GARDINER, Thomas (1591-1652), of Cuddesdon, Oxon.

Although Thomas Gardiner’s family came from Hertfordshire, his father was a clergyman in the neighbouring counties of Middlesex and Essex who had married the daughter of a prominent London Merchant Taylor, and Gardiner’s own career was thoroughly metropolitan.31Vis. London (Harl. Soc. xv), 299; Oxford DNB. He entered the Inner Temple in May 1610, after a period at Clifford’s Inn, and was called to the bar in April 1618.32I. Temple database; CITR ii. 107. He remained active as a barrister during the 1620s and 1630s, following the established cursus honorum, from treasurer’s and steward’s auditor for his Inn in the early years to bencher in June 1635, attendant to the reader and then reader in April 1638, and finally, in 1639-40, attaining the office of treasurer.33CITR ii. 145, 164, 179, 191, 224, 229, 234, 236, 241, 252-62. From May 1636 until June 1642 he was assiduous in his attendance at the Inner Temple parliament.34CITR ii. 229-267.

Alongside his successful career as a barrister, Gardiner was also chosen for a series of other positions, mostly in the gift of the royal court. From 1623 until 1631, if not later, he served as protonotary and clerk of the crown in the counties of Carmarthen, Pembroke and Cardigan in south Wales.35Oxford DNB; E215/1061/1, 3. It may have been during this time that Gardiner first came to the attention of William Laud, then bishop of St David’s. This relationship developed during the later 1630s. In 1635, Gardiner donated £20 to the Bodleian Library in Oxford during a fund-raising campaign supported by Laud; and when the archbishop faced impeachment by Parliament in March 1641 he asked for Gardiner to defend him, as he had ‘been of his counsel in divers businesses heretofore’.36CSP Dom. 1635-6, p. 65; LJ iv. 176a. Laud may even have encouraged Charles I to promote Gardiner as recorder of London in the winter of 1635-6. At first, the king was not so sure, preferring Sir Henry Calthrop for the post, but Calthrop was reluctant to serve as recorder, and on 23 January 1636 the king wrote to the lord mayor recommending Gardiner instead.37Strafforde Letters, i. 506, 511; CSP Dom. 1635-6, p. 179.

As recorder, Gardiner did his best to encourage London to support the king, even as royal policies became increasingly unpopular. In later years he was accused of being partisan, advising the mayor and aldermen to extract Ship Money from the livery companies to make up the shortfall in collections in 1638; calling for 3,000 Londoners to be raised to support the king’s war against the Scots in 1639; and persuading the mayor ‘to impress cloth, and conduct 200 men of the said citizens and inhabitants’ against the Scots in 1640. He was also charged with breaking his oath of secrecy when it came to City affairs, by warning the king of a petition of complaint prepared by the citizens in 1638, and of trying to stop growing support for a new Parliament in 1640, ‘saying it was dangerous and needless, and the petition would come unseasonably to interrupt the king’s affairs’.38Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 780-2. Although such criticisms and complaints may not be a fair reflection of Gardiner’s activities, still less his motives, there can be no doubt that he was closely associated with the court interest at this time. This influence, and his flourishing legal career, brought material benefits: he bought his brother-in-law’s interest in the manor of Cuddesdon and other lands in Oxfordshire in 1638; acquired 500 acres ‘in the draining lands in the Great Level’ in East Anglia; and was in a position to lend money to aristocrats, including Thomas Howard, 1st earl of Berkshire.39Oxford DNB; PROB11/259/392; CCAM 605-6.

Gardiner was already a controversial figure by the time of the Short Parliament elections in March 1640. Although he was returned as MP for the Cornish borough of Callington, this was but a consolation prize: he had originally stood as a candidate for the City of London but was rejected out of hand.40Pearl, London, 112. There is no record of his activity in the Short Parliament. Hostility towards Gardiner had increased still further by October 1640 and the City elections for the Long Parliament, which he had done his best to prevent. According to Sir Edward Hyde*

The king designed Thomas Gardiner, who was recorder of London, to be Speaker in the House of Commons … There was little doubt but that he would be chosen to serve in one of the four places for the City of London … [but] the opposition was so great, and the faction so strong, to hinder his being elected in the city, that four others were chosen for that service, without hardly mentioning his name.

Hyde states that the ‘diligence … used in one or two other places that he might be elected’ also failed on this occasion, and he had no doubt that this blanket rejection was the result of ‘so great a fear … that a man of entire affections to the king, and of prudence enough to manage those affections, and to regulate the contrary, should be put into that chair’.41Clarendon, Hist. i. 220.

