The Last White Rose (46 page)

He and his friends were given daily reminders of Henry’s policies. Scores of religious houses, some of which contained their ancestors’ tombs or were places where they had been accustomed to worship, were being demolished, often blown up with gunpowder and used as quarries. The country swarmed with beggars once fed by such houses, joined by starving monks and nuns (whose minuscule pensions went unpaid), together with their former servants and labourers.

Shrines were destroyed, pilgrims vanishing from the roads.Hallowed feastdays, celebrated since time immemorial, were arbitarily removed from the calendar. If Mass was still said in parish churches, the pope (that ‘cankered and cruel serpent, the Bishop of Rome’) was regularly abused from the pulpit. A new Court of Augmentations managed the plundered lands of the abbeys, while the Court of First Fruits and Tenths exploited the revenues of the Church.

Worse than all this were the new ideas about religion coming from Germany. No doubt, for some people, they induced an exhilarating certainty that faith in Christ was by itself enough to gain eternal life. But for others such a belief was a fiendish delusion that would drag men and women down to hell – the view of the White Rose group. They thought that the bishops recently appointed by the king were agents of the Devil.

Yet it was impossible to oppose Henry without an armedrising, as he was not a tyrant in the legal sense: ‘Where a Borgia used poison, a Tudor used the law’.
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During the Wars of the Roses both sides had employed Bills of Attainder against opponents
but never as a means of stifling opposition to peacetime policies. (Nor had they executed a single woman.) But in these days people risked the scaffold if they voiced any resentment. In 1538 the Benedictine prior of Lenton in Nottinghamshire, realizing that his house would be dissolved, was reported as saying of King Henry, ‘The Devil is in him, for he is past grace: he will never amend in this world. I warrant him to have as shameful a death as ever King had in England. A vengeance on him.’ Within a few weeks of the report reaching the authorities the prior was hanged, drawn and quartered.
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As time went on, Lord Montague grew even blunter than the Marquess of Exeter in expressing his disgust at the new England being created by Henry, declaring that the ‘King and his whole issue stand accursed’. (He did not mean Mary but Henry’s short-lived sons – a reference to Warwick’s curse.) Another of Montague’s comments was: ‘The King gloried with the title to be Supreme Head next to God, yet he had a sore leg that no poor man would be glad of, and that he should not live long for all his authority next God’s.’ When Sir Geoffrey received a court post, Montague fell out with him, saying that ever since he had been a boy he had disliked King Henry and that he was quite sure His Grace would end up by going mad.
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But in October 1537 Geoffrey Pole was forbidden to come to court. (It was on the same day as the christening of Prince Edward, who, ironically enough, was carried by the Marchioness of Exeter throughout the ceremony.) Perhaps someone had reported Geoffrey shouting ‘By God’s blood’ on hearing that Peter Mewtas had planned to kill Reginald, and accused him of declaring that he would have stuck his dagger into the man even had Mewtas been standing next to the king. ‘Geoffrey, God loveth us well that will not suffer us to come amongst them, for none rule about the court but knaves,’ Montague told him when he came home.

We know from Geoffrey that there were moments when his brother’s thoughts turned to armed rebellion, even if it was only
day dreaming. On one occasion Montague said he would rather live in the West Country than Hampshire, as the Marquess of Exeter possessed such a big following in the West, and that he regretted the death of his father-in-law Lord Bergavenny because he could easily have raised ten thousand men.
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Lord Montague’s servants echoed his opinions, in hoping that ‘My Lady Mary and the Cardinal Pole would marry’. Clearly, they knew the White Rose programme. One of them promised that he would shoot anyone who killed Reginald; when he confessed this to the family chaplain, John Collins, he received a blessing instead of a reprimand.

