7

THE GOLDEN COUPLE

On the day Queen Isabella died, Catherine had written two letters, one to her father saying she had not heard from him, and the other to her mother: “I have written three letters to you, and have given them to Doctor de Puebla to forward with all care. I wish to know above all things else how your health is … . I cannot be satisfied or cheerful until I see a letter from you. I have no other hope or comfort in this world than that which comes from knowing that my mother and father are well.”¹

Isabella’s death left Catherine bereft of a loving mother and powerful champion. Gone forever was the woman “who had been a legend in her lifetime.”² Catherine’s future now hinged on two men, King Henry and King Ferdinand. In the coming months, Catherine’s attempts to win Henry VII’s goodwill would be continually undermined. She would also have little support from her father. During this time, Catherine deteriorated “into a woman much weathered by her isolation in a country that forgot the courtesies due to her royal state. She sorrowed in lonely exile.”³ And it was very much a life of exile, since Catherine still had not mastered the English language and felt her isolation keenly thanks in large part to the language barrier. What few communications she had directly with Henry VII were in Latin. Further, she had none of the influential advisers who had helped keep her mother from being marginalized years earlier in Spain. She was obliged to rely on Dr. de Puebla and Doña Elvira. De Puebla was untrustworthy or ineffectual or both, and Doña Elvira would prove herself opportunistic and treacherous.

Queen Isabella’s death diminished King Ferdinand’s prestige and domination. Many Castilian nobles still harbored suspicions about Ferdinand II of Aragon, whom they found difficult to accept as one of their own. He had been consort to the Queen of Castile, but upon Isabella’s death, the succession to Castile (not Aragon) went to Juana. Isabella had invested Ferdinand with the power to act for their daughter in the event she could not reign, an understandable move considering Juana’s mental state. Now that Juana was Queen of Castile, a number of the country’s nobles switched their allegiance, believing that, if they sided with Juana and Philip, they might be able to recover some of the prerogatives they had lost during the previous reign.

Isabella’s death diminished Catherine’s value to King Henry. Spain was quite suddenly no longer the great power it had been when Ferdinand and Isabella ruled as the Catholic Kings. Henry VII thought it prudent to find a more advantageous bride for his only son and heir. King Henry accordingly coaxed his son to make a speech before the Privy Council and Bishop of Winchester in June 1505, in which young Prince Henry repudiated his betrothal with Catherine. This act cast Catherine’s fate into the unknown. King Henry was also unhappy with Ferdinand, who would not pay the rest of Catherine’s dowry. Henry VII therefore stripped Catherine of the hundred-pounds-a-month allowance he had granted after she waived her dower rights on becoming betrothed to Henry. With no source of funds, Catherine had barely enough money to buy food and could not pay her servants, who struggled to remain helpful to her. One of Catherine’s closest and most helpful Spanish friends was Maria de Salinas. “She has always faithfully served me, and in the hours of trial has comforted me,” wrote Catherine to her father.⁴ Catherine never stopped despairing for her faithful servants and always tried to alleviate their lot by begging money for their wages and dowries.

By April 1506, Princess Catherine’s situation had deteriorated so much that she sent the following lengthy letter to her father explaining her difficulties:

I have written many times to your highness, supplicating you to order a remedy for my extreme necessity, of which (letters) I have never had an answer … . I am in debt in London, and this not for extravagant things, nor yet by relieving my own (people), who greatly need it, but only for food; and how the king of England, my lord, will not cause them (the debts) to be satisfied, although I myself spoke to him, and all those of his council, and that with tears: but he said that he is not obliged to give me anything, and that even the food he gives me is of his good will; because your highness has not kept promise with him in the money of my marriage-portion. I told him that I believed that in time to come your highness would discharge it. He told me that was yet to see, and that he did not know it. So that, my lord, I am in the greatest trouble and anguish in the world … . I have now sold some bracelets to get a dress of black velvet, for I was all but naked: for since I departed thence (from Spain) I have nothing except two new dresses … . On this account I supplicate your highness to command to remedy this, and that as quickly as may be; for certainly I shall not be able to live in this manner.⁵

