Pole and His Books at Lambeth

The Reformation Cardinal exhibition at Lambeth Palace Library opened last week. It's an exhibition featuring some of his books (appropriately enough for a Library):

Pole’s was a life steeped in books. He was a scholar and a collector of one of the period’s most intriguing libraries, and it was in books that he fought his battles and made his strongest statements for reform. This exhibition gathers books from Oxford, London, and Rome to tell his story. The Pole who emerges is a complex and agonized individual, someone of sincerity and of evident charm, a connoisseur, a man of strong faith, a European statesman—and a battler for moderation within the limits of the possible.

There's an excellent digital exhibition for those of us who can't get to London before December 15, divided into "eras" of his life as a student, controversialist against Henry VIII, Cardinal scholar in Rome, Viterbo, and Trent, and Archbishop of Canterbury during the reign of Mary I. Each section highlights books, letters, and other documents: the books he studied, the books he wrote, books he inspired to renew the life of the Catholic Church in England, and books evaluating his role in the English Reformation and that renewal. 

The summing up:

Since [his death], he has been at the heart of two contrasting legends of English history. In one he is seen as the cruel agent of ‘Bloody Mary’ and an instigator of the burning alive of approximately three hundred English and Welsh men and women for their non-Catholic religious beliefs. The other legend of Pole as a saint and almost a martyr for the Catholic faith began to form immediately after his death. Biographies of the late cardinal were written and edited by men who had known him, notably Ludovico Beccadelli, and by supporters, not least at New College in Oxford, where a third of the fellows refused to accept Elizabeth’s religious settlement of 1559, resigned their fellowships, and moved abroad.

The role that Pole had played, his legacy for English Catholics in particular and for the European Counter-Reformation more broadly, would remain as meaningful as it was complex.

You have click on each image in the sections, scroll down a narrative panel or click on arrows to follow the explanation about the context and the provenance of each book or document, and then close the tab to return to the exhibition page and open another image. 

Two of the most interesting in the section on Henry VIII and Pole's "disagreements" are a Psalter with St. Thomas a Becket's name all blotted out and Pole's copy of the Bishop of Exeter John de Grandisson's Life of Becket, one of only six copies of the work to survive Henry VIII's attacks on the martyred saint.

Image Credit (Public Domain:) El cardenal Reginald Pole, por Sebastiano del Piombo

Reginald Cardinal Pole Exhibition at Lambeth Palace

The Archbishop of Canterbury's London headquarters, Lambeth Palace, is presenting an exhibition in its Library on the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, Reginald Cardinal Pole, beginning on October 5. The title of the exhibition is "Reformation Cardinal: Reginald Pole in Sixteenth-Century Italy and England":

Born in 1500 into the highest circles of the English aristocracy, becoming both cardinal and England’s last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, Reginald Pole steered a perilous course through the storm of the European Reformation. A brilliant scholarly career in Italy took him to Rome, from where he launched an audacious campaign against Henry VIII’s regime and its anti-papal policies. His intellectual leadership of the Church mirrored his position in a circle of close spiritual friends, which included the artist Michelangelo. Returning to England after the accession of the Catholic Queen Mary, Pole reconciled the English Church to Rome and did much to re-establish Catholicism before his premature death at Lambeth in 1558. This exhibition brings together books from Oxford, London, and Rome to tell the story of this complex, charismatic individual.

I'll be on the lookout for more information about the exhibition next week.

Consulting the British History Online entry for Lambeth Palace, I found some information about the Cardinal Archbishop's time there:

To Cardinal Pole, who succeeded to the archbishopric, is attributed the foundation of the long gallery in Lambeth Palace. He was appointed to the deanery of Exeter by Henry VIII.; but was abroad when the king abolished the Papal authority in England, and, not attending when summoned to return, was proclaimed a traitor and divested of his deanery. In 1536 he was made cardinal; and when Mary ascended the throne he returned to England as legate from Pope Julius III., and had his attainder reversed by special Act of Parliament. "Few churchmen have borne so unblemished a reputation as this eminent prelate, and few have carried themselves with such moderation and meekness. He died November 17, 1558, being the very day on which Queen Mary herself died."

and

Several circumstances respecting Cardinal Pole are noticed as having happened here by Strype, Burnet, and other authors. Queen Mary is said to have completely furnished Lambeth Palace for his reception at her own cost, and to have frequently honoured him with her company. "In 1554, on his arrival from the Continent, having presented himself at court, he went from thence in his barge to his palace at Lambeth; and here he soon afterwards summoned the bishops and inferior clergy, then assembled in convocation, to come to him to be absolved from all their prejudices, schisms, and heresies. The following month all the bishops went to Lambeth to receive the cardinal's blessing and directions."

"On the 21st of July, 1556," says Strype, "the queen removed from St. James's in the Fields into Eltham, passing through the park to Whitehall, and took her barge, crossing over to Lambeth unto my lord cardinal's palace; and there she took her chariot, and so rid through St. George's Fields to Newington, and so over the fields to Eltham, at five o'clock in the afternoon. She was attended on horseback by the cardinal, &c., and by a conflux of people to see her grace, above ten thousand." In the winter of the same year the queen removed from St. James's through the park, and took her barge to Lambeth, where she visited Cardinal Pole. After dinner she resumed her journey to Greenwich, where she kept her Christmas.

In 1558 Cardinal Pole died at Lambeth Palace. His body lay in state forty days, when it was removed to Canterbury Cathedral for interment.

The website for Lambeth Palace includes a picture of the "descendant" of one of the fig trees Cardinal Pole had planted on the grounds:

Fronting the Great Hall on the west side of the courtyard is a magnificent White Marseille fig tree, which came to Lambeth Palace with the last Roman Catholic Archbishop, Cardinal Reginald Pole, in 1556. He served Mary I (Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon) until they both died on the 17th November 1558. The tree was relocated to this position in 1828 when Edward Blore built the residential block, and it bears abundant fruit every autumn.

So the Archbishop of Canterbury can have his figgy pudding every Christmas!?!

It will be interesting to see how the curators use the books from Oxford, London, and Rome "to tell the story of this complex, charismatic individual."