Execution of Margaret Pole

The execution of Margaret Pole is a sudden, secretive killing that turns a royal command into a final conflict over whether she will submit to death. Told that she has only an hour and a half to live, she confronts the absence of a scaffold, the smallness of the waiting crowd, and the lack of any trial in the scene. At the block, her initial obedience breaks into resistance: her repeated refusal becomes both a struggle to stay alive and a witness to the wrong she believes has been done to her family.

The Sentence and Its Abruptness

Mr. Philips first says only that he is grieved, then tells Margaret that she is to be executed. Her response is disbelief. She understands the prospect as extraordinary for a woman of royal blood: in her view, a noblewoman cannot be put to death without a charge and a trial. She recalls the proceedings against Anne Boleyn, whose execution had been preceded by a trial in which the peers of the realm were convinced of grave accusations. The contrast makes Margaret’s own situation seem not merely dangerous but stripped of even that formal process.

The details that follow heighten the sense of haste. Looking from a low window toward the green, Margaret sees no scaffold. Mr. Philips explains that a block is being brought and placed on the grass. When she asks when the execution will take place, she expects the sentence to allow at least a day or several more; instead, he tells her it is to happen at seven, in an hour and a half. He then leaves with his head down. The scene gives no intervening hearing, preparation, or opportunity to appeal: the time between the announcement and the execution is itself part of the sentence’s force.

A Private Execution in Public View

Margaret understands the lack of a scaffold as a sign that the killing is being kept out of ordinary public ceremony. The block is set on the grass rather than on a scaffold at Tower Hill, beyond the walls. The execution is therefore both visible and concealed: a few people have gathered, but the event has not been broadly announced. Among those Margaret notices is the chain of the Lord Mayor of London. The small attendance does not make the act less official; it makes the contrast between royal authority and public witnessing more pronounced.

With so little time, Margaret confesses to a chaplain and asks him to go immediately to the boys, give them her blessing and love, and tell them to stay away from the windows facing the green. Her last preparations are directed toward her children, even as she tries to keep them from witnessing the execution. The windows connect the family’s private space to the place of death: she cannot prevent the event, but she can still ask that the boys be spared its sight.

Margaret interprets the speed of the order as evidence that Henry VIII may have decided on it only the previous night and that it was sent out that morning. This is her inference, not a separately confirmed account of the king’s decision. In her view, no one in her extensive family has been left able to dissuade him. The execution thus appears to her as an act of concentrated royal will, delivered too quickly for intervention and carried out without the public process she believes should protect someone of her rank.

From Obedience to Resistance

At the place of execution, the headsman instructs Margaret to put her head on the block and stretch out her hands when ready. She obeys at first, lowering herself awkwardly onto the grass. Then, just as she is about to place her forehead against the block and signal that the headsman may strike, a sudden desire to live overtakes her. She says no. The turn is decisive: what had looked like acceptance becomes an effort to withdraw her consent, even though the execution is already in motion.

The headsman’s first blow does not end the scene. Margaret struggles to rise, repeating her refusal as further blows fall and as she attempts to crawl away. The account does not present her resistance as a means of escape; it ends in her death. Its importance lies instead in the change from the obedient posture demanded of her to a defiance she sustains to the last. She explicitly rejects submission to the will of Henry VIII and understands her struggle as a way of bearing witness to the wrong done to her and her family.

Ending and Significance

The scene’s central reversal is not that Margaret can overturn the king’s command, but that the command cannot make her willing. The execution proceeds, yet its intended posture of submission is interrupted by her repeated refusal. Her final words are not an argument heard by a court or a plea that delays the sentence. They are the last action available to her within a process that has given her almost no time and no evident opportunity to contest it.

The author’s note places this death within a much longer life. Margaret was sixty-seven when she was killed on Tower Green, and the note identifies her commonly remembered distinction as Henry VIII’s oldest victim on the scaffold. It also insists that her life had been lived at the center of the Tudor court and the former royal family, although the lives of women such as hers were largely ignored by contemporary chroniclers and later historians. The execution therefore closes the novel’s account of a political life as well as depicting a killing: the hurried block on the grass reduces a life embedded in royal affairs to a concealed, hastily arranged death, while Margaret’s resistance insists that the manner of her end be remembered as an injustice.