Reginald Pole and Last Session of the Council of Trent

Found when looking for something else*: a presentation on Reginald Cardinal Pole's works published for the Council of Trent by the Aldine Press in 1562: De Concilio liber and Reformatio Angliae. 

Reginald Cardinal Pole, the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, was dead of course (+11/27/1558) when Pope Pius IV convened the last session of Council of Trent. Pole had died under the cloud of suspicion of heresy during the reign of Pope Paul IV, who had stripped him of his title as Papal Legate. Mary I showed some of her father's spirit in responding to Papal authority and had not permitted Pole to leave England for Rome to face those charges. Others in Pole's circle, like Giovanni Cardinal Morone, suffered imprisonment and interrogation by the Roman Inquisition. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, he was vindicated after his arrest, imprisonment, and investigation:

[He] was arrested by the pontiff's order, confined in the Castle of Saint Angelo (31 May, 1557), and made the object of a formal prosecution for heresy, in which his views on justification, the invocation of saints, the veneration of relics and other matters were incriminated and submitted to rigid inquiry.

The cardinal strenuously repudiated these charges, but he was kept in confinement until the death of Paul IV. In 1560 his successor Pius IV authorized a revision of the process against Morone, and as a result the imprisonment of the cardinal and the whole procedure against him were declared to be entirely without justification; the judgment also recorded in the most formal terms that not the least suspicion rested upon his orthodoxy.

As H. George Fletcher comments in his presentation, publication of Pole's Book of the Council, written for the first session of the Council of Trent in 1542, 20 years earlier, and the records of Legatine Council he had held in England to begin the re-establishment and the reforms of the Catholic Church, was meant to offer a "posthumous vindication" of Pole's life and work for the Church.

In both Eamon Duffy's presentation on Cardinal Pole and H. George Fletcher's, Pope Paul IV does not come off well. Even the Catholic Encyclopedia calls his pontificate a great disappointment. 

Fletcher's presentation, made at the Grolier Club in 2015, offers some narrative on Pole's life and and works, but is mostly concerned with his acquisition of one of the books published by the Aldine Press in 1562 and whether it could be a copy sent to the last session of the Council of Trent and used by a peritus assisting one of the delegates there.

*Oh, what was I looking for? Some more information about this image.

The Final Session of the Council of Trent Opens

The third and final session of the Council of Trent opened on January 18, 1562, convened by Pope Pius IV, a good Medici. This session decided many details about priestly formation: bishops were to ordain only suitable men to holy orders and to supervise their moral life; clergy were to reside in their parishes and to perform regular duties; a seminary was to be established in every diocese; the discipline of clerical celibacy was upheld, etc.

This was the session of the Council attended by the last Catholic Bishop of St. Asaph's, Thomas Goldwell. He had been appointed by Mary I and he gave the last rites to Reginald Cardinal Pole, but had to go into exile at the beginning of Elizabeth I's reign without ever really becoming the ordinary of his diocese in Wales. As the Catholic Encyclopedia explains:

He was the only English bishop at the Council of Trent, where he was treated with marked respect. He was there engaged in the revision of the Breviary and the Missal; and also urged the council to excommunicate Queen Elizabeth. His mere presence at Trent was a cause of such excessive annoyance to Elizabeth that she wrote the following extraordinary farrago of falsehood to her German envoy Mundt: "We think it may be that one Goldwell, a very simple and fond man, having in our late sister's time been named to a small bishopric in Wales called St. Asaph, though never thereto admitted, flying out of the realm upon our sister's death, is gone to Rome as a renegade, and there using the name of a bishop, without order or title, is perhaps gone in the train of some Cardinal to Trent, and so it is likely the speech hath arisen of a bishop of England being there."

Not only did Thomas Goldwell attend the third session of the Council of Trent, but he was active in implementing its reforms:

In 1563 Goldwell was vicar-general to the Archbishop of Milan, St. Charles Borromeo. In 1567 he was made vicar of the cardinal archpriest in the Lateran, and in 1574 the Cardinal Vicar Savelli made him his vicegerent; he thus became, so to speak, the "working" bishop of Rome. . . . One of the last acts of his long and strenuous career was to serve on the Congregation for the Revision of the Roman Martyrology, in 1582. On the death of the Bishop of Lincoln, in 1584, Goldwell became the sole survivor of the ancient English hierarchy. He died the next year [on April 3], and was buried at St. Sylvester's.

He had even tried to accompany St. Edmund Campion, Father Robert Persons, et al on the mission to England in 1580 but became too ill during the journey on the Continent from Rome to the coast. He had to turn back at Reims.