Richard Gardiner (English divine)
English Anglican priest
Richard Gardiner (1591–1670) was an English divine.
Life
Gardiner was born in 1591 at or near Hereford, and went to the grammar school of that town. In 1607 he entered Christ Church, Oxford, as a poor scholar, taking the degree of B.A. in 1611, M.A. in 1614, and D.D. in 1630. About this time he took holy orders, and, though he seems to have held no preferment, became known as a brilliant and quaint preacher.
As deputy-orator to the university, some time previous to 1620, he delivered an "eloquent oration" upon James I's gift of his own works to the library. James I, according to Wood, gave to Gardiner the reversion of the next vacant canonry at Christ Church in reward for a speech made before the king "in the Scottish tone". He was accordingly installed in 1629.
In 1630 he was appointed one of the chaplains in ordinary to Charles I. He continued deputy-orator, and in this capacity made the university oration to the king on his return from Edgehill. In 1647 he was examined several times before the parliamentary visitors, and deprived of his prebend.
He lived obscurely at Oxford, befriending poor royalists, until the Restoration, when he was reinstated (July 1660).
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7325862. VIAF identifies the subject as 20029111. The Library of Congress control number is n84136836. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1591, 1670, 1607 and 1611.
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This entry incorporates text from “Richard Gardiner (English divine)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.