Catherine’s fate sank into greater uncertainty as the days passed. King Ferdinand, preoccupied with his own problems, wrote infrequently and continued to insist that King Henry was responsible for Catherine. King Henry occasionally gave her some money, but the amounts were few and far between. When Doña Elvira proposed a plan, little wonder then that Catherine jumped at it. As Queen of Castile, Juana might be able to mitigate Catherine’s plight, the duenna suggested. Why not write to Juana, inviting her to England? Upon receiving Catherine’s invitation, Juana and Philip replied that they could not visit her but that Catherine was certainly welcome to come to see them at Calais. They added that she should bring King Henry with her. Dr. de Puebla got wind of the letter and convinced Catherine that a meeting between Philip and Henry was the last thing King Ferdinand, Spain, or Catherine needed. If Philip and Henry came to an understanding at the expense of King Ferdinand and Spain, there was no telling the impact on Spain’s future, as well as Catherine’s. For all her distrust of de Puebla, Catherine understood his point. She tried to convince King Henry, who had by then learned of the idea, not to proceed with the meeting.

Catherine soon discovered that Doña Elvira’s brother, the Spanish ambassador to Flanders, had pressed her to get Catherine to write the invitation. He had his own agenda, believing that Castile’s future was better served by turning away from Aragon and reorienting toward Henry and Philip. When Catherine saw through her duenna’s duplicity, “a seething fury replaced her anxiety. She knew she had been played for a fool and she inwardly writhed at her own ineptitude and folly.”⁶ The event “marked the hour when Catherine came of age and the last of her innocence and naïveté was discarded like a worn-out mantle.” ⁷ She confronted Doña Elvira and dismissed her immediately. From then on, Catherine would tread carefully in a world flush with conspiracy. And aptly so, since nowhere was the art of dissimulation and intrigue going to be more evident or more challenging than in the Tudor court of England’s next king.

In 1506 the meeting between Philip and Henry VII took place after all, not in Calais but in England, thanks to the vagaries of the weather. Juana and Philip were traveling from Flanders to Castile to be crowned king and queen in their new kingdom. However, a violent storm unexpectedly sent the ship carrying them to England. King Henry VII welcomed the couple as they disembarked. Catherine met her sister Juana but was never left alone with her, save for a very brief period, during which Isabella’s two daughters found nothing in common. Hence, little came of the encounter between the sad sisters.

In October 1506, in an unexpected turn of events, Philip died from typhoid fever, though rumors of poisoning inevitably emerged. A distraught Queen Juana, already besotted over her husband, now transferred her obsession to his dead body. In a macabre turn of events, Juana traveled about Castile with Philip’s corpse, refusing to be separated from it.

Across the channel, Henry VII began to entertain the idea of marrying the widowed Juana. He had been impressed by her beauty during her brief visit to England. Henry VII also had been negotiating a marriage between Prince Henry and Juana and Philip’s daughter, Archduchess Eleanor, who seemed a greater dynastic and political catch than Catherine of Aragon. Another marriage uniting the Tudors with the Habsburgs, this time Eleanor’s brother Archduke Charles with Princess Mary, King Henry’s daughter, was also discussed. All these negotiations illustrate the trajectory that the Habsburgs were following. Thanks to Philip and Juana’s marriage, the Habsburgs were set to rule Spain for generations and were now well on their way to becoming the most powerful and envied dynasty in Europe.

Catherine wondered when her situation might improve. The constant wrangling over funds, plus her uncertain status in a land still foreign to her, was oppressive, a far cry from her childhood at the Alhambra. There was, however, one person in the English court whom Catherine was getting to know better and who brought some light into an otherwise demoralizing life. This person was none other than Prince Henry.

