The Last White Rose (47 page)

Perhaps Geoffrey, who may have been among the crowd watching the execution, feared that he might die in the same way. He broke. No jury ever dared to acquit anybody accused of treason and he realized that his only hope was to secure a royal pardon by slavishly cooperating with his questioners and telling them everything he knew, even inventing evidence if necessary. First, he wrote to the king, begging for forgiveness, and then he repeated critical remarks made by every male member of the White Rose party, including all Montague’s comments about Henry. The authorities had got what they needed – not very much, but enough for their purpose.

On 4 November Exeter and Montague were arrested and sent to the Tower, soon followed by their wives and children. So were Sir Edward Neville, Dr Croftes and John Collins, the chaplain from Bockmer. On 28 November Cromwell wrote to Sir Thomas Wyatt that the Marquess of Exeter and Lord Montague had been committed to the Tower for ‘sundry great crimes’; not because of mere suspicion, but because of evidence and confessions.
¹⁷
Cromwell was lying, however. Nothing serious could be proved against them, however much they may have detested King Henry. The usual show trials of the two noblemen by their peers came first, with the Lord Chancellor, Lord Audley, presiding. Montague’s took place on 2 December and that of Exeter the next day. Both pleaded not guilty to the indictments, although they knew very well that it would make not the slightest difference to the outcome.

Apart from speaking contemptuously of the king, and dreaming hopefully that he was dead, the only ‘evidence’ against Lord Montague was of having said to Geoffrey, ‘I like well the doings of Cardinal Pole, and I would we were both over the sea for
this world will one day come to stripes.’ A similar allegation of having spoken such words was to be made against all the accused. It was damning enough, however, in the context of Reginald’s efforts to launch an invasion and stir up rebellion against Henry VIII. Inevitably, Montague was found guilty of high treason and condemned to death. In a way the sentence came as a relief to him. ‘I have lived in prison these last six years,’ he had declared while being questioned – a revealing comment on the terrifying claustrophobia of life in Henrician England.

The Marquess’s trial was more dramatic, according to Richard Moryson in a pamphlet written shortly afterwards. In court Exeter accused Sir Geoffrey ‘with frenzy, with folly and madness’. Geoffrey retorted that he had certainly been frenzied when he planned to act as a traitor in company with the accused, ‘disobedient to my God, false to my Prince and enemy to my native land’. He added, ‘I was also out of my wit and stricken with a sore kind of madness when I chose rather to kill myself than to charge them with such treasons as I knew would cost them their lives.’ But God had saved him from killing himself. ‘His work [is] that I have declared myself, my brother, the Marquess, with the rest, to be traitors.’

If Moryson can be believed, ‘The Marquess was stiff at the Bar and stood fast in denial of most things laid to his charge, yet in some he failed and staggered, in such sort that all men might see his countenance to avouch that [which] his tongue could not without much faltering deny.’ But although a distinguished scholar Moryson was also a government agent.
¹⁸
Despite allegations that he approved of Cardinal Pole’s activities, the only charges that could be brought against Exeter were of having said, ‘I trust once to have a fair day upon these knaves which rule about the King, and I trust to see a merry world one day’, and of making a similar remark on another occasion. Unlike Montague there was no record of any derogatory words about King Henry. He had done nothing that was a crime under the Treason Act. But, inevitably, the Marquess too was found guilty.

Tried on 4 December, Sir Edward Neville remained defiant until the end, refusing to admit that he had committed any treason. Also tried on that day were poor old Dr Croftes from Chichester Cathedral and Collins the Bockmer chaplain, together with Hugh Holland, the sea captain. In court the two priests bravely declared their loyalty to the pope, well aware it would bring them a death sentence, Collins admitting in addition that he had prophesied, ‘The King will hang in hell one day for the plucking down of abbeys’. The pair were found guilty of the treasonable offence of denying the royal supremacy, while Hugh Holland was condemned for communicating with a traitor beyond the seas.

