It was a housekeeping matter, the French ambassador said; Henry, now with his fifth wife, Katherine Howard, wanted to make a progress north, and to empty the Tower before he set off, either by acts of mercy or the condemnation of detainees. A tradition has grown up that George was drowned in a vat a malmsey, an expensive sweet wine. Margaret was not executed with her eldest son, but was held in the Tower for the last years of her life the king paying her bills, outfitting her as became a great lady in furred petticoats and a satin nightgown. (Along with Margaret her sister-in-law Eleanor Pole was also a lady-in-waiting to Katherine. To ease the situation, Margaret devoted her third son, Reginald Pole, to the Church; he was to have an eventful career as a papal Legate and later as Archbishop of Canterbury. He could now only write to his wife and favorite daughter Margaret with a piece of coal or burnt stick on scraps of paper. A pearl necklace is just a shadow now. He has been held up to schoolchildren for centuries as the most. It took many blows to finally kill her and this botched execution was itself remembered and, for some, considered a sign of martyrdom. Contemporary chroniclers often referred to him as a friend of the poor. He was Dean of Exeter and Wimborne Minster, Dorset, as well as a canon of York. Her father was Shakespeares false, fleeting, perjured Clarence, who died in the Tower of London at the age of 29, attainted for treason and supposedly drowned in a butt of malmsey. "Pole, Margaret Plantagenet, Bl." Those two could only get along for short while before things got heated. That was the beginning of Thomas Mores public career, and it was a telling one. But Margaret Pole, one of the great magnates of Tudor England, is not overlooked. May 28, 2015. It is meant to contrast with the reality of European rule, divided by ideologies and greed and self-interest. The new pretender, Ralph Wilford, was arrested and killed before the conspiracy bred any action. After Henry VIII and then his son Edward VI had died, and Mary I was queen, with the intention to restore England to Roman authority, Reginald Pole was appointed papal legate to England by the Pope. Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons: A Play in Two Acts. She is the daughter of a duke and the niece of two kings, Edward IV and Richard III. Margaret is a devout Catholic and a member of the House of York, which fought Henry's father during the War of the Roses; she is first cousin of Henry's mother Queen Elizabeth of York through her father George Plantagenet, Elizabeth's uncle and the brother of Edward IV. When that daughters father-in-law was executed by Henry VIII, the Pole family fell out of favor briefly, but regained favor. It was time to be rid of Warwick. Not only did this mean that Margaret came of royal stock, but it meant that she came from the family that was historically opposed to the reign of the Tudors, a fact that would affect her throughout her life. Joan (Margaret) Pole ca 1333-Married toThomas Chaworth ca 1331-1373 Paternal grand-parents, uncles and aunts. Or was there, as she claimed, nothing worth burning? Margaret and Richard Pole had five children, born between about 1492 and 1504: four sons and the youngest a daughter. But the kings horoscope was looking nasty and, according to a Spanish commentator, he aged twenty years in two weeks. Margaret Pole was restored to a position as lady-in-waiting, which helped her financial situation. European rulers keen to destabilise England had promoted the claims of this plausible, glamorous young man, but by the summer of 1498 he was in the Tower, about to embark on the last act of his mysterious life. Margaret's own favour at Court varied. More essentially argued that communal life is the only way to end the ill effects of self-interest on politics. The 8-episode season follows Catherine of Aragon (Charlotte Hope) and King Henry VIII's (Ruari O'Connor) tumultuous marriage. They were charged with treason. As a young king, he was named Defender of the Faith by the pope for defending the church against Protestant heresy; his Lord Chancellor was Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. For these reasons, More had no cause to suspect his monarch of anything less than fealty to their shared faith. However, things suddenly change in May 1541 when a decision was made to execute her. Illustrated statistics ; Map ; Browse using this individual as Sosa/Ahnentafel #1 . But eventually the break between the king and his chief minister could not be ignored. Cardinal Wolsey and the king needed no further reason to bring More into the kings service. She served later as a governess to Mary. Henrys adult opponents were dead or driven abroad. They married less than a month after Jane Colts death and More had to seek special dispensation from the church. He encouraged them to do so. He married Anne Cheney, daughter of Nicholas Cheney. In 1512, Parliament, with Henrys assent, restored to her