Stephen Gardiner

English administrator, religious leader, and statesman

• Born: c. 1493
• Birthplace: Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, England
• Died: November 12, 1555
• Place of death: Whitehall Palace, London, England

As one of the most talented of the defenders of religious conservatism and traditional doctrine in early Tudor England, Gardiner fought the advance of Protestantism in church and state. Although his personal efforts were largely successful, ultimately his cause suffered defeat.

Early Life

Stephen Gardiner was born at Bury St. Edmunds, England. His parents were the well-to-do clothmaker John Gardiner and his wife, Agnes. Stephen appears to have been the youngest of three sons and as early as 1507 was destined for university study and a clerical career. He duly entered Trinity Hall at Cambridge University in 1511, a college founded to promote the study of civil and canon law. Although he possessed a working knowledge of Humanistic subjects and Greek, his formal degree study was in the law.

In 1518, he earned the degree of bachelor of civil law, followed by the degrees of doctor of civil law in 1521 and doctor of canon law in 1522. Meanwhile, about 1521, he was ordained as a priest. From 1521 to 1524, he lectured on civil and canon law at Cambridge University and attained sufficient respect to be elected master of Trinity Hall in 1525. His old college still possesses two portraits of him that show him as solidly built and clean-shaven, with penetrating eyes and a large straight nose.

During these years, Gardiner also made his initial contacts with the world of the court and government of Henry VIII . His first important post was as a tutor for a son of Thomas Howard, the influential third duke of Norfolk. Possibly through this position or through work representing Cambridge University, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the lord chancellor and the king’s chief minister, noticed Gardiner’s talents and made him his secretary in late 1524. This appointment marked the beginning of Gardiner’s career as a clerical statesman.

Life’s Work

Gardiner’s first two years in Wolsey’s service were quiet and unremarkable, but in 1527 that changed. From that point onward, Wolsey began using Gardiner as a diplomat on three lengthy missions during 1527, 1528, and 1529 to secure Henry VIII’s wish for an annulment of his marriage from Catherine of Aragon . When the king’s disputed marriage finally came to trial during June and July of 1529, Gardiner served as legal counsel to the king. He performed ably in that capacity and even though the trial ended in failure, a grateful Henry VIII appointed him as his principal secretary on July 28, 1529. This appointment allowed Gardiner to miss the final wreck of his former master Cardinal Wolsey’s fortunes in October, 1529.

Initially, Henry VIII’s divorce appeared to be a traditional problem in which manipulating the canon law and securing a papal dispensation would secure the desired end. It was a task seemingly well suited to Gardiner’s legal training and political skills. As a result, Henry VIII again rewarded his good work in 1531 by making him bishop of Winchester, the second-richest diocese in England. Unfortunately, the diplomatic obstacles that had prevented an annulment persisted. This continuing stalemate left Gardiner powerless to aid the king, since he could envision no solution outside the existing legal and constitutional structures. By the spring of 1532, Gardiner was favoring the abandonment of the quest for an annulment of the royal marriage.

Leadership slipped from Gardiner’s hands during 1532 as an activist faction led by Thomas Cromwell came forward. They offered Henry VIII a way out of his marital difficulties by replacing papal control with royal control over the English church. This approach was completely uncongenial to Gardiner, since it involved the reduction of clerical privilege and possessed strong associations with the growing Protestant movement. He defended the clergy’s position so vigorously against the Common’s Supplication Against the Ordinaries in April, 1532, that Henry VIII was alienated. It was an ill-timed move. Gardiner, previously thought to be next in line for the archbishopric of Canterbury, was passed over. Instead, the vacant office went in 1533 to Thomas Cranmer, a Protestant. Later, in April, 1534, Gardiner lost his principal secretaryship to his archrival Cromwell, also a Protestant.

Gardiner quickly became one of the leaders of the conservative opposition to Protestantism in Henry VIII’s court and government. In 1535, he rehabilitated himself with the king by publishing Episcopi de vera obedientia oratio (1535; bishop’s speech on true obedience), which provided the most convincing intellectual defense of the royal supremacy over the Church of England. Henry VIII rewarded the achievement by making him resident ambassador to France, where he stayed from October, 1535, until September, 1538. It was not a particularly satisfying reward, as Gardiner disliked ambassadorial work, and by 1538, Henry VIII and Cromwell were so dissatisfied with his performance that they recalled him.

