Samuel Rawson Gardiner

The son of Rawson Boddam Gardiner, he was born in Ropley, Hampshire. He was educated at Winchester College and Christ Church, Oxford, where he obtained a first class in Literae Humaniores. He was subsequently elected to fellowships at All Souls (1884) and Merton (1892). For some years he was professor of modern history at King's College London, and devoted his life to the subject. In 1896 he was elected to give the first series of Ford Lectures at Oxford University. He died in Sevenoaks, aged 72. ==Puritan Revolution==

Gardiner published his history of the Puritan Revolution and English Civil War in three series of 19 volumes, originally published under different titles, beginning with the accession of King James I of England. Following Gardiner's death, it was completed in two volumes by Charles Harding Firth as The Last Years of the Protectorate (1909). A standard modern study of Gardiner is Mark Nixon, Samuel Rawson Gardiner and the Idea of History (Royal Historical Society/Boydell Press, 2010). ==Evaluation of Oliver Cromwell==

As a foremost historian of the era, Gardiner's evaluation of Oliver Cromwell is especially significant. No figure in English history has called forth a greater range of evaluations. On the positive side Gardiner concluded: :"The man—it is ever so with the noblest—was greater than his work. In his own heart lay the resolution to subordinate self to public ends, and to subordinate material to moral and spiritual objects of desire. He was limited by the defects which make imperfect the character and intellect even of the noblest and the wisest of mankind. He was limited still more by the unwillingness of his contemporaries to mould themselves after his ideas. The blows that he had struck against the older system had their enduring effects. Few wished for the revival of the absolute kingship, of the absolute authority of a single House of Parliament, or of the Laudian system of governing the Church....The living forces of England—forces making for the destruction of those barriers which he was himself breaking through, buoyed him up—as a strong and self-confident swimmer, he was carried onward by the flowing tide." :"In the latter portion of the Protector's career it was far otherwise. His failure to establish a permanent Government was not due merely to his deficiency in constructive imagination. It was due rather to two causes: the umbrage taken at his position as head of an army whose interference in political affairs gave even more offence than the financial burdens it imposed on a people unaccustomed to regular taxation; and the reaction which set in against the spiritual claims of that Puritanism of which he had become the mouthpiece…. It was no reaction against the religious doctrines or ecclesiastical institutions upheld by the Protector that brought about the destruction of his system of government.... So far as the reaction was not directed against militarism, it was directed against the introduction into the political world of what appeared to be too high a standard of morality, a reaction which struck specially upon Puritanism, but which would have struck with as much force upon any other form of religion which, like that upheld by Laud, called in the power of the State to enforce its claims. Even though Oliver was in his own person no sour fanatic, as Royalist pamphleteers after the Restoration falsely asserted; it is impossible to deny that he strove by acts of government to lead men into the paths of morality and religion beyond the limit which average human nature had fixed for itself." :"In dealing with foreign nations his mistake on this head was more conspicuous, because he had far less knowledge of the conditions of efficient action abroad than he had at home. It may fairly be said that he knew less of Scotland than of England, less of Ireland than of Great Britain, and less of the Continent than of any one of the three nations over which he ruled. It has sometimes been said that Oliver made England respected in Europe. It would be more in accordance with truth to say that he made her feared." :"Oliver's claim to greatness can be tested by the undoubted fact that his character receives higher and wider appreciation as the centuries pass by. The limitations on his nature—the one-sidedness of his religious zeal, the mistakes of his policy—are thrust out of sight, the nobility of his motives, the strength of his character, and the breadth of his intellect, force themselves on the minds of generations for which the objects for which he strove have been for the most part attained, though often in a different fashion from that which he placed before himself. Even those who refuse to waste a thought on his spiritual aims remember with gratitude his constancy of effort to make England great by land and sea; and it would be well for them also to be reminded of his no less constant efforts to make England worthy of greatness." ==Family==

Gardiner married twice. First to Isabell Irving, daughter of Rev Edward Irving. After her death in 1878, he married fellow historian Bertha Cordey in 1883. His great-granddaughter, Mary Boyce, was a British scholar of Iranian languages and an authority on Zoroastrianism. ==Works==

• History of England from the Accession of James I to the Disgrace of Chief-justice Coke. 1602–1616 (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1863) read online • Prince Charles and the Spanish Marriage, 1617–1623 (2 vols.) (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1869) read online • ''The Thirty Years' War, 1618–1648'' (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1874) read online • History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War, 1603–1642 (10 vols.) (London: Longmans, Green and Company) (1883–1884, 1896–1901, 1904–1908) read online • History of the Great Civil War, 1642–1649 (3 vols.) (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1886–1891; 4 vols., 1893–4, 1904–1905) read online • The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1628–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889, 1906, 1951) read online • ''A Student's History of England, from the Earliest Times to 1885'' (2 vols.) (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1890–1891, 1895–1897). read online • The Hanoverian Period (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1891) read online • Outline of English History B.C. 55 – A.D. 1886 (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1891) read online • A School Atlas of English History (ed.) (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1892) read online • History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649–1660 (4 vols.) (London: Longman, Green and Company, 1897–1901, 1894–1903). read online • What Gunpowder Plot Was (London, Longmans, Green and Company, 1897) read online • Letters and papers relating to the First Dutch War, 1652–1654 Publications of the Navy Records Society. 6 vols. (London: Navy Records Society, 1898–1930). [Vols 1–2 edited by Samuel Rawson Gardiner. Volume 3 edited by Samuel Rawson Gardiner and C. T. Atkinson; vols 4–6 by C. T. Atkinson.] • Oliver Cromwell (London, Goupil and Company, 1899, 1901, 1903) read online • Prince Rupert at Lisbon (ed.) (London: Royal Historical Society, 1902) read online • Outline of English History B.C. 55 – A.D. 1902 (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1903, 1905) read online He edited collections of papers for the Camden Society, and in 1891- was editor of the English Historical Review. ==References==