Reginald Pole was an English cardinal and archbishop of Canterbury.
Background
Reginald Pole was born at Stourton Castle, Staffordshire, on 12 March 1500. Pole was a younger son of Margaret, countess of Salisbury, daughter of George, duke of Clarence: he was therefore of the blood royal and his mother was governess and companion of Princess Mary.
Education
Educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, Reginald Pole showed such promise that he was sent in 1521 at the king's expense to Padua to continue his studies.
Career
Reginald Pole was intended for the church from his youth and when he was seven years old was sent for five years to the grammar school which Colet had founded near the Carthusian monastery at Sheen.
Here he had Linacre and William Latimer as teachers.
In 1517 Henry VIII appointed his young kinsman to a prebend in Salisbury, and soon afterwards to the deaneries of Wimborne and Exeter.
He was a friend of Sir Thomas More, who says that Pole was as learned as he was noble and as virtuous as he was learned.
In 1519, at the king's expense, he went to Padua, the Athens of Europe, according to Erasmus; and there, where Colet and Cuthbert Tunstall had also been educated, the " nobleman of England " as he was called, came into contact with the choicest minds of the later Italian Renaissance, and formed the friendships that influenced his life. In 1525 he went to Rome for the Jubilee, and two years after returned to England and was initiated by Thomas Cromwell into the mysteries of statesmanship, that master telling him that the main point consisted in discovering and following the will of princes, who are not bound by the ordinary code of honour.
When the divorce question arose, Pole, like many other excellent men, seems at first to have been in its favour.
He probably took the same view that Wolsey had, viz.
that the dispensation of Julius II was insufficient, as of two existing diriment impediments only one had been dispensed.
At this time, he says, the more he saw into the case the less he knew how to act as he was desired.
On his return to England he spoke strongly against the project to the king, who seems to have dealt gently with him in the hope of using him for his own ends.
He offered him the sees of York or Winchester, and kept them vacant for ten months for his acceptance.
There was a stormy interview at York Place; but Pole succeeded in mollifying the king's rage so far that Henry told him*to put into writing his reasons against the divorce.
This was done, and, recognizing the difficulties of the situation, the king gave him leave to travel abroad, and allowed him still to retain his revenues as dean of Exeter.
The parting of the ways had been reached.
Pole's reply, which took a year to write, and was afterwards published with additions under the title Pro unitate ecclesiae, was sent to England (May 25, 1536) and was meant for the king's eye alone.
In January 1537 he received a sharp letter of rebuke from the king's council, together with the suggestion that the differences might be discussed with royal deputies either in France pr Flanders, provided that Pole would attend without being commissioned by any one.
Paul III in the early spring of that year named him legate a latere to Charles V and Francis I, for the purpose of securing their assistance in enforcing the bull by helping a projected rising in England against Henry's tyranny.
Moreover, the fear of Henry was sufficient to make the French king refuse to allow one who was attainted by act of parliament to remain in the kingdom; so Pole passed over to Flanders, to wait for the possible arrival of any royal deputies.
There he was appointed to the famous commission which Paul III established for considering the reforms necessary for the church and Roman curia.
Towards the end of 1339, after Henry had destroyed the shrine of St Thomas Becket, another attempt was made to launch the bull of deposition, and Pole again was sent to urge Charles V to assist.
When the news came to the cardinal he said to his secretary Beccatelli that he had received good tidings: " Hitherto I have thought myself indebted to the divine goodness for having received my birth from one of the most noble and virtuous women in England; but henceforth my obligation will be much greater, as I understand I am now the son of a martyr.
Here he came into close relations with Vittoria Colonna, Contarini, Sadoleto, Bembo, Morone, Marco Antonio, Fla. minio, and other scholars and leaders of thought; and many of the questions raised by the Reformation in Germany were eagerly discussed in the circle of Viterbo.
The " dolce libriccino, " the famous Tratlato ulilissimo del beneficio di Gesu Christo crocifisso verso i christiani, which was the composition of a Sicilian Benedictine and had been touched up by the great latinist Flaminio, just appeared at Mantua in 1542 under the auspices of Morone, and had a wide circulation (over 40, 000 copies of the second edition, Venice 1543, were sold).
