Christmas

Christmas in the novel is less a stable celebration than a recurring test of what remains possible under political pressure. Its familiar feasts, gifts, prayers, music, and household preparations carry different meanings as Margaret Pole’s circumstances change: they can shelter Princess Mary’s dignity, disguise a dangerous plan, reopen a relationship with the king, or make imprisonment feel more absolute. Across successive years, the season’s return measures the distance between public festivity and private grief.

A Feast Kept for Mary

In England at Christmas 1531, the court’s outward abundance cannot produce general happiness. Henry VIII keeps a lavish feast at Greenwich, but the queen is away at The More, honored and well served yet alone. Princess Mary and Margaret are ordered to Beaulieu in Essex. Margaret tries to make the twelve days cheerful with wassailing, dancing, disguising, feasting, the Yule log, and the raising of the Christmas crown. The festivities are real, but their meaning is divided: Mary misses her mother, prays for her father, and finds little joy in a season that ought to unite the family.

The separation has hardened by the winter of 1533. At Beaulieu, Margaret expects no invitation to court and hears that the woman who calls herself queen is celebrating another pregnancy, confident this time of a son. Mary cannot send her mother a seasonal gift or even her good wishes. Rather than let that prohibition define the household’s observance, Margaret holds a Christmas feast for the princess. Local farmers’ wives bring apples, cheeses, and smoked hams; relatives send gifts; churches in the surrounding countryside pray for Mary and her mother. The household continues to serve Mary on bended knee and address her by her title. Lady Anne Hussey openly calls her by her true rank, explaining that at forty-three she is too old to change her ways. The feast thus gives material form to a loyalty the king’s orders cannot easily erase: food arrives from the neighborhood, prayers carry Mary’s name, and customary recognition survives inside the house.

Celebration as Cover

By Christmas 1534, Margaret’s public role as hostess masks a perilous private purpose. She has written to Geoffrey Pole and Montague, urging them to hire men and horses and find a boat to take people to Flanders. At Bisham Manor she keeps the feast while waiting anxiously for news from Hatfield and Kimbolton. Finding a way into a royal palace and bribing a servant in a royal prison take time; her sons must also approach boatmen on the Thames carefully and discover who will sail to Flanders and who is loyal to the queen. The ordinary work of Christmas becomes cover for the work of escape. Margaret must seem occupied with the feast and the baking of the great pudding while her household shares an apprehension it cannot show.

That apprehension extends to Bisham Priory. Margaret and her household fear the return of Thomas Cromwell’s inspectors, who have already examined the monastery’s treasures and rich lands. The inspectors departed without explanation, but their silence offers no assurance of safety. Christmas activity and concealment therefore run alongside one another: the household prepares a feast as if nothing is wrong, while the possibility of another inspection hangs over the priory and the rescue plan remains unfinished.

The Court and the Prisoner’s Christmas

In 1537, Christmas briefly brings Margaret into Henry VIII’s presence again. She visits Greenwich with Montague and her grandson Harry, carrying gifts to a court still in mourning for Jane Seymour. The king accepts them, offers seasonal compliments, and permits Margaret to visit the infant Prince Edward, even allowing Harry to accompany her. The nursery’s doubled guards and requirement for written permission make the king’s fear for his son unmistakable. Margaret admires the baby’s healthy appearance and gives his nurse a gold coin, promising prayers for his health. Afterward she goes to Mary’s rooms. Mary rises and runs to her, and Margaret embraces her as she always has. In a quiet Christmas visit, the court grants Margaret access to the king’s son while her lasting bond with the excluded princess remains unmistakable.

A year later, the season reaches Margaret not as a guest but as a prisoner. In her room in the tower at Cowdray House in December 1538, she hears preparations for Christmas outside her door. The household fasts for Advent, cuts holly, ivy, brambles, and gorse to weave a green crown, brings in a great log for the feast, rehearses carols and dances, and orders spices for twelve days of seasonal dishes. These sounds make Margaret imagine herself at home at Bisham; the imagined return ends when she remembers that she is confined and waiting for William Fitzwilliam to bring news that her sons are dead and her hopes finished. When his troop arrives in early December, she watches his entrance from her shuttered window, reading the arrival as the approach of heartbreak before he has delivered his message. The contrast is stark: outside, the household rehearses the season’s abundance; inside, Margaret awaits a report she fears will destroy her family.

Ritual Beyond the Cell

In the winter of 1539, the Tower’s Christmas is marked not by a feast described in detail but by the stillness of captivity. Water freezes in Margaret’s jugs, and drips from the slates form icicles. Harry can attend Edward’s lessons and dine in the Courtenay rooms, while Margaret and Gertrude Courtenay exchange goodwill without writing a word to one another. Margaret’s cousin William de la Pole dies alone in his cold cell after thirty-seven years of imprisonment. She prays for him, reads when the light permits, sews by the window, and prays at the small altar in her room. She tries not to imagine release or the future; instead, she studies endurance. The season belongs to a world that continues beyond the Tower, but the details of cold, restricted movement, and private prayer define what its return means for the prisoners.

After Thomas Cromwell’s death, Margaret expects the prisoners held under his Act of Attainder to be released. No one comes. The king’s new marriage and subsequent illness delay the hope: Margaret waits for him to return from his honeymoon in good spirits and sign their release, then hears that he has shut himself away in pain and desolation. Through summer and autumn she waits for news of his recovery. As cold weather returns, she imagines that he may pardon them after Christmas, as part of the season’s celebrations. He does not. Christmas therefore ends this sequence not with reunion or reprieve but with another failed expectation. Its rituals recur, yet recurrence alone cannot restore the family, free the prisoners, or make the king act; the season’s familiar promise becomes a measure of how long Margaret has been made to wait.