Archbishop Pole

John Edwards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317179702
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

This fresh exploration of the life, work and writing of Archbishop Pole, focuses particularly on Pole's final years (1556-58) as Archbishop of Canterbury. Fully integrating Pole's English and Continental European experiences, John Edwards places these in their historical context and signposts lessons for contemporary issues and concerns. Stressing the events and character of Pole's 'English' life, up to his exile in the 1530s, as well as in his final years in England (1554-58), this book explores his close relationship, both genealogical and emotional, with Henry VIII and Mary I. Portraying Pole as a crucial figure in the Catholic-Protestant division, which still affects Britain today, this book details the first, and so far last, attempt to restore Roman Catholicism as the 'national religion' of England and Wales by telling the life-story of the hinge figure in forging English religious and political identity for several centuries. The final section of this book draws together important and illuminating source material written by Pole during his years as Archbishop of Canterbury.

Chapter 1
Family and Upbringing

Reginald Pole was born in March 1500, the third son of Sir Richard Pole (1458/9–1504) and his wife Margaret, née Plantagenet (1473–1541). It is virtually certain that the birth took place at Stourton Castle, in Staffordshire, the use of which had been granted to the future cardinal archbishop’s parents by King Henry VII, so that his mother could remain fairly close to her husband’s operations in the government of Wales and the Marches. The fortified manor house stood on the banks of the river Stour, about half a mile north-east of the village of Kinver, and about a day’s ride from the seat of Prince Arthur of Wales’ council at Ludlow.¹

Much of Reginald’s character and future life would be strongly influenced by his mother’s Plantagenet descent, and by the violent events that befell the family, both before his birth and during his early years. She had been born at Farleigh Castle near Bath, on 14 August 1473, to George, duke of Clarence and Isabel, née Neville, her father then being third in the line of succession. Clarence was a son of Richard, duke of York, and brother of King Edward IV and Richard, duke of Gloucester, the future Richard III. He received his dukedom in 1461, when Edward seized the throne, and the turbulence of his life would set the tone for that of his grandson Reginald, involving high political status and ambition, along with deep insecurity. Eventually, on 18 February 1478, Cardinal Pole’s grandfather was executed, on trumped-up charges of treason. The deed was done privately within the precincts of the Tower of London, perhaps to avoid any public demonstration in his favour, as Clarence had been quite popular. Whether the legendary butt of Canary wine (malvasí, or malmsey) was used cannot be known, but it is not impossible.²

After his wife’s death, in December 1476, the duke had behaved in a foolish and provocative way, given his brother Edward’s well-founded fears for the long-term security of his regime, and the effects of his actions on Margaret, the mother of the future Cardinal Pole, were rapid and severe. In her earliest years, she had lived in a large household, in which her father and mother between them had over 300 servants, and where the traditional liturgy of the Church was scrupulously and devoutly observed.³ Now, at the age of just five, she was the daughter of a convicted and executed traitor, who was believed to have plotted to overthrow his own brother. Under the treason legislation of the time, after their father’s death, Margaret and her brother Edward became wards under the protection of the king, and completely dependent upon him. Also, while Edward was allowed to inherit the Neville estates of his mother, including the earldom of Warwick, which were not affected by the Act of Attainder against Clarence, his sister’s prospects, in February 1478, appeared to be grim. King Edward subsequently granted the wardship of the young earl of Warwick to Thomas Grey, marquess of Dorset, and Margaret was entrusted to his care as well. If anything unfortunate happened to her brother, which was hardly unlikely in the circumstances which prevailed in the England of the 1480s, her impressive royal pedigree might still produce a good marriage for her in the future.

