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 them[5]: 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.
[Note 5: See Lloyd's Worthies, article _Pole_.]
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.