Few, conversant with the celebrities of the sixteenth century, will fail to see in Reginald Pole the most distinguished Englishman of his day. Of royal descent, a notable scholar and a man whose conscience ruled every action of his life, he voluntarily exiled himself, when, at the cost of a single principle, the highest preferments in Church or State lay open to him. Two passions marked his singularly blameless career: love of his country and devotion to the Holy See. He turned his back on the one, when the King renounced the other, and made it high treason to continue to acknowledge the Pope Head of the Church of England. We have seen that when Pole refused to return to England he was declared a traitor, a price was put upon his head, and his aged mother was brought to the block. Paul III. made him a Cardinal, in order to avail himself of his knowledge and brilliant talents at the Council of Trent, and at the death of that Pontiff, he was the imperial candidate for the Papacy. Had he possessed a particle of ambition he might have controlled the Conclave. On Mary’s accession, he wrote many urgent appeals to the Queen, beseeching her to lose no time in riveting the broken chain between England and Rome. He possessed undoubted influence with her, but less than the Emperor, who counselled delay, and took care that the interests of the empire should before all be secured. The eldest son of the Church, Charles ever made religion the handmaid of politics; and as for Philip, in spite of his boasted maxim, that it would be better not to reign at all, than to reign over a nation of heretics, he was content always to play a waiting game, and above all to follow his father’s lead. Pole, in common with Gardiner, had considered that Mary was fatally mistaken in allying herself with Spain, that the English would have been far more easily reconciled to Rome if every other foreign element had been excluded, and confidence in herself planted on a firm and solid basis, and that, at all events, the re-establishment of Papal jurisdiction should have been her first care in ascending the throne. If, when the kingdom was at her feet, she had freed herself from the Emperor’s influence, and had summoned Pole in his official capacity as Papal Legate, he believed that the movement towards reunion would have been a truly national one.