Born on June 28, 1491, at the Palace of Placentia in Greenwich, Prince Henry, like Princess Catherine, received a first-rate education, becoming fluent in several languages. His paternal grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, the Countess of Richmond, oversaw his education. The miserly Henry VII in the end spared no expense in getting for his son the best tutors, including the poet laureate John Skelton. Prince Henry thrived and excelled at his studies. Healthier than his elder brother, Arthur, Henry was athletic as well as musical and scholarly. By the time Henry was fifteen, he had grown into a handsome young man, tall and muscular, with reddish brown hair and a charming personality. He was turning out to be a fine catch for any woman, and Catherine was not immune to his charms. By the time Catherine was twenty, she and the adolescent Henry had developed a mutual fondness, much to King Henry’s annoyance. He kept the two apart, and for three months in 1507, Catherine did not see the prince, prompting her to tell her father that “it seems to me a great cruelty.”⁸ Despite the king’s attempts to loosen the bond that had grown between them, the prince’s affection for Catherine had taken hold.

Catherine’s maturity prompted her father to bestow an important role on her. King Ferdinand had enough confidence in her to appoint his daughter as his ambassador in England in 1507. As his diplomatic agent, Catherine saw her status improve. Her letters to King Ferdinand became much more than personal opinions; they took on the tone of official views. They were reasoned compositions, evidence of the princess’s intelligence. However, never far from her analyses were pleas for help. In one report to her father, Catherine again emphasized where Henry VII stood: “As long as he is not entirely paid [the other half of my dowry], he regards me as bound and his son as free … . Thus mine is always the worst part, and what he does now is glorify himself for his magnanimity in waiting so long!”⁹

In spite of the constant penury, Catherine’s appointment as her father’s envoy invigorated the princess. For the first time since she arrived in England, she was seized with energy. She actively sought out any kind of information about Henry VII, the court, and the political situation. Catherine lobbied King Henry more than ever and “learned too, though this was a hard lesson, to keep her head and her temper, to be patient, wary, closemouthed, to endure without a sign insult, humiliation, open rebuffs and sly persecution, to be spied upon and lied to, and brow-beaten without betraying herself, without abandoning for an instant her sense of the larger issue, her relentless pursuit of her one aim. Her father had told her that on her marriage to the Prince of Wales depended the friendship between England and Spain, perhaps the very safety of her house. If the driving force of a single will could achieve that marriage, Catherine would do it.”¹⁰

When King Ferdinand granted Catherine’s request for another Spanish ambassador to England, he came in the person of Don Gutierre Gómez de Fuensalida. However, Fuensalida disappointed Catherine with his grandiloquent ways and insensitive dealings with King Henry. By now, the princess from Castile had become a discerning judge of character. Her unpleasant experience with Doña Elvira had been the first in a long line of incidents that alerted Catherine to insincerity and duplicity. The lonely and desperate years at Henry VII’s court had awakened in her a sharp awareness of the real world. Naturally upright in character, Catherine now understood that political and personal survival depended on courting those in power. But to what extent would she have to dissemble? And would there come a point when she would have to compromise her principles completely?

Throughout this time of crisis and throughout her life, Catherine, like her mother, remained constant in her religious devotions. Like Isabella, Catherine was insistent on having a spiritual director or confessor who could help her form her conscience in accordance with the Church’s teachings. In time, Catherine found a most acceptable confessor in the person of Fray Diego Fernandez. A member of the Franciscan Order, to whom Queen Isabella was especially attached, Fray Diego was an intellectual, a Spaniard who spoke English, and above all, a kindred spirit whom Catherine admired and trusted. It was understandable that she came to rely on Fray Diego. Here was an undisputed champion of her cause, cultivating in her much needed mettle. Fray Diego counseled Catherine to hold her ground, urging her to stay strong and to fight for her rightful position as the future wife of the future king of England.

Despite Catherine’s attempts to improve her lot, her irregular situation continued. She was at an impasse. Likewise frustrating, the princess felt a growing attraction to the seventeen-year-old Henry, who by now had grown into a splendid-looking prince with his broad physique, great height (over six feet tall), and easy charm. Clean-shaven, with a fair and clear complexion like Catherine’s, Henry also possessed handsome features, including a rich head of hair, a fine, long nose, arched eyebrows, and penetrating eyes that cast a playful twinkle. Henry, in sum, was turning into a princely Adonis, and Catherine was succumbing, as any woman would to a handsome and charming young man who paid her flattering attention.

