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would listen to him that he was heir to the throne. However, local levies under the Earl of Westmorland recaptured the castle almost immediately and he was executed at Tyburn the following month. 3
    Cardinal Pole came home as papal legate in November 1554, warmly welcomed by Mary and her Habsburg husband, ‘King Philip’. Later in the month, he formally reconciled England to the papacy. After Philip’s departure in 1555, never to return, Reginald became the queen’s most trusted confidant, presiding over a restoration of English Catholicism in the light of the Council of Trent, envisaging a new, Catholic translation of the Bible, with seminaries in every diocese to ensure that priests were properly trained. On 20 March 1556 he was finally ordained as a priest himself, and consecrated as Archbishop of Canterbury two days later. He even saved a few Protestants from the fire – he wanted to spare Cranmer but was overruled by Mary – and in his Book of Martyrs Foxe admits that Pole was ‘none of the bloody and cruel sort of Papists’.
    But time and the future Queen Elizabeth were against his attempts to introduce the Counter-Reformation, and his health was failing. As a bitter irony he was ordered by Paul IV to return to Rome and face charges of heresy, although Mary refused to let him leave the country. He died in 1558 on the same day as the queen. The last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, Reginald Pole was the only man to occupy the see of St Augustine who might conceivably have been King of England.
    A final, ghostly whisper came from the White Rose in 1562 when Elizabeth I fell ill with smallpox and it looked as if shemight die. Her heir presumptive, Mary, Queen of Scots, was a Catholic so the Calvinist Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon, whose mother had been Lord Montague’s daughter, was proposed as a successor by the Protestant leaders in England. The news so angered Hastings’s papist cousin Arthur Pole, Sir Geoffrey’s eldest son, that Pole offered his support to Queen Mary, graciously offering to forego his own claim to the throne on condition she created him Duke of Clarence: there was even talk of him marry ing her. Caught plotting against Elizabeth, Arthur Pole was found guilty of treason, but the queen spared his life because of his royal blood, and he died in the Tower at some unknown date during 1570 – the ultimate Yorkist prisoner. 4
    In their staunch fidelity to a dispossessed royal family, and in their adherence to Common Law and disgust at the setting aside of the obvious heir to the throne, the last Yorkists foreshadowed the Jacobites. Supporters of the exiled House of Stuart may have been aware of this when they adopted the White Rose as their own emblem – James II had been Duke of York before he became king. However, there was no Sir Walter Scott to immor-talize their sixteenth-century predecessors.
    Although Mary and Elizabeth were in turn threatened by rivals (the former by her sister, the latter by her Scottish cousin), neither of them appears to have been particularly frightened by the situation. By their time, their dynasty’s right to the throne was established beyond question, so that they had no sense of being parvenus. Indeed, Elizabeth’s triumphant reign made it seem that the Tudors had been predestined to rule England. In consequence, the cult of the Tudor age has largely obscured the Yorkist pretenders (except, perhaps, for Perkin Warbeck) and concealed the dread in which the White Rose was held by Henry VII and Henry VII.
    Epilogue
     
1 . D.M. Loades, Two Tudor Conspiracies , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1965, pp. 21–3, 45–6.

2 . Ibid., p. 225.

3 . A. Rowntree (ed.), History of Scarborough , London, Dent, 1931, p. 214.

4 . Oxford DNB : H. Pierce, ‘Arthur Pole’.

C HRONOLOGY
     

     

     
     
1483
Disappearance of Edward V and the Duke of York – the ‘Princes in the Tower’
1484
Edward, Prince of Wales dies – the Earl of Warwick is briefly heir to