CARDINAL POLE.  The story of the life of Reginald Pole and of the destruction of his illustrious family will always be inseparably bound up with the history of Thomas Cromwell. It affords the most striking example of the unscrupulous policy of the King's minister towards those who stood in the way of the royal despotism in Church and State. It forms moreover a valuable connecting link between the internal and foreign administration of the time, as it concerns itself with nearly all the great problems which Cromwell had to face.

To turn for a moment to the earlier history of Pole; he was born in March, 1500, the fourth son of Sir Richard Pole, and his wife Margaret, Countess of Salisbury. ¹  In his youth Henry had helped him forward in his education, paying twelve pounds for his maintenance at school, and later obtaining for him a pension from the Prior of St. Frideswide's, while he was an undergraduate at Magdalen College. ²  Subsequently, by the royal munificence Pole was enabled to go to Italy, where he worked with the foremost scholars of the time. ³  He returned to England in 1527 and there received many marks of distinction, but wishing to continue his studies, he soon removed to Paris. Henry was particularly anxious that the University there should pronounce in favour of the divorce, and with some difficulty induced Pole to carry on negotiations with it to that intent. When the University finally came to the decision that the King desired, Pole received a hearty letter of commendation and was subsequently induced to return to England. ⁴

Henry now urged him openly to support the divorce, and offered him as an inducement the archbishopric of York, which had been left vacant at Wolsey's death, but in vain. Pole firmly refused to approve of the King's new measures, saying that to do so would be inconsistent with his principles.⁵  A little later he witnessed the concessions wrung from the clergy concerning the Royal Supremacy, and was not slow to perceive that it was by Cromwell's agency that the entire ecclesiastical system of the country had been overthrown. He called to mind the conversation he had held years before with the 'Satanae Nuncius,' when the latter had dared to uphold the superiority of Machiavelli's doctrines to the scholastic learning, and soon became convinced that England was not a safe place for a man of his ideas, while such a person as Cromwell was in power. He accordingly requested leave to continue his study of theology abroad, and obtained Henry's consent. ⁶

He settled down at Padua, and there lived the quiet life of a scholar until 1535, when the King determined to find out about him. He sought information concerning Pole and his beliefs from one Thomas Starkey, who had long been an intimate of the future Cardinal. In answer to the King's inquiries Starkey sent back an imaginary dialogue between Pole and his companion Lupset, in which the former was represented as opposed on principle to a royal despotism, but still personally faithful to Henry VIII. The King, however, was not contented with this vague and half-contradictory reply, and caused Starkey to write again to Pole and ask him honestly to express his views about the divorce and the Royal Supremacy. ⁷ To this Pole responded in May, 1536, with a letter enclosing his famous treatise, 'De Unitate Ecclesiae,' which he sent by his faithful servant Michael Throgmorton. ⁸ This work fulfilled all too perfectly Henry's request for a candid opinion; so plain were its expressions of disapproval, that even Starkey himself felt obliged to write to the King to say how much he had been shocked by its violence. ⁹  Henry dissembled his anger, and sent Throgmorton back to Pole with a message urging him to come home in order that he might talk with him more fully. The King took good care to make Throgmorton himself promise to return in any case. ¹⁰  Coupled with the King's message came a letter of reproof from Pole's mother, which had evidently been written at Henry's command. ¹¹  This letter aroused Pole's suspicions and he refused to return, alleging as his excuse the fact that the King enforced with 'sore severitie' a law by which any man who would not consent to his supremacy was declared a traitor. It appears from Pole's reply that Cromwell had also written to him, 'to styrr hym the more vehemently.' If the letter of the King's minister was half as savage and threatening as those which he later wrote, it is no wonder that Pole was alarmed.

