This study is doubly welcome, as an early entrant in Ashgate's promising series of biographies of archbishops of Canterbury, and as the first readable life of Reginald Pole to appear in recent years. The late and lamented Thomas Mayer was immensely learned on Pole, but seemed to have inherited his subject's inability to produce clear and concise prose; Edwards admirably remedies the lack, and also pays generous tribute to Mayer's coal-face research, while briskly disposing of his argument that Pole was some sort of pioneering gay role model. Naturally, given the balance expected of the series, it is Pole's four last years, as primate of All England, which commands attention, so half the text is given up to that swansong of a career marked overall more by promise than fulfilment; but Edwards's command of the Anglo-Spanish background enriches the earlier part of his story. Indeed, his sketch of Pole's background in the murderous dynastic politics of fifteenth-century England is masterly in conveying to the reader Pole's peculiar and delicate position in relation to two successive Henry Tudors whose claim to their throne was a good deal less convincing than his own. Edwards picks up the irony that Margaret Plantagenet, Pole's ultimately ill-fated mother, was created countess of Salisbury in her own right by Henry viii, providing a precedent for a second female creation in her own right, that of Anne Boleyn as ‘marquess’ of Pembroke. Throughout the biography we are presented with a man who was never quite as heroic or decisive as he would have liked to be, and who was sometimes left with the job of later covering his tracks – for instance, to explain the fact that in 1529–30 he had consented to go abroad to promote the royal case for annulment of Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon. In fact, he was rather active in that cause. One is then left aghast at the political and emotional ineptitude of the central literary text of his career, the De unitate (1536); certainly his family back in England were horrified by its likely effect on the king, with reason, as their subsequent fates were to demonstrate. Edwards goes so far (p. 115) as to call Pole ‘a self-regarding snob’. Hardly surprisingly, the great powers of Western Europe, France and the Empire, regarded him as a toxic brand whose effect was to complicate their delicate relations with England; it was a feeling which would unhelpfully dog his relations with the Habsburgs in the later years under Queen Mary when he was back in his native land. Perhaps it was just as well that Pole never became pope, for all the qualities of moderation which he seemed to represent in the struggle for the Roman Church's soul in the 1540s and early 1550s. The church leaders who gathered in the various sessions of the Council of Trent, and the College of Cardinals electing to the papacy in 1549 and 1555, no doubt recognised the unrealistic streak in his character. There remains the curious contradiction between Pole's years as the white hope of the ‘Spirituali’ in Italy in the 1540s, patron to some remarkably heterodox figures reaching out to the Protestant Reformation, and his determined imposition of a discipline-minded Catholicism while archbishop of Canterbury. At least one of his lieutenants, the humanist András Dudic, was so alienated by his years as Pole's secretary in England that he ended up as a leading light in the foundation of the Hungarian Reformed Church and a determined advocate of religious toleration. Those Marian years were nevertheless by no means unproductive: as Eamon Duffy has already ably demonstrated in Fires of faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (New Haven–London 2009), Pole contributed much to creating a self-confident English Catholicism which survived the catastrophe of Mary's early death, not to mention his now familiar anticipation of much in the implementation of the Counter-Reformation. Edwards provides plenty of material in this satisfying text to confirm such a judgement.