Noble Blood - The Last Plantagenets

Episode Date: September 29, 2026

During Henry VIII's reign, his dynasty was looking shaky: he had only one son, and if Henry died before his heir came of age, the country would be in danger of a civil war. Worse, there were still heirs to the York family in England, possibly plotting against him... Support Noble Blood:—ORDER 'THE ARCANE ARTS'— Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon— Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'    See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. On October 26, 1538, Jeffrey Pohl was visited in his cell at the Tower of London by interrogators. No doubt Pohl was nervous. One of the men that came to interrogate him was William. William Fitzwilliam, one of King Henry the Eighth's most trusted admirals and one of the most powerful men in the government.

But perhaps being faced with his interrogator gave Geoffrey a strange kind of relief. By this point, Jeffrey had been imprisoned in the Tower of London for two months, and it remained murky exactly what crime he had committed. Perhaps the investigation would give him some answers. Fitzwilliam had 59 questions for Jeffrey. The first 12 were about his brother, Reginald Pohl. Had Jeffrey received letters from him? Had their mother? It probably didn't surprise Jeffrey

that the investigators were so concerned with his family. His mother, Margaret Pohl, was the niece of two kings, Edward IV and Richard III. This made Geoffrey Pole a descendant of the Royal House of York, the Plantagenet dynasty of the White Rose that had ruled England before the Tudors won the Wars of the Roses, culminating in Henry the 7th and then his son, Henry VIII, taking over the throne. Henry VIII took particular issue with Jeffrey's older brother, Reginald Paul.

an exiled cardinal living in Venice, who was a public critic of Henry's break with the Catholic Church in 1534. Sure enough, as Jeffrey's interrogation continued, more and more of the questions seemed to be about Jeffrey's opinions on Henry VIII and the Church of England. Jeffrey admitted that he and his family were dissatisfied with Henry VIII. religious policies and longed for a, quote, change. Change was a loaded word in Tudor, England. To Henry's investigators, a change could be a coded threat to the king. After all, if King Henry VIII were deposed, that would certainly change a lot.

Jeffrey tried to quash that interpretation, quickly clarifying that he meant a reversal in religious policies rather than for the, quote, king's person to be changed. At the end of the interrogation, he even appealed to Henry VIII directly, asking him for, quote, good keeping and cherishing, and, quote, in exchange for his open participation, he promised that he would confess everything, no matter who it implicated whether it was his, quote, mother, brother, uncle, or any other.

Jeffrey must have known he was putting his family in danger. The stakes for treason against the king were high, and the king was looking for any excuse, it seemed, to do away with his perceived enemies. A family that arguably had a more direct claim on the English throne than Henry did, or at least a claim that could unite opponents against him. Jeffrey had plenty of reason to be worried.

He was a known critic of Henry VIII and, yes, a descendant of the House of York. But those were not themselves crimes, were they? When, the following month, five of Jeffrey's family and friends, including one of Henry VIII's own cousins, joined Jeffrey in the Tower of London, it seemed that Jeffrey had his answer. What seemed at first to be an investigation of one man was shaping up to be an investigation into a conspiracy. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood.

It wasn't just that Jeffrey Pohl was a York that made him suspicious to Henry VIII. After all, Henry had Yorkist blood himself. His mother was Elizabeth of York, and his grandfather was Edward V. Jeffrey's great-uncle. Henry VIII had, historically, been on good terms with the Pohl family. Margaret Pohl, Jeffrey's mother, had thrived during the early days of Henry the Eighth's rule. She had been close to Catherine of Aragon before Henry VIII had cast her aside, and even served as governess to his daughter, Mary. Jeffrey's older brother, Reginald Pohl, had been on good terms with Henry as well.