On the 22nd of December, 1536, Pole much against his will was created Cardinal at Rome, and two months later was appointed Papal legate to England. ¹²  It appears that in spite of the Ten Articles the Pope had not yet given up all hope of re-establishing his power in Henry's dominions, and had determined to make use of Pole as the most likely means of accomplishing this end. The news of the latter's new dignity and of the Papal intentions against England was received with dread at the King's Court. It was remembered that as far back as 1512 a prophecy had been made to the effect, 'that one with a Red Cap brought up from low degree to high estate should rule all the land under the King, . . . . and afterwards procure the King to take another wife, divorce his lawful wife, Queen Catherina, and involve the land in misery'; and that further 'that divorce should lead to the utter fall of the said Red Cap . . . and after much misery the land should by another Red Cap be reconciled, or else brought to utter destruction. ¹³'  We are told that Cromwell knew this prophecy well, and that he often discussed it, and sought to learn whether the last part of it should some day come to pass, as he had seen the first fulfilled in his own time. Had Pole been able to arrive in England promptly, so that he could have taken advantage of the disturbance caused by Bigod's rebellion, it is possible that Cromwell's fears might have been realized before his death, and that a reconciliation with Rome might have taken place in 1537 instead of in 1554.  But the bull of legation was unaccountably delayed till the 31st of March. ¹⁴  Meantime the northern revolt had been crushed, Francis and Charles were still at war, and Pole's chance had gone. By this time Henry had doubtless perceived that the new-made Cardinal could never be induced to support his cause, but would certainly oppose it as long as he lived. As reconciliation seemed impossible, the King turned his thoughts to arrest or execution. The foreign affairs of England at that juncture were in such a favourable condition that Henry felt strong enough to dictate both to the Emperor and to the King of France. Informed by the latter (who was just then in terror of losing England's friendship because of his war with Charles) that Pole was coming through France with money to help the northern rebels, Henry was bold enough to demand in answer that he should not be received as a legate, and also that he should be extradited as a traitor; he also wrote to Gardiner at Paris to keep 'good espyall' on his movements. ¹⁵  A letter from Sir Thomas Palmer, a somewhat quarrelsome knight at Calais, would seem to indicate that a plot to apprehend or assassinate Pole had been set on foot as early as the spring of 1537, and Cromwell in a letter to Gardiner of May 18 further discusses the matter. ¹⁶  Pole, however, had been advised of these treacherous schemes, and had escaped first to Cambray and later to the palace of the Cardinal of Liège, where he remained, grieved and mortified at the failure of his mission, but perfectly safe from Cromwell's assassins. ¹⁷  Returning thence to Rome at the Pope's command, he reported the unsuccessful result of his journey in October.

