Syon Monastery to Richmond. c. 1523
The boat slid across the surface of the Thames, leaving behind the riverside monastery of Syon and heading upstream the short distance to Richmond. Catherine was in a melancholy mood. The wealthy monastery, home to both nuns and priests, was known for its devotion and learning. Her visit there must have set her thinking. She was fortunate to have the brilliant Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives with her as she travelled home. He was the one person she could turn to for intimate and intelligent conversation in her native tongue. There had been no fellow Spaniard to whom she could talk this way in the years since Fray Diego had left in disgrace. That day’s conversation stuck in Vives’s mind. ‘I remember your mother, a most wise woman, said to me … that she preferred moderate and steady fortune to great ups and downs of rough and smooth,’ he told her daughter Mary in a book written for her in 1524, a year after he arrived in England. ‘But if she had to choose one or the other, she stated that she would elect the saddest of lots rather than the most flattering fortune, because in the midst of unhappiness consolation can be sought, whilst sound judgement often disappears from those who have the greatest prosperity.’
They were maudlin thoughts, perhaps explained by the new phase of life she had entered by the time Vives appeared in 1523. Catherine was now infertile. Her last pregnancy had been in 1518, when she had been only just in her mid-thirties, but so many failed pregnancies may have left lasting damage. She seems to have accepted her new state with equanimity, perhaps eased – given her painful experience of childbirth – by the thought that this was God’s will. Catherine had borne children. God had taken all but one of them away. The confusing reports of the time seem to point to three live births and at least three stillbirths or miscarriages. The pregnancies proved that she had not shirked her responsibilities to her husband, parents or England. Her womb could no longer serve their, or her, ends. One child was left, an heiress. That was God’s choice. It was also, at least in theory, enough.
Catherine’s mother Isabel had been a queen regnant. This may have been rare for the age, but there was no convincing reason why her granddaughter should not also reign. It was true that England had never had a real queen regnant but, unlike in Catherine’s father’s kingdom of Aragon, there was no explicit rule against it. The Tudor name would be lost if Mary married. Henry’s family, however, was not obsessed by its Welsh name. They preferred to cast themselves as the final and legitimate union of the rival royal families that fought the Wars of the Roses – Lancaster and York.
Catherine was an attentive mother. Like many a single child, indeed, Mary felt the weight of maternal expectation. It was certainly a close relationship, despite the long periods of time they would spend apart. The courage Mary displayed when siding with her mother in the face of danger later on in life shows a relationship strong enough to survive not just separation but also persecution.
Mary’s education was one of Catherine’s chief concerns from the start. She herself set about teaching her daughter the basics of Latin and delighted in Mary’s precocious skills in dancing and, as a musician, at the keyboard of a spinet or plucking a lute.
Catherine had not forgotten her own humanist education in Spain and she turned to Vives for advice on educating her daughter. Vives came from a family that had been persecuted by the Inquisition and which may have practised crypto-Judaism. He himself was a serious, thinking Christian, devoted both to religion and education. Catherine commissioned from him a groundbreaking and popular book called The Education of a Christian Woman which helped pave the way for the newly cultured women of later in the century. Although it contained its fair share of old-fashioned prejudices, Vives’s book broke moulds by urging that girls be educated in more than just domestic skills and dancing. ‘If the mother knows literature, she should teach her children when they are small,’ Vives advised. ‘As for her daughters, in addition to letters, she will instruct them in the skills proper to their sex: how to work wool, and flax, to spin, to weave, to sew and the care and administration of domestic affairs.’ The aim, he said, should be to teach them the importance of ‘justice, piety, fortitude, temperance, learning, clemency, mercy and love of humankind’.
With the help of Wolsey, Sir Thomas More and Oxford University, Catherine had attracted Vives to England – where he spent most of his time over five years. The Spaniard had been brought up by a harsh mother. ‘She never lightly laughed upon me,’ he said. ‘There was nobody that I did more flee, or was more loath to come nigh, than my mother, when I was a child.’ Given his experience, Vives might have been expected to suggest something different for Mary. Instead he heartily recommended more of the same. To spare the rod was to spoil the child. This was especially so if the child was a girl, given the potential magnitude of any (presumably sexual) disasters that could occur to her. ‘Specially the daughter should be handled without any cherishing. For cherishing marreth sons, but it utterly destroyeth daughters.’
