GARDINER, STEPHEN. - English prelate and statesman, b. at Bury St. Edmunds between 1483 and 1493, d. at Whitehall on 12 Nov. 1555. A student at Cambridge, he took his degree in law. He became secretary to Cardinal Wolsey in 1525.
In 1528 he was sent to Clement VII to obtain papal consent to the annulment of the marriage between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. Appointed secretary by Henry VIII, he quickly acquired great influence. In 1531, on Wolsey's death, he succeeded him as bishop of Winchester. Again on behalf of Henry VIII he was present at Marseille at the meeting between the Pope and Francis I (1533), and two years later he was summoned, together with other bishops, to justify the new title of supreme head of the Church of England that the King had assumed. He did so with the De vera oboedientia, the best known of his defenses of royal supremacy with respect to Rome.
However, although he had supported the supremacy and the royal independence with respect to the papacy, G. opposed the doctrines of the Reformation, so much so that he was considered the most tenacious defender of the Catholic faith. When Edward VI ascended the throne, G. was imprisoned for his sermon in defense of the real presence in the Eucharist delivered on 29 June 1546. Freed and restored to his bishopric when the kingdom passed to Mary, G. was appointed Lord Chancellor, and he crowned the Queen. During this period he retracted what he had maintained in Henry's time concerning the supremacy of Rome and Henry VIII's divorce.
Besides the discourse mentioned above, he wrote: An explication and assertion of the true catholique fayth, touching the most blessed Sacrament of the author, with confutation of a book written against the same (Rouen 1551): a work composed in prison against Cranmer's symbolistic interpretation of the Eucharist; Confutatio cavillationum quibus sacrosanctum Eucharistiae Sacramentum ab impiis Capharnaitis impeti solet (Paris 1551; Louvain 1554): this work too was written in prison against the eucharistic errors of Cranmer and of Peter Martyr Vermigli, who are recalled, retento nomine, with the words cavillatores e argutores nostri. At Cambridge, in the library of Corpus Christi College, various unpublished manuscripts of G. are preserved. BIBL. For his many writings, v. J. B. Mullinger, Dictionary of national biography, VII, Oxford 1937-38, pp. 80-65; J. A. Muller, S. G. and the Tudor reaction, London 1926; G. Constant, La Réforme en Angleterre, I: Le schisme anglican, Henry VIII, Paris 1930; P. Polman, L'élément historique dans la controverse religieuse du XVIIe siècle, Gembloux 1932 (v. index); P. Janelle, L'Angleterre catholique à la veille du schisme, Paris 1933 (documented reconstruction of the milieu and of the first part of G.'s life; on p. 352 a note on other works by the same author); H. M. Smith, Henry VIII and the Reformation, London 1938 (v. index).
Gabriele Musatti