Meantime in January, 1537, Michael Throgmorton had fulfilled his promise and returned to England. ¹⁸  If Henry had once thought that Pole's servant would put his loyalty to the Crown before his faithfulness to his master, ¹⁹ he must have been convinced of his mistake by this time; but Throgmorton was saved from punishment for the present by Henry's temporary failure to subdue the Pilgrimage of Grace, and anxiety lest fresh hostility should be aroused abroad; and was soon sent back to carry to his master a final warning to desist from attacking the Royal Supremacy. ²⁰  From this errand Throgmorton did not return; it would have been the act of a madman to do so, considering the way in which events were moving. Instead, he wrote two long and conciliatory letters to Cromwell, one from Rome on February 15, the other from Liège on August 20. ²¹   In the first he attempted to appease the anger of the King, which had been aroused by Pole's acceptance of the Cardinalate. In the second he insisted that Pole had always done his utmost for the advancement of the King's honour and good name, except in matters which concerned the unity of the Church. Furthermore he pointed out that though Henry had treated him as a rebel and put a price upon his head, the Cardinal had shown great forbearance in not leaving his book against the King in the hands of the Pope, who would infallibly have published it, and in refusing the exercise of certain censures which had been prepared against Henry in Rome. Throgmorton added, moreover, that the Pope had just called Pole back to Italy to take part in the General Council appointed for the following November, at which it was inevitable that strong measures would be taken against England. He assured Cromwell that if the King desired to avoid this danger it would be indispensable for him to become reconciled to Pole, on whose attitude at the Council so much depended. Throgmorton appears to have supplemented this letter with a verbal suggestion that a conference should be arranged between the King's chaplain Dr. Wilson and the Cardinal, before the latter's departure for Rome, in the hope that some final agreement might be reached. He promised to use his own efforts to induce Pole to do his part, and seized the opportunity to excuse himself for not returning to England, by observing in this connexion that he could best further the King's interests by tarrying with his master. At first the plan which Throgmorton proposed seems to have found acceptance with Henry. A favourable reply was drawn up by Cromwell, and Dr. Wilson and his companion, Dr. Nicholas Heath, received instructions preparatory to a conference with Pole. ²²  But though Henry, discouraged as he was by his failures to kill or capture the Cardinal, appears to have been momentarily persuaded that Throgmorton's suggestion was feasible, his minister from the first was strongly opposed to it. The first draft of the reply to the letter of Pole's servant bears every evidence of having been written under compulsion, and Cromwell must have succeeded, before it was actually sent, in persuading the King that a mission which was to meet the Cardinal on his own ground could only result in failure, and that the sole thing to do was openly to menace Pole and his family with assassination. Such at least seems the most probable explanation of the fact that Wilson and Heath never started on their errand, and of the singularly abusive and malevolent letter with which Cromwell finally replied to that of Throgmorton.²³  The last hope of reconciliation with the Cardinal had vanished; not he alone, but also his aged mother and brother in England, had been threatened with destruction. Another obstacle to Henry's despotism was to be annihilated, as every attempt to surmount it had failed.

Pole meanwhile remained in Italy, assured of his personal safety but grieved to the heart that his mother and brother were still in England, where the King could take vengeance on them for his own alleged treason. In August, 1538, his brother, Sir Geoffrey Pole, was arrested and placed in the Tower, where he was examined on the charge of having had treacherous correspondence with his brother Reginald, and having interfered with the King's endeavours to arrest him. ²⁴  His replies to the questions put to him implicated many others, and before the close of the year the heads of the powerful families of Montague, Courtenay, Delawarr, and Nevill had been arrested and sent to the Towers. ²⁵  There is reason to believe that the confessions of Sir Geoffrey Pole were extorted from him by threats of torture, to serve as an excuse for the arrest of these noblemen, and a letter of Castillon to Montmorency asserts that their destruction had been decided on long before, on account of their connexion with the Yorkist dynasty. ²⁶  Cromwell's activity in procuring matter for the various indictments is sufficiently attested by an enormous number of notes of evidence and memoranda for prosecution in the hand of his chief clerk. The apparent difficulty which he had in trumping up any plausible charges against his victims, would seem to show that no adequate proof of any really disloyal intent could be found. Indeed, in order to have any sort of excuse for the arrests of the Marquis and Marchioness of Exeter, Cromwell had to exhume a long forgotten episode, and accuse the latter of having ridden in disguise three years before to confer with the Holy Maid; while it was remembered that the Marquis had been put in the Tower in 1531 on the charge of assembling the commons of Cornwall for an insurrection, with intent to depose the King. An unfortunate remark of Courtenay's that 'Knavys rule about the Kyng,' and that he hoped 'to gyue them a buffet oone day,' was brought up against him as a treasonable sentence; it certainly could not have been pleasing to Cromwell, who was doubtless the arch-'knave' referred to. ²⁷  But it is very unlikely that any of the unfortunate noblemen had been guilty of crimes which could fairly be interpreted as treason. The French ambassador had hit upon the real secret of their offences when he remarked that they all were adherents of the White Rose. ²⁸  In fact the whole plot against Pole may in one sense be regarded as preparatory to a final attack on the Yorkist nobles, whose position had never been secure since the accession of the House of Tudor. Blow after blow had been struck against them by Henry VIII and his father, but still some vestige of them seemed always to remain, to threaten the King's position and endanger his succession. There can be no doubt that Cromwell, whose action in the case was certainly influenced more than usual by personal animosity, found little difficulty in persuading the King that the existence of Courtenay was a serious menace to the security of the reigning dynasty, on account of the claim that he had to the throne as grandson of Edward IV. At any rate, Henry seemed resolved on a wholesale destruction of all nobles who could possibly be regarded as rivals of the Crown, and the relationship of most of his victims to the family of the persecuted Cardinal afforded him a pretext of which he did not fail to take advantage. Exeter, Montague, and Nevill were beheaded in December, on Tower Hill, while Sir Geoffrey Pole, who had been tried and condemned with them, was spared, mainly, as Cromwell frankly told Castillon at the end of December, because the King expected to get something more out of him. ²⁹  He was ultimately pardoned, but passed the rest of his life in musing, 'going about,' says a contemporary writer, 'like one terror-stricken all his days. ³⁰'

