Catherine of Aragon (6 page)

9th February 1506

Henry announced today that a treaty of close friendship with Philip has been signed. A whole string of royal marriages has been proposed as well. Mary is promised to Philip's young son, Charles, and Henry himself may possibly marry Philip's sister, Margaret of Savoy, though the lady has not been consulted about it. And Harry, it is suggested, could take as his bride Philip's daughter, Eleanor. I saw the shadow that crossed Catherine's face when she heard this. She is still utterly convinced that Harry is hers, but I cannot see how they can consider her a possibility now that her father has become the common enemy of Philip and Henry.

Harry was not present to hear these proposals. He has been sent at the head of a big retinue to fetch Juana from the West Country. Bets are being laid as to whether he will succeed, but I am sure he will. Nobody could refuse Harry when confronted by the full force of his charm and determination.

10th February 1506

He succeeded! Juana is here, white-faced and huge-eyed, a little inclined towards tears – but surely not mad? She greeted King Henry with tremulous dignity, and as he gave her his arm to escort her in, I saw him look down at her with a curiously tender concern. Philip, on the other hand, greeted his wife with no more than conventional courtesy, and I saw her lips quiver as he walked away, though she managed to retain her composure.

Henry announced this evening that Philip has agreed to hand over the fugitive Earl of Suffolk, who has been living in the Netherlands for many years. The two royal men are on fire with their friendship and the power of the promises they have made to assist each other against all enemies, and Uncle Rod has sent a desperate message to Ferdinand of Aragon, warning him of the forces allied against him.

Tomorrow Catherine and her remaining retainers are to be sent back to Richmond, so she has had little chance to talk to her sister. And I have a new reason to regret leaving here. Tonight, I met a man who enchants me. He was sitting by the lily pool where great goldfish swim slowly under the round leaves. I had gone out to cool my flushed face, heated from dancing, and did not see him until he said, “It's better out here. Sane.”

He came with Philip's entourage. He is their court jester, and they call him “Mr John” – perhaps that's as close as they can get to his real name, Michel Valjean. Or perhaps he took it as a stage name. I find myself remembering every word of the conversation I had with him. Such a down-to-earth conversation, about the absurdities of royalty and the dangers and pleasures of trying to cheer them up. “Your King Henry is hardly a laugh a minute, is he?” he said. “Hard work getting him to crack a smile. But he gave me ten pounds for amusing him, so I must have done something right.”

He took my hand when we turned to come in, and ran his thumb over my knuckles. “A nice hand,” he said. “Practical.”

But tomorrow I have to go back to Richmond.

1st April 1506

All Fools' Day. So I think of my Fool, of course. My Michel. Foolishly, I expect. He has moved on now, to other courts, other fishponds, warm and still in the heat of Spain.

28th June 1506

Prince Harry's fifteenth birthday.

For us, there is no cause for celebration. Again, we shift in our ragged clothes from one contemptible place to another. When we came back to Richmond, we were put in rooms above the stable, dusty and mouse-infested, and now we are in a filthy, run-down manor in Fulham.

Nobody grumbles any more, we are past that. Everyone is aware of Catherine's simmering rage, but the determination in her set face commands respect. There are no carping remarks now about her pawning off the remaining plate and jewels, though we all know the goldsmiths charge her high interest rates, fearing they will never see their money again. Occasionally Henry gives her a hundred pounds or so, but it is swallowed up at once in reclaiming some of the pawned treasure. She cannot be stripped of everything, she says, if she is to have some self-respect when she marries Harry. I can't understand how she goes on believing this will happen.

18th October 1506

An extraordinary blow has fallen. We heard today that Philip of the Netherlands is dead. Philip the Handsome, as they all called him. Philip the Faithless, breaker of Juana's heart. Philip the friend of Henry and newly arrived king of Castile.

What will happen now? I suppose this means Ferdinand will resume his throne, ruling on behalf of Juana, whom he has always declared to be insane.

I am kept busy mending Catherine's gowns. I darn the tears and thin patches, then decorate them with flat-stitch embroidery, but nobody is taken in. We are destitute.

