The Last White Rose (50 page)

After Sir Richard died in 1504 she spent the next few years away from Bockmer, their pleasant home amid the Buckinghamshire woodlands, and lived with the nuns of Syon Abbey, although without taking vows. (In the harsh fashion of the day her children were attached to the households of various noble families.) However, she emerged when Henry VIII came to the throne. After he handed back her Neville mother’s lands in 1513 she became one of the five biggest landowners in England, with large estates in seventeen counties, notably in Hampshire and Essex as well as throughout the West Country. A dozen stewards were required to administer them. How high a place she occupied in the royal favour is shown by her investiture as Countess of Salisbury, and at the time the only English peeress in her own right.

She also acquired several fine country houses, notably Clavering Castle in Essex and Bisham Manor by the Thames in Berkshire, next to the priory, together with a London ‘inn’, Le Herber, which was a palatial mansion that stood on the site of today’s Cannon Street Station. Her favourite, all but regal, residence, however, was the great castellated house of red brick,
surrounded by a deep moat, that she built at Warblington in east Hampshire, on the Sussex border near Havant and not far from the sea. Destroyed in the Civil War, only one side of a gatehouse turret and a few other fragments survive, next to a farm, but she would still recognize Warblington church nearby (from where Dr Helyar fled abroad).

Save for Queen Katherine, no woman in the kingdom lived with more splendour than the Countess of Salisbury. Her Planatagenet arms (with the lions of England and lilies of France) were carved on the stonework and over the gateways, painted on the glass of the larger rooms’ windows, embroidered on the hangings in the dining chamber and on the testers over the beds. Numerous tall ‘standing cupboards’ were laden with plate of gold, silver gilt and silver, together with vessels of Venetian glass. Her household included seventy-three indoor servants, among whom were a steward, a comptroller, a clerk of the kitchen, a marshal of the hall, an usher of the hall, six gentlemen waiters and even a fool.

One of her lesser houses was a castle in south-west Hampshire (now in Dorset), opposite the Isle of Wight and near the Augustinian priory of Christchurch. In the great church here she built a resting place for herself and her husband that they were never to occupy. Implausibly ascribed to Pietro Torrigiano (who designed Henry VII’s tomb at Westminster Abbey) and completed in 1529, the Salisbury chantry with its fan tracery ceiling still stands in the north aisle. The last of the Plantagenets could have left no more regal a monument than this lovely little chapel.

For a long time Margaret, whom Henry VIII, in his own words, ‘loved and honoured as [he did] his own grandame’, was deeply respected at court. She became Queen Katherine’s valued friend and a much-loved governess to the Lady Mary, almost a second mother. She ran the princess’s household with amiable efficiency, her commands to the child invariably beginning with the gentle words, ‘Madam, your mother would wish’. These years from 1516 to 1521 were probably among the happiest of
her life. Yet the king’s comparison with his grandmother was unfortunate, as he may have realized later. His father’s claim to the throne came from Margaret Beaufort’s remote kinship with the House of Lancaster, but there was nothing remote in any way about Lady Salisbury’s descent from the House of York.

The Poles prospered. Henry VIII not only created her eldest son a peer but made her second son Arthur an Esquire of the Body and then, still more flattering, a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, which implies that the king enjoyed his company and regarded him as a close friend. Talented, witty, a natural courtier and a hero in the tournament, Arthur was knighted, together with her youngest, least gifted, son Geoffrey. Neither had ever performed any outstanding services so the accolades were an expression of the king’s respect for their mother. As we know, Reginald had equal reason to be grateful to royal favour. Her children’s rise in the world seemed complete when her daughter Ursula married Lord Stafford, who was the Duke of Buckingham’s heir and the greatest catch in England.

But at the duke’s fall in 1521 Lady Salisbury lost favour with Henry, because after Ursula’s marriage the Staffords and the Poles had grown too friendly for his liking. As has been seen, even Arthur was banished from court, suspected of involvement in the Duke of Buckingham’s mythical plot, and when the king and queen left Windsor that summer, Margaret was forbidden to accompany Mary, losing her post as governess and told to keep away from court. In 1525 she was reinstated, however, while the following year Henry visited her house at Warblington. Nothing further disturbed her good relations with him until he divorced Queen Katherine.