On 9 December, a day of strong wind and pelting rain, the Marquess of Exeter and Lord Montague were beheaded on a sodden scaffold on Tower Hill. ‘They had been so linked by God in sincere affection during their lives that He would not at the last hour let them be separated, both dying together in the cause of God,’ Reginald wrote years later to Exeter’s son.
¹⁹
Sir Edward Neville was beheaded with them. ‘And the two priests and Holland were drawn to Tyburn and there hanged and quartered’ is Hall’s laconic record of their own, more agonizing, deaths on the same day.
²⁰

Attempts to incriminate the marchioness failed, although she was one of the few members of the White Rose party who had wanted a full-scale rebellion. Her correspondence with Chapuys was treason in every sense, but luckily for her the authorities knew nothing about it. When they claimed that treasonable motives must have lain behind her visits to the Nun of Kent, Elizabeth Barton, she said that she had gone to see the nun because she was worried about her children’s health – almost certainly a lie but a convincing one. Even so, she remained a prisoner in the Tower until 1540.

For some weeks Sir Geoffrey Pole, who had also been found guilty of treason, remained in his cell at the Tower. By now he was dangerously unbalanced. On 28 December he made another
unsuccessful effort to commit suicide, on this occasion trying to suffocate himself with a cushion, and when his wife petitioned for his release she wrote that he was ‘as good as dead’. Early in 1539 Geoffrey at last received the pardon for which he had worked so hard. He was set free and allowed to go home, but could not settle down. He was a haunted man in a permanent frenzy, and the following year he attacked and badly wounded a Sussex gentleman who had borne witness against him, after which he fled to Flanders. Eventually, he made his way to Rome, throwing himself on the mercy of his brother the cardinal who forgave him. He then settled at Liège, where he received a pension from the kindly Erard de la Marck and where his family joined him.

There was another victim of the ‘Exeter Conspiracy’. Sir Nicholas Carew, the Master of the Horse, had been Henry’s closest friend since they were small boys, so expert in the tournament that the king had given him a tilting yard of his own at Greenwich in which to practise. After a rakish youth – Wolsey thought him a bad influence – he had settled down, frequently leading embassies to France where he was a great favourite of Francis I. As Master of the Horse he was a member of the King’s Council and therefore someone of real political importance.

But on 31 December Henry’s old jousting and hunting companion was accused of involvement and arrested. Shortly before his arrest the king had finally turned against him in a fit of childish pique after an angry argument over the result of a game of bowls. According to Chapuys, he was caught when a letter found among the marchioness’s papers supposedly proved that he, too, belonged to the White Rose party and the ‘conspiracy’. In reality, he was guilty only of having stayed unshakeably loyal to Katherine of Aragon and her daughter, despite the fact that he owed his glittering career entirely to King Henry. This heinous fault had been compounded by a witness claiming during the recent trials that Carew had often been at West Horsley and had regularly corresponded with Lord Montague.

At his trial in February 1539 Carew was charged with abetting Exeter – although how was not specified – and with discussing with him ‘the change of the world’. There were also rumours that he had regularly smuggled letters of support to Queen Katherine and the Lady Mary: Chapuys suspected that Carew’s destruction was part of the campaign to isolate Mary as he had always shown a chivalrous loyalty to her.

Desperately trying to save his life, Sir Nicholas recalled how the late marquess had seemed cast down on hearing of Prince Edward’s birth, which ended his tenuous hopes of succeeding to the throne. His White Rose friends had all been conservatives in religion, so Carew converted to the new Henrician form of Christianity, ostentatiously reading the Bible in English – ‘in the prison of the Tower, where he first savoured the likeness and sweeetness of God’s most holy word,’ as Hall unctuously puts it.
²¹
However, he was disappointed if he hoped for a pardon.