Catherine and Henry ignored this part of his advice. Where they did pay attention, however, was in his recommendations for Mary’s studies. Here Vives was enlightened for the time, with his revolutionary idea that women deserved to be educated just as much as men. He even dared suggest, in fact, that women could often be intellectually more gifted than men. For Mary he recommended a mixture of reading that ranged from contemporary work by Erasmus or Thomas More’s Utopia to daily sessions with the New Testament. Medieval romances, along with dolls, were discouraged. Both, he thought, could lead a girl astray by over-agitating the imagination. This was strict, possibly indigestible, fare – but at least a woman’s education was being taken seriously. Catherine liked the idea so much that she produced money for a translation of The Education of a Christian Woman from Latin into English. The English version was reprinted eight times during the sixteenth century, suggesting it offered an idea that had found both its time and its place.
Catherine had, of course, already drunk at a fountain of learning that turned old-fashioned mores on their head. ‘Our age has seen the four daughters of Queen Isabel … each of them well accomplished,’ recalled Vives. Juana la Loca, he said, impressed her fellow Spaniards by replying in Latin to the speeches delivered whenever she entered a city or town. ‘The English say the same of their queen Catherine,’ he added. ‘There have been no queens who were so loved and admired by their subjects.’ Knowledge, then, was not a danger to women. It was a help, rather than the hindrance that some others saw, to virtue. This message was what Vives – a man who claimed not to know of a single learned woman who was evil – spelled out for Catherine and Mary on paper. In a world where ideas of women’s inferiority had ruled so absolutely, it was a small revolution.
This apparently simple idea helped create an atmosphere of intellectual freedom to which women (and their men) were not accustomed. For Erasmus and others, indeed, the fact that Catherine and women like Sir Thomas More’s clever daughters joined in debates ‘afore the king’s grace’ was truly remarkable. This they put down, in part, to Catherine’s own education under her mother Isabel. ‘Who would not wish,’ asked Erasmus, ‘to live in such a court as hers?’ Erasmus was no less fulsome in his praise of Catherine herself, for whom learning and religion necessarily went hand in hand. He called her ‘a unique example in our age … who, with a distaste for the things of no account that women love, devotes a good part of her day to holy reading’. Serious, pious Catherine was a contrast to those women who ‘waste the greatest part of their time in painting their faces or in games of chance and similar amusements’, Erasmus said approvingly. Isabel would have been proud of the way Catherine passed the love of learning on to Mary. A visiting Frenchman found the girl ‘thin, sparse and small’ but ‘admirable by reason of her great and uncommon mental endowments’.
Catherine believed that, educated or not, Mary’s destiny was to marry one of Europe’s great princes. This did not imply renouncing her rights as a queen regnant. Some worried, however, that a foreign husband might end up running her kingdom. Hence the dismay of certain Englishmen when they realised that a French match could mean that, one day, they would be ruled over by a French king. The new match with Charles, however, crowned Catherine’s expectations. It was a way of fulfilling her own life’s purpose. England and Spain could now come together through her daughter.
Catherine was so enamoured of this idea that she soon found ways to indulge her fantasy of Mary’s perfect marriage – even though the little girl was still years away from being able to wed. A gold, jewelled brooch bearing the emperor’s name was pinned to her six-year-old daughter’s chest on Valentine’s Day 1522. The emperor, her mother wished all to know, was the girl’s valentine – even if he was sixteen years her senior. Catherine made sure the brooch was in place a fortnight later when Charles’s ambassadors came visiting at Greenwich. There were sweet words, too, for her nephew. ‘After we had saluted the princess, Catherine continued to question me no less sweetly and prudently about your majesty and there was much pleasant conversation,’ one ambassador reported. This was ‘especially about the beauty and the charms of the little princess, who, it should be noticed, wore on her bosom a golden brooch ornamented with jewels forming your majesty’s name’, he added. Catherine was all charm again when the ambassadors took their leave of her a few days later. ‘She began to speak of you with such good and honest words that it was her greatest desire to see you here,’ he reported.
She then said I should not leave without seeing how the princess, her daughter, could dance. Princess Mary did not have to be asked twice; she performed a basse dance, and twirled so prettily that no woman in the world could do better; afterwards, the queen commanded her again to dance a gaillarde and she acquitted herself so well that it was marvellous to see; then she played two or three songs on the spinet, and, indeed sire, it is hard to believe the grace and skill she shows, with such self-command as a woman of twenty might wish for. And, what is more, she is pretty and very tall for her age … and a very fine cousin indeed.
Catherine was wooing her nephew. Mary was her vehicle.
