So far, Catherine had failed at making love–or, rather, at making babies. Would she be any more successful at making war? For war was the reason that Ferdinand had emptied his coffers to pay the last instalment of her marriage portion. Two decades previously, he had signed the Treaty of Medina del Campo with Henry VII, King of England, in order to complete the encirclement of his enemy, France. Now, with his daughter’s marriage to the younger Henry safely accomplished at last, he had brought the scheme to fruition. Catherine was its symbol: she was also expected to play an active part in unleashing war.1
Ferdinand was quite open about this. Caroz, the Spanish ambassador in England, was instructed to do everything he could to get Henry VIII to declare war on France. If he failed, he was to invoke Catherine ‘and ask her to persuade her husband’. And if Catherine were sufficiently unfilial to prefer peace to war, then Caroz was to use Fray Diego to persuade Catherine to persuade Henry. Ferdinand even wrote directly to Fray Diego, to promise him favour and preferment in the Church.2
Ferdinand’s willingness to resort to the black arts against even his own child is characteristic. But it proved unnecessary. Catherine was Isabella’s daughter: she had practically been born in camp and she felt at home there. War was her element and showed her at her best. Nor did Henry take any persuading to fight the French. Instead, he began his reign with a calculated gesture of bellicosity. The French ambassador, the corpulent Abbot of Fécamp, arrived to thank Henry VIII for his letter proposing the continuation of Henry VII’s policy of peace and friendship between the two countries. The new young King was outraged. ‘Who wrote this letter?’ he demanded fiercely. ‘I ask peace of the King of France, who dare not look me in the face let alone make war on me!’ And yet the letter proposing the renewal of peace had been written. And, despite Henry’s protestations, the peace was renewed. For though the King wanted war, the members of an important party on his Council were determined to maintain peace.3
It was Catherine’s first responsibility–and one which was congenial to her–to stiffen Henry’s determination to over-ride the peace party. Thereafter, she had a choice. She could remain the tool of Ferdinand’s schemes, as her father hoped and intended. Or she could work with her husband to the glory and benefit of England. Catherine never hesitated: had not her father told her that she must become English?
Ferdinand’s first use of Catherine was indirect. Her letters home had told her father, excitedly, how much she was enjoying the endless round of entertainment laid on for her by Henry. In one of his first despatches, Caroz went into greater detail. He was especially struck by the twice-weekly foot combats with javelin and sword that were known as fighting at the barriers. They had been instituted, he solemnly informed Ferdinand, ‘in imitation of Amadis and Lancelot, and other knights of olden time, of whom so much is written in books’. Many young men of the Court excelled in this sport. ‘But the most conspicuous…the most assiduous and the most interested [combatant]…is the King himself ’. There was much froth and nonsense about such Court tournaments–as when, on one memorably absurd occasion, Henry made his entrance sitting, fully armed, in the middle of a fountain fashioned out of precious fabric that spouted real water through eight gargoyles. But there was high chivalric purpose and seriousness as well.4
Ferdinand decided to exploit this latent idealism for his own ends. In February 1511 he sent letters asking the English to help him launch a crusade against the Moors in North Africa. The bait was obvious. You all take part, Ferdinand told the young men of England, in mock combats fought on fictional grounds. Now fight, he challenged them, a real war for a real reason: ‘against the Infidels, enemies of Christ’s law’. Thomas, Lord Darcy, immediately volunteered to lead the expedition, and chose as his provost-marshal ‘a lusty young man and well beloved of the King’, Henry Guildford, whose father, Sir Richard, had died, within sight of Jerusalem, on pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
Darcy’s troops sailed to Cadiz, only to be told on arrival that Ferdinand had been forced to abandon the crusade against the Moors because of the threat from nearer home of the King of France. Darcy returned to England not best pleased.5
But Guildford, determined to extract some adventure from the affair, rode to Ferdinand’s Court at Burgos. There the Spanish King knighted him in the names of Saint James and Saint George, the patron saints of Spain and England. He also gave him an augmentation or addition to his coat of arms of ‘a canton of Granada’: that is, of a pomegranate on a silver square at the ‘dexter chief ’ or top left of his shield. The pomegranate was Catherine’s badge, and Guildford was to remain loyal through good times and bad to the daughter of the King who had knighted him.6
Ferdinand’s efforts to involve England in war were also helped, unwittingly, by the intended target, the King of France. Pope Julius II and Louis XII had been allies. But they had quarrelled over the division of the spoils of their successful war on the Republic of Venice, and Julius had attacked the French armies in Italy. Stung, Louis decided to turn the tables. If the Pope could use secular weapons, he, the Most Christian King of France, would riposte with spiritual ones. He summoned a Council of the Church to Pisa, and threatened to depose Julius. But the manoeuvre backfired since it enabled the opponents of France–in particular Ferdinand and the Pope–to present Louis as the common enemy of Christendom, who would reopen the wounds of the Great Schism which had torn the Church apart in the fifteenth century. This line found an especially ready hearing in England, where Henry and Catherine outdid each other in conspicuous piety.
