With the executions of Perkin Warbeck and the Earl of Warwick, the English had done all that they could–and more than they should–to hasten Catherine’s arrival in England. But still she delayed in Spain.
The treaty had specified that Catherine should marry Arthur at ‘the end of his fourteenth year’: that is, in September 1500. But this was the latest date provided for, and Ferdinand and Isabella had fed expectations that she would arrive sooner. En route to his posting in the Netherlands, Don Juan Manuel, the Spanish diplomat and brother of Dona Elvira, Catherine’s duenna, had borne news that the Princess would be sent in spring 1500. But March came and went and still there was no firm word. ‘The sums spent in preparation for the Princess are enormous,’ De Puebla reported. The English, he continued, were on tenterhooks and Henry VII was getting impatient. For the English King did not like spending money ‘on spec’.1
None of this, of course, was Catherine’s fault. Instead, she was–as so often–the victim of her relatives and of circumstances.
The first problem lay in the relationship between her father, Ferdinand, and her future father-in-law, Henry VII. Both were too clever by half. They both, as it happens, wanted the marriage. But, since deceit was their second nature, neither could quite believe in the other’s good intentions. The result was that Catherine’s marriage–a prize for the grasping–nearly dropped through the slippery fingers of the two royal intriguers. For Ferdinand first to raise and then to dash hopes of Catherine’s departure was an obvious negotiating tactic. But it was an increasingly dangerous one. The more nearly adult Arthur got, the more valuable a prize he became–and there were other eager royal fathers with eligible daughters. The risk was real that Ferdinand, in his desire to strike a hard bargain, might find himself an underbidder–which would leave Catherine, still in Spain indeed, but also on the shelf.
The motives of Catherine’s mother, Queen Isabella, in helping to delay her daughter’s departure were more honourable. The deaths, first of her heir and only son, Don Juan, in 1496 and then in 1500 of her grandson by her daughter Isabella, Dom Miguel (who was her next heir), plunged her into a physical and emotional decline. Her energies, once inexhaustible, waned, and her religiosity deepened and became more morbid. She spent longer and longer at her devotions, and under her robes of state–once so rich and gaudy–she wore the coarse habit of a Franciscan nun. This drove a wedge between her and her husband and, after the departure of her third daughter, Maria, to marry Manoel of Portugal, all that was left to her was Catherine, her youngest and dearest child. The bond between mother and daughter, always close, got stronger. So when the Catholic Kings protested that they would send Catherine as soon as ‘the state of health of the Queen [Isabella] would permit it’, they are for once to be taken at their word.2
But finally circumstances, stronger even than Ferdinand’s deceit or Isabella’s depression, took control. Already, in March 1500, a rumour had reached England via Genoese merchants. Her parents, it was said, had other ‘very great and pressing occupations’: the Moors of the Alpujarras had rebelled. The Alpujarras, a region of wild and craggy mountains and rich valleys to the south-east of Granada, had been given as a little fiefdom to Boabdil, the last Moorish king of Granada. Now its people rose in a savage and at first successful Revolt. The Christian general sent against them was killed and his troops massacred. Ferdinand and Isabella had to fight one more campaign together, which was to be their last, to preserve the Reconquest. Isabella raised troops and Ferdinand led them into action himself.
In April the English were formally told of the Revolt and its consequences for Catherine’s departure: the Spanish royal family had been at Burgos, in the north of Spain, to speed Catherine on her way. But the news of the Revolt forced them to turn south and to abandon plans for the Princess’s journey.3
The Revolt exposed the hollowness of the settlement with the Moors; it also casts a searching light on the nature of Catherine’s own religious beliefs.