5

DESTINED FOR ENGLAND

After over twenty years of marriage, Queen Isabella was as devoted to King Ferdinand as ever. Even his occasional roving eye and the siring of several illegitimate children did not dampen the queen’s love for her husband. When, at the end of 1492, King Ferdinand nearly died from stab wounds inflicted by a would-be assassin, Isabella’s dedication to her husband was apparent. In informing Archbishop Talavera of the incident, the queen recounted her shock, saying that, “the wound was so great … I could not find the courage to look at it.”¹ King Ferdinand’s brush with death had awakened in Queen Isabella a new sense of mortality, prompting her to write, “Thus we see that kings too may die.”²

Ferdinand recovered, but the assassination attempt had opened an even more conscious awareness of spiritual development within the already pious Isabella. From this time onward, she dwelled increasingly on the state of her soul, exhorting her spiritual adviser, Hemando de Talavera, to guide her in the right direction. Isabella told Talavera that “greatness and prosperity had made me think of it [death] and fear it more.” It was essential, the queen noted, “to prepare to die well.”³

Talavera took his order to counsel Isabella to heart. As her spiritual adviser, he did not hesitate to admonish the queen when he thought it necessary. Although the queen preferred to dress modestly in private, there were times when her desire to illustrate the splendor of her position resulted in what might have been perceived as an extravagant show. A contemporary once noted how a dress Isabella wore was so opulent “that there is no man who can well imagine what could be the value of it.”⁴ When Talavera chastised the queen about the court’s lavishness, she explained that she had only one silk dress made for her and it was not an extravagant one at that.

Meanwhile, after Queen Isabella’s greatest triumph, the fall of Granada, disparate Spanish peoples long accustomed to mutual jealousies bonded as a nation. This unity, along with Spain’s enhanced international reputation, prompted the royal couple to look beyond their borders, largely to address Ferdinand’s concerns about France, a perennial thorn in Aragon’s side. Ferdinand had for many years risked his life fighting for Castile’s causes. Isabella knew she owed her husband much and, once Granada was secured, willingly went along with his wish to focus on Europe.

Central to a successful foreign policy was a set of agreements between foreign powers. In the days of Ferdinand and Isabella, these agreements generally consisted of alliances secured by marriages between progeny of the monarchs who had reached formal accord. Therefore, to expand Spanish power and influence throughout Europe, Ferdinand and Isabella jockeyed to secure dynastic marriages for their children. Through a series of brilliant matches, Queen Isabella’s children linked Spain to Portugal, England, and the Holy Roman Empire. These carefully planned nuptials had one main objective—to isolate France, then the great power of Europe.

No less determined to see France encircled was Henry VII, the first Tudor king of England. Henry had won his crown in 1485 by defeating King Richard III, who died at the Battle of Bosworth Field. This was the last important battle in the decades-long civil war known as the Wars of the Roses. Richard III’s death marked the end of the Plantagenet dynasty’s hold on the English throne. When Henry VII, the Lancastrian contender, assumed the crown, it signaled the rise of the Tudor dynasty. Henry knew he needed to secure his tenuous hold on the newly won crown. His marriage to Elizabeth of York, Richard III’s niece, was designed to secure the crown at its center. Henry also needed to unite his family in marriage to another powerful one with links to England if possible. In his careful search for a consort for his son Arthur, the Prince of Wales, Henry’s choice fell on Isabella and Ferdinand’s youngest child, Catherine of Aragon. Spain, the new power on the Continent, would both add luster to the Tudor dynasty and hem in France.

Henry VII worked quickly. He had only assumed the throne the year Catherine was born, and before Arthur’s birth. Yet the intrepid new monarch had already decided that a commitment to marriage between the two youngsters was a shrewd move, both dynastically and politically. As early as 1488, when Catherine was in her third year, King Henry proposed that his two-year-old son and heir marry her as soon as the two came of age. The alliance would see England and Castile defend each other from their common enemy, France, as well as aid each other in reclaiming properties held by France. These consisted of Cerdagne and Roussillon for the Spanish and Normandy and Aquitaine for the English.

