| Honorific Prefix: | Blessed |
| Margaret Plantagenet | |
| Countess of Salisbury | |
| Noble Family: | York |
| Spouse: | Sir Richard Pole |
| Father: | George Plantagenet, 1st Duke of Clarence |
| Mother: | Isabel Neville |
| Birth Date: | 14 August 1473 |
| Birth Place: | Farleigh Hungerford Castle, Somerset, England |
| Death Place: | Tower of London, London, England |
| Burial Place: | Church of St Peter ad Vincula |
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 Margaret's marriage to Richard Pole, she was also known as Margaret Pole. She 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.[1]
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.
Margaret was born at Farleigh Castle in Somerset, the only surviving daughter of George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence, and his wife Isabel Neville. George was a son of Richard of York, 3rd Duke of York, and a brother of both Edward IV and Richard III. Isabel was the elder daughter of Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick ("Warwick the Kingmaker") and his wife Anne Beauchamp, 16th Countess of Warwick.
Warwick was killed fighting against Margaret's uncles 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, but only as a courtesy title and 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.[3] She was most likely named for her paternal aunt Margaret of York.[4]
Isabel died suddenly when Margaret 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 led Clarence to 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.[5] His grief over his wife's death, and the midwife having been suggested by his sister-in-law Elizabeth Woodville, made him distance himself from his brother, Edward IV.
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, 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.
In 1485, Richard III 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 House of 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.
Soon afterwards, Henry VII gave Margaret in marriage to his cousin, Richard Pole, whose mother was a half-sister of the King's mother, Margaret Beaufort. 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 Catherine's entourage was dissolved after Arthur died in 1502, aged fifteen.
Richard Pole died in 1505, leaving Margaret 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 Pole's funeral. Margaret had inadequate means of supporting herself and her children, so she was forced to live at Syon Abbey as the guest of the Bridgettine nuns.[6] She remained there until she returned to favour when Henry VIII came to the throne in 1509. To ease the situation, she 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, however, he bitterly resented what he saw as her abandonment of him.
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 the Earldom of Salisbury to Margaret, and also some of her brother's former land for which she paid 5,000 marks (£2,666.13s.4d), . Henry VII had controlled these lands while Margaret's brother was a minor and then during his imprisonment; he confiscated them after Edward's trial.[7] However, Edward's Warwick and Spencer [Despencer] estates remained in the hands of the Crown.[8]
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 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 heiress of Roger Lewknor. Margaret and her son Henry pressed Arthur's widow to take a vow of perpetual chastity to preserve her inheritance for the 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.[9] Margaret's youngest son, Geoffrey Pole, married 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 was 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 caught up in Buckingham's treason conviction, she was dismissed from that appointment, but it had been restored to her by 1525.
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 Margaret "a fool, of no experience".
In 1531, Reginald Pole had warned of the risks involved if Henry VIII should divorce Catherine and marry Anne Boleyn. In 1532, he returned to Padua and received a last English benefice in December of that year. Chapuys suggested to Emperor Charles V that Reginald should marry Henry VIII's daughter Mary and combine their dynastic claims. Chapuys also communicated with Reginald through his brother, Geoffrey.
Reginald replied to correspondence he received from Henry VIII with his own pamphlet, pro ecclesiasticae unitatis defensione, also called de unitate, which denied both royal supremacy and Henry's position on marriage to a brother's wife. Reginald also urged the princes of Europe to depose Henry immediately.
Henry VIII wrote to Margaret, who in turn wrote to her son, reproving him for his "folly".[10] In May 1536, Reginald finally and definitively broke with the King. After Anne Boleyn was arrested and eventually executed, Margaret was permitted to return to Court, albeit briefly.[11]
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 organise a march on London to replace the King'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 organise an embargo against England — the countermeasure of which he himself had warned Henry in 1531.[12]
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, 1st Marquess of Exeter (Henry VIII's first cousin and Geoffrey's second cousin), had implicated him. Geoffrey appealed to Thomas Cromwell, who had him arrested and interrogated. Under interrogation, Geoffrey said Montagu and Exeter 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, Margaret 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, symbolising Margaret's support for the Church of Rome and the rule of her son, Reginald, and the King's Catholic daughter, Mary. Margaret was sentenced to death, but was held in the Tower of London for two and a half years with her grandson, Henry, and Exeter's son. In 1540, Cromwell fell from favour to be attainted and executed himself.
The following poem was found carved on the wall of Margaret's cell:[13] [14]
On the morning of 27 May 1541, Margaret was told she would die within the hour. She answered that no crime had been attributed to her. Nevertheless, she was taken from her cell to the precincts of the Tower where a low wooden block had been prepared instead of the customary scaffold.
Two written eyewitness reports survived her execution: one by Charles de Marillac, the French ambassador, and the other by Chapuys, ambassador to the Holy Roman Emperor. The accounts differ somewhat. Marillac's report, dispatched two days afterwards, recorded that the execution took place 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: "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 chief executioner[15] 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.[16]
A third account in Burke's Peerage 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.[17] [18] [19] [20]
Margaret was buried in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula within the Tower of London.[21] Her remains were later uncovered when the chapel was renovated in 1876.[22] [23]
When not at Court, Margaret lived chiefly at Warblington Castle in Hampshire and Bisham Manor in Berkshire.[24] She and her husband were parents to five children:
Her son, Reginald Pole, said that he would "never fear to call himself the son of a martyr". Margaret was later regarded by Catholics as such and was beatified on 29 December 1886 by Pope Leo XIII.[25] She is commemorated in the dedication of the Church of Our Lady Queen of Peace & Blessed Margaret Pole in Southbourne, Bournemouth.[26]
Panel paintings of Margaret can be found in the following churches:
There are stained glass windows of her in the following churches:
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