Medina del Campo. 14 March 1489
The English— ambassadors Thomas Savage and Richard Nanfan had never seen anything quite like it, or certainly not in the receptions given to their foreign counterparts at home. It was a March evening in the Castilian town of Medina del Campo – a time of year when bright but chilly days merge quickly into icily cold nights. The ambassadors were here to meet the royal couple who headed what was rapidly becoming one of Europe’s most powerful monarchies. It was not just Isabel and Ferdinand they wanted to see, however. They were also here to cast their eyes over a tiny princess, their daughter Catherine.
The ambassadors had spent two days at their comfortable lodgings, hung with fine tapestries, in the town. They had finally recovered from an arduous trip that started two months earlier in the port of Southampton and had twice seen them driven back to English ports by unruly winds and fierce storms. There had been much crying ‘to God and to all the saints in Paradise’ when they came close to drowning in the Bay of Biscay. In the dead of night their ship was blown over sideways by a gust of wind, taking in ‘so much water that she was quite under water and all on one side for a while, and the great sail almost entirely steeped in the sea’. On land things had scarcely been any better. For a week they took refuge from a snow storm in the northern Spanish port town of Laredo. Finally they scaled the exposed slopes of the Cantabrian cordillera on the road towards Burgos and Medina del Campo. Along the way they braved the wrath of a feisty Spanish landlady who at first ordered them off her premises and into the cold for being ‘so bold as to come into her house without her leave’. They were, she told them in no uncertain terms, ‘great devils’ and ‘bawdy villains’. She took their money, however, and, after a miserable night, they ‘rose very early’ and fled.
Now, finally, they were in one of the main wool and textile centres of the meseta. Medina del Campo was the great trading town of Castile, with fairs that attracted goods and people from across Europe. In the comfort of this small walled city, over-looked by an imposing castle, they were due to meet the Spanish king and queen. Fifteen years after Isabel assumed the throne and a decade after her husband inherited his father’s crown in Aragon, news of the couple’s expanding kingdoms and growing strength had spread across the whole of Europe. The dual nature of the Spanish monarchy, nevertheless, still intrigued the English visitors.
‘Perhaps some may blame me that I speak of “kings” (in plural), and some people may be astonished, and say, “How! Are there two kings in Castile?”’ observed the herald Roger Machado, one of the English ambassadors’ party, when he wrote down his impressions of that journey. ‘No [I say], but I write “kings” because the king is king on account of the queen, by right of marriage, and because they call themselves “kings”, and superscribe their letters “By the king and queen”, for she is the heiress [of the throne].’
These were atypical monarchs for their – or almost any – time. They were also, however, people who had to be taken into consideration by any other self-respecting European king. England’s Henry VII, another monarch to have emerged from the confusion of a violently fractious kingdom, already rated them so highly that he was eager to make one of the strongest sorts of alliance that could be formed outside warfare. The founder of the Tudor dynasty would betroth his eldest son and heir, Arthur, to the Spanish royal family’s fourth daughter, Catherine. It did not matter that the former was just two years old or that the latter was three. Alliances were sealed by such promises. These could always be broken, as they often were, but this was the best sort of promise to offer. It was why Dr Savage, a future archbishop of York, and Sir Richard Nanfan were here. The Spaniards were not so needy of an alliance with an apparently shaky new dynasty like the Tudors, but they had a surfeit of daughters and were determined to put them to good use. ‘If your highness gives us two or three more daughters in twenty years’ time you will have the pleasure of seeing your children and grandchildren on all the thrones of Europe,’ a prescient Fernando del Pulgar, who went on to become an official chronicler of her reign, had told Isabel many years before. With four healthy daughters, there were now enough to include the English in their plans.
At seven o’clock in the evening, as dusk fell, the messengers from the king and queen arrived at their quarters. Two bishops, a count, the comendador of an order of knights involved in the battle for Granada and a string of other nobles, officials and ‘great persons’ appeared. These were no ordinary messengers, but this was no ordinary meeting. The same queen who had shed the black of mourning and dazzled the people of Segovia with her brilliant, regal robes had not lost her knack for turning on the powerful resources of political theatre. Her visitors, quite simply, had to go home impressed. They were to be given a dizzying initiation into the dramatic ostentation which, as chroniclers of the time repeatedly found, the Castilian court turned on so suddenly and explosively when called upon to overawe important guests.
