Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury

Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, was born Margaret Plantagenet on 14 August 1473 at Farleigh Hungerford Castle in Somerset, England. She was the daughter of George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence, brother of Kings Edward IV and Richard III, and of Isabel Neville, daughter of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, known as the Kingmaker. Through both parents she belonged to the highest ranks of the English nobility and carried a residual Yorkist claim to the throne as niece of two kings. Her mother died in December 1476, and her father was attainted and executed for treason in February 1478, leaving Margaret and her younger brother Edward, Earl of Warwick, as royal orphans whose Plantagenet blood made them politically dangerous. After Henry VII's victory at Bosworth, the young Earl of Warwick was kept in confinement and was executed in 1499. Margaret herself was married, in the early 1490s, to Sir Richard Pole, a trusted kinsman of the king's mother Margaret Beaufort, a match intended to bind the remaining Yorkist heiress to the Tudor dynasty.

Sir Richard Pole died in 1504, leaving Margaret a widow with five children: Henry, Arthur, Reginald, Geoffrey, and Ursula. For some years she lived in relatively modest circumstances, but in 1513 King Henry VIII restored to her the earldom of Salisbury, which had belonged to her ancestral line, making her one of the few women of the period to hold a peerage in her own right and one of the wealthiest nobles in England. She served at court and was appointed governess to Princess Mary, a position that reflected both her rank and the king's early trust. Her household was known for piety and learning; her son Reginald was educated for the Church and became a distinguished scholar and later a cardinal. Margaret remained a devout Catholic throughout the religious upheavals of Henry VIII's reign.

The family's fortunes collapsed after Henry VIII sought to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and to assert royal supremacy over the English Church. Reginald Pole, then on the Continent, wrote against the king's policies and refused to support the break with Rome, which the king treated as betrayal by a man he had once favored. In 1538, amid accusations connected with the so-called Exeter Conspiracy, Margaret's eldest son Henry Pole, Baron Montagu, was arrested and executed, as were other relatives. Margaret herself was arrested in November 1538, stripped of her titles by act of attainder in 1539, and imprisoned in the Tower of London. Contemporary accounts describe her as maintaining dignity and religious devotion during more than two years of confinement. She was never given a public trial on the principal charges against her.

On 27 May 1541, at about the age of sixty-seven, Margaret Pole was executed within the Tower of London. The beheading was notoriously botched: an inexperienced executioner reportedly required multiple blows, and later Catholic tradition remembered her death as a particularly cruel martyrdom. She was buried in the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula within the Tower. In the Catholic Church she is venerated as a martyr who suffered for her faith and for her family's refusal to accept the royal supremacy. Pope Leo XIII beatified her on 29 December 1886 among a group of English martyrs. Her feast day is observed on 28 May. She was never formally canonized. Her son Reginald Pole later returned to England under Queen Mary I and served as Archbishop of Canterbury, dying in 1558 on the same day as the queen.