Containing extracts from the I Hundred and Ten Divine Considerations of Juan Valdes (q. v. ), %it was soon regarded with the utmost horror by many.
It is by no means certain that Pole ever knew about the process begun against him; and immediate subsequent events show that no credence was given to the charges. 1While at Viterbo his rule was firm but mild; and no charge of persecuting heretics is made against him.
He regained many, such as his friend Flaminio, by patience and kindliness, to a reconsideration of their errors.
During this time also he was still engaged in furthering a proposed armed expedition to Scotland to aid the papal party, and in 1545 he was again asking help from Charles V.
But the Council of Trent (q. v. ), first summoned in 1536, was at last on the point of meeting, and this required all his attention.
In 1542 he had been appointed one of the presiding legates and had written in preparation his work De concilio; and now in 1545, after a brief visit to Rome, he went secretly, on account of fear of assassination by Henry's agents, to Trent, where he arrived on the 4th of May 1545.
His views on the subject of original sin, akin as it is to that of justification, were accepted and embodied in the decree.
He was present when the latter subject was introduced, and he entreated the fathers to study the subject well before committing themselves to a decision.
On the 28th of June 1546 he left Trent on account of ill-health and went to Padua.
His suggestions and amendments were accepted, and the decree embodies the doctrines that Pole had always held of justification by a living faith which showed itself in good works.
He wrote several times to England to prepare a conference, but only received a rude reply from Somerset, who sent him a copy of the Book of Common Prayer.
At the conclave of 1549 Pole received two-thirds of the votes, but by a delay, caused by his sense of responsibility, he lost the election and Julius III succeeded.
But many difficulties were put in the way of return.
He was still under attainder; and the temper of England was not yet ripe for the presence of a cardinal. 1 See, however, Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopiidie (ed.
3) §" Pole, " where it is said that " only his procrastination, and then his death saved him from appearing before the Inquisition. "
Within the institution of the Inquisition his name continued to be regarded as that of a heretic and misleader of others, as is proved by the mass of evidence accumulated against him in the Compendium inquisilorum (v. archivio della societi di storia patria, Rome, 1880), p. 283, &c. -(Ed. )
The project of the queen's marriage was also an obstacle. A marriage between her and Pole, who was then only a deacon, was proposed by some, but this did not at all meet the views of the emperor, who therefore hindered him the more from setting out for England.
Arriving at Whitehall, where he was received with joy by Mary and Philip on the 30th of November, he proceeded to parliament and there absolved the kingdom and accepted in the pope's name the demands respecting ecclesiastical property.
He entered wisely on his work of reformation, for which he was well prepared.
One of the most important matters he had to deal with was to rectify the canonical position of those who had been ordained or consecrated since the breach with Rome.
Acting according to the instructions he had received from Rome, where the matter had been fully gone into, he made an investigation, and divided the clergy ordained after that period into two classes; one consisting of those ordained in schism, indeed, but according to the old Catholic rite, and the other of those who had been ordained by the new rite drawn up by Cranmer and enforced by act of parliament 16t of April 1550.
The first class, after submission, were absolved from their irregularity, and, receiving penance, were reinstated; the second class were simply regarded as laymen and dismissed without penance or absolution.
At his first convocation he exhorted the bishops to use gentleness rather than rigour in their dealings with heretics; and Pole, in himself, was true to his principle.
On the 4th of November 1555 Pole opened, in the chapel royal at Westminster, a legatine synod, consisting of the united convocations of the two provinces, for the purpose of laying the foundations of wise and solid reforms.
In the Reformatio Angliae which he brought out in 1556, based on his Legatine Constitutions of 1555, he ordered that every cathedral church should have its seminary, and the very words he uses on this subject seem to have been copied by the Council of Trent in the twenty-third session (1563).
He also ordered that the Catechism of Caranza, who, like him, was to suffer from the Inquisition for this very book, should be translated into English for the use of the laity.
To injure Spain and heedless of England's need, Paul IV deprived Pole of his power both as legate a latere and iegatus natus as archbishop of Canterbury (June 14, 1557).