King Henry continually obstructed her betrothal to the prince as he sought a match that might bring greater advantages to England. By the early part of 1509, Catherine’s spirit finally broke. She decided to leave England and return to her native land, where “she could spend the rest of her life serving God. This was the final expression of despair on the part of Queen Isabella’s daughter, who had been trained to believe that life on the throne, not in the convent, was the destiny for which God had sent her on earth.”¹¹ However, at this, her lowest ebb, fate suddenly took another turn.

For months, Henry VII had been in declining health. His appetite was failing him, his cough became more troublesome than ever, and his constitution was weak. Henry’s thoughts turned to Elizabeth, his wife. Clearly the time was nearing when he would join her in peaceful repose. After planning a chapel in Westminster Abbey for himself and his queen, Henry prepared for death, requesting innumerable Masses to be said for his soul. He died on April 22, 1509. The new king, Henry VIII, was two months shy of his eighteenth birthday.

King Ferdinand, upon hearing the news, acted quickly. Not knowing the extent of Henry’s desire to marry Catherine, he advised Fuensalida and Catherine that he would grant all the concessions, including the outstanding dowry, in order to facilitate the marriage. One of Henry VIII’s first acts was to declare before his councilors his intention to marry and that, in marrying Catherine, he was fulfilling his father’s dying wish. Catherine was, he stated, the only woman he desired to marry. He had longed to wed her, the woman he loved, and now that he was king, he was determined to make her his wife in no time.

Upon hearing the news she had so ardently desired, Catherine was overcome with gratitude. All the years of uncertainty, of poverty and humiliation, were not for naught. Fray Diego had been right in counseling her to fight for this, and now she had won. At last Catherine was to become Queen of England.

The longed for day arrived on June 11, 1509, when Henry and Catherine were wed privately at Greenwich. The Archbishop of Canterbury asked: “Most illustrious Prince, is it your will to fulfill the treaty of marriage concluded by your father, the late King of England, and the parents of the Princess of Wales, the King and Queen of Spain; and as the Pope has dispensed with this marriage, to take the Princess who is here present for your lawful wife? The King answered: I will … . The Princess answered: I will.”¹² The happy bride wore white, with her hair flowing loosely as a symbol of virginity. They then sealed their union with a Mass at the church of the Observant Friars. Catherine would have likely taken comfort in the thought that what God had put together through the sacrament of marriage, no man can put asunder. Only death could part her and Henry now. Unlike Catherine’s previous marriage, there was no doubt that her marriage to Henry was consummated soon after their wedding, with the king even boasting that Catherine had indeed come as “a maid” to him, unblemished.

The marriage was popular with the English, who had not forgotten the excitement they felt when Catherine had arrived eight years before as Prince Arthur’s bride. The English people had also been aware of her plight after becoming Arthur’s widow. Now that Henry VIII had come to the damsel’s rescue, all was sure to end happily. Trade between Spain and England would boom, prosperity would smile upon the English. Catherine, though a bit older looking than the bride of fifteen, still possessed a prettiness that charmed many, including the new king.

For weeks after Henry and Catherine’s wedding, festivities went on, and Catherine joined in the celebrations. She had told her father as much, writing to him: “Our time is ever passed in continual feasts.”¹³ Ferdinand was pleased to hear the news, writing to Catherine that he was “thankful to God for the conclusion of her marriage. [He] loves her more than any of his other children. She has always been a dutiful and obedient daughter to him. Her marriage is a very grand and very honourable one.”¹⁴ In another letter, he tells Catherine that he “is exceedingly glad to hear that she and the King her husband are well and prosperous, and that they love one another so much. [He, Ferdinand] hopes their happiness will last as long as they live. To be married is the greatest blessing in the world. A good marriage is not only an excellent thing in itself, but also the source of all other kinds of happiness.”¹⁵