The Marchioness of Exeter and the Countess of Salisbury were meantime held prisoners in the Tower. On May 12, 1539, 'the moste tractable parlament' that Henry ever had passed a sweeping bill of attainder, to legalize the wanton massacres of the preceding year and to destroy the victims who still remained. ³¹  The Marchioness of Exeter was subsequently pardoned, but the Countess dragged on a miserable existence in prison for more than two years after her attainder. The only evidence of her treason was a cloth which had been found in her house, embroidered on one side with the arms of England and on the other with the five wounds of Christ, the emblem carried by the rebels in the Pilgrimage of Grace. Still execution was delayed, and it was not until the spring of 1541, almost a year after the death of Cromwell, that an insurrection in Yorkshire under Sir John Nevill sealed her fate, and she was barbarously beheaded by a clumsy executioner on May 28. ³²

Meantime the Cardinal at Rome, powerless as he was to prevent the ruin of his family, was contriving in some way to humble the arrogant King and the ruthless minister who had caused him so much woe. The Pope saw that what Henry dreaded most of all was a coalition of Francis and Charles, and as there was a good prospect of this event at the close of 1538, he sent Pole to each of these two sovereigns to urge them to agree to stop all trade with England and lay the foundation for a continental league against her. Pole gladly accepted the task, and careless of his own safety, though he knew that his path would be full of Henry's hired assassins, he set out for Spain and reached the Emperor's Court at Toledo in safety in February, 1539. When the King heard of his arrival there, he wrote to Charles in very much the same way that he had addressed Francis two years before, accusing Pole as a traitor, and demanding his extradition as such, or at least insisting that Charles should not grant him an audience ³³  But unfortunately Henry was now no longer in a position to dictate, and the Emperor, realizing this, saw no reason to accede to his request, and answered, as Cromwell later wrote to Wriothesley, that if Pole 'were his owne traytour, commyng from that holy father' he could not refuse him audience ³⁴  But in spite of all this, the Cardinal's mission was a failure. Charles for the present was content with the slight rebuke that he had given Henry for his bullying ways; cautious as ever, he did not propose to put himself in a position from which he could not retreat until he was sure of his ground, and intimated to the legate that the Pope had made a great mistake in publishing censures which he could not enforce. Pole could not obtain his consent to the Papal proposals and left Toledo much discouraged ³⁵  He was also exceedingly suspicious of some design of Sir Thomas Wyatt's to cause his assassination, and mentioned it in a later letter to Cardinal Contarini ³⁶  That his fears were not entirely groundless is shown by a cipher letter from Wyatt to Cromwell containing many passages pregnant with hidden meaning which can only be explained if such a design is premised. ³⁷  Pole soon betook himself to his friend Sadolet at Carpentras, whence he sent a messenger to Francis on the same errand as that on which he himself had gone to Charles. The French King's reply was as unsatisfactory as the Emperor's had been, and in 1540 the Cardinal returned to Rome with his mission unaccomplished, and deriving only small consolation from the thought that he had been successful in baffling the attempts of Henry's and Cromwell's assassins.