During the first year of the Long Parliament, Gardiner was treated with suspicion by the king’s opponents in Parliament, but he was not subjected to any direct attacks. In January 1641 he was summoned ‘to give an account to this House [the Commons] by what warrant he reprieved [Goodman, the Jesuit priest]’, but this was not pursued, possibly because Gardiner immediately accused Sir Henry Vane I* of also having a hand in it.42D’Ewes (N), 278-9, 287. In early March, when Archbishop Laud asked for Gardiner to be among his counsel for the defence, Parliament rejected the request, supplying an alternative team.43LJ iv. 174b, 176a. But when on 31 March there was a conference over Parliament’s desire for a loan from the City, Gardiner, as spokesman for the latter, was the bearer of encouraging news, which was – unsurprisingly – well-received.44Procs. LP iii. 279, 280. Four days later he gave a reassuring update, evoking a similar response.45Procs. LP iii. 363. On 17 he was among the counsellors summoned to Westminster Hall on behalf of Thomas Wentworth†, 1st earl of Strafford, then on trial. Gardiner objected to the Lords’ ruling that they must speak only to matter of law and not to matter of fact, claiming that it rendered them impotent: ‘till they should be directed upon what to argue, the case being stated before them, they could not say more neither properly nor pertinently, nor as did befit the respect and duty which they owed unto the lord of Strafford’. This appears to have provoked a hasty adjournment for the day.46Procs. LP iii. 593-5, 597, 599, 601.

Over the summer Gardiner’s brother Michael, a Vintner, was among merchants summoned by Parliament as delinquents for allegedly being party to a breach of customs regulations, although he was bailed on 20 August on security of £10,000.47Procs. LP iii. 394, 415, 498; Vis. London (Harl. Soc. xv), 299; Greenford par. reg. It was not until the winter of 1641-2 that Gardiner himself became the focus for attention. The reason was not so much Parliament’s vindictiveness as Gardiner’s increasingly provocative stance. In November, when Parliament asked the City for another loan to fund the suppression of the Irish rebellion, Gardiner took the opportunity of an address to the privy council to accuse MPs of failing to uphold the City government against unrest by the inhabitants, some of whom were involved in riots and other disorders to show their dissatisfaction. He warned that previous levies had affected trade, and had not been repaid, and said that ‘there was now such a slighting of the government of the city, that there is an equality between the mayor and the commons, the power of the mayor no more than that of the commoners of the city’.48Pearl, London, 125; Nalson, Impartial Colln. ii. 597. When the king returned from Scotland at the end of the month, he made a formal entry into London and was received by the City authorities, with Gardiner making the official speech of welcome. Gardiner not only welcomed the king, but also pledged the City’s support to him, and, controversially, proclaimed the citizens’ devotion to ‘our established religion’. The speech also asked the king to strengthen the authority of the mayor and aldermen, and was the formal occasion for the offer of gifts of £20,000 to the king and £5,000 to the queen. The king showed his pleasure at this public display of loyalty by knighting the mayor and various aldermen, including Gardiner.49CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 184, 188; Pearl, London, 127; Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 211. But, for the king’s opponents, Gardiner was now a marked man.

In the next few weeks, as the political situation became increasingly tense, Gardiner remained robust in his defence of the king. In December 1641 he led attempts to suppress the anti-episcopal petition organised by Alderman John Fowke and other critics of the crown in the City. According to a later, hostile account, ‘he … caused some of the petitioners to be sent for before the lord mayor and himself, and questioned them as rioters and disturbers of the peace, saying that the putting their hands to a petition was the way to put all together by the ears’ and that the whole design ‘tends to sedition and blood, and to cutting of throats’.50Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 781. This brought a Commons investigation of Gardiner later in the month, and a condemnation of his attempts to block the petition.51D’Ewes (C), 319-20, 337-8. On 5 January 1642 Gardiner attended the common council meeting which ordered a petition to be presented to the king opposing the ordering of the City militia according to the wishes of Parliament; and three days’ later he was among the aldermen asked by the king to investigate the disturbances in London.52CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 238, 249. This caused a further backlash, and Gardiner and his associates were blamed for ‘endeavouring and plotting to hinder the proceedings in Parliament, the peace and safety of this kingdom’.53Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 781; Lindley, London, 202. Complaints against Gardiner were read in the Commons on 22 and 24 February, and he was condemned by both Houses as one of the ‘authors and contrivers of the said petition’.54PJ i. 437n, 451, 454. In early March, Gardiner was briefly imprisoned in the Tower by the House of Lords, for refusing to open his defence as counsel for the attorney-general, Sir Edward Herbert*, who was being prosecuted for his part in the king’s attempt to arrest the Five Members in the previous January.55Clarendon, Hist. ii. 25; LJ iv. 604a, 639b, 642a.

