On 5 October 1518, Catherine had stood next to her husband in her Great Chamber at Greenwich. This was the first and largest room of her suite and it had been ‘very sumptuous[ly]’ decorated for the occasion. In front of Catherine was her daughter Mary, ‘dressed in cloth of gold, with a cap of black velvet on her head, adorned with many jewels’. Mary was two and a half years old and it was her wedding day.
First, Cuthbert Tunstall, the most brilliant English scholar of his day and Master of the Rolls, gave an oration de laudibus matrimonii (in praise of marriage). The address lasted some time and Mary (probably tired and bored by all the talk) was ‘taken in arms’ by her Lady Mistress. Then the representative of the bridegroom, who was a year younger than Mary, stepped forward. Hands were held and oaths exchanged. Finally, Cardinal Wolsey, Mary’s godfather, put the ring on the fourth finger of her right hand, and the proxy-groom passed it over the second joint. Mary was now a married woman. She was, however, probably more interested in the ring, which, though made small to fit her tiny finger, was set with a large diamond ‘supposed to have been a present from the Cardinal’. Wolsey always had an eye for the perfect gift.
The ages of the bride and groom, which seem so outlandish to us, presented no difficulty to Catherine. She was a dynast herself and had been pledged at the age of three to Arthur when he was aged two. Instead, her sticking-point was the nationality of the bridegroom. For he was the Dauphin Francis, the heir to the French throne. Mary’s marriage was the seal on a new Anglo-French alliance. This revolted Catherine’s deepest instincts. She was Spanish herself and consistent in her desire for England to stick to the old certainties and remain the friend of Spain and the enemy of France. Now she was required to welcome a French prince as her son-in-law. Unfortunately, neither her husband’s minister, Wolsey, nor, increasingly, her husband himself, any longer shared her commitment to old certainties.1
For times had changed yet again. In particular, the coming of age of Catherine’s nephew, Charles, the son of her sister, Juana, who is known to history as the Emperor Charles V, re-ignited the struggle for dominance in Europe between France and Spain.
At first Charles seemed the underdog. Only eighteen and inexperienced, he was lantern-jawed, slow of speech and, so many thought, slow of wit as well. He was of course heir to vast territories: Burgundy and the Netherlands from his father, the Archduke Philip, Spain from his grandfather, Ferdinand, and, from his other grandfather, Maximilian, who was to die in 1519, huge swathes of Germany. But he had yet to make good his claim to many of these lands. Characteristically opportunist, his rival, the brilliant and mercurial Francis I of France, decided to strike first, before Charles had consolidated his hold on his inheritance. Francis scored some easy victories. But Charles quickly gave the lie to those who had underestimated him.
Henry and Wolsey also saw their opportunity. In terms of size, population and wealth, England came a poor third after France and the territories of Charles V. But, not for the last time, England was able to punch above its weight. For Francis and Charles were evenly balanced opponents. The support of England, Wolsey and Henry reckoned, could make all the difference to the outcome of their struggle. Cui adhereo praeest (Whom I back wins) became their motto and they resolved to sell England’s support to the highest bidder. The visible prize in the auction would be the hand of Catherine’s daughter, Mary.
Francis, eager for England’s support against Charles, or at least its neutrality, made the first bid. Henry and Wolsey were receptive and agreement was quickly reached. It consisted of three elements: the marriage of Mary and the Dauphin; a settlement of outstanding Anglo-French differences, which was wrapped up in a grandiose Treaty of Universal Peace (a sort of pan-European security pact); and a still-more grandiose summit conference, to be held as soon as possible, to ‘nurture love’ between Henry and Francis.
It was another woman, Louise of Savoy, the mother of Francis I, who best understood Catherine’s feelings about the settlement and her consequent conflict of loyalties. Not that she sympathised. Instead, Louise’s awareness was a product of anxiety. She knew that the Anglo-French alliance was a recent plant of sickly growth and she feared that Catherine would use her influence to uproot it entirely.
Catherine was not short of opportunities. The first hitch arose over the proposed summit conference between Henry and Francis. This was postponed several times–so often, in fact, that the French started to doubt whether it would happen at all. To try to clear the air, the two kings swore an oath, promising, as was then fashionable, not to shave until they met.
On 9 November 1519, the French ambassador to England arrived in France with terrible news: King Henry of England had cut off his beard!
