Catherine’s involvement in the war preparations became common knowledge. Indeed, to one observer she seemed the real driving force. ‘The King [is] bent on war,’ noted the merchant Lorenzo Pasquaglio of the Venetian ‘factory’ or depot in London, ‘the Council [is] averse to it; the Queen wills it.’ But if the campaign of 1513 was indeed Catherine’s war, it had got off to a bad start–especially in the areas where she was most concerned. But Henry and Catherine were not deflected. Nor was their mutual trust weakened. War, instead, proved the best aphrodisiac, and the campaign of 1513 was to leave their marriage stronger and Catherine’s position more impregnable than ever.1
But in the spring of 1513 such an outcome seemed unlikely. For April had indeed proved the cruellest month. On the 25th, Sir Edward Howard had met his spectacular death, and the naval campaign never recovered. He was immediately replaced as Lord Admiral by his elder brother Lord Thomas Howard. But Thomas, though a brave man and a fine soldier, was solid and steady. He was lead to his brother’s mercury, and the kamikaze daring went out of English seamanship, not to return till the Elizabethans. Meanwhile, Catherine’s father, Ferdinand, betrayed England for the third time. On 18 April, ambassador Caroz signed a new treaty with England that provided for a joint attack on France in two months. But the left hand of Spanish policy in London did not know what the right hand in Spain had been doing. For less than three weeks earlier Ferdinand had agreed to a truce with France. This truce, signed on 1 April, made a fool of his ambassador in England, and it made a dupe or worse of his daughter. For the truce, Ferdinand claimed, had been brokered en route by the Aragonese Franciscan whom he was sending as Catherine’s confessor.2
But Henry and Catherine brushed these disappointments aside. They would fight on land; without allies and, if need be, on two fronts.
The first front would be opened in north-eastern France. The army would be led by Henry himself and it would be launched from the English bridgehead of Calais. The undertaking was on the largest scale and, sensibly, the troops were mustered gradually. At the beginning of May the foreward under the Earl of Shrewsbury left for Calais. The rearward under Charles Somerset, Lord Herbert, followed later in the month. Both commanders were well known to Catherine through their posts at Court, where Shrewsbury was Lord Steward and Herbert Lord Chamberlain. The advance parties of troops then moved into camp, leaving Calais clear for the King and his retinue, which made up the middleward of the army.
Catherine accompanied Henry on the English leg of his journey. They left Greenwich on 15 June, and ‘with small journeys’ rode through Kent. It was a brilliant cavalcade. The guard had been raised to a wartime strength of six hundred and bought new liveries of green and white, trimmed, at vast expense, with embroidery and spangles of silver and silver-gilt. The retinues of the nobles were scarcely less splendid or large. By 20 June, the King and Queen reached Canterbury, where they prayed and offered ‘at the martyrdom of St Thomas [Becket]’ for the success of the eighth Henry who, unlike the second Henry, fought on behalf of the Church and its authority. On the 28th the royal party arrived at Dover. The harbour was a sea of ships, ‘such as Neptune never saw before’. They were painted, trimmed and gilded, with banners and pennants flying. The Pope’s arms mingled with Henry VIII’s. The King and Queen stayed the night at Dover Castle, then, the following day, Henry set sail.
One of his last acts before leaving English soil was to constitute Catherine as ‘Regent and Governess of England, Wales and Ireland’, during his absence ‘in his expedition against France, for the preservation of the Catholic religion and the recovery of his rights’. She was given sweeping powers to raise troops, to make ecclesiastical appointments (apart from bishoprics), to pick sheriffs, to issue warrants for the payment of money and generally to use her sign manual or signature to set the machinery of government in motion. Henceforward, until the King’s return, her signature, ‘Katherina the Qwene’, would have as much force as ‘Henry R’. Mere Queen Consort no more, she was now, like her mother, co-sovereign of the lion’s share of her husband’s dominions.3
Catherine did not weep at the parting. But a strong man nearly did. For Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, found himself left behind. Before stepping aboard, Henry had taken him by the hand and said, ‘My Lord, I trust not the Scots, therefore I pray you be not negligent.’ The Earl had replied, ‘I shall so do my duty, that Your Grace shall find me diligent, and to fulfil your will shall be my gladness.’ Surrey ‘could scantly speak when he took his leave’. The King and ‘the flower of all the nobility’ were about to win glory on the fields of France; for him, there was only the slog of border warfare. Once he had recovered his composure, he swore a vengeance on the man who had deprived him of his birthright of accompanying his King ‘in such an honourable journey’. ‘Sorry may I see him or I die, that is the cause of my abiding behind, and if ever he and I meet, I shall do that in me lieth to make him as sorry if I can.’ The intended object of his vengeance was James IV of Scotland. For James’s recent behaviour had made it clear that England would indeed have to face war on two fronts: in the north of England as well as the north of France.4
Surrey’s appointment as Lieutenant of the Northern Marches made it safe for Henry to leave England: the Earl would supply the iron inside the velvet of Catherine’s regal mantle. His support began immediately. Once Henry was gone, Catherine let her feelings show. And, as the two rode north from Dover, Surrey ‘attended on the Queen to London, comforting her as best he might’. But he was not to be at her side for long.
