Six Wives (18 page)

    For Catherine, this was the final treachery. It was also the last straw. So far, she had held firm in the face of adversity. But this was too much. She had demanded the payment of her marriage portion. It had been paid. She had asked for a new, plain-speaking ambassador. He had been sent. And then everything had gone wrong. Even De Puebla's handling of her affairs acquired a retrospective, roseate glow. 'De Puebla', she wrote to her father, 'is accustomed to behave with the greatest gentleness towards Henry [VII], while the ambassador [Fuensalida] bears himself very audaciously towards him and his Council.' At last, she understood the logic of De Puebla's position: 'as she is constrained to submit to [the English authorities], no one can be of use who does not behave with moderation'.
¹²

    But the insight came too late. Soft means had been tried and failed. Hard means had been attempted, with even worse results. She had done everything she could, to no avail. She was at a dead end. The enterprise of the English marriage was over. She admitted her failure to her father and, what was more difficult still, to herself. 'Do not let me perish', she begged Ferdinand, 'otherwise . . . I am afraid I might do something which neither the King of England nor your Highness, who has much more weight, will be able to prevent.' Above all, 'send for me [to Spain], that I may conclude my few remaining days in serving God. That would be the greatest good I could have in this world.' Catherine's will, the will of the daughter of Isabella, had been finally broken.
¹³

Catherine wrote this despairing letter on 9 March 1509. Six weeks later Henry VII was dead and Catherine's world was turned upside down.

I
t was indeed a new world that was ushered in when, on 21 April 1509, in great agony of body and mind, King Henry VII died. At fifty-two, he was not an old man, even by the standards of the sixteenth century. But the deaths, in quick succession, of his eldest son and his wife, had aged and soured him. His health broke down and he became increasingly oppressive: to members of his wife's family, to anyone with money, and, above all, to Catherine herself.

* * *

For Catherine, then, Henry VII's death could hardly make things worse. But would it make them any better?

On the whole, Catherine thought that it would. Back in September 1508 she had ventured to express 'the hope that the Prince would be better than his father'. Fuensalida, looking on the black side as usual, had replied: 'Please to God that the hope prove true, but he saw no likelihood of it.' For once, Catherine proved the better prophet.
¹

    How had Catherine arrived at her optimistic reading of Prince Henry's character and inclinations? After all, the two had been allowed to spend very little time together and none in private. But Catherine was friendly with Mary, Henry's favourite sister. Perhaps, too, the courtship of her lady-in-waiting, Ines de Venegas, with William Blunt, Lord Mountjoy, which blossomed into marriage a few months into the new reign, had already begun. If so, this would have told Catherine all that she needed to know. For Mountjoy, though some thirteen years older than Henry, was his
'socius studiorum'
or 'companion in studies'. And it was Prince Henry's education, above all, that made him so different from his father.
²

    Henry, like Catherine herself, had been largely schooled in the Classics. Unlike Catherine, however, his education was influenced directly by the great Erasmus himself. Once again, the conduit was Mountjoy. Mountjoy had been Erasmus's favourite pupil in Paris and, when Mountjoy returned to England and took his place in Prince Henry's household, he kept up an enthusiastic correspondence with his former teacher. He also made sure that Henry was thoroughly inculcated both in Erasmus's characteristic style and in his moralising approach to the Classics. He even brought Erasmus to England and introduced him to the eight-year-old Henry in 1499.
³

    But Mountjoy was a gentleman as well as a scholar. He came from a great military family, while his stepfather, the aged Earl of Ormond, was the source of the stories about Henry's namesake, the all-conquering Henry V, that formed another important aspect of the Prince's upbringing. Here history merged into legend. For when, late in the fifteenth century, Sir Thomas Malory came to write
Le Morte D'Arthur
, the definitive version of the Arthurian cycle, he remodelled the deeds of the mythical Arthur on the achievements of the real Henry V. For the young Henry, devouring
Le Morte D'Arthur
in Caxton's printed edition of

1485 and listening spell-bound to Ormond's reminiscences, the real and mythical hero-kings became one. He would be another Henry V, another Arthur: brave in war and peace, generous, bold and gallant.
⁴

    For Henry, aged seventeen years and ten months when his father died, was young – young enough to believe what he read and young enough to think that it could be put into practice. Erasmus's influence, also exercised primarily through books, supplied spice and intellectual ambition. From this source came Henry's sense of justice and virtue as the proper business of kings, as well as a fierce hunger for fame and for the acquisition of that most elusive of accolades for a ruler: to be known to contemporaries and to posterity as 'the Great'.