Henry VII, eager to secure this proposed match, dispatched two representatives, Richard Nafan and Thomas Savage, to Ferdinand and Isabella’s court at Medina del Campo. The queen and king treated Nafan and Savage to a spectacular welcome. Eager to impress Henry’s emissaries, they ordered a glittering court reception. The monarchs both dressed sumptuously in gold and sable, welcoming the envoys while seated under a grand canopy sporting the arms of Castile and Aragon. Isabella made an especially dazzling impression on the representatives. Looking every inch the queen, she also wore velvet and ermine and a stunning array of rubies, pearls, and diamonds. One ruby was said to be the size of a tennis ball. No less lavishly dressed were the royal children, who donned velvet and cloth of gold. In the days that the emissaries were at Medina del Campo, Ferdinand and Isabella treated them to displays of dancing, jousts, and bullfights. Though Isabella was not a fan of the bullfight, she understood the importance of the bloody sport to the Andalusians and allowed them to enjoy it.

When the time came to meet the object of their visit, little Princess Catherine, Nafan and Savage could not have been more pleased with her. Dressed in brocade and adorned with jewels, Catherine was a healthy-looking child of whom her mother was inordinately proud. At one point, Queen Isabella held up little Catherine for all to see during a tournament in which knights fought in an impressive reenactment of their battle engagements against the Moors. The Englishmen described her as “a singularly beautiful child.”⁵ The lavish welcome accorded the representatives showed Castile to be a wealthy power, with which Henry VII would be proud to ally himself. Before Nafan and Savage left, they concluded the cherished treaty allying England with Castile. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella agreed that their youngest should become the Princess of Wales and later the Queen of England. Thus, as Spain reoriented its foreign policy toward England and England did the equivalent toward Spain, the fate of a Spanish princess was cast. At a tender age Princess Catherine was already destined for England.

Spain’s royal alliances did not end with Catherine. In 1490, her eldest sister, the infanta Isabel, was given in marriage to the royal house of Portugal, in a bid to maintain peace and friendly relations between the neighboring countries. The blond-haired Isabel traveled with the queen when possible, including those famed visits Isabella made to bolster her troops during the Granada War. Before sending off their daughter to Portugal to wed Prince Afonso, heir to King John II, Ferdinand and Isabella ordered festivities lasting for days. But within six months after the wedding, Afonso died after his horse fell and crushed him. The distraught young widow returned to the family fold. Unlike six-year-old Catherine, the twenty-year-old Isabel suddenly faced an uncertain future. Queen Isabella would have to see if there was another match on the horizon that would benefit Spain.

Since the conquest of Granada, the royal family had lived in the Alhambra whenever possible. The most beautiful of their palaces, the Alhambra was also Princess Catherine’s most exotic home, with its long ties to Islamic history. Here, among the brilliant mosaic-covered halls, heavily pillared terraces, and arches intricately carved in the Moorish style, Catherine and her family lived and played. Fountains spouted delicate streams of water into lily-covered pools. Trees and bushes in emerald green and fragrant flowers dotted the lush gardens. Inside, Catherine and her sisters had as their apartments what had been the women’s quarters during the palace’s Moorish days. Around the city of Granada itself, orange and olive trees grew in profusion along with pomegranates. It was an enchanting paradise for Catherine, who would later choose the pomegranate as her personal symbol.

Within her own family, Catherine could count her mother as a special hero. Here was her own flesh and blood who had spent a decade fighting the Moors and ultimately conquered them. Just six years old when her parents took possession of Granada, Catherine could not have been unimpressed by the great drama surrounding the completion of the Reconquista. The young infanta grew to observe and learn from the woman who was not only her mother but was also a person of singular importance on the world stage. Princess Catherine needed only to look around the Alhambra for reminders of her mother’s greatest triumph. Having spent her youth by Queen Isabella’s side, Catherine had naturally imbibed some of her mother’s well-known traits: her intelligence, her piety, her resilience, her stubbornness. Catherine also “grew up conscious from her earliest years of the dignity to which she had been born as a daughter—an infanta—of Spain; it was an awareness of being a true royal princess … which never left her.”⁶

Catherine also grew up with a lasting image of her parents living up to their motto, “Tanto monta, monta tanto.” Before her was an example of a true royal marriage, in which Ferdinand and Isabella epitomized the vision of a “king and queen working in harness.”⁷ As the child of two remarkable parents, Catherine would always be proud of their accomplishments.