Henry VIII proudly wrote to his father-in-law. He expressed much affection for his bride of six weeks, “whose virtues increase, shine and flourish more day by day,” adding that he would not have chosen another woman over her for a wife.¹⁶ Nearly a year into the marriage, King Henry could still write to his father-in-law that “he and his Queen are perfectly happy, and that his kingdom enjoys undisturbed tranquility.”¹⁷ Catherine also wrote to her father, assuring him that “our English kingdoms enjoy peace and the people love us, as my husband and I love one another.”¹⁸

Soon after Henry and Catherine’s wedding, as part of the wedding festivities, a kind of castle was constructed near the palace of Westminster. The rose and pomegranate, Henry’s and Catherine’s symbols respectively, as well as the initials H and K, were prominently displayed throughout the castlelike structure. Catherine’s choice of the pomegranate as her symbol was highly charged with meaning. She chose the emblem of Granada, which her mother had conquered in 1492. The pomegranate also was associated with fertility, and as Henry’s consort, Catherine’s first duty was to provide him with children. In no time, the Tudor rose and pomegranate decorated the couple’s palaces, so that courtiers and visitors alike needed only to glance at a wall or ceiling to be reminded of the royal couple’s deep bond of affection.

In the king and queen’s honor, jousts and tournaments were held. King Henry was particularly skillful at playing the knight in these events. He not only reveled in his abilities but also relished promoting a chivalric court. Catherine was his ladylove, and the king was her champion-knight, who proudly wore their initials on his armor during jousts. The young queen delighted in these revelries and supported her husband by her presence.

Henry was a fine horseman who liked to hunt and go hawking. Catherine, also passionate about hawking, joined her husband in this pastime, courageously riding her horse as hard as she could to keep up with the king. Henry was also an excellent and avid player of royal tennis and enjoyed archery. There were few days in the early years of the couple’s marriage when King Henry did not participate in some kind of physical amusement, both as a form of exercise and as a way of flaunting his prowess, for he was always a boastful creature.

Sumptuous times called for sumptuous clothes, and Henry VIII ensured that his court dazzled. Velvets and satins, cloths of gold, and heavily embroidered material adorned the king and queen and members of their court, as did ostentatious jewelry. The jewels in particular caught many people’s attention, because of their size, sparkle, and exquisite cut. With so many saints’ days in an England still steeped in Roman Catholicism, there was plenty of opportunity to parade in such finery, be it Easter Sunday, or the days celebrating the feasts of St. George (England’s patron saint), Corpus Christi, St. Thomas of Canterbury, the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, or Christmas, among many others.

Tudor Christmases were a highlight of court life. They culminated on the feast of the Epiphany, or the Three Kings, twelve days after Christmas Day, in a special banquet. Christmas gift exchanges took place on New Year’s Day. During her first Christmas as his wife, Catherine received an exquisite illuminated missal from Henry. He inscribed it with the words “If your remembrance be according to my affection, I shall not be forgotten in your daily prayers, for I am yours, Henry R., forever.”¹⁹ Moved by this, Catherine inscribed her own message beneath it, saying: “By daily proof you shall me find to be to you both loving and kind.”²⁰

Queen Catherine could not help but be dazzled by this dynamo of a husband. Whatever Henry embarked on he did with vigor and panache. “When a royal ship was to be launched, he himself acted as pilot, in a sailor’s coat and trousers of cloth of gold, and a gold chain with the inscription ‘Dieu et mon Droit’ on which hung a whistle, ‘which he blew as loud as a trumpet.’”²¹ Catherine and Henry threw themselves completely into their merrymaking—a refreshing change from the sober final years of Henry VII’s reign. Catherine herself was occasionally the target of Henry’s merriment, but his pranks were always done in good jest and with good intentions. The couple was obviously in love, and it was easy to see why Henry and Catherine fell for each other. To Henry, Catherine was the intriguing princess from a faraway land, demure and in distress. Each had been lonely in his or her own way, Catherine because of her predicament as well as being a foreigner, while Henry, though outwardly jovial, was under the scrutiny of his demanding father and bereft of the loving presence of his departed mother. Little wonder, then, that the two gravitated toward each other. For Catherine, Henry represented the epitome of a prince. The new queen was not the only one dazzled by this magnificent specimen. A foreigner at court had penned similar thoughts: “His majesty is the handsomest potentate I have set eyes on … with an extremely fine calf to his leg.”²² Handsome and athletic, accomplished and intelligent, gentlemanly and religious, Catherine could not have asked for more in a husband. His undivided attention to her was very gratifying, especially after all the years she had to endure in limbo while King Ferdinand and King Henry VII haggled over her future.