Catherine’s formal support came instead from the small Council that was appointed to assist her. Most of the Council had accompanied Henry to France. But it would be wrong to think of the handful left in England as the dregs. Instead, Catherine’s two leading advisers, William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor, and Sir Thomas Lovell, the Treasurer of the Household, were among the weightiest members of the whole body.
Lovell had been a leading member of Henry VII’s government. He was soldier, lawyer and administrator, and showed himself ruthless in all three roles. This aspect of his character is captured by his bronze portrait medallion by Torrigiano. It shows him in profile, and firmness is its essence. His cap is pulled down firmly on his head; his chin is firm; and his mouth is firmly clenched and turned down at the corners in an image of formidable authority. He was now ageing. But he was a tower of strength to Catherine. He acted as her Lord High Everything Else, deputising as Lord Steward for Shrewsbury, who was in France, and as Earl Marshal for Surrey, who was on the borders. He also served as a sort of honorary consort to Catherine, fulfilling the military duties which, as a woman, she was felt to be unable to discharge herself.5
Warham, in contrast, was probably expected to run the civil government. He was a councillor of long-standing and vast experience. He was also, as Archbishop of Canterbury, the King’s first subject, and, as Lord Chancellor, his senior minister. But he was out of place in a war government. He had been a last-ditch supporter of peace; he was also engaged in a long-running dispute about ecclesiastical jurisdiction with his fellow bishop and councillor, Fox of Winchester. The dispute came to a head during the campaign, to Catherine’s embarrassment and Warham’s fury. He became at best a semi-detached member of Catherine’s regency Council.
Under the Queen and Council there was a skeleton administration. Warham’s Chancery acted as a general secretariat, while the Chamber, under its Treasurer, John Heron, dealt with finance. Catherine as Regent was specifically authorized to issue instructions to both these bodies.
For Catherine, the first three weeks after Henry’s departure were a period of phoney war. Her husband was still in Calais and Surrey was still in the south, busy raising his following from his own estates. Meanwhile she took up residence at Richmond and her Council busied itself organising Lord Admiral Thomas Howard’s naval expedition. Its mission was to take the heavy guns of the royal artillery directly to Newcastle by sea, whence they would be deployed by land against the expected Scottish invasion. The warrants for payment were signed by Catherine; they were paid on 16 July and the force was to set sail on the 21st. The pace of events now quickened. Surrey had finished raising his men. They were a crack force of 500 ‘able men’, part gentlemen, part tenant farmers. On 21 July, they paraded in London before Sir Thomas Lovell and, the following day, the Earl rode north to Doncaster to take up his command. On the 21st also, Henry left Calais to join the other divisions of his army under Shrewsbury and Herbert, who were already laying siege to the strongly fortified French town of Thérouanne.
So three English expeditions–two by land and one by sea–left within twenty-four hours of one another. It was a remarkable example of combined operations and bade fair for the outcome. The English, helped by Catherine, had indeed learned from the previous year’s disasters. Europe would have to sit up and take notice.
