Stephen Gardiner

• 1. Introduction

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  Stephen Gardiner died on the 12th of November 1555 with a Latin phrase on his lips: Erravi cum Petro, sed non flevi cum Petro. "I have erred like Peter, but I have not wept like Peter." It was a fitting end for a man whose entire life had been spent navigating the hairpin turns of religious and political loyalty in Tudor England. He had defended the pope, then dismantled his authority. He had served a king who divorced his wife, then helped a queen undo that divorce. He had helped write the case for royal supremacy, then publicly recanted it. Gardiner was not a man without convictions. He simply lived in an age that kept demanding he choose which conviction mattered most. How did a cloth merchant's son from Bury St Edmunds rise to become Lord Chancellor of England? What did it actually cost him? And what do his last words tell us about a man who spent his whole career arguing that obedience to earthly power was the same as obedience to God?

• 2. From Cambridge to Wolsey

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  In 1511, a 28-year-old Stephen Gardiner met the Dutch scholar Erasmus in Paris. That meeting captures something essential about Gardiner's early trajectory: he moved in the most learned circles of his age. At Trinity Hall, Cambridge, he had distinguished himself in the classics, particularly in Greek. He then turned his attention to canon and civil law, disciplines in which, by the account of contemporaries, no one could dispute his command. He received his doctorate in civil law in 1520, and his doctorate in canon law the year after.

  Those credentials caught the eye of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who brought Gardiner on as his personal secretary. Gardiner was reportedly present at The More in Hertfordshire when the Treaty of the More was concluded, an occasion that likely brought him to the attention of Henry VIII for the first time. He learned the workings of foreign politics during this service, a knowledge that would prove indispensable in the years ahead. It was through Wolsey's patronage that Gardiner would get his first chance to act on the largest stage in European diplomacy.

• 3. The Great Matter

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  Henry VIII's determination to end his marriage to Catherine of Aragon handed Gardiner the most consequential legal assignment of his career. In 1527 he and Sir Thomas More were named commissioners negotiating a treaty with France, and that same year Gardiner was dispatched to Orvieto to extract a specific legal instrument from Pope Clement VII: a decretal commission that would allow the divorce case to be tried in England, without appeal to Rome.

  The mission placed Gardiner in an almost impossible position. Pope Clement had recently been forced to shelter in Castel Sant'Angelo when mutinous soldiers of the Holy Roman Empire overran Rome. Now at Orvieto and deeply anxious about offending Charles V, who was Catherine's nephew, Clement refused to issue any definitive ruling. Gardiner held long debates with the Pope's cardinals. His dispatched messages from this period survive, and they show a man doing everything the law allowed and more. Wolsey even urged him to press for a decretal that could be shown to the King and Wolsey alone and then destroyed, so desperate was the Cardinal to keep his credit with Henry.

  Gardiner's pleading ultimately fell short. A general commission was granted, allowing Wolsey and Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio to try the case in England, but it fell far short of what Henry wanted. Gardiner returned home without the decisive instrument. The case would eventually be solved not through papal concession but through a rupture with Rome itself, a rupture that Gardiner had not intended but would spend the rest of his career managing.

• 4. Bishop, Secretary, Absolutist

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  In early August 1529 Gardiner was appointed the King's secretary, and within two years Henry had rewarded him with the bishopric of Winchester, one of the wealthiest sees in England. The appointment came with a personal message from Henry that is worth pausing on. "I have often squared with you, Gardiner," the King said, "but I love you never the worse, as the bishopric I give will convince you." The remark confirms that Gardiner had genuinely argued back against the most powerful man in England, and had survived it.

  His 1535 treatise De vera obedientia became the most capable defence of royal supremacy produced during the English Reformation. "Princes ought to be obeyed by the commandment of God; yea, and to be obeyed without question," Gardiner wrote. He sincerely believed in what he described as the semi-divinity of kings. Yet this conviction sat in permanent tension with his Catholic doctrinal instincts. In 1539 he helped enact the Six Articles, which were designed to hold the line against Protestant doctrine, and which drove Bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Shaxton to resign. He also attempted, with others, to charge Archbishop Cranmer with heresy in connection with those same Articles. Henry's personal intervention stopped it.

