The Times/1912/Obituary/Dr. James Gairdner, C.B.

We regret to announce the death, at his residence, West View, Pinner, on Monday, of Dr. James Gairdner, C.B., late of the Record Office.

By the death of Dr. Gairdner the world of historical scholarship loses one of the last survivors of the generation which produced Froude, Freeman, Stubbs, S. R. Gardiner, Acton, J. R. Green, Lecky, Creighton, and Maitland. Born at Edinburgh on March 22, 18128, James Gairdner was younger than Froude, Freeman, and Stubbs, but older than all the other historians named above, whose labours in the latter half of the nineteenth century raised historical studies in England to a position they had never attained before. Gairdner's share in this achievement was less obvious than that of any of the colleagues we have mentioned: he was not a great writer; and he produced no history on the grand scale. But his services to the scientific study of historical materials were second to none, and he was easily the foremost English archivist of his time. Almost the whole of his life was passed within the walls of the Public Record Office.

His father, John Gairdner, who lived to the age of 86, and his uncle, William Gairdner, were both noted Scottish physicians; his mother, Susanna Tennant, was granddaughter of that minister of Ayr, who is commemorated in Burns's "The Kirk Alarm" :— :D'rymple mild, D'rymple mild,
 * Though your heart's like a child,
 * And your life like the new-driven snaw,
 * Yet that winna save ye.
 * Auld Satan must have ye,
 * For preaching that three's ane an' twa

Gairdner inherited many of his great-grandfather's attractive qualities, but he followed neither his profession nor that of his father and uncle. After being educated in Edinburgh he entered the Record Office as a clerk in 1846 at the age of 18, and became Assistant Keeper of the Records in 1859. Three years before his promotion he had begun his association with the great work of his life, the monumental edition of the "Letters and Papers in the Reign of Henry VIII." Eleven volumes of State papers relating to that reign preserved in the Record Office had already been published, but the late Dr. Brewer, to whom was now entrusted the task of editing a collection of loose papers illustrative of the Reformation, persuaded the authorities that the work could not properly be done without also calendaring the vast number of papers existing outside the walls of the Record Office; and the series was begun on the plan, which distinguishes it from all the other Calendars published by the Master of the Rolls, of including all contemporary letters and papers, private and public, domestic and foreign, whether preserved in the Record Office of elsewhere. Brewer invoked Gairdner's assistance; and when Brewer died in 1879, after completing four volumes, Gairdner succeeded him as editor-in-chief. The 21st and last volume was published in 1910, 56 years after the inception of his task. The number of volumes is no guide to the magnitude of the work, for most of them have more than one part, and one (Vol. IV) has four parts and runs to over 4,000 pages. The total number of entries exceeds 50,000 and the number of documents calendared is not less than 100,000, while the index to the last volume along occupies 736 columns. The editorial standard steadily rose as the work progressed, and the result has been a corpus of historical materials unequalled in value in any other period of history, unrivalled in scholarship in any other country. It is one of the achievements of which England may well be proud, and the pride would be greater but for the decision of the authorities to discontinue the series beyond the reign of Henry VIII, and to leave Dr. Gairdner's work a magnificent torso.

Dr. Gairdner's parerga on the history of the 15th and 16th centuries might have constituted the life-work of several less industrious scholars. In 1858 he edited for the Rolls Series a volume of "Memorials of Henry VII.," and in 1861 and 1863 two volumes of "Letters and Papers" for the reigns of Richard III. and Henry VII. He also edited for the Old Camden Society "Collections of a London Citizen in the Fifteenth Century" (1876), and "Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles" (1878). But apart from his official labours his best-known editorial work was done on the famous "Paston Letters," of which he published editions in 1872-5, 1901 and 1904; his exhaustive introduction to this invaluable source of 15th-century history is perhaps his most successful literary achievement. He also prepared Brewer's prefaces to the first four volumes of the "Letters and Papers of Henry VIII." for republication as a "History of the Reign of Henry VIII." (1884). His contributions to periodicals and composite works would fill several volumes; he wrote numerous articles for the English Historical Review; his contributions to the "Dictionary of National Biography" amounted to nearly two-thirds of a volume, and included nearly all the important figures in English history between 1450 and 1550, such as Richard III., Henry VII. and VIII. and their wives, Wolsey, and Cardinal Pole; and for the "Cambridge Modern History" he wrote two chapters on the same period. In 1881 he published a collection of papers by himself and James Spedding, called "Studies in English History." His independent historical works consist of a "Life of Richard III.," published in 1878 and revised in 1898, "Henry VII." in Lord Morley's "Twelve English Statesmen" series, a volume (1902) dealing with the period 1485-1558 in Stephens and Hunt's "History of the Church of England," and "Lollardy and the Reformation," of which two volumes appeared in 1908, and a third in 1911.

In these books Gairdner's limitations were more apparent than in his editorial work. He did not possess the gifts of narrative, imagination, or humour, nor were his powers of subtle analysis in any way remarkable. Personally he was the most modest, kindly, and helpful of men, and his sympathies were warm. But for the historical period in which circumstances led him to specialize he felt a profound distaste. His criticism of nearly everything that was done at the Reformation was so severe that his sturdy Anglicanism appeared almost a nom sequitur. His father who had at one time been a Unitarian, took refuge in the Established Presbyterian Church of Scotland, looking, as Gairdner wrote, for breadth and freedom more to National Churches than to sects. The son sought satisfaction in the Established Church of England, passing from Presbyterianism to a higher and higher Anglo-Catholicism, and growing more and more convinced in his conservatism as he grew older. He deplored to the last the Disestablishment of the Irish Church, and vigorously combated all proposals to modify the position of the Athanasian Creed in the services of the Church, or that of the hereditary principle in the House of Lords. Cardinal Pole was the historical character with whom he appears to have felt the closest affinity.

Gairdner was given an honorary LL.D. at Edinburgh in 1897, and was made C.B. on his retirement from the Record Office in 1900. Oxford made him an honorary D.Litt. in 1910. He married in 1867, Annie, daughter of Joseph Sayer, of Carisbrooke, and had issue one daughter. The late Sir William Tennant Gairdner, Professor of Medicine at Glasgow University, was his elder brother.