But, despite this good start, Catherine now experienced the worries of every woman whose husband goes to the front. Letters became her lifeline and she set up a chain of messengers. As she explained on 26 July to Thomas Wolsey, the King’s Almoner and the rising star in the Council, she had sent her servant to France with the present letter. He was ‘to tarry there till another cometh and this way I shall hear every week from thence’. Understandably, Catherine’s principal concern was for her husband’s health and safety: ‘for with his life and health there is no thing in the world that shall come to him amiss by the grace of God, and without that I can see no manner good thing shall fall’.6
Catherine, as a war-wife, is hardly unique in having such thoughts. But her concerns have been misrepresented. In several accounts, Catherine is portrayed as showing herself to be more Henry’s nanny than his wife, while the King himself appears as an overgrown schoolboy who had to be reminded to change his socks, wash behind his ears and avoid catching cold. Actually, there is nothing in Catherine’s letters on such trivial topics. Instead, she was concerned lest Henry needlessly exposed himself to the enemy. These fears came to a head when he arrived at Thérouanne and joined the siege. Henry VIII had already played Henry V once, when he had stayed up all night, touring the camp to put his troops in good heart. Now he seems to have thought that he was at Harfleur, though the walls of Thérouanne were as yet unbreached. His Council in France warned him against such posturings. But the warning was quickly forgotten, and, during a later siege, Henry walked close to the walls, ‘occasionally, for three hours and a half at a time’. Other royal women had similarly rash menfolk, and the Archduchess Margaret, Catherine’s sometime sister-in-law, wrote to her father, the Emperor Maximilian, in a similar vein, after he had joined Henry on the campaign. ‘As such things are not conducted without great danger,’ she wrote following one engagement, ‘she begs him to be careful.’ But in the case of Catherine and Henry there was a special, unspoken fear. Henry had no heir. If he fell, his dynasty fell. And the reason for this state of affairs was Catherine’s own failure to have children. On 1 August, Catherine took matters into her own hands and wrote directly to the Archduchess Margaret, to ask her to send Henry a physician.7
But Catherine’s letters were not only about wifely concerns and womanish fears. She wrote also as her husband’s Regent and co-adjutor in policy. She commented on morale on the home front: ‘everybody here is in good health, thanked be God, and the Council very diligent in all things concerning the expedition of the King’s service’. She showed a shrewd managerial touch. It would be a good idea, she suggested, if the King wrote to the Council about her good reports of their conduct, ‘that he is very well content therewith and give them thanks for it, bidding them so to continue’. She reported news, like the message which had just come from Lord Admiral Howard. And she did her best, even at a distance, to encourage Henry to stick to the ‘England alone’ policy which they had agreed upon after her father’s third betrayal. ‘I trust to God that the King shall come home shortly with as great a victory as any prince in the world; and this I pray God send him’, she continued, ‘without need of any other prince.’
Catherine’s next weekly letter is missing. But it would have told Henry of the continuing preparations to resist the impending Scottish invasion. She had already sent out letters to local notables in the southern shires and boroughs, requiring them to report on the numbers of men and quantities of harness or armour they could supply. The town of Gloucester failed to respond and was sent a sharp reminder on 4 August. ‘Writings and news from the Borders show that the King of Scots means war,’ she told them. They must send the required information within fifteen days. They did.
On 9 August, Catherine transacted a more awkward piece of business. Responding to Henry’s direct orders, she summoned Warham to appear before her and justify his conduct with Fox. It was an extraordinary occasion. Catherine, assisted by Lovell and another councillor, sat quasi-judicially. And Warham, Chancellor and Primate of All England, found himself demoted from judge to accused. The Queen demanded an answer. Warham took evasive action, promising to set out his case by letter. Both the Queen and the Archbishop found the meeting an uncomfortable one and Catherine, wisely, tried to avoid involvement as much as possible. For once, she emphasised that she was a mere agent, acting in her husband’s name and according to his letters, ‘for the matter was so new to me I would go no further in it’.8
By the time of Catherine’s next letter, on 13 August, the long-threatened war with Scotland had materialised. On the 11th, Lyon King had delivered James IV’s declaration of war to Henry in person in France. High words had been uttered on both sides. But the exchange had ended with Henry dismissing the herald with a munificent reward. Back in England, Catherine had the wit to turn her labours into a joke: ‘Ye be not so busy with the war, as we be here encumbered with it,’ she told Wolsey. Morale remained good, she continued. Everyone was pleased that the phoney war was over ‘and all [Henry’s] subjects be very glad, I thank God, to be busy with the Scots, for they take it for a pastime’. For herself, ‘my heart is very good to it, and I am horribly busy with making standards, banners and badges’. It is a prettily feminine picture: Catherine, sitting with her ladies, embroidering (perhaps a little more hastily than usual) lions, pomegranates and crosses of St George. Or it would be prettily feminine, were not the standards and banners to fly over Catherine’s own army, to be led by the Queen in person.
