Six Wives (9 page)

    The Duchess Elizabeth of course spoke no Spanish. So, to assist her in greeting Catherine, she was assigned the services of William Hollybrand, who gave a speech of welcome in the Duchess's name 'in the Spanish tongue'. The speech, like everything else, had been the subject of minute preparation and Hollybrand spoke according to a written text. How Catherine and her Spanish suite had hitherto overcome the language barrier is anyone's guess. As Plymouth traded with Spain, there would have been Spanish speakers among the merchant community. There were probably some resident Spaniards too – though they were regarded as a disorderly lot and were treated with disdain by metropolitan Spaniards. English and Spanish churchmen no doubt conversed in Latin, in which language Catherine herself was also able to communicate. Finally, her newly acquired French would have been put to the test by her more sophisticated hosts, including Lord Broke, who had spent two years' exile in Brittany.
¹⁰

    Hollybrand himself probably combined the roles of merchant and minor royal bureaucrat as collector of the customs on wine in the port of London. He, too, was to become a part of Catherine's life, as Treasurer of her household as Princess of Wales.
¹¹

    Beyond Amesbury the quality of the roads improved and Catherine was supplied with a 'chair' or chariot as an occasional substitute for her litter. The intention was now that she would make rapid progress towards London. But at Dogmersfield near Fleet in Hampshire, where Catherine was due to spend the nights of 5 and 6 November in a manor house belonging to the Bishop of Bath and Wells, her iron schedule was suddenly broken. For Henry VII could contain his impatience no longer. The King would see his future daughter-in-law and introduce her to his son. And nothing would stop him.
¹²

H
enry VII's decision to snatch a semi-licit glimpse of Catherine before her arrival in London was a last-minute one (the meeting does not appear in her itinerary); nevertheless, its effect was carefully considered. The King was accompanied by a reporter (probably a herald), who wrote up the event and turned it into the prologue to the official account of Catherine's reception and marriage. The herald's prose was purple, like most modern royal reporters'. He was also determined, like his royal master, to milk his story for all it was worth.
¹

    Once again, the modern parallel is striking. For the early Tudors, like the Windsors, played the card of Family Monarchy, and turned the rites of passage of family life – the births, marriages and deaths – into public pageants. There was already a strong medieval tradition to this effect. But Henry VII, seated shakily on his throne, carried it to fresh heights in an attempt to curry popularity. And Catherine, like another young Princess of Wales, seemed typecast to play a starring role in this royal charade.

* * *

Henry VII was staying at Richmond. He had just rebuilt the palace, with its fantasticated cluster of onion domes, and renamed it after the earldom he had held before he became King. Now, on 4 November, as though reluctant to leave his new creation, he did not set out till the afternoon. The short November day was soon spent, and the King and his party had to put up unexpectedly at Chertsey Abbey, with only a few miles of their journey accomplished. The next day he made better time and the morning mists had barely cleared when he left. The day turned out fine and sunny and the route was a pleasant one, through the southern part of the forest of Windsor. Soon the royal party was at a full gallop until it reached Easthampstead, on the western border of the forest, near Wokingham. Here took place the first piece of family theatre, in the form of a public meeting between the King and his eldest son Arthur, Prince of Wales.
²

    Arthur was riding from his principality of Wales to his wedding in London. He was already well used to public events. When he had been received by his future subjects, as on his entry into London in 1499, he had been gravely courteous; when he had greeted his father, he had been elaborately deferential. So it was on this occasion. The inhabitants of Easthampstead were also used to frequent royal visitors to the King's hunting lodge on the edge of the village. So they cannot have been too surprised to find themselves pressed as extras into a Tudor photoopportunity. 'The true and loving English people', as a few dozen villagers became in the reporter's grandiloquent phrasing, 'pleasantly perceive[d] the pure and proper Prince Arthur . . . solemnly to salute his sage father . . . which was great gladness to all trusty hearts'.
³

    Father and son, whose relationship under the hype was real and close, then spent the night together in the hunting lodge. The following morning they rode out together to 'the plains' – that is, to the flat heath land round Farnborough and Aldershot. Somewhere in the middle of the scrubby wilderness, the King and Prince met with the advance party of Catherine's suite.

