Catherine was now ill herself. Perhaps Arthur had died of something infectious and she had caught the same disease. Perhaps she had collapsed with the shock of his premature death. At all events, her parents were soon pressing for her to be removed from ‘that unhealthy place’. Their concerns were superfluous. Long before their letters reached England, Catherine had been brought back from Ludlow to London. She was carried in one of the Queen’s litters, which was covered in black cloth and trimmed with black ribbon and fringe as a sign of mourning. She travelled slowly and by easy stages, partly because of her state of health and partly because the English suspected that she might be pregnant. If the child lived and if it were a boy, it would be heir of England. Catherine would have fulfilled her dynastic role and her honoured place as mother of the future King would be assured. She reached Croydon by 4 May. It was soon apparent that she was not carrying Arthur’s child.1
This fact changed everything. The heir was now the King’s second son Henry, Duke of York, who on 22 June was granted an office as ‘Prince of Wales’ (though he would have to wait for eighteenth months before his formal creation). As for Catherine, what was she? She was a royal widow certainly. And, at the age of sixteen, might yet be a royal wife again. But whose?2
Answering these questions took seven long years as her parents and her father-in-law manoeuvred and bargained. Catherine was the person most concerned with the outcome. But no one thought to consult her. Nor apparently did she expect them to. Instead, to begin with, she was passive–as passive as the grain between the upper and the nether millstones.
In the negotiations between England and Spain, Henry VII held the trump card: he had control of Catherine’s person. He played this advantage shrewdly and with increasing ruthlessness.
At first, he was all proper concern. As soon as her health was sufficiently recovered, Catherine was set up at Durham House in the Strand. Durham House, the London palace of the Prince-Bishops of Durham, was one of the finest residences in the City and was fully worthy of a daughter of Spain. Catherine was also attended exactly as her parents had provided. Her Spanish Household, which had accompanied her to Ludlow, had somehow struggled back from the Marches, complete with Juan de Cuero and his jealously guarded hoard. At Ludlow, Henry VII had been persistent in trying to reduce the status of Catherine’s male servants to English norms. At Durham House, the pressures vanished and they were free to take up their old positions. Indeed the King concerned himself with only a single question: who would pay for Catherine’s establishment and how much?3
The question should scarcely have arisen, since, in theory, the provisions for Catherine’s dower, painstakingly threshed out at Medina del Campo and flamboyantly ratified at her wedding, made her one of the richest women in England. But the dower, as we have seen, was a reciprocal arrangement, made in return for the marriage portion. The first half of the portion had been paid on the nail at the wedding; the second half was due a year later. However, Arthur’s death had supervened after only five months. The premature death of young princes was hardly unusual in the sixteenth century (Don Juan, Catherine’s only brother, had also died shortly after his wedding). But, by some extraordinary oversight, the Anglo-Spanish treaties made no provision for what was to happen in such circumstances. Subsequently, the Spanish claimed that law and convention required the payment of Catherine’s dower. Henry VII, on the other hand, took the view that, since only half the marriage portion had been handed over, he was under no obligation to fulfil his side of the bargain by paying the dower in full, or even in part. Henry VII, Ferdinand and Isabella were warned in the immediate aftermath of Arthur’s death, ‘would never fulfil his obligations to Catherine’. They were incredulous. But the warning proved all too accurate.4
Not that Catherine was left destitute–at least to begin with. Instead, Henry’s first tactic was to pay her a monthly allowance in lieu. The sum –£83 6s 8d a month, amounting to £1,000 a year–was a considerable one, since £1,000 per annum was the income of a substantial baron. It was also exactly what the £20,000 capital value of the first instalment of the marriage portion would have yielded had it been invested in the contemporary land-market. I do not think that this is mere coincidence. The payments were made to William Hollybrand. Catherine had first encountered him when he had acted as spokesman and interpreter at her meeting with the Duchess of Norfolk. Now he seems to have joined her service as Treasurer of her Household. He was one of the few Englishmen in an almost wholly Spanish establishment and it cannot have been an easy position.