    This was the young man whom Catherine, it seems, had glimpsed and in whom she put her hope. She probably knew, too, of more personal motives for his reaction against his father. From Margaret Pole, she had learned, perhaps, of Prince Henry's resentment at Henry VII's mistreatment of his mother's Yorkist relatives. And Catherine's own eyes would have told her that he hated being cooped up at his father's Court. That he wanted to joust and that only his father stopped him. That he had sat in the royal seat during one of Henry VII's bouts of illness; and that, like Prince Hal after he had tried on his dying father's crown, he had never wanted to give it up.

Now was his chance; now was Catherine's.

* * *

The old King died at 11 o'clock at night on the 21st. But his death was kept secret for two days. Councillors came to and from the royal apartments as though the King were still alive. And his son continued to appear publicly as Prince Henry and to be addressed as such. Not till the evening of 23 April was the truth made known and not till the 24th was the new King proclaimed in London. The concealment was to facilitate a political
coup
. Behind the smooth, uninterrupted façade of Court ceremony there took place a vicious faction struggle. This resulted in the downfall of two of the old King's leading councillors, Edmund Dudley and Sir Richard Empson, and the disavowal and reversal of the oppressive policies with which they were identified. The real author of these policies had, of course, been Henry VII himself. But he could not be blamed, openly at least.

    The most dramatic reversal of policy was the decision that Prince Henry, now King Henry VIII, should marry Catherine after all. This decision, too, was probably taken behind closed doors in the first fortyeight hours of the reign. Certainly by 8 May it was a
fait accompli
. Fuensalida was bewildered and even Ferdinand, normally so quick on his feet in an emergency, struggled, against the disadvantages of distance, to keep up with events.

    Nevertheless, there was no heedless rush to the altar. Instead, the English continued to extract the last drop of advantage from the situation. They made sure that the remainder of Catherine's marriage portion was paid in full and in cash. Catherine and her family also renounced any claim to the return of the money in the event of the premature death of either spouse. And not until the necessary deeds were signed and sealed were Henry and Catherine married on 11 June. The hard bargaining continued even into the couple's exchange of vows. 'Most illustrious Prince,' Henry was asked, 'is it your will to fulfil the treaty of marriage concluded by your father . . . and the parents of the Princess of Wales, the King and Queen of Spain; and, as the Pope has dispensed with this marriage, to take the Princess who is here present for your lawful wife?' 'I will,' Henry replied. Catherine was asked the equivalent question. 'I will,' she replied.
⁵

    Thus the vows were made; it remained to be seen how they would be kept. It also remained to be seen who would benefit from the marriage. So far, all the advantage had been on the English side. But Ferdinand rarely gave something for nothing. He had paid 200,000 crowns for the English marriage. He would expect a commensurate return on his investment.

* * *

Catherine's second marriage, in contrast with her first wedding to Arthur, was a private, almost furtive affair. There were probably lingering doubts about the propriety of the marriage, which, despite the Papal dispensation, never disappeared. Also, the wedding was overshadowed and overtaken by preparations for a much greater ceremony. The Feast of St John the Baptist, 24 June, and, by their reckoning, Midsummer Day, had previously been a day of ill-omen for Catherine. This was the day when her father had been due to pay the second instalment of her marriage portion; he had twice defaulted and twice exposed her to intolerable humiliation. Ever since 1505, she had dreaded the day. Now she could look forward to it with joy. For Henry had decided that it should be his coronation day – and hers, as well, since she would be crowned alongside him.

