Six Wives (13 page)

    Nevertheless, the second treaty did leave Catherine's 'ornaments' in a curiously anomalous position. As soon as she arrived, they were valued and a receipt was demanded for them from the English. But, like the remainder of the second instalment, they were not due to be handed over for another twelve months. Meantime, they were jealously guarded by Juan de Cuero, who also fulfilled the function of Keeper of Catherine's Wardrobe. De Puebla, it seems, then came up with a scheme to liberate the 'ornaments' from their limbo to the heavenly benefit of Henry VII's coffers. If Catherine could be persuaded to use the goods, he told the King, they would lose part of their agreed value. Henry VII would therefore be justified in refusing to accept them and in demanding cash
in lieu
. Catherine's parents would have to pay, but they would also be reluctant to take the goods back from their daughter since she and her Household had already used them. Thus, at the end of the day, the English would have both the money
and
the property. Catherine herself, De Puebla assured Henry VII, had given her agreement: 'I have already spoken with the Princess, and won her over to my side.' It may be so. Unfortunately for De Puebla, however, De Cuero, who had charge of the property, was
not
on his side. Instead he was an ally of De Puebla's enemies, De Ayala and Dona Elvira. He stuck rigidly by his brief and Henry VII experienced the humiliation of asking for something and being refused.

    The Spaniards, including Catherine herself, were lucky that Henry VII had been taught in the school of hard knocks to keep his temper – unlike his second son, for example. Even so, De Ayala, bursting with indignation, persuaded himself that the scheme to send Catherine to Wales was part of the plot. Once she was there, he fumed, she would be under immense pressure to use the disputed goods. Firm instructions must be issued to the contrary, he wrote to her parents.

    De Ayala's reading of the King's motives has been widely accepted. Yet it seems a calumny. For at this stage of Henry VII's reign there are few signs of miserliness. On the other hand, there is abundant evidence of his anxious concern for the well-being of his son and heir. Would he really have been prepared to risk compromising Arthur's welfare for a mere 30,000 crowns? I think not. De Ayala's charge also ignores other arguments in favour of allowing the couple to live together. Arthur had apparently enjoyed his wedding night. So when he pleaded with Catherine to agree to come with him to Wales, he spoke for himself at least as much as for his father. As for Catherine's own reaction, I believe Alessandro. She was uxoriousness itself and marriage was her destiny. At last, after so many delays, she had fulfilled it, only to be told that she was to live separately from her husband. No wonder she was 'in despair'. And no wonder she resisted the separation – just as she would fight, much more openly and vehemently, against her separation from her second husband.

    So the English King changed his mind. And the most powerful motive was the one shared by Henry VII and De Puebla: the latter wanted Arthur and Catherine to have a child to cement the AngloSpanish alliance; the former wanted a grandson to guarantee the future of his dynasty. For both, the way to the future lay through Wales, so to Wales Catherine went.

    'That we might observe the ancient customs of our realm', Henry VII wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella in a long-overlooked letter, 'we recently despatched into Wales the most illustrious Arthur and Catherine, our common children.' 'For though the opinion of many were adverse to this course by reason of the tender age of our son', Henry continued, 'yet were we unwilling to allow the Prince and Princess to be separated at any distance from each other.'

    Moreover, he added, Ferdinand and Isabella had no need to be concerned about Catherine's welfare, since '[she] has with her a venerable man, Alessandro Geraldini, her principal Chaplain, for whom we have the greatest regard, partly by reason of his virtues shown unto us in many ways, [and] partly because he has been [Catherine's] preceptor'. Geraldini would, no doubt, Henry ends, keep the Catholic Kings fully informed about both Catherine's welfare and the state of England.
¹⁷

    Arthur and Catherine left Court on 21 December to begin their independent married life by keeping the great feast of Christmas together 'forty miles from here'. It was a journey which began with high hopes but ended in disaster.
¹⁸

A
rthur was a well-known figure in the Welsh Marches, where he had spent most of his short life. He was also a well-liked and respected one. Now he returned, with his new wife, Catherine. She was high-born, pretty and gracious. He was the hero of the hour. They were a golden couple, ready, it seemed, to usher in the new Arthurian age of which the Welsh poets had sung ever since the Prince's birth.

