Reginald Pole

• 1. Introduction

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  At about seven o'clock on the evening of the 17th of November 1558, Reginald Pole died in London. He was England's last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury. He was born on the 12th of March 1500 at Stourton Castle in Staffordshire. He was the third son of Sir Richard Pole and Margaret Pole, 8th Countess of Salisbury. His blood connected him to the Plantagenet kings. His maternal grandfather was George Plantagenet, 1st Duke of Clarence, making Reginald a great-nephew of Edward IV and Richard III. That genealogy brought royal favor and royal suspicion in equal measure. Henry VIII called Pole a second cousin and gave him a pension of £12 to fund his schooling. The same Henry later sent agents across Europe with orders to kill him. What drove a royal cousin from his king's favor into exile is the first question. What happened to those he left behind is another.

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• 2. Oxford and Padua

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  At Magdalen College, Oxford, Pole matriculated in 1512 with William Latimer as his principal tutor. Thomas Linacre also taught him between 1518 and 1520. He earned his BA degree on the 27th of June 1515. In February 1518, Henry VIII granted him the deanery of Wimborne Minster in Dorset. He later held the prebendary of Salisbury and became Dean of Exeter in 1527. He also held a canonry in York and several other church livings, though he had not yet been ordained as a priest.

  In 1521, with a stipend of £100 from the king, Pole left for the University of Padua. There the world of Italian Renaissance scholarship opened to him. Among those he met was Pietro Bembo, the humanist cardinal and poet. He also encountered Gianmatteo Giberti, who had served as Pope Leo X's datary and chief minister. Jacopo Sadoleto and Gianpietro Carafa were part of the same circle; Carafa would later become Pope Paul IV. Others in his Padua network included Giovanni Morone, Rodolfo Pio, Otto Truchsess, and Stanislaus Hosius. He also met Cristoforo Madruzzo, Vettor Soranzo, Pier Paolo Vergerio the younger, and Peter Martyr Vermigli. Vergerio, Soranzo, and Vermigli were later condemned as heretics by the Catholic Church. Vermigli in particular went on to contribute significantly to the Protestant Reformation in England. Pole's studies were partly funded by his election as a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Henry VIII himself covered more than half the total cost.

  In April 1526, Pole's brother Henry, 1st Baron Montagu, presented him with the living of South Harting in Sussex. Three months later, Pole returned home, arriving from France with an escort provided by Thomas Lupset. He had gone to Padua a graduate of Oxford and came back connected to some of the leading minds in Catholic Europe. Henry VIII would soon put those European connections to use by sending him to Paris to sound out theologians at the Sorbonne.

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• 3. The King's Offer

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  In October 1529, Henry VIII sent Pole to Paris. He was sent to gauge opinion among the theologians of the Sorbonne on the proposed annulment of the royal marriage to Catherine of Aragon. He worked alongside Bishop Edward Foxe on that mission. He returned to England in the summer of 1530 and, for a time, lived in John Colet's former house at Sheen. By around 1531, he had furnished Henry with a private analysis of the political difficulties of a divorce and warned of the dangers it posed to the succession.

  Henry offered Pole the Archbishopric of York or the Diocese of Winchester in exchange for his public support of the annulment. Pole declined. He went into self-imposed exile in France and Italy in 1532, continuing his studies in Padua and Paris. He received one final English benefice, the vicarage of Piddletown in Dorset, between December 1532 and early 1536. During this period, the imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys had suggested to Emperor Charles V that Pole might marry Henry's daughter Mary. Such a union would combine their dynastic claims.

  The final break came in May 1536. Thomas Cromwell, Cuthbert Tunstall, Thomas Starkey, and others wrote to Pole with questions on Henry's behalf about religious authority. Pole's reply came in the form of his published treatise Pro ecclesiasticae unitatis defensione. It was a theological argument against Henry's position on marrying his brother Arthur's widow. It also denied the royal supremacy over the Church and delivered a personal denunciation of the king's policies. Pole went further still, urging the princes of Europe to depose Henry at once. Henry wrote to Pole's mother, the Countess of Salisbury. She wrote back to her son, reproving him for his "folly." On the 22nd of December 1536, Pole was created a cardinal, over his own stated objections. He became the fourth of the five English cardinals of the first half of that century. Pope Paul III also made him a papal legate to England the following February. He was sent to organize support for the Pilgrimage of Grace, a movement pressing Henry to restore traditional Catholic advisers. Neither Francis I of France nor the Emperor supported that effort. The English government tried to have Pole assassinated.

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• 4. A Family Destroyed

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  Sir Geoffrey Pole was arrested in August 1538, caught in correspondence with his exiled brother. Under interrogation, he admitted that Henry Pole, 1st Baron Montagu, had also been party to that exchange. Henry Courtenay, 1st Marquess of Exeter, was implicated as well. Exeter was Henry VIII's first cousin. Thomas Cromwell had previously written that the Pole family had "little offended save that he Reginald Pole is of their kin." Despite that acknowledgment, Montagu, Exeter, and Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, were arrested in November 1538. The charges were treason, and other family members were taken along with them. They were committed to the Tower of London. Reginald Pole was attainted in absentia.

  In May 1539, Montagu and Exeter were tried and executed for treason. As part of the evidence against Lady Salisbury, Cromwell produced a tunic bearing the Five Wounds of Christ. This symbol of traditional Catholicism was said to have come from her possessions. It had not appeared when her house was searched at the time of her arrest; it surfaced six months later. It is likely to have been planted. Margaret was held in the Tower for two and a half years under severe conditions. She was confined alongside her grandson (Montagu's son) and Exeter's son, by order of the king.

