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[501]. 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[502]. Subsequently, by
the royal munificence Pole was enabled to go to Italy, where he worked
with the foremost scholars of the time[503]. 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[504].
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[505]. 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[506].
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[507]. 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[508]. 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[509]. 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[510]. Coupled with the King’s message came
a letter of reproof from Pole’s mother, which had evidently been written
at Henry’s command[511]. 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[512]. 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[513].’ 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[514]. 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[515]. 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[516]. 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[517]. 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[518]. If Henry had once thought that
Pole’s servant would put his loyalty to the Crown before his
faithfulness to his master[519], 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[520]. 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[521]. 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[522]. 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[523]. 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[524]. 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 Tower[525]. 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[526]. 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[527]. 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[528]. 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[529]. 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[530].’
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[531]. 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[532].
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[533]. 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 ‘wer_e_ his owne trayto_ur_,
co_m_myng from that holy father’ he could not refuse him audience[534].
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[535]. 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[536]. 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[537]. 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.