A Scottish-Canadian Blethering On About Books

Cardinal Pole, the title figure, is a bit of a cipher, other than being a 'nice guy' but on the (implicitly) wrong side. Ainsworth tries to present his narrative voice as entirely neutral in the vicious Catholic/Protestant culture wars of the period he's writing about, but his choice of terms occasionally betrays him as being a conventional Protestant. Rather like Scott, however (who was probably his inspiration), he is most concerned with presenting and reprobating the extremists on each side. And, of course, he takes full opportunity to throw in a couple of burnings at the stake, though his account of the physicalities of that horror is laundered in the extreme, to the point that he claims that neither of his suffering victims scream. Extremely unlikely, unless, of course, they were strangled by a sympathetic executioner beforehand, which is not an eventuality he chooses to bring up, let alone depict.

This is a slightly unusual Ainsworth in that the fictional junior couple are not allowed to have a happy-ever-after at the end; it seems close, but the young man, Osbert Clinton, forfeits it by joining the traitorous revolution. His suicide seems decidedly tacked on and was probably a second thought, perhaps at the urging of one of Ainsworth's editors or friends.

The 'serious' historical figures are Mary I (Bloody Mary) and Philip, of course, along with a couple of her Catholic bishops who took the lead in the persecutions of the Protestants, and a couple of the historical Protestant clergy who bore the brunt of that persecution. Mary is depicted as weak and desperate to keep Philip's affections, despite the fact that he's a philanderer (he goes after Osbert Clinton's girl with extraordinary pertinacity). Philip's a bit of a moustache-twirling villain, to be honest, and Ainsworth clearly also enjoyed sending up his retinue of Spanish hidalgoes in the early chapters. We also had a chapter-length essay description of Southampton, and another of Winchester, the latter a bit more interesting to me perhaps only because I've been there. I wasn't aware that Philip was feasted at the so-called Arthur's Round Table, which, though not authentic in the Arthurian sense, certainly developed a history of its own.

Of the 'humorous' characters - three giants and a dwarf - in all likelihood real life people abused in fact as they are abused in fiction here, the less said the better. Maybe the nineteenth century was close enough in sensibility to the sixteenth to enjoy this, but the twenty-first simply cannot.

Anyway, I read this in a Tauchnitz, 1863 edition (it formed volumes 665 and 666 of the British Authors Collection!) and felt a great sense of homecoming doing so. I have missed Ainsworth's peculiar mixture of historical obsession and rather bored romance!