Henry had financed Reginald's education, and in return, Reginald helped convince Parisian theologians to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. But by the 1530s, as Henry VIII became more concerned about his own succession, he began viewing these family members with more suspicion. By 1531, he had only one daughter with Catherine of Aragon and no son, which left his grip on the throne, frighteningly tenuous. The Poles were not the only aristocratic family that could threaten Henry's claim to the throne. The Marquess of Exeter, Henry Courtney, also had plantagenet ancestry. He was Henry the 8th's cousin. Courtney was a prominent member of Henry the 8th's court as a member of his privy council, and he was known as a prominent jouster. But in 1531, as Henry the 8th was still without a male heir, members of Courtney's inner circle were reported to say things like, quote,

my lord Marquise would be king, and that he would eventually, quote, wear the Garland. It's hard to know how seriously Henry took that gossip. He did temporarily remove Courtney from the Privy Council just in case. Finally, in October 1537, Henry finally had his long-awaited son, Prince Edward, with his third wife, Jane Seymour. But Jane died just 12 days after the birth, so Henry's only male heir had no mother and no younger brother. If Henry died, his son would have been much too young to take over the throne, leaving Henry's reign still vulnerable to other aristocratic families with plausible connections to the royal line, like the Poles or the Courtney's.

Worse by this time, the Poles and the Courtney's, had also long. long been openly criticizing Henry's religious directives. In 1534, Parliament recognized Henry VIII as the head of the Church of England, overturning the Pope's refusal to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Reginald Pohl, committed to the unity of the Catholic ruling class, was skeptical that a secular monarch could lead the church. He published a bombshell tract called Deunitate in 1536, which condemned the divorce and Henry's religious power grab. The Pope, in response, made Reginald a cardinald and a papal legate, and Reginald began traveling throughout Europe, hoping to convince Francis I, the King of France, and Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, to intervene in the situation.

Initially, Francis and Charles refused to work together, but the Pope negotiated peace with the two nations in 1538, which made an alliance a much greater possibility and a much greater threat to England. They discussed an international effort against England, in part brokered by Reginald, that would use diplomatic, economic, and even military force against England, to strong-arm Henry VIII into abandoning the Church of England. Meanwhile, Henry Courtney had made the mistake of making an enemy of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's chief minister. Like Reginald Pohl, Courtney was a religious conservative.

But he didn't care so much about theological matters like the legitimacy of the Church of England or Henry the 8th's divorce. In fact, Courtney signed a 1531 petition encouraging the Pope to grant the annulment. Instead, Courtney took issue with the more local effects of Cromwell's injunctions. In 1535, Courtney had been appointed the steward of abbeys and priories in the Western territories he ruled over. These institutions played a crucial role in the daily life of these territories, since they employed people, rented land, and served as intermediaries between the neighboring gentry and the aristocracy. But in 1536, Cromwell dismantled them, much to Courtney's chagrin. This development was

so devastating to the relationship between Courtney and Cromwell that in 1537, a rumor circulated that Courtney had been sent to the tower for stabbing Cromwell with a dagger. He wasn't, but it says something that that rumor seemed plausible. Courtney's religious grievances seemed even more dangerous, given that he had a powerful friend, Jeffrey and Reginald's older brother, Henry Pole. You might notice that this is the third Henry in the story. Courtney's first name is actually Henry,

So we have Henry Courtney, Henry Pole, and of course, Henry VIII. I'll refer to Henry Poll by his aristocratic title, Lord Montague, to keep things from getting too confusing because there are also a lot of polls around. Like Courtney, Montague was a member of Henry the Eighth's court who supported his divorces and beheadings publicly, but remained skeptical of the king's hostility to, local priories and abbeys. In Montague, Courtney found a sympathetic ear for his complaints. In August 1536, Courtney told Montague that he hoped one day to have his revenge on the, quote, knaves ruling about the king, and that he trusted they would someday see a, quote,

merry world again. The friendship between Montague and Courtney, seemed to confirm Henry VIII's deepest fears, that there was a group of aristocrats with Yorkist blood out to get him. A 1538 letter from a foreign ambassador, quote, Henry VIII calling the Poles a part of, quote, the white rose, the symbol of the House of York. The ambassador wrote that the king had told him earlier that he wanted to, quote, exterminate the house.

