The River Thames serves as more than scenery in Margaret Pole’s account: it is at once a public thoroughfare, a place of courtly pleasure, and a possible channel for secret communication and escape. Its waters carry Princess Mary Tudor before cheering onlookers, bring Montague’s torchlit barge to a nighttime rendezvous, and connect the court’s piers with routes beyond London.

Public passage and royal performance

On the journey home to Richmond Palace, Princess Mary Tudor sits at the rear of the royal barge on a gold throne as people cheer from the riverbank. She acknowledges the wherrymen with a raised hand and inclines her head when fishwives at Lambeth quay call blessings on her and her mother, Katherine of Aragon. Her gestures are carefully limited: she recognizes the crowd without appearing disloyal to her father. The river thus gives royal visibility a public setting, where even a small movement can carry political meaning.

That composed passage contrasts sharply with what follows on land. Once the bedroom door closes behind them, Mary collapses into uncontrollable sobbing, unable to contain the grief that Margaret understands as bound up with her parents’ separation. The barge has carried a princess who must hold herself steady before the public; the room beyond the journey reveals the distress that performance conceals.

Courtly recreation and the river at dusk

The Thames also frames the court’s seasonal entertainments. Swifts, swallows, and martins build nests along the palace walls while the courtiers bring in the May, dance in the woods, race and swim, and fish by the river. At a bonfire, cooks prepare the catch in butter in cauldrons among the ashes. Later, barges carry the company out as musicians play across the water and twilight settles over the river.

One evening’s return interrupts this leisurely pattern. Coming home without torches, the party hears the drum of rowers echo over the water and sees Montague’s barge approaching with torches at both ends. Margaret initially expects to meet her son alone and sends Mary toward the palace. Mary instead insists that, at sixteen, she is old enough to hear what he has come to say. The river journey has become an approach to consequential family news, and its landing place a threshold between the court’s quiet evening and the political danger awaiting the family.

Piers, letters, and concealed routes

The river’s piers and traffic offer practical means of movement. After Mary gives Margaret an unsealed, unnamed letter intended for her mother, Margaret leaves by the gardens and pier, takes a barge downriver to the water stairs above London Bridge, and continues through the City under the protection of her guards. At a later meeting, she shows the folded paper to Montague and Geoffrey Pole and explains that she has promised to get it into Katherine of Aragon’s hands. Montague proposes passing it to Eustace Chapuys, the Spanish ambassador, who secretly writes to the queen and delivers her letters to the emperor and the Pope. Margaret warns that no one must know the letter has come through them. The waterside route belongs to a wider network of guarded messages, intermediaries, and concealed loyalties.

That network also informs plans to get Mary out of England. Margaret remains in London while Montague and Geoffrey choose a guard, plan a route skirting the city, and arrange for a ship to wait at a small Thames-side village such as Grays. Geoffrey later confirms that the boatman there is ready to leave when called. The scheme depends on the river’s connection between inland approaches and a waiting vessel, but it remains a contingency rather than a completed escape. When Mary receives letters from the Boleyn queen offering friendship, the immediate danger appears to ease; later threats to her safety renew the family’s consideration of flight.

A route shadowed by surveillance

The river’s usefulness is inseparable from the risks of moving people and information through a politically watched world. The family’s escape preparations rely on trusted boatmen, carefully selected escorts, and routes that avoid London. They also intersect with other channels of communication: Margaret’s kinsman Arthur Plantagenet, Viscount Lisle, says he can receive goods she is preparing to send to Calais, while a message to his London steward will signal their arrival. Meanwhile, Montague’s horses and a stable boy’s reports about Mary’s daily walks provide other pieces of the plan. The account does not describe a successful departure by river; it presents the Thames as an available but precarious passage, one element in a larger effort to protect Mary while keeping the family’s intentions secret.