Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet

Abstract

As Thomas Mayer demonstrates in this excellent new volume, Reginald Pole was one of the most important international figures of the middle of the sixteenth century.Not only was Pole at the head of the Catholic reform movement, famously coming within one vote of the papacy in the 1549 conclave, but he was also at the centre of the struggle against the Protestant reformers in his native England.In this latter capacity, though, he became inextricably entangled in the dispute between Philip II and Pope Paul IV, eventually suspected and mistrusted by both.It is these two sides of his life -the Italian reformer and the English papist -which account for the double image of Pole which dominates the historiography.But by putting together the English and Italian sides of his life, Mayer is able to present a more moderate and more human portrait of the cardinal.Gone is the "Sancte educatus, sanctus vixit, sanctissime mortuus est," as he was described by his unidentified eulogiser in 1558, but so also is archbishop Matthew Parker's verdict: "inglese italianato, diavolo incarnato."Instead, Mayer presents a Pole who is theologically consistent from De unitate forth, albeit one who is progressively more mystical in his writings.He was a skilled rhetorician who preferred to withdraw at moments of direct conflict and write; yet he was a man decidedly uncomfortable with the authority that authorship bequeathed.Mayer states that Pole, trapped between ambition and self-abnegation, "had greatness thrust upon him and it missed" (p.439).This work is not just a biography of the English cardinal; it is the penultimate volume of Mayer's quartet on Pole.As such, it provides context and structure to the arguments he has made in the series of fifteen articles recently collected and reprinted as Cardinal Pole in European Context, his A Reluctant Author: Cardinal Pole and his Manuscripts, and his calendar of Pole's correspondence, scheduled to appear in early 2002.The fruit of twenty years of archival research, this volume bristles with detail, but because of the sheer bulk of the information that Mayer has uncovered he is forced to draw the context very tightly around the central figure in order to accommodate all that he can.As he freely admits, wider events and personalities are treated largely as tangential and only insofar as they touch Pole.While this is fair enough and partially redressed by arguments he has supplied elsewhere in the quartet, it will make the narrative dense to the reader familiar only with Pole's English or Italian incarnation.Mayer relies heavily on three types of evidence: the writings associated with Pole and his circle, his letters, and an array of ancillary material drawn mostly from Italian archives.By itself, Mayer argues, this evidence does not constitute history, for much of that which emanated from Pole and his circle was a consciously rhetorical product crafted to persuade.As a result, the Pole of these works is a corporate construction intended to cultivate a "myth of sanctity" (p. 2), which was closely linked to the agenda of Catholic reform.Pole was the archetypal literate Renaissance man, a figure who constructed his image carefully through texts and

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