Louise summoned the English ambassador, Sir Thomas Boleyn. Boleyn immediately pointed the finger at Catherine, saying, ‘as I supposed, it hath been by the Queen’s desire’. But Catherine’s motives, Boleyn insisted, were entirely innocent: she simply hated beards. ‘I have here aforetime,’ he told Louise, ‘known when the King’s Grace hath worn long his beard, that the Queen hath daily made great instance, and desired him to put it off for her sake.’ Louise remained suspicious, asking ‘if [the] Queen’s Grace was not aunt to the King of Spain (Charles V)’. Boleyn replied that Charles was indeed her sister Juana’s son. But, he assured Louise, it was Henry’s feelings that mattered, and he ‘had greater affection for [Francis] than any King living’. Mollified, Louise ended the exchange by exclaiming that ‘Their love is not in the beards but in the hearts!’2
But the delays continued and Louise’s doubts revived. She put them point-blank to Boleyn’s successor as ambassador, Sir Richard Wingfield. ‘She demanded me of the Queen’s Grace, and whether I thought her to have any great devotion to this assembly.’ Wingfield prefaced his reply by describing Catherine’s attitude to the proper submission of women in marriage:
There could not be a more virtuous or wise princess anywhere than the Queen my mistress was, having none other joy or comfort in this world but to do and follow all that she may think to stand with the King’s pleasure; and considered by her as well it pleased him to be entirely affectionate to the said assembly, as also the alliance and marriage to be passed and concluded between the Princess and the Dauphin, he thought none could be more desirous [for the meeting] than she.
In other words, for Catherine of Aragon read Blancha Maria: ‘It is even as though Luis Vives would it.’3
However, the Imperial ambassadors in London, writing only three days later than Wingfield, picked up a different story: Catherine ‘had made such representations, and shown such reasons against the voyage [to meet Francis], as one would not have supposed she would have dared to, or even to imagine’, they reported. Henry rarely responded well to confrontation. But on this occasion he took it in good part. ‘She is held’, the ambassadors concluded, ‘in greater esteem by the King and his Council than ever she was.’4
Actually, the various reports are not as contradictory as they seem. For Henry and Wolsey had already decided to hedge their bets by reopening negotiations with Charles V.
Suddenly, Catherine’s family connexions ceased to be unmentionable and became an asset once more. And suddenly, Catherine stepped back into the inner circle of power from which she had been excluded since Wolsey’s rise. Or, at least, she appeared to. When, on Sunday, 18 March, the Imperial ambassadors arrived at the Court at Greenwich they found Henry, Catherine and Wolsey deep in conversation. Henry broke off to inform them that he had decided to meet Charles V before his encounter with Francis I. He was therefore writing to the French King to ask him to postpone their meeting for a few days–though of course without telling him the real reason. Catherine uttered a heartfelt plea. ‘Raising her eyes to heaven, with clasped hands [she] gave praise to God for the grace she hoped he would do her that she might see Charles.’ To see her nephew ‘was her greatest desire in the world’. Then she thanked Henry, and curtsied to him deeply. Henry, ever the gentleman, doffed his hat to his wife. It was just like old times.5
Catherine had her wish and met her nephew, when she and Henry were en route to France. Charles landed at Dover where Wolsey and Henry met him. They overnighted and then, early on the morning of Whitsunday, 27 May, rode to Canterbury. There, on the landing of the grand staircase in the archbishop’s palace, was Catherine, magnificent in cloth of gold and pearls. ‘She embraced her nephew tenderly, not without tears,’ and Henry, Catherine and Charles proceeded to a family breakfast. On Whitmonday, there was a splendid banquet. In compliment to Charles as King of Spain, all the entertainment was in the Spanish fashion–in dress, music and dancing. Catherine was in her element. The following day, Henry and Charles first slept off their hang-overs and then devoted themselves to business. Charles took his leave late that night and, with long wax torches to light the way, was escorted to Sandwich. Thence, on Wednesday the 30th, he sailed to Flanders.6
Meanwhile, Henry and Catherine continued to Dover and then Calais for the much postponed meeting with Francis I. It took place in a sort of noman’s-land between Calais and the French town of Ardres. This is a flat and dusty part of France. But in 1520 an army of English and French craftsmen, working in competition with each other and against the clock, transformed it into fairyland. Even the tents were made of cloth of gold. But it was an outdoor summer event in northern Europe and no one could control the weather. There were violent winds, which blew down the tents and whipped up blinding storms of dust, and torrential rains, which turned the dust into a sea of mud. Bishop Fisher, who was there in Catherine’s train, saw the bad weather as a sign of God’s anger at the pointless pomp and circumstance. But the event survived the setbacks and caught the imagination. It still does. It was The Field of Cloth of Gold.