  Margaret Pole was finally executed in 1541, protesting her innocence until the last. The appointed executioner was inexperienced and delivered nearly a dozen blows before she was killed. Her death was regarded as a grave miscarriage of justice both at the time and afterward. Reginald Pole is reported to have said he "would never fear to call himself the son of a martyr." Some 350 years later, in 1886, Pope Leo XIII beatified her. Sir Geoffrey was pardoned in January 1539 and survived. He was the only member of those arrested who did not die in the Tower or on the scaffold.

  Historians have noted that Margaret was one of the last surviving members of the House of Plantagenet. Until Reginald definitively entered the clergy, that descent could, under certain circumstances, have made him a potential claimant to the English throne itself.

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• 5. Near the Papacy

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  In 1542, Reginald Pole was appointed as one of three papal legates to preside over the Council of Trent. The council had been convened to define the Catholic Church's response to the Protestant Reformation. He arrived carrying a theological position that would cause him difficulty. His personal belief in justification by faith alone over works had drawn accusations of heretical crypto-Lutheranism. Those accusations did not disappear when the council concluded.

  When Pope Paul III died in 1549, a papal conclave assembled to elect his successor. Pole emerged as the leading candidate. At one point during the 1549-1550 conclave, he held 26 of the 28 votes required to be elected. Thomas Hoby, an Englishman who had traveled to Rome specifically to be present during the proceedings, later recorded what he witnessed. Hoby wrote that Pole had been blocked by the Cardinal of Ferrara. According to Hoby, Ferrara persuaded cardinals of the French faction that Pole was "both Imperiall and also a verie Lutheran." Two votes short of the papacy, Pole remained a cardinal.

  The death of King Edward VI on the 6th of July 1553 would soon change his situation entirely. It opened a path back to England that had been closed for more than twenty years.

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• 6. Return to Canterbury

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  Queen Mary I's accession to the throne made Pole's return to England possible at last. But neither Mary nor Emperor Charles V moved quickly. Charles feared Pole might oppose Mary's planned marriage to his son, Philip of Spain. Mary shared that concern. Together they delayed his arrival until the 20th of November 1554. Parliament repealed his attainder just two days later, on the 22nd.

  On the 27th of November 1554, Pole appeared before Philip and Mary and the assembled members of Parliament at the Palace of Whitehall. He opened his papal commission and presented his legatine credentials there. Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester and Lord Chancellor of England, was among the dignitaries present. Gardiner would steer the restoration of Catholicism through Parliament in January 1555. As papal legate, Pole negotiated a key concession: a papal dispensation allowing the new owners of confiscated former monastic lands to keep them. In exchange, Parliament passed the Revival of the Heresy Acts in January 1555. The acts restored heresy legislation going back as far as the reign of Richard II. On the 13th of November 1555, Thomas Cranmer was officially deprived of the See of Canterbury. The Pope promoted Pole to cardinal-priest and made him administrator of the See of Canterbury on the 11th of December 1555. He was ordained a priest on the 20th of March 1556 and consecrated a bishop two days later, formally becoming Archbishop of Canterbury. He also became chancellor of Oxford University in 1555 and of Cambridge in 1555 or early 1556.

  In 1555, Queen Mary began permitting the burning of Protestants for heresy. Some 220 men and 60 women were executed before her death in 1558. Pole's involvement in the persecutions is disputed. He was in poor health during the worst period, and there is evidence he sometimes favored a more lenient approach. Three condemned heretics from the diocese of Edmund Bonner were pardoned on appeal to Pole; he assigned them a penance and gave them absolution. Many former enemies, including Cranmer, signed recantations affirming belief in transubstantiation and papal supremacy. Despite this, the Queen could not forget their responsibility for the annulment of her mother's marriage. As archbishop, Pole also served effectively as the Queen's chief minister and primary adviser. That role would last until the final November of both their lives.

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• 7. Two Deaths in November

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  Pope Paul IV, elected in 1555, held a deep distaste for the humanist Catholicism that Pole represented. He was also fiercely opposed to the Spanish alliance that Pole had supported. Paul first cancelled Pole's legatine authority, then sought to recall him to Rome to face a heresy investigation based on his early writings. Their dispute was longstanding, predating Paul IV's election as pope. Mary refused to send Pole to Rome. She accepted his suspension from legatine office but would not hand him over.

  Pole's reading of Machiavelli's The Prince, encountered during his years in Italy, moved him to a blunt condemnation. He described the book as "written by an enemy of the human race." In his view, it "explains every means whereby religion, justice and any inclination toward virtue could be destroyed." He also authored De Concilio, a treatise on the authority of the pope. He produced an important body of letters, later edited by Angelo Maria Quirini.

  On the 24th of September 1558, Pole was named as one of the executors in the will of Sir Robert Acton. Acton's will expressed sentiments consistent with dying in the Protestant faith; naming a Catholic cardinal as executor was, under the circumstances, a striking choice. Pole died just weeks later, in London, during an influenza epidemic. He had outlasted Queen Mary I by barely twelve hours. He was buried on the north side of the Corona at Canterbury Cathedral. William Harrison Ainsworth wrote a novel titled Cardinal Pole in 1863. Pole has remained a notable presence in historical fiction since. Hilary Mantel made him a significant character in The Mirror and the Light, the last of her trilogy on Thomas Cromwell.

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