Meet the tour guide

There is one essential quality of a tour guide: he must know the territory.

No man knew or knows more about the 17th century—at least the first half of it—than Samuel Rawson Gardiner. The period was his life's work. He was both meticulous and precise. Gardiner's pace of documentation was this: one year of history, one year of writing. There is no doubt Gardiner knows the territory.

But what about other characteristics that make a good guide, things like amiability, curiosity, physical endurance and an open mind? I claim that Gardiner has these, too.

For details about Gardiner's life and work, see the biographical material I have collected. As one of his friends pointed out, Samuel Gardiner is not the kind of man whose biography is written. These few anecdotes, though, give some idea of the man:

• He was a teacher. At the same time he was teasing out the causitive events of an era, he was lecturing to first-year students at King's College, London on the most basic facts of the period. Nor was he a dry teacher. When asked to provide an examination question for upper-level students on the soporific author Johann Bluntschli, his contribution was "Give your reasons for thinking Mr. Bluntschli to have been an ass."
• He was energetic. He went by bicycle to many of the sites about which he wrote.
• He liked to stroll with friends. The Minnesota historian James K. Hosmer recorded this visit with Gardiner:

  He invited me to his home at Bromley in Kent, where he allowed me to read the proofs of the volume in his own great series which was just then in press. It related to matters that were vital to my purpose and I had the rare pleasure of reading a masterly work and seeing how the workman built, inserting into his draft countless marginal emendations, the application of sober second thought to the original conception. I spent the best part of the night in review and it was for me a training well worth the sacrifice of sleep. In the pleasant July afternoon we sat down to tea in the little shaded garden where I met the son and daughter of my host and also Mrs. Gardiner, an accomplished writer and his associate in his labours. The interval between tea and dinner we filled up with a long walk over the fields of Kent during which appeared the social side of the man. He told me with modesty that he was descended from Cromwell through Ireton, and the vigour of his stride, with which I found it sometimes hard to keep up, made it plain that he was of stalwart stock and might have marched with the Ironsides.

• He was Deacon of the Apostolic Church, an apocalyptic Protestant sect so rigorous that it was ejected from the Presbyterian denomination. Yet his judgments on the puritans, the catholics and the Church of England are just and even-handed.

Samuel Gardiner is our tour guide because

1. He knows the country.
2. He is amiable (if dry and occasionally pedantic).
3. He is enthusiastic.
4. He tries to see the country for what it is, not for what he wishes it had been.