least of one occasion on which he appears to have tried to save a victim, even against his own will. Another person who shares to some extent the responsibility of the persecution is Cardinal Pole. But to him, on the other hand, historians appear to have been most unaccountably lenient. He may possibly have deserved his early reputation as a learned and studious man, and he seems to have been sincere, and fairly free from selfish and personally ambitious schemes; but he was a pedant, and what would in modern days be called a prig. As a negotiator he was incompetent, and as a statesman beneath contempt. He held the seals for a few months after Gardiner's death, until he received an intimation from the Pope that his legate must not serve two masters, when he retired to make room for Archbishop Heath; and at this time De Noailles describes Mary as so regarding the legate that 'she neither will nor can do anything without him.'[1] This is the very winter, also, when the horrors of the Lollards' Tower and Bonner's coal-house were perpetrated. Added to this, his own injunctions to the bishops, of February 1555, for the reconciling of their dioceses to the Church, introduced a register of all persons in each parish who had been reconciled, with a promise of a future visitation of a very significant character. Moreover, towards the latter part of the persecution, in no place did it rage more hotly than in Pole's own diocese of Canterbury: and although it is alleged that Thornton, the Suffragan of Dover, and Archdeacon Harpsfield, were the principal agents in the matter, yet it ought not to be forgotten that Thornton and Harpsfield were but Pole's subordinates, and there is no reason why the rule 'qui facit per alium facit
- ↑ De Noailles, vol. v. p. 256.
