Bill of attainder targeting the Plantagenet family

The Bill of attainder targeting the Plantagenet family is the parliamentary measure that brands the family traitorous without a trial, confiscates its goods and threatens its descendants’ inheritance. Its force lies not in a demonstrated offense but in the conversion of kinship, correspondence and a keepsake into evidence of guilt. For Margaret Pole, the bill marks the point at which an old family name itself becomes a crime and imprisonment replaces any meaningful hearing.

Background and Stakes

The act comes after years of conflict over who may define religious and political legitimacy in England. When Montague reports that the Church has surrendered to Henry VIII, he describes a settlement in which the king will rule the Church himself and the Pope will be disregarded in England. Thomas More, unwilling to remain Lord Chancellor under the new arrangement, has resigned. The news makes the shift in authority tangible: the Crown is claiming jurisdiction over matters that had belonged to the Church.

The succession dispute sharpens that conflict. At the 1534 oath administered to the nobility by Thomas Cromwell, Margaret understands that the Pope has publicly ruled the marriage of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon valid, while Henry VIII has declared otherwise and claims authority to determine the consequences for the succession. Thomas More refuses to sign the oath as written, though he would accept a revised version; Henry VIII had promised his friend that he would not be tested on this point, but the oath puts him to the test all the same. The scene establishes a pattern in which official declarations demand outward conformity even where conscience and competing authority remain unresolved.

Montague’s proposed response is to defend Katherine and the princess. He plans to take Geoffrey Pole with him, have Geoffrey slip away at Calais to meet Reginald Pole, and send reports and messages to the Pope and to Katherine’s nephew, the King of Spain. Montague hopes that a papal ruling against Henry VIII might compel the king to take Katherine back. He argues that the family must be the ones to defy the king, invoking their Plantagenet identity and the white rose as a shared cause. Margaret’s close-knit family connections, which sustain alliances through marriage, are also vulnerable to suspicion: she recognizes that the same interwoven ties that bind the family together can make it appear to outsiders to be a faction or conspiracy.

The Parliamentary Measure

In the summer of 1539, Parliament meets while Margaret is held in the Tower of London. Cromwell presents the Act of Attainder, which declares the Plantagenets traitors without trial or evidence. The consequences reach beyond the named adults: their goods are forfeited to the Crown and their children disinherited. Gertrude Courtenay and Margaret are listed among the dead men whose names appear in the act, demonstrating how the measure gathers the living into a collective accusation built around family identity.

The bill does not merely punish particular conduct. It makes the family’s name, property and descendants part of the charge. The declaration operates as a political verdict before any individual case is tested in court. Its reach is especially stark because the people named include a woman and children as well as men already dead: the sentence follows lineage, not simply an act attributed to a single accused person.

The Case Presented as Evidence

The materials brought forward do little to establish a specific offense. Officials produce dozens of letters said to have been written by Gertrude. They also produce a letter Margaret wrote to Reginald Pole, intended to assure him of her love, which was never delivered. The letter’s private purpose and failure to reach its recipient contrast with the public use to which it is put: it is presented within a case that treats family correspondence as incriminating material.

Cromwell then takes a badge from a satchel: the Badge of the Five Wounds and White Rose, embroidered on white silk and given to Margaret by Thomas Darcy. He offers it as conclusive evidence of her guilt, although the badge itself is not a crime. The distinction between an object’s meaning and the accusation attached to it is central to the scene. A devotional emblem associated with the white rose can be made to signify political disloyalty without proof that possessing it establishes treason.

The response in Parliament is notably muted. Neither the House of Commons nor the House of Lords erupts in protest. Margaret considers that the members may be accustomed to attainders and death, or that some may keep similar badges in their own country houses, remnants of a time when they hoped better days might come. Whatever their reasons, their silence leaves Cromwell’s limited exhibits standing as the public face of the case.

Imprisonment and Significance

The immediate consequence is confinement in the Tower of London at Henry VIII’s wish. Margaret’s grandson Harry Pole, Gertrude and Gertrude’s young son are also kept there. The bill’s reach is thus felt not only in the forfeiture of property and the threat to inheritance, but in the enclosure of several generations of the family.

During the following winter, imprisonment narrows the family’s life to separate rooms and constrained contact. Harry is allowed to attend Edward’s lessons and dine in the Courtenay rooms, while Margaret and Gertrude exchange goodwill but do not write to one another. Margaret’s cousin William de la Pole dies in his cell after thirty-seven years as a prisoner. His death is not presented as a consequence of the 1539 act, but it makes the danger of prolonged confinement within the Tower unmistakable to Margaret.

The act’s central reversal is that symbols of inherited standing and allegiance become instruments of accusation. A family that had understood its bonds as a source of duty and collective identity is recast by royal power as a threatening faction; its correspondence and keepsakes are made to carry the weight of a verdict unsupported by trial. The resulting imprisonment leaves Margaret focused not on release or the future but on endurance.