The Last White Rose (45 page)

Another of Pole’s handicaps had been a crippling shortage of ready money so that he was unable to hire troops – the papal letters of credit proved to be either faulty or insufficient. In June the Emperor Charles gave the Conde de Cifuentes his own, realistic assessment of the cardinal’s prospects: it ‘appears to us that being, as you say, so scantily provided with funds, he can scarcely be successful in his mission’.
¹⁴

In September 1537 Cromwell at last discovered that Michael Throckmorton had been playing a double game. ‘You have bleared mine eye,’ he told him in an angry letter. ‘I must, I think, do what I can to see you condignly punished.’
¹⁵
From then on Michael went in fear for his life. During the following summer, on a day of intense heat, a visitor to Rome ran into a sweating Throckmorton, puffing and blowing in a quilted knife-proof jacket and a steel helmet that he was wearing as protection against assassins.
¹⁶

27. Spring–Summer 1537: ‘Mr Pole’s Traitorous Practises’

1
. Hall,
op. cit.
, p. 828.

2
.
CSP Ven
,
op. cit.
, vol. V, 575.

3
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit.
, vol. V (i), 131.

4
. Dodds and Dodds,
The Pilgrimage of Grace
,
op. cit.
, vol. II, p. 280.

5
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit.
, vol. XII (i), 779.

6
. Mayer,
Correspondence of Reginald Pole
,
op. cit.
, vol. 1, p. 174.

7
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit.
, vol. XII (i), 1032.

8
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit.
, vol. XIII (ii), 797.

9
. Mayer, ‘A Diet for Henry VIII’,
op. cit.
, p. 323.

10
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit.
, vol. XII (ii), 128.

11
. Mayer
, Correspondence of Reginald Pole
,
op. cit.
, vol. 1, p. 168.

12
.
Ibid
., p. 178.

13
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit.
, vol. XII (i), 809.

14
.
CSP
Sp
,
op. cit.
, vol. V (ii), 151.

15
. Merriman,
Thomas Cromwell
,
op. cit.
, vol. II, pp. 87–90.

16
. See A. Overell, ‘Cardinal Pole’s Special Agent: Michael Throckmorton, c. 1503–1558’, in
History
, 94 (July 2009), p. 315.

28

Autumn 1538: The ‘Exeter Conspiracy’

‘the lord Marquess of Exeter and the Lord Montague with a sort of their adherents of mean estate and no esti mation greatly have been commanded to the Tower … their offences be not known by light suspicion but by certain proofs and confessions.’

Thomas Cromwell, letter to Sir Thomas Wyatt, 28 November 1538
¹

Yorkism never ceased to be a threat in Henry’s mind. This is the only possible reason for his belief in the ‘Exeter Conspiracy’. Some historians argue that his decision to destroy the Poles and Courtenays had nothing to do with their White Rose blood, yet he could not forget their claims to the throne.
²
Ambassadors such as Marillac and Chapuys, who often talked to him, speak of the ‘White Rose faction’ in their reports, while Marillac says that Henry used the phrase himself. The king knew that besides disliking his religious policies, its members were urging his
daughter not to swear allegiance to the statutes that bastardized her. It was logical enough for him to fear that if Reginald led an invasion on Mary’s behalf, the White Rose lords would join him.

In July 1536, the king’s son, the Duke of Richmond, who, despite his bastardy, some thought might succeed his father on the throne, had died, probably from the tuberculosis that killed his royal grandfather. He was only seventeen. Although Henry had been very fond of the boy, instead of giving him a proper funeral he ordered the Duke of Norfolk to smuggle his body out of London in a waggonload of straw and bury it as quietly as possible in the Howards’ family vault at Thetford. The reason for this heartless behaviour must surely have been that Henry feared his subjects would attribute the boy’s death to the curse incurred by the Earl of Warwick’s murder.