But Ferdinand’s best allies in England were the English nobility. Fighting came as naturally to them as it did to the hidalgos and grandees of Spain. The leaders of the pack were the Howards. Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, had three fine sons by his first wife, Elizabeth Tilney: Thomas, the heir, Edward and Edmund. Now each was spoiling for a fight: on land or at sea, in the tilt-yard or on the battlefield. All were expert jousters. But they preferred the real thing since the risks and the rewards of war were greater. The problem was that England remained officially at peace. Then, in June 1511, two Scottish ships captained by Andrew Barton entered English waters. The Scots claimed that Barton, a favourite of King James IV, was a privateer: in other words, that he had been licenced by his sovereign to carry out specific reprisals to redress wrongs done. The English called him a pirate. Sir Edward Howard (who was acting as deputy to the ageing Lord Admiral, the Earl of Oxford) and his brother Lord Thomas, fought a naval battle with Barton off the Downs. Barton was killed, his two ships captured and his men brought back in triumph to London in September 1511.7
The swaggering return of the Howard brothers with their prisoners and their spoils brought the divisions in the King’s Council to a head. James IV was Henry VIII’s brother-in-law and, thanks to the renewal of the Anglo-Scottish treaty in June 1509, his ally also. On both grounds, the King of Scotland was outraged by the treatment the Howards had meted out to Barton. He wrote to remonstrate with Henry accordingly. But Edward Howard was shameless in his aggression (‘wanton’ is how a contemporary describes his attitude) and ‘marvellously incendith [fires] the King against the Scots’. The result was a letter from Henry that added insult to James’s injury. It was no business of a prince, Henry loftily told his brother monarch, to equate ‘doing justice on a pirate or a thief ’ with a breach of amity and alliance.8
The feverish atmosphere at Court was further heightened when Darcy returned to Windsor, nursing his grievances. The King and Caroz co-operated to repair his damaged ego and his injured purse. Caroz paid him an over-the-odds daily rate for his men; Henry turned his loan of £1,000 for the expedition into an outright gift. ‘Thus the King’s money goeth away in every corner’, one of the peace party complained.9
Meanwhile, Henry’s envoy, Dr John Young, had been sent to France to demand that Louis XII make proper submission to the pre-eminence of the Pope. Louis had returned a dusty answer and Young complained that ‘never man had worse cheer than he in France’.10
Events, in short, were on a knife-edge and the set-piece debate in the Council on the choice of war or peace was a close-run thing. At first, the peace party carried the day. But the return of Young, with Louis’s dismissive message, provided Henry with the ammunition he needed to reverse the verdict. Responding to the King’s cry of ‘the Church in danger’, the Council decided on war.
In November 1511, England joined the ‘Holy League’ of Ferdinand of Aragon, the Emperor Maximilian and Pope Julius. Thus, ironically, Henry, the future Supreme Head of the Church of England, fought his first battles in defence of the most extravagant temporal claims of the Papal monarchy. For, in return for his attack on the ‘schismatic’ Louis XII, Pope Julius had promised to transfer the kingdom of France to Henry–providing he defeated the French first.11
While the debate about war or peace still raged, Catherine had wisely kept in the background. Whatever her influence behind the scenes, the decision was Henry’s and had to be seen as Henry’s. But, once war was decided upon, Catherine began to emerge as an important force in her own right. Her first role was to help hold together the Anglo-Spanish alliance, which proved shaky from the start. This was inevitably difficult, since it cast her yet again as pig-in-the-middle between her husband and her father. Her actions were ambiguous then and they remain a little hard to interpret even today.
The plan of campaign was for England and Spain to launch a joint attack on France by 1 April 1512. Ferdinand suggested that the attack take place in the area of Guienne. Situated in the extreme south-west of France, just across from the Spanish frontier, it formed part of the Duchy of Aquitaine to which the King of England had a historic claim. An impressive expeditionary force set sail under the Marquess of Dorset and landed at the frontier town of Fuenterrabia. But then Ferdinand indeed made April fools of his allies by repeating his tricks of the previous year. Instead of his army under the Duke of Alba joining the English in laying siege to Bayonne, it overran the defenceless little Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre.
