Richmond Palace. April 1507
Catherine stood before the king and listened as he tore her world apart. Henry had decided it was time to explain that her betrothal was off. Her father had not sent the dowry money, so there could be no wedding. ‘The king said that the prince was free and he had no obligation towards the marriage,’ she wrote to Ferdinand afterwards, begging him to send the money. Humiliation sat uneasily on Catherine’s shoulders. It was like the shame of her poverty. She had been taught to be submissive, but also to be proud. She could not stop ‘thinking that I am your highness’s daughter’, she wrote.
Catherine had already implored her father to send a new ambassador, someone who was straight-talking and, preferably, had experience of England. This, she explained, was a country ‘remote from all others’ and with such strange forms of behaviour that it needed special treatment. Soon the credentials naming the new ambassador chosen by Ferdinand arrived. Who could serve his interests better than a loyal, loving and noble subject already living in London and with excellent access to Henry VII? Catherine herself was to be his ambassador.
It was an extraordinary move on Ferdinand’s part. Women, however high their status, were rare in the world of power and diplomacy. She was joining a select group of sixteenth-century women, most of whom owed their position or their power to blood ties or marriage. Perhaps Ferdinand, like others, saw something of her mother in Catherine. She was instructed to work in parallel with the increasingly sickly De Puebla – who had to be carried to court in a litter. Catherine presented her credentials to Henry VII early in the summer of 1507.
Her letters home had become increasingly distraught and dramatic. Her household, she claimed, wore rags and lived in complete misery. She continued to hawk her dowry plate and begged her father to send money. With her diplomatic credentials in her hand, however, she could at least try to do something to change her situation.
Immediately after Philip the Handsome’s death in 1506, Henry had suddenly seemed kinder to Catherine, offering to give her the Fulham house reserved for the Flemish ambassadors or any other place she needed to recover from illness. Her stock had risen and she once again became a desirable bride for Henry’s son. More importantly, Henry had developed an infatuation of his own. Like many men who met Catherine’s sister Juana, he had been struck by her beauty. What some people saw as madness he found strangely exciting. Juana seems to have bewitched him during her short stay at Windsor. He even argued that, after Philip had taken control of her kingdom, ‘she should be at liberty’. She was also, of course, the queen of Castile. If Henry were to marry her he would win a beautiful and interesting bride while also gaining in power. Ferdinand – whose consent was needed for the marriage – could continue being regent, he told De Puebla. All Henry wanted was Juana, her childbearing potential and the income that might come his way. It would have been a tremendous coup and Henry put considerable effort into pursuing her. Ferdinand told Henry that he had placed him top of the long list of those who wanted to marry her. The list, however, was just that. It had no purpose beyond keeping Henry quiet. Ferdinand had no intention of marrying his daughter off. While she remained a widow, and one obsessed by her dead husband, Castile was his to rule.
Catherine immediately spotted that Henry’s infatuation offered her an opportunity. She played at go-between, passing on Henry’s messages about Juana to Ferdinand. ‘I bait the king with the hope of marrying Doña Juana and I flatter him and his councillors,’ she told her father in a coded letter sent secretly in October 1507. She also wrote directly to Juana, saying that Henry had been pained by her departure and had not liked the way Philip treated her in England. He had been angry but was warned by his council ‘not to interfere between a husband and wife’. Henry, she told her sister, is ‘a very passionate king’. ‘The great affection he has felt, and still feels, towards your royal highness from that time until now, is well known,’ she added.
Diplomacy gave her a new lease of life. She found the verbal sparring with Henry VII stimulating. ‘I spoke so well that I should rejoice to give an account of it,’ she gushed to her father after one round with the English king. ‘You speak cleverly,’ Henry acknowledged at one of their meetings. ‘But [I fear] your father the king, my brother, is too clever.’ She applied herself to learning the tricks of the diplomatic trade with earnest enthusiasm. Letters, she knew, were routinely intercepted. King Henry’s spies would love to know what she was saying to her father and, more importantly, what he was saying in reply. She began, therefore, to write in code. Her letters used the Spanish diplomatic ciphers of the time. Some of these codes, which Ferdinand sent to her, replaced individual letters with symbols that vaguely resemble Chinese figures. Others replaced key words – especially names – with Latin numerals or fanciful code-words. ‘A messenger sent by the little duck to the falcon returned a short time ago much pleased with the answer of the falcon,’ read one earlier message in Spanish code sent to De Puebla. ‘The little duck and the fuzarco are so contented that they say nothing could better piebald than the fly with the falcon. Thus everything is going on well now, and it is in the mar-maid that it will be concluded in favour of the cuckoo and the young eagle.’ We can picture Catherine sitting in her rooms in Greenwich or Richmond with her table of codes beside her, laboriously rewriting her letters in what, to anyone else, seemed gibberish. Sometimes the finished version looked so absurd that she worried no one would understand it. At other times she was so excited by the work of coding and decoding that she spent three or four days in ‘unearthly’ good spirits.