Isabella was preoccupied with Castile, but she did not by any means neglect her role as mother. Her children’s welfare was always uppermost in Isabella’s mind. The queen had a special place in her heart for her only son, Juan, who received extra attention because of his position as the future king. Because his health was delicate, doctors and caretakers watched the fair-haired prince closely. To groom Juan for his role as king, the queen sent eminent councilors and lawyers to teach her son about statecraft.

Prince Juan may have been singled out for special attention and care, yet this did not mean that Isabella’s daughters lacked attention. Recalling her limited training as a child, the queen was determined that Isabel, Juana, María, and Catherine receive a fine education. She demanded that they be developed to their fullest potential. Instruction in the classics was foremost in the princesses’ curriculum. To this end, Isabella employed some of the finest humanists of the day, such as the poet Antonio Geraldini and his brother, Alessandro. Under the direction of the Gerladini brothers, Catherine and her sisters read an impressive list of authors that included the Roman statesman, dramatist, and philosopher Seneca; the Christian poets Prudentius and Juvencus; and great doctors of the Church: Saints Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory. The princesses were also tutored in canon and civil law as well as history and Latin. In fact, “so well grounded in the classics” were they, that when they were older, the sisters “were able to reply to the speeches of ambassadors in ex-tempore Latin, fluent, classical, and correct, and Catherine appeared to Erasmus and to Luis Vives [the famed humanist scholars] a miracle of feminine learning.”⁸ So impressive was Catherine of Aragon’s education that Erasmus declared her “egregiously learned.”⁹ This was high praise indeed since in Italy two famous aristocratic contemporaries of Catherine—Isabella and Beatrice d’Este—were among the most accomplished and educated women in Renaissance Europe.

In educating her daughters, Queen Isabella had not neglected other, more practical arts. Embroidery, spinning, weaving, sewing were introduced, as were music, drawing, and dancing. By the time Isabella’s daughters had finished their schooling, she could feel satisfied that she had done well in educating Spain’s infantas. Of the four sisters, Juana and Catherine were justifiably among the most accomplished. Juana was highly musical and praised by a contemporary as having “for her age and sex” a high ability in composing and reciting verses, while Catherine, “proficient on keyboard and harp,” was also “learned in philosophy, literature, and religion,”¹⁰ having a command of French and German besides Castilian and Latin.

Isabella had never forgotten the inadequacy of her own education in Latin, then the language of the learned and of diplomacy. She set herself the task of learning Latin under the tutelage of Beatriz Galindo, a professor of rhetoric, philosophy, and medicine at the University of Salamanca. Queen Isabella may have never reached the fluency that Catherine and her sisters attained, but she managed to improve her Latin enough to understand documents and even “read with pleasure the Vulgate and Caesar’s Commentaries.”¹¹

Isabella’s love of reading and learning stayed with her throughout her life. The queen’s personal library, housed in the Alcázar of Segovia, provides a glimpse of her interests. Composed of 250 books chosen by the queen, the library consisted of works by Livy, Virgil, Plutarch, and Boccaccio; books on Spanish history, law, science, hunting, riding, and medicine; and especially treasured by the queen were religious volumes.

Spurred by the queen’s example, an appreciation of learning infused the Isabelline court. In this, Isabella was very much a part of the world of Renaissance humanism that emerged at the end of the Middle Ages. A new spirit of discovery and learning permeated Europe during Catherine’s childhood. Humanism, with its emphasis on classical antiquity and on the human potential as well as reasoning, swept the Continent. The high and mighty, such as Lorenzo de’ Medici, sponsored artistic greats such as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Giovanni Bellini, Sandro Botticelli, Raphael, and Titian were other artists who made their mark at the time and whose works continue to resonate today. Other notables of the time include the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, the writer Baldassare Castiglione, the philosopher and scholar Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Niccolò Machiavelli (who featured Catherine’s father, King Ferdinand, in his famous work, The Prince).