Thanks to the earlier meeting with Charles V at Canterbury, Catherine had gone to The Field of Cloth of Gold in better spirits than she had dared hope. She played her part, wore magnificent clothes and hung a fortune in jewels on her person. She was even agreeable to Francis I, though he had called her old and deformed. She could afford to be polite because she knew that it was all a sham–from the blood-brotherhood of the two Kings in the tournament to the concluding ceremony on 23 June when they took communion together at Wolsey’s hands and renewed their oaths of eternal friendship.7
A fortnight later, Catherine and Henry met Charles once more, first as his guests at Gravelines, and then as his hosts at Calais. For Catherine at least it was a much more agreeable four days.8
What had happened, of course, was that Charles had made a counter-bid for English support. And it was a much higher one, since Charles V needed England in a way that Francis I did not.
For the succession to Charles’s vast inheritance had reached a moment of crisis. All had gone smoothly in the Netherlands, where he had been born and brought up. He had also, having outbribed his rival, Francis I, been elected King of the Romans (Holy Roman Emperor–elect) in succession to his paternal grandfather Maximilian. But Spain, Catherine’s native land and the jewel in the crown of her nephew’s inheritance, looked as though it might slip through his fingers.
On 20 May 1520 he had set sail from Corunna for his meeting with Catherine and Henry in England. Even as his Court was embarking, widespread disorders had already broken out. They turned into a great revolt, known as the Comuneros. The rebels were protesting Charles, his foreign advisers and his demands for heavy taxation to pay off the debts he had incurred in winning the Imperial election. The Comuneros won sweeping victories and set up a junta (a revolutionary government). The unpopular foreign Regent, Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht, who was Charles’s former tutor, was driven out of Valladolid and royal authority, painstakingly established by Catherine’s parents, looked as though it might collapse entirely.
For the moment there was nothing Charles could do about Spain since he was needed elsewhere in his dominions. He had to be crowned King of the Romans at Aachen and to settle accounts with Francis I. But then he would have to return to Spain–or lose it. The expedition would need money and ships. He had neither. But England had both ships and money. And Charles knew he would have to pay–or promise–dearly for them.
But Henry and Wolsey were in no hurry to close the deal. After all, Francis I, smarting from his defeat in the Imperial election, might yet bid higher still. The result was an extraordinary diplomatic dance between England, France and the Empire. England, in the person of Cardinal Wolsey, played the part of a coy maiden, turning now to Francis as her partner and now to Charles. The farce reached its conclusion at the conference at Calais in 1521. In theory, Wolsey sat as mediator, to adjudicate the differences of Francis and Charles. In reality, Henry had already decided to throw over France and ally with Charles.
To secure the English alliance Charles was prepared to promise anything. He promised to marry Mary with a dowry heavily discounted by the repayment of his and his grandfather Maximilian’s debts to England. He half promised to procure Wolsey’s election as Pope. He promised to help make Henry king of the rump of France, after he had settled his own claims against French territories. He even promised to make good the pensions that Henry and Wolsey would forgo by declaring war on France. If the English had asked for the moon, Charles would have promised that as well. And he would have found it scarcely more difficult to deliver than the rest.9
But such realities were for the future. For the present, Catherine was delighted at the new direction of policy. She now had the prospective son-in-law of her dreams. And things were different for Mary as well. At her proxy marriage to the Dauphin in 1518, she had been an infant, oblivious to the real meaning of the event. Now she was six years old, precocious and perhaps a little spoilt, and in love with the idea of being in love. Encouraged by Catherine, she had chosen Charles as her Valentine and wore a golden jewel at her breast, with the name ‘CHARLES’ picked out in jewels. She also had another, even larger, brooch with letters spelling out the title of her husband: ‘THE EMPEROUR’. She wore the brooch when she sat for a portrait miniature, which, almost certainly, was intended as a lover’s gift to Charles. If Mary, who had never seen Charles, was in this state already, what would it be like when they met face to face?10
A meeting in fact was due in the following spring. As part of the Calais settlement, it had been agreed that Charles would come to England on his way back to Spain, to pick up ships and reinforcements. Charles was all for making it a severely practical event and spending the money thus saved on the war. ‘We prefer’, he protested, ‘to visit Henry like a son coming to his father’s house…and hope that too great pomp and ceremony will not impede the friendly familiarity which we hope will continue, not only throughout our life, but throughout that of our successors.’ There is an echo here of his grandmother Isabella, expressing her anxieties about the lavish reception planned for Catherine on her arrival in England, twenty years previously, in 1502. But Charles protested in vain. Henry and Wolsey, like Henry VII before them, wanted a triumph: it was not every day that they had an emperor to parade through London.11