The most outspoken member of the White Rose circle was Sir Edward Neville, once a favourite companion in the tilting yard of the king, whom he had come to loathe. Montague’s brother-in-law and one of Exeter’s closest friends, Neville sang songs in the gardens at West Horsley, adding words aimed at Cromwell, such as: ‘knaves should be put down and lords should reign one day’. Sensing his dislike, Henry ordered Neville to keep away from Exeter, although only later did he learn that Sir Edward had several times observed, ‘His Highness was a beast and worse than a beast’.
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Neville detested Henry’s courtiers as much as their master. ‘God’s blood, I am made a fool among them, but I laugh and make merry to pass the time,’ he grumbled to Sir Geoffrey when they happened to be at court together at Westminster. ‘The King keepeth a sort of knaves here that we dare neither look nor speak. And if I were able to live, I would rather live any life in the world [than] tarry in the Privy Chamber.’
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It is surprising that any Pole or Courtenay, let alone Neville, dared to stay a moment longer in Henrician England when they were in such obvious danger. Reginald could have given them refuge. Yet it meant leaving behind rank and position, beautiful mansions and estates. (Even Sir Geoffrey, a younger son, had married an heiress and owned a fine ‘L’-shaped house at Lordington in Sussex, beneath the Downs.) The prospect of penniless exile was scarcely an alluring one. Nevertheless, Lord
Montague thought of taking refuge with the cardinal in Rome at least once, remarking, ‘The King to be revenged of Reynold, I fear, will kill us all’.

Sir Geoffrey was the only member of the White Rose faction who ever seriously planned to leave the country. Although he was heavily in debt, his motives had more to do with fear of the king than moneylenders. Nervous and overstrung, he had grown terrified. Several times he asked the sea captain Hugh Holland (who brought his warning to Reginald) to take him over to Flanders, but Hugh refused, not wanting to risk being accused of aiding and betting the flight of someone who might be proclaimed a traitor. Eventually, he went to see a family friend, old Dr Croftes, the Chancellor of Chichester Cathedral, who had taken the Oath of Supremacy with the utmost reluctance and had himself thought of emigrating. He lent Geoffrey twenty gold nobles when he told him he wanted to go abroad because he feared for his life.

But next day he received a letter from Dr Croftes, saying that Our Lady had appeared to him in a dream during the night, and had warned that if Sir Geoffrey should leave England his departure would ruin the entire Pole family. So Geoffrey decided to stay, paying back the twenty nobles. Croftes then went to Lord Montague’s steward, telling him that his master’s brother was in severe financial trouble and Montague paid off Geoffrey’s debts. Plainly on close terms with Sir Geoffrey, Dr Croftes lent him a book. It was Thomas More’s
History of King Richard the Third
; perhaps Croftes had chosen it as a study in tyranny that suited the times. It may be significant that another copy was found in Lord Exeter’s possession.

Among the Poles’ clerical friends was John Helyar, rector of East Meon and the vicar of Warblington in Hampshire. Lady Salisbury’s chaplain at Warblington Castle and an Oxford educated theologian, he violently disapproved of the king’s religious policies, and in the summer of 1535 (before the cardinal’s first mission) had asked Sir Geoffrey to persuade Hugh Holland to
take him over to France, a trip that had duly taken place. Helyar claimed that he wanted to study at the University of Paris, but there were rumours that he had fled after ‘traitorous words’. Joining the cardinal at Rome, he was given a job running the city’s English Hospice. He kept in touch with the Poles, corresponding with Geoffrey. English agents in Rome quickly identified Helyar as a sworn enemy of the Henrician regime.
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‘Pity it is that the folly of one brainsick Pole or, to say better, of one witless fool should be the ruin of so great a family,’ commented Thomas Cromwell ominously in his angry letter to Michael Throckmorton of late 1537. Admittedly, on another occasion the Lord Privy Seal had reported to his master that the Poles ‘had offended little save that he [Reginald] is of their kin’. Yet Cromwell realized that it was now in his power to destroy the White Rose party because the king had come to regard them as a threat. For a time, however, his spies had difficulty in obtaining any evidence. He sent his nephew to ask Exeter to be ‘frank and open in certain things’, tacitly offering a pardon if he would provide information to convict the Pole brothers, but the marquess contemptuously declined. Then, almost by accident, the Lord Privy Seal found a way.

