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Biography

Reginald Pole was the fourth child of Sir Richard Pole (1462–1505) and Margaret Plantagenet (1473–1541), who was a niece of King Edward IV (1442–1483) of England and countess of Salisbury. He was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford University, graduating as Bachelor of Arts in 1515. In 1521, King Henry VIII sent him to study at the University of Padua, and although he seems not to have matriculated there, he spent about 5 years in Italy, forming part of the circle of Niccolò Leonico Tomeo (1456–1531). In Padua, he continued his studies in Classical and Renaissance philosophy, as well as becoming increasingly interested in theology. In the 1520s, it seemed likely that he would become a courtier of Henry VIII, and in 1529, he was sent by the king as part of a delegation to the Theology Faculty of the University of Paris, which succeeded in gaining the theologians’ support for Henry’s divorce from his first wife, Katherine of Aragon (1485–1536) (Edwards 2014:1–29). After he returned to England from Paris, he turned against his royal master, opposing both the divorce of Katherine and King Henry’s separation from the Roman Catholic Church and Henry’s adoption of the title and role of Supreme Head of the English Church.

Pole returned to Italy in 1531 and remained there until 1553. In December 1536, he was created a cardinal by Pope Paul III (1468–1549), taking part in a papal commission to reform the Church and to prepare for the General Council which eventually opened at Trent in December 1545. In the meantime he was appointed as papal legate to France and the Holy Roman Empire, with the aim of securing peace between those two major Catholic powers. He was also named as papal legate to England, and his support of the traditionalist rebellion in the north of the kingdom in 1536–1537, known as the “Pilgrimage of Grace,” led to the execution of his brother Henry Pole, Baron Montagu (1492–1539), as well as other friends and relatives, who were accused of conspiring with him against the king. During these years, Pole made various attempts to return to his homeland, but it was only Mary I’s accession to the English throne, in July 1553, that enabled him to do so. As papal legate to England once again, now on behalf of Julius III (1487–1555), he masterminded the restoration of Catholicism in England, Wales, and Ireland, continuing this process until he and Queen Mary died on the same day, 17 November 1558. In the 1540s, while governor of Viterbo and Bagnoregio, in the Papal States, Pole and his circle had been suspected of “Lutheran” views and, during his last years in England, this suspicion resurfaced, in the reign of his former friend, but now his enemy on theological grounds, Pope Paul IV (Gian Pietro Carafa 1476–1559). Pole died under threat of trial by the Roman Inquisition, and the next queen, Elizabeth I (1533–1603), undid most of his ecclesiastical work, separating once again from Rome and restoring the vernacular liturgy of the Church of England, which had been introduced under Edward VI (1537–1553). Nevertheless, Reginald Pole subsequently became an inspiration to Catholics, in England and Wales and on the Continent of Europe, for what was regarded by many as his saintly life and for his contribution to the reforms decreed by the Council of Trent (1545–1563) (Pole 2002–2004; Mayer 2000a, b; Edwards 2014).

Heritage and Rupture with the Tradition

During Pole’s time as a student at Oxford University, Oxford retained a medieval Arts syllabus, based on the trivium and quadrivium, but his own college, Magdalen, was in the forefront of teaching Classical languages, literature, and philosophy, in addition to the prescribed subjects. One of his college tutors, William Latimer (c.1467–1545), had previously been a pupil of Leonico at Padua. Evidence of Pole’s own intellectual development in Italy, between 1521 and 1526, comes from personal correspondence. No doubt building on foundations laid during his time in Oxford; he is known to have read deeply in Greek philosophy, including the works of Plato (circa 428/423 BCE, Aristotle ((383–321 BCE), Galen (130–200 CE), the Academics, and the Peripatetics. By the early 1530s, when Henry VIII was trying to divorce his wife Katherine and beginning to threaten to break with the Church of Rome, Pole wrote to his friends, including Jacopo Sadoleto (1477–1547), bishop of Carpentras, and Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), that scholars of their own time were more fortunate than the Classical Greeks and Romans, because they had been given the light of the Christian Gospel and had the Son of God as their guide. By this time, Pole’s interest had moved from philosophy to theology, and he regarded this as a progression to a higher science. By 1534, he had concluded, as he wrote to Sadoleto, that doctrine and ethics were far more important than those favorite pastimes of the Renaissance, poetry and oratory. He still shared with his humanist friends the belief that the philosopher Plato was capable of leading a person to God. Even so, he now thought that reliance on the human senses and intellect would have ultimately to be abandoned, in favor of the recognition that humans, of themselves, could not have any knowledge that was truly sure and certain. Instead, he thought that anyone who sought the truth about the world and human existence must strive for, and maintain, faith in the Christian Trinitarian God. Only in that way could he (or she?) receive the benefit (beneficium) of Christ’s saving acts.

