Reginald Pole

Reginald Pole was an English cardinal of royal Plantagenet descent who opposed Henry VIII’s annulment and rejection of papal authority. Living in exile, he wrote against the king and narrowly escaped efforts to capture or kill him, while members of his family suffered execution in England. Under Mary I he returned as papal legate, reconciled the kingdom with Rome and became archbishop of Canterbury. He died in 1558 on the same day as the queen.

Pole appears in Philippa Gregory’s The Queen’s Fool and in Tudor fiction about Mary I, Thomas Cromwell and the English Reformation. He is often presented as a principled exile or a dangerous dynastic alternative to the Tudors. His role in restoring Catholicism and approving persecution under Mary complicates any simple image of the humanist victim of Henry VIII.