19th October 1506

I walked to the Strand late this afternoon, to see my uncle. He begins to look very old and worn. He says that now Philip is dead, Henry will have to win the favours of Emperor Maximilian, Philip's father. No lucky storm will blow him into Henry's court, so other means must be found. Henry is going to lend him 100,000 gold crowns.

23rd October 1506

A letter came from Mama today. She tells a terrible story about Juana. She would not leave Philip's body, sitting beside it in the chapel day and night, not seeming to hear what anyone said to her. When at last she fell asleep, they took it out of her sight, but she woke in a frenzy and summoned her servants, and when she found the coffin she bade her men take it on their shoulders and follow her, and she set out across the hills in a strange, wild procession with her dead husband. Heaven knows what has happened now – Mama does not say.

1st March 1507

Harry's elder sister, Margaret, gave birth to a son ten days ago. He is the first of a new generation of Tudors – that is, if they will think of him as a Tudor up there in Scotland. The boy is to be called James, after his father. I can hardly meet Catherine's eye, knowing what everyone is saying. If only she had managed to give Arthur a son, we would have had a royal boy here in London. As it is, this newborn half-Scot stands next to Harry and even, at some time in the future, above him, for this new James could inherit the crowns of both England and Scotland.

13th July 1507

Catherine is triumphant. After all these years, her father has sent her 2,000 ducats, apparently justifying all her faith in him. Now that Philip is dead, Ferdinand is again secure as the ruler of Spain, and he needs to patch up his damaged friendship with England. Perhaps I am cynical, but I suspect that his sudden generosity is more to please Henry than his daughter – but I will not say so, of course.

Catherine sat down at once to write a long letter of thanks to her father, and as she sealed it, she told me she had asked him to send a different ambassador. She made no explanation, just said we needed someone new. Did I not love her like a sister, I would feel deeply hurt.

2nd August 1507

I see now what Catherine was after. A fat package arrived from Spain this morning, and it contained the official papers which make Catherine herself Ferdinand's ambassador. Uncle Rod was at the court, and when he heard this he put his fingers to his forehead and closed his eyes in despair.

I, too, find it hard to believe Catherine can be a diplomat. She is clever, certainly, and tenacious, but her iron determination to marry young Prince Harry and be the Queen of England colours all her thinking, and I doubt whether she has it in her to learn the subtle arts of statesmanship. But I may be wrong. She learns fast.

3rd September 1507

Michel is here! A servant said this morning, with the curl of the lip I am used to, “There is a person in the kitchen wishing to see you.”

And there he was, thinner than ever after long weeks of travel on foot. There was no place for him in the Spanish court once Philip had died, and he is going to make his way to the Netherlands, where Philip's eight-year-old son Charles is being cared for until such time as he is old enough to marry Mary.

If Michel secretly hoped he would be taken on as court jester here, he is out of luck, alas. Henry's generosity on the previous occasion was, I'm afraid, more to impress Philip with his careless munificence than to reward Michel's talent, and there are already a number of fools and entertainers here, some of them “innocents” whose drooling antics never make me smile.

Michel is not a welcome guest. He sleeps in the hay-loft and, did I not take him bread and meat scrounged from the kitchen, he would have nothing.

We walk together in the evenings and kiss, and I wish with all my heart that I could be with him always – but we can make no plans. Michel says he has no belief in plans, anyway. “Any wise man should lock them in a box and throw away the key,” he says. “Half the world consists of key-seekers, you see, and what would they do if keys were not thrown away for them to seek?” I love him so much.

9th October 1507

The King is interested in marrying Juana. Catherine is all in favour of it. She has started to think diplomatically now and actually consults Uncle Rod quite often, with a new respect for his opinions. She can see that the alliance Henry hopes to forge with Philip's father, Maximilian (a brigand of a man, if you ask me), spells out a terrible danger to her father, so any link between England and Spain is to be welcomed.

