Cardinal Pole was on his way to England, when he dispatched from the Tyrol two messengers, one to the King of France, and the other to the emperor, informing them of his instructions to negotiate, if possible, a peace between them in the name of the pope. Charles V., however, was by no means disposed to let Pole proceed quietly on his journey. He was bent on marrying his son Philip to Mary, and he feared that the cardinal might be either a rival of his son or an adversary of the match. He refused, therefore, to see the legate, stopped him in the heart of Germany, and caused him to return to Dillingen, on the Danube. Here he received instructions from Rome to wait until circumstances should clear his path; and here too he learned that the articles of the queen's marriage had been agreed to, and the rebellion of Sir Thomas Wyatt suppressed. But the chief obstacle to Pole's presence in England being removed, the emperor consented to receive him at Brussels,[114] and Mary consulted him by letter as to the bishops whom she should appoint to fill the sees of those whom she had removed. The new prelates were carefully selected; and when the Catholic religion was again proscribed in the succeeding reign, one of them only, Kitchin of Llandaff—the calamity of his see—who had changed with every change of the court, abjured the faith of Christ and adopted that of Queen Elizabeth.
Pole was still unable to obtain the emperor's permission to cross over to England, because the marriage of Mary with Philip had not yet been celebrated. The delay was truly afflictive to the cardinal and the queen, and the negotiations carried on by Pole between the emperor and the king of France produced little effect. At last the emperor yielded to Mary's entreaties; Pole's legatine powers, though already very ample, were enlarged; and he was permitted to accept the invitation of the Lords Paget and Hastings, with a train of gentlemen, sent to Brussels for the purpose of escorting him to his native country. He was empowered to reconcile England to the holy see on such conditions as he should think proper and feasible, particular faculties being given to him to dispense with the restitution of church property and ecclesiastical revenues. His agreeable manners and amiable address pointed him out as the fittest man in the world to execute so difficult a commission; and the English ambassador at Brussels, writing of him to Mary, said,
"His conversation is much above that of ordinary men, and adorned with such qualities that I wish the man who likes him the least in the kingdom were to converse with him but one half-hour; it must be a stony heart which he does not soften."[115]
The bill required for the reversal of Cardinal Pole's attainder was passed in November, 1554. It stated that the only reason for the attainder had been the cardinal's refusal to consent to the unlawful divorce of Queen Mary's father and mother, and its repeal restored him to all the rights which he had forfeited through his probity. The legate having taken leave of the emperor, set out the next day in princely style, accompanied by one hundred and twenty horse. A royal yacht and six men of war were in readiness to receive him at Calais. The wind itself was propitious to his voyage, and, having been rough and contrary for several days, suddenly changed its direction, and wafted the apostolic messenger safely to the British shore.
The legate, when he landed at Dover, was received and welcomed by his nephew, Lord Montague. He was treated as one of the royal family, and on his arrival at Gravesend, he was met by the Earl of Shrewsbury and the Bishop of Durham. They presented him with the act by which his attainder was reversed; and in his character as legate he proceeded with them up the Thames in a royal barge, at the head of which shone conspicuously his silver cross. Masses of spectators lined the banks, and a large number of smaller barges followed him up the river till he arrived at Whitehall, then the residence of the court. The chancellor with many lords, the king, and the queen with the ladies of her court, welcomed him with affectionate joy. The palace of Lambeth, which Cranmer had exchanged for a prison, was richly furnished for his use, and on the morrow, the 28th of November, the lords and commons assembled expressly to hear from the legate's own lips the object of his coming. The address which he delivered was long and impressive; it dwelt on the dismal condition of nations cut off from the unity of the church; and it set forth the abundant blessings which would follow from the purpose of the holy see and the queen being accomplished in the formal reconciliation of England to the communion of the Bishop of Rome. On the next day, which was the feast of St. Andrew, the parliament met again, together with the king, the queen, and the legate. The nation, like a scattered and harried flock, was received once more into the fold of the church by general consent, amid deep emotion, praises, and tears of joy. Yet many who were present had misgivings about the permanence and solidity of the union thus affected. They remembered the recent rebellion in favor of Lady Jane Grey, the rising of Sir Thomas Wyatt, the countenance supposed to be given to the rebels by the Princess Elizabeth, the extreme unpopularity of the Spanish alliance, and the haughty, violent character of Gardiner, the chancellor, and of Bonner, the Bishop of London.[116] Events unfortunately justified these apprehensions, and made the short reign of Mary, for reasons which we shall presently enumerate, a dismal failure and an instalment of endless disaster.
The day after the reconciliation, the lord mayor and other civic authorities waited on the legate, and requested him to honor the city with a visit. Accordingly, on the first Sunday in Advent he went by water from Lambeth, landed at St. Paul's wharf, and proceeded in great pomp to the cathedral, where high mass was celebrated in presence of their majesties and the court. The sermon was preached by Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester, who took occasion to confess the share which he had in the national guilt, and to implore his hearers, who had been influenced by him when he went astray, to follow him now that he had recovered the right path. It was certainly asking a good deal, since Gardiner himself had sat with Cranmer and pronounced the sentence of divorce between the king and Catharine. He had also maintained the royal supremacy, and sold his pen to Henry's caprice.[117]
The bill which was framed to effect the restoration of the Catholic religion in England was very comprehensive and carefully worded. It distinguished minutely between the civil and ecclesiastical jurisdictions, and guarded against what legists are accustomed to consider the encroachments of the latter.[118] It secured to the owners of church lands the undisturbed possession of their property wherever it had been legally conveyanced; and without this concession the legate's mission would have proved fruitless. It was followed by a release of state prisoners, and by an embassy being sent to the Roman see. Before it had reached its destination, Pope Julius III. died,[119] after a pontificate of five years. He was succeeded by Marcellus, who reigned only three weeks, and by his decease opened the door for renewed exertions to raise Cardinal Pole to the papal chair. It was the third time that Pole's friends had used all their influence in his behalf. In the conclave which elected Julius III., Cardinal Farnese had nearly succeeded in procuring his election; in the proceedings which issued in the choice of Marcellus, the same cardinal had obtained letters from the king of France in Pole's favor; and now again, when Caraffa was chosen and took the name of Paul IV., it was not the fault of Philip, Mary, or Gardiner that the tiara did not light on the head of Reginald Pole.