House of Montague and the Pole family more broadly. The ambassador continued, It looks as if Henry VIII is searching for any possible excuse that can be found to ruin and destroy them. I think that few lords in this country can feel safe. Around the autumn of 1538, the king had warned another member of the court to stay away from Courtney, whom he thought was a bad influence. This air of paranoia seemed to have affected the friendship between Montague and Courtney. One day in 1538, Jeffrey Pohl, Montague's younger brother,

noticed that Montague and Courtney were acting strangely towards each other. Montague explained that they were avoiding each other on purpose to avoid the king's suspicions. But little did Jeffrey know that he had caught the king's eye already as well. In the spring of 1538, a family friend of the Poles told Thomas Cromwell that Jeffrey was sending messages containing, quote, all the secrets of the realm to his older brother, Reginald Poel. Jeffrey, allegedly, had a servant secretly carry these letters across the channel from England to Rome. In June, the servant was arrested.

According to later testimony, Jeffrey Pohl watched him being taken into custody and called out to ask where he was going. The servant answered with a warning, the tower, and soon Jeffrey would be next. On November 4, 1538, a week after Jeffrey was interrogated in the Tower of London, Lord Montague and Henry Courtney were both arrested. The two men were charged with conspiring against the king. These accusations of treason spread to the rest of the family. Courtney's wife, Gertrude, their son, Edward,

and several priests and servants that associated with them, were arrested as well. Investigators invaded the estate of Margaret Pohl, Jeffrey and Montague's mother, and a few relatives of the Courtney's to look all over their belongings for evidence and question their servants about their conduct. The toughest nut for the investigators to crack was Margaret Pohl. The 60-something woman denied knowing anything about her son's affairs. She had distanced herself from her son Reginald after he went overseas and had written to him in 1536 after the publication of

D. Unite, urging him to tone it down and reminding him that his primary duty was to serve the king. For days, investigators questioned Margaret, quote, all day, both before and afternoon till almost night. But they recalled that, for all we could do, she would confess nothing. They told Thomas Cromwell that she was so earnest, precise, and manlike incontinence, that she was either entirely faultless or, quote, the most errant traitress who ever lived. In spite of Margaret Poll's refusal to cooperate, the government managed to drum up some very damning evidence against the so-called White Rose faction. A few priests associated with them had spoken out against Henry VIII. One claimed that Henry was not the supreme head of the church.

Another said that Henry would hang in hell for destroying abbeys throughout the country and had told a friend to burn his sermons if he were ever arrested, suggesting that he had something to hide. Jeffrey and Montague also admitted to communicating with Reginald Pole, who was trying to interfere in the king's plans from abroad. But did these rumors add up to a conspiracy to overthrow the king. None of the accused mentioned explicit plans to overthrow Henry or to help Reginald conspire against him. While Jeffrey confirmed that he had communicated with Reginald, the government did not

have copies of their letters, so they had no sense of what they might have contained. Despite the shakiness of the evidence, the government brought Montague and Courtney to trial in early December of 1538, each one day apart. The two were charged with desiring the king's death, seeking to deprive him of his title as supreme head of the church, and conspiring with Reginald Pole. Montague's trial was relatively straightforward. Through their investigations, the government had gathered plenty of evidence against him. In his interrogation, Montague had admitted that on November 7, 1538, he had said, I dreamed now that the king is dead,

and two days later continued with, The king is not dead, but he will die one day suddenly, his leg will kill him, and we shall have jolly stirring. This reference to the king's leg was no fluke. In 1538, Henry VIII had developed a sore, which historians suspect was an ulcer, vein or bone infection that had caused a serious decline in his health. Jeffrey corroborated his brother's dissatisfaction with the king,

recalling that Montague, quote, many times lamented, grudged, and murmured at the estate of the world. Jeffrey also quoted his brother Montague saying that he liked well the doings of Cardinal Reginald Pohl and that their brother Reginald, was, quote, ordained of God to do good, which indicated that he could have been involved in Reginald's traitorous dealings. A jury of 28 of his peers unanimously found Montague guilty of treason and sentenced him to death. Courtney's case the next day was more complicated. The problem was that the government had almost no evidence connecting him to the conspiracy. Montague hadn't

accused him of his interrogations. Even Jeffrey Pohl, who had seemed willing to throw anyone under the bus in exchange for his safety, couldn't come up with any conversation where Courtney had actually threatened the king. The government found out about Courtney's comment about hoping for a fair day against the knaves in Henry's court, but these remarks cast aspersions on Henry's advisors rather than on the king himself. While the investigators reconsidered the 1531 rumor that Courtney's friends expected him to wear the garland as the King of England as potential evidence, they couldn't substantiate that Courtney encouraged or even acknowledged those rumors. The best evidence they had for Courtney's treason was that he revealed in his interrogation that his friend