A torch-lit procession took them to the doors of the royal palace where the monarchs, restless and peripatetic as ever, had established their movable court. The modest palace in Medina del Campo, where Isabel would die fifteen years later, was a compact network of halls, courtyards and galleries. They were conducted into a ‘great room’ where, as Machado breathlessly reported, ‘they found the kings … seated under a rich cloth of gold’. In the centre of ‘this great cloth of state’ was an escutcheon quartered with the arms of Castile and Aragon. The monarchs both wore robes ‘woven entirely of gold’. The king’s was lined with the finest sable fur. It was the queen, however, who provoked a literary gasp of awe from Machado. The spectacular clothes and jewels she wore that evening – and the other outfits worn over the following days as the ambassadors were entertained with feasts, jousts, bull-fights and dances – were worthy, in his mind, of minutely detailed reporting.
Over her robe of cloth of gold Isabel wore ‘a riding hood of black velvet, all slashed in large holes, so as to show under the said velvet the cloth of gold in which she was dressed’. The hood itself was decorated with a broken line of finger-sized, oblong-shaped blocks of gold thread encrusted with jewels ‘so rich that no one has ever seen the like’. A white leather girdle with a pouch, which seemed somewhat masculine to Machado, was decorated with a ‘balass ruby [from Persia] the size of a tennis ball, five rich diamonds and other precious stones the size of a bean’.
The queen’s heavy jewellery dazzled as much as her dress.
She wore on her neck a rich gold necklace composed entirely of white and red roses, each rose being adorned with a large jewel. Besides this she had two ribbons suspended on each side of her breast, adorned with large diamonds, balass and other rubies, pearls, and various other jewels of great value to the number of a hundred or more. Over all this dress she wore a short cloak of fine crimson satin furred with ermine, very handsome in appearance and very brilliant. It was thrown on [negligently] cross-wise over her left side. Her head was uncovered, excepting only a little coiffe de plaisance at the back of her head without anything else.
Machado, a man with a keen eye for the monetary worth of clothing and jewellery, estimated that the queen was wearing some two hundred thousand crowns’ worth of gold.
This was blatant power-dressing. Each ruby, each diamond and every stretch of rich cloth or fur reinforced the idea of Isabel’s absolute superiority over all those who surrounded her. In fact, in the strictly defined society of Isabel’s Castile, sumptuary laws prevented others from outdoing her in her glory. These laws regulated everything from the use of silk and brocades to the gold-or silver-plating of swords and spurs. No one was to outshine the royal family.
The formal hand-kissing and speech-making that followed was slightly spoilt by the fact that the man appointed to speak on behalf of the Spanish monarchs, the ancient Diego de Muros, bishop of Ciudad Rodrigo, had lost most of his teeth. The English visitors strained their ears, but failed to understand the Latin words that babbled past his toothless gums and out between his lips. This was, in any case, a minor inconvenience compared to that suffered by a previous English ambassador, Thomas Langton. He had been sent to see the monarchs in Madrid in 1477. They were, at the time, still establishing themselves and battling for supremacy in a civil war against supporters of Isabel’s challenger for the crown – Juana la Beltraneja. On that occasion a special scaffold had been erected for the ambassador. It collapsed mid-speech, catapulting Langton to the ground. The dutiful ambassador picked himself up, dusted himself off and carried on as if nothing had happened.
Such diplomatic faux pas were now unthinkable in the Castilian court. Nothing was to be left to chance with the new embassy. The next twelve days of negotiating and entertainment were planned with absolute precision. The ambassadors were alternately charmed, amused, overwhelmed and conducted to the negotiating table. They also got their first glimpse of the young girl who Machado would refer to as either ‘the princess of England’ or the ‘princess of Wales’, Catherine of Aragon.
