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Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury

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Margaret Plantagenet, Countess of Salisbury (14 August 1473 – 27 May 1541), was the only surviving daughter of George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence, a brother of Kings Edward IV and Richard III, by his wife Isabel Neville. As a result of her marriage to Richard Pole, she was also known as Margaret Pole. One of the few members of the House of Plantagenet to have survived the Wars of the Roses, she was executed in 1541 at the command of King Henry VIII, the second monarch of the House of Tudor, who was the son of her first cousin, Elizabeth of York. Pope Leo XIII beatified her as a martyr for the Catholic Church on 29 December 1886.[2] One of her sons, Reginald Pole, was the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury.

Blessed

Margaret Plantagenet
Countess of Salisbury
Portrait of an unknown woman, often identified as the Countess of Salisbury[1]
Born14 August 1473
Farleigh Hungerford Castle, Somerset, England
Died27 May 1541(1541-05-27) (aged 67)
Tower of London, London, England
BuriedChurch of St Peter ad Vincula
Noble familyYork
Spouse(s)Sir Richard Pole
Issue
FatherGeorge Plantagenet, 1st Duke of Clarence
MotherIsabel Neville

Margaret was one of just two women in 16th-century England to be a peeress in her own right (suo jure) without a husband in the House of Lords.[3]


Early life

 
Margaret in her youth

Margaret was born at Farleigh Castle in Somerset, the only surviving daughter of George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence, and his wife Isabel Neville, who was the elder daughter of Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, and his wife Anne Beauchamp, 16th Countess of Warwick. Her maternal grandfather was killed fighting against her uncle, Edward IV, at the Battle of Barnet. Her father, already Duke of Clarence, was then created Earl of Salisbury and of Warwick. Edward IV declared that Margaret's younger brother, Edward, should be known as Earl of Warwick as a courtesy title, but no peerage was ever created for him. Margaret would have had a claim to the Earldom of Warwick, but the earldom was forfeited on the attainder of her brother Edward.[4] She was most likely named for her paternal aunt Margaret of York[5]

Margaret's mother died suddenly when her daughter was only three years old after giving birth to a son, Richard (who would only outlive her by a year). The death of his wife made Margaret's father believe that the midwife and a servant had poisoned her and his son. He had them brought to trial, found guilty and executed on very slim evidence.[6] The grief over his wife's death and the midwife having been suggested by his sister-in-law Elizabeth Woodwille (therefore in his mind making her the instigator) made him distance himself from his brother.

Not much is known about Margarets life around this time but one can assume she was raised and educated not unlike many other girls of the English nobility in the 15th century.[5] This would have involved playing musical instruments and sewing[7] and how to run a large household.

The Duke of Clarence plotted against Edward IV and in February 1478 was attainted and executed for treason. His lands and titles were thereby forfeited. Edward IV died in 1483 when Margaret was ten. The following year, the late king's marriage was declared invalid by the statute Titulus Regius of 1484, making his children illegitimate. As Margaret and her brother, Edward, were debarred from the throne by their father's attainder, their uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, became King Richard III. He had married Anne Neville, Margaret’s maternal aunt.

Richard III sent Margaret’s children to Sheriff Hutton Castle in Yorkshire. In 1485, he was defeated and killed at the Battle of Bosworth by Henry Tudor, who succeeded him as Henry VII. The new king married Margaret's cousin, Elizabeth of York, Edward IV's daughter, and Margaret and her brother were taken into their care. As young Edward was a potential York claimant to the throne, he was soon moved to the Tower of London. 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.

Shortly after that (probably in November 1487) Henry VII gave Margaret in marriage to his cousin, Richard Pole, whose mother was a half-sister of the king's mother, Margaret Beaufort.[8] When Perkin Warbeck impersonated Edward IV's presumed-dead son, Richard of Shrewsbury, 1st Duke of York, in 1499, Margaret's brother Edward was attainted and executed.

Richard Pole held various offices in Henry VII's government, the highest being Chamberlain for Arthur, Prince of Wales, Henry's elder son. When Arthur married Catherine of Aragon, Margaret became one of her ladies-in-waiting, but her entourage was dissolved when Arthur died in 1502 aged fifteen.

When her husband died in 1505, Margaret became a widow with five children. She had a small estate of land inherited from her husband but no other income or prospects. Henry VII paid for Richard's funeral. 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. Later in life, he bitterly resented her abandonment of him.[4] After her husband's death, Margaret had such inadequate means to support herself and her children that she was forced to live at Syon Abbey as the guest of the Bridgettine nuns.[9] She remained there until she returned to favour when Henry VIII came to the throne in 1509.

