Alhambra – Laredo. 21 May – 27 September 1501
Catherine rode out of the Alhambra early one May morning on the start of her journey to a new life. It must have been an emotional parting for her parents, who had finally run out of excuses for keeping her with them. As they got older, however, the Spanish monarchs became less grandiose about their daughters’ departures. Just five years earlier Catherine had seen Juana go off to Flanders accompanied by 133 ships bearing an army of fifteen thousand men – most of whom died of cold, malnutrition and Burgundian unkindness. The entire family had traipsed across Spain to wave her off from the port of Laredo. María, on the other hand, had been taken as far as Santa Fe, just a few miles from Granada – where the royal family stayed with her for a week before she set off for Portugal. By the time Catherine left, their energies had been sapped almost completely. Isabel and Ferdinand simply rode with her as far as Santa Fe and waved her on. She was late already, they explained. Her parents would just slow her down.
The excitement, on this occasion, was mainly on the English side. Isabel had even let Henry VII know that she thought he was overdoing the wedding plans. ‘Demonstrations of joy at the reception of my daughter are naturally agreeable to me. Nevertheless it would be more in accordance with my feelings … that the expenses should be moderate,’ she wrote to her ambassador in London, Rodrigo de Puebla. ‘We do not wish our daughter to be the cause of any loss to England. On the contrary, we desire that she should be the source of all kinds of happiness.’ If he wanted to be generous to her daughter, the queen said, she would rather it was with his love.
Isabel had originally planned to accompany Catherine to the port at La Coruña. Given the time it took her daughter to reach the north coast, her protestations that she would slow her daughter down sound feeble. Perhaps, once more, the fifty-year-old queen was not feeling well. So, instead, Catherine was placed in the care of Elvira Manuel, her bossy new lady mistress, and her husband, Pedro Manrique – the overbearingly proud lord of the northern town of Ezcaray. An archbishop, a bishop and a count accompanied her to England. These were to return after the wedding while, to Catherine’s long-term dismay, the haughty Elvira Manuel and her pompous husband stayed on. The English had also asked her to bring ladies who were ‘of gentle birth and beautiful or, at the least, by no means ugly’. Six young Spanish girls, who seem to have met the requirements, set out with her.
Catherine’s party was in no hurry, despite the anxiousness of those awaiting her in England. Henry VII had wanted her there almost from the day of her engagement in Medina del Campo, arguing that pre-pubescent brides-to-be were commonly sent to the country where they were due to be married. The date of her arrival had been a constant preoccupation. A special papal dispensation had been asked for so that the couple could marry, if necessary, before Arthur reached fourteen. Henry became increasingly impatient after the original September 1500 deadline went by. Isabel pleaded various illnesses (her fever, Catherine’s ague) to put him off but that did not stop Henry issuing invitations for a May wedding. Perhaps the king’s formidable mother, Margaret Beaufort, was the force pushing his own concerns. She had been through two weddings and borne a child before her own fifteenth birthday. Catherine was probably aware by this stage that, according to De Puebla’s despatches, ‘the king is much influenced by his mother … in affairs of personal interest and in others’. She may also have heard that Margaret was an archetypically hellish mother-in-law for Elizabeth of York. ‘The queen, as is generally the case, does not like it,’ De Puebla added.
The trip north to La Coruña took an unusually lengthy three months. It involved, amongst other things, a diversion to Santiago de Compostela. Catherine, already showing a strong religious streak, wanted to make the pilgrimage to the supposed burial site of St James. This was a jubilee year and pilgrims arriving there gained a plenary indulgence – a remission of all the time to be spent in purgatory. The searing heat of the Castilian summer slowed her party down further, requiring further days of rest at the monastery in Guadalupe. There were many other stop-offs along the way, as cities honoured her with bull-fights, banquets and visits to view the bones of local saints. The northern city of Zamora, for example, slaughtered ten calves, three fighting bulls and twelve dozen fowl while also providing eight large casks of wine. She may have passed though Salamanca, where her brother once rode down streets carpeted with sweet-smelling aromatic herbs. Her parents’ claim that ‘we ordered those with her to go as fast as possible’ does not survive close study.
The long trip gave Catherine plenty of time to think about what awaited her. Although the marriage was political, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York were genuinely excited about their eldest son’s bride. On one occasion, when Catherine sent two copies of a letter to them, her future in-laws squabbled over who got to keep the one that remained after they forwarded the other to Prince Arthur. ‘The king argued obstinately with the queen about keeping one of the letters for himself to carry around with him,’ De Puebla reported. ‘She fought hard before giving it to him.’ Henry, the son of an iron-willed mother, was fascinated by the strength of character shown by the Spanish royal women. He told one visitor that he would give up half of his kingdom if Catherine was like her mother. In later life this fascination would be extended to her sister Juana, who fired up an old man’s ardour and became something of an obsession.
Catherine had exchanged love letters with her fiancé during her time at the Alhambra. He wrote from what, for her, must have been the mysterious-sounding castle of Ludlow. ‘I have read the most sweet letters of your highness lately given to me, from which I have easily perceived your most entire love to me,’ he wrote in October 1499.
Truly those your letters, traced by your own hand, have so delighted me, and have rendered me so cheerful and jocund, that I fancied I beheld your highness and conversed with and embraced my dearest wife.I cannot tell you what an earnest desire I feel to see your highness, and how vexatious to me is this procrastination about your coming. I owe eternal thanks to your excellence that you so lovingly correspond to this my so ardent love. Let it continue, I entreat, as it has begun; and, like as I cherish your sweet remembrance night and day, so do you preserve my name ever fresh in your breast.