    Henry had sent word to Catherine at Dogmersfield that he was coming to see her. Catherine responded by sending the senior ambassador accompanying her to say that that was impossible; the orders of her father, the King of Spain, were clear: she was not 'to have any meeting, nor use any manner of communication [with her husband's family] . . . unto the inception of the very day of solemnisation of marriage'.

    Henry's response was categorical. He summoned his councillors and they held a meeting there and then, on horseback and in the open air. Their decision was unanimous. Ferdinand might be King in Spain but Henry was King in England. And Catherine and her suite were now 'so far entered into [Henry's] Empire and realm' that they were subject to the English King and to English customs. It was a case of: when in Rome, do as the Romans do. Catherine and her advisers acquiesced graciously. They had, after all, no choice.
⁴

    Leaving his son behind, the King rode forward, as the advance guard, to lay siege to the Infanta in her castle. Catherine tried a final ruse. She would proclaim herself the Sleeping Beauty and send word to Henry that she was 'in her rest' after her journey. Henry refused to be put off. 'If she were in her bed he would see and commune with her, for that was the mind and the intent of his coming,' he said. He gave her a few moments to get herself ready; then, booted and spurred, strode into her 'third' (that is, her most private) chamber. Each spoke 'the most goodly words' in their own language.

    The ice maiden had melted. The King withdrew to change out of his riding dress and the Prince of Wales arrived at the manor house at Dogmersfield. A second meeting now took place, between the young couple themselves. They had been betrothed and married repeatedly by proxy. Now they renewed their vows in person, with the bishops of both sides interpreting English and Spanish into their common language of Latin.

    There followed supper and an impromptu ball. Catherine summoned her minstrels and danced with her ladies. Arthur then danced 'right pleasant and honourably' with Joan, Lady Guildford.
⁵

    Joan was the wife of one of the King's leading ministers; she was also daughter of Queen Margaret of Anjou's most faithful lady-in-waiting. Through her mother, who was a native of Piedmont, she had acquired a skill in languages that was unusal in the Tudor court: as well as her fluent French she spoke good enough Latin for Erasmus to be impressed by her conversation, and she probably had Spanish too. These skills gave her an important role in the marriages of the early Tudors – though her fanatical devotion to the royal children meant that it was not always a happy one.
⁶

    But Joan was a mature woman, who was, moreover, married to someone else. Why did not Arthur dance with his own bride-to-be? It can hardly have been repulsion. For Catherine did not have the dark eyes and hair and sallow, creamy complexion of most of her ladies-in-waiting. Instead, with the looks inherited from her English ancestry, she corresponded closely to contemporary ideals of beauty.

    Happily, we can see what Arthur saw thanks to a recently reidentified portrait of Catherine in her early teens. She is simply dressed, in a sort of smock, with her hair parted, pulled back and braided into a short, netted plait, and she holds a red rose, the badge of the Lancastrian ancestry she shared with Arthur. She is a country girl, fresh and charming.

    Was Arthur's failure to seize her in his arms then the result – as many writers have darkly hinted – of a lack of manhood? Hardly. Instead it was a straightforward question of etiquette. After all, there had been enough to-do about Arthur's merely seeing Catherine. For him to have embraced her and danced with her would have been – even in more relaxed England – a step too far, even an insult.

A
fter Dogmersfield, Catherine and Henry VII and Arthur went their separate ways. The King returned to Windsor and Richmond; Catherine continued her journey towards the capital. En route, there was another meeting, this time with the Duke of Buckingham. Buckingham was the richest noble in England, with a pedigree that made the Howards and even the Tudors seem upstarts. Neither he nor the Tudors ever forgot the fact. His pride was to be his undoing. But for Catherine, used to the
grandees
of Spain, it seems to have been a bond of affinity. And they came to have enemies in common.