In the event both Edward and Margaret outlived Edward IV, and on 9 April 1483, Margaret became a ward of the new king, her uncle Richard of Gloucester. The deaths in the Tower of London of Edward IV’s two sons, Edward V and Richard of York, ironically raised the status of Clarence’s son and daughter. Although Margaret’s claim to the throne remained more distant than that of her brother, Edward, earl of Warwick, she now had a considerable amount to offer a future husband, but Richard III was all too aware and fearful of this. Although Earl Edward and Margaret escaped death at this stage, the new king used his own interpretation of the law against them, declaring that they were both barred from the succession by their father’s attainder, although the relevant act of parliament required no such thing.⁴ While Princes Edward and Richard were still alive in the Tower, Earl Edward and Margaret were sent to Sheriff Hutton Castle, 10 miles from York, to live under the supervision of their cousin John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln. This castle had once belonged to the Neville side of the children’s family, though it was now in royal hands. In March or April 1484, with Edward’s sons already dead, King Richard’s own son, Edward, died too. Under the hazy English succession law of the period, this should probably have made the earl of Warwick next in line to the throne, but that never happened in legal form, since Richard was all too aware that, if Warwick’s position was thus formalised, he himself would have to admit that the young earl should in fact be king already. In these circumstances, given Richard’s record in government to date, it looked, when 1485 began, as though Earl Edward and Margaret would be lucky to survive to adulthood. At best, they were going to be closely watched.⁵

In fact, on 22 August 1485, Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, defeated Richard’s superior forces in battle near Bosworth, in Leicestershire, the king died during the battle, and Henry replaced him. This situation created new threats to Clarence’s offspring. Earl Edward was especially vulnerable under the new, insecure and fearful regime of Henry VII, because the series of recent royal and noble deaths had left him as the only surviving direct and legitimate male descendant of Edward III, through his fourth son, Edmund, duke of York, and also by a female line from that king’s third son, John of Gaunt. In contrast, Henry VII could only claim descent from Edward III through his mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, also from John of Gaunt, but by an illegitimate line. Earl Edward thus better represented the claim which the Tudors would later make for themselves, to combine the Yorkist and Lancastrian inheritances, and bring to an end the series of conflicts known to history as the ‘Wars of the Roses’. An even more intriguing possibility was that Margaret herself, rather than the Tudor Mary I, might have been England’s first sovereign and reigning queen. Henry VII was generally worried about his position, at home and abroad, but he was rightly anxious in particular about Warwick and Margaret. Indeed, immediately after the battle of Bosworth, he headed straight for Sheriff Hutton, and even before that, while still in Leicester, he sent his servant Robert Willoughby to secure the young earl, in case he became a focus of immediate rebellion.⁶ The new king’s fear was entirely realistic, given that Warwick, as Isabel Neville’s son, might have called upon considerable political and military support in the north.

On top of that, when Henry came to the throne, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon were already seeking marriage alliances for their children which would both secure their own Trastamaran dynasty and enhance Spain’s position in Europe. In this context, Diego de Valera, a military man and political commentator who frequently advised the Spanish rulers, wrote to them, on 1 March 1486, about the current situation in England. In this letter he reported that Edward of Warwick was a major threat to Henry VII’s rule, in part because he had the backing of the highly influential Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland.⁷ Indeed, as early as October 1485, some in the English garrison in Calais had apparently believed for a while that Henry was already dead, and that he would be succeeded by the earl of Warwick.⁸ In view of all this, as well no doubt as his own imaginary fears, Henry Tudor moved Earl Edward and Margaret well away from the potentially rebellious north, placing them as ‘guests’ with his mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, along with other royals and nobles, including Henry’s own wife, Elizabeth of York, and her sisters, as well as the earl of Westmoreland and the duke of Buckingham. He no doubt thought it would be better if they were under Lady Margaret’s eagle eye, rather than travelling the country as potential focuses, or even fomentors, of trouble for him. Such measures will have seemed all the more justified and necessary when two minor uprisings did indeed occur in March and April 1486 respectively. The second of these, led by a former servant of Richard III, Humphrey Stafford, was apparently precipitated by a rumour that the earl of Warwick had escaped to the Channel Islands, with the intention of following Henry VII’s earlier example by mounting an invasion from abroad, probably with French help.

