Cardinal Pole's Special Agent: Michael Throckmorton,c.1503-1558

Abstract

Michael Throckmorton is best known for his peripatetic career as Cardinal Pole's agent. This article underlines the anxieties and dangers of that role, undertaken amidst fears that English agents would assassinate the cardinal. It also investigates Throckmorton's private life as a student in Italy in the 1530s and as a family man, one of a large clan divided by religion. Using the new evidence of his book inventory, it suggests that Throckmorton was a humanist, in whose library editions of the classics were outnumbered by medical texts. His ownership of banned or suspect religious works is set in the context of his friendship with the spirituali in Pole's household at Viterbo, especially the reformer-poet Marcantonio Flaminio. In 1553 Throckmorton carried to Queen Mary the papal bull making Pole the legate responsible for England's reconciliation. After delicate negotiations in England, Throckmorton returned to Mantua and died there in 1558, partly protected from the religious and political turmoil which afflicted Pole's last years. The article concludes by relating Throckmorton's life to wider contemporary experience: European perceptions of English religious change, the ‘medical renaissance’, Marian persecution, and the complexities faced by erstwhile spirituali.