Returning to England, Gardiner retired to his diocese, where he opposed Cromwell’s policies at the local level and his publishing of the Great Bible in English in 1539. Fortunately for him, Henry VIII’s basic doctrinal conservatism began to recoil from the increasing Protestant influences over the English church. As a result, Gardiner and the conservatives seized the initiative in Parliament from Cromwell and secured the passage of the doctrinally conservative Act of Six Articles in June. It is highly probable that Gardiner was actually even its author. The conservative offensive continued in the spring of 1540, although at first it appeared that Cromwell might still survive. Yet the incessant and effective sniping of Gardiner and the duke of Norfolk combined with the fiasco of the king’s marriage with Anne of Cleves to bring about Cromwell’s fall in June, 1540.

Cromwell’s fall brought Gardiner little profit except that he replaced his old rival as the chancellor of Cambridge University. Henry VIII quickly sent him off on an embassy to Emperor Charles V at Regensburg from November, 1540, through September, 1541. For the remainder of the reign, Gardiner served the king on various foreign embassies, helped procure supply for the wars against France and Scotland, and aided in the preparation of the conservative doctrinal statement known as the King’s Book in 1543. During the spring of 1542, Henry VIII even named him as his chief minister, although he never allowed him to exercise the same authority as Wolsey or Cromwell. It was Gardiner’s misfortune that Henry VIII found him to be talented but overly aggressive and therefore contrived to keep him out of the center of power for the remainder of his reign and afterward.

Henry VIII’s will barred Gardiner from the regency council of Edward VI. Instead, power rested with Edward Seymour, the young king’s uncle and the soon-to-be duke of Somerset. Protestants now controlled the government although Gardiner doggedly resisted their reforms of the Church of England. The problems began when Archbishop Thomas Cranmer issued a set of reformed injunctions for the Church and his Book of Homilies in August, 1547. Gardiner protested and quickly found himself either imprisoned in Fleet Prison or under house arrest from September, 1547, through February, 1548. The reformers released him from house arrest for several months in the spring of 1548 when they thought they had converted him to their cause. Yet they did not trust him. Gardiner publicly proclaimed his adherence to traditional Catholic doctrines during a sermon he delivered at Paul’s Cross in London on June 29, 1548. The next day, he was placed under close confinement in the Tower of London, a sentence that lasted until August, 1553, after Edward VI’s death.

The Edwardian Protestants had decided to try the stubborn Gardiner in December, 1550, since his continued imprisonment without trial was highly illegal. Although he escaped condemnation for treason, the trial deprived him of the bishopric of Winchester and continued his imprisonment. Sometime earlier he had also lost the mastership of his beloved Trinity Hall. Throughout this ordeal, he retained a sense of optimism, which was repaid when the sickly Edward VI died on July 6, 1553.

With Queen Mary I on the throne, Gardiner soon returned to the center of power. Released from the Tower in August, 1553, he reclaimed his diocese of Winchester, the mastership of Trinity Hall, and the chancellorship of Cambridge University. Furthermore, Mary appointed him as lord chancellor on August 23, 1553. During the first Parliament of Mary’s reign, Gardiner helped to secure the repeal of the Edwardian Protestant statutes but failed to obtain a revival of the medieval heresy laws. More successfully, he began recruiting the faithful bench of Catholic bishops for the Marian church that proved so effective and later fiercely resisted the Elizabethan regime in a way unheard of from their Henrician predecessors.

