Includes bibliographical references (pages 199-205) and index.
Daughterof violence -- A new order -- Two widows -- Countess of Salisbury -- Lady Governess -- Perseverance -- Unheard-of cruelty -- Honour and Conscience -- An opinion given -- Coming to stripes -- The lady in the Tower -- Restoration -- Puious ends -- The evidence in the Exeter conspiracy -- Margaret's goods and servants.
Of the many executions ordered by Henry VIII, surely the most horrifying was that of sixty-seven-year-old Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, hacked to pieces on the scaffold by a blundering headsman. From the start, Margarets life had been marred by tragedy and violence: her father, George, Duke of Clarence, had been executed at the order of his own brother, Edward IV, and her naive young brother, Edward, Earl of Warwick, had spent most of his life in the Tower before being executed on orders of Henry VII. Yet Margaret, friend to Catherine of Aragon and the beloved governess of her daughter Mary, had seemed destined for a happier fate, until religious upheaval and rebellion caused Margaret and her family to fall from grace. From Margaret's birth as the daughter of a royal duke to her beatification centuries after her death, Margaret Pole: The Countess in the Tower tells the story of one of the fortresss most unlikely prisoners.