Meanwhile, the English, without the victuals and transport which Ferdinand had promised, were stuck in Fuenterrabia, where, very conveniently from Ferdinand’s point of view, they blocked the path of any French force sent to rescue Navarre. Dorset’s soldiers behaved as English youths do in Spain. They ate too much garlicky food, drank too much wine, caught the sun and got diarrhoea. They chatted up Spanish girls and got into fights with Spanish men. Finally, when Henry, giving in at last to Ferdinand’s cajolery, instructed them to join the Spanish army in Navarre and over-winter abroad, they refused. Dorset, faced effectively with mutiny, had to agree to return to England.
The debacle was almost entirely Ferdinand’s responsibility. But he resolved to brazen it out and sent envoys to England to throw the blame on Dorset’s mismanagement and the English lack of experience in warfare.12
The Spanish envoys had separate letters of credence to Catherine and naturally sent first to her. She, however, replied that it would be improper for her to receive them before they had audience with her husband. Instead she gave them good advice. Don’t rush things, she advised: ‘the King was already informed how shamefully the English had behaved, and that he was very angry with them’. The ambassadors were then invited to a show ‘trial’, in which the English captains all accepted Ferdinand’s version of events and likewise threw the blame on Dorset, who, handily, was absent and seriously ill. Finally the ambassadors had a private audience with the Queen. She informed them that ‘she had told the King and some of his councillors that they ought to give money to [King Ferdinand] with which to carry on the war in Guienne, if they wished to win that duchy’.13
What was Catherine doing? If we accept the Spanish despatches at face value there is no doubt: Henry’s wife had sided with her father. She was using her superior age and worldly wisdom to lead her inexperienced husband by the nose to the benefit of Spain and the detriment of England. It is not a pretty portrait of a marriage. Henry appears weak to the point of simplicity and Catherine deceitful, even treacherous. But the picture depends on assuming, with the Spanish envoys, that Henry really had swallowed Ferdinand’s bluster. In fact, we have Catherine’s own word for it that Henry had been aware of Ferdinand’s duplicity for months. As early as September, he had been speculating on the possibility of having to carry on the war effort alone in the event of Ferdinand and the Pope backing out–though in public he protested that he ‘firmly believed that neither…would ever desert him’. Likewise Henry’s ministers wrote of Ferdinand’s ‘slackness’ and dismissed his envoy as a ‘man full of words’. But equally Henry, his advisers and, above all, his Queen were aware that Ferdinand was England’s only serious ally in the war against France. If Henry wanted to keep Ferdinand on his side for the campaign of 1513, he had to pretend to accept Ferdinand’s version of the Guienne campaign of 1512. And he had to make the pretence convincing.
This is where Catherine came in. She told the Spanish envoys that Henry accepted their master’s version of events. Then the King and his ministers laid on the show trial to give substance to Catherine’s words. There are signs that the Spanish themselves suspected that they might be being taken for a ride. Most of the proceedings of the ‘trial’ were conducted in English, and they had to rely on Henry’s Latin translation of what the accused captains said in their excuse. Clearly suspicious about the unanimity of the replies, as translated by Henry, the envoys afterwards asked some councillors in Latin and five others in French for their version of the answers. Exactly the same formulae were repeated. The element of collusion and rehearsal is obvious. The participants even found it hard to keep a straight face. Half way through, apparently, the accused asked and were granted permission to rise from their knees to await the verdict. Such consideration was a rare luxury in a Tudor court of law. Moreover, the ‘trial’ was extra-judicial. Despite the confessions of the accused, no one was punished, and no one, not even Dorset himself, seriously lost favour. Instead Dorset went on to play a leading part in the French campaign of the following year. But the ritual humiliation of the English commanders (most of whom deserved it anyway for their spinelessness in the face of their badly behaved men) had done enough. Honour was satisfied all round and Ferdinand’s ambassadors could proceed to renew the treaties for another year of campaigning against France. Catherine’s final comment in her private audience with the Spaniards held out the additional bait of an English subsidy for a new invasion of Guienne: sign on the dotted line for cash, Ferdinand was told.14
But is this really a more attractive picture of Catherine’s behaviour? Does it not simply reverse her role and show her deceiving her father on behalf of her husband? Actually, as Catherine well knew, you had to be up very early in the morning to deceive Ferdinand. Rather, she was telling him what he wanted to hear. And she was doing so to preserve his great creation: the Anglo-Spanish alliance.
Since her marriage, as Catherine was also aware, the alliance had worked to Ferdinand’s benefit. Now she threw herself into making sure that England reaped at least equal reward.
