The Last White Rose (37 page)

One of those executed, Henry Gold, a Kentish parson, had been specifically charged with secretly visiting ‘the Lady Katherine, Princess Dowager’ (the ex-queen) in order to recruit her help in replacing Henry on the throne with his daughter, the Lady Mary, who ‘should prosper and reign in this realm and have many friends to sustain and maintain her’.
¹¹
The charge contained the kernel of what became the White Rose group’s long-term plan, although wish list is perhaps a better description than plan. This was to overthrow Henry, make Mary queen and give her a husband with Yorkist blood, who would be king consort.

The scheme ignored the Marquess of Exeter’s own chances of elbowing Mary aside in the event of Henry’s death, which seemed far from distant in view of his regular bouts of ill health. Yet while there are hints that until the birth of the future Edward VI Exeter hoped he might inherit the throne, he would almost certainly have accepted a White Rose solution. On the other hand, incapable of plotting, he would do nothing to help the Lady Mary replace her father, dutifully serving the king as one of the commissioners for Queen Katherine’s formal deposition in 1533 – and, three years later, for her successor’s trial. Meanwhile, Lady Salisbury and Lady Exeter remained in secret contact with the so-called ‘princess dowager’, not daring to visit her because her household was full of spies.

22. 1525–35: The White Rose Party

1
. Shakespeare,
Henry VI
, Part 1, Act 2, Scene 4.

2
. Hall,
op. cit
., p. 703.

3
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit
., vol. III (i), 386.

4
. Leviticus 20: 21.

5
. Hall,
op. cit
., p. 782.

6
. G.W. Bernard,
The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the
Remaking of the
English Church
, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, pp. 87–101.

7
. M.H. and R. Dodds,
The Pilgrimage of Grace 1536–1537 and
the Exeter
Conspiracy
, 2 vols, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1916, vol. II, p. 181.

8
.
LP Hen VIII
, vol. XIII (ii), 961.

9
. Hall,
op. cit
., pp. 780–1.

10
.
Ibid
., pp. 808–14.

11
.
Ibid
., p. 813.

23

1533–4: Rebellion?

‘Your Majesty should try every means possible to have near you, or somewhere under your control, the son of the Princess’s Governess, the daughter of the Duke of Clarence, to whom in the opinion of many people here the realm should belong.’

Eustache Chapuys to Charles V, 27 September 1533
¹

England was shaken to the core by Henry VIII’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon, and by the questioning of spiritual certainties that resulted from the king’s religious policies. Secular traditions were questioned almost as much. Sitting in seven sessions between 1529 and 1536, the ‘Reformation Parliament’ enacted new laws that increased the crown’s powers enormously. An administrative revolution had been imposed by Henry’s chief minister Thomas Cromwell, who bribed, bullied and cajoled MPs into passing the necessary bills. Sometimes the king himself came and addressed both Houses.

Courts were set up to control England’s landowners more firmly. The Court of Wards and the Court of General Surveyors were staffed by high-handed officials, and similar courts were established for Wales and the Welsh Marches. The crown’s new intrusiveness, its meddling with day-to-day life, did not endear it to ordinary people. Men were encouraged to report disloyal comments by neighbours to the local justices of the peace, who were ordered to send denunciations to London without delay. Cromwell’s spies seemed to be listening at every keyhole.

The Henrician revolution, the creeping ‘increase in governance’, unsettled everybody – nobility, gentry and common folk. There was unease all over England. Many people began to hope that King Henry would soon be succeeded by his daughter Mary who, despite the grim reputation she later gained, enjoyed extraordinary popularity in the 1530s. However, the king had no intention of letting a girl follow him to the throne, bringing an end to the Tudor dynasty.

Among those who helped to revive the cause of the White Rose was a most unlikely Yorkist – Katherine of Aragon. A friend of Lady Salisbury and Lady Exeter, the former queen warmly encouraged the Yorkist cause. In her eyes the heir to the English throne was her daughter Mary, and she was determined to ensure her succession. No woman had ever ruled Katherine’s adopted country, but she did not see this as an obstacle: her mother and her sister had both been sovereigns. Should the king beget other children, then Mary must fight them. A consort who represented the House of York would be a vital ally in such a situation and in consequence the aims of the ‘Aragonese faction’ coincided with those of the White Rose families.

Aware that her marriage to Prince Arthur had been the cause of Warwick’s death, Katherine suffered from a guilty conscience, believing ‘Divine justice had punished the sin of her father King Ferdinand’. It was Lady Salisbury who first explained the situation to her. Years later, the countess’s son Reginald Pole wrote that the queen felt ‘very much bound to recompense
and requite us for the detriment that we had received on her account’. By ‘detriment’, he meant his uncle Warwick’s murder. With so many of her children dead in infancy, Katherine was understandably inclined to share the belief that the earl’s killing had brought a curse upon the Tudors.
²

‘You can have no conception of just how strongly people here want Your Majesty to send troops,’ Eustache Chapuys, the imperial ambassador, wrote to Charles V in the summer of 1533. A subtle cleric from Savoy in his mid-forties, an exceptionally able lawyer whose experience included presiding over legal tribunals and interrogating witnesses, and also a scholar who was yet another of Erasmus’s innumerable friends, Chapuys had been carefully selected for his post by the emperor. King Henry took a great liking to the new envoy, frequently chatting with him and never guessing during his long stay in England that he was a dedicated enemy.

