Six Wives (4 page)

Finally the King put on the Queen's wedding ring.

Anne of Cleves's ring was engraved: 'GOD SEND ME WELL TO KEEP .' Few prayers can have been more brutally or more quickly rejected. Seven months later she was divorced and, after a consolatory dinner, returned the ring to the King, 'desiring that it might be broken in pieces as a thing which she knew of no force or value'.
¹⁰

* * *

The question is now insistent: did Henry view marriage itself as being like that ring, 'a thing of no force or value'? Certainly, his attitude to it was peculiar. Just how peculiar has been obscured by the claim of most modern historians that royal marriages made in private, like Henry's, were the rule. They were so only because he made them the rule. The earlier practice, which he inherited, was variable. It is set out in the official handbook of English protocol known as
The Royal Book
. This was drawn up under the Lancastrians; then it was handed over, like a relay baton of legitimacy, to the succeeding dynasties: first to the Yorkists and then to the Tudors.

    The ceremonies in
The Royal Book
fell into two main types. There were those which conferred divine sanction on the Monarchy, of which the most important was the coronation. And there were those which ensured the continuance of the royal line. This is why incidents in the Queen's reproductive cycle figured so heavily: the conception, her confinement, her delivery, the baptism of her child, and her churching, when, some forty days after giving birth, she was freed from the pollution of childbed. And the beginning of all these, naturally, was her marriage.
¹¹

    Here
The Royal Book
offered a choice. 'Also it must be understood whether the King will be married privily or openly.' But, in offering this choice, it took for granted that the Queen (assumed to be a foreign princess) would have had a grand reception when she set foot on English soil, and that her marriage would be followed almost immediately by her coronation. How this worked out in practice is best seen in the sequence of ceremonies for Margaret of Anjou when she came to England in 1443 to be Queen of Henry VI. She was formally received at Southampton on 10 April; married quietly at nearby Titchfield Abbey on 22 April; and then, a month later, was crowned at Westminster on 30 May. And the coronation was of the most magnificent: it was preceded by a triumphal procession from the Tower to Westminster, with verses for the pageants written by the Lancastrian laureate John Lydgate, and it was followed by three days of jousts.
¹²

    So for Margaret, a quiet wedding was a private interlude in the otherwise highly public complex of ceremonies which acknowledged her as Queen. Such, clearly, was the intention of the author of
The Royal Book
. Henry VIII followed it only in the case of his first two Queens, Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, who were indeed publicly and gloriously crowned soon after their rather hole-in-the-corner weddings. But Henry's other Queens were never crowned – though there was an intention to crown Jane Seymour which was put off, it was claimed, because of plague. There were acknowledgement ceremonies of sorts. But they were improvised and consisted in showing the Queen off to the Court (which could be controlled) rather than to the people (who were unpredictable).
¹³

    The lack of publicity of Henry's marriages does therefore make a point. Henry's marriages had more public, political consequences than those of any other sovereign. England threw off her ancient religion and destroyed old values and old, beloved ways of life, all for the sake of women – Henry's women. But, despite this, Henry refused to see his marriages as other than private acts. They were entered into for his personal satisfaction. And, if they failed to satisfy him, he broke them.

    But this does not mean that Henry took marriage frivolously. Rather, he took it too seriously. In this one respect, at least, his attitude was curiously modern. Like us, he expected marriage to make him happy, rather than merely content, which is the most that sensible people hope for. Therefore, like us, when marriage made him unhappy, he wanted out. The result nowadays is a soaring divorce rate and a crisis of marriage. The result then was that Henry suffered from these same problems on a personal basis.

    And he did suffer. So did his kingdom, his Church and his children. But those who suffered most of all were the Six Wives who became the Queens of Henry VIII.

PART ONE

C
atherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII, was born on 16 December 1485. Her mother, the warrior-queen Isabella of Castile, had spent most of her pregnancy on campaign against the Moors (as the still-independent Islamic inhabitants of the southern part of Spain were known), rather than in ladylike retirement. Only after her capture of Ronda did she withdraw from the front, first to Cordoba and then to Alacala de Henares to the north-east of Madrid, where the child was born. The baby was named after Catherine, her mother's English grandmother, who was the daughter of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. She took after the English royal house as well, with reddish golden hair, a fair skin and bright blue eyes.
¹

    The Englishness of her name and appearance proved prophetic. After a happy, secure childhood, Catherine's life was to become a series of struggles: to get married, to have a child and, above all, to protect her marriage and her child against her husband's determination to annul the one and bastardise the other. And the scene of these struggles was England.

* * *

Catherine's parents, Ferdinand and Isabella, were the most remarkable royal couple of the age. They were both sovereigns in their own right: Isabella of Castile, Ferdinand of Aragon.