Catherine also pressed her more sincere hospitality on her nephew. ‘Her greatest desire’, she told the Emperor’s ambassador, ‘was to see you here and to receive you with the greatest honour and best cheer possible.’ But Catherine had not finished with the ambassador. Before he took leave, she said firmly, he must first see the Princess dance. Mary ‘did not have to be asked twice’ and performed without a trace of childish shyness or false modesty. First she danced a slow dance and a galliard ‘and twirled so prettily that no woman in the world could do better’. Then she shifted to the keyboard and ‘played two or three songs on the spinet’. The ambassador was impressed, as was the intention. ‘Indeed, sire,’ he reported to Charles, ‘she showed unbelievable grace and skill and such self-command as a woman of twenty might envy. She is pretty, and very tall for her age…and a very fine young cousin indeed.’12
The ambassador’s words were exactly what Catherine had wanted him to write. But did she stop to consider the risks for her daughter in encouraging these performances? Mary was wearing Charles’s name, dancing for Charles, living and breathing Charles. Such romantic fantasies were hard enough to sustain even in aristocratic marriages. But Charles was royal. And, though he was Catherine’s nephew, his projected marriage with her daughter was a dynastic one. It had been made for reasons of power politics; if the circumstances changed, it could equally be broken for dynastic reasons. Where would that leave Mary, now that Catherine had taught her love along with Latin?
Charles arrived at Dover as planned on 26 May. After inspecting the fleet, the two monarchs made their way to Greenwich. There Charles found Catherine and Mary waiting for him at the Hall door. Charles knelt and ‘asked the Queen’s blessing’ and had ‘great joy to see the Queen his Aunt and in especial his young cousin germain the Lady Mary’. Catherine and Mary in turn received him ‘with much love’. Three days were spent in ‘banquets…pageants, jousts and tournaments’. Henry showed off his skills in the lists; and Mary, no doubt, performed in person for Charles on the dance floor and the spinet. Charles and Henry then made a joint entrée into London, each with a naked sword born upright before them.13
Then the two monarchs moved to Windsor, to perform the ceremonies of the Garter and get down to serious negotiation. Here Catherine joined them, and brought Mary too. The representative of Charles’s brother, the Archduke Ferdinand, caught sight of her and, blinded by the charms of neither mother nor daughter, delivered a cool assessment. ‘She promises to become a handsome lady,’ he reported of Mary, ‘although it is difficult to form an idea of her beauty as she is still so small.’ And that of course was a problem: there was a sixteen-year age-gap between Charles and Mary. Was it feasible for him to wait so long? Was it even desirable?14
From Windsor, Charles went to Southampton, where he embarked for Spain. Henry accompanied him to the coast but Catherine and Mary took their leave of him at Windsor. Charles had become a familiar figure in Catherine’s life. She had met him three times within the space of two years. She had also renewed her personal friendship with her former sister-in-law, the Archduchess Margaret. Margaret had continued to act as Regent of the Netherlands for the frequently absent Charles, and had accompanied him to the post–Field of Cloth of Gold summit conference. It seemed, in short, that Catherine’s family was reconstituting itself in her own generation. And, thanks to the forthcoming marriage between Mary and Charles, there was hope that it would continue into the next.
With Charles, her favourite nephew and prospective son-in-law, Catherine had been all smiles. But his brother Ferdinand’s ambassador had to deal with a harder, less familiar Catherine. Charles had left Ferdinand as his Regent in Germany and Austria. There he had to confront the growing menace of the Turkish or Ottoman Empire, then at the height of its power. He had sent his ambassador to Windsor to remind Henry and Charles that Christian Europe’s south-eastern frontier was about to collapse. He got short shrift, even from Catherine, and even after he had played the family card. The ambassador ‘told her that [Ferdinand] regarded her as his true mother, and asked her not to forsake him, but to see that the King of England should send him succour against the Turks’. Catherine replied briskly that ‘it will be impossible’. Could anything be done next year, he persisted. She would write her answer, she said. The ambassador then asked Charles to make an approach. And, on this topic, Charles ‘had not found her at all gracious’. The ambassador tried again himself. Catherine said she was too much occupied to write.