Queen Isabella, who placed a high value on virtue, also imposed a strict moral discipline on her court. This extended to curtailing vices such as gambling that had been rampant under Enrique IV’s reign. Religion, not surprisingly, reigned supreme in the home and at court. Isabella inculcated in her children a devotional nature and urged them to discern what was right and true. A life steeped in God, where conscience was to be a guiding force, was fostered by Queen Isabella and taken to heart by Catherine.

As queen, wife, and mother, Isabella offered the young Catherine an example to emulate. Isabella “knew that marriage was no enchanted land of endless romantic bliss and like everything else to which she addressed herself, it required … thought.”¹² Isabella therefore approached her marriage to Ferdinand realistically. To her, he was neither “a god nor a demon” but “a man with certain weaknesses … [and] knowing his weaknesses, she never expected the impossible of him. The good in him she recognized and fostered; the bad she did her best to neutralize. If he served her well, she served him even better. When he rebelled and lost hold of himself, it was her steady hand that soothed him and brought him back to his senses. Throughout her life she was his anchor, his stay, his good genius—a fact clearly proved by the almost total collapse of his character and conduct after she was dead.”¹³

But if Isabel steered the marriage firmly, she never attempted to dominate. “‘Con blandura’—with tact, with graciousness—was one of her favorite phrases,” and it was this blandura she exercised when dealing with her husband. ¹⁴ This is not to say that Isabella felt little or no jealousy. She was jealous of Ferdinand’s mistresses. But because Isabella had a profound respect for the sacrament of marriage and herself could never countenance being unfaithful, she contained her feelings. The queen may have tried her hand at keeping the occasional attractive woman from Ferdinand’s orbit, but when she could not prevent her husband from straying, she “simply bore the affair until it wore off.”¹⁵ Moreover, reproaches for the king’s lapses, if any, were kept away from prying eyes. Publicly, Isabella supported her husband, scrupulously avoiding scenes of rage and envy. She forgave him his infidelities and remained devoted to him. Her wifely devotion was evidenced by her sewing the shirts he wore. If Ferdinand “complained that she replaced the sleeves many times before making him a new one, his very tone of affectionate jocularity, to say nothing of the fact that he would wear no others, amply reveals the esteem in which he held her.”¹⁶

This long-lasting and harmonious matrimonial partnership sadly eluded most of the royal couple’s children. Already, Isabel, Catherine’s eldest sister, had seen her marriage ended after only six months. The widowed Isabel, only in her twenties, exhibited signs of melancholy as she continually mourned her dead husband. Her excessive fasting and religious fervor worried even her highly devout mother. Though her parents wished for a new marriage, Isabel preferred to take the veil. Ferdinand and Isabella finally persuaded their eldest daughter to transfer her allegiance toward another marriage. In 1497, the rail-thin infanta consented to remarry in Portugal, this time to the country’s new king, Manoel I. Remembering the comely princess from Castile during her brief stay in Portugal years earlier, Manoel asked for Isabel’s hand in marriage, preferring her to her younger sister María. As part of her agreement to marry, Isabel secured Manoel’s promise to expel the Jews from Portugal. He reluctantly agreed, and Iberia witnessed another group of persecuted Jews fleeing their homes for strange new lands.

Before Isabel’s second marriage, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella secured a double alliance that joined two of their children to the Habsburg dynasty. As much as a pact with the powerful Habsburgs was sure to help Ferdinand and Isabella in their quest to isolate France, an alliance with the new, powerful Spain was also bound to be to the advantage of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian, ruler of Austria and Burgundy and head of the Habsburg dynasty. Infanta Juana would marry Archduke Philip, then Prince Juan, at seventeen years of age, would marry Archduchess Margaret. These marriages would make Maximilian father-in-law to Isabella’s children.

Juana stood out among the children. Darker in coloring than her siblings, Juana also had a strangely brooding character that manifested itself early in her life. Catherine found it difficult to relate to this brilliant but mercurial sister, whose moods swung from great heights of happiness to abysmal depressions. Catherine found it much easier to get along with her sister María, a cherubic character but the least talented of Isabella’s daughters. Catherine also idolized and enjoyed the company of the family favorite, the much adored Prince Juan.