But in October 1537 Queen Jane Seymour gave birth to the son and heir for whom the king had always longed, the future Edward VI, an event greeted with magnificent celebrations that were brought to a close by her death twelve days later. By now Henry was forty-five – by Tudor standards well on the way to old age. He was determined that, if the boy succeeded when still a minor, he should not disappear like the young Edward V. With its two potential pretenders, the White Rose faction was an obvious threat. ‘The King told me a long time ago that he wanted to exterminate [
exterminer
] the House of Montague that belongs to the White Rose and the Pole family of which the Cardinal is a member,’ reported the Sieur de Castillon from London towards the end of the 1530s. ‘So far, I don’t know what he means to do about the Marquess [of Exeter] … It looks as if he is searching for any possible excuse that can be found to ruin and destroy them … I think that few lords in this country can feel safe.’
³

Among England’s richest magnates, Exeter enjoyed semi-regal status throughout the West Country. In Devon his thirty-nine manors in the Exe valley formed an estate almost as large as the Duchy of Cornwall, of which he was high steward besides being lord warden of the stannaries and where he owned another
eighteen manors and castles. He had a further sixteen manors in Dorset and Hampshire. Exeter also possessed several palatial residences, the most imposing being a huge moated and castellated house at Tiverton, while his ‘inn’ at London was the Red Rose in St Lawrence Poultney, once the property of the Duke of Buckingham. When not at court, however, he preferred the seclusion of his Surrey mansion at West Horsley (later acquired by Sir Walter Raleigh), although even here his household numbered over a hundred gentlemen waiters, yeomen and grooms of the chamber, not to mention more menial servants.

The marquess had always tried to keep on the right side of Henry, serving on the commission for depriving Katherineof her rank as queen in 1533. For a time he had belonged to what formed the main faction at court, united by dislike of Thomas Cromwell, his main ally being Sir Nicholas Carew, Master of the Horse.
⁴
But when Cromwell became supreme, he spent more time in Surrey.

Links between the Courtenays and the Poles grew close, partly because of the Marchioness of Exeter’s friendship with Lady Salisbury. Yet although they were staunch Catholics who loathed Cromwell and criticized royal policies in secret, they were less a political party than a group of friends, who included Lord Montague’s brother-in-law Sir Edward Neville and, to a lesser extent, Lord de la Warr. The ‘treason’ they talked had only recently become treason under Henry’s new laws, and they did not appreciate the danger from Cromwell’s thought-police. Even so, before Reginald Pole’s challenge became an obsession with the king they had seemed safe enough. Still in favour, Exeter was granted several confiscated monasteries. Far from supporting the Pilgrimage of Grace, he and his West Country levies formed part of the Duke of Norfolk’s Army Royal.

An amiable, unambitious, calm-tempered man who was in his early forties, Lord Montague, Reginald Pole’s elder brother, had also done his best to avoid antagonizing King Henry. He had dutifully served on the commissions that tried the
Carthusians and Sir Thomas More for treason, if only in an honorary capacity, although we can guess that the whole business revolted him. (He owned copies of More’s books and enjoyed reading them.) Less unwillingly, with Exeter he was among the peers who condemned Anne Boleyn. He, too, brought a force to fight the pilgrims. Punctilious in performing his ceremonial duties as a courtier, he did so at Prince Edward’s christening in October 1537 and as a mourner at Queen Jane Seymour’s funeral in September.

After learning that King Henry had received Reginald’s insulting
De Unitate
during the summer of 1536, the Poles had grown alarmed, however, realizing that in the new, Henrician England they were only alive on sufferance. Montague wrote to Reginald in September, declaring that when Cromwell read extracts of the book to him he felt as if he had lost mother, wife and children. He accused his brother of wicked ingratitude towards a sovereign to whom he owed everything, as did his whole family. If he did not come home, he would lose his king’s good will, his country and his family. Lady Salisbury wrote, too, saying that because of his behaviour Henry had sent her ‘a terrible message’. The king had always been good to her and she expected her sons to serve him faithfully. Nothing had ever upset her as much as his anger, even the deaths of her husband or children. (She had recently lost her second son, Sir Arthur Pole.) ‘Do your duty or you will be my undoing,’ she ended.
⁵

Reginald confided in his friend Contarini that when these messages from his family arrived, they upset him so much that he very nearly gave in and went back to England.)
⁶
But then he guessed that his mother and his brother had been forced to write them in response to explicit orders from Henry which they dared not refuse. The truth was that Lady Salisbury and Lord Montague had even had to submit their letters to the King’s Council for approval, before they could be sent to Venice.

Despite their alarm, it is astonishing just how indiscreet the White Rose group allowed themselves to be. When someone
rebuked the Marquess of Exeter for accepting former abbey lands, he replied, ‘good enough for a time: they must have all again one day’, by which he seems to have meant that in his opinion the monks were undoubtedly going to get them back.‘Knaves rule about the King,’ he observed, after entertaining Cromwell at West Horsley where, in his words, he gave the Lord Privy Seal ‘a summer coat and a wood knife’. Shaking his fist, the Marquess added, ‘I trust to give them a buffet one day’.