no sense of humour. No one who knew him, and no one who read his notes on those extraordinary Pastons, could think that. In the three volumes in which that unique collection of evidence bearing on the country life of the Fifteenth Century was at last. made accessible, and intelligible, to readers, Gairdner had the opportunity of penetrating into every domestic detail of the history of an ordinary upper-class family in an out-of-the-way part of England, their loves and hates, their dinners and washing, their chapels and their bedchambers, their friends and their dependants; and most amply he availed himself of it. Thus he not only gave to English people a complete picture of an obscure age, drawn by a contemporary hand and cleaned by an expert, but he was able to prepare himself for his study of the Reformation by a thorough knowledge of the kind of people who needed to be reformed, who led the movement, and whose very ordinary ideas were carried in it to success. One need not particularise all he wrote after this. It is quite enough to say that he came to know more than any man living about Richard III., Henry VII., and Henry VIII.; perhaps quite as much as they knew themselves. An amusing instance of this is the debate that arose about the 'Little Princes in the Tower.' That chivalrous naval knight-errant, Sir Clements Markham, must needs have it that they were not murdered at all, or that if they were Henry VII. had them murdered. (I hope this is not an unfair way of putting it.) James Gairdner dealt with that opinion as delicately as Izaak Walton with the worm and as conclusively as S. R. Gardiner with the writer who said that Cecil invented the Gunpowder Plot. It was the same with the recurring faddists who believe that Perkin Warbeck was Edward IV.'s son. Those views will not be heard of seriously in history again. And Henry VII. will remain a cold, virtuous person (though we shall still be able to smile at Bishop Stubbs's account of his matrimonial projects), Cardinal Morton (honour to his memory from those who live close by his Leam, though he did tell a debtor that he should be dampné en helle) a good man, and Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a hunchback and a murderer.

But how about Henry VIII.? The curious thing is that when we come to his reign, that to which Gairdner devoted seven-tenths perhaps of his working life, and about which he knew very much more than any other person living or dead, we have the greatest difficulty in extracting a judgment. There is nothing in his books like that marvellous picture in Stubbs's Lectures. We must draw

our own portrait of the lion, counting up all that the lion devoured. We have to be content with a sentence here and there, and those most frequently bare statements of fact, not estimates of character, such as this:

The revolution effected by Henry VIII. was a thing without parallel in history, and it is hard to realise it all at the present day.'

Perhaps that is, after all, as good a way as any. If Henry VIII. is not adequately described by his own acts, who ever will be? Gairdner seems for a moment as if he would characterise Queen Mary; but no, off he goes into the things she did and allowed. Here is the passage:

History has been cruel to her memory. The horrid epithet "bloody," bestowed so unscrupulously, alike on her and on Bonner and Gardiner and the bishops generally, had, at least, a plausible justification in her case from the severities to which she gave her sanction, though it was really not just, even to her. The spectacle of those cruel proceedings in public, and the enduring recollection of them afterwards, blotted out from the public mind what even at first was but imperfectly known-the painful trials which she herself had so long endured at the hands of lawless persecutors; yet it was just such lawless persecutors who had deranged the whole system of Church government, and as queen she endeavoured to suppress them by means which, if severe, were strictly legal. Among the victims no doubt there were many true heroes and really honest men; but many of them also would have been persecutors if they had had their way. Most of them retained the belief in a Catholic Church, but rejected the mass and held by the services. authorised in Edward VI.'s time. But of course this meant complete rejection of an older authority-higher, according to time-honoured theory, than that of any king or parliament-which had never been openly set aside until that generation. The revolution had not merely dethroned the Pope-it had virtually destroyed the authority of the bishops. Under Edward VI. they complained that they could no longer exercise their proper functions; the coercive jurisdiction which alone enabled them to have complete supervision of their dioceses was entirely taken away. That was certainly a fact; but it was also a fact that men were not going to endure it again. Secret baptisms, secret communions, secret readings of Scripture, were irregularities quite destructive of episcopal supervision; but they went on and were not to be put down even under Mary.'

