Towards the end of the reign of King Henry VII, he was successively Master of the Rolls, a Privy Counsellor, Dean of Windsor and Bishop of Durham.

Having received the prebend of North Kelsey, Lincolnshire (in Lincoln cathedral) in 1495/96, which he held until 1500,[16] he succeeded Thomas Langton as Provost of Queen's College in 1496.

He was appointed Master of the Rolls in 1504, and was incorporated at Lincoln's Inn on 20 January 1505: in the same year, being admitted to the Privy Council, he became Dean of St. George's Chapel, Windsor.

[34] The French historian Aubéry accuses Bainbridge of cunning and artifice, and of mixing his personal ambition to become a cardinal with the interests of his royal master.

[36] Aubéry repeats what was said by Paride de' Grassi in his Life of Julius II concerning two occasions on which Bainbridge acted surprisingly while in Rome.

De' Grassi, the Master of Ceremonies, had instructed him to make his speech under four simple points, first to magnify the dignity of Cardinal, second to lessen the merits of himself and his fellows, third to extol the beneficence of the Pope, and to conclude with thanks and the submission of their humble service.

[38] Bainbridge was immediately sent with an army to lay siege to Ferrara, but the creation of the Holy League relieved the papacy of some pressure by involving Spain against the French forces.

[36] Bainbridge obtained other Italian benefices, both at Vicenza and in the administration of San Giovanni Battista at Treviso: and by bull of 29 November 1513 he became Cardinal protector of the Cistercian Order.

[44] He and Matthäus Schiner, Bishop of Sion, had held out against Pope Leo's decision to rehabilitate the schismatic churchmen of the Council of Pisa (1511), the colleagues of Cardinal Federico Sanseverino and Bernardino López de Carvajal, and refused to attend the ceremony of their readmission.

[45] The Liber Pontificalis of Archbishop Bainbridge, which is the latest surviving example of the Old English rite, and contains musical notation, was edited for the Surtees Society.

[46] Bainbridge died on 14 July 1514, having been poisoned by a priest, Rinaldo de Modena, who acted as his steward or bursar, in revenge for a blow which the cardinal, a man of violent temper, had given him.

De Giglis was the resident English ambassador at Rome, and regarded Bainbridge as a threat to his position: he also had sufficient power and influence to make Rinaldo retract his confession and have him killed in prison.

[36] Richard Pace and John Clerk, the cardinal's executors, were eager to prosecute De Giglis, but he maintained that the priest was a madman whom he had dismissed from his own service some years before in England, and his defence was accepted as sufficient.

[7] The Latin epitaph reads:"Christophoro Archiepiscopo Eboracensi S. Praxedis Presbytero Cardinali Angliae A Ivlio II Pontifice Maximo Ob Egregiam Operam S.R.

Ecclesiae Præstitam Dvm Svi Regni Legatvs Esset Assvmpto Qvam Mox Domi Et Foris Castris Pontificiis Præfectvs Tvtatvs Est.

"[2] (In Memory of Christopher, Archbishop of York, and Cardinal Priest of St. Praxede; created by Pope Julius II, for the eminent services done by him to the Holy Roman Church, during his embassy from his own nation, and afterwards defending the same, both at home and abroad, as Legate of the Papal army.)

At Bainbridge's death in 1514; the Langton chantry at Bongate was effectively incorporated with his own, and endowed with his bequest of Toot Baldon, to be managed by Queen's College.

[59] The records of Queen's College show that the Bongate chantry under the Bainbridge endowment remained active until the Dissolution, and pensions were still being paid to proxies into the 1570s.