Margaret Pole and Thomas Cromwell

Margaret Pole and Thomas Cromwell stand on opposite sides of Henry VIII’s effort to remake religious and political authority. Cromwell becomes the king’s indispensable administrator, carrying royal policy into Parliament and enforcing it against dissent; Margaret, whose loyalties run through family, faith, and the displaced Queen Katherine, tries to preserve relationships and channels of counsel that the regime is closing. Their conflict grows from disputed claims about marriage and inheritance into a contest over who may define truth, loyalty, and treason—and ends with both of them confined in the Tower of London.

From the Church settlement to the succession oath

Cromwell’s ascent is marked by the departure of Thomas More, whose resignation as Lord Chancellor follows the Church’s surrender to the king. The news reaches Margaret through her son Montague: the king will rule the Church himself, the Pope is to be disregarded in England, and More has returned the seal of office and gone home. Margaret recognizes the consequence as more than a change of personnel. Her daughter-in-law Princess Mary Tudor understands that the king has taken the Church, its wealth, laws, and courts into his own possession, and neither Margaret nor Montague can contradict her. Cromwell’s power lies in helping make that transformation a working political fact.

In spring 1534, Cromwell administers the succession oath to the assembled peers at Westminster Palace. Margaret sees him occupying the office once held by More, but the oath demands more than a formal acknowledgment of royal succession: it asks the nobility to accept the king’s account of his marriage and family. The Pope has publicly ruled that Queen Katherine’s marriage to Henry VIII is valid, yet the king claims that papal authority has no place in England and that his own declarations settle the matter. Margaret’s account presents the resulting divide as a crisis of judgment as well as obedience: the peers know what the Pope has ruled, but must decide what they themselves can swear.

More also refuses the oath as it stands. Margaret remembers that he would have signed a revised version and did not condemn those who accepted the existing one; he refused because he could not sign it without violating his conscience. Henry VIII had promised More that he would never test him on this matter, but breaks that promise. Cromwell is the official administering the oath, while the king’s broken word makes plain the force behind the process: private conscience is allowed little protection when royal policy requires public conformity.

Opposition through family and secret channels

Margaret’s resistance does not take the form of a public challenge to Cromwell alone. She works through a family network that can carry messages between the princess, Queen Katherine, and allies abroad. When Margaret promises Princess Mary Tudor that a paper will reach her mother, Montague proposes giving it to Eustace Chapuys, the Spanish ambassador, who secretly writes to Queen Katherine and forwards her letters to the emperor and the Pope. Margaret insists that no one must know the message has passed through them. Secrecy is not incidental: it is the condition that allows opposition to continue under surveillance.

Reginald Pole’s reports sharpen the stakes. He says that Charles V will invade if Henry VIII publicly marries Anne Boleyn and sets Princess Mary Tudor aside, and that the emperor has sworn to defend his aunt and cousin. Montague believes war is certain. Margaret’s family is therefore maintaining ties not merely to sympathetic correspondents but to a potential foreign intervention against the king. Her efforts to rescue the princess extend those ties into practical preparations: Geoffrey checks that a boatman at Grays is ready to leave, Arthur Plantagenet, Lord Lisle, in Calais agrees to receive goods, and Montague brings several strong horses to court under the explanation that they are for the hunting season. Through these arrangements, Margaret’s opposition becomes a covert operation that Cromwell’s government may interpret as disloyalty or conspiracy.

Suspicion, negotiation, and Geoffrey’s arrest

The danger around Margaret’s household becomes more immediate when messages connected to Reginald and a warning about Francis Bryan are discovered. Montague tells Margaret that Cromwell has read the message Hugh Holland carried to Reginald and knows it was not an ordinary note about local wheat prices. Cromwell accuses Geoffrey of disloyalty, but Montague distinguishes that accusation from treason: warning a brother that someone has been sent to kill him is not, in itself, treason. Geoffrey is nevertheless arrested, and Margaret fears what panic may lead him to say. The relationship between her household and Cromwell is thus both political and personal: his investigations reach her sons, while their secret communications give the government grounds to scrutinize the family.

Cromwell’s methods also make rumor dangerous. Margaret’s associates recognize that gossip can be made to sound incriminating even when there is no evidence. Montague identifies a merchant as the person who carried Margaret’s warning to Reginald and helped send her chaplain overseas. When the family seeks an audience with Cromwell, he delays them for days before Montague meets him, apparently by chance. Montague reports that he raised the rumors and suggested that Gervase Tyndale’s tongue be slit as a warning; Cromwell neither agreed nor refused, but asked to see Geoffrey. He then dines with Montague and later questions Geoffrey again. The account gives no evidence that Tyndale was punished, but it shows how quickly a dispute over reputation can become a matter for Cromwell’s attention and how the family must negotiate with the official who controls access to the machinery of government.

Attainder and the reversal of power

In 1539, Parliament considers Cromwell’s Act of Attainder against the Plantagenets. It declares the family traitors without trial or evidence, forfeits their goods to the Crown, and disinherits their children. Margaret and Gertrude Courtenay are included among the living and the dead. Cromwell presents letters attributed to Gertrude and an undelivered letter from Margaret to Reginald, along with the white silk badge of the Five Wounds of Christ and the white rose that Thomas Darcy had given her. The badge is treated as incriminating evidence, although the narration stresses that possessing an embroidered badge in an old box is not itself a crime. Its symbolic association with the Pilgrimage of Grace supplies the political meaning the government wants to attach to it.

The result is imprisonment in the Tower of London for Margaret, her grandson Harry, Gertrude, and Gertrude’s young son. Cromwell’s role in the attainder makes him the immediate face of the power that has dispossessed them, though the king remains the authority in whose name they are held. When Margaret later sees Cromwell dragged from a barge and brought into the same Tower, the reversal is stark: the once-powerful councillor has lost his chain of office and is a prisoner among those he helped confine. Margaret weeps with relief and expects that his death will bring freedom, since they were imprisoned under his attainder. Yet no one opens their cell. The hope that Cromwell’s fall will undo the consequences of his policy proves premature, and their confinement continues under the king’s rule.