James Willoughby explores the enigmatic man at the heart of a new exhibition.
In every portrait of him that we have, Cardinal Reginald Pole stares out, watchful and reticent. His eyes seem to be painted unnaturally large. He grasps the arms of his chair as if poised to spring out of it. A prince of the Church who was also a descendant of the English royal line, Pole had a perilous course to steer through the storm of the European Reformation. If – as the portraitists saw – he was wary of strangers, then that was not without reason. Henry VIII had ordered the assassination of the “archtraitor” in 1537, infuriated by his cousin’s public opposition to the royal supremacy. There were enemies too in Rome, who accused Pole of being a crypto-Lutheran and sought to bring him before the Inquisition on charges of heresy. And yet, remarkably, here was a man who came within one vote of being elected pope, and who returned in triumph to his homeland to become Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry’s daughter, Mary I.
Ever since, Cardinal Pole has been at the heart of two competing national narratives. The first portrays Mary Tudor and her archbishop as stolid reactionaries unable to arrest Britain’s Providential destiny as sovereign Protestant nation and world power. The second narrative condoles in their failure to return the country to its historic place in Catholic Europe, thwarted by bad luck and time. The two narratives are born of a central conflict in the island story that, like Greek fire, has a tendency to reignite down the ages in different ways. Both strands have obscured an authentic portrait of Pole, which is emerging only now to reveal the enigmatic man who was the intellectual leader of the Marian restoration and a decisive figure in the European Counter-Reformation.
Reginald Pole was born in 1500, with descent from the Plantagenet royal line. The royal purse supported his studies at Oxford and afterwards at Padua in Italy, then a thriving centre of humanistic study. Pole, a natural scholar, won many admirers there. The poet Pietro Bembo described him as “perhaps the most virtuous and learned and grave young man in all of Italy”. It became conventional to praise him for being as virtuous as he was noble, as noble as learned; no one forgot how close he stood to the throne.
His years in scholarly seclusion permitted him to maintain a public silence on Henry’s assumption of the royal supremacy over the English Church in the early 1530s. What caused him finally to speak out was the judicial killing in 1535 of the chancellor, Thomas More, and Bishop John Fisher, who had both refused to swear the Oath of Supremacy. Their executions shook Pole and brought to the surface tensions he could no longer reconcile within himself. In a blaze of work he produced the book commonly known as the De unitate (On the Unity of the Universal Church). The firmest statement of papal supremacy of the 16th century, it emphasises the absolute distinction between secular and spiritual authority and the impossibility of a king acting as head of both state and Church. For “the love of a harlot”, Anne Boleyn, and through avarice for the goods of the Church, the King, and thereby the whole country, had been cut off from God.
Henry’s fury was immediate. His regime sought to keep questions on the supremacy focused on loyalty rather than theology: Pole was therefore the “Italianate Englishman, Devil incarnate” gone native in the papal court and seeking to overthrow the sovereign power. The costs were paid in his family’s blood. In 1539 his older brother and cousin were executed and, two years later, so was his mother Margaret, Countess of Salisbury. “For one Pole’s sake the King would destroy all Poles,” said his friend Thomas Starkey. To Pole, they were martyrs and he was the son of a martyr.
The ideal of martyrdom infused Pole’s theology and was the lens through which he discussed the nature of the papal office and its reform. He developed it towards a providentialist understanding of the papacy’s role in English history. God had allowed martyrs in order to show His judgment upon Henry and underline the importance of papal supremacy. Unsurprisingly, Pole had a particular feeling for St Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury assassinated in 1170 on the orders of a different King Henry. With the king’s agents in pursuit, Pole was preparing himself for the same fate.
In Italy, where publication of De unitate had catapulted him onto the cardinal’s bench, he came under pressure of a different kind. He was exploring new religious ideas through his association with groups of heterodox reformers known as the spirituali. An important member of his circle was the poet Vittoria Colonna, whom Pole called his “new mother”. Vittoria introduced him to one of her own dearest friends, the artist Michelangelo. The painter Giorgio Vasari wrote that “Michelangelo especially revered the goodness and talents of the illustrious Cardinal Pole.” Through spiritual discussions, Pole influenced the creation by Michelangelo of some of the most beautiful and powerfully influential drawings and paintings of the Renaissance, including the Pauline Chapel frescoes, begun in 1542.
The central preoccupation of the spirituali was exploring the means to salvation for the Christian soul through the divine gift of faith (“justification by faith alone”), which was a chief tenet of Lutheranism. At the great Church Council at Trent in 1545, Pole’s was a voice for moderation, urging the assembly not to argue “Luther said that, therefore it is false”. But in the febrile atmosphere of 16th-century Europe, religious moderation was a dangerous attribute and a political liability. In 1549 his candidacy for the papacy was impugned by the Grand Inquisitor Gian Pietro Carafa, brandishing evidence that Pole was a clandestine Lutheran. In spite of that, Pole came within one vote of being elected pope. He refused further politicking and withdrew to Viterbo, giving his enemies opportunity to conspire against him.
Mary’s accession to the throne of England in 1553 drew Pole away from Italy. As papal legate and then as archbishop, he embarked on a campaign to reconcile the country to Rome, reconstitute parish religion, regenerate Catholic learning in the universities, refound monasticism, reform the clergy, and rebuild England’s relationship with the papacy. He was given only four years, dying at Lambeth of influenza on the same day as his queen, November 17, 1557.
In a posthumous publication, Pole said that Christian life should be an attempt to “turne not aside unto the right hand, nor to the lefte”. By this he meant that salvation rested on neither works nor faith alone. It was a view born of subtle theology but led him into conflict with both reformers and conservatives, Catholics and Protestants. Such binaries enmeshed Pole throughout his life and continue to colour his reputation. A new exhibition at Lambeth gathers books and objects from Oxford, London and Rome to tell the story of an enigmatic man: a gifted scholar of undoubted charisma, a subtle diplomat, an upholder of ecclesiastical unity and reform, unyielding in print but moderate in speech, notably introspective in that most introspective of ages.
Reformation Cardinal: Reginald Pole in 16th-Century Italy and England is at Lambeth Palace Library from October 5 to December 15, Monday to Friday. Entry is free.
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