Immediately afterwards, the newly-emerged radical leadership in London moved to take its revenge against Gardiner for ‘crimes’ dating back to 1638, including his encouragement of Ship Money, the bishops’ wars, and his activities in the winter of 1641-2. Together, these were taken as ‘sedition’, and formal impeachment proceedings took place in April and May.56Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 780-2; PJ ii. 53, 70, 229, 313, 337-8, 341; CJ ii. 492b, 499b, 543a, 558a, 569a, 570b. The impeachment was agreed by both Houses on 18 May.57CJ ii. 577b. Gardiner prudently withdrew from London before impeachment proceedings could be concluded, but he was not forgotten. In May 1643 he was formally sacked as recorder, and in the same month it was reported that the Londoners ‘had plundered Sir Thomas Gardiner… of all the goods he had in his house, without leaving him anything’.58Pearl, London, 266; Mercurius Aulicus, no. 19 (7-13 May 1643), 240 (E.103.10). In June the Commons ordered that Gardiner’s goods were to be seized by the Committee for Sequestrations, and his landed estate was only preserved as it lay close to the royalist capital of Oxford.59CJ iii. 149a-b.

At Oxford, Gardiner continued to be a strong supporter of the king’s cause. In December 1642 his role in prosecuting captured parliamentarian officers caused him to be denounced as an enemy of the state by the House of Commons.60Add. 18777, f. 96v. In March 1643 he was appointed a member of the (entirely theoretical) council of war for London, Westminster and Middlesex, and in the months that followed he was placed on commissions for forests and raising troops in Oxfordshire.61Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 323; Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 38, 42, 97. In October, Gardiner replaced the parliamentarian, Oliver St John*, as the king’s solicitor-general, and it was in this capacity (as well, perhaps, in acknowledgement of their long-standing friendship) that he drafted a royal pardon for Laud in April 1644.62Sainty, English Law Officers, 62; Clarendon, Hist. iii. 251, 467. In January 1645 he was chosen as one of the commissioners to negotiate the Uxbridge Treaty on the king’s behalf, being ‘very eminent in the knowledge of the law’.63Clarendon, Hist. iii. 469, 486; TSP i. 56-8; LJ vii. 150a, 157b, 159b, 166b, 168b, 176a. In May 1645 Gardiner, as solicitor-general, was sent bills from Ireland for his scrutiny before they passed the great seal.64CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 522. On 3 November 1645 he was appointed as attorney-general by the king, and he remained in Oxford until the city’s surrender in the summer of 1646.65Sainty, English Law Officers, 46. Gardiner continued to be held in great respect by his associates in the king’s service. Hyde had come to trust Gardiner, and in April 1647 appointed him one of seven people authorised to go through his official papers in the event of his death.66CCSP i. 371. Later, he described him as ‘a man of gravity and quickness, that had something of authority and gracefulness in his person and presence’.67Clarendon, Hist. i. 220. The king also continued to hold Gardiner in high esteem. In August 1648 he was one of those Charles requested to advise on the Newport Treaty, and in September Parliament granted Gardiner ‘liberty to go to the king, to attend him during the time of the treaty’, although it seems unlikely that he attended.68LJ v. 474b, 484b.

Gardiner compounded under the Oxford Articles on 10 November 1646, and was fined £942, being a tenth of the value of his estate.69CCC 1559. In 1648-9, he was the subject of further investigations about the debt he was owed by the earl of Berkshire, and threatened with sequestration for concealing his interest in it. In July 1649 he was arrested, but released on surrendering his bond from Berkshire, although further questions relating to this affair were raised in later months.70CCC 1559; CCAM 605-6. In November 1650 the council of state allowed Gardiner to come to London for nine days, on taking the Engagement, presumably to sort out his financial affairs.71CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 425, 565. By this time, he had already settled his estate, by an indenture of 19 February 1646, a will of 12 December 1648, and codicil to it penned on 1 April 1650. These arranged for the sale of the remainder of his lands in Oxfordshire and his share in the drainage lands to provide for his widow, pay his debts, and provide for his children. His legacy was less than he had hoped, and he roundly condemned ‘these troublesome and distracted times whereby it [his estate] hath been broken and wasted in exceeding great measure’.72PROB11/259/392. Gardiner died in 1652, and was buried at Cuddesdon on 15 October.73Cuddesdon par. reg. Three of his sons predeceased him, including his heir, also Sir Thomas, and a younger son, Henry, who were killed in the king’s service in 1645. At least two daughters and two sons survived him; neither of the latter sat in Parliament.74PROB11/259/392; Oxford DNB.