The martyrdom of Blessed Margaret Pole is a wonderful example of integrity to be imitated. Faced with the insatiability of evil, manifested by the hatred of a corrupt king, this fearless soul knew how to raise the banner of integrity, righteousness and the Catholic Faith. The Church celebrates her memory on 28 May.

Newsroom (13/06/2023 09:00) (Gaudium Press) At dawn on 27 May 1541, the Countess of Salisbury was told that her last hour had come. Her long and unjust captivity in the dreaded Tower of London was drawing to a close. In defence of her innocence, her sense of justice still led her to protest against King Henry’s cruelty; ignored, however, she made her way with a firm and resolute step to the place of execution.

About one hundred and fifty people were there to witness the gruesome spectacle. Without losing the composure of her noble lineage nor the dignity befitting the white hair of a person in her 70’s, the prisoner, after commending her soul to God, bent down on a crude wooden platform.

The executioner, however, being an inexperienced and clumsy young man, unfit for such an office, struck the victim’s shoulders with his axe in a most repulsive manner, which only increased her ultimate suffering. Stricken with pain, the unfortunate lady got up instinctively and tried to run around the platform, but was soon stopped. Finally, after repeated blows, she had her head severed.

In the bosom of the royal house

Margaret Pole was born on 14 August 1473. She was the daughter of the Duke of Clarence, George Plantagenet – brother of Kings Edward IV and Richard III of England – and Elizabeth Neville, daughter of the Earl Edmund Warwick, of the York lineage. Such ancestry made her belong to the old English royal house, being the last Plantagenet, as with her this dynasty, which reigned between 1154 and 1399, came to an end.

Due to the premature death of her parents, she was raised with her cousins, sons of Edward IV. At twenty-one, she married Sir Richard Pole, with whom she had five children: Henry, Godofroy, Arthur, Reginald – who became Cardinal, Papal Legate and later Archbishop of Canterbury – and Ursula. She raised them alone after being widowed in 1505.

In 1509, the then young Henry VIII ascended the English throne in place of his late older brother, Arthur. Blood ties made him and Margaret closely related. In fact, the future martyr was a cousin of Elizabeth of York, the monarch’s mother.

For a certain period of time, the sovereign had noble feelings for her. He considered her the “holiest woman in his kingdom” and even restored her possession of her family rights, which had been confiscated since the death of her brother Edward. In 1513, he made her Countess of Salisbury.

And, as a token of even more affection and recognition, together with his wife Catherine of Aragon, he entrusted her with the education of his daughter, Princess Mary Tudor. The Countess was godmother at the Baptism and Confirmation of the one who would one day be Queen of England and Ireland.

Now, if the heart of this sovereign seemed at first full of good intentions, he soon revealed himself to be proud and ambitious. Despite having fought for the interests of Holy Church against Protestantism and having received from the Supreme Pontiff the honorable title of Defender of the Faith, he thought he had the right to bury the English nation in schism in order to justify his abject lust…

Categorical refusal of error

Henry VIII, distorted by his evil passions, allowed himself to be seduced by Anne Boleyn, one of the ladies of the court. He then set about finding a way to annul his lawful marriage to Catherine of Aragon, on the pretext, among others, that she had been unable to bear a male child to inherit the throne.

Since he met evident resistance from the ecclesiastical authorities, he officially proclaimed himself the sole Head of the Church in England: the break with Rome had been declared. From then on, English history would be indelibly stained with the red blood of countless Catholics who dared to resist the unbridled impudence and caprice of a king.

“The Countess Margaret Pole“, on the other hand, “always considered as a holy woman, of deep and rooted faith, of great fortitude and accustomed to suffer”, faced this tortuous situation at the side of Catherine of Aragon and Mary Tudor, submissive to the true Church and categorically reproving the madness of the monarch.

The persecution begins

Constant in her resolution of fidelity, Margaret became the target of Henry VIII’s enmity and hatred; not because she was a threat to his perfidious interests, but because the mere presence of this noble and virtuous lady became the most pertinent condemnation of his conduct.

Not being able to get rid of her at once as he wished, without arousing inconvenience and noisy protests, Henry VIII acted with caution and discretion. His first move was to remove her from her duties as governess and exclude her from court in 1533. In so doing, he aimed to isolate Mary Tudor from Margaret’s influence, since he blamed her for the resistance he noted in the princess. The separation caused both, who wanted each other as mother and daughter, to suffer deeply.