The King also augmented the regular payments to Hollybrand with substantial occasional gifts. Catherine was given £40 for her expenses in the weeks immediately following Arthur’s death. In April 1503, she was given £100 on top of her allowance and double this sum in the September following. Henry VII accompanied the £200 with a fulsome letter in which he protested that ‘he loves her so much that he cannot bear the idea of her being in poverty’. But the King found the fact that Catherine made large, irregular demands on his coffers hard to stomach. In September, Hollybrand was ordered ‘to send directly an account of how the money is spent’. This was Henry VII presuming to control Catherine’s expenditure by audit. In April, his act of generosity had been accompanied by a more ominous threat: ‘for this time only’ was noted against the payment of £100 in the Treasurer of the Chamber’s account book. The marginal note seems to be written in the King’s own hand. If Catherine did not moderate her expenditure, Henry VII would cut her income off at the source.5
For Catherine, it would seem, was extravagant or, in De Puebla’s more tactful phrase, ‘liberal’. But it would be a mistake, I think, to see this as a settled character-trait. Rather, Catherine was displaying a sort of childish self-indulgence, on a par with the generally slow pace of her development. For, at the age of seventeen or eighteen, she remained, to all intents and purposes, a child, with Dona Elvira as a domineering and demanding step-parent. Moreover, the mould of dependency was a strong one: it would take a succession of crises to force Catherine to break free.6
Meanwhile, Ferdinand and Isabella tried to regain the initiative in their dealings with Henry VII. Their representatives in England were ordered to put two proposals to the King. The first was to demand that Henry VII return the first instalment of the marriage portion and send Catherine safely back to Spain. The second was to offer Catherine to him once more as a bride for the new heir to the throne, Prince Henry. The proposals were of course contradictory. And, though the Spanish envoys were instructed to pursue the first with vigour, it was intended only as a cover for the second. Henry VII was well briefed about the real intentions of Spanish policy and played his cards accordingly.
The Catholic Kings were also aware that the Spanish position in England had been fatally weakened by the divisions in Catherine’s entourage and they did their best to put a stop to them. They sent a new ambassador, Ferdinando Duque, to supplement and perhaps to supplant De Puebla. And they moved decisively against De Puebla’s ally in Catherine’s Household, her confessor, Alessandro Geraldini. Somehow, they had got wind of Geraldini’s understanding with De Puebla; they had even got hold of one of his letters to the ambassador. There was, they wrote stiffly to Duque, ‘no reason why such a man as Alessandro should remain in England’. Instead, he was to be lured back to Spain.7
The fear of the Catholic Kings was that Alessandro and his ally De Puebla would do damage to the negotiations for the new English marriage. This suggests strongly that Ferdinand and Isabella had got hold of the wrong end of the stick, since Geraldini and De Puebla had in fact been enthusiasts for Catherine’s English destiny; it also points to their enemy, Dona Elvira, as the source of the deliberate misinformation. At all events, Geraldini’s sudden recall left the duenna in unchallenged dominance over both Catherine and her Household. It also left her free to offer her own version of events.
This became a matter of moment when Ferdinand and Isabella demanded the truth from Duque about Catherine’s condition: had Arthur successfully consummated the union or was Catherine still a virgin? The Catholic Kings needed to know this fundamental fact about their daughter’s first marriage to help in their negotiations for her second. And ‘nobody’, they complained, ‘has told us’. As it happens, their letter crossed with one from Dona Elvira informing them ‘for a certainty’ that Catherine ‘remains as she was here’: that is, a virgin.8
Catherine’s parents accepted Elvira’s assurance. So have most succeeding generations. However, there are good reasons for doubting Dona Elvira’s statement or at least for scrutinising it more critically. As we have seen, there is circumstantial evidence, some of it contemporary, including the herald’s account, for taking the consummation as a likelihood if not as a fact. Dona Elvira’s own self-interested motives for insisting on her charge’s virginity (and hence Catherine’s continuing dependent status) are also very clear. Moreover, the only man who could have testified decisively to the contrary, Catherine’s confessor Alessandro, had been got out of the country, probably at Elvira’s own instigation, and, despite his fondness for mildly salacious gossip about the great, had doubtless been terrified into silence on this question at least.