Almost modern in his skills as an intelligence gatherer, Chapuys listened to opinions as widely as possible, from broad-ranging circles, knowing how to make his contacts trust him and talk freely.‘Every day I am approached … by Englishmen of distinction, education and intelligence, who inform me the late King Richard was never hated as much as is this King by his subjects,’ he reported.
³
Exceeding his instructions in a way that would have shocked the emperor had he known of it, Chapuys methodically encouraged and coordinated this hostility, creating a very dangerous situation.
⁴

Since 1531 (after being told he and his friends would be thrown in the Thames if they continued to oppose royal policy), John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester had been in close, if discreet, touch with Chapuys. Although a conservative theologian and an ascetic – he kept a skull on the altar when saying Mass – Fisher was also a keen humanist who had been taught Greek by Erasmus. He had gained an international reputation by his eloquent attacks on Martin Luther, while at the same time he was an admirer of Savonarola (whose ideas had seen a revival
during the 1520s), realizing that the Church was in urgent need of reform. Alone among English bishops, Fisher understood where Henry’s policies were heading and that nothing short of his deposition could save England from what would one day be called Protestantism. Moreover, he realized the potential strength of the White Rose–Aragonese faction.

This frail, bony-faced ascetic became one of the king’s most formidable enemies. In autumn 1533 Chapuys twice quoted him as wanting the emperor to send troops (and, by inference, depose Henry), a deed that he said would please God more than any crusade against the Turk. On the second occasion the bishop advised prompt action, assuring the ambassador that the majority of Englishmen shared his views and expected Charles V to intervene: they preferred an invasion to a trade embargo that might cause a far worse upheaval – a small seaborne force should be enough to topple King Henry. ‘Innumerable people from all walks of life keep on telling me this, to such an extent that they are almost deafening me,’ added Chapuys.
⁵

Chapuys also advised Charles to have Reginald Pole at his court, or somewhere else under his control, as so many people in England saw him as the rightful successor to the throne. The ambassador emphasized that the young man and his brothers had many relatives and allies among the English nobility, besides a large party of supporters – which surely meant Yorkist sympathizers. Among the allies was the Marquess of Exeter, who begged Chapuys to ask the emperor to come and rescue the country from Henry.

The ambassador also named as a potential ally Lord Bergavenny (Edmund de la Pole’s old friend) whom he had recently met at court.

One of the most powerful, wise and prudent lords of England, [he] is ill-pleased with the King because he detained him so long in prison with the Duke of Buckingham, his father-in-law, who left therin his person, while Bergavenny left his feathers – that is to say, a great part of his revenue, which he will be glad to get back again by any means and revenge himself.

Chapuys grumbled that they had been unable to talk properly because Cromwell had walked as close behind them as possible, trying to overhear their conversation.
⁶

Chapuys explained that Katherine of Aragon wanted Reginald to marry Mary, because of his Yorkist descent. Although she expressed surprising affection for Henry on her deathbed (she went on making his shirts to the end), Katherine was convinced he ought to be deposed. Whatever happened, she wanted her daughter to succeed him. She was a little worried about cutting out Exeter as he was the next male heir to Edward IV after Henry, but the ambassador cited the bastardization of King Edward’s children in 1483 by Bishop Stillington, acting on behalf of Richard of Gloucester. Again and again, Chapuys stressed Reginald’s right to the throne.
⁷
Whether or not the ambassador was familiar with the saga of the White Rose under the Tudors, it certainly appears that he had talked to a canon lawyer with Yorkist sympathies.

The Lady Mary was of course crucial. Only seventeen in 1533, yet highly educated, even erudite, and already with a political sense, she knew that her father’s divorce meant the loss of her inheritance. Even so, many saw her as their next ruler. Very different in aspect from the sour, pinched figure of later years, she was an attractive girl, possessing some of her father’s Yorkist good looks, with strong features – apart from a snub nose – and red-gold hair, and something of her mother’s warmth and dignity. We know from her household’s accounts for this year that her guests included Reginald’s brothers Lord Montague and Sir Geoffrey Pole, the Earls of Oxford and Essex, and Lord Sandys, all men who disliked Henry’s policies. Among women visitors were Lady Bergavenny, the Countess of Derby and Lady Kingston, whose husbands held similar opinions.
⁸
No doubt
Mary was surrounded by Cromwell’s spies, and careful not to discuss her future in public.