Buckingham was executed in 1521 and his son was ruined[58]; Montague and Abergavenny were thrown into prison[59] and made to pay heavy fines. The reason was simply that they were powerful enough to be dangerous, and Henry was powerful enough to crush them. So far the King had acted from the old motives and guarded against the old dangers; with the divorce of Katherine new factors came into play. The Pole family was devoted to the Queen, and would in any case have opposed the divorce. In addition to this motive the Countess was a very devout woman and had brought up her sons to be pillars of the Church[60]. In 1532 Reginald Pole with some difficulty obtained leave to go abroad, to escape acquiescence in the divorce. Reginald Pole was a man of quiet, amiable and studious disposition. He had been educated at the King’s expense, and was genuinely fond of his patron. There seems to be little doubt that if he had been left alone he would have been content to live peacefully in Italy with his friends and his studies. There he could have deplored the misfortunes of his country without attempting to remedy them by any more dangerous means than the vague, ineffectual plots at which legitimists always excel. But he was shaken out of his tranquillity by Henry himself. Early in 1535 Starkey, the King’s chaplain, who was a friend of Pole’s, sent him a royal command to state in writing his opinion on the royal title of Supreme Head of the Church of England. Henry wished to force Pole to take up a definite position. If he was friendly he might be useful; if hostile, he was dangerous, and the King was determined to know how to regard him. Pole was at first reluctant to undertake the task, but once he embarked on it he worked hard, and indulged to the full in the dangerous satisfaction of giving the King a piece of his mind. The book “De Unitate Ecclesiastica” was finished by the end of the year, but it was not despatched until Pole received the news of Anne Boleyn’s fall. Then, imagining, that the King might now be induced to change his policy, he sent it to England, at the end of May 1536, by the hands of his trusted servant Michael Throgmorton. It was, as its name implies, a vigorous defence of the one and indivisible Catholic Church under one supreme head, the Pope. The language of the book does not exceed the bounds of controversy as then observed; though, considering the King’s figure, the comparison between Henry and an unclean barrel was rather tactless. But Pole stated with perfect frankness his very strong disapproval of the King’s proceedings. From that time forth there was no hope that Henry would ever be reconciled to his kinsman[61].