In 1496 Queen Isabella, accompanied by Catherine and her other siblings, saw seventeen-year-old Juana off from Castile in a fleet that included over one hundred vessels and ten thousand armed men. It headed to Flanders, where Juana was to become the bride of Archduke Philip. On the return trip to Spain, the fleet was to bring Margaret, Philip’s sister, so that she could marry Juana’s brother. Juana eagerly welcomed the chance to flee from Isabella’s strict upbringing and so showed no sign of sadness at leaving her mother. Isabella, by contrast, viewed her daughter’s departure with some trepidation. She cried, wondering if she would ever see Juana again. Isabella also feared for this unstable child and for the future. After a harrowing journey, Juana arrived at her destination and immediately fell in love with her new husband. She became obsessed with him. Philip, though at first enamored of his attractive bride, soon returned to his feckless and irresponsible ways. Such a combustible combination was bound to end in disaster. Trouble lay ahead for this infamous daughter of Isabella and sister to Catherine of Aragon. The couple went down in history as Juana la Loca (Joan the Mad) and Philip the Handsome.

The late 1490s were years of great trial for Queen Isabella, nearly all of which involved her children. The first of a string of tragedies took place on October 4, 1497, perhaps the darkest day in Isabella’s life. The happily married Prince Juan, Isabella’s precious son and heir, died of fever at Salamanca after being married for only a few months. King Ferdinand was with his son when he died. In Juan’s final hour, Ferdinand comforted the young man, telling him to “have patience, since God calls you, who is a greater King than any other, and has other kingdoms and seigniories greater and better than any we might hold or might hope to give you, and they will last you forever. Therefore be of good heart to receive death, which comes once inevitably to all, with hope to be immortal henceforth and to live in glory.”¹⁷ Ferdinand had the unenviable task of breaking the news to Isabella. When she saw her husband upon his arrival, she asked right away: “Tell me the truth, Señor! … ‘He is with God,’”¹⁸ came the reply. Then, bowing her head in sorrow and resignation, Isabella uttered: “God gave him, and God has taken him away. Blessed be His holy name!”¹⁹

Prince Juan’s death was more than a personal tragedy for Ferdinand and Isabella. Its dynastic implications changed European history. For now the succession devolved on the couple’s surviving children, all female. First in line was Queen Isabel of Portugal. Yet here too great sorrow awaited. In 1498, the second knife of sorrow pierced Isabella’s heart: her favorite daughter died in her mother’s arms after giving birth to Prince Miguel of Portugal. Strangely enough, the moody Isabel had predicted her premature death. A distraught Queen Isabella was laid low for weeks afterward. Incredibly, the ill wind that carried the seeds of catastrophe blew into Isabella’s life anew, shattering her hopes for the future. In 1500 her frail, two-year-old grandson, Prince Miguel, under whom the whole Iberian Peninsula might have been finally united, also died. Again, Ferdinand and Isabella showed fortitude before others. But inside, the couple felt this latest loss very keenly. Spain’s future now lay in the hands of Queen Isabella’s increasingly mentally unstable daughter Juana. That same year Juana had given birth to a son, the future Emperor Charles V, who was one day to rule an empire stretching from Spain to Burgundy and the Low Countries as well as Naples and Sicily and the German lands of the Habsburgs. As if predicting what lay ahead, Isabella had murmured to Ferdinand upon hearing the news of this grandson’s birth on the feast day of St. Matthias: “The lot falls on Matthias.”²⁰

The infanta María was the next of Queen Isabella’s children to marry. The widowed King Manoel, who wished to make another alliance with Spain, asked to marry María this time. After obtaining the necessary papal dispensation, the Spanish princess married King Manoel. María, who became the mother of eight children, turned out to be the most fortunate of Isabella’s children, escaping a premature death like those of Isabel and Juan. She was also devoid of the mental instability that increasingly gripped Juana. Finally, María also escaped the marital woes for which her sister Catherine would become famous.

Through these tumultuous years, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand continued to be embroiled in European conflicts. France’s King Louis XII aimed to wrestle as much territory as he could from Ferdinand’s dominions. Ferdinand went to war against Louis, which upset Isabella, who was not happy to see her husband fight a fellow Christian king.

