There were no signs of such gloomy thoughts when the townsfolk of Plymouth welcomed ashore their future Princess of Wales and Queen. ‘She could not have been received with greater rejoicings if she had been the Saviour of the World,’ Isabella was told in a phrase that must have swelled her mother’s heart with blasphemous pride. The English took early to Catherine, and her hold on popular affection always remained secure.1
What makes it the more impressive is that Plymouth’s welcome was entirely spontaneous. The English of course had made elaborate preparations for Catherine’s reception. But everything had been based on the assumption that she would land at Southampton. So when she came ashore instead at Plymouth, the townsmen and local gentry were left to their own devices to offer their own, impromptu welcome. The town had already begun to enjoy the prosperity which, in the course of the next century, made it home to Francis Drake and the Pilgrim Fathers–those two contrasting products of the Reformation and English Imperialism that were to be the nemesis of Catherine, her House and her country. For now, however, Catherine benefited from the profits of Plymouth’s trade and fishing, staying in ‘the goodly house towards the haven’ built by ‘one Painter, a rich merchant’.2
She remained there over a week, as the arrangements for her official welcome were hastily revised. Plymouth is one hundred and fifty miles from Southampton, where the official welcoming party under Lord Willoughby de Broke was assembled. So it was decided that Catherine should be met part-way, at Exeter. First the slowest moving element of the cavalcade–a relatively plain horse litter, for Catherine, and twelve palfreys (or riding horses) for her ladies–was despatched to Honiton. Then Broke himself followed in post, with a new, hastily drafted schedule that itself bore traces of further alterations as Henry VII’s administrators adjusted to events on the ground. Having picked up the advance horses and litter, Broke was to arrive at Exeter on 17 October ‘at the furthest’. By this time, Catherine had already left Plymouth with an escort of local gentry and nobles. The escorts had also been organised by Broke, who, fortuitously, was the most powerful landowner round Plymouth, and they had been instructed to cover the forty-four miles from Plymouth to Exeter to get Catherine there on the 19th for her formal reception.3
Broke was an obvious choice for the honour of receiving Catherine and conducting her to London. As one of the handful who had shared Henry Tudor’s exile in Brittany before he became King, he was a member of the inner circle of Tudor government. He was also, as Lord Steward, the senior officer and administrator of the King’s Household. And he was most carefully briefed. The rendezvous went according to plan–as did the rest of the new itinerary, which was stuck to with impressive precision. Catherine would have been struck immediately. Her parents were mighty monarchs, more powerful by far than the English King. But their domestic life and etiquette were relatively informal. Now she was in a different world. Instead of her summer ramble across Spain, there was the military precision of her English journey: she was being inducted into one of the most pompous and ceremonialised courts of Europe.4
Catherine’s route to London followed roughly the line of the present A30. Every dozen miles or so there was a halt. The first stop was Honiton, ‘a fair long thoroughfare and market-town’, with, then as now, handsome houses strung along the highway which also doubled as the main street. Honiton was open, welcoming and snugly prosperous: it would be hard to imagine a greater contrast to the compact, fortified towns and villages of south and central Spain: red-or white-built, with thickly clustered houses and dense warrens of lanes.5
Two or three miles before the next staging post at Crewkerne, Catherine crossed the county boundary. The notables of Devon and Cornwall, who had accompanied her from Plymouth, bade her farewell and handed her over to the dignitaries of Somerset. They included Sir Amyas Paulet and Sir John Speke, who were figures in central as well as local politics. Their country houses lay to the north, that is to the left of the road, where the ground rose quickly: the Paulets at Hinton St George, where Sir Amyas had built ‘a right goodly manor place of free stone, with two goodly high towers embattled (that is, with battlements) in the inner court’, and the Spekes at White Lackington. Perhaps they pointed out the general direction to Catherine, focusing her eye on another novelty: the English landscape. It was hilly: ‘but plentiful of corn, grass and elmwood, wherewith most part of all Somersetshire is enclosed’. No meseta, then, but a patchwork of fields, trim hedgerows and, above all, intense, variable greens now shading into the brighter colours of autumn and the greys and browns of early winter.6
Catherine’s journey continued, first through Dorset, with halts at Sherborne and Shaftesbury, where she spent the great feast of All Saints Day (1 November) in the Abbey, and then across Cranborne Chase to Amesbury Abbey on the borders of Wiltshire and Hampshire. At Amesbury, where she arrived on the 2nd, there was another formal reception in which she was introduced to one of the greatest English families: the Howards.7
The Howards had narrowly escaped disaster when they fought on the wrong side at Bosworth. The head of the House, John, Duke of Norfolk, was killed, and his son and heir Thomas, Earl of Surrey, was captured and attainted (that is, declared legally dead) by the triumphant Henry VII. But he was brought back to political life through his willingness to transfer his loyalty to the new King. He was restored first to his earldom, then to his estates and finally, in 1501, was made Lord Treasurer. His eldest son, another Thomas, was even allowed to marry the Lady Anne, the sister of the Queen, Elizabeth of York.8
The Earl of Surrey was the nearest thing Catherine had yet encountered to one of the great Spanish nobles or grandees of her parents’ court. He was a man of honour, proud of his lineage, mistrustful of novelty and, above all, a fighter. Fighting came as naturally to him as it did to the conquistadors of Spain: their foe was the Infidel; Surrey’s enemy was the French and their sidekicks, the Scots. Accompanying Surrey at Amesbury was his aged relative, the Duchess Elizabeth, the widow of the last Mowbray Duke of Norfolk. The Duchess Elizabeth would have made her own impact on Catherine: she was a formidable personality, whose stained-glass portrait at Long Melford Church in Suffolk served as the model for Tenniel’s drawing of the fiery Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. ‘Off with her head!’ the Red Queen cried. The Howards and their extended family experienced more than their fair share of beheadings in the course of the following decades: sometimes as Catherine’s allies, more often as her bitterest enemies.9
The Duchess Elizabeth of course spoke no Spanish. So, to assist her in greeting Catherine, she was assigned the services of William Hollybrand, who gave a speech of welcome in the Duchess’s name ‘in the Spanish tongue’. The speech, like everything else, had been the subject of minute preparation and Hollybrand spoke according to a written text. How Catherine and her Spanish suite had hitherto overcome the language barrier is anyone’s guess. As Plymouth traded with Spain, there would have been Spanish speakers among the merchant community. There were probably some resident Spaniards too–though they were regarded as a disorderly lot and were treated with disdain by metropolitan Spaniards. English and Spanish churchmen no doubt conversed in Latin, in which language Catherine herself was also able to communicate. Finally, her newly acquired French would have been put to the test by her more sophisticated hosts, including Lord Broke, who had spent two years’ exile in Brittany.10
Hollybrand himself probably combined the roles of merchant and minor royal bureaucrat as collector of the customs on wine in the port of London. He, too, was to become a part of Catherine’s life, as Treasurer of her household as Princess of Wales.11
Beyond Amesbury the quality of the roads improved and Catherine was supplied with a ‘chair’ or chariot as an occasional substitute for her litter. The intention was now that she would make rapid progress towards London. But at Dogmersfield near Fleet in Hampshire, where Catherine was due to spend the nights of 5 and 6 November in a manor house belonging to the Bishop of Bath and Wells, her iron schedule was suddenly broken. For Henry VII could contain his impatience no longer. The King would see his future daughter-in-law and introduce her to his son. And nothing would stop him.12