There is an author who relates that the lady Mary was educated with the cardinal under his mother, and hints that an early attachment had thus been formed between them5: A statement manifestly inaccurate, since Pole was sixteen years older than the princess; though it is not improbable that Mary, during some period of her youth, might be placed under the care of the countess of Salisbury, and permitted to associate with her son on easy and affectionate terms. It is well known that after Mary's accession, Charles V. impeded the journey of Pole into England till her marriage with his son Philip had been actually solemnized; but this was probably rather from a persuasion of the inexpediency of the cardinal's sooner opening his legantine commission in England, than from any fear of his supplanting in Mary's affections his younger rival, though some have ascribed to the emperor the latter motive.
When however it is recollected, that in consequence of Henry's having caused a posthumous judgement of treason to be pronounced against the papal martyr Becket, his shrine to be destroyed, his bones burned, and his ashes scattered, the pope had at length, in 1538, fulminated against him the long-suspended sentence of excommunication, and made a donation of his kingdom to the king of Scots, and thus impressed the sanction of religion on any rebellious attempts of his Roman-catholic subjects,—it would be too much to pronounce the apprehensions of the monarch to have been altogether chimerical. But his suspicion appears, as usual, to have gone beyond the truth, and his anger to have availed itself of slight pretexts to ruin where he feared and hated.
Such was the state of his mind when the treachery or weakness of Geffrey Pole furnished him with intelligence of a traitorous correspondence carried on with his brother the cardinal by several persons of distinction attached to the papal interest, and in which he had himself been a sharer. On his information, the marquis of Exeter, viscount Montacute, sir Edward Nevil, and sir Nicholas Carew, were apprehended, tried and found guilty of high treason. Public opinion was at this time nothing; and notwithstanding the rank, consequence and popularity of the men whose lives were sacrificed on this occasion; notwithstanding that secret consciousness of his own ill-will towards them, which ought to have rendered Henry more than usually cautious in his proceedings,—not even an attempt was made to render their guilt clear and notorious to the nation at large; and posterity scarcely even knows of what designs they were accused; to overt acts it is quite certain that they had not proceeded.
Henry lord Montacute was obnoxious on more than one account: he was the brother of cardinal Pole; and as eldest son of Margaret, sole surviving child of the duke of Clarence and heiress to her brother the earl of Warwick, he might be regarded as succeeding to those claims on the crown which under Henry VII. had proved fatal to the last-mentioned unfortunate and ill-treated nobleman. During the early part of this reign, however, he, in common with other members of the family of Pole, had received marks of the friendship of Henry. In 1514, his mother was authorized to assume the title of countess of Salisbury, and he that of viscount Montacute, notwithstanding the attainder formerly passed against the great house of Nevil, from whom these honors were derived. In 1521 lord Montacute had been indicted for concealing the treasons, real or pretended, of the duke of Buckingham; but immediately on his acquittal he was restored to the good graces of his sovereign, and, two years after, attended him on an expedition to France.
It is probable that lord Montacute was popular; he was at least a partisan of the old religion, and heir to the vast possessions which his mother derived from the king-making earl of Warwick her maternal grandfather; sufficient motives with Henry for now wishing his removal. If the plot in which he was charged by his perfidious brother with participating, had in view the elevation of the cardinal to a matrimonial crown by his union with the princess Mary, which seems to have been insinuated, lord Montacute must at least stand acquitted of all design of asserting his own title; yet it may justly be suspected that his character of representative of the house of Clarence, was by Henry placed foremost in the catalogue of his offences.
A similar remark applies still more forcibly to the marquis of Exeter. Son of Catherine, youngest daughter of Edward IV., and so lately declared his heir by Henry himself, it is scarcely credible that any inducement could have drawn this nobleman into a plot for disturbing the succession in favour of a claim worse founded than his own; and that the blood which he inherited was the true object of Henry's apprehensions from him, evidently appeared to all the world by his causing the son of the unhappy marquis, a child at this period, to be detained a state prisoner in the Tower during the remainder of his reign.
Sir Edward Nevil was brother to lord Abergavenny and to the wife of lord Montacute—a connection likely to bring him into suspicion, and perhaps to involve him in real guilt; but it must not be forgotten that he was a lineal descendant of the house of Lancaster by Joan daughter of John of Gaunt. The only person not of royal extraction who suffered on this occasion was sir Nicholas Carew, master of the horse, and lately a distinguished favourite of the king; of whom it is traditionally related, that though accused as an accomplice in the designs of the other noble delinquents, the real offence for which he died, was the having retorted, with more spirit than prudence, some opprobrious language with which his royal master had insulted him as they were playing at bowls together6. The family of Carew was however allied in blood to that of Courtney, of which the marquis of Exeter was the head.
But the attempt to extirpate all who under any future circumstances might be supposed capable of advancing claims formidable to the house of Tudor, must have appeared to Henry himself a task almost as hopeless as cruel. Sons and daughters of the Plantagenet princes had in every generation freely intermarried with the ancient nobles of the land; and as fast as those were cut off whose connection with the royal blood was nearest and most recent, the pedigrees of families pointed out others, and others still, whose relationship grew into nearness by the removal of such as had stood before them, and presented to the affrighted eyes of their persecutor, a hydra with still renewed and multiplying heads.
Not content with these inflictions,—sufficiently severe it might be thought to intimidate the papal faction,—Henry gratified still further his stern disposition by the attainder of the marchioness of Exeter and the aged countess of Salisbury. The marchioness he soon after released; but the countess was still detained prisoner under a sentence of death, which a parliament, atrocious in its subserviency, had passed upon her without form of trial, but which the king did not think proper at present to carry into execution, either because he chose to keep her as a kind of hostage for the good behaviour of her son the cardinal, or because, tyrant as he had become, he had not yet been able to divest himself of all reverence or pity for the hoary head of a female, a kinswoman, and the last who was born to the name of Plantagenet.
It is melancholy, it is even disgusting, to dwell upon these acts of legalized atrocity, but let it be allowed that it is important and instructive. They form unhappily a leading feature of the administration of Henry VIII. during the latter years of his reign; they exhibit in the most striking point of view the sentiments and practices of the age; and may assist us to form a juster estimate of the character and conduct of Elizabeth, whose infant mind was formed to the contemplation of these domestic tragedies, and whose fame has often suffered by inconsiderate comparisons which have placed her in parallel with the enlightened and humanized sovereigns of more modern days, rather than with the stern and arbitrary Tudors, her barbarous predecessors.
It is remarkable that the protestant party at the court of Henry, so far from gaining strength and influence by the severities exercised against the adherents of cardinal Pole and the ancient religion, was evidently in a declining state. The feeble efforts of its two leaders Cromwel and Cranmer, of whom the first was deficient in zeal, the last in courage, now experienced irresistible counteraction from the influence of Gardiner, whose uncommon talents for business, joined to his extreme obsequiousness,