As the 1490s unfolded, Queen Isabella remained preoccupied by many events, not least Christopher Columbus’s voyages of discovery. They were not proving to be as profitable as had been hoped. That would come later. The issues of slavery and the native populations also concerned Isabella. Columbus was a proponent of enslaving the natives, sending four ships full of captives to Spain in 1495. At first Ferdinand and Isabella agreed to their sale, but days later, Isabella had a change of heart, ordering that the sale be suspended.

Between 1493 and 1500, Columbus embarked on two more voyages. This time the explorer discovered Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad, and established settlements on Hispaniola. These colonies turned out to be disastrous. The colonizers were unprepared for the arduous task before them. The fortunes they sought were elusive, and they soon fought among themselves as well as with the native population. In Spain, feelings against Columbus ran high as Spaniards trickled home from the Indies with highly unpleasant stories. Soon enough Ferdinand and Isabella felt compelled to send an official to investigate. They trusted a courtier, Francisco de Bobadilla, to fulfill their mandate. In Santo Domingo, Bobadilla was shocked at what he found. Bad administration by Columbus and his brother had set the inhabitants against them. When Bobadilla confronted Columbus, the explorer insisted he was still the supreme authority on Hispaniola, undermining Bobadilla’s royal authorization to become the new governor. Bobadilla promptly ordered Columbus arrested. The explorer returned to Spain in November 1500, manacled and paraded in humiliation before the king and queen at the Alhambra.

When Columbus fell on his knees before Isabella, she took pity on him. She and Ferdinand allowed him to go on his fourth and final voyage in 1502; he was not permitted to visit Hispaniola. Sensitive to the explorer’s failure as an administrator, the king and queen did not restore him to his position as governor of the Indies. Columbus ended up shipwrecked on Jamaica for nearly a year. When he returned to Spain in November 1504, much of the luster that had shone on the intrepid explorer in the heady days of his first voyage was gone. Nevertheless, this inglorious ending did not take away the fact that “Columbus’ dream and Isabella’s breadth of vision had begun the most extraordinary, the most splendid, and the most terrifying chapter in Spanish history. Between them, they gave Spain a fabulously rich and powerful empire, although the discovery that led to Spain’s greatness also carried the seeds of the country’s decay.”²¹

The Americas took on “a life of their own and became the envy of Europe.” ²² Queen Isabella took an interest in these faraway lands and “saw to it that proper government, courts of law, and church institutions were established in Santo Domingo, the first capital of the Indies, and forbade the enslavement of American Indians. In 1503 she chartered a House of Trade (Casa de Contratación) in Seville which included royal officials, leading merchants, and ship owners, to regulate commerce with the Indies.”²³

An empire unprecedented in history took root thanks to Columbus and Queen Isabella. Half a millennium after the empire’s founding, Spain’s impact is still felt there today. Large regions of Central and South America continue to speak Spanish, the Castilian language of Isabella’s realm. Millions continue to adhere to Roman Catholicism, the faith she and Columbus so ardently championed.

At the same time that Columbus’s troubles captured the Spanish court’s attention, another pressing issue preoccupied Queen Isabella. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, all of Isabella’s children had left her side through death or marriage, with the exception of Catherine. The queen had to steel herself for the day soon coming when her beloved youngest child would have to leave the nest.

As a girl, Catherine had witnessed much of the drama of her mother’s reign. Present at Zubia in the final battle of the Granada War, Catherine saw the chaos, fear, and victory surrounding the Christian soldiers in their fight against the Moors. She could not have been more impressed when her parents took the city of Granada and went to claim the magnificent Alhambra. Upon his return from his first voyage to the New World, “when a triumphant Christopher Columbus, that self-styled Admiral of the Ocean, stood before Their Most Glorious Majesties, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, and exhibited the trophies of his exploration, somewhere nearer the throne stood a young and eager eight-year-old. From the comforting familiarity and tradition of the Old World, she viewed with wonder the dazzling images of the New.”²⁴

As the years passed, that impressionable eight-year-old grew into an obedient teenager. She had none of the remoteness of her sister Isabel, and none of the volatility of her sister Juana. Instead, Catherine appeared to have inherited her mother’s intense piety and strength of character. Physically, Catherine did not resemble her darker Aragonese ancestors except for their more pronounced chin. She did inherit Queen Isabella’s coloring: her fair complexion, bluish eyes, and reddish gold hair. Nearly medium in height, the princess from Castile also had a pleasant looking face, oval in shape, and clearly possessed an innate sense of royal dignity. This combined with her family background and intellectual accomplishments made Catherine of Aragon a fine catch for any European prince.