Countess of Salisbury

Henry VIII married Catherine of Aragon in 1509, and Margaret was again appointed as one of her ladies-in-waiting. In 1512, an Act of Parliament restored to Margaret the Earldom of Salisbury and some of her brother's land which had belonged to it, for which she paid 5000 marks (£2666.13s.4d), equivalent to £2,570,000 in 2023. Henry VII had controlled them first while her brother was a minor and then during his imprisonment; he later confiscated them after his trial.[10] However, her brother's Warwick and Spencer [Despencer] estates remained in the hands of the crown.[11]

As Countess of Salisbury, Margaret managed her lands well; by 1538 she was the fifth richest peer in England. She was a patron of the New Learning, like many Renaissance noblewomen; Gentian Hervet had translated Erasmus' de immensa misericordia Dei (The Great Mercy of God) into English for her. Her first son, Henry Pole, was created Baron Montagu, another of the Neville titles, speaking for the family in the House of Lords. Her second son, Arthur Pole, had a generally successful career as a courtier, becoming one of the six Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber.

Arthur Pole suffered a setback when his patron Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham, was convicted of treason in 1521 but was soon restored to favour. He died young (about 1526), having married the heir of Roger Lewknor. Margaret and her son, Henry, pressed Arthur's widow to take a vow of perpetual chastity to preserve her inheritance for her Pole children. Margaret's daughter Ursula married the Duke of Buckingham's son, Henry Stafford, in 1519, but after the Duke's fall, the couple were given only fragments of his estates.

Margaret's third son, Reginald Pole, studied abroad in Padua. He was Dean of Exeter and Wimborne Minster, Dorset, and a canon of York. He had several other livings, although he had not been ordained a priest. In 1529, he represented Henry VIII in Paris, persuading the theologians of the Sorbonne to support Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon.[12] Her youngest son, Geoffrey Pole, married well to Constance, daughter of Edmund Pakenham, and inherited the estate of Lordington in Sussex.

Margaret's own favour at Court varied. She had a dispute over land with Henry VIII in 1518; he awarded the contested lands to the Dukedom of Somerset, which had been held by his Beaufort great-grandfather, and were now in the possession of the Crown. In 1520 Margaret was appointed governess to Henry's daughter Mary. The next year, when her sons were mixed up with Buckingham, she was removed from that appointment but later restored to it by 1525.[13]

When Mary was declared a bastard in 1533, Margaret refused to give Mary's gold plate and jewels back to Henry. Mary's household was broken up at the end of the year, and Margaret asked if she could serve Mary at her own cost, but this was not permitted. The Imperial Ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, suggested two years later that Mary be handed over to Margaret, but Henry refused, calling her "a fool, of no experience".[14]

Fall

In 1531, Reginald Pole warned of the dangers of the Boleyn marriage. He returned to Padua in 1532 and received a last English benefice in December of that same year. Chapuys suggested to Emperor Charles V that Reginald marry Mary and combine their dynastic claims. Chapuys also communicated with Reginald through his brother, Geoffrey. Reginald replied to books Henry sent him with his own pamphlet, pro ecclesiasticae unitatis defensione, also called de unitate, which denied Henry's position on the marriage of a brother's wife and denied royal supremacy. Reginald also urged the princes of Europe to depose Henry immediately. Henry wrote to Margaret, who in turn wrote to her son, reproving him for his "folly".[15] In May 1536, Reginald finally and definitively broke with the king. After Henry's second wife, Anne Boleyn, was arrested and eventually executed, Margaret was permitted to return to Court, albeit briefly.[16]

In 1537, Reginald (still not ordained) was made a Cardinal. Pope Paul III put him in charge of organising assistance for the Pilgrimage of Grace (and related movements). The pilgrimage was an effort to organize a march on London to replace Henry's 'reformist' ministers with traditional, Catholic minds. Neither Francis I of France nor the Emperor supported this effort, and the English government tried to assassinate Reginald. In 1539, Reginald was sent to the Emperor to organize an embargo against England—the countermeasure he had himself warned Henry was possible.[17]

As part of the investigations into the so-called Exeter Conspiracy, Geoffrey Pole was arrested in August 1538. Geoffrey had been corresponding with Reginald; the investigation of Henry Courtenay, Marquess of Exeter (Henry VIII's first cousin and Geoffrey's second cousin), had turned up his name. Geoffrey appealed to Thomas Cromwell, who had him arrested and interrogated. Under interrogation, Geoffrey said that his eldest brother, Lord Montagu, and the Marquess had been parties to his correspondence with Reginald. Montagu, Exeter, and Margaret were arrested in November 1538.

In January 1539 Geoffrey was pardoned, but Montagu and Exeter were executed for treason after trial. In May 1539 Henry, Margaret, Exeter and others were attainted, as Margaret's father had been. This conviction meant they lost their titles and lands, mostly in the South of England.