some of the lands that had been held by Henry VII for her brother while he was imprisoned, and then had been confiscated when he was executed. It was not a bloodbath, but a selective cull, carried through by process of law. Henry needed a son and heir. (Edward would have had a better right to the throne as son of Richards older brother.) Hilary Mantelwasthe author of nine novels and three collections of short stories in addition to her prize-winning trilogy about Thomas Cromwell. His name was on the attainder and he was brought before the Privy Council in February 1534. ThoughtCo. If my head should win him a castle in France, he told his son-in-law in 1525, it should not fail to go.). More's trial took place on 1 July. Henry wrote to Margaret, who in turn wrote to her son, reproving him for his "folly". Arthur had been a courtier, an able jouster and a great favourite with Henry, serving in his privy chamber. [9] Her youngest son, Geoffrey Pole, married well to Constance, daughter of Edmund Pakenham, and inherited the estate of Lordington in Sussex. But not before Lina imparted . (We should note, however, that More brilliant and perceptive was never especially comfortable in his kings good graces. Jan 2016 - Mar 20226 years 3 months. Her many fortified houses and castles, the number of tenants she could turn out, the belligerent propaganda from abroad all these brought the whole family into deep suspicion. 1 Through his father he was descended from Edward III's son, Thomas of Woodstock, and his mother was Catherine Woodville, sister of Edward IV's queen, Elizabeth Woodville; she afterwards married Henry VII's uncle, Jasper Tudor, Duke of Bedford. When you visit the site, Dotdash Meredith and its partners may store or retrieve information on your browser, mostly in the form of cookies. Bishop of Rochester, and Sir Thomas More, once Chancellor of England and a close royal friend, had both . If the great Sir Thomas More believed the kings marriage to be unlawful, why, it must be so! These are not consistent; and ifas he claimed at one pointPole rejected the Divorce in 1526 and refused the Oath of Supremacy in 1531, he received benefits from Henry for a course of action for which others were sentenced to death. His crusade against his native land was never launched, but many years later he would return, Archbishop of Canterbury to Mary Tudor, and join in heresy-hunting and the burning of reformers. Soon he was acting as Henrys personal secretary and adviser, delivering official speeches, greeting foreign envoys, drafting treaties and other public documents, and composing the kings responses to Wolseys dispatches. She built herself a castle at Warblington, close to the sea on the Hampshire-Sussex border. By 1527, the king was in his mid-thirties, and his wife six years older. Some stories even claim this was at his own request, having been permitted to choose the manner of his execution. Quite the opposite. Margaret Pole. The queen had suffered a series of miscarriages throughout their marriage; their only surviving child was the Princess Mary. She is a former faculty member of the Humanist Institute. Edward was briefly displayed in public at St Paul's Cathedral in 1487 in response to the presentation of the impostor Lambert Simnel as the "Earl of Warwick" to the Irish lords. . Her mother died after giving birth to a fourth child; that brother died ten days after their mother. It is at this moment that we must step back and consider the England in which More now lived. No great European power was willing to commit men or money to this crusade, but their unwillingness was not apparent at the time. Perhaps the contrast with the quiet, gentle Jane was too striking. The Editor There wasn't any "relationship" as such. To that end, he spent the next three years in study and prayer, wearing a hair shirt next to his skin (a practice he never abandoned), and struggling to reconcile his genuine religious fervor with the demands of the outside world. Joan, wife of John Langton. And the king did not force the issue. London Review of Books Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots. It was perfectly clear to any objective observer that the marriage was unlawful before God! More suffered a sharp chest pain, possibly angina, and begged the king to release him from his duties. His brother came to the throne in 1509 as Henry VIII, married the widowed Catherine, and in a first flush of goodwill began to repair the damage to Margarets fortunes. Did she, as the regime alleged, burn the evidence that incriminated her? In January 1539 Geoffrey was pardoned, but Margaret's son, Henry, Baron Montagu (and cousin Exeter), were later executed for treason after trial. But and of course this clause was added simply to trap More the Act also required a repudiation of any foreign authority, prince or potentate. More could recognize Anne as the crowned queen of England. When Catherine of Aragon gave birth to a daughter, Mary, Margaret Pole was asked