Montague had gotten sick a few years earlier, and when he recovered, Courtney said he was glad Montague was feeling better. Someone wrote in the margin, against the Lord Marquise, suggesting that that mundane conversation could somehow be used against Courtney. But that interpretation seems like a real stretch. The government's case relied on Jeffrey Pohl as Star Witness, whose reliability was up for debate. Montague called Jeffrey a madman, and Jeffrey's wife suggested that her husband's state of mind was unstable.

On October 28, two days after his interrogation, Jeffrey Pole attempted suicide. According to one account, Courtney went after Jeffrey directly during the trial, accusing him of frenzy, folly, and madness. Jeffrey responded that the only madness he suffered from had been attempting to end his own life rather than confessing, but he proclaimed that God had stopped him from his suicide attempt, saying, quote, he hath saved him. my soul at the last. The knife went not so far as I would have had it gone. He thanked God for saving his life and told the court that if I had ten brethren, yea, ten sons, I would rather bring them all to this peril of death than leave my country, my sovereign lord, and mine own soul in such

danger. Let us, let us die, but be but a few better we have according to our desserts than our whole country be brought to ruin. Now, this very dramatic scene is likely either exaggerated or entirely made up. It comes from an account of the trial by a propagandist working for Henry the 8th who was not actually a firsthand witness to the so-called speech. Even if Jeffrey had received a directive from God to profess his loyalty to the king. It didn't seem to shake Courtney's confidence in his own case. Courtney had pleaded not guilty. He considered himself loyal to his cousin the king. He had grown up with him, jousted with him, and spent years in his privy counsel. Regardless of his religious conservatism or his private reservations about the Church of England, there was no evidence that

Courtney had communicated with Reginald Pohl or expressed any plan to depose Henry the 8th. But at the end of the day, Courtney sat before a jury of 28 of the most powerful nobleman in the country who had just found his friend Montague guilty the day before. Would they believe in his innocence or sentence him to death? To understand how the court would rule, we have to first see how the understanding of treason changed in the mid-1530s. Since 1352, it was considered high treason to, quote, compass or imagine the death of the king. Regardless of how imagined sounds, it did not mean that it was treasonous to have any hostile thoughts about the king. Instead, it meant that in order to be convicted of treason, those thoughts had to be connected to an open deed, evidence that

accused may actually act on them. In 1534, Henry VIII had been deemed the supreme head on earth of the Church of England, and he wanted to ensure that it was illegal to recognize the Pope over the authority of the crown. So Parliament passed a new act that broadened the definition of treason. Under this law, the government did not need to connect a person's hostile words or thought. to an action or plan. Instead, it became treason to, quote, wish, will, or desire by words or writing, harm to any part of the royal family, to deny the validity of any of their titles, or call Henry a heretic, schismatic, tyrant, or infidel. Historians suggest that this law essentially made being a Yorkist illegal because it denounced anyone who declared Henry VIII a usurper of the crown from the House of York.

The penalty for any of those utterances was death. Under the old definition, Courtney and Montague were unlikely to have been convicted for treason, since there was very little evident that they were actively plotting a rebellion against the king. But under the new definition, Montague's private conversations in which he admitted to imagining the king's death and criticizing his religious policies were sufficient to send him to the scaffold. The new treason act also made it easier to convict Courtney. It wasn't clear that he had expressed any animosity towards Henry VIII, but the burden of proof had been lowered enough that Jeffreys' claim that Courtney had contempt for the knaves that surrounded the king and that he wanted the world to change could be interpreted loosely

as a call for the death of the king. On December 5, 1538, the jury declared that Courtney had been guilty of compassing and imagining the destruction of the king and sentenced him to death. On December 9th, a stormy gray day in London, Henry Courtney and Lord Montague, were taken to Tower Hill and beheaded. Jeffrey's servant and a number of priests associated with the White Rose faction were also convicted of treason and were beheaded as well a few days later. Their heads were displayed on London Bridge or passers-by to Gawk at. Jeffrey Pohl was convicted of treason as well, but as a reward for his cooperation with the investigation, he was not executed.