Gardiner quickly discovered the limits of his new authority. Queen Mary decided to marry Philip II of Spain although her lord chancellor and subjects favored a native English aristocrat. Still, Gardiner swallowed his pride and married the couple at Winchester Cathedral during November, 1554. The next month, Parliament reenacted the old heresy laws, making a systematic persecution of Protestants possible. Gardiner had already vengefully begun arresting available Protestant leaders such as Cranmer, Hugh Latimer, and Nicholas Ridley for treason that autumn. Then, in January, 1555, he tried and condemned to burning five prisoners in the Tower. His hope was that the example of a few burnings would break the Protestants’ will to resist. That expectation quickly ended when he discovered that the burnings were instead creating revered martyrs. With that realization, he tried unsuccessfully to persuade Queen Mary and the new archbishop of Canterbury, Reginald Pole, to abandon persecution. Yet time was running out for Gardiner. Overexertion brought on attacks of edema and jaundice in September. Instead of seeking rest, the chancellor continued to labor for his queen. As a result, his condition continued to worsen, and he died on November 12, 1555, at Whitehall Palace in London.

Significance

Gardiner was the last of a dying breed of English clerical statesmen. He stood as a defender of clerical privilege and attempted to preserve traditional Roman Catholic doctrine just when the course of events was moving the English church into the Protestant camp. Within a mere three years of his passing, the death of Queen Mary would completely undo the restoration of England’s obedience to the Papacy that he had helped to bring about. In spite of his great gifts as a scholar, a churchman, an administrator, and a leader of men, he left little legacy except for a somewhat overblown reputation as a reactionary and persecuting Catholic prelate. Few English churchmen would ever again achieve the power and authority in the state that Gardiner exercised.

Bibliography

Dickens, A. G. The English Reformation. 2d ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. The best one-volume survey of the subject, Dickens’s work covers the period from late medieval England through the beginning of Elizabeth I’s reign and places Gardiner in the context of the religious struggle taking place around him.

Elton, G. R. Reform and Reformation: England, 1509-1558. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977. The research of this excellent survey places Gardiner firmly in the context of his own times. Interprets events in the light of the author’s “Tudor Revolution” thesis, which emphasizes the ideological and religious antagonisms between Gardiner and Cromwell. The author is somewhat hostile to Gardiner.

Gardiner, Stephen. The Letters of Stephen Gardiner. Edited by James A. Muller. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970. Reprints 175 letters with annotations and headnotes. An excellent source that includes a biographical sketch, a chronological outline, and a bibliographical essay on the state of Gardiner studies at that time.

Gardiner, Stephen. A Machiavellian Treatise. Edited by Peter Samuel Donaldson. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1975. An edition of Gardiner’s previously unprinted and unstudied last-known political treatise, which gave his advice to Philip of Spain on the proper way to rule England. Donaldson asserts that Gardiner’s opposition to the Spanish match was a negotiating strategy, not a manifestation of a rigid and myopic nationalism. The authenticity and significance of this work remain somewhat controversial.

Gardiner, Stephen. Obedience in Church and State: Three Political Tracts by Stephen Gardiner. Edited by Pierre Janelle. Reprint. New York: Greenwood Press, 1968. A scholarly edition and translation with a lengthy introduction of Gardiner’s Episcopi de vera obedientia oratio and two unpublished tracts concerning the execution of bishop John Fisher and a view of obedience to the law in contrast to the views of Martin Bucer. Shows Gardiner’s development as a supporter of Henry VIII’s royal supremacy over the English church but tempered by an increasing firm support of traditional doctrine.

Jelsma, Auke. Frontiers of the Reformation: Dissidence and Orthodoxy in Sixteenth-Century Europe. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1998. This study of outcasts and outsiders on the fringes of the Reformation includes a chapter on Gardiner and Protestant spirituality. Bibliographic references and index.

Loades, D. M. The Reign of Mary Tudor: Politics, Governments, and Religion in England, 1553-1558. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979. A contemporary study of this troubled period in English history by a leading expert. Loades places Gardiner in his period of greatest triumph and death.

MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Thomas Cranmer: A Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996. Includes an appendix detailing the household and familial connections between Gardiner and Cranmer.

Muller, James A. Stephen Gardiner and the Tudor Reaction. Reprint. New York: Octagon Books, 1970. Dated but still useful biography. It is sympathetic to Gardiner and should always be compared to the relevant account of events presented in Dickens, Elton, or Loades.

Redworth, Glyn. In Defence of the Church Catholic: The Life of Stephen Gardiner. Cambridge, Mass.: B. Blackwell, 1990. Biography detailing Gardiner’s battle to prevent the spread of Protestantism. Includes bibliographic references and index.