The Last White Rose (48 page)

3
.
LP
Hen VIII,
op. cit.
, vol. XIII (ii), 753.

4
. E.W. Ives, ‘Faction at the Court of Henry VIII: The Fall of Anne Boleyn’, in
History
, 57 (1972), pp. 169–88.

5
. Mayer,
Correspondence of Reginald Pole
,
op. cit.
, vol. 1, pp. 118–19.

6
.
Ibid.
, p. 118.

7
. T.E. Bindoff,
Tudor England
, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1950, p. 108.

8
. Elton,
Policy and Police
,
op. cit.
, pp. 350 and 359 n. 4.

9
. Dodds and Dodds,
The Pilgrimage of Grace
,
op. cit.
, vol. 2, p. 293.

10
. Bernard,
The King’s Reformation, op. cit
., p. 431.

11
.
LP Hen VIII, op. cit
., vol. XIII (ii), 804.

12
.
Ibid
., 804.

13
. For Helyar, see
Oxford
DNB.

14
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit.
, vol. XIII (ii), 797.

15
. M. St Clair Byrne,
The Lisle Letters,
6 vols, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981, vol. 5, no. 259.

16
. Hall,
op. cit.
, p. 826.

17
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit.
, vol. XIII (ii), 924.

18
. R. Morison,
An Invective ayenst [against] Treason
, London, 1539.

19
.
CSP Ven
.,
op. cit.
, vol. V, 806.

20
. Hall,
op. cit.
, p. 827.

21
.
Ibid
., p. 827.

22
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit.
, vol. XIII (ii), 960.

23
. Elton,
Reform and Reformation
, p. 281.

24
. J. A.Youings, ‘The Council of the West’, in
Transactions of the
Royal
Historical Society
, fifth series, 10 (1960), p. 45.

25
. Bernard,
The King’s Reformation
,
op. cit.
, p. 419.

26
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit.
, vol. XIV (i), 280.

27
.
Ibid.
, 280.

28
.
Ibid.
, 144.

29

Winter 1538–Summer 1539: Cardinal Pole’s Last Throw

‘to declare that he would be a King.’

Sir Thomas Wriothesley on Reginald Pole, to Lord Cromwell, March 1539
¹

The end of December 1538 found Reginald Pole struggling across the Apennines through deep snow. Disguised as a layman, he was riding a horse astride – instead of on a mule side-saddle as a cardinal would normally have done – and escorted by only a small party of horsemen, since he did not want to attract the attention of English assassins who were known to be lurking in Italy and might try to ambush him. Never strong, he found the cold and the bad road exhausting, particularly the descent to Bologna, commenting that any additional snow or rain might have prevented his journey altogether. He had further mountain roads to travel before he reached Spain, through the Alps and the Pyrenees. Storms made a Mediterranean voyage impossible during the winter, however,
and his mission was so pressing that he had to take this arduous route.

In the summer of 1538 King Henry’s foreign policy had suffered a severe setback when Francis I and Charles realized that he had been playing them off against each other and began to negotiate an agreement by which both promised not to make any alliance with England. Henry also learned that in the near future Pope Paul intended to publish a bull excommunicating him. Always a fervent supporter of the king, Edward Hall complained that ‘the cankered and cruel serpent the Bishop of Rome’ (egged on by Pole) was asking foreign powers to attack England and ‘utterly to destroy the whole nation’.
²
The invasion scare lasted until the spring of 1539, alarming the king to such an extent that he spent huge sums on building a dozen new castles along the coast. He also took steps against the White Rose.

In December 1539 Paul III created a new Scottish cardinal, David Beaton, ordering him to publish in Scotland the bull that excommunicated Henry VIII. Reginald, who had already written to congratulate Beaton on his promotion, was so encouraged that he asked the pope to let him have another try at toppling the king. His eloquent arguments were strengthened by sensational reports of Henry’s latest outrages: not only had he desecrated Thomas à Becket’s shrine at Canterbury and burnt the saint’s bones, but he was said to have put the bones on trial and ensured they were found guilty of treason. (The king had the shrine’s most famous jewel, an enormous ruby, made into a thumb ring.)