  George Cavendish's portrait of Gardiner at this period is clinical in its precision: "a swarthy complexion, hooked nose, deep-set eyes, a permanent frown, huge hands and a vengeful wit. He was ambitious, sure of himself, irascible, astute, and worldly." The man Cavendish described was capable of both mercy and severity in the same week. In 1544, a relative named German Gardiner, employed as Gardiner's own secretary, was executed for treason relating to the royal supremacy. Gardiner's enemies used the episode to hint that the bishop shared his secretary's views. Meanwhile, in a single incident that cuts across any simple portrait, Gardiner intervened to spare the composer and theologian John Merbecke from execution, reportedly saying he was "but a musician."

• 5. Prison Under Edward VI

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  Henry VIII died in January 1547, and Gardiner discovered almost immediately that his decades of service had not secured his place in the new order. Henry's will established a 16-man council to govern during the minority of the young Edward VI. Gardiner's name was not on it. Edward Seymour, a brother of Henry's third wife Jane Seymour, seized the role of Lord Protector and moved quickly toward radical Protestant reform.

  Gardiner resisted. Between Henry's death and the end of 1547 alone, he wrote at least 25 letters to Somerset arguing that the reforms were both theologically wrong and unconstitutional. He refused to permit the ecclesiastical authorities to visit his Winchester diocese. The result was imprisonment in the Fleet. He was released, summoned before the council, and when he declined to answer satisfactorily, he was imprisoned in the Tower of London in June 1548.

  The legal proceedings against him stretched for years. A lengthy hearing before the Privy Council began in December 1550 and, in February 1551, he was formally deprived of his bishopric. His see of Winchester passed to John Ponet, a chaplain of Archbishop Cranmer. Gardiner remained in the Tower for the rest of Edward's reign, a further two years. During this confinement he requested, and was denied, what he considered his acknowledged right as one of the Lords Spiritual to appear before the House of Lords. He had argued the king's case across Europe. Now he sat in a cell while the church he had helped reshape was reshaped again without him.

• 6. Lord Chancellor Under Mary

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  When Mary I entered London after her accession, Thomas Howard, the 3rd Duke of Norfolk, and other high-ranking prisoners were still in the Tower alongside Gardiner. The new queen released them all. Gardiner was restored to the bishopric of Winchester, appointed Lord Chancellor, and placed the crown on Mary's head at her coronation. He opened her first parliament and was, for a time, her leading councillor.

  The work of this final chapter of his life was in many ways the work of reversal. He was called upon to demonstrate the legitimacy of Mary's birth and the legality of her mother's marriage, to restore the old religion, and to recant the arguments for royal supremacy he had spent years constructing. He delivered a formal retraction, likely connected to the sermon he preached at the start of Advent in 1554, after Cardinal Reginald Pole had absolved England from schism.

  As chancellor Gardiner also negotiated the marriage treaty between Mary and Philip II of Spain, a match he personally found repugnant, as did most of the English political class. He executed the task anyway, taking care to write terms that explicitly prevented the Spanish from interfering in English governance. After Cardinal Pole was appointed and the reconciliation with Rome was complete, Gardiner remained in high favour. His role in the persecution of Protestants that followed is disputed. He certainly presided over the House of Lords when it revived the heresy laws. He sat in judgment on Bishop John Hooper and several preachers whom he condemned to be degraded from the priesthood, after which they were handed over to the secular authorities and burned. In his own diocese of Winchester, no victim of that persecution died before Gardiner himself did.

• 7. Death and Legacy

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  Gardiner died at Westminster on the 12th of November 1555, roughly six months after returning from a mission to Calais, where English commissioners had failed to broker peace with France. He had opened parliament as Lord Chancellor for the last time in October 1555, then fell ill and deteriorated quickly.

  His body was temporarily placed in a vault at the church of St Mary Overie. In February 1556 it was conveyed to Winchester Cathedral. A final funeral service was held on the 28th of February 1556, at which point it was formally noted that he had not yet been buried and no ground had been broken, because his executors intended eventually to build a chapel within the cathedral for his entombment.

  Fiction has returned to him repeatedly. In William Shakespeare and John Fletcher's play Henry VIII he appears as a significant figure. Ford Madox Ford made him a character in his Fifth Queen trilogy. Hilary Mantel gave him a sustained presence across Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light, casting him as an implacable opponent of Thomas Cromwell. In the television adaptation of Wolf Hall, Mark Gatiss played the role; Alex Jennings took it in the second series. Alison MacLeod's 1965 novel The Heretic named him the main instigator of the execution of Protestant martyr Anne Askew. Simon Russell Beale portrayed him in the 2023 film Firebrand. Whether he appears as villain or pragmatist depends on who is telling the story, which is itself something Gardiner would likely have understood.