Henry is concerned about the question of Juana's sanity, of course, having heard the tale of the mad coffin-carrying. My uncle assures him that Juana was simply driven beyond endurance by her beloved husband's flagrant infidelity to her. It is true that she did once attack one of his mistresses with a pair of scissors but, given steady kindness and care, she would very probably recover her stability. Henry was much taken with her during her short visit, and likes to regard her as an ill-used woman who is waiting for him to rescue her. The Tudors are incurably romantic.

24th December 1507

Henry's loan to Maximilian has had the desired effect. Last week the pair of them signed a treaty which pledges them to be allies, and in celebration we are all to have a merry Christmas, officially sanctioned. Free hogsheads of wine have been distributed throughout London, and singing and roistering is well under way. Bonfires burn in the streets and the church bells ring.

Needless to say, Catherine does not rejoice. She looks narrow-eyed and grim, but I cannot share her concerns at the moment. Today I had a letter from Michel, to read again and again, knowing his hand touched the paper and formed the words. I am as happy as any of the people in the streets, and wish I could join them in their singing and dancing.

14th January 1508

Catherine is demanding again that her father must send a new ambassador, but for a different reason this time. We must have a man of good standing, she says. Both she and my uncle (who has not been paid for many years) are too shabby and poor to be treated with any respect at court. It is time Spain was represented by a man of some grandeur.

16th February 1508

Ferdinand evidently saw the sense of Catherine's request. A new ambassador arrived today. His name is Gutierre Gomez de Fuensalida, and he is indeed grand – positively arrogant, in fact. He wears his fine clothes with the panache of a matador, and seems to regard Henry as the bull of England – a country which, he says, only understands a rough hand. Catherine enjoys his flamboyant company, but Uncle Rod is appalled. He is in bed with gout, but he sent his son Gonsalvo to warn Fuensalida to tread carefully, as relations between England and Spain are in a very delicate state.

Fuensalida took no notice but marched straight in to see the King, who has been ill with a chest complaint this winter. No wonder he felt so sure of himself – he had brought with him Catherine's long-unpaid dowry, 65,000 ducats of Aragon!

Suddenly, Catherine is back in favour. Fuensalida reported that Henry, though weak and forbidden to talk for long, spoke of her with great warmth and said there was nobody he would rather see as wife to his son.

“Didn't I tell you!” Catherine said to me this evening, sketching a dance across the floor in her delight. “Now we'll see!” But I feel uneasy about the new ambassador. Already people are finding him rude and objectionable, and I fear we are in for trouble.

19th February 1508

Trouble, indeed. It turns out that the 65,000 ducats does not represent the whole of Catherine's dowry. The rest is to be paid in jewellery and plate. Henry's officers asked whether the ambassador had brought these articles with him, and he pointed out that Catherine had been supplied with them in 1501, when she had married Arthur. But those had become Arthur's property when he had taken Catherine as his wife, the officers pointed out. Was Ferdinand now trying to pay his daughter's dowry with goods already in English possession? And why had he kept Catherine so deprived of her rightful dowry that she was forced to pawn these goods?

Fuensalida promptly pointed out that it was Henry's miserliness that had driven her to do this, and the meeting turned into a shouting match.

4th March 1508

Henry is recovered enough now to deal with Fuensalida himself, but every time they meet, it ends in a quarrel. My uncle, also a little better though still hobbling, does what he can to soothe the King's feelings and moderate Fuensalida's behaviour, so of course he is accused afresh of being on Henry's side. A dreadful situation.

27th March 1508

There is sad news from Scotland. Margaret has lost her baby son, little James. He died just a month ago, on 27th February, six days after his first birthday. She expects a second child this summer, but my heart goes out to her, especially as she stands in the middle of a worsening disagreement between England and Scotland. To have an English royal father and a Scottish royal husband puts her in a terrible position.

Last week Henry arrested the Earl of Arran for travelling across England without the necessary papers when he was on his way home to Edinburgh from France. The papers were just a technicality that Henry could have overlooked – but he knew the Earl had been conferring with Louis XII in Paris, and felt sure the French and the Scots were ganging up against England.