But Catherine’s cup of sorrow was not yet full. For the last nine years, her confessor, Fray Diego, had been a central figure in her life. For her sake, he had endured the ‘thirst, hunger, nakedness and poverty’ visited on her servants under Henry VII. After her marriage to Henry VIII, he had helped acclimatise her to England and to the realities of wedded life. He seems even to have told her most of what she knew about sex. Catherine repaid him with uncritical devotion. Others formed a very different view of the opinionated friar and the list of his enemies grew long and powerful. It included Bishop Fox of Winchester who had done him ‘many wrongs’ under Henry VII, Lord Treasurer Surrey and his Countess who had her own bone to pick with the Queen, as well, of course, as the Spanish ambassador Caroz.
Eventually, Fray Diego’s way with the ladies, which was the basis of his hold on Catherine, proved his undoing. He was convicted of fornication before the Council. Winchester and Surrey, as his personal enemies, took pleasure in announcing the sentence. He was to be deprived of his offices, expelled from the kingdom and sent back to Spain. The last filled him with particular terror. He knew that Caroz had painted him as the source of most of his problems in dealing with the English and he feared Ferdinand’s revenge. He would return to the King of Aragon, he said, only ‘with fifteen regiments of cavalry’–though whether the troops were required to protect him or to drag him there is not clear.
In his despair he wrote directly to Henry to beg him reconsider the case. The letter is written in an extraordinary Latin: ungrammatical, unclassical and heavily hispanised. Yet, in its way, it is fluent, even eloquent. And, in both form and content, it takes us very close, I suspect, to the persuasive mutterings to which Fray Diego had subjected Catherine, both within the confessional and without.
He began by singing his own praises: ancient princes, he said, were agreed in giving the highest rewards to the servants of their wives, especially when they had forsaken their native land to serve their mistresses. Then, drawing deep on his reserves of innuendo and gossip, he counter-charged his two accusers in Catherine’s Household, Diego de Badillo, one of Catherine’s yeomen, and Master Pedro Morales, one of her chaplains. Diego, he could prove, had carnally known a woman in the Queen’s Household at Windsor. Geoffrey, one of the Queen’s footmen, was a witness to the fact, since he had seen them with his own eyes. As for the chaplain, the servant he kept, who was called by his own name, was really his natural son. And so on. Finally, there was a threat. He was surprised, he said smoothly, that Henry’s councillors had no fears in expelling from England someone who knew as much as he did. For he knew all the secrets of Henry’s Household and kingdom. In particular he was familiar with all his dealings with Spain. He had seen all of Henry and Catherine’s replies to Ferdinand, and he had personally encrypted them in the Queen’s own cipher. Think what someone who was less devoted to Henry’s service than he might do with such information! But the secrets of which Fray Diego knew most were those of Henry’s marriage-bed: ‘I pray you may have sons,’ he ended.1
It is unlikely that Henry saw the letter. But if he did, he was indifferent to both the blandishments and the blackmail, and Fray Diego was put on the next boat back to Spain.
Catherine, on the other hand, remained staunchly loyal. She wrote on Fray Diego’s behalf to her father, praising him as a good servant to her and to Spain. If only he had been suffered to remain in England, she claimed confidently, relations between England and Spain would not have sunk so low.
Fray Diego was replaced by another Spaniard, Jorge de Athequa, who became Bishop of Llandaff. Athequa was ‘a good, simple, timid soul’–in other words, everything that Fray Diego was not. Fray Diego was certainly a scamp and perhaps a bit of a scoundrel. But, in his way, he had been good for Catherine and, when he left, some of the life left Catherine with him.2
His departure was a depressing conclusion to a bad year for Catherine. But, just as the promises of 1513 had proved illusory, so the threats of 1514 failed to materialise–at least immediately. The peace with France collapsed; Henry and Ferdinand kissed and made up and Catherine and Henry, kissing more intimately, returned to the business of getting an heir.
Louis XII, despite his age and diseases, had been looking forward to his marriage with Mary. But it proved too much for him and he died only a few weeks afterwards on 31 December–of his exertions, it was said. Since he had only daughters, he was succeeded, according to French dynastic custom, by his nearest male relative, Francis, Duke of Angoulême. Francis I was even younger than Henry VIII, and as vainglorious. In particular, he was eager to rescue France’s military reputation from the debacle of 1513. He promptly invaded Italy and, fighting at the head of his own troops, won the great set-piece battle of Marignano against the Swiss. Henry’s glory was eclipsed and the English King was bitterly envious.3
There was nothing for it but for Henry to swallow his resentment of Ferdinand. Ferdinand had the sense to sugar the pill by making Henry a present of magnificent jewellery and in October 1515 new Anglo-Spanish treaties were signed.4
Catherine was delighted that the storm clouds of 1514 had blown over so quickly. But there is a new note in her letter to her father. She writes, not as she had done before, as more English than the English and as Henry’s better and more devoted half. Instead, she sets herself to explain, with detachment, even with cynicism, the behaviour of both her adoptive country and her husband.