Three days later, on 16 August, Henry had the victory that Catherine had prayed for. A large French cavalry force, made up of the crack gendarmerie, tried to force its way through the English besiegers in order to re-provision Thérouanne (by throwing sides of bacon over the walls!). But they were caught off guard by the English archers and guns, and they turned tail and fled. In their haste to escape, the knights slashed the heavy bards and trappers off their horses and flung away their weapons and horse-armour. It was a sauve qui peut, in which only one weapon was used effectively: the spurs which gave the battle its name. Even so, they did not ride fast enough and many distinguished prisoners were taken, headed by the Duke of Longueville, who was of the blood royal, and the seigneur de Bayard, the chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, who had been the hero of the Italian wars.
Henry did not fight himself. But he made up for it by his chivalrous magnanimity after the victory. He had Longueville clad in a gown of cloth of gold and summoned him to sup with him. The Duke said, ‘Sire, I will not.’ The King replied, ‘You are my prisoner and must do so.’ While Henry and his prisoner ate elegantly, the inhabitants of Thérouanne, deprived of their bacon, faced starvation. They had no hope now of relief and, a week later, they surrendered the city.9
English historians, characteristically deprecating English achievement, are dismissive of the Battle of the Spurs. The French were not so foolish. They had done more than lose a battle and a city; they had lost their reputation. Henceforward, until they were redeemed by another victory under another king, the gendarmerie, once the flower of French chivalry, were known derisively as ‘hares in armour’. And the reputation lost by the French now belonged to Henry.10
Catherine knew this and her response was ecstatic: ‘The victory hath been so great that I think none such hath been seen before. All England hath cause to thank God of it, and I specially.’ But as important as the victory, Catherine thought, was the way that it had been won. For the Emperor Maximilian, the titular ruler of Christendom, had joined with Henry, not as an ally but as a paid soldier, wearing ‘a cross of St George with a rose’ and taking the King’s shilling (in fact, rather more, since 70,000 crowns worth £14,000 were transported to Gravelines ‘for use of the Emperor’). The two rulers met on 11 August. On the one side, the Emperor Maximilian and his suite wore black cloth as mourning for the late Empress; on the other, King Henry and his attendants shimmered in cloth of gold. Even the King’s horse was harnessed with gold and trimmed with gold bells. The Emperor played the poor relation in behaviour as well as appearance: ‘declaring publicly that he came to be of use to the King of England, and calling the King at one time his son, at another his King and at another his brother’. Catherine lapped up the contrast. ‘I was very glad to hear the meeting of them’, she wrote to Wolsey, ‘which hath been to my seeming the greatest honour to the King that ever came to Prince.’11
But, though she basked in her husband’s glory, she never forgot that she was engaged in mighty enterprise of her own. ‘Ye shall see’, she told Wolsey, ‘how Almighty God helpeth here our part as well as there.’ The good news to which Catherine referred was the defeat of an advance Scottish raiding party under Lord Hume. Their losses were so heavy that it became known as the ‘Ill Raid’.
On 22 August, nevertheless, James IV and the main Scottish army crossed the border. At first, he carried all before him. He took Norham Castle (to the anguish of its proud owner, Thomas Ruthall, the Prince-Bishop of Durham) and three smaller castles; then, about 4 September, he established himself in a strongly fortified camp on Flodden Edge. It was protected from the south (the likely direction of English attack) by a steep slope and it commanded the road north from Wooler through the valley of the Till. The English response, agreed in advance but co-ordinated on the ground by Catherine and her Council, was designed to provide cover in depth. Three armies were available. The first was the northern army commanded by Surrey. He had been in the north since the beginning of August, cajoling, organizing and winning hearts and minds. His plans now rolled smoothly into operation. The whole strength of the north was summoned to muster with him at Newcastle on 1 September. His son Thomas, the Lord Admiral, was already in the port with the fleet and the artillery. The guns were put ashore and Thomas, together with 1,000 men from the fleet, joined his father. The result was a formidably armed and disciplined force of 20,000 men which took the field at Bolton in Glendale.
