Margaret Pole’s move to Syon Abbey was a refuge wrested from financial ruin, but it also forced her to separate from her young son Reginald. With her older boys already sent away and no means to keep all her children at home, she accepted shelter at Syon and a place for Reginald at nearby Sheen Priory. The river between the houses made their closeness visible; the discipline of the priory made their separation real.

Financial Ruin and the Search for Shelter

Margaret’s choices followed a year of failed efforts to keep her household afloat. She could not buy her boys new riding boots or feed their horses. Borrowing from herself and taking from her tenants had not solved the shortfall; she concluded that the family was ruined. In her account, widowhood, poverty, and her name all worked against her, while the king’s mother’s hostility meant that others would not dare help. Two cousins remained imprisoned in the Tower of London, leaving her without their support.

Her kinsman George Neville was the one person who answered the many letters she sent. He offered to raise her oldest boys at his home, so Margaret sent Henry and Arthur away with a promise that she would fetch them when she could and that their separation would not last forever. Her steward, John Little, took them to Birling Manor in Kent. The departure was painfully immediate: the boys rode on the last of the horses, in shabby clothes, uncertain of where they were going. Margaret tried to smile and wave, but tears blurred her view. She feared she had failed them as their mother and would not be able to raise them as Plantagenets.

Ursula, at eight, was too young to be sent to a great household, and remained with Margaret. So did Geoffrey, nearly two, still learning to walk and not yet speaking. Margaret describes him as anxious and easily brought to tears, and says that she could not bear to part with him: his only word was Mama. But keeping some of her children with her did not mean she could keep Reginald. She asked her father for help, explaining that she could not pay her bills or keep her children at home, and requested a place for the little boy in a religious house. If the Church required it, she would give him to God; she also acknowledged that she could not keep him.

A Refuge Across the River

The reply arranged more than Margaret had requested. She could live at Syon Abbey with Ursula and Geoffrey, while Reginald was placed in Sheen Priory, the monastery attached to the abbey. Syon was one of her family’s favored religious houses, opposite the old Sheen Palace. It was governed by a Mother Abbess and attended by about fifty nuns, who also received noble visitors. The arrangement promised food and a roof for the next few years. Ursula might later become a novice and nun, giving her a secure future.

John Fisher found Reginald a place at Sheen Priory, only a few miles away across the river. The distance made it possible for Margaret to imagine small forms of contact: perhaps she might be allowed to set a candle in her window, whose glow Reginald could see, or hire a boatman to visit him on feast days. These were hopes, not guarantees. The two placements were physically close, but their rules would govern whether mother and son could meet.

That contrast turned the proposed refuge into a source of dread. Syon was not a silent house: its sisters went into London to teach and pray. Sheen, by contrast, belonged to the Carthusian Order, whose monks lived as solitary hermits. Except on Sundays and feast days, when they might speak, and during a weekly walk when they could talk quietly, the priory maintained prayerful silence. The monks lived and worked alone in individual cells, enclosed by high walls. Margaret knew Reginald as a bright, talkative child who loved reading aloud, telling riddles and jokes, and learning to sing in a round. She tried to reassure herself that he might learn to value silence and find a religious calling there. Yet she feared that, if no such vocation came, she would have placed her lively son in a wordless prison for life.

The Journey and the Parting

The journey away from home brought the arrangement out of the realm of plans and into the lives of the children. Margaret rode pillion behind John Little with Geoffrey in her arms; Ursula rode a small pony, and Reginald rode his brother’s old hunter. He rode well, with his father’s ease with horses and people, but Margaret thought of what he would leave behind: the stables, the dogs, and the noise of the farmyard. She could not bring herself to tell him their destination. She imagined he would ask where they were going and that she would then find the courage to explain that she, Ursula, and Geoffrey were bound for one religious house, while he was going to another. He did not ask. He seemed subdued by leaving home, while Geoffrey was excited by the journey and Ursula’s initial brightness gave way to whimpering.

Only on the last morning, on the towpath beside the river as they rode toward Sheen, did Margaret tell him, “We’ll soon be there. This will be your new home.” Reginald looked up from his pony and asked, “Our new home?” Margaret answered, “No,” and told him that she would stay nearby, just across the river. The short exchange exposed the difference between the journey as a family outing and its actual purpose: Reginald had assumed they would remain together, while Margaret had been carrying the knowledge that they would part.

When the priory towers came into view, the gate opened and the prior came out to greet them. He took Reginald by the hand and helped him down from the saddle. Margaret promised that she would visit and that Reginald would be allowed to visit her. But the boy stood very small beside the prior, pale-faced and without defiance, and pleaded, “Lady Mother, let me come with you and my brother and sister. Don’t leave me here.” The prior immediately made the house’s rule explicit: children were to be silent before their elders, and in the priory Reginald would speak only when ordered. “Silence, holy silence. You will learn to love it.” Reginald folded his lower lip under his teeth and said no more, still looking at his mother.

Separation and Its Aftermath

The prior urged Margaret away, reasoning that the parting should be done quickly because it had to be done. She turned her horse and rode off. Reginald was only six, pale with fear beside the prior; though he obeyed and remained silent, his mouth formed the word Mother. Margaret’s account ends the departure in helplessness: there was nothing she could do or say, so she rode away.

The move brought the household’s financial emergency to a partial, practical resolution: Margaret and her younger children had shelter at Syon, while Reginald had a place at Sheen. But the arrangement divided a family already dispersed by poverty, and its promised nearness could not undo the separation. The river was narrow enough for Margaret to imagine seeing the priory chimneys and perhaps reaching her son on feast days; the institutional rules placed him in a life of silence that she feared would suppress the very qualities she loved in him.

In Winter 1506, Margaret lived at Syon Abbey under a discipline different from Sheen’s, yet she describes herself as living as though sworn dumb, like her little boy. The sisters did not keep silence, but she could not speak of her resentment and bitterness without giving voice to more resentment and bitterness. The separation therefore shaped both sides of the refuge: Reginald entered a house where silence was imposed as religious discipline, while his mother made silence her own response to a parting she had been unable to prevent.