority and though the conceptual framework has been challenged (above all in the treatment of parliamentary affairs) it remains unshakeable as a balanced narrative."

"He has been our Master Interpreter; he has toiled year after year that his countrymen might understand what their forebears really thought and did, when they failed, where they succeeded. He has made it possible for us to understand the curious warp or twist in the regular development of this nation that has made it different from other European nations in its political and social life—a warp of a strange, possibly not wholly beneficial, kind, but a warp the conditions of which can now to some extent be made out. He has done for us as to Cromwell's day what Stubbs has done for us as to the days of Henry FitzEmpress and Earl Simon and Edward I, and he has done it by enormous toil, and by a well-devised and consistent method. Knowledge can only be achieved by rightly directed and unselfish effort. Gardiner knew this, and in the security and helpfulness of his results he had the sole reward he sought or valued."

"The late Professor Samuel Gardiner, for instance, could absorb facts, and he could state them; but he had no point of view; and the result is that his book on the most exciting period of English history resembles nothing so much as a very large heap of sawdust."