It was hard to think that even the flower of Scotland could defeat it and certainly the Howards, father and son, harboured no such doubts. But the English government had dared to think the unthinkable–and to provide for it. For if James won and if he broke the northern army he still had to face and overcome two more armies. The first was commanded by Catherine’s right-hand man, Sir Thomas Lovell. Between 3 and 7 September, Lovell was empowered to raise the Midland counties, to punish all who resisted and to use martial law. All the commissions were signed by Catherine, and the fact that Lovell was ‘subject to the commands of Queen Catherine, Regent’ was made explicit. By 9 September, he was at Nottingham, with 15,000 men and marching north.
Finally, if James had also broken through Lovell and the Midlanders, he would have had to deal with Catherine herself, who had taken the field with all the might of the south of England.12
Like Surrey in the north, Catherine had spent August mustering and preparing her forces. On 2 September, ‘the Scots being so busy as they now be’, she was ‘looking for my departing every hour’. On 8 September, she ordered the royal standards and banners to be issued from the Great Wardrobe. And shortly thereafter, Catherine marched out, from Richmond, with two ‘standards of the lion crowned imperial’, and with banners bearing the arms of England and Spain and images of the Trinity, the Virgin and St George. She had a herald, a pursuivant and six trumpets. Her artillery alone cost £100 to transport. She had 100 carriages, each with a pennant. She may even have worn armour, since in September Robert Amadas, the royal goldsmith, was paid for ‘garnishing a headpiece with crown gold’. By 10 September she was at Buckingham, sixty miles north of London, with an army variously described as ‘a numerous force’ or ‘a great power’ and estimated (with probably spurious precision) at 40,000.
Catherine’s martial behaviour was widely commented on. Writing from the Venetian ‘factory’ in London, Lorenzo Pasquaglio turned English in his enthusiasm: bursting with pride he informed his brother that not only had ‘our magnanimous King’ won great victories, but ‘our Queen’ had also taken the field. But the man who was perhaps proudest and most understanding of Catherine’s behaviour was her sometime director of studies, Peter Martyr. He kept a sharp eye on English affairs from his post at Valladolid and on 23 September reported that Catherine, ‘in imitation of her mother Isabella’, had made a splendid speech to the English captains. She told them ‘to be ready to defend their territory, that the Lord smiled upon those who stood in defence of their own, and that they should remember that English courage excelled that of all other nations’. If we take Martyr’s report literally, this speech must have been delivered on 21 July, when Surrey had mustered his men in London. But it seems unlikely that Catherine would not have made a similarly rousing oration to her own troops. She had indeed learned English, become English and made herself mistress of both the language and the people’s hearts.13
Just before she left Richmond, Catherine had briefly to turn away from English affairs and deal with the aftermath of her husband’s victories in France. Wolsey had informed her that Henry’s prize trophy, the Duke of Longueville, was being sent to England, where he was to be lodged in her household. Catherine protested that the proposed arrangement was impossible. She was about to depart for the front, while her Chamberlain, Lord Mountjoy, who was the only person of status to ‘attend upon him’, was also about to leave to take over as Captain of Calais. In the circumstances she suggested that Longueville should be kept in the Tower. Her advice was acted on and Catherine herself authorised the payment of £13 6s 8d ‘for lodging and boarding Duke Langevile and six persons with him in the Tower’. But her mind was on other, more important things: pray God, she begged Wolsey, ‘to send us as good luck against the Scots as the King hath there’.14
She had her prayer. Surrey tried first to lure James IV from the protection of his camp on Flodden Edge by a knightly challenge to battle. James replied that it was not for an Earl to dictate terms to a King. Chivalry having failed, Surrey resorted to stratagem. He marched off to the north, apparently with the intention of launching a counter-invasion of Scotland. But he halted overnight, and, very early on the morning of 9 September, swung to attack the Scots from the north, where the slope of the ground was gentle and offered little protection. At first the Scots did well. They scattered the extreme right of the English under Surrey’s youngest surviving son, Sir Edmund, and Lord Thomas, who commanded the vanguard and the artillery, in despair tore the Agnus Dei from his neck and sent it to his father in a plea for reinforcements. But the day turned. The English guns and archers needled the Scots into mass charges which came to grief on English pikes. James and his Household charged with the rest and the King of the Scots fell only a spear’s length from Surrey’s banner.
