Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 20.djvu/428

 missal from the council. But it was his last triumph, and in the following year his own fall and execution left his rival in almost undisputed possession of the royal favour and of supreme political influence. In the university of Cambridge Gardiner was also elected as his former opponent's successor in the chancellorship. Apart from his power to aid and protect the academic community, his election was recommended by his high attainments as a scholar and the discernment which he had already evinced as a judicious patron of rising merit among men of letters. He was, however, alarmed at the progress which the Reformation doctrines were making in the university, and his policy was chiefly retrograde. In May 1542 he issued an arbitrary edict forbidding the continuance of the new method of pronouncing Greek which had been introduced by Thomas Smith and Cheke. As regards the abstract merits of the question his view was probably the right one; but the measure had a disastrous effect in the manner in which it chilled the enthusiasm which those two eminent scholars had succeeded in arousing in connection with the revived study of the language.

In 1541 he was once more sent on an embassy to Germany. On his way he stayed at Louvain, and was hospitably entertained by the university, but these feelings of cordiality were soon changed when his hosts found leisure to make themselves acquainted with the drift of his treatise, ‘De vera Obedientia’ (copies of which he appears to have distributed among them), and he was not permitted to celebrate mass in the city.

In March 1542 the project of a new translation of the New Testament was again brought forward, at Cranmer's suggestion and with the royal sanction, in convocation, and the several books were once more portioned out to the different translators. Various writers, misled chiefly by Burnet, have represented the failure of the undertaking as arising partly from Gardiner's jealousy of Cranmer and partly from his real dislike to the project. ‘His design,’ says Burnet, ‘was that if a translation must be made it should be so daubed all through with Latin words that the people should not understand it much the better for its being in English’ (, ed. Pocock, i. 455, 498). But although it is true that Gardiner drew up a list of Latin words which he considered it would be safer to retain in their Latin form, it seems more just to interpret his anxiety in this respect as dictated by nothing more than those considerations which would naturally suggest themselves to the classical scholar and well-read theologian. He perceived the difficulty, not to say the danger, of attempting to supply exact English equivalents for words which learned divines had found it necessary to define with laborious and painful precision, and to whose definitions the decisions of the church had given the highest doctrinal importance. That Gardiner, by merely exhibiting the above list, should have alarmed Cranmer and brought the whole enterprise to an untimely end, would seem, to say the least, highly improbable. Mr. Dixon more reasonably represents Henry's interference, and the proposal to relegate the whole task to the two universities, as the result simply of the royal caprice (Hist. of the Church of England, ii. 285–9).

In September 1542 Gardiner, in conjunction with Tunstal, conducted the negotiations with the imperial ambassador in London. In the following year an event of a peculiarly painful character inspired his enemies with fresh hope. His private secretary was his own nephew, a young priest named Germayne Gardiner. He was now, along with three other clerics, brought to trial on the charge of denying the royal supremacy. The other three were acquitted, but Gardiner's nephew suffered the death of a traitor (, ed. Pocock, i. 567). That the event afforded an opportunity for aspersions on Gardiner's own loyalty is sufficiently probable. But the assertion of Strype that ‘after this he never had favour or regard of the king more,’ is altogether at variance with the evidence. Not less so is the story which exhibits Gardiner as the chief actor in a plot designed to bring about the disgrace of Catherine Parr, and falling himself under the royal displeasure in consequence. This rests on no contemporary authority, and is probably a protestant invention. It is discredited chiefly by the fact that at no subsequent period of his life, and especially in the proceedings at his deprivation, is any reference made to any such conduct on his part by his enemies (see, Essays on the Reformation, Nos. xv. and xvii.; , Hist. of England, c. xxvii.) The evidence which convicts him of having been accessory to the plot of the prebendaries in 1543 for Cranmer's overthrow is better attested, but it is remarkable that, although somewhat under a cloud in 1546 for resisting an exchange of lands with the king, he appears to have retained the royal favour to the last. It is, however, undeniable that by the doctrinal reformers he was at this time looked upon as their chief enemy in England, although the complaint of Latimer that Gardiner had sought to deprive him of his bishopric was repudiated by the latter with considerable warmth, and apparently with truth.