Arthur's principal seat, Ludlow Castle in Shropshire, was a not unworthy Camelot. It stands on a rocky outcrop commanding a meander of the River Teme. At its core is a Norman keep. But in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Mortimers, Earls of March, had transformed the castle into a magnificent palace-fortress, worthy of a family who were the mightiest Marcher lords and able to make and unmake kings. On the northern side of the inner bailey they built a symmetrical lodging, lit by large, traceried windows. In the centre is the great hall. It is elevated on a basement and entered by a broad stone stair that is as much ceremonial as functional. On either side are chambers in projecting wings. Catherine and Arthur occupied the block to the east, which was entered by a staircase from the dais of the hall. To the north, a massive square tower projects out beyond the curtain wall. It contains adjacent closets, with deep, embrasured windows overlooking the flood-plain. These were the couple's most private rooms.

    But the most handsome building in the castle was one of the oldest. This is the chapel, which, like the keep, is Norman. It is circular. Outside, the doorway and windows are placed with absolute symmetry; inside, there is an arcade of pilasters supporting interlaced arches. In its severer, northern European fashion, the chapel is as pure and elegant an exercise of architectural geometry as any that Catherine had seen in the Alhambra.
¹

    Nor did the Princely Household have to fear comparisons either. The President of the Prince's Council was William Smith. Bishop successively of Coventry and Lichfield and Lincoln, he was a scholaradministrator of the old school. He became Chancellor of Oxford University in 1500 and in September 1501 escorted Arthur on a visit to the university. Arthur stayed in Magdalen College, where the Bursar, a certain ambitious young don called Thomas Wolsey, was hurrying to complete the great tower and, allegedly, cooking the college books to raise the necessary funds. Arthur had paid his visit to Oxford on his way to his wedding with Catherine. On the way back, the couple probably passed through Oxford as well. They may indeed have spent Christmas at Woodstock, five miles to the north. And Oxford was always to remain Catherine's favourite university – unlike the rest of the royal family whose patronage went to Cambridge. Another Oxford connexion was Arthur's tutor, Thomas Linacre. Physician, grammarian and pioneer scholar of Greek, Linacre was probably the most learned man in Europe north of the Alps. He was also an impossible perfectionist, who found writing a torment. He must have been a demanding teacher. But his efforts meant that Arthur could confront Catherine on more than equal terms of scholarship.
²

    But the most important members of Arthur's entourage from Catherine's point of view were Sir Richard Pole, Arthur's Chamberlain, and his wife, Margaret Plantagenet. Both had royal connexions. Pole was a member of Lady Margaret Beaufort's family of the half-blood, which issued from her mother's second marriage. Margaret Plantagenet was royal herself. She was daughter of George, Duke of Clarence and sister of the Earl of Warwick who had been executed in 1499 to make England safe for Catherine. Now Catherine learned the truth about the circumstances of her marriage – and from the woman who had been most injured by it. It could have been the beginnings of a vendetta: instead Catherine and Margaret became fast friends.
³

