Catherine was now on the shelf–in the sense that she was stuck in that limbo reserved for wives whose husbands do not much care about them one way or another. She became uglier and duller and more devoted to learning and religion. Meanwhile, Henry took mistresses, spent time with the boys and even, occasionally, immersed himself in the serious business of government. There was no public scandal and the structure of the Court, with its separate apartments for the King and Queen, staffed by separate Households, easily accommodated their increasingly separate and different lives.
The decline in Catherine’s appearance in her thirties was very marked. The last wholly favourable comment about her was made in 1514, when she was in her thirtieth year and at the beginning of her fourth pregnancy. ‘The Queen’, the Netherlands ambassador reported, ‘is of a lively and gracious disposition; quite the opposite of the Queen her sister [Juana the Mad] in complexion and manner.’ But the breach with Spain and two miscarriages in quick succession took their toll. By spring 1515, the new Venetian ambassador Giustiniani and his suite thought that Catherine cut a poor figure. Overdressed and unattractive, she was out-shone not only by her magnificent husband but by her ladies as well. ‘She is rather ugly than otherwise’, the ambassador wrote, ‘but the damsels of her Court are handsome, and make a sumptuous appearance’. Four years later, in 1519, Giustiniani was reduced to scraping the barrel of compliment. ‘She was not handsome, though she had a very beautiful complexion.’ Francis I, speaking at the same time, was blunter. ‘He [King Henry] has an old deformed wife,’ he said, ‘while he himself is young and handsome.’1
‘Deformed’ is, of course, a characteristic Gallic sexual hyperbole. Francis meant only that Catherine had become very fat. Unfortunately for Catherine, early-sixteenth-century fashion favoured slimness in women. So did Henry’s own preferences. Nor, alas, did Catherine have the build to carry it off. For she seems to have been very short. When she was young and pretty and svelte, the effect was charming. But with continuous childbearing (she was pregnant at least seven times in the nine years from 1509 to 1518) and repeated stress and disappointment, her once trim figure broadened and layers of fat swelled her face and body. By the time she reached the menopause, which seems to have come to her very early at about thirty-five, she was (like the middle-aged Queen Victoria) nearly as wide as she was tall.
What made it worse, of course, was that she had married a husband who was younger and better-looking than she, and who had kept his youth and looks longer. Hence the contrast brutally noted by Francis. Catherine was probably aware of it too. Once, she had gloried in appearing at Henry’s side. Now, she seemed to avoid all but essential Court ceremony and Giustiniani, who witnessed everything worth noticing at the Tudor Court between 1515 and 1519, reported on his departure that he ‘had seen her but seldom’.2
Alienated, or perhaps self-exiled from English life, Catherine reidentified with her native Spain. Ambassadors were quick to note the change and to exploit it. So when the new Venetian Embassy visited her in 1515, Pasquaglio, ‘knowing it would please her, addressed her in Spanish…The Queen answered also in Spanish, and then entered into a long familiar conversation about the affairs of Spain’. It was more than a matter of language and when, in 1519, Prince Charles, her sister Juana’s son, was elected Holy Roman Emperor, ‘the Queen of England, being a Spaniard, evinced satisfaction at the success of her nephew’.3
In her altered circumstances, the Other World became as attractive as Iberia. Catherine had always been religious–more seriously so even than Henry, who prided himself on his piety. The difference is clear in Catherine’s correspondence as regent, in which she is as anxious about her husband’s spiritual health as his physical. ‘Thanked be God of it,’ she wrote to Henry after Flodden. ‘And I am sure your Grace forgetteth not to do this, which shall be cause to send you many more such great victories, as I trust He shall do.’ She rammed the point home in her letter to Wolsey, written the same day. ‘This matter [the victory of Flodden] is so marvellous that it seemeth to be of God’s doing alone. I trust the King shall remember to thank him for it.’ But all of this was private, between the royal couple alone, even when mediated through Wolsey. By 1519, Catherine’s piety had taken on a public dimension. ‘The Queen’, Giustiniani concluded his thumb-nail sketch, ‘[is] religious and as virtuous as words could express’.4
Nowadays, I suppose, we would talk of a change of image. In the first six years of her marriage to Henry, Catherine was ‘lively and gracious’. She was young and pretty and sometimes flighty. She presided over jousts and the Court of Love. She was a powerful political influence on the King, and, for a few months, she ruled England as regent. She showed herself able, at least as able as Henry, and under her regency Tudor England won its greatest military victory before the Armada. She was religious. But the God she worshipped was the God of Battles.
In her thirties, Catherine lost most of this. She lost her looks, her political power and her husband’s love. She had also failed to give him a son. But she found something that replaced them all: the love of God. She also retained the love of the people. For, like her, most Tudor women lost their looks and their figures in childbearing. And many took to religion as a consolation. The difference, of course, was that Catherine performed on a wider stage.
So far, in her life in England, Catherine had trod many stages: the great walkway in St Paul’s at her first wedding; the theatre in Westminster Abbey at her coronation; the painted grandstand in Palace Yard at the jousts for the birth of Prince Henry. But the largest and most important was in Westminster Hall after the ‘Evil Mayday’ riots in 1517.
These riots were a series of ugly, xenophobic attacks on foreigners in the City of London. Like such attacks nowadays, the actual violence was perpetrated by young, footloose men–the City apprentices. But the youthful rioters received tacit support from their elders and betters. The resulting disorders nearly got out of hand, and the King and Court, who were far more sympathetic to foreigners than the common folk, took a terrible revenge. The Duke of Norfolk (as Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, had been made in reward for Flodden) put the City under military occupation and decided to inflict exemplary punishment. Thirteen of the rioters, some of whom were little more than children, were convicted of high treason (since their foreign victims enjoyed the King’s protection) and put to execution.
As usual, the Howards operated as a family firm. The executions were supervised by Norfolk’s youngest son, now known as Lord Edmund Howard after his father’s promotion, as Knight Marshall. The punishment for treason–hanging, drawing and quartering–was always horrible, but the actual pain inflicted varied greatly, depending on how the execution was carried out. Edmund Howard spared nothing: he ‘showed no mercy but extreme cruelty to the poor younglings in their execution’. Some Londoners, no doubt, remembered his actions when, twenty-five years later, Lord Edmund’s daughter, Catherine Howard, stepped onto the scaffold in her turn.
The stand-off between Court and capital had now become dangerous. Four hundred other rioters were in gaol, equally at risk of execution. At this point Catherine intervened. According to the Papal Nuncio, ‘our most serene and compassionate Queen, with tears in her eyes and on bended knees, obtained their pardon’.
The formal granting of the pardons was turned into a grand public display. The King came into Westminster Hall and sat in the seat of judgement. Fifteen thousand Londoners crowded into the body of the Hall, and the prisoners, stripped to their shirts and with nooses round their necks, were brought in. They fell on their knees and cried: ‘Mercy!’ Wolsey and the lords interceded for their pardon, which the King granted. The cheers rang out. But the person they were really cheering was Catherine.5 Later, when Catherine came, in turn, to suffer, Londoners and their wives never forgot their loyalty to her.