Sometimes Margaret could be ruthless in family matters. Sir Arthur had married a rich heiress, Jane Lewkenor from Bodiam Castle in Sussex, and when he died around 1527–8, probably from the sweating sickness, without leaving sons, Margaret made his widow take a vow of chastity so that her fortune would be inherited by his daughters. (But she did not force her to enter
a convent, as sometimes stated.) Twelve years later, when her mother-in-law was in no position to object, Jane asked Bishop Barlow of St Asaph for help. A keen enthusiast for the New Learning, who had no sympathy for vows of chastity, Barlow freed her from any commitment and she quickly found a new husband.

Henry’s attitude towards Margaret did not alter noticeably when he decided to divorce the queen, and she was allowed to remain as the Lady Mary’s governess. But everything changed as soon as he married Anne Boleyn in 1533. When he sent a lady to demand the surrender of Mary’s jewels and plate, Margaret indignantly refused. She was dismissed from her post, despite offering to pay for the upkeep of the princess’s household, and never saw Mary again. Before Margaret’s dismissal, Queen Katherine wrote to Mary, ‘I pray you, recommend me unto my very good lady of Salisbury and pray her to have a good heart, for we never come to the kingdom of Heaven but by troubles.’
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Although Margaret returned to court after Queen Anne’s downfall (and even received a royal grant of land in Yorkshire), the king grew increasingly hostile towards the Poles after Reginald’s
De Unitate
, despite her spirited pretence at being horrified by her son’s behaviour. Already irritated by her loyalty to Queen Katherine and to the Lady Mary, and by her conservatism in religion, during the Cardinal’s mission in 1537 Henry began to see her as a dangerous enemy.

She showed a shrewd sense of self-preservation when Sir Geoffrey was arrested. ‘I pray God, madame, he do you no hurt,’ said her alarmed steward. ‘I trow he is not so unhappy that he will hurt his mother, and yet I care neither for him nor for any other, for I am true to my Prince,’ she answered, knowing very well that her words might be reported to the authorities. A letter to her eldest son, written after Geoffrey’s arrest, reveals the same wariness:

Son Montague, I send you heartily God’s blessing and mine … This is the greatest gift that I can send you, for to desire God of his help, which I perceive [there] is great need to pray for. And as to the case as I am informed that you stand in, mine advice is to refer you to God principally and upon that ground so to order you both in word and deed to serve your prince [while] not disobeying God’s commandments.
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On 12 November, accompanied by Bishop Goodrich of Ely, the Earl of Southampton (who had interrogated Geoffrey) arrived at Warblington to question the countess. During this initial interrogation she strongly denied having corresponded with Reginald in recent years or having burned compromising letters. On 14 November Southampton and the bishop reported to Cromwell that they had cross-examined the lady for two days, from morning till night, sometimes gently and sometimes roughly, but could get nothing out of her. She was ‘manlike’ in her behaviour – either her sons ‘have not made her privy nor participants of the bottom and pit of their stomachs, or else she is the most arrant traitresss that ever lived’.
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She seemed ‘somewhat appalled’, however, on being told that she must leave Warblington, which made them hope she was going to confess what they wanted. Taken to Southampton’s house in Sussex, Cowdray, she was kept there until the following May, treated with every indignity by the earl and his wife, who refused to speak to her. (Yet Lady Southampton became so frightened of Margaret that she refused to be left alone in the house with her, while Southampton said he found her presence disturbing.) Despite relentless bullying, she gave nothing away. Her interrogators reported to the Lord Privy Seal that they had never come across anybody like her before: ‘we may call her a strong and constant man rather than a woman’.

On 12 May 1539 the Countess of Salisbury was included in the Act of Attainder passed against the leaders of the Pilgrimage and those implicated in the ‘Exeter Conspiracy’. She and the
steward of one of her Welsh estates, Hugh Vaughan, were accused of allying themselves with the ‘false and abominable traitors Henry Pole, late Lord Montague and Reginald Pole, sons unto the said Countess, knowing them to be false traitors and common enemies unto your Majesty and this your realm’. Margaret and Vaughan were further charged with ‘sundry other detestable and abominable treasons to the most fearful peril and danger of the destruction of your most royal person’.
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No details were given, but during the proceedings Cromwell rose in the House of Lords and displayed an embroidered tabard.

