Pole’s hectoring effusion, including unflattering accounts of the King’s behaviour back to his accession, based on first-hand observation, and clarion-calls for him to return to papal obedience, was the opposite of Campeggio’s emollient overtures. Its contents were, as Pole’s biographer perceptively comments, the sort of unvarnished truths that a conscientious spiritual adviser might present to a penitent in the privacy of confession. The vital difference was that they had already been said in draft
