BOOKS.
CARDINAL POLE.*
THERE are some characters who enjoy in histories all the advantage of a blameless reputation; and authors of different parties, who are at variance in other matters, unite in extolling them. Like the pattern boys of an edifying tale, these paragons can do no wrong, at least in their own eyes. Their pious intentions and their plausible phrases condone all the mischief that their action may produce; and their opponents are wicked persons who deserve the miserable end which ought to be, and is generally, their fate. So it has been, for the most part, with Reginald Pole, the proverbial good boy of most English historians, and of our troubled sixteenth century, through which no other conspicuous personage is represented as passing without infection. Whether this traditional estimate of Pole is really in accordance with facts, or is rather a legend of historians,
• must be the chief object of our present inquiry; and the result of our examination will give us the standard by which Mr. Haile's performance must be judged.
Before we refer to the detail and workmanship of his volume it may be well to sketch a bare outline of Pole's origin and career. He was born in 1500. Through his mother, the daughter of George, Duke of Clarence, and granddaughter of Warwick the Kingmaker, he was of Royal and illustrious descent. The strain, however, had shown itself turbulent, ambitious, fickle, a very tangle of obscure and contradictory disloyalties, in which kindred, friendship, and country weighed light in comparison with self. His father, Sir Richard Pole, was the son of a half-sister of Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII. It was a Lancastrian connexion; but it did not convey to the young Poles, as Mr. Haile asserts, "the blood of the two royal houses," and they had not "royal descent on both sides." Margaret of Richmond was the sole representative of John of Gaunt and Catherine Swynford; and whatever claim she might have against the Duchy of Lancaster, it must be remembered that the legitimation of the Beauforts in 1397 had been qualified in 1407 by the words exceptd dignitate regali. George of Clarence was attainted, as probably he deserved, for many treasons. His son, the young Earl of Warwick, was the helpless though dangerous puppet of aristocratic personages and foreign pretenders whose claims were certainly not for our national interest ; and he was beheaded, since imprisonment had not removed the danger. Clarence's daughter, Margaret Pole, was restored to some of her family honours and to many of the estates. Her husband was enriched and favoured by Henry VIL These bounties were continued and increased by Hemy VIII. Through their mother's blood and their father's connexions, the young Poles stood very near the throne. Their position was fully and generously acknowledged, and they had all the privileges of being not only kinsmen but friends and favourites of their Sovereign. Such a position was un- doubtedly hazardous. In those times it could only be held safely by perfect honesty and candour ; and it must be owned also, if we would be fair, that the ancestral record of the Poles, on their mother's side, was by no means a guarantee for these virtues, but a presumption of their opposites. In an age of prevailing treachery and violence, the performances of Warwick and Clarence appear much the worst and the most wanton. Margaret Pole came of a bad stock and inherited odious traditions. Her children show many signs of hereditary genius : the only sort, perhaps, with which Reginald Pole was endowed.
It was in these circumstances that Pole was born and educated, the latter chiefly at the expense of Henry VIII. He began school with the Carthusians at Sheen. Possibly he went on to the Benedictines of Canterbury ; certainly he proceeded to Oxford, and entered at Magdalen. At fifteen he took his degree, and was soon dowered with pleasant benefices, though he never failed to inveigh against pluralities and
• The Life of Cardinal Pole. By Martin Haile London: Sir I. Pitman and . BOWL L913. net.:1 non-residence. In 1519 he went away to the University of Padua, travelling and living as an English Prince, with a large ecclesiastical revenue, and a still handsomer allowance from Henry VIIL Like so many others in that century, he became Italianated, first by the Renaissance, and then by the Catholic Reaction. On his best side Pole was a scholar, a friend of Bembo and of other leading Humanists, and him- self an artist in elegant La.tinity. Fine taste he certainly had ; but of genuine thought or of searching criticism there is no trace in all his works. He merely played with words, as he did with politics, handling both with superficial fluency ; and perhaps no one in that hour of visitation was blinder to the real issues which were moulding a new society out of the fading pageant of the mediaeval world. By nature Pole was amiable and sentimental. Like many egoists, he had a big allowance of emotional piety. Among his closest friends were Sadoleto, Contarini, Vittoria Colonna, and that fascinating group of more liberal Catholics, some of whom wavered long on the borders of the Reformation, while others actually crossed. Pole's Italian life was creditable and pleasant. If he bad kept to it he would have come down to us as a scholar and patron of letters, of high rank, amiable character, and distinguished manners, well endowed by nature and fortune, and not insensible to his advantages. In all this he reminds us of his mother's great-uncle, George Neville, Lord Chancellor and Archbishop of York, a brilliant and cultivated nobleman, but a thoroughly disreputable and treacherous politician, an appropriate link in the unnatural alliance between Clarence, Warwick, and the Lancastrians.
