mametupa: One lady ghost in the Tower of London We saw this lady, Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbu

mametupa:One lady ghost in the Tower of LondonWe saw this lady, Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, in the Tudors. Of the women who perished so violently on the private scaffold, surely none suffered more terribly — nor more undeservedly — than Margaret Pole, Coun­tess of Salisbury. Over seventy years of age, innocent of all crime, the countess was slain as an act of vengeance by King Henry VIII. The countess’ son, Cardinal Pole, from the safe haven of France, reviled Henry’s religious beliefs. Retribution — and the axe — descended on his mother. On the scaffold the countess proclaimed her innocence. She refused to kneel over the block and she challenged the axeman to `remove her head as best he could’. Pursuing her around the block, the axeman is said to have literally hacked her to death in a welter of blood.Over the centuries it seems as if her proud Plan­tagenet spirit still shrieks defiance to the sombre skies. On the anniversaries of her brutal execution, her ghost is reported to run round the scaffold site pursued by the spectral axeman, the bloodstained axe brandished aloft.One night in 1975 personnel in the Waterloo Block overlooking the Green were roused in the early hours by the sound of piercing screams. This was confirmed by men on duty in the Byward Tower, and a few nights later the guardsman patrolling the rear of the Waterloo Block also reported that just before dawn he too heard high-pitched screaming from the direction of the Green. Nothing was found. Could it really have been the death cries of the hideously mutilated countess?Source: Ghosts of the Tower of London, G.AbbotPS. Margaret Pole was daughter of George Plantagenet, 1st Duke of Clarence, and his wife Lady Isabel Neville, who was the elder daughter of Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, and his wife Lady Anne de Beauchamp, Countess of Warwick, so she was a cousin to Elizabeth of York. -- source link

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