The tabard was accepted as damning evidence. The Deputy at Calais, Lord Lisle, received a description in a letter from one of his officials:

There was a coat-armour found in the Duchess [
sic
] of Salisbury’s coffer, and by the one side of the coat there was the King’s Grace his arms of England, that is the lions without the flowers de lys, and about the whole arms was made pansies for Poles and marigolds for my Lady Mary … And betwixt the marigold and the pansy was made a tree to rise in the midst, and on the tree a coat of purple hanging on a bough in token of the coat of Christ, and on the other side of the coat all the Passion of Christ. Pole intended to have married my Lady Mary and betwixt them both should again arise the old doctrine of Christ.
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Whether the tabard had been embroidered at Margaret’s command during the Pilgrimage or whether it was a cunning forgery run up by Cromwell’s agents, everyone who saw it realized that its symbols spelled out the White Rose programme – Mary as queen and Reginald Pole as king consort, together with the restoration of Catholicism – which could only happen if Henry VIII were deposed. Nothing could have summed up better why Henry and Cromwell had been so frightened of the Pole family.

In autumn 1539 the countess was brought from Cowdray to spend what was left of her life in the Tower. Neither she nor her two gentlewomen, whom she was unable to pay, had any change of clothing. What they had soon wore out and was in any case inadequate for the winter, from which she suffered miserably, confined in a cold, damp and unheated cell. Only in 1541, towards the end of her imprisonment, did the latest queen, Katherine Howard, intervene and see that she was given new clothes, including a furred petticoat.

Still more distressing for the old lady was the fact that her two grandsons were also in the Tower, although neither had been attainted. In King Henry’s eyes, however, they shared their parents’ guilt. Gertrude Courtenay, formerly Marchioness of Exeter, was released in 1540, but her son Edward had to remain in the Tower. Some people expected that Lady Salisbury would also be released. However, she was the mother of the cardinal whom the king hated more than anyone else in the world. In consequence, she and Henry Pole were specifically excluded from the general pardon of that year.

It appears that the king ordered young Henry Pole to be treated particularly harshly, to ensure that he rotted to death. Described by the cardinal as ‘the remaining hope of our race’,
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he had inherited Warwick’s claim to the throne. In July 1540 the French ambassador reported that Edward Courtenay, who was then about twelve, had grown taller and been given a tutor. But ‘the little nephew of Cardinal Pole … is poorly and strictly kept and not desired to know anything’.
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Margaret must have feared for the boy’s life, remembering how when she was a little girl certain other royal children had disappeared in the Tower.

Early in 1540 the ‘Botolph Conspiracy’ at Calais (which by then was not quite as prosperous as formerly but still a cherished possession of the crown) ensured that Cardinal Reginald Pole stayed very much in the king’s mind. The aged Deputy, Lord Lisle – a bastard of Edward IV, born in 1461 and another survivor from the Yorkist court – had acquired a new chaplain,
Gregory Botolph, once a monk at Canterbury. Later alleged to have fled with the plate when his monastery was dissolved, he was known by friends as ‘Sweetlips’, but whether on account of musical, social or sexual talent is unclear. His plan was to hire 500 men and seize the town for the pope and the cardinal, whom he claimed to have seen at Rome on a recent, secret visit, and he recruited over a dozen accomplices. Yet while he may have visited Rome, it is improbable that he had met either Paul III or Pole, while his ‘plot’ sounds more like a confidence trick.

Even so, when Sweetlips’s letters were intercepted, the authorities took the plot very seriously and he was attainted by Parliament. What happened to him afterwards is unknown, but two of his accomplices were hanged, drawn and quartered in August 1540. Ridiculously, the king even suspected poor old Lord Lisle, bumbling and hopelessly inefficient, and he was sent to the Tower. Where Pole was concerned, Henry’s imagination always ran riot. His obsession may also explain why Lord Leonard Grey was executed the following year, despite having served well as Deputy in Ireland – his real offence was to have let the young Earl of Kildare escape and join the cardinal.