Pole, unfortunately, followed this relative into the slippery ways of politics, for which he was wholly unfitted. Worst of all, he was unable to distinguish between politics and religion, or between egoism and patriotism. His words, as usual, were correct and specious, but his ways were devious, and worse; and ultimately his real intentions must be judged by what he did, not by what he professed. He came back into a troubled England. Wolsey was tottering to his fall, and the Papal jurisdiction with him. The King's divorce had become a practical and urgent question. Pole was against it ; but Mr. Haile's documents show that he undertook a mission to further it. When Henry broke with Rome, Pole chose the Papal side ; and then, from the safety of exile, he wrote violently against the King and our national policy. While professing an unctuous loyalty, and a personal affection for Henry, he intrigued with any and every enemy of his King and country, and did his utmost to inflame European opinion against them. He was a pensioner of Charles V. When the Pope was an open and active enemy, Pole became his Legate, charged with fomenting rebellion and civil war, with organising foreign invasions. His own pretensions to the Crown, and his possible marriage with Mary Tudor, were both used in his attempts against the King. It is hardly sur- prising that Henry VIII. considered Pole one of his most dangerous enemies, and acted accordingly with his usual vigour.
For the next few years Pole was occupied alternately with plotting and writing against the Kings of England, trying to arrange the Council of Trent, to explain the problem of Justification, to prove the lawfulness of the Papal claims, and to govern one of the Papal States. At Mary's accession he was made Legate to England, and after many delays was allowed to reconcile that Sovereign and her Parliament to Rome. When Cranmer had been removed, be succeeded to the archbishopric. As Mary's leading Councillor and as Primate, he must be held responsible in both capacities for the persecutions an&burnings of her reign. Though Gardiner as Chancellor was the medium for re-enacting the statute De Haeretico Comburendo, he was dead before most of the execu- tions were carried out ; and Bonner was only more notorious than other diocesans because be administered the See of London. Pole's own diocese was treated severely, and some of the latest executions happened in it. In the end Pole himself was accused of heresy by Paul TV.; his legatine powers were cancelled, and this affair set Mary and the Pope by the ears ; both Pole and she died out of favour with the Papacy, he, fortunately for himself, on the same day as the Queen. And so their sinister tragi-comedy was played out with some cost to the nation, but with disaster to their Church. Pole may have meant well, but he did his country much harm, as much as verbiage can do. • "Willing to wound,
and yet. afraid to strike." There is much that fits 'Pole in the character of Attiens ; and, if we may borrow from Pope again, Pole, the most fractious and the most fatuous conspirator in English history, was for ever mumbling what he dared not bite. In the end he and his cause vanished together, and finally from all official place and recognition among us; both manifestly failures on English soil and rejected of the English people.