For Henry had made up his mind that his old friend was one of the principal members of ‘that faction’, and Sir Nicholas was duly beheaded on Tower Hill in March. As Lord Montague had shrewdly observed to Geoffrey Pole, ‘the King never made man but he destroyed him again, either with displeasure or the sword’.
²²
Although Lady Carew was reduced to penury by the attainder, characteristically Henry sent agents to Carew’s widow to take back the diamonds and pearls, once Queen Katherine’s property, that he had given her when her husband was in favour.

As a plan of action, the ‘Exeter Conspiracy’ existed only in the head of Henry VIII. What had worried the coldly calculating Lord Privy Seal, however, was the mere fact that a White Rose faction should exist at all. ‘Henry’s reaction was predictably savage, and Cromwell’s predictably thorough, but they had a reality to react against.’
²³
The reality was a potential and not a plot, however. Had the emperor sent an invasion force to England, it would easily have found an unguarded landing place along the South Coast, while there was reason to suspect that the West was
dangerously disaffected. ‘This is a perilous country,’ the Dean of Exeter, Dr Simon Heynes, had reported to Henry in 1537. ‘For God’s love, let the King look to it in time.’
²⁴

While it is certainly possible that in their wilder moments Exeter and Montague might sometimes have dreamed of a rising, if only to save themselves, both men were much too negative and incompetent to have organized one. In any case, they had missed their only chance during the Pilgrimage of Grace. The fact of the matter was that Cromwell saw a chance to fuel his master’s paranoia and rid himself of two powerful opponents, poisoning Henry’s mind with a minimum of ‘proof’. This consisted of no more than Sir Geoffrey’s crazed babbling, together with reports of one or two scattered incidents that had been sent in by agents.

One such report was of how, late during the previous year, just after Prince Edward’s birth, some Courtenay tenants had told West Country neighbours at Bere Regis in Dorset, ‘the King hath but a little season to come and then my Lord Marquess shall be King, and then all shall be cured’.
²⁵
This report was not referred to in the indictment, but it is more that likely that Cromwell brought it to Henry’s attention. To an over-excited mind, the tenants’ opinions must have seemed to confirm Dr Heynes’s warning about serious disaffection in the West Country. According to Chapuys, Cromwell claimed that Exeter had intended to marry his son to the Lady Mary. No doubt he had also told the king of the marquess’s intention and emphasized that if such a marriage had taken place there would not have been much future for Prince Edward.

Henry convinced himself he had escaped death by a very narrow margin indeed. In February 1539 he sent detailed instructions to Sir Thomas Wyatt in Spain to tell Charles V ‘how by the Cardinal’s counsel’ Exeter and Montague had been planning to murder him, with his son and daughters, and that the marquess had intended to take his place ‘these last ten years’ – Sir Geoffrey Pole’s evidence had proved this beyond
any reasonable doubt.
²⁶
Embarrassed, nevertheless, by the total lack of documentary evidence for his unhinged version of events, Henry told the French ambassador, Castillon, of a newly discovered correspondence between Exeter, Montague and the cardinal, which confirmed their guilt. (If it ever existed, the letters have never been produced.) Castillon commented sardonically that the king and Cromwell wanted to put the dead men on trial after their execution.
²⁷

Just how alarming Henry VIII had become may be seen from a letter of January 1539 in which a terrified Castillon begs to be recalled, because the king realizes the French are going to refuse his requests – presumably for assurances that King Francis should abandon his new alliance with the emperor. Although Henry had often chatted with Castillon in a friendly way, laughing at his jokes, the Frenchman says he is dealing with ‘the most dangerous and cruel man in the world’, who despite his being an ambassador will punish him for the refusal. The king ‘is in a fury and has neither reason not understanding’.
²⁸

28. Autumn 1538: The ‘Exeter Conspiracy’

1
. Merriman,
Thomas Cromwell
,
op. cit.
, vol. 2, no. 281

2
. M.L. Busch, ‘The Tudors and the Royal Race’, in
History
, 55 (1971), pp. 37–48.