Before this tumult subsided, Humphrey Stafford’s supporters apparently mounted a demonstration in the earl of Warwick’s heartland, crying out ‘A Warwick! A Warwick!’ in Birmingham.⁹ Henry no doubt hoped that the semi-hostages lodged with his mother, including Clarence’s heirs, would renounce their claims to the throne, as she had done for him. Given that Earl Edward and Margaret were clearly legitimate, while some doubt was cast on his own wife’s legitimacy, as there were indeed questions in some quarters over King Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, the Clarence children would have to be closely watched for the foreseeable future. Despite this, and perhaps with the purpose of incorporating her into the Tudor establishment, Margaret now received particular honours from the king. In September 1486, she headed the list of ladies who attended Henry and Elizabeth’s son, Prince Arthur, at his baptism and confirmation in Winchester Cathedral, and in the following year she was a prominent attendant at Elizabeth of York’s coronation as queen, in Westminster Abbey.¹⁰ She herself would soon be married to the future cardinal archbishop’s father.

In an account of Elizabeth of York’s coronation, which took place in November 1487, it is said that Margaret watched the ceremony with Henry VII and Lady Margaret Beaufort, and she is referred to there as the wife of Richard Pole.¹¹ There is a possibility that this document, being a late sixteenth-century copy, contains a subsequent amendment of Margaret’s surname, and her marriage to Richard has commonly been dated, in modern historiography, to about 1491–4.¹² Hazel Pierce, on the other hand, has argued strongly for 1487 as the correct date, saying that the arrangement of the Pole marriage may well have been a response by Henry VII to the dangerous threat which had just been posed to him by the young man, known subsequently as Lambert Simnel, who had claimed to be the earl of Warwick, raised troops in Ireland, invaded England as ‘King Edward VI’, and was only defeated by a major military effort on the Tudor king’s part, at the battle of Stoke, on 16 June 1487. Simnel’s enterprise could fairly be described as a Yorkist plot, and involvement in it came dangerously close to Margaret and her brother, in that one of those who fled to Flanders, after it was discovered, was none other than John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln, who had once guarded the pair at Sheriff Hutton.¹³ In the circumstances in which she found herself in 1487, under effective house-arrest in the charge of Lady Margaret Beaufort, and facing the additional danger of being linked with Simnel’s rebellion, it is perhaps not surprising that Cardinal Pole’s mother accepted as her husband someone who was neither of royal nor of noble descent, at least in England.

Richard Pole was born in Buckinghamshire, in 1458 or the following year, as the eldest son of Geoffrey Pole, esquire, and Edith St John, of Bletsoe.¹⁴ Geoffrey came originally from Wales, and was a staunch supporter of Henry VI, to whom he was an esquire of the body from 1440. His main governmental and other offices were located in South Wales, and he was a councillor of Jasper Tudor, earl of Pembroke. Richard Pole’s mother, Edith St John, was also a solid Lancastrian supporter in the Tudor connection, being a half-sister of the future Henry VII’s mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, countess of Richmond, and widowed sister-in-law of Jasper Tudor. Perhaps not surprisingly, given this background, Geoffrey Pole held himself aloof from Edward IV’s regime, remaining largely on his Buckinghamshire manors of Ellsborough, Medmenham and Stoke Mandeville, and dying in that county in 1479. Thus his son Richard’s childhood was spent in relative obscurity, until Henry Tudor successfully invaded Wales and England in 1485. In response to her son’s victory, Lady Margaret Beaufort quickly rallied the known Tudor supporters in England, and on 22 October of that year, Richard Pole was appointed esquire to the new king’s body. In 1486, he was made constable of Harlech Castle, and sheriff of Merioneth, both offices being for life, a strong sign of Henry’s personal trust in him.¹⁵ To cement his reputation with the king, he fought f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Family and Upbringing
• 2 The King’s Servant
• 3 Rupture
• 4 Reform
• 5 Homecoming?
• 6 Legate and Archbishop
• 7 Consolidation and Crisis
• 8 Dying
• 9 Legacy
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index