The day now became a rout. For once figures tell the true story: with the King died an archbishop, a bishop, two abbots, twelve earls, fourteen lords and at least 10,000 ordinary folk. The English, in contrast, lost no more than 1,500. In the confusion and among the piles of bodies, most of which were quickly stripped and reduced to the anonymity of nakedness, James’s corpse was not at first identified. It was learned from Scottish prisoners that he had either been captured or killed but his actual fate still remained unknown when Surrey sent the first news of victory to Catherine.15
The messenger probably reached Catherine within a little over twenty-four hours–say, late on the 10th or early on the 11th. She wrote immediately to her husband in Lille, where Henry was staying as the honoured guest of Maximilian and Margaret. Her letter has not survived. But a report of its contents went round the city like wildfire on the 13th.
The Queen of England has written to the King in reply to his letter about the encounter with the French and about the Duke of Longueville, whom he sent as a present. She says she thanks his Majesty for the good news and for the present of the Duke…. She says she has shown no less prowess than he in fighting the Scots…. With regard to the gift of the Duke, which is truly a great gift, she hopes to surpass the King in this also, and instead of a Duke she hopes to send him a King.
The writer is the Milanese ambassador. No doubt his tale lost nothing in the telling. But he is usually well-informed and the tone of Catherine’s actual letter of the 16th is only a little less triumphalist. Its contents are of a piece as well. It compares, favourably, her own achievements with Henry’s, and it also refers to an earlier promise to send him James as a prisoner (in return, no doubt, for Longueville). The Milanese report, in short, is to be believed.16
By the time of this further letter, Catherine was fully informed about the outcome of Flodden. James’s body had been found on the 10th by one who ‘knew him well by his privy tokens’. When the body was stripped, it was discovered that he had died of two serious wounds, one inflicted by an arrow and the other by a pike. Surrey sent part of James’s coat-armour (that is, his surcoat of the royal arms of Scotland) to Catherine, along with letters, to her and to Henry, fully describing the battle. Then he had the Scottish King’s corpse disembowelled, cauterised and embalmed to await a decision about burial. For James had died under the threat of excommunication, and excommunicates were denied Christian burial.17
As soon as Catherine learned the full extent of the Scottish defeat, she halted her march north, disbanded her troops and began to travel east on a very different mission. And it was from her stopover at Woburn Abbey on the 16th that she wrote her only letter of this momentous year that is addressed directly to Henry himself, rather than mediately to Wolsey.
Catherine begins her letter formally enough: ‘Sir’. But she quickly becomes more intimate: ‘my husband’, even ‘my Henry’. And her tone is frankly exultant. ‘To my thinking, this battle hath been to your Grace and all your realm the greatest honour that could be, and more than ye should win all the crown of France.’ She is also competitive. She had not been able to send the piece of James’s coat-armour by the previous messenger; it comes with this, she told Henry. ‘In this your Grace shall see how I can keep my promise, sending you for your banners a King’s coat.’ ‘I thought,’ she continues, referring to her earlier promise, ‘to send himself unto you [as a prisoner], but our Englishmen’s hearts would not suffer it’. James’s fate is a cue for a reflection on the due deserts he has had for his perfidy: ‘It should have been better for him to have been in peace than have this reward.’ ‘All that God sendith is for the best,’ she concludes piously. She ends the letter with a formal submissiveness that its contents rather belie, ‘Your humble wife and true servant’. And she signs simply ‘Katherine’.
Catherine’s piety was undoubtedly real. But it was also a touch complacent. This is understandable enough, since the last few months had granted her everything she could wish. The war, her war as well as Henry’s, had been a triumphant success. Together, they had proved the doubters wrong: England could fight and win. The doubters had been headed by Catherine’s own father. Now he would have to eat his words. Catherine was also avenged: the eventual fate of James IV’s body parallels the wretched humiliations of Sir Edward Howard’s abused corpse. Catherine even found time to settle accounts with her former rebellious servant, Francesca de Carceres, whose elderly husband had died, leaving her unprovided for. Ferdinand suggested putting her in the service of his daughter Maria; Wolsey in that of the Archduchess Margaret. Catherine would have none of it. ‘She is so perilous a woman that it shall be dangerous to put her in a strange house,’ she insisted. She must be sent back to Spain and to a nunnery. The French, the Scots, and her own servant had all found that it was dangerous to cross Catherine.
But God’s goodness to her was not over. On the 16th she told Henry ‘now [I] go to our Lady at Walsingham that I promised so long ago to see’. She was at the shrine on 23 September and, among other prayers, offered up thanks for the fact that she was with child.18