The seduction of Charles had its final act in the summer of 1522, when he visited again – this time for six weeks. On this occasion Catherine and Mary greeted him at the hall door at Greenwich where, Hall reported, ‘he asked the queen’s blessing … that is the fashion of Spain, between aunt and nephew’. Henry paraded the emperor through London and, as usual, put on a jousting tournament. Charles preferred to watch, standing in the gallery with Catherine as Henry hurled himself into the joust. At one stage a message arrived from France which provoked a ripple of warlike excitement amongst the onlookers. ‘While the king and the emperor looked on the letter, a sudden noise arose amongst both their subjects that it was a letter of defiance, sent to them both by the French king.’ The spectators, it seemed, were spoiling for a fight with the French. They feasted and danced. Mary danced again, this time for her beau. The alliance against France was firmed up.
Mary’s engagement to Charles was still in place three years later when she must have sat for a miniature portrait by the painter Lucas Horenbout, wearing a brooch boldly bearing her fiancé’s title, ‘The Emperour’. The brooch was pinned as close to her heart as it could be. A marriage day, however, was still years off and there was no guarantee that the stars in the political constellation of Europe would still be where Catherine wanted them when that day came.
The miniature of Mary showed a red-haired, ruddy-cheeked girl with pale blue eyes – more the English rose than a granddaughter of far-away Castile or Aragon. Catherine herself also sat for Horenbout at least twice about this time. She is noticeably more thick-set, with a heavier line to her jaw, than in earlier portraits – though the fine complexion noticed by some is still in place. She is, however, every bit a queen. In one she wears a gable head-dress and rich, spotted ermine over the sleeves of her black gown. A little silvery marmoset sits playfully on her arm, a small chain attached to its waist. In another she wears a red gown, the square neckline edged in jewels and a more discreet French hood revealing a generous amount of coppery hair.
Catherine had entered mid-life in a state of contentment. She may have lost the freshness of youth and the ability to bear children but she had produced an heir or, rather, an heiress, to the crown. Her husband was not sexually faithful, but he was loyal in other ways. The second Horenbout miniature – emblazoned with the Latin words ‘Queen Catherine his wife’ – was one of many signs of that. Vives, too, offered words of long-term encouragement for a good wife (and the perfectionist Catherine was nothing if not that) heading towards menopause. ‘The truly good woman, through obedience to her husband, will hold sway, and she who always lived in obedience to her husband will command great authority over him,’ he said. Most importantly for her happiness, perhaps, was the re-established link with Spain through her daughter. Catherine had played match-maker in more than one sense. It was not just Mary she was joining to Charles, but her husband too.
Henry showed genuine, if oscillating, passion for this arrangement. It was not so much Charles who interested him, but the grandiose plans they drew up. Together, Henry believed, they could tear France apart. This so-called ‘Great Enterprise’ would finally deliver England’s old lands in France – lost during the Hundred Years War – back into Henry’s hands. He even dreamed of asserting ‘his ancient right and title to the crown of France’. It would be the greatest achievement in English history since Agincourt, with Henry as architect and the old enemy in France as victim.
Catherine spotted the danger immediately. She had seen Henry fooled and humiliated by her father. His boyish enthusiasm for glorious, over-ambitious projects was still easily aroused – even if it was often tempered by Wolsey. So, too, was his sense of bruised suspicion. Catherine had long ago warned that the English were given to excessive emotions, easily spurred to overexcited flights of fancy and just as easily cast down into the depths of resentment, hurt and wariness.
Her nephew, in other words, was playing with fire. He had offered Henry the moon. The English king had now reached out for it. If Charles did not deliver, Henry’s anti-Spanish wrath would be aroused even more terribly than before. It was Charles’s ambassador who felt the rough edge of Catherine’s tongue when she first realised his master might have promised too much. ‘She told us vehemently that the only way for you to retain the friendship of this king and of the English was to fulfil faithfully everything that you have promised,’ he wrote back to Charles in January 1523. ‘It was much better to promise little and perform faithfully than to promise much and fail in part.’
The Great Enterprise was an on–off affair from the start. Henry himself blew hot and cold and his frustration mounted whenever his own bouts of enthusiasm did not coincide with those of Charles. Wolsey, meanwhile, often sought ways to come to terms with the French. Catherine, for her part, began her own secret diplomacy. In March 1524 she warned Charles’s ambassador Louis de Praet that Henry’s patience was snapping. ‘The king is very discontented,’ de Praet wrote.