There is no people in the world more influenced by the good or bad fortune of their enemies than the English. A small success of their enemies prostrates them, and a little adversity of their antagonists makes them overbearing. Such being the case, he may judge for himself how much the English love him, and how much they are persuaded that his friendship is necessary to them.
And by ‘the English’, of course, Catherine meant the King of England in particular. It is a sharp but scarcely flattering analysis of her husband’s psychology.
In her letter Catherine referred, almost in passing, to the fact that she had had another miscarriage in the spring. But she did not tell her father that she was already pregnant again. Had repeated failure taught her that it was safer not to boast? This time, however, she carried the baby to term.
But not even Ferdinand could cheat death forever. It had been a miracle, Peter Martyr felt, that he had survived the last few winters as his asthma had turned to dropsy and worse. Finally, in January 1516 he died. Catherine had already taken to her Chamber when the news arrived in England. According to the Venetian ambassador, Sebastiano Giustiniani, the fact was ‘kept secret during some days on account of the expected delivery of the Queen’. The precaution worked. Catherine was successfully delivered. And the child lived. But it was a girl.5
The sense of deflation was palpable. Writing two days after the birth, Giustiniani assured the Republic that he would offer their congratulations; ‘had an heir male been born’, he added, ‘[he] would have done so already’. He eventually got to Court on the 24th and congratulated Henry ‘on the birth of his daughter and the well-being of the Queen’. ‘The State would have been yet more pleased’, he continued, ‘had the child been a son.’
Henry’s reply to Giustiniani was both chivalrous and loyal: ‘We are both young,’ he said. ‘If it was a daughter this time, by the grace of God the sons will follow.’6
But Catherine was already thirty-one. This was relatively old for childbearing by sixteenth-century standards, and it was two years before she conceived again. In April 1518, Lord Mountjoy, Catherine’s Chamberlain, gave the news in confidence to Wolsey’s Court agent, the royal Secretary, Richard Pace. Pace added his own fervent hopes: ‘Prays to God heartily it may be a Prince, to the surety and universal comfort of the realm’. He also suggested that Wolsey write ‘a kind letter to the Queen’. By early June, the word had spread, and Giustiniani was ‘assured of it by a trustworthy person, who heard it from the King’s own mouth’. The ambassador added the same rider as Pace: ‘It was an event most earnestly desired by the whole kingdom.’7
And no one, of course, desired it more earnestly than Henry. About this time, or perhaps a little earlier, he wrote a letter in his own hand to Wolsey. Since the King hated writing, this was a method of communication that he used only for the most important and secret business. His news was both. ‘I trust’, he told Wolsey, ‘that the Queen my wife be with child.’ This was why, he continued, he was reluctant to return to London from Woodstock, the Oxfordshire palace where they were staying. ‘Because about this time is partly of her dangerous times and because of that I would remove her as little as I may now.’ In other words, Henry is saying, Catherine had reached that stage in her pregnancy where she had previously proved to be most vulnerable to a miscarriage. It was a lesson learned from bitter experience. Bitter experience had also taught Henry not to count his chickens. ‘I write this unto [you],’ he continued, ‘not as a ensured thing, but as a thing wherein I have great hope and likelihood…[but] nisi quod Deus velit inceptum opus bene finiri [only if God will the beginning does the work end well].’ It was a prayer which Catherine, no doubt, uttered as fervently as Henry.8
At the beginning of July Henry paid a flying visit to Wolsey at Greenwich, leaving the Queen and most of the Court at Woodstock. He returned on the 5th at 8 o’clock at night to the best homecoming present of all. ‘And the Queen did meet with his Grace at his chamber door, and showed unto him, for his welcome home, her belly something great, declaring openly she was quick with child.’ Catherine’s ‘dangerous time’ had passed. Henry immediately ordered a Te Deum to be sung at St Paul’s and another at Woodstock.9
It was decided that the lying-in should take place at Greenwich, and, in the second half of July, the Court moved there by slow stages. In August, the Pope asked whether Catherine were with child, and expressed himself delighted when he was told she was. ‘Hopes it will be a Prince who will be the prop of the universal peace of Christendom,’ the Cardinal Protector of England added for himself. In October, Giustiniani expressed the same hope more baldly: ‘God grant she may give birth to a son, so that, having a heir male, the King may not be hindered from embarking, if necessary, in any great undertaking.’ The delivery, he reported, was expected ‘within a month or rather more’. The Prior of Canterbury was warned to be ready to send the font for the christening. The anticipation was now overwhelming.10
On 10 November Catherine went into labour and, during the night, was delivered of a child. It was another girl, ‘to the vexation of everybody’, Giustiniani reported, for ‘never had the kingdom so anxiously desired anything as it did a Prince’. As though aware of her irrelevance to the great scheme of things, the baby died shortly thereafter.11
The great font was returned to Canterbury. It would not be needed again while Catherine was Queen.