    Finally, she was brought to Lambeth, to await her entry into London. There she would be shown to the English people and married to Arthur. For Catherine, it would be the fulfilment of her destiny; for her fatherin-law, Henry VII, it was the achievement of his fondest ambition. Nothing was too good or too costly for the celebrations: he would make the streets of London run with wine, and gold would pour out of his carefully managed coffers.
¹

* * *

News of the scale of the preparations reached Spain and, just before Catherine's departure, Isabella wrote to Henry. 'I am told', she said, 'that the King . . . has ordered great preparations to be made, and that much money will be spent upon her reception and her wedding.' She was, of course, flattered and pleased at the attention shown to her daughter. Nevertheless, she continued, it would be more in accordance with her feelings if the expenses were moderate. She did not wish that her daughter should be the cause of any loss to England, either in money or in any other respect. 'On the contrary, we desire that she should be the source of all kinds of happiness.' Let Henry, therefore, be more niggardly with his money but lavish with his affection. 'The substantial part of the festival', she enthused, 'should be his love.'

    This was Isabella at her gushing, sentimental worst. Subsequent events, however, were to make her words seem prophetic – as though the Queen of Spain, Cassandra-like, had uttered a warning of the nemesis that follows hubris. But at the time, Cassandra-like again, she was ignored.
²

* * *

Preparations for Catherine's wedding had begun at least two years previously, in 1499, when it was thought that she would soon be arriving in England. Henry VII appointed a group of commissioners, consisting of councillors and officers of the royal household, to plan and organise the event. But he was a hands-on King and he was certainly consulted on all of the commissioners' big decisions and many of their smaller ones as well. The commissioners' starting point was
The Royal Book
, with its collection of precedents for everything from christenings to funerals. But the rules it prescribed for weddings were of the vaguest. This was a challenge; it was also a chance to create something new in both scale and content. The commissioners (and Henry) seized the opportunity with both hands.

    The key decision would be location. By the late fifteenth century, most important royal events consisted of four elements: an
entrée
or procession, the actual ceremony, the creation of Knights of the Bath, and a tournament. The various elements stretched over several days and took place in different venues. The first, the
entrée
or procession, followed a more-or-less fixed route, traversing the City of London at its widest, from the Tower in the east to Temple Bar in the west. This showed off the King or other member of the royal family to as many of the inhabitants of England's commercial capital and by far its largest city as cared to watch. For the support of the Londoners was worth having. They numbered some 50,000 and regarded themselves as a sort of proxy for the English: they
were
The People. In the fullness of time Londoners (and especially their wives) were to become Catherine's most vociferous partisans.

    The remaining elements of royal ceremonies, however, were normally held outside the City boundaries in the suburbs. Westminster lay two miles to the west of the City and was connected to it by the Strand and King Street (the modern Whitehall) and by the more important highway of the Thames. Here the King had his main residence (and the only one formally entitled a palace): the Palace of Westminster. Here too, and forming part of the palace precinct, was Westminster Abbey. This was a specifically royal church. It contained the shrine of Edward the Confessor, England's royal saint, and it was the burial place of most of his successors, including King Edward III, from whom both Catherine and Arthur descended. Above all, the Abbey was where English Kings and Queens were crowned, with (in the King's case) the regalia taken from Edward the Confessor's own tomb. The coronation took place in front of the high altar in a specially designed area of the church known as the
theatre
. This combination of facilities, in the Palace and the Abbey, made Westminster the natural ceremonial capital, just as the City of London was the popular, commercial one.

    But, whatever Westminster's attractions, Henry VII's commissioners ignored them. Instead, they decided that Catherine's wedding would take place in the Old St Paul's Cathedral in the City. This is because they had their sights on a single goal: audience. Large audiences were elusive in the sixteenth century. There were no modern media to take the event to the people; instead the people had to be able to take themselves to the event. Old St Paul's was in the middle of the largest potential audience in the country and it was an easy walk for most of them. It was also big enough to take all who were likely to come, with a standing capacity of ten thousand or more. It remained only to make sure that, in the absence of a
theatre
like Westminster Abbey, the vast crowds could see.