John Stead's Marriage and Gardiner's Final Loss of Authority

Chapter 5 John Stead’s Marriage and Gardiner’s Final Loss of Authority

Bernard Gardiner had a little less than five years to enjoy the new Tory-leaning administration, its High-Church agenda, and his victory over William Blen- cowe.1 With the death of Queen Anne in 1714, inaugurating the Hanoverian era and the Whig resurgence, which is the subject of Chapter 6, a number of fellows of All Souls once more ignored the warden’s insistence that they take orders. When Gardiner protested to the new Archbishop of Canterbury William Wake (Tenison having died in December 1715), he found little support and should have expected nothing else. Tenison was Wake’s mentor and Wake owed his initial bishopric to the lobbying of Tenison whose insistence over- came Queen Anne’s desire to appoint all English bishops on her own authority, without interference. Created Bishop of Lincoln during the later stages of the Convocation Crisis, Wake composed two lengthy defences of royal supremacy over the Church of England, the clerics of which should be seen as servants of the crown. In Erastian language Wake had written in 1697 that the majority of England’s clergy had been “brought to [a] sense of their Duty” and “Submitted to the King.” Five years later in 1703 he argued that Convocation could never meet “without the King’s Consent” and had no independence from the monarch.2 Thus Wake declared Henry Sacheverell guilty and his objection to High- Church exclusionary politics had him vote against the Occasional Conformity Act.3 That Wake would hold positions favourable to the crown and administration should not surprise. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the visitor of All Souls, was a political as much as a clerical position and that both Tenison and Wake served God, monarch, and Parliament. Any ruling made by Wake and

1 E. Neville Williams, The Eighteenth-Century Constitution 1699–1815: Documents and Commen- tary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 334–337. 2 William Wake, The Authority of Christian Princes over their Ecclesiastical Synods Asserted (London, 1697), 355; Wake, The State of the Church of England (London, 1703), 83. 3 Norman Sykes, “Archbishop Wake and the Whig Party: 1716–23: A Study in Incompatibility of Temperament,” Cambridge Historical Journal, 2 (1945): 95; Jacqueline Rose, “By Law Es- tablished: The Church of England and the Royal Supremacy,” in The Later Stuart Church, 1660–1714, ed. Grant Tapsell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 35.

114 Chapter 5 before him Tenison that impacted All Souls was certainly measured against those three metrics. A frustrated Gardiner wrote to Wake in June of 1716, that “It was that Good Designs of a founder are necessary,”

it has been so with ye Compass of a few years last past; when such Licen- tiousness has appeared in this College, especially in ye most Principle Design of Ye Founder, That of Holy orders, as No Age or Place can equal: and if a Visitor will not please to look into what a Warden thus complains of, ye Warden must be Persecuted most unjustly and intolerably for thus adventuring to do his Duty.4

Over the next few months, tensions at All Souls did not ease. Indeed, the same issues kept reappearing: holy orders, medicine, and respect for the Warden’s opinion. Although the events of this chapter are less obviously linked to the legacy of 1688, differences of High-Church and Low-Church conceptions of Anglicanism, fear over creeping Catholicism, and the extent to which a fellow might be forced to take orders in a Church of England that many understood in increasingly comprehensive terms, make what follows an important compo- nent in conceptualizing Gardiner and his wardenship. In a November 1716 letter to Wake, Gardiner urged the Archbishop to do something “to consider my Complaint against ye Dispensation from Holy Or- ders.” The reason for Gardiner’s latest anxiety began in January of 1715 when one John Stead, an arts fellow, had been granted a dispensation from orders to study medicine. The problem was, as Gardiner complained toward the end of 1716, there “are ye 4 Persons already Dispensed as a Physician; and if Mr Stead may be a 5th, there is no Determinate number” and the Founder’s wishes, with respect to the number of fellows in orders, would have to be ignored.5 For Gar- diner the same slippery slope that existed in 1709 with Dod and Stephens, had rematerialized in 1716: more fellows allowed to evade college requirements meant the end of the pious community of scholars envisaged by the Founder and coveted by the Warden. By December of that year Gardiner worried greatly over the state of All Souls. There were so few fellows in orders, he wrote to Wake, that it “lyes upon 4 Fellows to do ye Duty of 13 who at this time ought to be Priests.”6 In the summer of 1717 Gardiner counselled Wake: “My Lord this [is] Such a State as this College was never before reduce to.” How far had religious

4 Wake Correspondence, vol. 15 fol. 71r. Gardiner to Wake, 8 June 1716. 5 Wake Correspondence, vol. 15 fol. 73r. Gardiner to Wake, 23 November 1716. 6 Wake Correspondence, vol. 15 fol. 85v. Gardiner to Wake, 22 December 1716.