Despite this development of his views in the 1530s, it is still true that, although he would later be primarily associated with the main theological issues in sixteenth-century Europe, he was steeped in the “new learning” of the Renaissance. From his first stay in Padua until his death, he would express his religious faith in terms of the Christian humanism associated with Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536). In his preaching and writing, Pole avoided the scholastic techniques still used by most theologians of his day. Thus, instead of structuring his work as a series of quaestiones, with ample citations from medieval compilers and theologians such as Peter Lombard (1100–1160) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), he used a warmer and at times almost conversational style, frequently quoting, sometimes paraphrasing, or else commenting on Scripture. His emphasis, in both writing and preaching, was on the lived experience of the Christian faith – in the Bible, in Christian history, and in his own day (Edwards 2014: 85–108).

Pole wrote no major or systematic philosophical or theological work, but his most lengthy surviving treatise, generally known as De unitate, contains revealing passages about his intellectual methodology and confirms the general points made above. By 1535–1536, when he composed this somewhat rambling tract, at the request of King Henry VIII of England, he seems to have fully developed his approach to exegesis, incorporating the humanistic techniques and approaches which he had learned in Oxford and especially in Italy. The fact that Henry and his supporters used biblical quotation and arguments to justify his divorce of Katherine enabled Pole to deploy his own scriptural study in opposition to it. Thus, in various passages of the De unitate, he criticized the methods used by his opponents, particularly concerning the nature of authority in the Catholic Church. In this lengthy and sometimes rambling treatise, Pole repeatedly built up arguments on the basis of biblical texts, in order to justify papal authority over the Church and over Christian rulers. A fine example is Pole’s discussion of the fundamental question of whether, as the Roman Catholic Church claimed, St Peter, in New Testament times, had superiority over the other apostles, hence justifying and validating the papacy. Having discussed, in quite a sophisticated way, the meaning of the metaphysical use of the word “rock” in relation to Jesus’s famous statement to Simon Peter (“You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church”), Pole followed the principles and method of many biblical scholars in the Renaissance, by seeking concord between the four Gospel accounts. In addressing the question of whether there was a hierarchy among Jesus’s first disciples, Pole referred to the commissioning of the original apostles (Matthew 10; Mark 3), but focused particularly on Luke’s account of the Last Supper (Luke 22). In his version of Jesus’s rejection, on this occasion, of any such notions of supremacy, Pole combined the techniques of medieval glossators and Renaissance “Christian philosophers” by putting his own words into Jesus’s mouth, referring to Christ’s imminent betrayal by Judas. Both in De unitate and elsewhere, Pole did not provide a systematic biblical commentary of the kind that would appear in later centuries, but he was clearly fully aware of current scholarly developments on the subject, in Italy and elsewhere (Pole 1538; Pole and Dwyer 1965).

Innovative and Original Aspects

Pole was part of an innovative movement or tendency, among Catholic scholars and clergy, rather than producing original philosophical ideas of his own. His achievement was largely practical rather than theoretical. He put into practice, while in England as papal legate and as archbishop of Canterbury, some of the ideas about Christian teaching and worship that were shared and developed by his friends in Italy, in the 1520s–1540s. Although most of his work, between 1554 and 1558, involved the restoration of traditional Catholic observance and belief in England, his occasional sermons, some of which survive, indicate his Christian humanist approach (Fenlon 2005; Duffy 2006; Edwards 2014, 215–221).

Impact and Legacy

At his death, Pole’s program of restoration and reform was incomplete, and the fact that he and Queen Mary died on the same day meant that his legacy depended entirely on the new Queen, Elizabeth. She was half sister to her predecessor and the daughter of Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn (1501–1536). Elizabeth quickly set about dismantling Mary and Pole’s work in the Church, by separating once more from the See of Rome, and using Parliament to restore, with a few minor revisions, the 1552 Book of Common Prayer as the liturgy of the English Church, and having herself declared its Supreme Governor. Her choice as the new archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker (1504–1575), not only worked to put Elizabeth’s ecclesiastical policies into effect but also did his best to vilify his predecessor and deny his achievement (Edwards 2014:249–262). Yet things would be very different in Catholic Europe, where the decrees of his London Synod, held in 1555–1556, were published as guides for the final sessions of the Council of Trent (1562–1563) (Pole 1562). In the Roman Catholic Church, he was primarily remembered as a Catholic reformer, but in that capacity he nonetheless represented an important current in “Erasmian” Christian philosophy.

Cross-References