She was frustrated by her dealings with the English. ‘Those in this kingdom are as dilatory as any in the world in negotiating,’ she explained. She passed on diplomatic titbits, and used her new position to defend herself against threats to her future marriage. She even advised Ferdinand against a rumoured match between her sister Juana and the French count of Foix which would anger Henry and spoil her own wedding plans. ‘I say it because, in this, I myself feel personally interested,’ she admitted. By August 1507 she was telling her father that no woman, whatever their station in life, could have suffered more than she. ‘I love you more than ever a father loved his daughter,’ Ferdinand replied. Yet he did nothing to prove it.
Over the next year and a half, despite her best efforts, things slowly went from bad to worse. Catherine alternately pleaded for money, complained at Henry’s ill-treatment of her, lambasted her father for his inaction and, as ever, blamed it all on the long-suffering De Puebla. She also became increasingly wily. Some letters she sent on circuitous routes via Flanders because ‘it would have been dangerous, or at any rate might have been considered suspicious’ to be seen sending too many couriers direct to Spain. She was happy, too, to let others think that she was still a passive, dumb victim. ‘They fancy that I have no more in me than what appears outwardly, and that I shall not be able to fathom his designs,’ she explained. ‘I dissimulate.’ It was a tactic that would serve her well. She also became convinced that the unfortunate De Puebla, whose alleged ‘designs’ she was referring to, was in cahoots with Henry.
With Henry she used both guile and obstinacy. When the English king suggested that her father was considering cancelling the marriage she insisted it ‘could not be undone’. She also added a threat. ‘I said that, even if this were not so, your highness knew what my wish was, namely, that I should not be taken out of the power of the king of England even if I were to die for it.’ She would only leave England, she seemed to mean, in a coffin. If Ferdinand and Henry failed to sort her marriage out, she was saying, then she was not going to help them find a simple way out of their potentially dangerous stand-off. On one occasion when Henry suggested to her that both he and Ferdinand were still free to break the marriage treaty, she pretended not to understand. ‘I told him that I could not comprehend him and that I did not like to take it in the sense which he meant.’
Ferdinand somehow persuaded Henry to stick by the marriage treaty and give him more time to come up with the missing money for his daughter’s dowry. Early in 1508 he reassured Catherine that, as far as he was concerned, the marriage was still on. He also praised her work as his ambassador. She was proving so ‘virtuous and prudent’ in her handling of Henry that, from now on, he promised to treat her words ‘as gospel’.
Catherine had noticed, however, that she was the real loser in this game. Whenever Ferdinand negotiated more time to pay, Henry’s grip on Catherine increased. ‘He does not lose anything thereby; on the contrary,’ she told her father. ‘He is the gainer. For, as he has told me, as long as he is not entirely paid, he regards me as bound and his son as free. He [his son] is not yet so old that delay is disagreeable. Thus mine is always the worst part.’
By July 1508 Ferdinand had still not produced the marriage money. A comically blustering Fuensalida, having arrived in February to help Catherine, made things worse by telling Henry that his regal honour obliged him to stick by a wedding agreement that Ferdinand kept breaking. Henry replied by quibbling over the dowry payment, claiming that Catherine’s plate and jewels had lost value and that it must now all be paid in cash.
Fuensalida was shocked by the treatment she was receiving. ‘The princess is not well. She is very thin and pale,’ he reported. As negotiations dragged on and Henry became meaner, she began to lose hope. ‘She is so cast down and disconsolate,’ he reported. ‘She shows a pleasant face to everyone, but she cannot hide what she feels from me.’
Henry VII, meanwhile, occasionally called Catherine in to complain angrily about her father. His son, on at least one of these occasions, was sent out of the room and he even started to keep his daughter Mary away from her. She was given shabby, smelly quarters and Fuensalida swore that even his servants got better food than the king sent her. The ambassador worked himself up into such a lather of righteous hatred of Henry and the English that he augured nothing but misery from a marriage to the young Prince Henry. ‘The princess might one day become queen of England, but she is being offered the most hapless life a woman ever had,’ he said.