    Castile formed the larger, western part of what we now call Spain, stretching from the Bay of Biscay in the north to the marches of the Islamic kingdom of Granada to the south. It was a country of torrid, sunburned mountains and castles and high plains roamed by vast flocks of sheep. The territories of Aragon lay to the east. They were smaller, but richer and greener, encompassing the foothills of the Pyrenees, the fertile valleys of the Mediterranean coast and the great trading city of Barcelona. The traditions of the two kingdoms were as distinct as their landscapes. Castile was insular, aristocratic and obsessed with the crusade against the Moors in which lay its origin and continuing
raison
d'être
. Aragon, in contrast, was an open, mercantile society: it looked north, across the Pyrenees towards France, and east, across the Mediterranean towards Italy.

    To a striking extent, the two sovereigns embodied the different characteristics of their realms. Isabella was intense, single-minded and ardently Catholic, while Ferdinand was a devious and subtle schemer. But he was much more: a fine soldier, who won more battles, both in person and by his generals, than any other contemporary ruler; a strategist, with a vision that was European in scale and grandeur; and a realist, who had the wit not to let his numerous successes go to his head. Understandably, Machiavelli worshipped him as the most successful contemporary practitioner of the sort of power politics he himself recommended: 'From being a weak king he has become the most famous and glorious king in Christendom. And if his achievements are examined, they will all be found to be very remarkable, and some of them quite extraordinary.'
²

    Catherine manifestly took after her mother. But, I shall also argue, there was more in her of her father's qualities, both for good and bad, than has been commonly realized.

* * *

    They married in 1469, he aged seventeen, she a year or so older. Immediately Isabella was disinherited by her brother, Henry IV of Castile, in favour of his doubtfully legitimate daughter, Joanna. After the death of Henry IV in 1474, a civil war broke out between niece and aunt. This resulted in Isabella's victory and proclamation as Queen of Castile, and Joanna's retreat into a nunnery. Five years later, Ferdinand succeeded his father in Aragon. Ferdinand was the son of John II by his second marriage, and only after two deaths, both rumoured to be by poison, was he delivered the throne. Having fought everybody else to a standstill, Ferdinand and Isabella then threatened to come to blows themselves. He was determined to be King indeed in Castile; she was equally resolute to preserve her rights as Queen Regnant.

    Finally their quarrel was submitted to formal arbitration. This established the principle of co-sovereignty between the two. Justice was executed jointly when they were together and independently if they were apart. Both their heads appeared on the coinage and both their signatures on royal charters, while the seals included the arms of both Castile and Aragon. And these were quartered, as a gesture of equality, rather than Ferdinand's arms of Aragon 'impaling' Isabella's arms of Castile, as was usual between husband and wife. Such power-couple equality was unusual enough in a medieval royal marriage. But, in fact, Isabella was the first among equals since, with the exception of the agreed areas of joint sovereignty, the administration of Castile was reserved to her in her own right.

    Not surprisingly, Ferdinand jibbed. But he soon submitted and, united, the pair carried all before them. For, despite Ferdinand's four bastards by as many different mothers, he and his wife were genuinely, even passionately, in love. But even in this there was rivalry. 'My Lady,' one of Ferdinand's letters to the Queen begins, 'now it is clear which of us two loves best.' But they were in love with their growing power even more than with each other. Granada, the last stronghold of the Moors in Spain, surrendered in 1492 and the following year Columbus returned from his first voyage to America, having taken possession of several of the West Indies in the name of the 'Catholic Kings', as Ferdinand and Isabella were to be entitled by a grateful Pope in 1496. Catherine was at her parents' side to witness both these momentous events.
³

    And there is no doubt which had the most effect. Years later, when she was sent a present of a ceremonial Indian chair and robe, she ignored them. But the memory of Granada was forever green.

    This is shown by Catherine's choice of badge. In both Spain and England it had become the practice for important people to have a badge as well as a coat of arms. A coat of arms was a given, as it was inherited. But a badge was a matter of personal selection. Some badges, it is true, ran in families – including many of the most famous ones, including the Red Rose of Lancaster or the White Rose of York. But even these were regularly modified, added to or discarded by individual family members to suit their own purposes or circumstances. Badges were also more freely used. They appeared on personal possessions, in interior decoration and on servants' clothing. At one level, therefore, they were a mere form of labelling – like nametapes; at another, they were a personal symbol, even a form of self-expression in an age where such opportunities were limited.

    Catherine's choice fell on the pomegranate. This was a tribute to her parents' decision to add the pomegranate to the Spanish coat of arms in a punning reference to the conquest of Granada. (The wordplay does not really work in English. But it is clear in a Romance language like French, where the name of the fruit and the city is the same:
grenade
.) But there were other layers of meaning as well. In classical mythology the pomegranate is the symbol of Proserpina, the queen of the underworld, whose return to earth each spring heralds the reawakening of life after the death of winter. Christianity borrowed this idea, like so much else, and turned the pomegranate into a symbol of the Resurrection. Finally it represented the two, opposed aspects of female sexuality. These derived from the fruit's appearance. The outside is covered in a hard, smooth skin. But the inside (always revealed in Catherine's version of the badge by a cut in the surface of the fruit) teems with a multitude of seeds, each surrounded with succulent, blood-red jelly. The hard exterior suggested chastity; the teeming interior fertility.