Revenge against the Pole family

In 1536, when Anne Boleyn was finally rejected by the king, Margaret was reinstated at court. However, Henry VIII’s fury against her did not diminish at all; on the contrary, it became even more exasperated when the monarch learned that Reginald Pole – the Countess’s son and a staunch opponent of his behaviour – had been summoned to Rome to be made a Cardinal by Pope Paul III.

As if that were not enough, in 1540 there fell into the hands of the sovereign the treatise ‘Pro ecclesiasticæ unitatis defensione’, authored by the Cardinal himself, in which the fallacy of the king’s arguments was made clear. The king then decided to execute his extreme revenge against the Pole family.

Cardinal Pole, who had moved to Italy years before because of his disagreement with the king, refused to return to English soil, and only for this reason escaped death; his closest relatives did not, however.

On 3 November 1538, two of his brothers and some other relatives were imprisoned on charges of high treason. Their real crime, according to reports of the time, was that they were blood relatives of the Cardinal… All but one of them were killed within two months.

Even the hardest of hearts would find the torture inflicted on a mother who had a child beheaded and several relatives killed too much to bear, but not on the spiteful and voluptuous Henry, who was still seeking revenge.

On 13 November 1538, the worthy Countess was arrested in her own home and subjected to extensive and cunning interrogation. They hoped to find grounds to accuse her of fomenting popular uprisings against the Crown and of colluding with the revolutionary machinations of her children.

However, the only thing the detractors could say was that “they had never seen or heard a woman so determined, so fearless and so precise in her gestures and words” and that her honest answers only allowed them to conclude two things: “Either her sons had never told her the secret of the conspiracy, or she was the most skillful traitor that ever existed”.

Condemned for her brilliant innocence

The heroic Margaret, nevertheless, had all her property confiscated and was taken as a prisoner to Cowdray Park, where she was treated without the least civility. Her house, thoroughly searched for evidence, still attested to her innocence, for they found nothing to inculpate her.

They then subjected her to a new interrogation, and again they were forced to acknowledge her virtue.

They forced her to live for months in seclusion and isolation. At a certain point, an arbitrary sentence came to accelerate her ordeal. During the months of May and June of 1539, the House of Lords and the House of Commons sentenced, by a legislative act, sixteen people to death, without any prior trial or possibility of defence. A real abuse of power… And among the victims was the Countess of Salisbury.

What evidence did they allege against her? A white silk tunic, on which the five wounds of Christ were embroidered, a symbol that they believed linked her to the so-called Pilgrimage of Grace, a protest movement against the schism of the English monarch, which involved nobles and people. It is also supposed to have been made by one of the accusers in order to condemn her.

On 28 June, Margaret was transferred to the Tower of London to begin the last and most painful stage of her Calvary.

In this prison she spent almost two years before her sentence was carried out, suffering the inclemency of winter with inadequate clothing. The deprivation of almost everything necessary prepared her already patient soul for that fateful and glorious 27 May, when, victim of the unjust hatred of a kingdom, she could present herself victorious and unblemished to the King of Heaven.

General commotion at her death

When her martyrdom was consummated in 1541, her ill-treatment became the object of universal disapproval. The French ambassador Marillac wrote to King Francis I that the episode was “more worthy of compassion than of long letters”, and commented: “The Countess of Salisbury was beheaded […] in the presence of so few people that until the afternoon it was doubted whether it was true. The manner in which they proceeded in her case seems to indicate that they were afraid to kill her publicly and did it in secret.”

Chappuys, Emperor Charles V’s ambassador, said that it was “the most strange and regrettable execution“, since she was “almost a septuagenarian, who in the natural course of things had not so long to live, and there was no reason that could justify her hasty death“.

Cardinal Pole, who was overcome with grief at what had happened, also lamented: “The king had my mother beheaded for her constancy in the Catholic Faith, even though she was already seventy years old and was, after her own children, his closest relative. This was the reward he thought fit to grant her for the care she had devoted to his daughter’s education and for the long services she had rendered him”.

Recognition of her virtues

“Blessed are those who suffer persecution for the sake of justice” were the last words of this martyr. And they may well be considered as the just definition of her life. In the words of one of her biographers, “she died an innocent victim of Henry VIII, without being contradicted for a single instant in her refusal to confess to crimes she had never committed. […] Thus ends the singularly painful life of the last direct descendant of a royal strain near which the Tudors were but beginners.”

The Countess of Salisbury shone before God as a heroine, and her once unknown fidelity was proclaimed to the whole world by the Supreme Pontiff in 1886, on the occasion of her beatification.

By Bruna Almeida Piva

Text extracted, with adaptations, from the magazine Heralds of the Gospel n. 245, May 2022.

Compiled by Sandra Chisholm