It's November 1553 and Stephen Gardner is sitting at the center of power once again, presiding as Lord Chancellor at Mary the First Parliament.

Around him are the great nobles of the realm, foreign ambassadors and bishops newly restored to their seas.

For the past decade, Gardner's career has been a political roller coaster,

imprisonment, disgrace, return to favor, and near ruin more than once. In Tudor England,

men in his position often, mostly, ended with their heads on the block. Yet somehow he's alive,

he's here, he's influential, and he's

very much in charge. How did he manage to survive the whiplash politics of Henry the 8th,

Edward the 6th, and Mary the 1st, without, you know, losing his head or his nerve?

Settle in, my friends, grab your coffee or your water because this is a fascinating story.

We are going to analyze now how on earth this man managed to keep his head when so many others lost theirs.

Hey friend, welcome back to the YouTube channel for the Renaissance English History podcast.

I am your host, Heather. I've been podcasting on Tudor England since 2009 with my show,

which makes it the original Tudor History podcast. I am, as always, delighted that you are here with me today talking about the most politically lucky man of the 16th century Stephen Gardner. Let's get right into it.

Where did Stephen Gardner get his start? Well, to start with, he was born around 1483,

the son of a cloth merchant from Bury St. Edmonds. His education at Trinity

Hall in Cambridgeshire specialized in both civil and canon law, that kind of dual expertise that made

him valuable to both church and state alike. By the early 1520s, he had caught the attention

of Cardinal Woolsey, who was always on the

lookout for very clever legal minds. Woolsey sent Gardner on diplomatic missions, including

the delicate negotiations with France in 1525. But his real breakthrough came in the late 1520s

when Henry VIII's Great matter, the attempt to annul

his marriage to Catherine Veragon, needed lawyers capable of picking apart papal authority. Say that 10 times

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