Carthusian Order

The Carthusian Order is presented through Sheen Priory as a religious community whose demanding silence governs both daily life and its members’ relations with the outside world. For Margaret Pole, the order first offers her young son Reginald a secure home and education, but its discipline also separates them; later, Sheen becomes the setting of a prophecy that draws suspicion toward the Pole family and the monks themselves.

Sheen Priory and the discipline of silence

Sheen Priory is the brother house to Syon Abbey, where Margaret and some of her children find shelter. The houses stand only a few miles apart, on opposite sides of the river. The physical distance is short enough for Margaret to imagine seeing the priory’s chimneys from her refuge, yet the religious discipline between them makes the separation profound. She hopes that a candle in her window might let Reginald know she is thinking of him, and that a boatman might sometimes carry her across to visit on feast days.

The Carthusian monks are described as silent hermits, living and working alone in individual cells. Their silence is not absolute at every moment: they may speak on Sundays and feast days, and once a week they walk together and converse quietly. The rest of the time is given to prayer and solitary work. The account emphasizes how completely the practice organizes life: the monks are enclosed behind high walls, and Reginald’s mother imagines him hearing only the wind. The form of the community is conveyed not through its rules in the abstract, but through the ordinary speech, singing, and play that its discipline would remove from a child.

Reginald Pole’s childhood at Sheen

John Fisher finds places for both Margaret and Reginald when the family needs refuge. Sheen Priory can house and educate the boy; Syon Abbey can shelter his mother, his sister Ursula, and Baby Geoffrey. The arrangement is generous in practical terms, providing food, accommodation, and a future for the children. Its cost is that Reginald must live apart from his family within a community whose way of life Margaret fears may not suit him.

She remembers him as merry, bright, talkative, and proud of learning to sing in a round. He enjoys reading aloud and patiently telling riddles and jokes to his brothers. Against that lively portrait, Margaret pictures the silent cells and the solitary routine of the monks. She tries to believe that quiet might teach him to value his own thoughts and that he might discover a genuine religious vocation. But the hope is shadowed by her fear that, if no such calling comes, she will have placed her son in a wordless prison for life.

Margaret considers alternatives and finds none she can accept. She knows no one who would take Reginald as a squire, lacks the money to apprentice him, and rejects the prospect of training a Plantagenet heir for an ordinary trade. Her choices are framed by his family identity as well as their poverty: Sheen offers prayer, education, and safety, while the other imagined futures seem to diminish his standing or expose him to a less secure life. She finally accepts the place because she believes she can do nothing more for him, though the thought of the child’s separation brings her to tears.

The separation is later recalled in the scene of their reunion. At twenty, Reginald appears at Margaret’s side during the gathering of rival royal courts and kneels for her blessing. He is now tall, strong, serious, and handsome; she alone sees the boy she left at Sheen. Her memory fixes on his trembling lip and on the fact that he could not speak to ask her to stay. The order has therefore shaped a lasting family bond through absence: the reunion is joyful, but its emotional force depends on the remembered silence of their parting.

An adult return to the Carthusians

When Reginald returns to England as a young man, he chooses to go back to the Carthusian Brothers at Sheen and live in silence again. Margaret asks whether he will live with her, acknowledging both her pleasure at seeing him and her uncertainty about sharing a household with an independent adult who thinks for himself. He answers that he can live at Sheen and visit her, as he did when he was young.

The meaning of this return differs from his childhood placement. Margaret stresses that the family’s circumstances have changed: England is prosperous, the king is considered good, and Reginald could stay with her by choice rather than because she cannot afford to house him. He agrees that they live in different times. The same religious house that once seemed to Margaret an unavoidable refuge can now be Reginald’s chosen home. His decision does not erase her anxiety. She remembers that a cousin was beheaded after listening to talk of the end of the Tudor line at the monastery and warns Reginald that something dangerous may have been said there. He calls that danger a lie, while she insists that it cost his kinsman his life.

Prophecy, suspicion, and the court

Sheen Priory enters the political plot through a report that its library contains a prophecy concerning the Duke of Buckingham. According to the account relayed to Margaret, the prophecy says that people will acclaim the duke as king and that Parliament will offer him the crown, as it did to Henry VII. Margaret initially objects that meeting with the Carthusians is no crime: she herself worships in their chapels, and the order educated and raised Reginald. The political danger arises not from religious association alone, but from the claim that the monks possess or preserve words that can be interpreted as a threat to the reigning dynasty.

The suspicion spreads through a chain of associations. The Duke of Buckingham is said to have spoken with the Carthusians at Sheen; he is close to Montague, Margaret’s son, and is also connected to her family through his daughter-in-law, Ursula. Reginald’s upbringing at the priory makes the family’s connection especially visible. The queen tells Margaret that Thomas Wolsey has persuaded Henry VIII that the duke foresaw the family’s death and the end of its line, and that the duke’s confessor has broken his vow of silence to reveal predictions, manuscripts, and signs in the sky. In this climate, a monastery’s library and the relationships of its visitors become grounds for political fear, whether or not the reported prophecy is true.

Later, the troubled weather and burning comets intensify the atmosphere of portent. A former friend of Reginald, now a Carthusian monk, tells Margaret’s confessor that he saw a burning red globe above the church and understood it as a sign that the king’s anger would fall on the monks for keeping the prophecy safe and hiding the manuscript. This remains a reported interpretation, not a confirmed account of what the sky or the manuscript means. Its narrative force lies in the way fear turns the priory’s custodianship into apparent evidence against them.

The priory as a center of religious and political contact

Sheen is not depicted as sealed off from every visitor or public concern. Elizabeth Barton stays at Syon Abbey and preaches to the Carthusian Brothers; she is said to have visions and knowledge beyond what others expect of a country girl. Margaret hears that Barton has also traveled to Canterbury with Geoffrey, and that many people, including John Fisher and Thomas More, have encountered her. The courtier Montague reasons that contact with Barton cannot by itself prove disloyalty when so many have heard her preach or met her privately.

That reasoning does not protect those connected with her. Thomas Cromwell arrests Barton and seven holy men with her, as well as John Fisher and Thomas More. Margaret’s account presents the arrests as part of a widening power to treat religious dissent and contact as grounds for confinement. Fisher, who had once secured places for Margaret and Reginald, is now held in a stone cell in the Tower; Barton and her associates are also imprisoned. The contrast gives the Carthusian connection a double significance: the order is first a source of care and education, then a link in a network of religious contacts scrutinized by the Crown.

Across these episodes, Sheen Priory’s silence is both a lived discipline and a contested political image. Margaret fears what silence will do to her son when he is a child; as an adult, he returns to it willingly. Yet the same secluded house is associated with a prophecy, a hidden manuscript, and a breach of vows that feeds royal suspicion. The narrative does not establish the Carthusian Order as the author of a political conspiracy. Instead, it shows how a community defined by withdrawal can become politically exposed when its places, visitors, and memories are drawn into a struggle over loyalty and succession.