Pole, REGINALD, 'Cardinal of England,' was the son of Sir Richard Pole, and Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, the daughter of the Duke of Clarence and niece of Edward IV. He was born in Staffordshire, March 1500. He received the rudiments of his education from the Carthusians at West Sheen, and at twelve years of age he was sent to Magdalen College, Oxford. His relationship to the crown made him an important person, and being destined for the church, he was presented at an early age with several benefices. At nineteen he went to Italy with a pension from the king to finish his studies at Padua. He returned to England in 1525. He was then high in Henry's favour, while Queen Catharine was much attached to his mother. Pole's position, when the question of the king's divorce was raised, became a difficult one. He appeared at first disposed to take the king's side. In 1530 we find him in Paris endeavouring to obtain from the university a decision favourable to the divorce, but shortly afterwards he became disgnsted with the policy of Cromwell, refused the archbishopric of York which was offered to him on the death of Wolsey, and remonstrated with the king upon the course he was pursuing. Henry, however, made no open quarrel with him; and Pole left England in 1532, and after a short stay at Avignon took up his residence in Italy. Here he formed intimate friendships with a number of men of learning and piety—Sadoleto, Contarini, Morone, Flaminio, Priuli, and others—who were urgent for an internal reformation of the church, and whose views on justification by faith as a rule approximated closely to the doctrine of Luther. Pole still retained his English ecclesiastical revenues, and made no hostile demonstrations against Henry, but in 1535 he entered into a political correspondence with the Emperor Charles V. Pole was now compelled by Henry to declare himself, which he did in a violent letter addressed to the king, afterwards famous in its revised form as the treatise De Unitate Ecclesiastica. The king withdrew Pole's pension and preferments. Paul III., on the other hand, made him a cardinal (22d December 1536), and sent him as legate to the Low Countries to confer there with agents of the English malcontents. Henry retaliated by causing a bill of attainder to be passed against him, and by setting a price on his head. His mother, with other relatives, was thrown into the Tower on the ground of treasonable correspondence with the cardinal, and subsequently beheaded. Pole's diplomatic career was not, however, a brilliant one. His several attempts to procure the invasion of England were not successful. From 1539 to 1542 he acted as governor of the 'Patrimony of St Peter,' of which Viterbo was the capital. He took an active part in the discussions on the Interim, and when the Council of Trent was opened in 1545, he was one of the three cardinals who acted as legate-presidents. In the conclave which followed on the death of Paul III. in 1549, Pole was at one moment on the point of being elected pope; after the election of Del Monte, as Julius III., he lived in retirement at a Benedictine monastery at Maguzzano on the lake of Garda, until the death of Edward VI., when he was at once commissioned to proceed to England as legate à latere, to assist Queen Mary in the reconciliation of the kingdom to the Church of Rome.
Pole was still only in deacon's orders, and had not abandoned the idea which he had apparently entertained from his youth, of marrying Mary Tudor. The queen for a moment considered the project of obtaining a dispensation for this union with favour, but the influence of Charles V. pre- vailed in favour of his son Philip. The emperor's fear of Pole's interference or precipitancy led to the legate being prohibited from entering England for more than a year. Philip was married July 25, 1554. Pole's attainder was removed by parliament, November 22, and two days later he arrived in London. He was provided with ample powers to allow the owners of the confiscated church property to retain their possessions, a condition which was understood to be absolutely necessary to secure the submission of parliament. On the 30th Pole solemnly absolved the Houses of Parliament and country from their schism, and reconciled the Church of England to Rome. As long as Cranmer lived Pole would not accept the archbishopric of Canterbury, although the see was vacant by the former's degradation, but after Cranmer was burnt Pole was ordained priest, 20th March 1556, and on the 22d consecrated archbishop. In the meantime Giovanni Pietro Caraffa, once a friend of Pole and afterwards his bitter enemy, had become (May 1555) Pope Paul IV. The pope was indignant at the concessions made by the authority of his predecessor to the holders of church property; and he revived the accusations of heresy which had been in former days brought against Pole, both on the ground of his leniency towards Lutherans when papal governor at Viterbo, and of his well-known opinions on justification. Paul IV. was, moreover, now at war with Spain, and could not tolerate Pole as his ambassador at the court of Philip and Mary in England. The cardinal's legation was accordingly cancelled, and he was summoned before the Inquisition, into the prisons of which the pope had already thrown Pole's friend, the Cardinal Morone. Mary angrily protested, and the pope somewhat relented. He would not reinstate Pole, but appointed William Peto, a Franciscan friar, as cardinal and legate in his place. The queen gave orders that the papal messenger bearing the hat should be stopped at Calais, and Peto died without receiving it. When peace was made between the pope and Spain, Paul still refused to reinstate Pole as his legate, and he did not withdraw the odious and unjust accusation of heresy. When the queen died, 17th November 1558, Pole, whose health had been long feeble, was lying dangerously ill. The impending failure of all his hopes no doubt hastened his end. He died on the following day, sixteen hours after the queen, in his fifty-eighth year.
It has been a disputed question how far Pole was responsible for Mary's persecution of Protestants. His leniency towards heretics in Italy had even brought him into trouble. Nevertheless it is remarkable that after Philip's departure from England and Gardiner's death (November 1555), when Pole became the queen's supreme adviser and her inseparable companion, the persecution increased in violence. If it was not instigated by Pole, it could not have continued without his sanction and support. In his diocese of Canterbury he issued in the last year of the reign a fresh commission against heretics, and in July he delivered over to the secular arm five persons, who were burnt alive at Canterbury a week before his death.
Besides the above-mentioned De Unitate, Pole was the author of De Concilio (Rome, 1562), De summi Pontificis officio (Louvain, 1560), and De Justificatione (Louvain, 1569). His letters, with a life prefixed, were published by Quirini (Brescia, 1744). Beccatelli's life of Pole, originally written in Italian, was published in a Latin translation at London in 1690, and in an English translation by B. Pye in 1766. The first edition of Phillipps' life, which occasioned much controversy, appeared in 1764-67. The fullest recent life of Pole is that by Hook, vol. viii. of his Archbishops of Canterbury. Compare Ranke's Lives of the Popes, Froude's History, and Dixon's History of the Church of England, vol. iv.