He has uttered loud complaints before his household, and matters have gone so far that the queen sent her confessor to me in secret to warn me of Henry’s discontent and ask me to write to you and advise you to remedy matters. She is is very sorry that your majesty ever promised so much in this treaty, and she fears that it may one day be the cause of a weakening of the friendship between you two. I beg your majesty to keep this communication of the queen’s secret; it would be regrettable if it came to the ears of certain English.
It soon became clear who those ‘certain English’ were. Wolsey was growing wary of Catherine. The woman who had done all she could to push Henry and Charles together – and had drawn Wolsey into the plan – began to feel the slow chill of suspicion. Wolsey watched her every move, seeing her as a danger to his own manoeuvrings. ‘I would have communicated more frequently with the queen but I have been warned by some of her friends that it would not be discreet,’ de Praet reported on 17 November 1524. ‘Indeed, I have often noticed that the cardinal [Wolsey] was very restless whenever I talked to her, and often interrupted our conversation.’
By now, however, England had become something of a sideshow for Charles. He was busy fighting Francis in Italy and had little time, or money, for grandiose adventures with Henry. The latter’s frustration was partially assuaged by Francis’s problems in Italy. In November 1524 Henry gleefully read out aloud to Catherine the news that the French king, at the head of his own army, was getting into difficulties with Charles’s troops there. ‘He declared the news and every material point which upon the reading his grace well noted unto the queen’s grace and all other about him who were marvellous glad to hear it,’ wrote one of those present. ‘The queen’s grace said that she was glad the Spaniards had yet done somewhat [well] in Italy.’ Henry speculated that Francis had pushed too far, and might be unable to fight his way home. ‘The king’s grace laughed and said he thinketh it will be very hard for him to get thence [i.e. back home].’
Their joy was still greater when Francis was captured at Pavia the following February and was taken off to Spain. Wine ran in the streets of London, bonfires were lit and trumpets blasted in celebration. Henry feasted and rode with Catherine in state to a celebratory mass in St Paul’s – almost as if the victory had belonged to him rather than Charles. Catherine’s joy, however, was tempered by the fact that Charles seemed to have forgotten her. She wrote to her nephew from Greenwich, begging him to explain his silence. Had the fickle sea swallowed up her letters? ‘Nothing would be so painful to me as to think that you had forgotten me,’ she wrote, adding that Henry had ordered solemn processions across the land to celebrate the victory over Francis. ‘Love and consanguinity demand that we should write to each other more often.’
The joy was short-lived. Charles’s victory shifted the balance of power in Europe dramatically in his favour. Henry – or, rather, Wolsey – no longer held the key and Charles was no longer interested in the Great Enterprise. The engagement with Mary was broken and, preferring an alliance closer to home, Charles soon agreed to marry a princess from Portugal. Anti-Spanish sentiment was quick to raise its head. Wolsey upset Charles by publicly calling him ‘a liar, who observed no manner of faith or promise’. Charles’s aunt Margaret, according to the plain-speaking English cardinal, was ‘a ribald’ while his brother Ferdinand was ‘a child, and so governed’. Wolsey’s undiplomatic outburst earned him a rebuke from his own ambassadors. ‘Your grace’s plainliness is not so well taken as it is worthy; wherefore it were as good to give them good words for good words, keeping secret your thoughts as they do,’ they told him. The shifting sands soon saw Henry sign a peace treaty with France in August 1525.
Catherine’s relationship with Wolsey followed the same downward spiral as the relationship with Spain. Until then it had survived the occasional competition over whether Henry should lean towards France or Spain. Catherine had sensibly avoided direct confrontation with Wolsey and was always politely solicitous as to his welfare. Early in 1525, for example, she ‘very lovingly, both in words and countenance, did enquire of your … good health’, according to one of Wolsey’s regular correspondents at court. The time was nearly over, however, in which Henry could write to Wolsey saying that ‘The queen my wife hath desired me to make her most hearty recommendations to you, as to him that she loveth very well …’
Something major, in fact, had changed. Wolsey was by now at the height of his power. He began to behave, for reasons Catherine herself could not understand, as though she had lost all influence over her husband. Such was his mysterious confidence, or arrogance, that he began to treat her with disdain.
Even her countryman Vives, whose learning both she and Wolsey had eagerly embraced, would eventually became a point of contention for them. In Catherine’s mind, however, the kind of hardships Wolsey was beginning to subject her to were as much a gift from God as anything else. ‘He knows what is expedient for all, and is often more propitious when he changes sweet for bitter,’ Erasmus wrote to her later – echoing Catherine’s conversation with Vives on the way back from Syon.
She had not expected, however, the sour pill she was forced to swallow in the chilly early summer of 1525.