Margaret Pole and Elizabeth of York's Cousinly Friendship

Margaret Pole and Elizabeth of York are cousins whose friendship grows out of shared Yorkist identity, political danger, and bereavement. Elizabeth offers Margaret protection when they are young, and Margaret becomes a confidante to the queen in turn. Their bond gives private intimacy to the novel’s larger conflict between the House of York and Tudor rule: each woman’s losses are at once familial grief and part of a struggle over who may survive, inherit, and belong at court.

Shared beginnings and mutual protection

Margaret remembers Elizabeth as a companion from the precarious years after the Tudor victory. Both were young, frightened by the upheaval, and determined that the York family should endure. Elizabeth, who would become queen by marrying Henry VII, hoped that York would retain a place in the new order and that its members could share in the rewards of the Tudor court. Their connection therefore begins not as uncomplicated kinship but as an alliance formed under a change of dynasty: Elizabeth’s route to influence ran through marriage to the ruler who had displaced their family.

That alliance becomes deeply personal when Margaret fears for her younger brother, Edward Plantagenet. Elizabeth reassures her that she and her mother will protect him, blocks the Yeomen of the Guard when they come to arrest him, and repeatedly asks Henry VII to release him. The protection cannot alter the outcome: Edward is ultimately executed for his identity as a Plantagenet. Elizabeth stays with Margaret through the grief, sharing the anguish of a loss that also implicates the name and lineage they have in common. For Margaret, Elizabeth is thus not merely a cousin at court; she is the person who tried to stand between her brother and the king’s power, and who remained beside her when that effort failed.

A confidence about the curse

After the Christmas feast at Westminster Palace in the winter of 1500, Elizabeth comes down from her rooms to say goodbye to Margaret, who is leaving while pregnant. Henry VII remains in his chamber. His mother, Margaret Beaufort, attributes his condition to a touch of fever, but Margaret reads his apparent illness as guilt over the deaths of her brother and the alleged traitor accused of joining a plot. The two women recognize a shared bereavement: each has lost a brother, and each understands the cost of surviving within a court shaped by those deaths.

In private, Elizabeth confesses that she and her mother had pronounced a curse against whoever took her brothers from the Tower and put them to death. She recalls that, when she was seventeen, they addressed their words to the river and to the ancestral goddess associated with their family. The curse called for the killer’s son to die while still a boy, and then for his grandson to die as well, so that the family would recognize the deaths as payment for the loss of their own. Elizabeth admits that the words were hers too, not only her mother’s, and fears that she may have cursed her own son, Arthur Tudor. Margaret does not dismiss the possibility: if Henry VII or his mother were responsible for the deaths, the curse might reach Elizabeth’s husband and child. Their whispered exchange makes shared family history feel like a threat carried forward into the next generation.

The secret is also a measure of trust. Elizabeth speaks close to Margaret and draws her away to an enclosed garden, while both are afraid that Margaret Beaufort might be listening. Margaret understands the confession as more than a tale of the supernatural: it exposes Elizabeth’s guilt, fear for Arthur, and dread that the Tudor line might end without boys to inherit. Their kinship allows Elizabeth to voice what she could not safely say in the watching court, while Margaret’s response shows that she shares the danger rather than standing outside it.

Fear, kinship, and courtly silence

The friendship continues to provide practical comfort amid political uncertainty. When news comes of Edmund de la Pole, Margaret’s cousin, Elizabeth steadies her, seats her, and opens a window so that she can recover from the shock. Edmund is a Plantagenet serving Henry VII and is presented as a loyal member of the king’s inner circle, despite his brother’s rebellion. His position makes his possible arrest especially alarming: his example suggests that loyalty might not protect even a prominent cousin from suspicion.

Margaret and Elizabeth’s silence in the aftermath reflects the breadth of their family network. They think of the many cousins and kinsmen connected through blood and marriage, a prominent web that reaches across England. Within the family, those ties mean mutual support and shared interests; under a suspicious gaze, the same closeness could be treated as evidence of faction or conspiracy. Their friendship is therefore both an emotional refuge and a relationship exposed to political interpretation. Elizabeth’s gestures of care do not remove the danger, but they let Margaret face it in the company of someone who understands what the family’s name can cost.

Elizabeth’s death and Margaret’s grief

In February 1503, Margaret receives the news that Elizabeth has died after giving birth to a daughter, who also dies. The news comes in a letter sealed with black wax. Richard Pole offers his condolences, but Margaret cannot tell him how much Elizabeth meant to her. She remembers a companion who had helped her imagine that the House of York could survive the Tudor victory, had promised to guard Edward Plantagenet, and had comforted her when that promise could not save him.

Margaret’s grief is intensified by the repeated losses bound up with Elizabeth’s family. She has already buried Elizabeth’s son; now she faces the queen’s funeral as well. The narration distinguishes the child’s death from Elizabeth’s own: one is associated with what Margaret calls the Tudor disease, the other with Tudor ambition. In Margaret’s view, the family’s safety has been bought at a terrible price, while the woman who once tried to protect her and her brother is gone. Her uncertainty about whether she can bear to attend the funeral conveys how much the death exceeds the formal loss of a queen.

The friendship’s continuing force

Elizabeth’s influence persists in Margaret’s later decisions through remembered obligations. When Margaret’s sons urge action to defend Katherine of Aragon and Princess Mary Tudor, Margaret recalls that she loved Henry VIII’s mother and had promised to keep her sons safe. She also remembers having taught Henry VIII to walk. Those memories complicate her opposition to his policies: her resistance is not simply hostility toward a king, but a sense that he is endangering the inheritance and honor of the family to which Elizabeth had bound her life.

The relationship links several generations through care, grief, and political duty. Elizabeth’s attempt to protect Edward Plantagenet fails, yet it remains central to Margaret’s understanding of loyalty; her confession of the curse turns shared loss into a fear about the future; and her death leaves Margaret with a promise that still shapes later choices. Their friendship gives the novel’s dynastic conflict an intimate scale, showing how affection can persist within the same court that makes family bonds vulnerable to suspicion, succession, and violence.