But what of Catherine herself? Surely her steadfast affirmation of Dona Elvira’s claim is decisive? But Catherine’s insistence on her virginity is put on record only long, long after the event, in 1529. And the value we attach to it depends on our subsequent reading of Catherine’s character and actions. Traditionally, Catherine has been regarded as a plaster-of-Paris saint, who could not tell a lie. Actually, she was both more complex and much more human.
We should also consider Catherine’s position in the immediate aftermath of her marriage to Arthur. Did she know enough about sex to realise what had happened? On the contrary, everything suggests that she was and long remained both ignorant and, worse, misinformed. And was she in a condition to tell the truth even if she had known it? Here it is important to remember that the decision for Catherine to accompany Arthur to Wales had only been reached after long and acrimonious discussion. On one side, arguing for departure and living together, had been Alessandro and De Puebla; on the other, in resolute opposition, was Dona Elvira. If only by her acquiescence, Catherine had sided with her confessor against her duenna. We can imagine Catherine’s girlish guilt when things turned out as they did. We can also imagine how that guilt was exacerbated by Margaret Pole’s revelations about her brother Warwick’s execution. Her marriage to Arthur, Catherine must have felt, had been made in blood and bitterness. It, her first marriage, and even he, her first husband, were things accursed, and Catherine wished to blot both out of her memory. How better than by claiming that the marriage had never been consummated? In other words, that it had never been a marriage at all and that Arthur had never been her husband?
All this is, of necessity, speculation. But it is striking that Dona Elvira’s claim commanded by no means universal assent at the time. The English flatly denied it. The Spanish asserted it, but covertly. And Rome, judiciously, sat on the fence.
The Pope had been involved in the negotiations for Catherine’s second marriage from an early stage. This is because the marriage was highly contentious. Catherine would be marrying her own brother-in-law and such a union raised profound questions of natural and canon law. Only the Pope could settle them with the absolute power of binding and loosing he claimed as heir of St Peter. At the time, the English were among the most fervent defenders of the Papal powers; later, and thanks to Catherine’s own marriage, it was a different story. The Papal agreement to the marriage would be couched in the form of a document known as a ‘dispensation’ because it ‘dispensed’, or set aside, the moral and legal obstacles against the marriage.
The negotiations themselves had made rapid progress. The English asked, and the Spanish, by and large, granted. On Ferdinand and Isabella’s own instructions, legitimate questions about Catherine’s dower rights and the marriage portion were swept under the carpet. Nothing, neither Catherine’s rights nor her welfare, must get in the way of the new English marriage. The treaties for the marriage were signed on 23 June 1503 at Richmond. Two days later, on the 25th, the young couple were betrothed ‘at the Bishop of Salisbury’s place in Fleet Street’. And three days later still, on the 28th, Henry celebrated his twelfth birthday.9
But then matters stalled in Rome. The first clause of the marriage treaty provided that both parties would petition Rome for a dispensation. The dispensation, it continued, was required because Catherine had previously contracted a marriage to Arthur:
whereby she became related to Henry, Prince of Wales, in the first degree of affinity and because her marriage with Prince Arthur was solemnised according to the rites of the Catholic Church and afterwards consummated.
