Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > In Defence of the Church Catholic: The Life of Stephen Gardiner > Status Update

‘Imperial diplomats only heard of violent words being hurled at Winchester and there was no mention of Dudley’s being expelled. Yet, if de Selve’s account is the more accurate, it underlines Gardiner’s high standing with the monarch if, in the aftermath of moves against Askewe and the queen, Gardiner was not also required to absent himself for having provoked Dudley.’

‘Simply because Stephen Gardiner’s doctrinal sentiment was in close harmony with the king’s should not mislead us into thinking that the bishop called the theological tune. But, as is so often the case, there is reason to suggest that Gardiner did add his own counterpoint to the melody given out by the king. We can see that in the way Winchester reacted to (rather than initiated) events’

‘Stephen Gardiner has, of course, been credited with being in league with the Howards to do all in his power to fan ‘the flame of Henry’s lust’. Katherine’s advancement has been portrayed as one of the ‘machinations of Cromwell’s enemies’ which were decisive in turning king against minister.’

‘In the mid-1530s, though, with the pre-eminence of Thomas Cromwell, among whose friends numbered Archbishop Cranmer and among whose allied could be found the Boleyns, the mood around Henry was, superficially at any rate, evangelical. There was no one to speak up for Stephen Gardiner. His brand of conservatism in religion seemed to offer the king neither glory nor, now that things had gone so far, security’

‘In Mary’s reign he likened his and the nation’s apostasy to having fallen asleep in the face of painful realities, and even then he was still prepared to admit about the Supremacy that ‘when King Henry was hear perhaps there was something to be said for it.’‘

‘Gardiner’s legal training in these years profoundly affected his religious views. It consolidated his deep-rooted mistrust of change and alteration. The basis of both canon and civil law was the Roman legal system. The student of Roman law had drummed into his head the notion of the authority of the law-giver, namely the emperor, whose rights and prerogatives had in many ways simply been assumed by the pope’