    The day before, she processed through London, as she had done on the eve of her wedding to Arthur. Then, she had been dressed as a Spanish Infanta, and had ridden Spanish-fashion, side-saddle on a mule. Now, she appeared every inch the English Queen. She was carried, English-style, in a litter. And everything about her was vestal white: the horses, the covering of the litter, Catherine's own dress. She wore her hair like a bride: long and loose and covered only with a 'coronal set with many rich orient stones [that is, pearls]'. It became her: even a hostile witness conceded that her hair was 'beautiful and goodly to behold'.

    But it is important to understand the meaning of the display. It was not, as many writers have assumed, a proclamation of the fact that she was a virgin when she married Henry. Instead, Catherine was only following precedent: every detail of her equipage, from the colour of the horses, the litter and the dress, to the 'dishevelled' state of her hair and 'the rich circlet' on her head, was specified by
The Royal Book
in its provisions for the coronation of a queen.

    But, just as the Queen's procession reached the Cardinal's Hat tavern in Cornhill, the blue sky darkened and the heavens opened. The rain was so violent that it overwhelmed the silken canopy borne over Catherine and, in all her finery, she had to take shelter 'under the hovel of the drapers' stalls'. The shower was as short as it was sharp and Thomas More made light of it, in a little poem he appended to the collection of coronation verses he presented to the King. Others saw it as a darker augury. Had Catherine really escaped the curse of Midsummer's Day?

    After Catherine followed her ladies-in-waiting and the gentlemen of her Household. Most were now English. They were headed by Lady Elizabeth Stafford, the sister of the Duke of Buckingham, who himself made a magnificent showing during the ceremonies as acting High Steward of England. Also in attendance on the Queen were Margaret Plantagenet and Elizabeth Boleyn. The latter was sister of the Earl of Surrey, wife of Sir Thomas Boleyn and mother of three young children, Anne, Mary and George, who was the baby of the family. Catherine's Spanish servants were not forgotten: Ines de Venegas, Maria de Gravara and Maria de Salinas all figured honourably among her ladies. Room was found even for Alonso de Esquivel and Juan de Cuero, despite the fact that both had fallen foul of their mistress. But the face Catherine was possibly most pleased to see was that of Fray Diego, who took his place in the procession with the rank of 'the Queen's Chancellor and Confessor'.

    On the 24th itself the coronation took place. Two thrones were placed on a platform in front of the high altar in Westminster Abbey: the higher for Henry, the lower for Catherine. First came the coronation of the King. Then it was Catherine's turn. The ceremonial for a queen consort was somewhat simpler than for a king. No oath was administered to her, nor, as a woman, was she invested with the sword or spurs. But she was anointed on the head and the breasts; the coronation ring was put on the fourth finger of her right hand, the crown on her head, the sceptre in her right hand and the ivory rod surmounted with the dove in her left. Catherine was now Queen, as sacredly and inalienably as Henry was King. As she returned to her throne, she bowed to Henry 'honouring, as is right, his majesty'.

    Catherine, of course, was both learned and devout, so for her the words of the elaborate Latin prayers uttered over her would have meant as much as the symbols and ritual. One by one, the names and stories of the great women of the Bible were recalled and applied to her. Grant, God was beseeched, that Catherine may be a vehicle of victory, even as '[Thou] didst sometimes cause Thy people to triumph over a most cruel enemy, by the hand of Judith, a woman'. Might her marriage endure: just as God, 'for the good of Thy people the Jews . . . didst deliver Queen Hester from captivity and bring her to the bed of Ahasuerus and to the society of his kingdom', so, for the good of England, might He keep Catherine with Henry that 'she, continuing always in the chastity of princely wedlock, may obtain the crown that is next unto virginity'. But, above all, God was begged, let her have children: like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and the Virgin Mary herself, may she 'multiply and rejoice in the fruit of her womb'; might she have a Son, a Christ for England.
⁶

    Thus Catherine was dedicated to a service greater than herself, greater even than Henry.

* * *