Writing like this, it will be said, does not come from a great

historian. No one will pretend to compare Gairdner with Froude in his power of telling a story or of turning facts into romance. There was no halo of enthusiasm about his writing, not any attempt to decorate and attract. But it is not difficult to claim for him that he was a great historian nevertheless. The great, the primary assertion we make for him is this: that a reader may always be quite certain that in Gairdner he will find the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so far as it could be known at the time the particular book was written. That is the characteristic of that long series of articles in the 'Dictionary of National Biography,' and again in the 'Dictionary of English Church History,' published only the other day, of his chapters in the Cambridge Modern History,' of his History of the Church of England from Henry VIII. to Mary,' of his three stout volumes on 'Lollardy and the Reformation.' Every statement, you may be quite certain, has chapter and verse for it. He will not give you brilliant generalisations like Maitland or enchanting pictures of romantic scenes or characters like Froude; but under all he says you will be conscious of an immense strength, sincerity, and veracity: you will know that you stand here, as he stands without fear or favour, on the solid bedrock of fact. And that is why Gairdner's work will endure longer than that of several of his greater contemporaries; it has no such danger of being superseded. Look at Maitland's brilliant chapters in which he takes the Reformation in England and Scotland together and weaves the two discordant stories into a harmonious, and quite incredible, whole. Those chapters which delighted readers at first, and carried the little historians off their feet in jubilation, will have no influence at all on the writing of Reformation history in time to come. They slur over far too many difficulties and ignore far too many outstanding facts. But Gairdner ignores nothing. One might say, with a smile, of one who has such a passion for fact, that he does not even ignore ideas. Take a few words from the modest preface in which he explained what he meant to do in Lollardy and the Reformation.' He describes how he had tried to tell what he believes to be the truth about this very important period of Church History' when he wrote a volume in the series edited by Dr. Stephens and Dr. Hunt. Now he wished to see the whole movement in its origin and results. Before, he was restricted to the reigns of Henry, Edward, and Mary.

But the Reformation, as a study by itself, forbids us to confine our view even to one single century. We must look back for the

predisposing causes; we must look forward to the subsequent developments, and we must endeavour to realise from both causes and developments the unity of the whole subject, and the position at which we have arrived in our own day as a true and natural consequence of all that has gone before.

It is not a mere study of events that will suffice for this. In the religious history of a nation one might almost treat events, even of a religious character, as matters of subordinate interest. Great events, indeed, must be noted, not only as special crises due to the development of new forces, but as conditions laid down for future progress; and it has been my main purpose to inquire how far they either controlled or were controlled by the religious feeling of the nation. In this attempt I think I may be pardoned for passing over much that is of considerable interest, not only in political but even in ecclesiastical history. The ancestry and growth of ideas that have revolutionised the world are far more important matters than the reception of a legate or the proclamation of a latter-day crusade.

Therefore the last work he wrote was a study of ideas and books as well as of facts and men; and it is a book which shows him at his best, his most natural self. Quietly he rambles on, staying you for a moment with the fullest footnotes, but always with his own aim quite clear before his eye. Nothing is allowed to escape you, and you arise, rather exhausted perhaps, but feeling what you never quite feel with Stubbs or Gardiner, certainly never with Lord Acton, that you now know as much about the matter as anybody can. And that surely is what it is part of the business of the historian to make you feel.

That tall, serious Scotsman, who looked at you with a certain sincere austerity, had determined to know the truth, and he wished you to know it too, for he felt certain, behind all his discoveries and convictions, that the truth would make you free.

Now, to sum him up, what did this great archivist do for English history? He settled a great number of those small matters on which men make great decisions once and for all. A straw not only shows how the wind blows, but very often will turn the scales for a particular historical conclusion. Let me give two little instances which do not go quite so far as that, but still have a really important bearing on Reformation men and things. Wilkins nearly two centuries ago printed the terrible indictment which Archbishop Morton produced against a wicked abbot of St. Albans. There has been every sort of attempt by historians of bias to exploit,

manipulate, or burke this document. The last attempt was to discredit it indirectly by declaring that it was impossible to find an abbot to whom it referred. Gairdner settled that matter, quite clearly, once and for all. The second instance shall be this. Investigators of the part Cranmer played in the Reformation were anxious to inquire how much he was affected by what Stubbs called a certain evangelical obliquity in Anne Boleyn's eyes.' They discovered that he was chaplain in her family.

Instantly arose a piercing scream. We were asked for our evidence. I shamefacedly confess that I myself could not remember where I had found the statement, though I was certain it was contemporary, and could only mumble like Mr. Justice Stareleigh that it was in my notes, and feel bound to modify it in a new edition of my book. But out came Gairdner's book, and there of course were the facts all right, and the very reference I had forgotten to the book I had on my shelves. Cranmer indeed was chaplain of this Anna.' And thereby must have hung many a tale.

But the settling of small matters does not, perhaps, carry you very far. What you want to know is-what did this great investigator think of the great English Reformation itself? That is not very easy to answer. An intelligent young clergyman once asked him what he thought about the continuity of the Church,' and received a long and careful answer which must have puzzled him very much indeed. But while we are confident that, whatever Gairdner's own opinions may have been, they did not influence his most exact and scrupulous mind one hair-breadth in its treatment of historic fact, we may be helped to see why he so well understood the position of the Church of England in the great crisis of her history, by some knowledge of his own religious convictions. So S. R. Gardiner was the better able to understand Puritanism because he so much admired Cromwell and was proud to trace descent from him. In his last book James Gairdner revealed something of his own religious history when he wrote:

'I have never felt the least personal inclination towards the Church of Rome, though I confess I have always desired to understand it. But I have always desired to understand other religions also. For I myself was brought up outside of all the orthodoxies, and for half my life what I now feel to be the vital doctrines of Christianity, acknowledged all the world over, were certainly quite unintelligible to me, and accordingly incredible.'

But he did not stay in that critical aloofness. In a private