It was indeed a new world that was ushered in when, on 21 April 1509, in great agony of body and mind, King Henry VII died. At fifty-two, he was not an old man, even by the standards of the sixteenth century. But the deaths, in quick succession, of his eldest son and his wife, had aged and soured him. His health broke down and he became increasingly oppressive: to members of his wife’s family, to anyone with money, and, above all, to Catherine herself.
For Catherine, then, Henry VII’s death could hardly make things worse. But would it make them any better?
On the whole, Catherine thought that it would. Back in September 1508 she had ventured to express ‘the hope that the Prince would be better than his father’. Fuensalida, looking on the black side as usual, had replied: ‘Please to God that the hope prove true, but he saw no likelihood of it.’ For once, Catherine proved the better prophet.1
How had Catherine arrived at her optimistic reading of Prince Henry’s character and inclinations? After all, the two had been allowed to spend very little time together and none in private. But Catherine was friendly with Mary, Henry’s favourite sister. Perhaps, too, the courtship of her lady-in-waiting, Ines de Venegas, with William Blunt, Lord Mountjoy, which blossomed into marriage a few months into the new reign, had already begun. If so, this would have told Catherine all that she needed to know. For Mountjoy, though some thirteen years older than Henry, was his ‘socius studiorum’ or ‘companion in studies’. And it was Prince Henry’s education, above all, that made him so different from his father.2
Henry, like Catherine herself, had been largely schooled in the Classics. Unlike Catherine, however, his education was influenced directly by the great Erasmus himself. Once again, the conduit was Mountjoy. Mountjoy had been Erasmus’s favourite pupil in Paris and, when Mountjoy returned to England and took his place in Prince Henry’s household, he kept up an enthusiastic correspondence with his former teacher. He also made sure that Henry was thoroughly inculcated both in Erasmus’s characteristic style and in his moralising approach to the Classics. He even brought Erasmus to England and introduced him to the eight-year-old Henry in 1499.3
But Mountjoy was a gentleman as well as a scholar. He came from a great military family, while his step-father, the aged Earl of Ormond, was the source of the stories about Henry’s namesake, the all-conquering Henry V, that formed another important aspect of the Prince’s upbringing. Here history merged into legend. For when, late in the fifteenth century, Sir Thomas Malory came to write Le Morte D’Arthur, the definitive version of the Arthurian cycle, he remodelled the deeds of the mythical Arthur on the achievements of the real Henry V. For the young Henry, devouring Le Morte D’Arthur in Caxton’s printed edition of 1485 and listening spell-bound to Ormond’s reminiscences, the real and mythical hero-kings became one. He would be another Henry V, another Arthur: brave in war and peace, generous, bold and gallant.4
For Henry, aged seventeen years and ten months when his father died, was young–young enough to believe what he read and young enough to think that it could be put into practice. Erasmus’s influence, also exercised primarily through books, supplied spice and intellectual ambition. From this source came Henry’s sense of justice and virtue as the proper business of kings, as well as a fierce hunger for fame and for the acquisition of that most elusive of accolades for a ruler: to be known to contemporaries and to posterity as ‘the Great’.
This was the young man whom Catherine, it seems, had glimpsed and in whom she put her hope. She probably knew, too, of more personal motives for his reaction against his father. From Margaret Pole, she had learned, perhaps, of Prince Henry’s resentment at Henry VII’s mistreatment of his mother’s Yorkist relatives. And Catherine’s own eyes would have told her that he hated being cooped up at his father’s Court. That he wanted to joust and that only his father stopped him. That he had sat in the royal seat during one of Henry VII’s bouts of illness; and that, like Prince Hal after he had tried on his dying father’s crown, he had never wanted to give it up.
Now was his chance; now was Catherine’s.
The old King died at 11 o’clock at night on the 21st. But his death was kept secret for two days. Councillors came to and from the royal apartments as though the King were still alive. And his son continued to appear publicly as Prince Henry and to be addressed as such. Not till the evening of 23 April was the truth made known and not till the 24th was the new King proclaimed in London. The concealment was to facilitate a political coup. Behind the smooth, uninterrupted façade of Court ceremony there took place a vicious faction struggle. This resulted in the downfall of two of the old King’s leading councillors, Edmund Dudley and Sir Richard Empson, and the disavowal and reversal of the oppressive policies with which they were identified. The real author of these policies had, of course, been Henry VII himself. But he could not be blamed, openly at least.
The most dramatic reversal of policy was the decision that Prince Henry, now King Henry VIII, should marry Catherine after all. This decision, too, was probably taken behind closed doors in the first forty-eight hours of the reign. Certainly by 8 May it was a fait accompli. Fuensalida was bewildered and even Ferdinand, normally so quick on his feet in an emergency, struggled, against the disadvantages of distance, to keep up with events.
