The Last White Rose (49 page)

In April Reginald wrote an impassioned letter that was addressed to the Imperial Chancelllor Granvelle but was meant for Charles. ‘God is my witness that once I loved and revered
Henry,’ he said. ‘But no good can be expected from him or his island while he stays King.’ Knowing how deeply Pole loved his family, Henry had cunningly tried to use them as tools to bring him round to his way of thinking, making them write letters that accused him of betraying his king. His brother Montague’s death was a call from God to fight for His cause more effectively; by killing Montague, Henry had taken away the person he loved best in the world apart from his mother.

If they did not choose me, then every decent man in England would choose some one else from my family to ask the Emperor for help because no family has endured more for his kindred … his aunt [Queen Katherine] used to say that all the trouble dated from the time when she heard that my mother was no longer the Princess’s governess. She had been so anxious for my mother to become the child’s governess that she had gone to visit her with the King, in order to persuade her to take the post. The Queen’s physician, who is now at the Imperial court, can testify to this. My family suffered a very great deal for her … and the Queen often declared how deeply she was obliged to us. I am saying all this to demonstrate just how much our island deserves [the Emperor’s] help when it is asked for by the English family best qualified to do so.
⁸

But it was in vain. Charles had made up his mind not to intervene in English affairs.

Just how frightened of an invasion Henry had been was revealed by the great ‘muster’ in the city of London on 8 May, which took place after the scare was over but it was too late to cancel. Most able-bodied male Londoners between sixteen and sixty took part, 15,000 marching to Westminster where the king reviewed them from his new gatehouse at Whitehall and the more skilled demonstrated their aptitude as archers or arquebusiers. Similar musters took place all over the country.
Making ‘very laborious and painful journeys towards the sea coasts’,
⁹
Henry had also visited all the major ports to inspect defence works.

His relief was evident in his noticeably relaxed behaviour a week after the muster. ‘This present Holy Thursday eve the King took his barge at Whitehall and rowed up to Lambeth,’ wrote John Worth to Lord Lisle at Calais. ‘He had his drums and fifes playing, and rowed up and down the Thames for an hour after evensong.’ The same writer notes Henry’s edifying care for his subjects’ morals and spiritual life, now that he was free from worry:

The recorder of London’s servant Ball showed me that last week there was one hanged for eating flesh on a Friday against the King’s command … It is said there is another Act passed that if any priest or married man be taken with another man’s wife he shall suffer death. God save the King. His Grace receives holy bread and holy water every Sunday, and daily uses all other laudable ceremonies. In all London no man dare speak against them on pain of death.
¹⁰

The cardinal’s defeat was neatly underlined by the inclusion of ‘Reynold Pole, late dean of the cathedral church of Exeter’ in the Bill of Attander that was enacted in May, which conveniently lumped together the leaders of the Pilgrimage with those of the so-called ‘Exeter Conspiracy’. His own official crime was to ‘have taken and pursued worldly promotions in the gift of the … Bishop of Rome’.
¹¹
In July Pole was still hoping for the Earl of Kildare to start a rising in Ireland, but nothing came of it. His second mission had ended in utter failure.

Henry’s obsessive hatred of Reginald as one of those pretenders to his throne whom he had feared ever since childhood had been particularly evident during the first half of 1539. In a letter of 13 February, clearly written in a towering rage, Henry had ordered Sir Thomas Wyatt to tell Charles V that the cardinal
was ‘so lewd and ingrate that no prince should esteem him worthy to be spoken with … his words (such traitors being commonly hypocrites) may be fair and pleasant; but howsoever the head be coloured the tail thereof is always black and full of poison’. Revealingly, Wyatt was also ordered to say that the king had raised Pole’s entire family ‘from nothing’.
¹²
Their Plantagenet mother’s origins could scarcely be described as ‘nothing’, and it was the kind of abuse to be expected from an insecure parvenu rather than a great monarch.

Sir Thomas told everyone at Toledo who would listen to him that if Henry gave him 10,000 gold crowns and publicly proclaimed Pole a traitor, then he would wager his entire estate at home in England that he could easily arrange for the man to be killed within six months. He suggested that Rome was the best place to do the job. But this was just a piece of calculated sycophancy on the part of Wyatt, who was merely trying to please the king. He must have known all too well that plenty of other Englishmen had tried and failed to assassinate the cardinal.

