That day in the spring of 1489 at Medina del Campo—was it, perhaps, Catherine’s earliest memory? She was wearing lovely new clothes and had been given fourteen young ladies, also prettily dressed, to wait on her. There were roaring crowds and a bullfight. Her mother, rough with jewels and stiff with cloth of gold, held her up to see the spectacle. Then peculiarly dressed men, speaking a language which she did not understand, saluted her with low bows and a strange, unfamiliar title: ‘our princess of England, Donna Catherine’. It was the Embassy come from England to negotiate a treaty of alliance between England and Spain, which was to be sealed with Catherine’s marriage to Arthur, Prince of Wales.1
The intended bridegroom was two years old; Catherine, the bride, just over three.
About a hundred years previously, Catherine’s English great-great-grandfather, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, had sent one of his daughters to marry in Spain and another in Portugal (she too had become one of Catherine’s ancestors). England then had been the greatest military power in Europe. John of Gaunt’s father, King Edward III, had conquered much of France, and Gaunt, for his part, was trying to acquire a Spanish kingdom for himself in the right of his second wife, Constance of Castile.
But subsequently, both England and Gaunt’s House of Lancaster had a roller-coaster ride. The issue, as usual, was dynastic division. Gaunt’s grandson Henry V had come within a whisker of uniting England and France in a Dual Monarchy. But Henry V died prematurely and, under his son Henry VI, who succeeded at the age of six months, his inheritance fell apart. First France was lost; then the English turned on themselves in civil war.
The civil war, later known as the Wars of the Roses, pitted the House of Lancaster (with its badge of the Red Rose) against the House of York (with its badge of the White Rose). Eventually the House of York won. In 1471, Edward IV made his claim secure by killing Henry VI and his son Prince Edward: the main Lancastrian descent was now extinguished.
But John of Gaunt, like most of his rank, had had a complex marital history. His marriage to his first wife, the heiress Blanche of Lancaster, was an affair of state. But, according to Chaucer’s poem The Book of the Duchess, it blossomed into a love affair as well. Gaunt’s second marriage, however, to Constance of Castile, continued as it had begun, as a marriage of convenience. Gaunt consoled himself with Catherine Swinford, the wife of one of his senior household officers. He had several children by her, whom he had legitimated by the surname of Beaufort, and he married her after Constance’s death.
The descendants of the Beauforts, who were given the Dukedom of Somerset, had a claim to the throne, though it was rendered doubtful both by their original bastardy and by the terms of their legitimation.
Another satellite family of the Lancastrian dynasty was the Tudors. They descended from an extraordinary marriage between the Queen-Dowager Catherine, Henry V’s widow, and a young, attractive Welsh yeoman of her household, Owen Tudor. His sons, Edmund and Jasper, were recognised as Henry VI’s half-brothers and given the earldoms of Richmond and Pembroke respectively. Edmund, the elder, was then married to the heiress of the Duke of Somerset, Lady Margaret Beaufort. Margaret was only twelve but the marriage was consummated regardless. Shortly afterwards Richmond died and Margaret, after a terrible pregnancy and delivery which left her unable to have any more children, gave birth to a son, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond.
With the extinction of the main Lancastrian line in 1471, Henry Tudor became the Lancastrian claimant. It seemed of little importance at the time as he was a penniless exile in Brittany while in England Edward IV sat securely on the throne. But in 1483, Edward IV too died prematurely, of gluttony and lechery, and his young sons, Edward and Richard, were usurped by their uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester. He proclaimed himself Richard III and imprisoned the Princes in the Tower, where, almost certainly, he had them murdered.
Richard’s usurpation split the Yorkist party down the middle and transformed Henry Tudor’s position. Swearing to marry Edward IV’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth, Henry set sail for England in the summer of 1485. The expedition was funded by the French and most of the troops were French mercenaries. The fleet landed in Milford Haven at the south-western tip of Wales (Henry always made much of his Welsh ancestry) and Henry marched to meet Richard III at Bosworth, near Leicester. Richard was defeated and killed, and Henry Tudor, crowned with the coronet which had fallen from Richard’s helmet, was proclaimed Henry VII on the battlefield.2
Five months later, after his coronation at Westminster and his acknowledgement by Parliament, he fulfilled his promise and married Elizabeth of York in January 1486. The new House, which united the rival claims of York and Lancaster, was given a new badge, the Tudor Rose, which, white within and red without, combined the Lancastrian and Yorkist badges. Elizabeth conceived immediately and was delivered of a son in September. He was born in Winchester, the old capital of Wessex, which was increasingly identified with the still older, mythical capital of Britain, Camelot. And he was christened Arthur, after Camelot’s king.3