Catherine’s war regency was the climacteric of her life. It had promised much. But the promises turned to dust. Her pregnancy ended mysteriously–presumably in a miscarriage. War, in which she had thrived, turned to peace, in which there was no political role for her. And her husband broke decisively with her father. The Anglo-Spanish alliance had been the raison d’être of her marriage. Without it, and without children, what was her marriage worth? Within six months of the ‘loving meeting’ between the King and Queen after Henry’s return from France in October 1513, Catherine started to find out.1
In the autumn of 1513, Henry of England, the Emperor Maximilian and Ferdinand of Aragon had signed a treaty committing them to a three-pronged invasion of France in June of the following year. All three parties had also renewed their commitment to the marriage of Henry’s sister, Princess Mary of England, with Prince Charles of the Netherlands.
But Ferdinand immediately had second thoughts. He calculated that France, conveniently weakened by Henry’s successful assault, would be so anxious to make peace with Spain that it would be willing to pay for it. And he persuaded the flighty Maximilian that he, too, could benefit more from such a settlement. The Franco-Spanish truce was renewed in March 1514 and was joined by Maximilian shortly thereafter. And the wedding of Mary and Charles, due to take place by 14 May, was hastily postponed.2
Now, there was nothing new about Ferdinand betraying England. As we have seen, Ferdinand’s perfidy had become a fixed event in the political calendar. What was new this time was Henry’s reaction. Instead of turning a blind eye as before, he reacted with fury. And he decided to turn the tables.
Henry’s triumphs of the previous year had given him a fresh confidence. He had proved he could fight a war; now he would show that he could win a peace. Moreover, he had spent so much on the war (£500,000 in the single month of June 1513), that peace was a tempting prospect on financial grounds alone. Finally, he had a new minister: Thomas Wolsey.
Wolsey, after a series of false starts, had joined the royal service at the end of Henry VII’s reign. And his rise continued under Henry VIII, when he was made royal Almoner. Nominally, the Almoner was a middle-ranking clerical official of the Court who was responsible for the King’s charitable doles of food. But Wolsey’s real job was to act as Court agent for Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester. Henry never really trusted Fox: ‘Here in England they think he is a fox’, he told Caroz, ‘and such is his name.’ But Fox was the weightiest councillor and leader of the peace party. So long as the peace party was in the ascendant, Wolsey served Fox with his inimitable enthusiasm and efficiency. But after the defeat of the peace party at the crucial Council meeting in October 1511, Wolsey changed tack. He read, correctly, Henry’s commitment to war, and adapted himself to it. And in promoting Henry’s war aims, he was as successful as he had been in serving his former master, Fox. The will driving the war might have been Catherine’s, as Pasquaglio suggested, but the organising and strategic genius behind the triumphs of 1513 was Wolsey’s.3
And it was Wolsey, not Catherine, who benefited. In his modest Almoner’s robes, he had been the éminence grise of the French campaign, always at Henry’s side and acting, significantly, as intermediary even between Henry and his wife. But thereafter the modest garb and demeanour were cast off, and Wolsey became in quick succession Bishop of Tournai (Henry’s grandest acquisition of the French campaign), Bishop of Lincoln and (after the mysterious death of Bainbridge in Rome) Archbishop of York. Finally, in 1515, he pushed Warham aside and became Chancellor as well. With each promotion, his plumage became more magnificent, his wealth greater and his hold over Henry more complete. The King, one of Wolsey’s creatures informed him, spoke of him as ‘though ye were his own father’. Where would that leave Henry’s wife?4
Under Wolsey’s guidance the diplomatic revolution of 1514 moved apace. Early in the new year, secret negotiations were opened with France. They were greatly facilitated by the enforced presence in London of Longueville, who found himself transformed from honoured prisoner into a trusted go-between. The logic of the negotiations was simple. England had been France’s most dangerous enemy in 1513, therefore France would pay even more to make peace with England. Louis XII indeed was prepared to concede almost anything: Tournai, a massively increased pension (as it was called by the French) or tribute (as the English preferred to describe it), even himself. And what Louis offered, Henry and Wolsey were happy to accept. On 10 August, peace between England and France was proclaimed, and, three days later, it was reaffirmed by a proxy marriage.5
And this, it turned out, was the most astonishing volte-face of all. For instead of Mary marrying the youthful Prince Charles of the Netherlands, her groom was to be the ageing Louis of France. According to the Venetian ambassador, who was present at the betrothal, Mary was ‘so pleased to be Queen of France’ that she was prepared to overlook the fact that her new husband was, at fifty-two, nearly three times her own age and sickly. Mary herself later said that she had protested at the marriage; indeed she claimed she had only agreed to it after making Henry promise that, next time, she could marry whom she wished. Perhaps. But being Queen of France, as the Venetian said, was a fine thing. And the betrothal gave her a foretaste of the glories of her future position.6
The ceremony took place at Greenwich. Archbishop Warham officiated and preached the sermon. Longueville impersonated Louis. Mary, in so far as she was allowed to be, was herself. Longueville took her right hand and recited the oath. Mary took his right hand and made her promises. Then each signed the written agreement, the Princess writing her name as ‘Marye’. Finally, Longueville gave her a ring which she placed on the fourth finger of her right hand. She was now Queen of France. As for Longueville, he was now a rich man, as Henry gave him his cloth of gold gown and a reward of 10,000 crowns. It was worth it, Henry VIII probably felt, for the pleasure of dishing Ferdinand.7
Ferdinand’s daughter, Catherine, was present at the ceremony. She was dressed almost identically to the bride, who was now her equal in status. We do not know her thoughts. But probably she felt pity for the childish excitement of her sister-in-law and womanly sympathy for what she suspected Mary might face in the marriage bed. But her worst fears should have been reserved for herself. For Mary’s French marriage undid everything that Catherine had done since she came to England from Spain. It might even undo her own marriage.