Henry VIII was justified in fearing Reginald Pole. In the eyes of many Englishmen, he stood not only for the old religion and for the old nobility, but also for the old royal family. When the
Book of Common Prayer
was introduced in 1549 the West Country rose in their own Pilgrimage of Grace, carrying the banner of the Five Wounds and calling for the return of the Mass, as the new service ‘is but like a Christmas game’. Among demands made by the rebels was that ‘because the lord Cardinal Pole is of the King’s blood [he] should not only have his free pardon, but also sent for to Rome and promoted to be first or second of the King’s Council’.
¹³

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

1
. LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit.
, vol. XIV (i), 456.

2
. Hall,
op. cit.
, p. 823.

3
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit.
, vol. XIV (i), 114.

4
.
Ibid.
, 405.

5
.
Ibid.
, 456.

6
.
Ibid.
, 200.

7
.
Ibid.
, 560.

8
. Mayer,
Correspondence of Reginald Pole
,
op. cit.
, vol. 1, p. 222.

9
. Hall,
op. cit.
, pp. 828–9.

10
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit.
, vol. XIV (i), 967.

11
. Mayer,
Correspondence of Reginald Pole
,
op. cit.
, vol. 1, p. 228.

12
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit.
, vol. XIV (i), 280.

13
. Transcript from Lambeth Palace Library, in Fletcher and MacCulloch,
Tudor Rebellions
, p. 141.

30

May 1541: The Death of the Last Plantagenet

‘The old lady being brought to the scaffold set up in the Tower, was commanded to lay her head upon the block, but … refused, saying “So should traitors do, and I am none.” Neither did it serve that the executioner told her it was the fashion; so turning her greay head in every way, shee bid him, “If he would have her head, to get it as he could.” So that he was constrained to fetch it off slovenly.’

Lord Herbert of Cherbury, The Life and Reigne of King Henry VIII
¹

Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, the Earl of Warwick’s sister, had lived through all the conspiracies against the Tudors, from Lord Lovell’s rising in the year after Bosworth to the Pilgrimage of Grace and her son’s ‘missions’. Her life binds together the whole tragic story of the White Rose in decline, until its final
extermination. Although Henry VIII had at first admired this stately lady, in the end he decided to kill her. He did so not merely because he wanted to revenge himself on Reginald Pole, but because she was the last Plantagenet – a living reproach to the Tudor dynasty.

She had been born in 1473. Her mother, a daughter of Warwick the Kingmaker, died when she was four, while her father George, Duke of Clarence, was murdered in 1478 for plotting against his brother Edward IV. (According to rumour, he was drowned in a butt of Malmsey and for the rest of her life his daughter wore a tiny wine keg on her bracelet.) Brought up with King Edward’s family, she and her brother the Earl of Warwick spent most of Richard III’s brief reign at Sheriff Hutton Castle in Yorkshire.

Judging, as far as one can, from a clumsy portrait of her painted in later life (now in the National Portrait Gallery), Margaret Plantagenet inherited the good looks of the House of York, but after her world turned upside down at Bosworth, she was lucky not to disappear into the Tower or a nunnery. What made the little girl’s very existence peculiarly dangerous for the new dynasty was her claim to the throne. Unlike Elizabeth of York, she had never been bastardized by Parliament. However, Henry VII’s mother found a safe husband for her. This was a cousin of the Tudor king called Richard Pole, one of his most reliable henchmen, a country gentleman who, although he came from Buckinghamshire, was of Welsh origin. He had been knighted for his services at Stoke Field.
²

At the time of her wedding in either 1486 or 1487, she was about fourteen and her husband in his late twenties. Admittedly, the match was inferior to one with the great magnate to whom her hand would have been given had her uncle Richard stayed on the throne, justifying Warbeck’s charge that Henry Tudor married ladies of the blood royal to ‘certain of his kinsmen and friends of simple and low degree’. Yet it was better than disappearing into a convent, and the pair seem to have been happy
enough: we know from one of her letters that she mourned Richard Pole when he died. They had five children who survived infancy, four sons and a daughter.

The years of their marriage were overcast in turn by the supposed return of the ‘Duke of York’ from the dead, her brother Warwick’s alleged plot and unjust execution, and the threat by her cousin Edmund de la Pole. None of these endangered Margaret, however, because of her husband’s commitment to the new dynasty. During the middle years of Henry VII’s reign she often visited court, since not only did Richard Pole hold important offices (such as Prince Arthur’s Lord Chamberlain, President of the Prince’s Council in Wales and Controller of the Port of Bristol), but also he became Chief Gentleman of the Bedchamber. In 1499 he was made a Knight of the Garter. Margaret herself became one of Katherine of Aragon’s ladies-in-waiting as soon as she arrived from Spain.