Nevertheless, there was no heedless rush to the altar. Instead, the English continued to extract the last drop of advantage from the situation. They made sure that the remainder of Catherine’s marriage portion was paid in full and in cash. Catherine and her family also renounced any claim to the return of the money in the event of the premature death of either spouse. And not until the necessary deeds were signed and sealed were Henry and Catherine married on 11 June. The hard bargaining continued even into the couple’s exchange of vows. ‘Most illustrious Prince,’ Henry was asked, ‘is it your will to fulfil the treaty of marriage concluded by your father…and the parents of the Princess of Wales, the King and Queen of Spain; and, as the Pope has dispensed with this marriage, to take the Princess who is here present for your lawful wife?’ ‘I will,’ Henry replied. Catherine was asked the equivalent question. ‘I will,’ she replied.5
Thus the vows were made; it remained to be seen how they would be kept. It also remained to be seen who would benefit from the marriage. So far, all the advantage had been on the English side. But Ferdinand rarely gave something for nothing. He had paid 200,000 crowns for the English marriage. He would expect a commensurate return on his investment.
Catherine’s second marriage, in contrast with her first wedding to Arthur, was a private, almost furtive affair. There were probably lingering doubts about the propriety of the marriage, which, despite the Papal dispensation, never disappeared. Also, the wedding was overshadowed and overtaken by preparations for a much greater ceremony. The Feast of St John the Baptist, 24 June, and, by their reckoning, Midsummer Day, had previously been a day of ill-omen for Catherine. This was the day when her father had been due to pay the second instalment of her marriage portion; he had twice defaulted and twice exposed her to intolerable humiliation. Ever since 1505, she had dreaded the day. Now she could look forward to it with joy. For Henry had decided that it should be his coronation day–and hers, as well, since she would be crowned alongside him.
The day before, she processed through London, as she had done on the eve of her wedding to Arthur. Then, she had been dressed as a Spanish Infanta, and had ridden Spanish-fashion, side-saddle on a mule. Now, she appeared every inch the English Queen. She was carried, English-style, in a litter. And everything about her was vestal white: the horses, the covering of the litter, Catherine’s own dress. She wore her hair like a bride: long and loose and covered only with a ‘coronal set with many rich orient stones [that is, pearls]’. It became her: even a hostile witness conceded that her hair was ‘beautiful and goodly to behold’.
But it is important to understand the meaning of the display. It was not, as many writers have assumed, a proclamation of the fact that she was a virgin when she married Henry. Instead, Catherine was only following precedent: every detail of her equipage, from the colour of the horses, the litter and the dress, to the ‘dishevelled’ state of her hair and ‘the rich circlet’ on her head, was specified by The Royal Book in its provisions for the coronation of a queen.
But, just as the Queen’s procession reached the Cardinal’s Hat tavern in Cornhill, the blue sky darkened and the heavens opened. The rain was so violent that it overwhelmed the silken canopy borne over Catherine and, in all her finery, she had to take shelter ‘under the hovel of the drapers’ stalls’. The shower was as short as it was sharp and Thomas More made light of it, in a little poem he appended to the collection of coronation verses he presented to the King. Others saw it as a darker augury. Had Catherine really escaped the curse of Midsummer’s Day?
After Catherine followed her ladies-in-waiting and the gentlemen of her Household. Most were now English. They were headed by Lady Elizabeth Stafford, the sister of the Duke of Buckingham, who himself made a magnificent showing during the ceremonies as acting High Steward of England. Also in attendance on the Queen were Margaret Plantagenet and Elizabeth Boleyn. The latter was sister of the Earl of Surrey, wife of Sir Thomas Boleyn and mother of three young children, Anne, Mary and George, who was the baby of the family. Catherine’s Spanish servants were not forgotten: Ines de Venegas, Maria de Gravara and Maria de Salinas all figured honourably among her ladies. Room was found even for Alonso de Esquivel and Juan de Cuero, despite the fact that both had fallen foul of their mistress. But the face Catherine was possibly most pleased to see was that of Fray Diego, who took his place in the procession with the rank of ‘the Queen’s Chancellor and Confessor’.
On the 24th itself the coronation took place. Two thrones were placed on a platform in front of the high altar in Westminster Abbey: the higher for Henry, the lower for Catherine. First came the coronation of the King. Then it was Catherine’s turn. The ceremonial for a queen consort was somewhat simpler than for a king. No oath was administered to her, nor, as a woman, was she invested with the sword or spurs. But she was anointed on the head and the breasts; the coronation ring was put on the fourth finger of her right hand, the crown on her head, the sceptre in her right hand and the ivory rod surmounted with the dove in her left. Catherine was now Queen, as sacredly and inalienably as Henry was King. As she returned to her throne, she bowed to Henry ‘honouring, as is right, his majesty’.