Such is Mr. Haile's hero—" the greatest Englishman of his time," as he calls him—if we strip his 'biography of casuistry and rhetoric, and try to estimate him as he really was, looking frankly at good and bad together. Above all, we must look fairly and broadly at the history in which Pole was an actor. To make him the leading figure in that stirring scene is impossible. Neither by nature nor in reality was be that. Pole certainly was not the moving force round which great events were centred, and by which they were compelled. He rather drifted among the storms of politics than directed them. Pole might conceivably be made the subject of an interesting and a pathetic biography; but Mr. Haile has not distinguished clearly between biography and history, and therefore his volume is not an artistic success. We say all this with regret, because there is much labour in Mr. Haile's book, and some careful research that has given him con- temporary material which he professes to use as evidence ; but be generally fails to see, or perhaps to state, the con- clusions which follow inevitably from his quotations. This is the more unfortunate because the late Father Taunton and two Benedictine writers are implicated by Mr. Haile in his results, and Dr. Gairdner is appealed to frequently as a corroborating witness for many unpatriotic and prejudiced opinions.
These matters take us into the controversies which are produced by differing views about Henry character, the Papacy, and the Reformation. Since Englishmen in general have made up their minds about the last two, the first is usually the pivot on which theological controversy turns. By extremists on both sides Henry is either brazenly absolved or absolutely condemned, and we accept neither judgment. Then he was thought to stand or fall with Fronde, and therefore Fronde was vehemently attacked. Mr. Herbert Paul has shown how dastardly those attacks were in their methods, how hypocritical in their motives, and how false in their accusations : we might add, how reckless and unpatriotic in their substance, for Henry can only be con- demned wholesale if the majority of the English people are implicated in the same guilt ; and we refuse utterly to believe that the Englishmen of that generation were different from all others, or that the immediate predecessors of the Eliza- bethan age were a nation of cowards and sycophants. Fronde himself, then, has now been ably and brilliantly vindicated, and his conception of Henry has been more than justified by Mr. Pollard's impartial and scientific reconstruction of his character from the original documents, which no one knows better or has used with a finer skill. Mr. Pollard brings us back to Gray's condensed verdict, which was indeed a stroke of genius : "the majestic Lord, That broke the bonds of Rome." That sums up Henry's work and our debt. We must judge his achievement not only by his methods, or by his character as an individual, but by its effects. Have we done better by following the lead of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth than we should have done if we had accepted the Catholic Reaction, with the theology of Trent, the Inquisition, the Index, and, not least, the continued burden and obstruction of the Religions Orders ? ese things would have been the inevitable consequence of Pole's triumph. Our deliverance from them is due chiefly to Henry "VIII. But even Henry could not have effected so sweeping and perilous a change unless either the majority or the intelligence of the nation bad been behind him. The majority, we feel sure, was anti-Roman, and had been since the twelfth century. Only a minority, we think, was at first anti-Roman. Perhaps it would be clearer to say anti-mediaeval. But it was the intelligent and progressive minority, to whose views the majority was converted by the methods of the Papacy and the wisdom of Queen Elizabeth.
It was the fixed resolve of the nation to have no more dynastic quarrels, to avoid another civil war, and to maintain a strong central Government as a barrier against any rearm section of feudalism. The disposal of the monastic lands was in accordance with this settled policy ; and it not only secured the Reformation in the sixteenth century, but the new landed families gave its 'the Parliamentarians who resisted Charles I., and the Whigs who expelled James II. It must- be remem- bered, too, that if Henry spoiled a more than plausible case by his doings with Anne Boleyn, Clement VII. was neither a free agent nor an equitable judge. To lose England was, no doubt, bad ; but the loss of Charles V. was worse ; even more serious would have been the loss of the Papal States ; and, worst of all, the final ruin of the Medici cause in Florence.. These were the reasons which prevailed in Rome. Louis XII., Charles Brandon, and Margaret Tudor all obtained divorces for much less cause than Henry could show for repudiating a marriage with his brother's widow.
Mr. Haile's methods of judging are not only unequal but contradictory, since he applies one standard to Henry and Elisabeth, and quite another to the reign of Mary. His general conception of our history is untenable; and his con- struction tumbles like a house of cards when facts are applied to it. In detail he is often at fault both as regards facts and scholarship. Many of his conclusions, again, are dubious in a high degree.
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