The Last White Rose (51 page)

Undoubtedly, there was some sort of plot to rescue Margaret from the Tower. In an undated letter to a French bishop, written some time during 1540, Reginald refers to what had been planned ‘for my mother’s release’ and to a friend of his who was the brains behind the scheme, but who had been put in prison as a result of pressure by the English authorities, although he had since been set free.
¹⁰
It has been suggested the ‘friend’ was Sweetlips Botolph of the Calais Plot, but the identification is far from certain.
¹¹
If it was Botolph, then the plan can never have had much chance of success.

In 1540 the sores – the infection had spread – on Henry VIII’s leg were causing him even more acute pain, unbalancing his mind still further. His monstrous obesity (we know from his armour that by now he measured a good four and a half feet around the waist and nearly five round the chest) cannot have
helped either his mental equilibrium or his temper. He became more suspicious than ever, arresting the servile Bishop Sampson of Chichester for supposedly writing in secret to the pope. Early in 1541 Sir Thomas Wyatt, who was liked by everybody, and Sir John Wallop went to the Tower of London on baseless charges of corresponding with ‘the King’s traitor Pole’, regardless of the former having done his best to arrange for Pole’s murder in 1539. (Both were pardoned at the intercession of Queen Katherine Howard, Wyatt on condition that he returned to his unfaithful wife.) The king also ordered the arrest of the Gentleman Porter at Calais, Sir John Palmer, another loyal servant who was innocent of any wrong doing.

When interrogated by Cromwell, Lord Darcy had told him that he hoped ‘shall there one head remain that shall strike off thy head’, and in June 1540 the Lord Privy Seal, only recently created Earl of Essex, was arrested at the council table by an exultant Duke of Norfolk. Despite his frantic pleas – ‘Most gracious Prince, I cry for Mercy! Mercy! Mercy!’ – he was beheaded on Tower Hill on 28 July. After his death, the French ambassador Marillac heard that the king was calling him ‘the most faithful servant he had ever known’, which seemed to imply that he had been a victim of slander, executed in error. There were rumours that he was punished for the fiasco of his master’s marriage to Anne of Cleves, the ‘Flanders Mare’. Yet it was undoubtedly Henry who brought him down, deciding that in secret Cromwell was ‘a miserable heretic sacramentary’, to use his minister’s own phrase.
¹²
Cranmer had tried to save him, writing to the king of the Lord Privy Seal’s loyalty, diligence, wisdom and experience. But Henry believed the man had outlived his usefulness.

In April 1541 a conspiracy came to light in the West Riding of Yorkshire, an attempt by a dozen wealthy gentlemen in the Wakefield area, headed by a Mr Leigh, together with several parsons, to revive the Pilgrimage of Grace. They planned to seize and kill the evangelical Archbishop of York, Robert Holgate, who was President of the Council of the North, and then call in
the King of Scots: until he arrived, they hoped to use Pontefract Castle as a base for raising supporters in a revolt against Henry’s ‘bad government and tyranny’.
¹³
However, the rising was nipped in the bud. Chapuys, who says the plot was provoked by the reprisals of 1537, believed that had it got off the ground it would have been even more dangerous than the Pilgrimage – this time the Northerners had no illusions about Henry. About 50 people were involved, of whom 25 were captured. Fifteen were put to death, and Sir John Neville of Chevet (often mistakenly described as the brains behind the plot) was executed on a charge of ‘misprision’, that is, failing to report the plot soon enough.

It seemed that the Northerners’ spirit had finally been broken. In 1541, planning to meet James V and ensure Scotland’s neutrality in the event of an invasion from Flanders or France, King Henry at last summoned up the courage to visit the North Country, and before setting out he made a clean sweep of the state prisoners in the Tower. Those involved in the recent rising were going to die in any case.

A sudden impulse made him decide to include Margaret, Countess of Salisbury. Early, either on 27 or 28 May, she was woken and told without explanation that she was to die that morning. The execution took place at 7 a.m. ‘When informed of her sentence, she found it very strange, not knowing her crime, but she walked to a place in front of the Tower where there was no scaffold but only a small block,’ reports Chapuys. ‘She there commended her soul to God and desired those present to pray for the King, Queen, Prince and Princess.’ In particular, she sent her blessing to the Lady Mary, before being told to stop talking and lay her head on the block. The ordinary executioner being absent on professional business in the North, according to Chapuys, ‘a blundering youth [g
arçonneau
] was chosen, who hacked her head and shoulders almost to pieces’.
¹⁴

But the ambassador was not present. A seventeenth-century source says the old lady refused to kneel and tottered round, screaming, ‘So shall all traitors die and I am none!’, before being
caught and held down on the block.
¹⁵
The countess was buried beneath the floor of the chancel of the chapel at the Tower of London, St Peter ad Vincula, where her skeleton – and skull – were discovered during a nineteenth-century restoration. With characteristic pettiness, the king sent commissioners down to Christchurch Priory to deface the heraldic devices on the painted roof bosses of her chantry chapel’s ceiling, which presumably included her royal arms. One wonders whether there were white roses among them.