    We know about the incident through Margaret's third son, Reginald Pole. He was born in 1500 in Stourton, Staffordshire. This was a manor in the King's hands, where, no doubt, Arthur was staying at the time. In youth Pole was a friend and passionate admirer of Henry VIII; subsequently he became a partisan of Catherine and her daughter Mary. He knew all the secrets of the royal family as well as his own. So his story is to be believed. But we must not attach too much importance to it at this stage. There was a cloud over Catherine's marriage. But it was no bigger than a man's hand.
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    Arthur's own more personal needs were also satisfied during these months of his married life, if we believe the subsequent testimony of one of his most intimate body servants, William Thomas. Thomas had been Groom of his Privy Chamber for three years and attended him to Ludlow. There one of his tasks had been to prepare the Prince for the conjugal bed. Thomas 'made [him] ready to bed and . . . conducted him clad in his night gown unto the Princess's bedchamber door often and sundry times . . . and that at the morning he received him at the said doors . . . and waited upon him to his own privy chamber'. Arthur, it would seem, was an assiduous husband. Too much so, some later gossip suggested.
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    But suddenly the idyll soured. On Easter Day, 27 March 1502, Arthur fell seriously ill. The herald's description of the malady is long on adjectives but short on precision. It was 'the most pitiful disease and sickness, that with so sore and great violence had battled and driven, in the singular parts of him inward, [so] that cruel and fervent enemy of nature, the deadly corruption, did utterly vanquish and overcome the pure and friendful blood'. Extracting a modern diagnosis from this is not easy. Most authorities have suggested a bronchial or pulmonary condition, such as pneumonia, tuberculosis, or the 'sweating sickness' which seems to have been a virulent form of influenza. But the phrase: 'the singular parts of him inward' has also been understood to point to testicular cancer. Some support for this theory may come from the testimony of an unknown witness, who remembered another of Arthur's servants as dating the Prince's decline from Shrovetide (8 February). Then 'he had lain with the Lady Catherine, and was never so lusty in body and courage until his death, which [he]said was because he lay with the Lady Catherine'. Testicular cancer, which is known to move rapidly in the young, would also explain the terrifying speed of the end. From Easter Day, when his illness became serious, to his death, took less than a week. On Saturday, 2 April, the Prince's 'lively spirits . . . finally mortified' and he yielded, 'with most fervent devotion, his spirit and soul to the pleasure and hands of Almighty God'.
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* * *

Sir Richard Pole immediately sent letters to the court at Greenwich. The messengers arrived late on the Monday. The task of breaking the terrible news was entrusted to the King's confessor. He entered the King's chamber early on the Tuesday morning, ordered everyone else out and then intoned in Latin from the
Book of Job
: 'What? shall we receive good at the hand of God and shall we not receive evil.' After these words of harsh comfort, he told the King of the death of his son.

    Henry's reaction shows the reality of parental feeling behind the brutalities of dynastic politics. As a dynast, he moved his children like chess pieces across the board of Europe's politics, to mate for the greater glory of the House of Tudor. But now he grieved for the loss of his son like any stricken father. His first thought was to summon Queen Elizabeth. She comforted her distraught husband and then returned to her own apartments to cry her mother's tears. Then she collapsed and King Henry came in turn to comfort her.

    It is a touching scene. But even at this supreme moment of personal agony, the dynastic imperative could not be forgotten. 'Remember', Queen Elizabeth begged her husband, that they still had other children – 'a fair goodly Prince [and] two fair Princesses' – to carry on the family line. And remember, above all, she cried, 'we [are] both young enough' to have more children.
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    It was a scene which Catherine's parents had played many times as death had cut down their heirs – first their eldest son, then their eldest daughter, then their first grandson. And it was a scene with which Catherine herself would become all too familiar. Similar words, 'and we still young enough', would echo in her own birthing chamber, though this time spoken by the husband rather than the wife.

    Etiquette forbade members of the royal family to see death, so neither Arthur's father nor his mother nor his widow accompanied him on his last journey. Instead, it was left to the stalwart Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, himself the father by two wives of twelve children who survived to adulthood, to supervise Arthur's funeral and to enact the rituals of grief as chief mourner. These took time to organise so, as usual, the body was embalmed: first it was eviscerated, then cauterised and finally stuffed with spices. The process was crude but on this occasion it was so effective that there was no need for the additional preservative of a lead coffin. Instead, chested only in wood, the Prince lay in state in his chamber for three weeks. On St George's Day, the funeral rites began, with requiem masses at Ludlow Parish Church and then at Bewdley where only three years previously Arthur had 'married' De Puebla as a proxy for Catherine. Spring that year in the Welsh Marches was unusually wet and windy, and between Ludlow and Bewdley the funeral car had to be pulled by oxen. The body was taken to Worcester Cathedral and buried on the south side of the choir.
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