But though Henry, discouraged as he was by his failures to kill or capture the Cardinal, appears to have been momentarily persuaded that Throgmorton’s suggestion was feasible, his minister from the first was strongly opposed to it. The first draft of the reply to the letter of Pole’s servant bears every evidence of having been written under compulsion, and Cromwell must have succeeded, before it was actually sent, in persuading the King that a mission which was to meet the Cardinal on his own ground could only result in failure, and that the sole thing to do was openly to menace Pole and his family with assassination. Such at least seems the most probable explanation of the fact that Wilson and Heath never started on their errand, and of the singularly abusive and malevolent letter with which Cromwell finally replied to that of Throgmorton[523]. The last hope of reconciliation with the Cardinal had vanished; not he alone, but also his aged mother and brother in England, had been threatened with destruction. Another obstacle to Henry’s despotism was to be annihilated, as every attempt to surmount it had failed. Pole meanwhile remained in Italy, assured of his personal safety but grieved to the heart that his mother and brother were still in England, where the King could take vengeance on them for his own alleged treason. In August, 1538, his brother, Sir Geoffrey Pole, was arrested and placed in the Tower, where he was examined on the charge of having had treacherous correspondence with his brother Reginald, and having interfered with the King’s endeavours to arrest him[524]. His replies to the questions put to him implicated many others, and before the close of the year the heads of the powerful families of Montague, Courtenay, Delawarr, and Nevill had been arrested and sent to the Tower[525]. There is reason to believe that the confessions of Sir Geoffrey Pole were extorted from him by threats of torture, to serve as an excuse for the arrest of these noblemen, and a letter of Castillon to Montmorency asserts that their destruction had been decided on long before, on account of their connexion with the Yorkist dynasty[526]. Cromwell’s activity in procuring matter for the various indictments is sufficiently attested by an enormous number of notes of evidence and memoranda for prosecution in the hand of his chief clerk. The apparent difficulty which he had in trumping up any plausible charges against his victims, would seem to show that no adequate proof of any really disloyal intent could be found. Indeed, in order to have any sort of excuse for the arrests of the Marquis and Marchioness of Exeter, Cromwell had to exhume a long forgotten episode, and accuse the latter of having ridden in disguise three years before to confer with the Holy Maid; while it was remembered that the Marquis had been put in the Tower in 1531 on the charge of assembling the commons of Cornwall for an insurrection, with intent to depose the King.