In his despatch, Chapuys gives the Countess of Salisbury a fitting epitaph. ‘God in his high grace pardon her soul, for certainly she was a most virtuous and honourable lady.’
¹⁶
He adds that she and her son were killed because of their Yorkist blood, the ‘last of the White Rose faction’, while even Hall goes so far as to say, ‘and she was the last of the right line and name of Plantagenet’.
¹⁷
The ultimate descendant of the longest reigning, most illustrious dynasty in English history, she was worthy of her royal forebears. Yet she died not only for her ancestry but also for her loyalty to the old religion, which the Catholic Church recognized in 1876 by beatifying her as a martyr.

The king’s behaviour towards Margaret Plantagenet revealed his abiding fear of the White Rose. In contrast, although it was clear that she really had plotted against him, Lady Exeter was released and given a pension; spared because she did not have Yorkist blood in her veins. Henry was even frightened of Margaret’s little grandson. Chapuys reported that after Margaret’s death young Henry Pole, who until then ‘had occasionally permission to go about within the precincts of the Tower was placed in close confinement, and it is to be supposed that he will soon follow his father and grandmother’. The ambassador adds, ‘God help him!’
No payments for the boy’s meagre diet are recorded after late 1542. How he died remains a mystery.

Marillac was convinced that the countess had been executed without warning and with such little publicity, ‘in a corner of
the Tower’, because of fears that her killing might cause widespread outrage. Older people must surely have recalled the Earl of Warwick’s murder and his curse. But Henry VIII was wrong if he thought he had exorcised the curse by killing Warwick’s sister. His son would die at fifteen and his two daughters would both be childless.

30. May 1541: The Death of the Last Plantagenet

1
. Lord Herbert of Cherbury,
The Life and Reigne of King Henry
VIII
, London, 1649, p. 648.

2
. H. Pierce,
Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury 1473–1541
, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2003, p. 14.

3
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit.
, vol. VI, 1126.

4
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit.
, vol. XIII (ii), 855.

5
.
Ibid.
, 818.

6
. Pierce,
Margaret Pole
, p. 171.

7
. St Clare Byrne,
Lisle Letters
, vol. 5, no. 1419.

8
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit.
, vol. XIV (ii), 212.

9
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit.
, vol. XVI, 1011.

10
.
Ibid.
, 403.

11
. Pierce,
Margaret Pole
, p. 176.

12
. Bernard,
The King’s Reformation
,
op. cit.
, p. 574.

13
.
CSP Sp
,
op. cit.
, vol. VI (i), 158. For a detailed account, A.G. Dickens, ‘Sedition and conspiracy in Yorkshire during the latter years of Henry VIII in
Reformation Studies
, London, Hambledon Press, 1982, p. 5–20.

14
.
Ibid.,
166.

15
.
The Life and Reigne of King Henry VIII
, p.648;
CSP Sp
, vol. VI (i), p. 332.

16
. Hall,
op. cit.
, p. 842.

17
.
CSP Sp
,
op. cit.
, vol. VI (i), 166.

31

Winter 1546–7: Henry VIII’s Final Phobia

‘I saw a royal throne whereas that Justice should have sit; Instead of whom I saw, with fierce and cruel mode, Where Wrong was set, that bloody beast, that drank the guiltless blood.’

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey: Poems
¹

Even before the White Rose families’ extermination, any threat they might have been to Henry VIII had ended for good when Emperor Charles V declined to give military support to Reginald Pole’s ‘missions’. No doubt the cardinal might still be alive in Italy, but he had ceased to be a danger. Even so, not content with having rooted out the very last remnants of the White Rose in England, the king tried to root it out abroad as well.

Two suspicious-looking Englishmen, who were arrested when Reginald was staying at Capranica in 1541, confessed that they had been sent to kill him. Luckily for them, he was the legate for Bologna (papal governor) and they came before
him for trial, escaping with only a short spell on the galleys. There were other attempts on Reginald’s life, all of which were unsuccessful. Yet King Henry’s assassins did not always fail. In 1546 Cardinal Beaton was brutally murdered in his castle at St Andrews by a pair of Scotsmen in English pay, each rewarded with
£
50. Pole led a charmed life.