istorical
writers. He was thorough in his investigation, sparing neither labor nor
pains to get at the truth. It may well enough be true that the
designedly untruthful historian, like the undevout astronomer, is an
anomaly, for inaccuracy comes not from purpose, but from neglect. Now
Gardiner went to the bottom of things, and was not satisfied until he
had compassed all the material within his reach. As a matter of course
he read many languages. Whether his facts were in Spanish, Italian,
French, German, Dutch, Swedish, or English made apparently no
difference. Nor did he stop at what was in plain language. He read a
diary written chiefly in symbols, and many letters in cipher. A large
part of his material was in manuscript, which entailed greater labor
than if it had been in print. As one reads the prefaces to his various
volumes and his footnotes, amazement is the word to express the feeling
that a man could have accomplished so much in forty-seven years. One
feels that there is no one-sided use of any material. The Spanish, the
Venetian, the French, the Dutch nowhere displaces the English. In
Froude's Elizabeth one gets the impression that the Simancas manuscripts
furnish a disproportionate basis of the narrative; in Ranke's England,
that the story is made up too much from the Venetian archives. Gardiner
himself copied many Simancas manuscripts in Spain, and he studied the
archives in Venice, Paris, Brussels, and Rome, but these, and all the
other great mass of foreign material, are kept adjunctive to that found
in his own land. My impression from a study of his volumes is that more
than half of his material is in manuscript, but because he has matter
which no one else had ever used, he does not neglect the printed pages
open to every one. To form "a judgment on the character and aims of
Cromwell," he writes, "it is absolutely necessary to take Carlyle's
monumental work as a starting point;"[153] yet, distrusting Carlyle's
printed transcripts, he goes back to the original speeches and letters
themselves. Carlyle, he says, "amends the text without warning" in many
places; these emendations Gardiner corrects, and out of the abundance of
his learning he stops a moment to show how Carlyle has misled the
learned Dr. Murray in attributing to Cromwell the use of the word
"communicative" in its modern meaning, when it was on the contrary
employed in what is now an obsolete sense.[154]

Gardiner's great work is the History of