As part of the evidence for the bill of attainder, Cromwell produced a tunic bearing the Five Wounds of Christ, symbolizing Margaret's support for the Church of Rome and the rule of her son, Reginald, and the king's Catholic daughter, Mary. Six months after her house and effects were searched at her arrest, the supposed discovery is likely to have been a fabrication. She was sentenced to death and executed at the king's will.

Margaret was held in the Tower of London for two-and-a-half years. She, her grandson Henry (son of her own son Henry), and Exeter's son were held together and supported by the king. She was attended by servants and received an extensive grant of clothing in March 1541.

In 1540, Cromwell fell from favour and was attainted and executed.

Execution

The following poem was found carved on the wall of her cell:

For traitors on the block should die;
I am no traitor, no, not I!
My faithfulness stands fast and so,
Towards the block I shall not go!
Nor make one step, as you shall see;
Christ in Thy Mercy, save Thou me![18][19]

On the morning of 27 May 1541, Margaret was told she was to die within the hour. She answered that no crime had been imputed to her. Nevertheless, she was taken from her cell to the precincts of the Tower of London where a low wooden block had been prepared instead of the customary scaffold.[8]

Two written eyewitness reports survived her execution: one by Marillac, the French ambassador, and the other by Chapuys, ambassador to the Holy Roman Emperor. The accounts differ slightly; Marillac's report, dispatched two days afterward, recorded that the execution took place in the corner of the Tower with so few people present that, in the evening, news of her execution was doubted. Chapuys wrote two weeks after the execution that one hundred and fifty witnesses were present for the execution, including the Lord Mayor of London.

Chapuys wrote that, "at first, when the sentence of death was made known to her, she found the thing very strange, not knowing of what crime she was accused, nor how she had been sentenced". Because the main executioner[20] had been sent north to deal with rebels, the execution was performed by "a wretched and blundering youth who hacked her head and shoulders to pieces in the most pitiful manner". It took eleven strokes of an axe for the executioner to remove her head. The first blow missed its mark, gashing her shoulder.[21]

A third account in Burke's Peerage, possibly apocryphal, described the appalling circumstances of the execution. It states that Margaret refused to lay her head on the block, declaiming, "So should traitors do, and I am none". According to the account, she turned her head "every which way", instructing the executioner that, if he wanted her head, he should take it as he could.[22][23][24][25][26] Margaret was buried in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula within the Tower of London.[27] Her remains were later uncovered when the chapel was renovated in 1876.[28][29]

Descendants

When not at Court, Margaret lived chiefly at Warblington Castle in Hampshire and Bisham Manor in Berkshire.[30] She and her husband were parents to five children:

Legacy

 
Stained glass windows of Gothic Revival Our Lady and the English Martyrs Church, Cambridge depicting Blessed Margaret Pole at prayer in her cell at the Tower of London and her beheading at Tower Green.

Her son, Reginald Pole, said that he would "never fear to call himself the son of a martyr". She was later regarded by Catholics as such and was beatified on 29 December 1886 by Pope Leo XIII.[31] She is commemorated in the dedication of the Church of Our Lady Queen of Peace & Blessed Margaret Pole in Southbourne, Bournemouth.[32]

Panel paintings of Margaret can be found in the following churches:

  • English Martyrs Church, Preston (she is on the right.)[33]
  • St Joseph's Church in Sale, Cheshire[34]
  • St. Marie's Church in New Bilton, Rugby, England[35]

There are stained glass windows of her in the following churches:

Cultural depictions

Notes

  1. ^ "Unknown woman, formerly known as Margaret Plantagenet, Countess of Salisbury — National Portrait Gallery". npg.org.uk.
  2. ^ DWYER, J. G. "Pole, Margaret Plantagenet, Bl." New Catholic Encyclopedia. 2nd ed. Vol. 11. Detroit: Gale, 2003. pp. 455–56.
  3. ^ ODNB; the other was Anne Boleyn, Marchioness of Pembroke. The ODNB does not qualify the assertion, but is discussing sixteenth-century usage; sources which apply modern law retroactively will consider some women peeresses in their own right when their husbands sat in Parliament with their father's style and precedence.
  4. ^ a b ODNB.
  5. ^ a b Higginbotham, Susan (15 August 2016). Margaret Pole: The Countess in the Tower. Amberley Publishing Limited. ISBN 978-1-4456-3609-2.
  6. ^ Wilson, Rebecca Sophia Katherine (30 March 2024). Tudor Feminists: 10 Renaissance Women Ahead of their Time. Pen and Sword History. ISBN 978-1-3990-4363-2.
  7. ^ Roy, Neha (6 April 2023). Henry VIII's Imprisoned Women: The Women of the Tower. Pen and Sword History. ISBN 978-1-3990-9579-2.
  8. ^ a b   One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "Blessed Margaret Pole". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
  9. ^ Powell, Sue (1 November 2005). "Margaret Pole and Syon abbey". Historical Research. 78 (202): 563–567. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2281.2005.00254.x.
  10. ^ ODNB, which argues that the restoration was a tacit admission of her brother's innocence; however, lands and titles had been restored to the heirs of guilty peers during the previous century.
  11. ^ The National Archives, minsters' accounts, SC6/HENVIII.
  12. ^ ODNB, Reginald Pole
  13. ^ Pierce 1996, pp. 86–89
  14. ^ Pierce 1996, pp. 102
  15. ^ ODNB, "Reginald Pole"; "Geoffrey Pole". Pole and his hagiographers gave several accounts of Pole's activities after Henry met Anne Boleyn. These are not consistent; if — as he claimed at one point — Pole 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.
  16. ^ ODNB; quotation as given there.
  17. ^ ODNB, Reginald Pole.
  18. ^ "The Execution of Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury". The Anne Boleyn Files. 27 May 2010. Retrieved 12 June 2011.
  19. ^ "The Tower of London". The Travelling Historian. Retrieved 12 June 2011.
  20. ^ This was not, as some say, Cratwell, who had himself has been executed three years earlier
  21. ^ Webb, Simon (2011). Execution: A History of Capital Punishment in Britain. The History Press. pp. 12–13. ISBN 978-0-7524-6662-0.
  22. ^ Pierce 1996, pp. 314–315
  23. ^ The Complete Peerage, v. XII p. II, p. 393
  24. ^ "Margaret Pole". Tudor History. Retrieved 18 January 2014.
  25. ^ "1541: Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury". Executed Today. 27 May 2013. Retrieved 18 January 2014.
  26. ^ "Block and Axe". Royal Armouries. Archived from the original on 25 September 2015. Retrieved 18 January 2014.
  27. ^ Profile of Margaret, Lady Salisbury, Regina (online)
  28. ^ "Pole, Margaret, suo jure countess of Salisbury (1473–1541), noblewoman". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. 2004. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/22451. Retrieved 18 November 2020. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  29. ^ Bell, Doyne C. (1877). Notices of the Historic Persons Buried in the Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula in the Tower of London. London: John Murray, Albemarle Street. p. 24.
  30. ^ Ford, David Nash (2010). "Margaret Plantagenet, Lady Pole & Countess of Salisbury (1473–1541)". Royal Berkshire History. Nash Ford Publishing. Retrieved 16 June 2011.
  31. ^ Camm, Bede, Lives of the English martyrs declared blessed by Pope Leo XIII in 1886 and 1895 (Burns and Oates Limited, 1904), ix.
  32. ^ "Our Lady Queen of Peace & Blessèd Margaret Pole, Southbourne". avonstour.co.uk. Retrieved 14 October 2021.
  33. ^ Forbester, Mike (24 September 2017), English Martyrs' Church, retrieved 30 July 2022
  34. ^ Ernest Denim (25 July 2015), Painted panel at St Joseph's church, Sale, Cheshire, retrieved 30 July 2022
  35. ^ Thomson, Aidan McRae (21 August 2016), English Martyrs, retrieved 30 July 2022
  36. ^ david.robarts (26 June 2014), Margaret Pole & Thomas More, Burlison & Grylls 1931, retrieved 30 July 2022
  37. ^ Elmar Eye (11 February 2007), Blessed Margaret Pole and St Oliver Plunkett, retrieved 30 July 2022
  38. ^ Budby (9 November 2017), [55673] St Mary (RC), Derby: Blessed Margaret Pole, retrieved 30 July 2022
  39. ^ Lawrence OP (14 September 2005), English Martyrs, retrieved 30 July 2022
  40. ^ Thomson, Aidan McRae (30 June 2012), English Martyrs, Shrewsbury Cathedral, retrieved 2 November 2022
  41. ^ "The King's Curse". Publishers Weekly. 21 July 2014. Retrieved 8 October 2014.
  42. ^ Bradley, Laura (13 June 2016). "Two More Game of Thrones Actors Just Joined Starz's The White Queen Follow-Up". Vanity Fair. Retrieved 14 June 2016.
  43. ^ Petski, Denise (17 May 2018). "The Spanish Princess: Charlotte Hope To Star In The White Princess. Follow-Up on Starz". Deadline Hollywood. Retrieved 1 June 2018.

Sources

Further reading

  • Pierce, Hazel (2003). Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, 1473–1541: Loyalty, Lineage and Leadership, University of Wales Press, ISBN 0-7083-1783-9
Peerage of England
Vacant
Title last held by
Edward Plantagenet 		Countess of Salisbury
1513–1539 		Forfeit
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