Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury

Who was Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury?

Margaret Pole, the Blessed, Countess of Salisbury, born Margaret of York, was an English peeress. She was the daughter of George, Duke of Clarence, who was the brother of King Edward IV and King Richard III. She was one of two women in sixteenth-century England to be a peeress in her own right with no titled husband. One of the few surviving members of the Plantagenet dynasty after the Wars of the Roses, she was executed in 1541 at the command of King Henry VIII, who was the son of her cousin Elizabeth of York. Pope Leo XIII beatified her as a martyr for the Roman Catholic Church on 29 December 1886.