Introduction

Reginald Pole (1500–58) was never a man of few words, nor was he in his correspondence. ¹ As the eighteenth-century translator of his first biography put it at a time when learned culture was still rhetorical and Pole's verbosity might therefore have continued to be appreciated, 'C[ardinal]. Pole seems to have written too much to be able at all times to write well; an indigested profusion of matter has so overloaded many of his epistolary writings, of the latter period of his life, that they are extremely languid and tedious: he seems too much to have accustomed himself to his pen, as not to care to lay it down; and is so elaborately verbose on every occasion of vindicating his conduct, or explaining his plan, that he often leaves the one in suspicion and the other in confusion.' ² Pole's prolixity did not produce an especially imposing number of letters and official papers, only about 2300 items. This is a little more than for his sometime secretary and biographer Andras Dudic, while Dudic's fellow biographer Ludovico Beccadelli left a further 700. ³ Erasmus's Opus epistolarum contains 3141 items, Pietro Bembo's 2578, and Isabella d'Este's a formidable 40,000. ⁴ Nevertheless, a much greater number survives for Pole than for Cardinal Contarini, and yet Contarini has been better served with modern treatments of his correspondence. While within the last century there have been two substantial publications about it, one intended to be comprehensive, there has been only one similar book for Pole, Heinrich Lutz's Friedenslegation, and it covers a period of only about two years. ⁵