Catherine was of course right. Her husband and her nephew had their hands full with France, and France, as Wolsey remarked with his characteristic verve, ‘was the real Turk’. ‘I know no other Turk,’ he added.15
Over the next few years, Catherine had need for her cool political realism, as the new alliance with Spain under her nephew proved almost as problematic as the old, under her father, the slippery Ferdinand.
The English fleet, under Lord Admiral Surrey, escorted Charles part-way to Spain. But, as it cleared the Channel, it broke away and turned to launch a lightning amphibious attack on Brittany in which Morlaix was taken and sacked. Admiral Surrey, as ruthlessly effective on land as on sea, was then launched on France from the east. He left Calais in late August, with two companies of Burgundians among his troops. They marched south, burning and looting the lightly defended towns and villages as they went. Not till they reached Hesdin, which lies mid-way between Agincourt and Crécy, did they encounter serious resistance. Surrey wanted to launch an assault on the castle; his Burgundian co-commanders demurred. The expedition turned back, acrimoniously.16
It was not the best of starts to Anglo-Spanish co-operation. And a much greater challenge lay ahead. This was the project, to which Henry and Charles had committed themselves, to conquer and dismember France. Known as the ‘Great Enterprise’, it needed commensurate preparations. With his usual energy and efficiency, Wolsey took matters in hand and in 1522 he carried out the ‘Great Proscription’. This was a new Doomsday survey of the nation’s population and wealth and it enabled both troop-recruitment and taxation to be put on an up-to-date, accurate footing. But, however effectively England directed its resources, it could not conquer France alone. Nor, under the terms of the treaties, was it expected to. Where, Wolsey and Henry wanted to know, were Charles’s troops? The answer, as under Ferdinand, was in the south. Once more, England seemed to be invading France only to provide cover for Spain’s aggrandisement in the Pyrenees or in Italy. Once more, the divergent interests of Spain and England bred distrust between the allies. And once more, Catherine found herself caught in the middle.
But this time she was older, wiser and spoke more bluntly. ‘She told us vehemently’, Charles’s ambassadors reported in January 1523, ‘that the only way for you to retain the friendship of this King and of the English was to fulfil faithfully everything you have promised.’ But that, Catherine knew, was easier said than done. Charles had promised the moon: how could he deliver? ‘It was much better’, she continued, ‘to promise little and perform faithfully than to promise much and fail in part.’ Catherine had put her finger on the essential problem in Anglo-Spanish relations. But not even she could suggest a solution.17
Finally, despite constant bickering, the threatened invasion of France was launched in autumn 1523. This was late in the season for so great an undertaking. But the decision to invade had been triggered by the revolt against Francis I of the Constable de Bourbon. He was the premier peer of France and had done what Buckingham had only dreamed of. The enemies of Francis I had great hopes of him. Bourbon himself was to advance through Provence in the south-east; Charles to attack from the south-west into Guyenne; while the English were to march on Paris from Calais.18
The English commander was Henry’s brother-in-law, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, who had married Henry’s sister Mary after the death of Louis XII. Suffolk’s reputation (except on the jousting field and in bed) does not stand high. But in 1523 he faced the French alone. He got the English within eighty miles of Paris, then had to turn back. Part of the problem was the weather, which turned viciously cold. But he had also been hamstrung by the failure of Archduchess Margaret to supply the promised transport, victuals and reinforcements. Bourbon’s attack had fizzled out in Provence; while in the south-east Charles had not even crossed the frontier. Instead, like Ferdinand a decade earlier, Charles saw his main interests as lying in the Pyrenees and contented himself with recapturing Fuenterrabia.19
After this debacle, relations between Henry and Charles threatened to break down entirely. Catherine was powerless to act: she could only inform, encourage and, above all, warn Charles. As early as January 1524, her warnings became insistent. Henry had been complaining loudly of Charles’s failure to meet his financial, let alone his military, obligations. He had not received a penny of the promised indemnity for the French pension; nothing had been paid of the loan of £30,000 which he had made to Charles to speed his return to Spain. ‘Matters have gone so far’, Charles’s ambassador reported, ‘that the Queen sent her Confessor to me in secret to warn me of Henry’s discontents.’
