Henry VII’s decision to snatch a semi-licit glimpse of Catherine before her arrival in London was a last-minute one (the meeting does not appear in her itinerary); nevertheless, its effect was carefully considered. The King was accompanied by a reporter (probably a herald), who wrote up the event and turned it into the prologue to the official account of Catherine’s reception and marriage. The herald’s prose was purple, like most modern royal reporters’. He was also determined, like his royal master, to milk his story for all it was worth.1
Once again, the modern parallel is striking. For the early Tudors, like the Windsors, played the card of Family Monarchy, and turned the rites of passage of family life–the births, marriages and deaths–into public pageants. There was already a strong medieval tradition to this effect. But Henry VII, seated shakily on his throne, carried it to fresh heights in an attempt to curry popularity. And Catherine, like another young Princess of Wales, seemed typecast to play a starring role in this royal charade.
Henry VII was staying at Richmond. He had just rebuilt the palace, with its fantasticated cluster of onion domes, and renamed it after the earldom he had held before he became King. Now, on 4 November, as though reluctant to leave his new creation, he did not set out till the afternoon. The short November day was soon spent, and the King and his party had to put up unexpectedly at Chertsey Abbey, with only a few miles of their journey accomplished. The next day he made better time and the morning mists had barely cleared when he left. The day turned out fine and sunny and the route was a pleasant one, through the southern part of the forest of Windsor. Soon the royal party was at a full gallop until it reached Easthampstead, on the western border of the forest, near Wokingham. Here took place the first piece of family theatre, in the form of a public meeting between the King and his eldest son Arthur, Prince of Wales.2
Arthur was riding from his principality of Wales to his wedding in London. He was already well used to public events. When he had been received by his future subjects, as on his entry into London in 1499, he had been gravely courteous; when he had greeted his father, he had been elaborately deferential. So it was on this occasion. The inhabitants of Easthampstead were also used to frequent royal visitors to the King’s hunting lodge on the edge of the village. So they cannot have been too surprised to find themselves pressed as extras into a Tudor photo-opportunity. ‘The true and loving English people’, as a few dozen villagers became in the reporter’s grandiloquent phrasing, ‘pleasantly perceive[d] the pure and proper Prince Arthur…solemnly to salute his sage father…which was great gladness to all trusty hearts’.3
Father and son, whose relationship under the hype was real and close, then spent the night together in the hunting lodge. The following morning they rode out together to ‘the plains’–that is, to the flat heath-land round Farnborough and Aldershot. Somewhere in the middle of the scrubby wilderness, the King and Prince met with the advance party of Catherine’s suite.
Henry had sent word to Catherine at Dogmersfield that he was coming to see her. Catherine responded by sending the senior ambassador accompanying her to say that that was impossible; the orders of her father, the King of Spain, were clear: she was not ‘to have any meeting, nor use any manner of communication [with her husband’s family]…unto the inception of the very day of solemnisation of marriage’.
Henry’s response was categorical. He summoned his councillors and they held a meeting there and then, on horseback and in the open air. Their decision was unanimous. Ferdinand might be King in Spain but Henry was King in England. And Catherine and her suite were now ‘so far entered into [Henry’s] Empire and realm’ that they were subject to the English King and to English customs. It was a case of: when in Rome, do as the Romans do. Catherine and her advisers acquiesced graciously. They had, after all, no choice.4
Leaving his son behind, the King rode forward, as the advance guard, to lay siege to the Infanta in her castle. Catherine tried a final ruse. She would proclaim herself the Sleeping Beauty and send word to Henry that she was ‘in her rest’ after her journey. Henry refused to be put off. ‘If she were in her bed he would see and commune with her, for that was the mind and the intent of his coming,’ he said. He gave her a few moments to get herself ready; then, booted and spurred, strode into her ‘third’ (that is, her most private) chamber. Each spoke ‘the most goodly words’ in their own language.
The ice maiden had melted. The King withdrew to change out of his riding dress and the Prince of Wales arrived at the manor house at Dogmersfield. A second meeting now took place, between the young couple themselves. They had been betrothed and married repeatedly by proxy. Now they renewed their vows in person, with the bishops of both sides interpreting English and Spanish into their common language of Latin.
There followed supper and an impromptu ball. Catherine summoned her minstrels and danced with her ladies. Arthur then danced ‘right pleasant and honourably’ with Joan, Lady Guildford.5
Joan was the wife of one of the King’s leading ministers; she was also daughter of Queen Margaret of Anjou’s most faithful lady-in-waiting. Through her mother, who was a native of Piedmont, she had acquired a skill in languages that was unusal in the Tudor court: as well as her fluent French she spoke good enough Latin for Erasmus to be impressed by her conversation, and she probably had Spanish too. These skills gave her an important role in the marriages of the early Tudors–though her fanatical devotion to the royal children meant that it was not always a happy one.6
But Joan was a mature woman, who was, moreover, married to someone else. Why did not Arthur dance with his own bride-to-be? It can hardly have been repulsion. For Catherine did not have the dark eyes and hair and sallow, creamy complexion of most of her ladies-in-waiting. Instead, with the looks inherited from her English ancestry, she corresponded closely to contemporary ideals of beauty.
Happily, we can see what Arthur saw thanks to a recently reidentified portrait of Catherine in her early teens. She is simply dressed, in a sort of smock, with her hair parted, pulled back and braided into a short, netted plait, and she holds a red rose, the badge of the Lancastrian ancestry she shared with Arthur. She is a country girl, fresh and charming.
Was Arthur’s failure to seize her in his arms then the result–as many writers have darkly hinted–of a lack of manhood? Hardly. Instead it was a straightforward question of etiquette. After all, there had been enough to-do about Arthur’s merely seeing Catherine. For him to have embraced her and danced with her would have been–even in more relaxed England–a step too far, even an insult.