On 27 May 1541 the Countess of Salisbury, Lady Margaret Pole, was executed by order of Henry VIII.
This was shocking, even for a populace who had become accustomed to the murder of famous and popular people by their increasingly despotic king. First and foremost it was shocking because of her social status and royal blood. The Countess of Salisbury was the daughter of the Duke of Clarence, George Plantagenet. She was the niece of King Edward IV and King Richard III. She was the first cousin of Henry VIII’s own mother, Elizabeth of York. She was the great-great-great-granddaughter of King Edward III on her father’s side. She was the great-great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, the third surviving son of Edward III, on her mother’s side.
Margaret Pole’s blood was so blue it could have camouflaged Smurfs.
Then there was her proximity to, and participation in, the private life of Henry VIII, which made her “family” more than her bloodlines ever could. Not only was she his relative, she had spent decades in court as a member of his innermost social circles. She served as a lady in waiting for his first wife, Queen Katherina of Aragon, and was his daughter Mary’s governess. The relationship between Mary and Lady Salisbury was very close. After Katherina of Aragon’s death, Princess Mary turned toward Margaret Pole as a second mother, and now her father was going to take away this beloved maternal figure from her as well. With Anne Boleyn long in the grave, who would Mary be able to blame for this travesty but her own father? How much worse did that make it for her?
The crime of her death is more horrendous when you think of how the Countess of Salisbury had been nothing but loyal to the king. She even went out of her way to reprove her son for defying Henry VIII over his break from the Church; even though she remained Catholic a heart, the king was the anointed monarch and thus all his subjects should obey him in her opinion. However, her loyalty meant nothing to the increasingly unstable an paranoid king. In 1539 Henry VIII allowed (or ordered) Thomas Cromwell to throw Lady Salisbury into the Tower. There she stayed for two years, until the morning of 27 1541, when she was told she was going to be executed within the next hour.
In spite of the shock, Margaret Pole was not one to cower before bad news, and “she replied boldly that no crime had been imputed to her. She was taken from her cell to Tower Green where a low wooden block had been prepared. She proudly refused to lay her head on the block and was dragged to it and forced down. As she struggled, the inexperienced executioner described as ‘a wretched and blundering youth struck, his first blow made a gash in her shoulder rather than her neck. Ten additional blows were required to complete the execution. A second account relates how she managed to escape from the block and that she was hewn down by the executioner as she ran.”
Not only was the King’s decision to execute the Countess revolting from a moral and social standpoint, it was a stupid. Having her beheaded was completely asinine from a political standpoint. Henry had killed her because she had the audacity to have given birth to children who were too closely related to him, and were therefore too close to his throne, but her death didn’t alleviate the threat; it worsened it. Although the King had killed her oldest son and her grandson already, one of her surviving sons, Cardinal Reginald Pole, was a serious political enemy and already a thorn in Henry’s side the size of a battering ram. Pole was fighting against England’s political agendas from continental Europe, out of Henry’s reach (although there are good arguments for the idea that the King did try to have him discretely murdered). With Pole (mostly) safe from physical harm, the best possible leverage Henry had over him was control over his mother. By killing the Countess, Henry ended any power he might have had over the rebellious Pole.
There was no reason to murder Margaret Pole, and every reason to leave her alive. Her death is a clear sign that King Henry VIII wasn’t making his decisions from a rational standpoint.
I enjoyed reading your article on Margaret Pole very much. I never thought Henry VIII was mentally deranged or insane. I thought he was selfish and vengeful as most dictators are. Margaret Pole’s execution was a horrendous event at the time of it’s occurrence and when one reads about it today it remains very disturbing.