The decision to continue the war in 1513 offered the opportunity. Wisely, Henry and his advisers had decided to learn from their mistakes in 1512 and do better. Catherine was in the thick of the attempt, working alongside her husband and using her unique position and her own expertise to complement his efforts.
She played an important role in the diplomacy. One of the key advantages of England as a member of the Holy League was that, with the Pope as an ally and fighting in his name, it could call on the censures of the Church to demoralise its enemies and keep waverers and neutrals on the side. But these spiritual weapons had to be handled carefully. If they were deployed in too obviously partisan a way they lost their edge: as James IV of Scotland sneeringly told the English ambassador, Henry VIII ‘was fortunate that ye had such a Pope so favourable to your Highness, and that was entered the League’. Catherine was especially useful in heading off such criticism. As Henry’s confidante as well as his consort, she was known to speak for him. And yet, as Queen Consort, she had no constitutional role. Instead, she was a sort of ‘official spokesman’, authoritative yet disavowable.
And it was in this capacity that she intervened decisively in Anglo-Scottish relations.
England’s drift to war with France had placed the little kingdom of Scotland in an awkward dilemma. Its historic traditions tied it to France in the ‘Auld Alliance’; more recently, Ferdinand had brokered the settlement with England as part of his policy of encircling France. Would Scotland return to its old alignment or stick with the new? No one, including James IV himself, quite knew. And neither he nor his brother-in-law Henry handled things well. Henry was heavy-handed, using the stick when the carrot would have been more effective. Meanwhile, the mercurial James played with fire, assuring England of peace on the one hand while, on the other, renewing the ‘Auld Alliance’ with France and making threatening manoeuvres against the great Border fortress of Berwick-on-Tweed.
Amid all this male posturing, Catherine played a cool feminine hand and on 18 September 1512 she wrote to Richard Bainbridge, Cardinal-Archbishop of York, who was in Rome. There Bainbridge had an important double role: he was the English ambassador to the Pope; he was also, as a resident cardinal, a leading member of the Papal Court and a personal favourite of Pope Julius II himself. In both capacities, he was frankly partisan: a true John Bull in a cassock. The French ambassador in Rome, wrote Bainbridge, was ‘as partial a Frenchman as I am an Englishman’–‘I pray God give him an evil trist!’ he added uncharitably. Catherine’s letter to Bainbridge was ostensibly purely personal, a ‘familiar letter’. And it contained only news, beginning with a highly coloured account of James IV’s manoeuvres against Berwick and going on to describe how the English had countered by sending the Earl of Surrey to the Borders to shake up the military organisation of the north. There was no hint of what Bainbridge might do with this information, much less instructions as to what he should do–instructions which Catherine of course was not empowered to give.
Yet Bainbridge did not hesitate. Catherine’s letter reached him in early November. The moment he read it he hurried to Pope Julius and, by 24 November, had obtained a Papal Brief or letter threatening James with excommunication for attacking Henry while Henry was engaged in Holy War against the French, the enemies of the Church.
The following spring, the Brief and a Bull giving effect to the threat were delivered to James by Dr Nicholas West, the English ambassador to Scotland. James blamed the excommunication on Bainbridge’s meddling, ‘albeit’, he said, ‘it was by information given from England’. This West denied. ‘It was the Pope’s own motion, helped on by the Cardinal,’ he asserted smoothly. Thanks to the fact that Bainbridge’s ‘information’ had come from Catherine rather than from Henry, West stood–just–on the right side of the truth.15
Catherine also played a direct part in the preparations for the next season’s campaigning, which began the moment the treaties with Spain were renewed in November. She showed a particular interest in naval warfare. Here, in contrast to the debacle in Guienne, England had won victories and acquired heroes. The key engagement had been fought with the French fleet off Brest in August 1512. One of the two big French vessels had fled, the other, the Cordelière, had been boarded by Sir Thomas Knyvet from the Regent. But suddenly the magazine of the Cordelière blew up, setting fire to both ships and killing most on board, including Knyvet. His death had something of the impact of Nelson’s in 1805. Especially affected was Knyvet’s companion-in-arms and commander, Sir Edward Howard, who vowed ‘that he will never see the King in the face till he hath revenged the death of the noble and valiant knight, Sir Thomas Knyvet’. Meanwhile, the French Channel fleet was reinforced by Prégent de Bidoux with a squadron of heavily armed galleys. Prégent, or ‘Prior John’ as he was usually known by the English, was an outstanding contemporary exponent of galley warfare and the English were rightly alarmed. Galleys (ships powered by oars), could operate in shallow waters, where deeper keeled sailing ships fouled the bottom. They could also go into action when sailing vessels were becalmed.