Certainly, this was the conclusion in both France and Rome, where news of the marriage of Mary and Louis was linked to a rumour that ‘the King of England meant to repudiate his present wife, the daughter of the King of Spain and his brother’s widow, because he is unable to have children by her’. Instead, it was claimed, Henry intended to marry, like his sister, in France, by taking a daughter of the Duke of Bourbon as his bride. It used to be thought that the rumour was lent substance by an entry in the index to the secret archives of the Vatican which, under the same year (1514), notes the ‘original of a letter written by the Pope to Henry, King of England, about the supposed nullity of his marriage’. But the entry now appears to be an error. So the story is no more than a rumour after all–albeit an extraordinary anticipation of later events.8
Moreover, Catherine, supposedly incapable of bearing children, had a not-so-secret weapon: at Mary’s wedding she was pregnant and visibly so. Her condition had been apparent five weeks earlier to an envoy from the Archduchess Margaret. ‘The Queen’, he reported, ‘is believed to be with child, and is so, as far as the writer can judge.’ A fortnight later, Henry himself confirmed the news in a letter to Margaret.9
By October, preparations for the lying-in had begun. Blue say (a kind of cloth) was ordered to hang the Queen’s bed, while a cradle covered in scarlet ‘without a frame’ and a couch were to be supplied ‘for the use of our nursery, God willing’. The political preparations had started too. Louis XII, Henry’s new brother-in-law, discussed the forthcoming birth with the English ambassador. ‘If God should send [Henry] a son’, the King of France said, he was as eager to stand as godfather, as he had been last time for the late Prince Henry. Louis promised to send ‘a good and honourable personage to be there against the Queen’s deliverance to represent his person, and to do the act in his name’. Wolsey transmitted the good news to Henry ‘who’, he reported, ‘is marvellously rejoiced’. Wolsey claimed, implausibly, that Catherine was equally pleased at the prospective godfather. But she had no choice.10
Catherine was due to take to her Chamber shortly after 15 November. This time, she probably looked forward to the enforced solitude and sequestration. For the atmosphere at Court had become intolerable. Henry was not satisfied that he had double-crossed Ferdinand, he wanted vengeance as well. And he opened negotiations to turn the Anglo-French peace into an offensive alliance against Spain. One immediate victim of Henry’s vendetta against Ferdinand was Caroz. The English, Caroz complained in early December, had ceased to use him as the Spanish ambassador. Instead, they treated him ‘as a bull, at whom everyone throws darts’. Henry was particularly rude, and ‘behaves in the most offensive and discourteous manner’. In the circumstances, Caroz begged for his recall.
The other target of Henry’s indignation was Catherine. She had no such easy escape as Caroz. She had to put a brave face on things, and did so with such success that Caroz complained that she had become English, and forgotten her duty to her father. He fingered the usual suspect, her confessor, Fray Diego, with whom he had waged guerrilla warfare since the earliest days of his Embassy. But the remaining members of her Household were almost as bad. ‘The few Spaniards who are still in her household’, Caroz explained, ‘prefer to be friends of the English and neglect their duties as subjects of the King of Spain.’ Worst of all was Dona Maria de Salinas, ‘whom [the Queen] loves more than any other mortal’. Not only was Maria anglicised, like the rest; she was also the cat’s paw of Ferdinand’s inveterate enemies, the Castilian exiles at the court of Prince Charles.
The result was that Ferdinand’s ambassador reaped no advantage from the fact that Ferdinand’s daughter sat on the English throne. He could ‘make no use of the influence which the Queen has in England, nor can he obtain through her the smallest advantage in any other respect’.
Caroz saw what Catherine wanted him to see. The breakdown in relations between England and Spain had forced her to choose between her father and her husband. Apparently, she had not hesitated. She had put her husband before her father and her acquired Englishness before her native Spanishness. But she could not escape her origins so easily. For Henry would not let her. Instead he was visiting the sins of his father-in-law on his wife’s head. ‘He had reproached her with her father’s ill faith, et conquestus suos in eam expectorabat [and he got his loud complaints to her off his chest]’. As Henry had a rugby-player’s chest (forty-two inches and expanding) the complaints were loud indeed.11
They resounded in Catherine’s ears even in her Chamber, where, according to Peter Martyr, they led to disaster. ‘The Queen of England’, he reported, ‘has given birth to a premature child–through grief, as it is said, for the misunderstanding between her father and her husband.’12