This was why Pole, with the pope’s approval, was on his way to the Spanish court at Toledo to ask for Charles V’s help. He had not wasted any time, leaving Rome just after Christmas, regardless of the weather. He must have known that his chances were even more slender than they had been in 1537. Since then it had become clear that Northern England had been cowed, while not only had men like Darcy gone to the scaffold but the White Rose families had been eliminated. The birth of a Prince
of Wales meant that the Lady Mary was no longer heir to the throne. Yet he did not give up hope of overthrowing Henry and may have envisaged some sort of regency under Mary. Despite the odds, the legal murder of his brother and of his friend Exeter strengthened his determination.

As in 1537, King Henry and Cromwell took Reginald’s new mission very seriously indeed. In January the king’s envoy at Brussels, Sir Thomas Wriothesley, reported that he had heard the cardinal was losing favour with the pope and was ‘not in such esteem at Rome as he was’, implying there was nothing to worry about.
³
But by February Wriothesley – an unbalanced creature who would one day take his own life – was panicking, convinced that war between the empire and England was imminent, already imagining himself in a dungeon. ‘Mr Wriothesley, your last letters of the 25
ult, show that to fair weather is succeeded, beyond all men’s expectations, very cloudy weather,’ Cromwell wrote to him.
⁴
Two months later Wriothesley reported wildly that Pole was coming to Flanders ‘to declare that he would be a King’. He also hinted that when the cardinal arrived he would poison him.
⁵
In his fear, Wriothesley had mentioned the unmentionable – that Reginald Pole was a rival for Henry VIII’s throne. Such a thought must have been in the minds of other well-informed Englishmen. (Two other sixteenth-century cardinals were to become kings – Henry I of Portugal and ‘Charles X’ of France.)

In February 1539 Cardinal Pole arrived at Toledo. Despite the attempts of Sir Thomas Wyatt, the English envoy in Spain, to persuade Charles V not to see him, he was given an audience that lasted for an hour. He begged the emperor to help with the deposition of Henry VIII, arguing that he was a far worse threat to Christendom than the Turks.

Pole then set out his case in an
Apologia
that listed the King of England’s iniquities and his own reactions. He described in detail the martyrdom of Fisher, More and the Carthusians, the destruction of monasteries and shrines, the persecution of dead
saints. The king was now turning on the English lords, having first killed the finest of them all, his kinsmen, ‘who had no peers in nobility of blood’ – a reference to their royal ancestry. Henry had even jeopardized the succession by rejecting those nearest to him, by which Pole meant the Lady Mary. He compared Cromwell to the demoniac in the Gospel, whose devils had entered into a herd of swine.
⁶

In further letters, Reginald denounced Henry to other rulers besides the emperor. The King of England’s attacks on the Church were not only damaging his afflicted island but might easily be copied all over the entire Christian world, he warned. After killing so many priests, he was turning on the no less defenceless nobility, whom he intended to annihilate. The cardinal also complained, with reason, that Henry was plotting his own death and had assassins waiting for him in France.

On 18 March Henry VIII’s envoy in Spain, Sir Thomas Wyatt, sent him a disturbing message. Reginald had asked Charles to send 8,000 landsknechts and 4,000 Italian mercenaries to Flanders, for an invasion, expecting ‘the wounded minds in England [the Pilgrims]’ to join them.
⁷
Wyatt did not yet know that, unmoved by the cardinal’s denunciation of Henry, the emperor had declined to take any action: after promising an embargo in Flanders on imports from England, he changed his mind. Nor would he allow publication in his domains of the bull excommunicating Henry. The English king’s wily diplomacy had succeeded in turning Charles against Pole, by portraying him as a man who was trying to set a people against their ruler, someone who undermined the royal authority. It was a bitter blow for Pole, as Francis I had promised to move against Henry if Charles would do so. Avoiding Wyatt’s hitmen, he left Spain and waited in vain at Carpentras for another six months before returning to Rome.