Execution of Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick

Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, is executed after thirteen years in the Tower of London, where the Tudors had confined him as a continuing threat to their rule. In Margaret Pole’s account, his title and name survive the loss of his lands and liberty; his death therefore reaches beyond the scaffold, turning dynastic rivalry into personal grief and an enduring image of the Tudor curse.

Background and Imprisonment

Edward is Margaret’s brother and, in her understanding, the true heir to the English throne. Known as The White Rose, he remains a living emblem of the House of Plantagenet even after the Tudors strip away his fortune and lands. Margaret describes him as having been shut in the Tower when he was eleven, without servants, property, a castle, or an education. His title and lineage, however, cannot be taken from him.

He remains imprisoned for thirteen years. Margaret’s account stresses the length and confinement of that interval: Edward does not feel meadow grass beneath his feet again until he is twenty-four. His survival preserves the political meaning attached to his name, but also leaves him in the hands of the dynasty whose claim he is said to challenge.

The Execution at Tower Hill

Edward is brought out of the Tower under guard and taken across the drawbridge to Tower Hill. There, he kneels before the block and is executed. Margaret does not describe herself as witnessing the scene. She is beside her cousin the queen when she receives the news, and dates it in her narration as having happened the previous day.

Rain falls throughout that day. In the queen’s rooms, Margaret and her cousin close the shutters against the dark weather. The private act of shutting out the storm cannot shut out what it signifies to Margaret: Edward’s death is not simply the end of her brother’s life, but the destruction of a member of her family whose royal blood made him a focus of political hope and Tudor anxiety.

Family and Dynastic Stakes

Margaret’s grief is inseparable from the family’s precarious position. She has children of her own, including sons named Henry and Arthur, and is pregnant when the news reaches her. Edward’s execution makes the danger facing the Plantagenets intimate: kinship and inherited names are sources of identity, but under Tudor rule they can also make relatives vulnerable to suspicion and confinement.

The wider family network remains politically charged. Margaret recalls the Plantagenet cousins and kinsmen whose marriages and blood ties link them across England, and later describes those same connections as capable of appearing, to a fearful observer, like a faction or conspiracy. Edward’s death thus belongs to a larger pattern in which family solidarity can serve as a claim to legitimacy while exposing the family to royal suspicion. The White Rose continues to figure in later appeals to Plantagenet identity and resistance, even after Edward himself has been killed.

The Curse in Retrospect

The execution also becomes part of the book’s recurring language of dynastic loss. In a later crisis, Margaret hears Henry VIII attribute his own bereavements to a curse. Elsewhere, the death of a royal infant is narrated as another extinguishing of a hoped-for line. These later events do not change the circumstances of Edward’s execution; they give it a place in a wider sequence in which fragile bodies and contested succession repeatedly unsettle royal claims.

That contrast sharpens the episode’s significance. Edward’s political importance rests on the survival of a name and a hereditary claim, yet the state’s power is shown in its ability to keep him confined and finally end his life. The execution leaves the Tudor throne in possession, but in Margaret’s telling it cannot erase the Plantagenet identity that made Edward dangerous to the dynasty in the first place.