Catherine, of course, was both learned and devout, so for her the words of the elaborate Latin prayers uttered over her would have meant as much as the symbols and ritual. One by one, the names and stories of the great women of the Bible were recalled and applied to her. Grant, God was beseeched, that Catherine may be a vehicle of victory, even as ‘[Thou] didst sometimes cause Thy people to triumph over a most cruel enemy, by the hand of Judith, a woman’. Might her marriage endure: just as God, ‘for the good of Thy people the Jews…didst deliver Queen Hester from captivity and bring her to the bed of Ahasuerus and to the society of his kingdom’, so, for the good of England, might He keep Catherine with Henry that ‘she, continuing always in the chastity of princely wedlock, may obtain the crown that is next unto virginity’. But, above all, God was begged, let her have children: like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and the Virgin Mary herself, may she ‘multiply and rejoice in the fruit of her womb’; might she have a Son, a Christ for England.6
Thus Catherine was dedicated to a service greater than herself, greater even than Henry.
On 27 June, three days after their joint coronation, Henry wrote to the Archduchess Margaret, the Regent of the Netherlands, to explain why he had married Catherine. It was, he claimed, in fulfilment of his father’s dying wish: ‘he, being then on his death bed…gave us express command that he should take in marriage the Lady Catherine…which we would not, neither in this nor a thousand other things whatsoever they be, disobey or infringe’.7
Henry’s words cannot be faulted as an expression of filial piety. But I do not think they should be taken seriously as an explanation of his behaviour. For, far from respecting his dying father’s every wish, Henry had, while the breath was scarce out of the body of the old King, endorsed a comprehensive overthrow of the key policies and personnel of his reign. In any case, had Henry VII really come round to the Spanish marriage? If so, he had done a good job of concealing his kingly intentions from Catherine.
The truth seems to be that Henry VIII married Catherine because he wanted to. He wanted her father, Ferdinand of Spain, as an ally in the war which he intended to wage against France. He wanted to be married to show that, despite his youth, he was fully adult and able to wield sovereignty without limitation. And finally, despite the fact that Catherine was twenty-four and a half years old to his eighteen, and that she was four feet something to his six feet two inches, she was still young enough and attractive enough to be wanted for herself. ‘Even if we were still free,’ Henry assured Catherine’s father on 26 July, ‘it is she, nevertheless, that we would choose for our wife before all other.’ This time Henry is to be believed.8
Catherine’s own motives for the marriage were also a mixture of the personal and the dynastic. It was her duty and destiny to be Queen of England. With a King like the young Henry VIII, who was the most handsome and brilliant prince in Christendom, it was a pleasure too. But Catherine had not been taught to set much store by pleasure. Instead, it is duty, to her father and to her House, which shines through the letter she wrote to Ferdinand in July 1509. ‘I have no other good except that of being your daughter,’ she assured him. She was ‘so well married’ indeed. But the marriage was the work of Ferdinand’s hands. As for Henry, her principal reason for loving him was not that he was her husband, but that he was ‘so true a son of your highness’. ‘I have performed the office of ambassador’ to England, she reminded Ferdinand. And she would continue to perform it with the additional power that came from presenting her credentials in the marriage bed.
Ferdinand knew his daughter well. He would now begin to receive the return on his investment in her marriage.
But, even in this letter, Catherine shed a little of her Spanishness. Juan de Cuero and his wife Janina had stepped into the shoes of the Manriques after their flight into exile. Janina de Cuero had replaced Dona Elvira as Catherine’s Lady Mistress, while Juan had become her Chamberlain. Now Catherine, more independent in spirit, got rid of them both. She told Ferdinand that the De Cueros ‘with my other servants, set off from hence to their homes’. She paid the members of her Household their eight years’ arrears of wages (save for the ever-unforgiven de Esquivel, who got only six). But this payment, Catherine made clear, was to discharge a debt of honour, not to reward good service. Instead, she wrote, her followers deserved censure for their misbehaviour but forgiveness for her sake, ‘by reason that they can call themselves mine’.9
The stick-and-carrot treatment Catherine suggested for her former Household servants was scant reward for their years of purgatorial exile in England. But, though ungenerous, it was an accurate assessment of the damage which their foolish quarrels had done her. Would the handful left behind, in particular her confessor, Fray Diego, serve her better?