Instead, he remained in the Tower of London. Three weeks after his brother's death, he attempted suicide a second time by trying to suffocate himself with a cushion, perhaps fearing that he would remain in prison forever. He survived and Henry VIII pardoned him on January 2, 1539. This entire incident came to be known

as the Exeter conspiracy, after Henry Courtney, the Marquis of Exeter. But whether the Exeter conspiracy reflected an actual conspiracy remains up for debate. As historian G.W. Bernard put it, Montague and Jeffrey were dissenters in their private conversations, but, quote, outwardly they did little. Their conversations were haphazard, bitter, and largely the quote, consolations of the powerless. Perhaps these complaints would have escalated into a legitimate threat to Henry the 8th, especially given that Reginald Poll really was working against Henry from overseas. That said, the White Rose faction was more of a loose collection of disaffected aristocrats

with differing agendas rather than an organized threat. The conspiracy was a product of Henry the 8th's paranoid imagination, and he systematically snuffed out any possibility for such an alliance to actually form. Over the next few years, Henry would imprison Lord Montague's son, another Henry Pole, and Courtney's son, Edward, in the Tower of London, alongside Margaret Pole, Montague's mother. Margaret would eventually be sentenced to treason and taken to the stocks herself in May 1541 at the age of 67 with no trial.

An ambassador remarked that when Margaret Pole had learned of her conviction, she said she, quote, found it very strange not knowing her crime. Her death was first. famously gruesome, because the usual executioner was out of town, a, quote, blundering youth was tasked with beheading her, taking 11 strokes to sever her head from her body. But Reginald Pohl might have had the last laugh. When Henry VIII died in 1547, his daughter with Catherine of Aragon, Mary, became Queen of England.

Mary was Catholic and invited Reginald Paul back to England in November 1544 after 20 years in exile. Within days of his arrival, he formally welcomed England back into the Catholic Church and became the Archbishop of Canterbury, exactly as Henry VIII had one day feared. That's the story of the so-called Exeter conspiracy, but stick around to you. to hear about an unusual piece of evidence against Margaret Pole, a silk coat. In May of 1539, several months after the executions of Montague and Henry Courtney, Thomas Cromwell brought a tunic to the House of Lords that was said to belong to Margaret Pole. The tunic was made of white silk and covered in intricate embroidery, with three lions,

the arms of England, and a garland of pansies and marigolds. Cromwell thought that this robe could be evidence of her treason against the king. A courtier named John Wirth summarized this interpretation in a letter to another official. He wrote that the pansies on the garland represented the pole family, while the marigolds represented Henry VIII's daughter, Mary. Between them was a tree. with a purple coat hanging from one of its branches to represent the coat of Christ. Worth said that this meant that Reginald Pohl would marry Henry's daughter

and that they would bring England back into the Catholic Church. But was this tunic really, Margaret's? There was no mention of the tunic in the detailed records of Margaret's possessions when government officials searched through them in their initials. investigation, it only appeared in the historical record for the first time when Cromwell brought it to Parliament. And there is no account of what happened to the tunic after Cromwell found it, what embroidery it actually contained, and what the embroidery may have really represented. All of that has been lost to time.

Noble Blood is a production of I-Heart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. Noblemud is hosted by me, Dana Schwartz. Writers for Noble Blood are Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Paul Jaffe, Natasha Lasky, and me, Dana Schwartz. The show is edited and produced by Jesse Funk and Nome's Gripen with supervising producer Rima Il Kali and executive producers Aaron Manky, Trevor Young, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from IHartRadio, visit the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This is an IHeart podcast, guaranteed human.