Henry VIII and Queen Catherine shared many pastimes. They were both passionate about music and danced together with great enjoyment. Henry was adept at playing musical instruments, including the organ and lute. He also dabbled in composing music, including some for Masses. Piety was among their common interests. Both had a sincere attachment to the Church, scrupulously observing the feasts and holy days and attending Mass frequently. Henry would also join Catherine in her apartment for vespers. As a devout Christian who dreamed of fighting a crusade in the Holy Land one day, King Henry also came to see Catherine in a special way. His wife was, after all, the daughter of the incomparable Queen Isabella. And because Henry’s beloved Catherine “had lived in a land conquered by the Infidel and whose mother had driven them away and raised the Cross in their Moorish palaces,” she “assumed an almost mystical light in his eyes.”²³

Catherine and Henry were also united by their love of learning. Few, if any, kings and queens in all Europe could compete intellectually with the couple. Henry was gifted with languages, and in order to communicate better with Catherine, he learned Castilian, which he added to his already fluent Latin, Italian, and French (Catherine at last mastered English but continued to speak it with a distinct accent that betrayed her Iberian origins). Henry’s intellectual interests also encompassed the sciences and theology. His compositions, which he sent to the Vatican, were much admired for their cogency and elegance.

Intellectually curious like Queen Catherine, King Henry sought to fashion his court into a haven where the promotion of scholarship took center stage. Only five weeks into the new reign, Lord Mountjoy, a humanist and future chamberlain to the queen, wrote with enthusiasm to his friend Erasmus about Henry: “If you could see how everyone here rejoices in having so great a prince, how his life is all their desire, you would not contain yourself for sheer joy. Extortion is put down, liberality scatters riches with a bountiful hand, yet our King does not set his heart on gold or jewels, but on virtue, glory and immortality. The other day he told me ‘I wish I were more learned.’ ‘But learning is not what we expect of a King,’ I answered, ‘merely that he should encourage scholars.’ ‘Most certainly,’ he rejoined, ‘as without them we should scarcely live at all.’ Now what more splendid remark could a prince make?”²⁴

The English court opened its doors to Europe’s greatest scholars. Among the most famous was the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives. Other intellectuals who were close to the king were the prelate and Greek scholar William Latimer and the lawyer and author Thomas More, as well as the physician and scholar Thomas Linacre, all of whom stood out for their erudition. The celebrated Erasmus declared that the English court under Henry and Catherine’s patronage had no rival. Erasmus also praised Catherine to her husband, telling the king, “Your noble wife spends that time in reading the sacred volume which other princesses occupy in cards and dice.”²⁵

King Henry VIII and Queen Catherine’s presence on the throne of England augured well for the future. The couple themselves exuded a triumphant and optimistic air. Catherine was proving to be a valuable helpmate to her husband. A fine adornment at court, a growing confidante of the king’s, an able organizer who “had her mother’s gift of producing magnificent effects when she chose,”²⁶ Catherine, in sum, was the ideal wife for Henry VIII. With so much going for this golden couple, it was not surprising to find King Henry VIII and Queen Catherine basking in their subjects’ adulation. As Henry wished, soon after their marriage, Catherine was crowned queen. Alongside her husband at his coronation, she looked suitably regal. Dressed in white and gold satin, she wore a gold crown with sapphires and pearls, her auburn-reddish hair streaming down her back. Queen Catherine made her way in a litter of white and gold to Westminster Abbey. Beside her rode Henry in cloth of gold and bloodred velvet. The coronation ceremony and her wedding were the culmination of a hard-won battle and long supplication for Catherine. At twenty-three, she was the cherished bride of a loving husband, and she, the daughter of Isabella of Spain, was now Queen of England.