At the same time, Catherine renewed her lament that Charles had over-extended himself. ‘She is very sorry’, the report continued, ‘that your Majesty ever promised so much in this treaty, and she fears it may one day be the cause of a weakening of the friendship between you two.’ But, above all, the ambassador begged, ‘keep this communication of the Queen’s secret; it would be regrettable if it came to the ears of certain English’. By which he meant, I suspect, Cardinal Wolsey. By November, the tensions between Wolsey and Catherine were out in the open. The Archduchess Margaret’s ambassador explained that he would have communicated more frequently with Catherine, ‘but I have been warned by some of her friends that it would not be discreet’. And when he had spoken to her, ‘I have often noticed that the Cardinal was very restless…and often interrupted our conversation.’20
Henry’s disillusionment with Charles meant that no English army left for France in 1524. With no threats to detain him at home, Francis I led a great expedition to Italy in person and at first seemed to carry all before him. But Charles’s troops, led by Bourbon, put up unexpectedly strong resistance. Sir Thomas More was with Henry at Hertford when the news was brought and he reported the King’s reaction. Whatever Henry’s doubts about Charles, he was delighted at Francis’s discomfiture. Catherine rejoiced too, with a simple, partisan patriotism. ‘[She] said that she was glad that the Spaniards had done it somewhat in Italy in recompense of their departure out of Provence’. Wolsey presciently guessed that Francis might have bitten off more than he could chew with his Italian expedition and Henry concurred, ‘think[ing] it will be very hard for him to get thence’. He laughed with pleasure at the thought. But he did not lift a finger to help Charles.
Wolsey’s guess proved correct and on 24 February 1525, Charles’s troops defeated and captured Francis at the battle of Pavia. Even the plumes of Francis’s helmet were plucked off as he lay pinned to the ground under his horse. It was Charles’s twenty-fifth birthday. He was now true Emperor of the West. And he no longer needed England.21
At first, Henry did not realise how the balance had changed. On 31 March he wrote a letter of congratulation to Charles, in his own hand and in French. He would have sent Wolsey in person, he said, if his health had been good enough to stand the journey. Instead he sent an Embassy. Its purpose was to propose the formal partition of France. Since God had punished Francis ‘for his high orgule, pride and insatiable ambition’ with his defeat and capture, it was Henry’s and Charles’s divinely ordained duty together to complete the task and strip him of his kingdom. And so forth.22
Catherine avoided such bombast in her letter. It was written on 30 March, the day before Henry’s, and it told Charles of ‘the great pleasure and content I have experienced at hearing of the very signal victory which God Almighty…has been pleased to grant to the Imperial arms in Italy’. In thanks, she told him, Henry had ordered prayers and solemn processions; she was sure Charles was doing the same. It was the tone of her own letters about Flodden.23
But Catherine’s letter also showed a sharper understanding of political realities than her husband’s. She had heard nothing from Charles for a long time. Diplomatically, she attributed Charles’s silence to the ‘inconstancy and fickleness of the sea’. But she suspected that the real reason was his displeasure with her husband’s performance as an ally. So in the rest of her letter Catherine mounted a loyal defence of his performance. Henry, she insisted, ‘has never failed to be the constant and faithful ally of your Highness’. Therefore, she begged, ‘I humbly beseech your Highness to persevere in the path of friendship and affection towards us’. On her own behalf Catherine pleaded the ‘love and consanguinity’ which should unite aunt and nephew.
Charles brushed it all aside. Henry had been captious and demanding. Now he would pay him in his own coin. He affected to take Henry at his word and proposed an immediate joint invasion of France. But there were conditions. Mary must be handed over immediately. Her dowry must be paid in full. And an additional loan, equivalent in size to the dowry, must also be granted. It was an ultimatum that was intended to be refused. And Henry and Wolsey duly rejected it. The Anglo-Spanish alliance was over. Henry’s dreams of conquest in France were at an end. And Mary, infatuated Mary, would have to be found another husband.24
As for Catherine, her desolation was complete. Not only had her daughter lost her husband, she (she feared) had lost her nephew. Charles did not bother to reply to her letter of congratulations. Indeed, he did not write at all. By November, it was ‘upwards of two years’ since she had had letters from Spain. Finally, she had to admit the truth to herself. Charles was angry with her and had forgotten her. But she protested hotly at the injustice of his behaviour. ‘And yet I am sure I deserve not this treatment, for such are my affection and readiness for your Highness’s service that I deserved a better reward.’ She protested in vain. It would take another, larger revolution in her affairs to make Charles notice her again.25
For Catherine was about to lose her husband as well.