to be one of the godmothers. Margaret is the main character of Samantha Wilcoxson's 2016 novel, Dwyer, J.G. Its influence upon William Shakespeares Richard III is immense. Ten years on, her situation was more difficult to negotiate. It was five years after the likely date of Margarets marriage that her first son was born. Family solidarity, the code of survival, did not mean much to Reginald, brought up under an alien roof; if he were to lose his earthly family, he said, he would still have the fellowship of the saints in paradise. His father, Sir Richard Pole, was a cousin of King Henry VII, and his mother, Margaret, countess of . Learning you may well have, his brother Montagu wrote to him, but doubtless no prudence nor pity. Reginald had compared himself to a surgeon ready to cut away diseased flesh from the body of England: not the most tactful metaphor, when your anointed king is dragging about with an ulcerated leg. In 1554, Mary reversed the attainder against Reginald Pole, and he was ordained as a priest in 1556 and finally consecrated as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1556. Two written eyewitness reports survived her execution: one by Marillac, the French ambassador, and the other by Chapuys, ambassador to the Holy Roman Emperor. It was during this trip that he began to write Utopia, his most famous work. The sitter might as well be carved, for all she suggests flesh or circulating blood. When Catherine of Aragon gave birth to a daughter, Mary, Margaret Pole was asked to be one of the godmothers. Seldom distracted from voicing their headline concerns, her people give each other a lot of information, in unmodulated voices, each time they speak. Reginald Pole, (born March 3, 1500, Stourton Castle, Staffordshire, Eng.died Nov. 17, 1558, London), English prelate who broke with King Henry VIII over Henry's antipapal policies and later became a cardinal and a powerful figure in the government of the Roman Catholic queen Mary Tudor. Their destruction came with a wave of arrests in the autumn of 1538. Of the many executions ordered by Henry VIII, surely the most horrifying was that of sixty-seven-year-old Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, hacked to pieces on the scaffold by a blundering headsman. It is painted on a dateable oak panel, and the dates suit the presumed subject, but the artist is anonymous. Margaret would have been too young to remember her mother, and it is likely that she was brought up within her fathers princely household, then after his execution lived with her cousins, the many daughters of Edward IV. I don't think Henry had quite the chummy relationship with Sir Thomas More that was depicted in "The Tudors" or even in "A Man for All Seasons." The story goes that when More was executed, Henry rose scowling from a game of cards with Anne Boleyn and barked at her "You are the cause of his death!" Margarets daughter Ursula would have 13 children, and three of her four sons would marry heiresses and have large families. This was not due to any dislike of the king. Born on the 14th August 1473, she went on to marry Sir Richard Pole in 1491. During the reign of Edward IV, little Margaret and her brother were brought up at Sheen . He worked eight years as undersheriff and proved himself an impartial judge and able administrator. The following poem was found carved on the wall of her cell: For traitors on the block should die; This site requires the use of Javascript to provide the best possible experience. Here is an excerpt from Chapter 7, "Unheard-Of Cruelty", describing the trial and execution of Sir Thomas More. It was the Act of Succession, passed the following month, that sealed his fate. It was the beginning of a fertile new line. But by then Lord Montagu was dead, executed along with the Marquis of Exeter and other opponents of the regime. Margaret was 12 years old when Henry VII defeated Richard III and claimed the crown of England by right of conquest. The accounts differ slightly; Marillac's report, dispatched two days afterwards, recorded that the execution took place in a corner of the Tower with so few people present that, in the evening, news of her execution was doubted. She managed her lands quite well, and became one of the five or six wealthiest peers in England. The boy, born in 1519, was welcome proof to Henry that he could father a son and that his lack of an heir was entirely Katharines fault. The trial of Sir Thomas More for treason opened in Westminster Hall on July 1, 1535. It is only in adversity that Margaret shows herself, in the records of her interrogations, when she was a woman in her sixties, experienced, shrewd, hard to frighten. Posted By Claire on May 27, 2012. In 1886, Margaret would be beatified by Pope Leo XIII as a martyr to Henrys regime. Henry accepted Mores resignation. Here is where it gets complicated. Geoffrey Pole, who had given the government what it needed, was pardoned. 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