Both Arthur and Catherine were thirteen at the time. The love expressed in their letters, and written in Latin, was a game. Their elaborate and repetitive protestations of devotion dripped with passion but stayed firmly within the baroque boundaries of courtly love. They already knew, however, that this love game was intensely serious. That was clear from the way Arthur closed his letter. ‘Let your coming to me be hastened, that instead of being absent we may be present with each other, and the love conceived between us and the wished-for joys may reap their proper fruit,’ he wrote. The fruit he referred to would have to come from Catherine’s womb. It was her job, after all, to prolong the Tudor dynasty.
Catherine had been thoroughly drilled in the history of Europe’s royal houses. She knew that Henry VII had emerged triumphant from the Wars of the Roses – the wily Tudor being the eventual victor in the long-running fight between Lancastrians and Yorkists. As the founder of a new dynasty the continuity of his line via Arthur was of vital importance to Henry. Catherine’s job was to produce grandchildren, and male grandchildren at that, to keep the Tudor line going.
Catherine’s parents, having also emerged from a period of turmoil and civil war, were permanently anxious to know whether the Tudor newcomers were really in control. The impostor Perkin Warbeck was a particular obsession. He had written to Isabel directly claiming to be one of the Princes in The tower, Edward IV’s two missing sons. These tragic boys were never seen again after being locked up in the Tower of London by Richard III in 1483. Warbeck, who was probably Flemish, told Isabel he had been saved by a man who had been ordered to kill him and that his identity had been kept a secret.
De Puebla kept Catherine’s parents thoroughly up to date on the whole Warbeck affair. Henry realised the Spaniards were worried and when Warbeck, who had been arrested, tried to flee in 1498 he informed De Puebla the minute he was recaptured. ‘The same hour that he was arrested, the king of England sent one of his gentlemen of the bedchamber to bring me the news,’ he said in an urgent despatch. De Puebla was able to reassure them later that Perkin ‘is kept with the greatest care in a tower, where he sees neither sun nor moon’. Later on, Henry VII interrogated Warbeck in person in front of De Puebla. ‘I, and other persons here, believe his life will be very short,’ he reported afterwards. The prediction proved correct. In January 1500, following the executions of Warbeck and the simple-minded young earl of Warwick – a more genuine claimant to the throne – he triumphantly informed Isabel and Ferdinand that there no longer remained ‘a drop of doubtful royal blood’ in England. The main pretenders had been killed, in part, to calm Spanish concerns. The blood-letting, Catherine would be told later, had been for her.
Catherine had probably also heard of Henry VII’s unpopularity and reputation for greed. The gold coin that entered his safe boxes rarely, if ever, came out again, De Puebla wrote in one letter. Henry’s servants possessed ‘a wonderful dexterity in getting hold of other people’s money’, the ambassador reported with obvious admiration. Another Spanish envoy, Pedro de Ayala, believed that a downturn in trade in England was partly due to ‘the impoverishment of the people by the great taxes laid on them’. Henry was not unduly upset by this idea. ‘The king himself said to me that he is happy to keep them low, because riches would only make them haughty,’ he said.
While Henry was unpopular, Elizabeth of York was much loved. De Puebla put this down, cynically if accurately, to the fact that she was powerless. Another Spanish visitor thought that the ‘very noble’ Elizabeth was kept in subjection by her mother-in-law. Elizabeth had written warmly to Isabel, hoping they might pass on their news – and that of their children – regularly.
Arthur, De Puebla said, was loved by the people mainly because, through his mother, he was Edward IV’s grandson. With his Yorkist blood, Catherine’s fiancé embodied the new ‘union’ of the old warring roses of England. De Puebla added, apparently as an afterthought, that those who knew the prince in person found him to be most virtuous. Catherine’s only way of judging that had been through his tender, if formulaic, written professions of love.
De Puebla’s despatches were a rare window through which Catherine could peer into England. The picture of the English that emerges from his pen turns the national stereotypes of today on their heads. For while the Castilians come across as stiff-upper-lipped and serious, the English were seen as flighty, untrustworthy and impetuous. Amongst other things, he complained, the English were continually changing their minds. That was something that Catherine, eventually, found especially hard to cope with. She may, however, have been reassured to hear that, like the Spanish themselves, the English were enemies of the king of France.
Catherine’s direct experience of the English was mostly limited to her almoner, John Reveles, and occasional meetings with ambassadors. She may also have exchanged words with a few of the other Englishmen at Isabel and Ferdinand’s court. These included a singer called Porris and a painter, known as the Maestre Anthony. She would probably also have been told of that gallant crusading English knight known as the Conde d’Escalas (Lord Scales) who won over Ferdinand and Isabel’s hearts when he appeared as a volunteer in the Granada War accompanied by a hundred archers and foot-soldiers armed with axes and lances. Scales was said to have turned the battle at Loja with his men. He had two teeth knocked out by a stone, however, and worried that his looks would be spoilt for ever. Ferdinand assured him that this was the virtuous injury of a crusader which, as a result, made him ‘more beautiful than deformed’.
We do not know how fearful Catherine was when, having been driven back to Laredo after a storm caught her first ship, she boarded the vessel that would finally take her to England. Did she recall coming to this port five years earlier to bid goodbye to her elder sister Juana? Did she compare her comparatively meagre expedition to the vast fleet that awaited Juana and her army of followers?
Perhaps her mind was more on the sea itself. Henry had sent one of England’s best captains, Stephen Brett, to steer her vessel after the failure of her first attempt to get to England. The Bay of Biscay, however, routinely terrified all those who ventured into it.
The vessel set off from Laredo at five o’clock in the afternoon on Monday 27 September 1501. That dusk she would have got her final glimpse of Spain – possibly the towering Picos de Europa where they fall almost straight into the Cantabrian Sea. More than a dozen years after the English ambassadors had arrived at Medina del Campo, Catherine was finally on her way. She would never see her homeland again.