The Last White Rose, page 32
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’,8 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’.9 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.
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 [garçonneau] 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: Poems1
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.
During the last years of Henry’s reign, two factions competed for his favour. One consisted of those who had followed the late Thomas Cromwell, including evangelicals such as Archbishop Cranmer and Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford. Opposing them were the Catholics led by the Duke of Norfolk, although by now he was suffering from chronic ill health and very much feeling his age. For a time, however, the old duke appeared to be in the ascendant after the king married his niece.
She was the tiny, auburn-haired Katherine Howard, more than thirty years younger than Henry, who became besotted with her. But in November 1541 Archbishop Cranmer broke the news to him that she was ‘a whore’. Kind-hearted, empty-headed, oversexed and completely out of her depth, the poor girl was one of the most pitiful figures in Tudor history. She had taken at least one lover before her marriage and was now having a full-blooded romance with a gentleman of the Privy Chamber, Thomas Culpeper. At first the king refused to believe Cranmer, but then, shedding tears of self-pity, he told the embarrassed council he had been betrayed. The charges were soon proved, the queen’s lovers being executed within a month. (In their indictment she was described as ‘a common harlot’.) Only seventeen, Katherine was beheaded in February 1542 after a Bill of Attainder avoided a trial that would have made the squalid details public. She was lucky to die beneath the axe instead of being burned alive for treason.
Abroad, despite vast expenditure, Henry’s foreign policy was ineffective on every front. Although English troops routed the Scots at Solway Moss in 1542, they were defeated at Ancrum Moor, and the following year the betrothal of Prince Edward to the little Queen Mary, on which Henry had set his heart – in what contemporaries called the ‘Rough Wooing’ – was broken off by the Scots. Three years of ruinously expensive war with France ended in 1546, having gained nothing.
As for religion, Henry continued to regard even the slightest disagreement with the ‘true doctine’ he had decreed as a blasphemous denial of his role as head of the Church. For, as he saw it, the law of God was in his personal care. This extraordinary assumption was evident in the Askew case.
In 1544 Mrs Anne Askew, a wealthy young Lincolnshire lady who had quarrelled with her husband over her ‘sacramen tarian’ views, came to live in London, seeking a divorce. The year after, having joined a group of evengelicals in the city, she was arrested and frightened into recanting. As she was a friend of the latest queen, Catherine Parr, of whose own religious opinions Henry was suspicious, he took a personal interest in the case. Rearrested in 1546, Anne was questioned by the council and, despite being a gentlewoman, so cruelly racked during her interrogations that she lost the use of her limbs and even of her eyesight. In July, unable to walk, she was taken to Smithfield in a litter to be burned at the stake with other evangelicals.
The perpetually suppurating ulcer on the king’s leg had turned into one among many, all giving him excruciating pain whenever the bandages were changed, which presumably happened several times a day. Sometimes he was in such agony that he could not speak. Because of his monstrous obesity (it was said that three men could have fitted inside his doublet) he needed a ramp if he wanted to mount a horse. He found walking difficult, having to lean on a stick, and in his palaces had to be carried about in a special chair. He suffered regularly from exhausting ‘fevers’ caused by the ulcers.
Yet although he had been hated by large sections of the population only a few years earlier – and even now the North could never forgive him – this rotting, moribund hulk of a man had become idolized as a benevolent colossus by many of his subjects, who turned a blind eye to his selfishness, cruelty and tyranny. Part of their veneration came from his having reigned over them for so long, yet most of it was due to the overwhelming impact of his extraordinary personality, shallow as it may have been. Clearly, he knew how to assume a grave and kindly air when necessary. Describing the king’s last speech to Parliament, Richard Grafton (continuing Hall’s chronicle) said his address gave ‘his subjects there present such comfort that the like joy could not be unto them in this world’. There is no reason to doubt Grafton.2
Because of his ailments, Henry’s temper had grown more dangerous than ever. Aware that he might have only a very short time left to live, he worried even more about what was going to happen when his young son – still only nine in 1546 – succeeded him as a minor. Although he had ensured that no more Yorkist pretenders were left in England, he was afraid that some other magnate might try and seize the throne. Richard of Gloucester’s example can never have been very far from his mind.
In particular, he did not trust the aged Duke of Norfolk. A pleasant-spoken and sly little man, always blandly reassuring while lying through his teeth, Norfolk could never forget what Bosworth, fought when he was a boy of twelve, had meant for his family: his grandfather was killed and his father taken prisoner, while the Howards forfeited their duchy.3 It had taken them years to recover their position. In consequence, no one possessed a keener sense for survival or for the main chance than Thomas Howard, who was completely without principles. ‘It was merry in England afore the New Learning came up,’ he famously declared in 1540. ‘Yea, I would all things were as hath been in times past.’ Yet despite his Catholic instincts, he was the man who had put down the Pilgrimage of Grace so mercilessly. Loathing Cromwell as he did, he had treated him with oily subservience, and then played a major part in destroying him.
