The Anglican clergy under the Tudors and the Stuarts were not so much priests, in the sense of the twelfth century, as hired political retainers. Macaulay’s celebrated description is too well known to need full quotation: “for one who made the figure of a gentleman, ten were mere menial servants.... The coarse and ignorant squire” could hire a “young Levite” for his board, a small garret, and ten pounds a year. This clergyman “might not only be the most patient of butts and of listeners, might not only be always ready in fine weather for bowls, and in rainy weather for shovelboard, but might also save the expense of a gardener, or of a groom. Sometimes the reverend man nailed up the apricots; and sometimes he curried the coach horses.”[302] Yet, as Macaulay has also pointed out, the hierarchy was divided into two sections, the ordinary labourers and the managers. The latter were indispensable to the aristocracy, since without them their machine could hardly have been kept in motion, and these were men of talent who demanded and received good wages. Probably for this reason a large revenue was reserved for the higher secular clergy, and from the outset the policy proved successful. Many of the ablest organizers and astutest politicians of England, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sat on the episcopal bench, and two of the most typical, as well as the ablest Anglicans who ever lived, were the two eminent bishops who led the opposing wings of the Church when it was reformed by Henry VIII.: Stephen Gardiner and Thomas Cranmer. Gardiner was the son of a clothworker of Bury Saint Edmunds, and was born about 1483. At Cambridge he made himself the best civil lawyer of the kingdom, and on meeting Wolsey, so strongly impressed him with his talent that the cardinal advanced him rapidly, and in January 1529 sent him to negotiate for the divorce at Rome. Nobody doubts that to the end of his life Gardiner remained a sincere Catholic, but above all else he was a great Anglican. Becoming secretary to the king in June, 1529, as Wolsey was tottering to his fall, he laboured to bring the University of Cambridge to the royal side, and he also devoted himself to Anne until he obtained the See of Winchester, when his efforts for the divorce slackened. He even went so far as to assure Clement that he had repented, and meant to quit the court, but notwithstanding he “bore up the laps” of Anne’s robe at her coronation.