Edward Plantagenet’s execution, ordered under Henry VII, removed a dynastic rival who had spent most of his youth imprisoned and had offered no armed challenge to the king. In Margaret Pole’s account, the decisive threat was Edward’s identity: as Earl of Warwick and a Plantagenet heir, he embodied a claim the House of Tudor could not erase merely by taking his lands or liberty. His death secured the succession at the cost of turning a family loss into a persistent measure of Tudor power and fear.

Dynastic position and imprisonment

Edward was Margaret Pole’s brother and the Earl of Warwick, a title inherited from their grandfather. Margaret describes him as the true heir to the throne of England and says that supporters might rally to the white rose if his standard were raised. The emblem made visible the political danger attached to his birth: even without action on his part, his name could gather people around a competing royal claim.

The crown stripped him of his fortune and lands, then confined him in the Tower of London among prisoners of different kinds. He had no servants, lands, castle, or education, but retained his name and title. Imprisonment therefore weakened his circumstances without removing the source of the threat as Margaret understood it. He was taken into the Tower at eleven and remained there until he was twenty-four, thirteen years in which his dynastic identity endured while his freedom did not.

The execution at Tower Hill

After those years, Edward was brought out of the Tower under guard. He crossed the drawbridge and was taken to Tower Hill, where he knelt at the block and was executed. Margaret emphasizes the contrast between the confined child and the adult who emerged only to die: the release did not restore his freedom, but carried him from long imprisonment directly to execution.

The account presents Edward as neither a rebel nor an active conspirator. Margaret contrasts him with a separate pretender who claimed the name of Richard of York, took up arms against Henry, and died for that challenge. Edward, by contrast, denied his own name and raised neither his voice nor an army, yet was killed all the same. The distinction sharpens the political logic of his execution: in Margaret’s telling, the danger lay not in what Edward had done, but in the claim his existence represented.

The decision also intersected with the marriage negotiations of the royal house. Margaret says the monarchs of Spain had promised their daughter as a bride for Prince Arthur only when assured that England had no rival heirs. She understands Henry VII’s action against Edward and the pretender as an effort to remove those rivals and secure the betrothal. The account thus connects an individual execution to the management of succession through international marriage as well as domestic force.

Family memory and the cost of survival

Margaret recalls the execution as having taken place the previous day, while she was with her cousin Elizabeth of York. Rain fell throughout the day; Margaret remembers the family’s grief and their withdrawal behind closed shutters. Her account makes the execution intimate without making it private in its consequences: she identifies Edward’s blood with her own and with the Plantagenet family’s shared inheritance.

Elizabeth of York had tried to protect her cousin. When guards came to arrest the young Edward, she barred their way and declared that he should not be taken. She repeatedly appealed to Henry VII for his release and later held Margaret as they grieved over his death. Her protection could delay neither the arrest nor the execution. For Margaret, the loss joined two women through a family name that the Tudor victory had made dangerous to bear.

The execution also shadows the next generation. When Prince Arthur asks about his marriage, Margaret has to set aside bitterness over her brother’s death; Arthur tells her that he had never asked for it. The exchange distinguishes the young prince from the decision that helped clear the way for his betrothal, while showing how the effects of that decision persist inside the family. Margaret’s effort to suppress resentment is part of the aftermath: survival at court requires her to live with a loss she cannot safely undo or openly redress.

A symbol that outlives its bearer

Edward’s execution did not extinguish the political meaning of the white rose. Years later, during Margaret’s journey to Peterborough, a woman in the street blesses the white rose alongside Queen Katherine and the princess. The scene does not identify Edward as the object of the woman’s greeting; instead, it shows the emblem continuing to carry Yorkist associations in public, beyond the life of the imprisoned earl. His death removed him, but not the symbolic language through which Margaret’s family could still be recognized.

Succession and royal authority

The execution belongs to a broader pattern in which the survival of royal heirs and the authority to define legitimacy become inseparable. Later, under Henry VIII, Margaret sees nobles summoned to Westminster Palace to swear an oath of succession even though the Pope has ruled that the marriage of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon is valid. The king’s claim that his own declaration makes a marriage, queen, and princess what he says they are exposes the continuing struggle over who may determine the succession. Thomas More refuses the oath in the form presented, and Henry VIII breaks his promise not to test his friend on the matter. These later events are not consequences of Edward’s execution, but they echo its central conflict: political authority presses against inherited claims, religious judgment, and individual conscience.

The book also returns to the language of a curse when Henry VIII grieves the loss of his son Henry FitzRoy and asks why he has lost those he loves. Margaret does not affirm a supernatural cause. The association instead makes the execution part of a recurring narrative of dynastic vulnerability, in which deaths within the royal family and disputes over heirs unsettle the rulers who seek to control succession. Edward’s fate is therefore both a specific act of Tudor repression and an early, enduring instance of the book’s larger question: whether a crown can make a rival claim disappear by destroying the person who carries it.