Early in 1538 a failed schoolmaster from Grantham called Gervaise Tyndale arrived at Warblington, saying that he had come to recuperate at ‘the surgeon house’, which was the little village hospital maintained by Lady Salisbury. In reality he was one of Cromwell’s spies, sent to ferret out evidence. A declared Reformer, shouting his hatred of popery from the rooftops, he found an ideal source of information in the doctor who ran the hospital, Richard Eyre, another Evangelical. Eyre told him that the countess not only dismissed servants who inclined to the New Learning, but that she forbade her tenants to read the New Testament in English. Eyre also confided that besides taking messages to Helyar, his neighbour Hugh Holland ‘conveyeth letters to Master Pole the Cardinal, and all the secrets of the realm of England is known to the Bishop of Rome’. When
Tyndale quarrelled with every priest for miles around, so much angry gossip ensued that Sir Geoffrey went to see Cromwell. He admitted that he had corresponded with Helyar, but only to give him news of the village, and for a while this defused the situation.

The catalyst in what happened next was the king’s illness in May 1538, when a floating thrombosis lodged in his lung. For nearly a fortnight it looked as if his death was imminent. Courtiers asked each other who would take his place on the throne – the baby Prince Edward or the Lady Mary. As soon as the king recovered, the Lord Privy Seal no doubt reported these discussions, making Henry more prone than ever to suspicion of plots against him. By now Cromwell’s agents must have learned about the White Rose dream of Mary becoming queen with Reginald Pole as king consort.

At about the same time, in May or June, Tyndale and Eyre sent Cromwell a denunciation of the popish regime at Warblington Castle. While it told him nothing he did not know already, he was very interested in an allegation that Hugh Holland had acted as courier between the Poles and the cardinal. The seaman was swiftly arrested, at Bockmer. As he was being taken away to London, hands bound behind him and feet tied beneath his horse’s belly, he met Geoffrey Pole on the road, arriving from Sussex. Holland prophesied that Geoffrey would soonfollow him.

Phlegmatic as ever, Lord Montague did not appear particularly worried, commenting that he always burned his correspondence. Panic stricken, Geoffrey, who did not, gave Montague’s chaplain John Collins his signet ring, sending him to Lordington with instructions to burn his own letters.

Under interrogation that may have included torture (at the Tower the rack was used on stubborn witnesseses) Holland implicated Sir Geoffrey up to the hilt. He only testified that besides organizing Helyar’s flight abroad Geoffrey had kept in touch with Reginald, but repeated his messages by word of mouth,
such as the warnings about assassins. ‘Show him the world in England waxeth all crooked, God’s law is turned upside down, abbeys and churches overthrown, and he is taken for a traitor,’ had been another warning. ‘And I think they will cast down parish churches and all at the last.’
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Geoffrey Pole was arrested without any warning on 29 August 1538. He was kept in a damp and filthy cell at the Tower for two months, his examination deliberately postponed until 26 October so that he could be demoralized by loneliness and darkness, dirt, hunger and vermin. Interrogated seven times, he was asked fifty-nine questions and threatened with the rack, and then offered a pardon if he would cooperate – which of course meant betraying his brother and Exeter. The man who relentlessly asked question after question was William, Earl of Southampton, who had been ordered by the king to extract the right answers. A portrait drawing of Southampton in the Royal Collection shows a face that is noticeably brutal even by Tudor standards.

After his first interrogation, Geoffrey tried to commitsuicide in his cell, stabbing himself in the chest with a knife, but failed. ‘Sir Geoffrey Pole was examined in the Tower by my lord Admiral [Southampton],’ wrote John Husee to Lord Lisle on 28 October. ‘They say that he was so in despair that he would have murdered himself and has hurt himself sore.’
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His wife, Dame Constance, was also questioned. Taken to the Tower for interrogation, she was allowed to see her husband, Afterwards she wrote to Montague, warning him that his brother was on the verge of a complete collapse and that he might blurt out something so dangerous that it might destroy the entire Pole family.

Probably Geoffrey knew what had been done in May that year to Friar John Forrest, a Franciscan who denied the royal supremacy. (Once Katherine of Aragon’s chaplain, he was well known to the White Rose party.) According to the gloating Hall, Forrest ‘was hanged in chains by the middle and armholes all quick [alive] and under the gallows was made a fire’.
A wooden statue of a saint was put on top of the faggots. ‘This friar when he saw the fire come and that present death was at hand, caught hold upon the ladder, which he would not let go.’ Adding the statue to the fire was a nice example of Henry’s sense of humour.
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