1536

In 1536, private hopes for a royal reconciliation unfold against a contest over who may define the law, the Church, and the succession. Margaret Pole watches Henry VIII consolidate authority, while the hopes she and her family place in Princess Mary, the Old Faith, and the possibility of Reginald Pole’s return are repeatedly unsettled by events. The year moves from guarded optimism to fear, and finally to a Christmas observance that preserves a vision of restoration without confirming it.

Earlier Conflicts Over Marriage and Authority

The struggles of 1536 rest on earlier disputes about marriage and succession. Margaret had been pressed to affirm that Prince Arthur and Katherine of Aragon had consummated their marriage, and later faced demands to support the claim that their marriage had been consummated. The issue mattered because Henry VIII’s ability to marry Katherine’s former husband depended on the marriage’s status; Margaret’s testimony could therefore be treated as a threat to the king’s household and dynastic future. These earlier confrontations show how a question of private fact could become a political test of loyalty.

The succession and the prospect of a male heir had also carried enormous weight well before 1536. Margaret was told she would raise the next King of England, but the baby entrusted to her care was found lifeless in his cradle. In another earlier confinement, hopes that Katherine might bear a living son gave way to the birth of a stillborn girl. Such losses form part of the background to the later struggle over Princess Mary’s status: royal legitimacy was argued through law and authority, but the pressure behind those arguments arose from the fragile prospects of the Tudor succession.

The Church and the Succession Oath

The break with papal authority had become a direct challenge to the structure of government. When Margaret’s son Montague explained that the Church had submitted to the king, he described a new order in which the Pope was to be disregarded in England and Henry VIII would rule the Church himself. Thomas More had resigned as Lord Chancellor and returned the seal of office. Princess Mary understood the change as an enlargement of her father’s possession of the country, extending across the Church’s wealth, laws, and courts.

In spring 1534, Margaret was summoned with the other peers to Westminster Palace, where Thomas Cromwell administered the oath of succession. The Pope had publicly ruled that the marriage of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon was valid, yet the king asserted that Katherine was not his wife and that Anne Boleyn was queen. The oath required the nobility to confront the distance between that papal ruling and the king’s claim that his own declaration settled the matter. Margaret’s account presents the conflict as more than a test of obedience: competing authorities offered incompatible accounts of marriage and legitimacy, while each individual had to decide what could be sworn in good conscience.

More’s refusal made that conflict personal. He would have accepted a rewritten oath, but would not sign its existing form; the king had promised his friend never to subject him to this test and nevertheless did so. Margaret later regretted that she had not stood beside More. Away from London at Bisham Manor, she was relieved to leave the city where More and John Fisher were held in the Tower and where Elizabeth Barton had been executed. Her retreat did not resolve the moral dilemma; it left her with a persistent sense that keeping safe had come at a personal cost.

Hope for Mary and the Crisis of May

By April 1536, Margaret had reason to hope that the political tide might turn. At the Manor of the Rose in London, she visited her cousin Gertrude Courtenay. The women had privately toasted the prospect that Anne Boleyn would fall, Henry VIII would recover his senses, and Princess Mary would be named his true heir. Yet Margaret did not trust Cromwell. She suspected he was balancing the Boleyn interest against France and the prospect of friendship with Spain and a return to Rome, waiting to see which side would prevail. The expectation of Mary’s restoration was thus entangled with suspicion about the minister managing the king’s policy.

In May, the promise of a favorable turn gave way to alarm. At L’Erber, Montague paced the private chapel and feared that Henry VIII had become unpredictable and that no one was safe. His fear contradicted the cautious optimism Margaret had expressed only weeks earlier: neither family connection nor apparent political advantage could guarantee protection. The change is central to the year’s narrative. The same court that seemed to offer a path back to Mary’s recognition could become a place of sudden danger, with no dependable way to read the king’s intentions.

Royal Grief and the King’s Claim

The king’s authority is repeatedly set beside his personal vulnerability. When Henry VIII mourned the death of his son Henry FitzRoy, he wondered whether a curse explained the losses of those he loved. Margaret did not affirm his suspicion. The scene shows grief intruding into the performance of kingship, while the king himself searches for an explanation that would give meaning to repeated bereavement.

At the same time, Henry’s public title and reach had expanded. After claiming sole rule in England and rejecting the Pope’s authority there, he took to styling himself Majesty rather than Your Grace. Margaret registers the contrast between this imperial-sounding dignity and the grieving man who had to be lifted from the floor and helped into bed. The title expresses political supremacy; the scene of mourning exposes the mortal person beneath it. In a year when the succession and the Church are both at stake, that contrast makes royal power appear immense in law and fragile in the lives it cannot secure.

Rebellion and a Christmas of Expectation

In October, while at Bisham Manor, Margaret heard reports of thousands marching on destroyed abbeys and rebuilding them while singing the psalms formerly heard there. Stories of a comet over Yorkshire and of the rising spreading underground in Lincolnshire mingled with her uncertain information from the country. Gertrude wrote that Henry Courtenay had been ordered to muster an army, serve under Lord Talbot, and march north. Although the king had said he would lead his own force, alarming reports from the North led him to send his kinsmen instead. The rebellion placed Margaret’s family near the advancing royal response, while the restoration of the abbeys gave the rising a visible religious dimension.

In November, worried about her two sons, with the king’s army behind them and the pilgrims before them, Margaret took Montague’s children to London in search of news. She expected that the rebellion would complicate plans for the king to crown his wife: with men and arms being sent north, she doubted that Henry could afford a grand ceremony, and believed the unrest had shaken his confidence. Her account keeps the immediate danger and the court’s ceremonial ambitions in view at once, showing how an uprising could disturb both military plans and the display of royal authority.

By December, uncertainty had not extinguished Margaret’s hopes. Although Bisham Priory remained closed, she opened her chapel at L’Erber for the old Christmas observances, keeping its door open and dressing the altar with cloth of gold, a chalice, a crucifix, and a monstrance holding the Host. The chapel’s saints and family banners made its devotional setting also a dynastic one: the White Rose gleamed opposite the Pole family’s pansy. Margaret imagined that Reginald might return to restore the Church, while Montague and Geoffrey might help restore the king to his proper royal place. The year therefore ends not with a resolution, but with a deliberate act of religious continuity and a renewed, fragile expectation of change.