Having mediated a peace successfully between France and the emperor, Pole was appointed, by Philip's special request, chief of the privy council. He was to be absent from the queen as little as possible, and nothing of importance was to be undertaken without his concurrence. Pope Paul IV., however, did not look favorably on Cardinal Pole, and had, even at this time, some thought of recalling him to Rome. Meanwhile the legate with Gardiner made a slight attempt to arouse the University of Oxford from its lethargy in respect to human learning, and a short time afterward, before the end of the year 1555, Gardiner being dead, the cardinal convoked a national synod to consider the disorders of the period, and the best means of stemming the torrent of depraved morals and strange forms of unbelief.
It is not our purpose to enter into the history of the severe measures which were adopted for the extirpation of heresy in England, and which we may, with the light which subsequent events have cast upon them, with reason suspect to have been extreme and injudicious. We are concerned only with the history of Cardinal Pole, and every thing goes to prove that he always preferred lenient to severe measures, so far as he considered it compatible with the welfare of religion and the safety of the throne. As for Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, and other principal personages who were put to death, they deserved their fate on account of the numerous treasons and crimes which they had committed, or to which they had been accessory; and Elizabeth herself might with perfect justice have been brought to the block, from which she was saved only by the influence of Gardiner, for conspiring against the crown of her sister. The whole number of victims brought to the scaffold was only from two to four hundred, and numbers of those who escaped into Ireland were sheltered and concealed from legal pursuit by the Irish Catholics, who have suffered death by thousands for the sake of religion, but have scarcely ever inflicted it on others. The fanatics and demagogues, who with the cowardly and blood-thirsty instincts of their species are seeking to stir up the American people, "who will not rise, in spite of their prayers and their prophecies," against the Irish Catholics of the United States, will do well to remember this fact, or rather, as such persons always forget what does not suit their purpose, the intelligent and honest citizens of this republic will do well to remember it, when these mischief-makers attribute to their Catholic fellow-citizens any ulterior design or hope of ever seeking to propagate their religion in this country by violent means.
As for Cardinal Pole himself, even Mr. Froude acknowledges that he was "not cruel." Burnet testifies that he rescued the inhabitants of his own district who were condemned to death from the hand of Bonner.[120] His secretary, Beccatelli, informs us that "he used his best endeavors that the sectaries might be treated with lenity, and no capital punishment inflicted on them;"[121] and he himself declares that he approved of putting heretics to death only in extreme cases.[122] Rigorous and severe punishments upon all classes of offenders, coercive measures and the stern exercise of authority were, however, according to the spirit of that age in every country, and it is not strange that the milder counsels of the gentle Pole were over-ruled, and that he was unable to hinder the executions desired by those who had the supreme power of the law in their hands. The administration of Mary was severe and despotic. Yet it is false to say that in her spirit and intentions she was cruel or tyrannical. What appears to us like an unnecessary and even impolitic rigor and vindictiveness against those who, by the laws of England, were rebels against both the civil and ecclesiastical authorities of the realm, was to a great extent due to the importunate counsels of the lay-lords. Even Bonner and Gardiner would gladly have pursued a milder policy, and the majority of the bishops and ecclesiastics, notwithstanding the atrocious persecutions to which they had been subjected under Henry and Edward, would have cordially sustained their primate if he had been left free to exercise his authority unimpeded by the interference of the civil power. Yet, though Mary's policy was severe, it was mercy itself compared to that of Henry, Elizabeth, and their Protestant successors. It is not only an atrocious calumny; it is a grim and dismal jest for the panegyrists of Elizabeth, and the exculpators of the hideous massacres of Cromwell, to affix the epithet of "bloody" to Queen Mary.[123] Moreover, it is not a mere question of a greater or lesser amount of bloodshed which should govern our award of justice in respect to the two cases. There is a difference of principle in the case, which an impartial Jew, Mohammedan, infidel, or even Protestant can and ought to admit, as some have admitted. Those persons who, in England or elsewhere, have been put to death by the civil power for the crime of heresy under the Catholic law, have been condemned for abjuring that religion in which they had been brought up, and which had been part of the law of the land, as well as the universal and traditional belief of the nation, from the beginning of its formation, or at least for centuries. Even if the principles of law by which they were condemned are pronounced tyrannical and unjust, it is plain that there is no parity between the case of a ruler acting on such principles, in common with other rulers of the time and of past ages, and according to maxims universally approved by jurists and statesmen, and one who compels his subjects to renounce their ancient laws and religion, and to abjure the faith in which they have been educated, at his individual whim and caprice. But although we are not disposed to abandon Queen Mary to her calumniators, we may give to Cardinal Pole the high honor of having been wiser than she was, or than her other counsellors were, and of having been in advance of the general spirit of his age in regard to the wisest and best method of treating religious errors, which had taken too deep a root to be summarily plucked up by a violent effort; and with these few remarks upon a topic which requires much greater space for a satisfactory discussion, we proceed with the personal history of the cardinal.