CHAPTER 52

TO RECONCILE, NOT TO CONDEMN

A year has passed since I began to knock at the door of this royal house, and none has opened to me. King, if you ask, as those are wont to do who hear a knock at the door: who is there? I will reply, it is I, who, rather than consent that this house should be closed to her who now possesses it with you, preferred banishment and twenty years of exile. And if I speak thus, is it not a sufficient claim to be permitted to return home and to approach you?¹

—CARDINAL POLE TO PHILIP, SEPTEMBER 1554

SINCE HIS APPOINTMENT AS PAPAL LEGATE ON AUGUST 5, 1553, Cardinal Pole had been petitioning Mary to allow him to return to England. He had traveled as far as Brussels but had been prevented from going any farther as the emperor wanted to secure Philip’s marriage to Mary before England embarked on the path of Catholic restoration.

Pole, however, argued that nothing should stand in the way of the Church’s immediate and unconditional return to Rome.² He believed the queen’s marriage to Philip was “even more universally odious than the cause of the religion,” and Mary feared his hostility to it.³ As the months passed and there was no sign of his zealous advice being heeded, the cardinal’s letters to Mary became more and more strident. “It is imprudent and sacrilegious to say that matters of religion must be cleverly handled, and left until the throne is safely established,” he wrote; “what greater neglect can there be … than by setting aside the honour of God to attend to other things, leaving religion to the end?”⁴ In many ways Pole and Mary were kindred spirits. Both had suffered for their faith and lived through years of isolation in fear of death. Pole had been in exile for much of his life; both had lost their mothers to Henry VIII’s cruelty. But England had changed in his twenty-year-long exile, since Henry’s break with Rome and the execution of his elder brother, Henry, Lord Montague, and his mother, Margaret Pole. Years of antipapal propaganda had left many English people hostile to the idea of a return of papal authority. A generation had grown up knowing only the king as head of the Church. Meanwhile, Church lands had fallen into secular hands and their “possessioners” were not prepared to give them up. Finally, though, with the Spanish marriage concluded and a compromise reached, Parliament repealed Pole’s attainder for treason and the cardinal could return to England.

On November 20, some fifteen months after his appointment as legate, Pole landed at Dover. Two days later, he journeyed to London, accompanied by an ever-increasing train of English noblemen and councillors. With Londoners lining the banks of the Thames, Pole took to the river at Gravesend, his large silver cross, an emblem of his legatine authority, prominent in the state barge. At noon he arrived at Whitehall, where he was met on a landing stage by Philip. With the sword of state borne before them, the king and cardinal proceeded to the Presence Chamber, where the queen awaited them. Pole had not seen Mary since she was a young princess. He knelt in front of the queen; she “received him with great signs of respect and affection; both shed tears.”⁵

A week after his arrival in England, Pole appeared before both Houses of Parliament at Whitehall. Having expressed his gratitude for the admission into the realm of a man hitherto “exiled and banished,” he outlined the cause of his coming. The pope had, he claimed, “a special respect for their realm above all other.” While others nations had been converted gradually, “this island the first of all islands, received the light of Christ’s religion.”

It was a spurious appeal to English nationalism, a providential version of history, intended to make Roman Catholicism suitably English. England was, in Pole’s view, the chosen Catholic nation. God “by providence hath given this realm prerogative of nobility above other,” and Mary was deemed its savior. “When all light of true religion seemed utterly extinct, as the churches defaced and altars overthrown … in a few remained the confession of Christ’s faith, namely in the breast of the Queen’s excellency.” When people conspired against her and “policies were devised to disinherit her, and armed power prepared to destroy her … she being a virgin, helpless, naked and unarmed, prevailed, and had the victory over tyrants.” Mary was the Virgin Queen who had restored the national religion.

With carefully chosen words Pole assured Parliament that his commission was “not one of prejudice to any person”:

I come not to destroy but to build. I come to reconcile, not to condemn. I come not to compel, but to call again. I come not to call anything in question already done, but my commission is of grace and clemency to such as will receive it, for touching all matters that be past, that shall be as things cast into the sea of forgetfulness.⁶

Two days later, a delegation from Parliament presented themselves at Whitehall, where Gardiner made their supplication:

We the lords spiritual and temporal, and the commons of this present Parliament assembled, representing the whole body of the realm of England and dominions of the same, do declare ourselves very sorry and repentant of the schism and disobedience committed in this realm and the dominions of the same, against the said See Apostolic … that we may, as children repentant, be received into the bosom and unity of Christ’s church. So as this noble realm, with all the members thereof, may in unity and perfect obedience to the See Apostolic.⁷

At five in the afternoon of Saint Andrew’s Day, November 30, Pole was conducted in full pontifical robes from Lambeth Palace to Westminster. There, with the Lords and Commons and the king and queen kneeling before him in their robes of estate, he formally absolved the country from its years of schism:

We, by apostolic authority given unto us by the most holy lord Pope Julius III, his Vice-regent on earth, do absolve and deliver you, and every [one] of you, with the whole Realm and the Dominions thereof, from all Heresy and Schism, and from all and every judgement, Censures and pains, for that cause incurred; & also so we do restore you again unto the unity of our Mother the holy Church … in the name of the Father, of the son and of the Holy Ghost.⁸

According to John Elder, it “moved a great number of the audience with sorrowful sighs and weeping tears to change their cheer.” England had returned to the Catholic fold. It was a moment of high ceremony and emotion.

That evening Mary gave a banquet for the king and his gentlemen, and after supper there were dancing and masques. The king had that day shown “liberality to the ladies of the court, who were dressed in the gowns he had given them.”⁹ The news of England’s return to the fold quickly reached Rome, whereupon the pope ordered processions, “giving thanks to God with great joy for the conversion of England to his Church.”¹⁰

THE SUNDAY AFTER the reconciliation with Rome—the first day of Advent—Mary, Philip, and Pole attended a High Mass sung by the bishop of London at St. Paul’s Cathedral. The crowds “both in the church and in the streets, were enormous, and displayed great joy and piety, begging the cardinal for his blessing.”¹¹

After Mass, Gardiner preached at St. Paul’s Cross, basing his sermon on the Book of Romans:

Now also it is time that we awake out of our sleep, who have slept or rather dreamed these twenty years past. For as men intending to sleep do separate themselves from company and desire to be alone, even so we have separated ourselves from the See of Rome, and have been alone, no realm in Christendom like us.

He continued:

During these twenty years we have been without a head. When King Henry was head perhaps there was something to be said for it, but what a head was Edward, to whom they had to give a protector! He was but a shadow. Nor could the Queen, being a woman, be head of the Church … now the hour is come … the realm is at peace … It is time for us also to awake.¹²

At the end “all those present, over fifteen thousand people, knelt down” to receive Pole’s blessing, crying out “Amen, amen!” “A sight to be seen it was, and the silence was such that not a cough was heard.”¹³