As agreed, both the English and the Spanish approached Rome for the necessary permission. Henry VII’s overtures were straightforward. But Ferdinand muddied the waters by putting his own gloss on the case as outlined in the treaty. The treaty, he told his ambassador in Rome, asserted that the marriage had been consummated. The truth, Ferdinand wrote, was the opposite. He even claimed that ‘it is well known in England that the Princess is still a virgin’. But, to satisfy the English, who are ‘much disposed to cavil’, ‘it has seemed to be more prudent to provide for the case as though the marriage had been consummated’.10
Ferdinand’s argument is a non sequitur. If it was ‘well known in England that the Princess is still a virgin’, why should it have satisfied English doubts to declare that she was not? No wonder that Rome seems to have been confused about the facts of the case and hesitated accordingly.
Henry VII knew nothing about Ferdinand’s manoeuvres and was therefore in the dark about the reason for the consequent delays. Soon he was fearing the worst. Did Rome, like some of his leading councillors and bishops, such as Archbishop Warham of Canterbury and Bishop Fox of Winchester, oppose the marriage as a matter of principle? Pope Julius II tried to reassure him. He admitted that he had ‘somewhat delayed to dispense with the obstacles to the marriage’. But he insisted that he had acted from the best of motives, taking his time ‘only from the wish to consider the case more maturely’. The letter was intended to still the English King’s doubts. But it had the contrary effect of heightening them. The Pope had told Henry VII that he would hear from him by Robert Sherbourne, Dean of the Chapel Royal, who had been on Embassy in Rome. But Sherbourne began his journey home without the dispensation. The English King despaired.11
He need not have worried–or at least, worried too much. Julius had agreed to the dispensation. But, as was frequent Papal practice with difficult decisions, he had not released the document. He would probably have continued to sit on it but for the circumstances of Isabella’s poor health. Finally, as a compassionate gesture, he sent her the Brief in the autumn of 1504. Ferdinand wrote to Henry VII on 24 November to announce its arrival.12
It was a document which had been much pondered and on which much hung. Yet it contained an extraordinary error of dating. Following the normal practice of the Papal chancery, it was dated in two ways: by the year of grace and by the year of the pontiff ’s reign. But the two contradicted each other: the year of grace dating was ‘the 7th of the calends of January of the year of our Lord’s Incarnation 1503’—that is, in the Roman calendar, 26 December 1502; whereas ‘the first year of our pontificate’ of the recently elected Pope Julius II only began on 1 November 1503. It was the sort of error which had invalidated many a lesser document.13
The Brief also contained one clause that outraged Isabella. For it stated, as a matter of fact, that Catherine’s first marriage to Arthur had been consummated. But Dona Elvira had sworn the contrary! In response, no doubt, to Isabella’s protests, the final, authoritative version of the dispensation, which took the form of a Bull, or Papal letters patent sealed with lead, took a very different line. Like all the best redrafting, it achieved the desired result with extraordinary economy–indeed, by the insertion of only a single word.
The Pope, the Bull began, had been informed that Catherine had ‘contracted a marriage with Arthur, Prince of Wales and that this marriage had, perhaps, been consummated’. The word translated as ‘perhaps’ is forsan. Its root is fors (‘chance’ or ‘luck’) and its usual meaning is indeed ‘perhaps’ or ‘perchance’. In this usage, forsan expresses a strong doubt about the marriage having been consummated. But forsan is sometimes used to state a fact, just as in English we say ‘something chanced or fortuned’, when we mean ‘something happened’. In which case the meaning becomes the opposite: ‘this marriage happens to have been consummated’.
Was the ambiguity accidental, like the error of dating in the Brief? Or was it deliberate? In any case, it contrived to square the circle. By means of the single weasel word forsan the dispensation managed to contain both the English and the Spanish version of what had happened (or not) between Catherine and Arthur. Resolving the ambiguity, Julius might have decided, was a matter for another day and, or so perhaps he hoped, for another Pope. So it proved.
Such subtleties were by then beyond Isabella, who was on her deathbed by the time the Brief arrived. Two days later she was dead. Her death, as Ferdinand wrote to Henry VII, was ‘the deepest grief that could happen to us in this world’. He had lost ‘the best and most excellent wife’. Catherine had lost her mother. A new world of uncertainty had opened.14