James Willoughby explores the enigmatic man at the heart of a new exhibition.
In every portrait of him that we have, Cardinal Reginald Pole stares out, watchful and reticent. His eyes seem to be painted unnaturally large. He grasps the arms of his chair as if poised to spring out of it. A prince of the Church who was also a descendant of the English royal line, Pole had a perilous course to steer through the storm of the European Reformation. If – as the portraitists saw – he was wary of strangers, then that was not without reason. Henry VIII had ordered the assassination of the “archtraitor” in 1537, infuriated by his cousin’s public opposition to the royal supremacy. There were enemies too in Rome, who accused Pole of being a crypto-Lutheran and sought to bring him before the Inquisition on charges of heresy. And yet, remarkably, here was a man who came within one vote of being elected pope, and who returned in triumph to his homeland to become Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry’s daughter, Mary I.