The three-year-old had missed out on the jousting and banquets, though her elder siblings Juan and Isabel had danced for the ambassadors with their Portuguese teachers. At the jousting, Machado found Queen Isabel wearing a Spanish mantilla ‘all spangled with lozenges of crimson and black velvet, and on each lozenge was a large pearl … [and] a rich balass ruby the size of a beechnut’. It was, he sighed, so impressive that ‘no man ever saw anything equal to it’. Two rubies, ‘the size of pigeon’s eggs’, and a large pearl deemed worth twelve thousand crowns hung as pendants from her head-dress. Such was the display of jewels on necklaces, mantilla and clothes that Machado’s normally acute sense of pricing was defeated. ‘So rich was the dress she wore that day that there is no man who can well imagine what could be the value of it,’ he wrote.
The ambassadors’ first meeting with Donna Catherine, as Machado also called her, appears to have been stage-managed to look like a simple family affair. The ‘richly dressed’ queen (an overwhelmed Machado had exhausted his powers of description by this stage) and Ferdinand, together with the elder three children, led them into a gallery hung with fine tapestries. Here they found little Catherine and her sister María, then aged six, both as lavishly dressed as their mother. They had with them their junior court of fourteen maidens (aged fourteen or younger) ‘all of them dressed in cloth of gold, and all of them daughters of noblemen’. Catherine was still too young to dance for her visitors, but little María gamely took the floor with ‘a young lady of her age and size, and led her to dance’.
This brief encounter is one of only a handful of childhood sightings of Catherine in the chronicles of the time, excepting Treasurer Baeza’s financial accounts. She was, like the rest of her family, on display. Like any three-year-old, however, she had little of import to say for herself. Machado himself made no attempt to describe the future queen of England. The Spanish ambassadors who had been sent to London the previous year were more fulsome when taken to view the tiny Arthur both asleep and naked. ‘He appeared to us so admirable that whatever praise, commendation, or flattery anyone might be capable of speaking or writing would only be truth in this case,’ they wrote.
The following day the ambassadors caught another glimpse of Catherine, this time in a less formal atmosphere. It was a day of fun and games, with the visitors being introduced to that most Spanish of activities, the bull-fight. This already rated alongside jousting and other games of chivalrous mock-warfare – especially a game called cañas inherited from the Moors in which sticks replaced arrows and lances – as entertainment for the country’s nobility. The bull-fight of the time was more like a mounted version of the bull-run (of the kind still practised, on foot, in Pamplona or, on horseback, in the Castilian town of Tordesillas) than the cape-waving affair of today. The riders attacked the bulls with lances. This could be particularly gory and Isabel was so upset by one bull-fight, where two men and three horses died, that she changed the rules. She demanded that upside-down cow-horns be glued over the points of the bulls’ horns, so that they curled harmlessly backwards. On this day the bull-fighting was combined with mock skirmishes and running with dogs ‘in the way they fought with the Saracens [i.e. the Moors]’. Isabel brought Catherine with her to watch and, it seems, she showed herself an affectionate and attentive mother. Machado certainly thought he had witnessed a new and different side to the Castilian queen. ‘It was beautiful to see how the queen held up her youngest daughter,’ he recalled.
Two days later, after a hard final session of bargaining, the Treaty of Medina del Campo was signed. England and Spain sealed their alliance. France, which had backed La Beltraneja in the battle for the Castilian crown, was effectively discarded as a Spanish ally. Both the English and Spanish monarchies had reasons for quarrelling with France. England and Aragon had territorial squabbles with her. Isabel, for her part, had long ago declared France to be a place that was ‘abhorrent to our Castilian nation’.
The ambassadors said their goodbyes to the monarchs and little Catherine later that day, though it was the Spanish royal family who left Medina del Campo first. They were off, once more, to wander their kingdoms, though their first stop was to be a visit to Catherine’s maternal grandmother – whom Isabel visited regularly – at nearby Arévalo.
The ambassadors went off laden with gifts. These included a Spanish war-horse, a smaller Moorish jennet, a couple of mules, yards of silk and sixty marks of silver each. ‘People speak of the honour done to ambassadors in England; certainly it is not to be compared to the honour which is done to the ambassadors in the kingdom of Castile, and especially in the time of this noble king and queen,’ concluded Machado, perhaps displaying the Iberian pride, and blood, that his surname suggests. Henry VII, it is to be presumed, was informed that his son’s future parents-in-law were suitably impressive and powerful. Spain was a great ally to have against the age-old enemy of France. Catherine of Aragon was a good catch. The three-year-old princess’s future path was set.