The Gardyner’s Passetaunce, the Flowers of England, and Thomas Gardyner, Monk of Westminster

Thomas Gardyner is known as the author of a short English prose chronicle, the Flowers of England, beginning with Brutus and ending in the reign of Henry VIII with the birth of Princess Mary in 1516.¹ It survives in what is thought to be an autograph copy, Dublin, Trinity College, MS 513, imperfect at the start, where it now accompanies an interesting selection of later chronicles and heraldic notes.² Two copies in later hands are to be found in different collections of heraldic and historical notes: Dublin, Trinity College, MS 633, and London, College of Arms, MS D4; a further copy, probably contemporary with these and in yet another hand, is in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson D. 1020.³ Gardyner’s authorship of the work is attested by internal evidence: he notes that it has been ‘Brewelly drawne owtte off dyuersse cronakulles … by the dyllygent labour off dan Thomas Gardyner monke in Westmynster’, and his name appears at other points in the work (TCD MS 513, fol. 3^v).⁴

Gardyner also compiled various pedigrees showing Henry VIII’s claim to the crown. Copied sideways-on in TCD MS 513, these go up to the birth of Princess Mary in 1516 and were presumably completed in that year. A later sixteenth-century copy of material relating to these pedigrees survives in the form of two rolls (one showing the Welsh line and the other the French), now Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Hist. e. 193. Although the introductory text indicates that these versions were made for Henry VIII ‘By me Dane / Thomas Gardener hys daily Orator / in hys vijth yere of hys rayne a monke in / Westmynster’ (i.e. 1516, the seventh year of Henry’s reign), the rolls making up Bodleian, MS Eng. Hist. e. 193 were clearly produced some time later than the genealogies in TCD MS 513, since dates of ‘1542’ and ‘H XXXV’ (i.e. 1544) appear at different points in their decoration.⁵

Fig. 1.

Trinity College, Dublin, MS 513, fol. 14^v.

By kind permission of the Library of Trinity College, Dublin.

Fig. 2.

Trinity College, Dublin, MS 513, fol. 15^v.

By kind permission of the Library of Trinity College, Dublin.

The works that Gardyner seems to have brought into being round about 1516 were strikingly shaped by his own origins and vocation, which gave him ties to both Westminster abbey and the house of Tudor. He was born c. 1479 in London, where his father, William Gardyner, was a skinner.⁶ His mother, Ellen, appears to have been the illegitimate daughter of Jasper Tudor, duke of Bedford, and the brother of Edmund Tudor, whose marriage to Margaret Beaufort produced the future Henry VII; Gardyner was thus, after 1485, the date of Henry’s accession, the king’s step-cousin once removed.⁷

Gardyner’s father William died in 1485, when Thomas was a small boy, and by 1493 his mother Ellen had married another London skinner, William Sibson. At the same time as his mother’s remarriage, when he was aged about fifteen, Gardyner was admitted a novice at Westminster abbey; in 1501 a Chancery pleading made by his stepfather, William Sibson and others noted that ‘the seid Thomas hath takyn uppon hym the ordre of religion within the monastery of Westmynster and there is professyd unto the same religion’.⁸ Some family connection with the abbey may have influenced this move: an Owen Tudor was a Westminster monk in the 1490s, in receipt of payments from Henry VII.⁹ Once established at Westminster, Thomas Gardyner presumably showed some intellectual promise, since as well as studying at Oxford during 1497–99, he and his exact contemporary William Fenne seem, in 1499, to have been the first abbey monks also to study for a year at Cambridge.¹⁰ Pearce detects the possibility of royal...