The story of Pole's life between 1535 and 1540 is the thread which binds together the foreign and domestic, secular and religious history of Cromwell's administration. The Cardinal's attempts to make the King renounce his title of Supreme Head and the other insignia of the despotism to which Cromwell had raised him at home were an absolute failure, and were punished with the shockingly unjust and cruel destruction of his family. Still his efforts to thwart the main aim of the foreign policy of the time, namely the separation of the interests of France and Spain, though not directly successful, were instrumental in bringing about the fall of his arch-enemy Cromwell. For the endeavours of the Cardinal were one of a number of things which combined to persuade the minister that the catastrophe which seemed imminent throughout the year 1539 could not be averted without external aid, and thus to induce him to take a step on his own responsibility which soon led him into disastrous conflict with the King.

1 Phillips, Pole, p. 3. Cf. also the genealogy at the beginning of the book. 2 Calendar of State Papers i. 4190. 3 Cal. iii. p. 1544. 4 Cal. iv. 6252. 5 Poli Epistolae, i. 251-62. 6 Cal. v. 737. 7 Cal. viii. 217-9. 8 Cal. x. 974-5. 9 Cal. xi. 156. 10 Cal. xi. 229. 11 Cal. xi, 93. 12 Cal. xi. 1353; xii. (i) 779. 13 Cal. xiv. (i) 186. 14 Cal. xii. (i) 779. 15 Cal. xii. (i) 625, 939. 16 Cal. xii. (i) 1219; Letters, 187. 17 Life of Pole, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. xlvi. p. 38. 18 Cal. xii. (i) 34, 249. 19 There is reason to think that Throgmorton had promised to be a spy on Pole's movements for the King. Cf. Letters, 218. 20 Cal. Xii. (i) 249, 296, 313. 21 Cal. Xii. (i) 429; xii. (ii) 22 Letters, 216-7. 23 Letters, 218. 24 Cal. xiii. (ii) 232 (p. 91). 25 Cal. xiii. (ii) 695, 770, 771. 26 Cal. xiii. (ii) 804, 805, 954-60. 27 Cal. xiii. (ii) 802, 979 (7). It is said that Cromwell, in the course of these prosecutions, contrived to deprive the victims of all chance of escape by inquiring of the judges whether, if a man were condemned to death for treason in Parliament without a hearing, the attainder could ever be disputed. He finally succeeded in obtaining the reluctant but correct reply that 'an attainder in Parliament, whether or not the party had been heard in his own defence, could never be reversed in a court of law.' Cf. Hallam, vol. i. pp. 29-30. Coke, Fourth Institute, p. 38, adds, 'The party against whom this was intended was never called in question, but the first man after the said resolution, that was so attainted, and never called to answer, was the said Earl of Essex (Thomas Cromwell): whereupon that erroneous and vulgar opinion amongst our historians grew, that he died by the same law which he himself had made.' 28 Cal. xiii. (ii) 753. 29 Cal. xiii. (ii) 986, 1163. 30 Wriothesley's Chronicle, vol. i. p. 92. 31 Cal. xiv. (i) 867, c. 15. 32 Cal. xvi. 868. 33 Cal. xiv. (i) 279-280. 34 Letters, 301. 35 Cal. xiv. (i) 603. 36 Cal. xiv. (ii) 212. 37 Cal. xiv. (i) 560.

      Excerpted from:

      Merriman, Roger B. "Cardinal Pole."
      Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell. Vol I.
      Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902. 202-212.

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Other Local Resources:

• Henry VIII
  
• Thomas Cromwell
  

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Books for further study:

Mayer, Thomas F. Cardinal Pole in European Context.
           Aldershot, Hant., UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2000.

Mayer, Thomas F. Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet.
           Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Mayer, Thomas F. A Reluctant Author: Cardinal Pole and His Manuscripts.
           American Philosophical Society, 1999.

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Cardinal Pole on the Web:

• Biography - Catholic Encyclopedia
  
• Biography - Augustana College Library
  
  

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