The future of Juana’s son and heir, Charles, had been organised, in the meantime, by his grandfather Maximilian. He had arranged a match between Charles, already known as the prince of Spain, and Henry VII’s daughter Mary. Henry was delighted. He made sure Catherine was fully aware that the links between England and Spain no longer ran just through her.
When, in March 1509, the dowry money was still not in London Catherine began to give up hope. The men working with her only made things worse, she said. ‘As Dr De Puebla conducted the affairs with too great gentleness in everything that regarded the interests of this king, so this other ambassador [Fuensalida] behaves with too great rigour towards him and his servants,’ she told her father. ‘I cannot make use of anything that is not done with moderation.’
Fray Diego, meanwhile, encouraged her to sell even more of her dowry plate. This she did, despite the tenacious resistance of Juan de Cuero – whom she soon also wanted sacked. ‘The princess behaves towards him as though he had committed the greatest treason in the world and all because he hinders them every day from selling a piece of plate to satisfy the follies of the friar,’ Fuensalida reported. Despite this, she managed to sell two hundred ducats’ worth of gold over fifteen days. It was not ‘known on what she spends it, except in books and the expenses of the friar’. Literature, it seems, was one of her few consolations. Fray Diego was another of them.
‘What afflicts me most is that I cannot in any way remedy the hardships of my confessor,’ she complained to her father. Fray Diego came up with some solutions of his own. He advised her, for example, to continue borrowing. Creditors – in particular a banker called Grimaldo (who had taken up with her gossipy lady Francisca de Cáceres, leading to yet another major falling out) – were knocking at her door. Diego, meanwhile, helped her to exercise her diplomatic influence. She even sent him to Henry to demand a copy of some articles of the marriage treaty. It was like waving a red rag at a bull. ‘On account of this he [Henry] grew angry,’ she indignantly informed Ferdinand. ‘And [he] permitted himself to be led so far as to say things which are not fit to be written to your highness.’ Henry took advantage of Diego’s presence to confront him with the rumours that he was dallying with the princess. The English king, she complained, cast doubt on ‘the honour of my house and said what is not true’.
Catherine was now an angry woman. ‘Not only does her highness feign to be angry with me but shows herself to be in reality,’ Fuensalida complained after receiving the sharp edge of her tongue. Catherine could no longer bear the sight of some of the most important people in her household. ‘I would rather die than see what I have suffered and suffer from every day from this ambassador and from all my servants,’ she wrote to her father.
Eight years had gone by since she arrived in England. Much of it had been misery. Now it was getting even worse. ‘It is impossible for me any longer to endure what I have gone through and still am suffering from the unkindness of the king and the manner in which he treats me,’ she told Ferdinand in the spring of 1509. Henry was now being deliberately vindictive. ‘He tried to make me feel this by his want of love,’ she complained after he had boasted that he no longer needed her father. ‘He said he was not bound to give my servants food, or even my own self.’
Catherine felt she could sink no lower. Nothing she did as ambassador made any difference. She had sold so much of her jewels and plate that she could no longer pay for her ‘high necessities’. Her father now also doubted that the wedding would take place and began making contingency plans to take her back home to Spain. Henry, he had decided, was ‘little desirous to bring the affair to a conclusion’. Catherine was so distressed that she imagined herself at death’s door. ‘I fear my life will be short, owing to my troubles,’ she told Ferdinand. Suicide seemed one of the few options left to her. ‘I am afraid I might do something which neither the king of England nor your highness, who has much more weight, would be able to prevent, unless, and that is necessary, you send for me,’ she told her father.
The melodramatic side of her nature was coming to the fore again. Whenever that happened, she instinctively reached for the refuge of religion. If she could not marry a man, she would become a bride of Christ. Ferdinand, she said, could ship her home and allow her to enter a convent ‘so that I may conclude my few remaining days in serving God … That would be the greatest good I could have in this world.’
Within weeks, however, reality was to supersede even her own heightened sense of drama. It bounced her suddenly from one extreme to another. The stalemate of her marriage was broken by nature. Henry VII died on 21 April 1509 – probably from pulmonary tuberculosis. Henry had seen off the many plots against him and, despite the unpopularity of his rapacious ways, had successfully established his line on the throne. His seventeen-year-old son and heir quickly decided to marry Catherine. After all her sufferings, she would finally be queen.