In 1498 King Henry VII had already expressed to the Spanish ambassador, Dr. Rodrigo González de Puebla, his pleasure at seeing the marriage alliance between Arthur and Catherine come to fruition. De Puebla reported to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella that Henry was generally envied on account of this marriage, stating: “He swore by his royal faith that he and the Queen are more satisfied with this marriage than they would have been with any great dominions they might have gained with the daughter of another Prince … . Begs that the Princess of Wales may be soon sent to England.”²⁵

The years drew Catherine ever closer to England when, on Whitsunday 1499, she and Arthur, Prince of Wales, were married in a proxy ceremony at Bewdley Manor in Worcestershire, England. This important stage having been completed minus her physical presence, it was only a matter of time before Catherine had to take that all-important step of leaving for England. It was an unavoidable moment that Queen Isabella nevertheless tried to delay as much as possible. Not only was the queen hesitant to let the thirteen-year-old Catherine go too soon but she also harbored some misgivings about Henry VII, who had a reputation for being stingy.

If Henry seemed to have had some deficiencies in his character, his wife, Queen Elizabeth, appeared to be the opposite. The Prior of Santa Cruz had advised Ferdinand and Isabella that Queen Elizabeth impressed him as “the most noble woman in England. He thought she suffered under great oppression, and led a miserable, cheerless life.” The prior also begged Catherine’s parents “to write a letter to the poor Queen sometimes, for charity’s sake.”²⁶

Already, Arthur and Catherine had been exchanging letters in Latin, written in formal, somewhat stilted style. In one letter, the prince wrote: “My dearest spouse … I have read the most sweet letters of your Highness lately … from which I have easily perceived your most entire love to me … . 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 proper fruit.”²⁷

Ten months before Catherine left for England, Ferdinand and Isabella wrote instructions to de Puebla to reassure Henry VII and to “tell the King of England that our intentions are unchanged. We love him and the Prince of Wales, our son, so much that it would be impossible to love them better. We appreciate the union with him, and his friendship so much that we wish to see the Princess as soon as possible married and living in the home of her husband the Prince.”²⁸

The excitement over Catherine’s impending arrival was not limited to the royal family. De Puebla reported his meeting with the Bishop of London to Ferdinand and Isabella with enthusiasm, saying that “it is impossible to describe how much he and the whole nation desire to see [Catherine]. In all parts of the kingdom preparations are making for her festive reception.”²⁹

Debate persisted, however, as to whether Catherine was ready to be sent away. Some, including her parents, felt that she was too young to go to a strange land and a new court, fearing that her morals might be corrupted without their personal influence. However, some thought that this might be the right time for Catherine to go, before she became too set in her ways in Castile. If that occurred, she might never be able to assimilate completely in England. And so, in a spirit of compromise, a date for Catherine’s departure was finally fixed for 1501.

Ferdinand and Isabella heard of the excitement surrounding their daughter’s impending arrival in England and were happy about it. However, the queen was concerned about the money being spent on it and wrote a letter in March 1501 from Granada regarding this: “I am pleased to hear it because … demonstrations of joy at the reception of my daughter are naturally agreeable to me … . Rejoicings may be held, but we ardently implore him that the substantial part of the festival should be his love; that the Princess should be treated by him and by the Queen as their true daughter, and by the Prince of Wales as we feel sure he will treat her.”³⁰

Queen Isabella could not delay the inevitable any longer. The time had arrived when she and King Ferdinand had to part from their youngest child. The teenage Catherine prepared to leave the family fold for a new and uncertain life in faraway England, for a “glorious marriage” that would be “of great advantage to the whole of Christendom.”³¹