ABSTRACT
Use the phrase ‘Henry VIII and the Cardinal’, and hearers or readers are almost certain to assume that the allusion is to Cardinal Wolsey. Reginald Pole, Henry VIII’s Plantagenet cousin and protégé, barely features in most accounts of the reign of the most formidable of the Tudors. Yet in the wider history of sixteenth-century Catholicism, Cardinal Pole looms far larger than Cardinal Wolsey. Pole’s European celebrity is now widely recognized. While still in his twenties, his piety, learning and royal antecedents won him the golden opinions and the friendship of the remarkable circle of ‘spirituali’ who formed the heart of the Catholic reform movement in sixteenth-century Italy. As Governor of the Papal state of Viterbo he would encourage and protect some of the most daring thinkers of the age, and he presided as Cardinal Legate over the opening stages of the Council of Trent. Despite wellwarranted suspicions of his sympathy with Lutheran teaching on justification, in the Conclave of 1549, Pole even came within a single vote of the papacy. His posthumous writings and the records of his Legatine activities in Marian England would play a crucial role in shaping the reform programme adopted in the final sessions of Trent.