Catherine wanted the English to be able to reply in kind and in conversation with the Venetian ambassador in November she discussed the possibility of hiring galleys from the Republic’s ample arsenal. She asked for four galleasses (that is, ships powered by both oars and sail) and two ‘bastard galleys’ to match the ones which she had heard the French were building. What was ‘the monthly cost of a galley completely found’? she enquired–10,000 ducats (£2,000), the ambassador replied. This figure is so enormous (more than the cost per month of the entire English fleet of twenty ships) that the guess has to be that an extra zero had somehow crept in. But even at £200 a month each (assuming that that is the real amount) the galleys were still very expensive and the plan was not pursued. Catherine lived to regret this.16
Why Catherine should have interested herself so closely in naval matters is unclear. Perhaps it was in conscious rivalry with her opposite number, Queen Anne of France. Anne was also Duchess of Brittany in her own right and, as such, had her own fleet which, since Brittany was the scene of the action, bore much of the brunt against the English. Or perhaps it was simply a matter of personalities. For the navy, rather like the Royal Air Force in the Second World War, seems to have attracted the most flamboyant and risk-taking individuals. In peace and at Court, they were the stars of the joust; in war, they were naval heroes. And in both capacities they performed for Catherine.
For jousts were invariably held to honour Catherine or to delight her. She presided and she awarded the prizes–as in October 1510, when she watched with her ladies from a special standing in the park at Greenwich as Sir Edward Howard felled ‘one Gyot, a gentleman of Almain [Germany], a tall man and a good man of arms’ in the fight with battle axes. And it was this incident, or one like it, which Howard recalled ‘in the Mary Rose, the 5th day of April [1513]’ when about to go into action against the French at the start of the new campaigning season. ‘I pray you’, he wrote, ‘recommend me also to the Queen’s noble Grace (and I know well I need not to pray her to pray for our good speed) and to all good ladies and gentlewomen.’
Howard, that is to say, identified with Catherine as his lady, whether in the lists or in the fleet. There seems every reason to suppose that she, in turn, identified with him as her knight and captain. So she worried about his ships. She worried about his armament. Unfortunately, she did not concern herself about his provisions.17
For it was the arrangements for victualling the fleet which led to the downfall of Edward Howard. This time, the French, comfortably protected by the guns of Brest, refused to stir. A blockade would have been the obvious response. But, because of the failure of provisioning, Howard could not sustain it. He had therefore a choice. He could retreat in ignominy, with nothing done, like the English army in Guienne. Or he could attempt the impossible. He had done the impossible once before, in Catherine’s presence, when he had overcome the mighty German man-at-arms. Now, inspired by her memory (as well as by a brutal challenge from Henry), he would do the same with the French captain, Prégent.
Prégent’s galleys lay inshore, protected by the rocks and shallows against Howard’s big ships and heavy guns. All Howard could pit against them were a few unarmed row barges. To throw these against the galleys was a suicide mission. Howard was told as much. He persisted. His own craft came up alongside Prégent’s flagship and he managed to board it with a score of others. But his men lost heart and cast off. ‘Come aboard again! Come aboard again,’ he cried. But he was ignored. Realising it was over, he tore off the golden whistle that was his badge of office and threw it into the sea. Then the French thrust him with pikes against the rails of the galley and threw his body overboard.18
After the battle was over, two English prisoners told Prégent that one of his victims had been their admiral. Delighted with this information, Prégent ordered his men to fish among the dead. The corpse was discovered and brought to him. Prégent had the body of Howard opened, eviscerated and then salted, as a temporary preservative measure. An apothecary, who would complete the embalming in a more conventional way, was due to arrive the following day. Meanwhile, Prégent sent Howard’s gold chain and ‘whistle of command’ (as opposed to the ‘whistle of office’ which he had flung in the sea) to the French Queen, and his clothes or ‘spoil’ to the King’s daughter, Madame Claude, who was married to the heir to the throne, the Duke of Angoulême. The heart Prégent was anxious to keep for himself. He humbly begged the King and Queen this favour; it would be to their advantage, he promised.19
Thus ended the man I have guessed to be Catherine’s favourite: stripped, gutted and salted like a fish, his clothing and effects distributed for the delectation of the ladies of the French royal house and his heart bid for as a souvenir by his killer.
Edward Howard had promised to avenge the death of his companion-in-arms, Thomas Knyvet. Catherine, I think, did not forget what had happened to Howard. And soon she would have vengeance in kind.