On Sunday morning, November 14, 1501, Doña Elvira and the princess’s ladies gently woke their mistress for what was to be a momentous day. Within a few short hours, Katherine’s status would change from virgin daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella to Arthur’s true wife and Princess of Wales. No more proxy marriages with a beaming and simpering de Puebla reveling in every minute as he substituted for his princess. This time the ceremony would be the full and solemn ceremony of matrimony, performed in the sight of God.
The bustle and excitement of Katherine’s apartments was mirrored throughout the city. In his lodgings at the Great Wardrobe, one of his father’s buildings that was conveniently close to St. Paul’s, Arthur too was up and about on that November morning. As arranged, he prayed quietly and peacefully inside the church, saying his last prayers as a bachelor before changing into his wedding outfit in a room set aside for that purpose in the Bishop of London’s palace; thus he and Katherine were not very far apart. The king, the queen, and, as ever, the “King’s Mother” prepared as well. They were to watch the service from a special box inside the cathedral that gave them a very good view while shielding them from curious onlookers. Prince Henry, who had performed so admirably in the processions, was required by his father to escort Katherine into the church—yet another starring role for the king’s spare heir. The Duke of Buckingham, another key figure at Katherine’s entry into the City, donned embroidered robes, cloth of gold, and furs of sable to ride in her procession once more. As for Sir John Shaa, out came his crimson garments and gold chain again, ready for his role in the proceedings. His mayoralty was nothing if not eventful.
Katherine’s gown, like the one she had worn on Friday, was very Spanish in style. It was also white, not then the traditional color for brides. Since Arthur had chosen white as well, the young couple would complement each other as much in clothing as it was hoped they would in life. Just like another Princess of Wales who, almost five hundred years later, would wed her prince in St. Paul’s (albeit Wren’s cathedral, not its medieval predecessor familiar to the Tudors), her dress was full-sleeved and full-skirted. Katherine’s wide skirts, puffed out by hoops, aroused considerable interest among the chroniclers who have left us their versions of the events of that day. They commented too on her veil, which reached to her waist and was edged with gold, pearls, and precious stones.
There had been several days of work behind the scenes to make the great church ready. Originally erected on a Saxon foundation, rebuilt after a disastrous fire by the Normans using stones brought from Caen, the church was huge, a symbol of strength, reverence, and pride for the citizens of London. Inside there were wall paintings, gilded alabaster statues of saints with glittering haloes, jeweled chalices and relics on display, and vibrant wall hangings fastened in the choir. Every inch glowed with color in the incense-laden air. A special platform covered in rich red cloth, railed at each side and with a round stage at one end, ran from the west door toward the choir so that all could see the prince and princess during the ceremony.
Trumpets sounded as Katherine was led into the church by Prince Henry, her train carried by Lady Cecily Welles, the queen’s sister. Katherine was accompanied by her ladies, by the ladies of the court, by the most important nobles and figures, including Buckingham and Oxford, and by many of her own countrymen who had come with her from Spain, all dressed in the costliest of fabrics and several with gold chains around their necks. When everyone, including Shaa and the City aldermen, had taken their places in the packed church, Arthur stepped forward to stand next to her. She was on his left, for the Bible taught that women had been formed from a rib taken from the left side of Adam. The aging Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry Deane, performed the nuptials, uttering the well-loved words so familiar to those gathered in St. Paul’s on that cold November Sunday. The chroniclers did not trouble to record what those words were; they assumed all would know them. And today we still know, for missals are extant that tell us. Everyone was there, Deane would have announced, “to join together two bodies” into “one body,” for that was the purpose of matrimony. Arthur and Katherine exchanged vows of fidelity, promising to care for each other in sickness and in health and for richer or poorer, words of love that resonate with us even now. With the formalities complete, Katherine and Arthur turned to both sides of the congregation to acknowledge their evident good wishes. Then, hand in hand, and now husband and wife in the sight of God, they walked into the main body of the great church for a solemn Latin Mass. And that, at least for the present, was that: the culmination of more than ten years’ diplomacy between the Catholic Monarchs and Henry.
The wedding feast that took place inside the bishop’s palace, where tables were laid for more than one hundred guests, catered to the most discerning of palates. There were three main courses, each one comprising a series of dishes: twelve in the first, fifteen in the second, and a massive eighteen in the final one. Lords and knights, none too arrogant to refuse the honor of serving their future king and queen, delivered the laden dishes to the rowdy cheers of the hungry guests. A goldsmith by profession, Shaa was particularly interested in the gold plate on display in two open cupboards, one in the chamber where the meal was consumed and the other in a room nearby. Golden pots, flagons, and cups studded with precious stones were exhibited to Shaa and his brother, who are said to have valued the contents of the second cupboard at £20,000. Henry was determined to show Ferdinand and Isabella that his country was no poverty-stricken backwater on the edge of Europe.
Marriage, however, consists of more than just words. There is a physical dimension. And that was about to come. Doña Elvira and a select group of ladies left the hall during the meal so that they could prepare the marital bed. This had to be done according to strict protocol, a process that took almost two hours. At last, though, all was ready and it was time for Katherine and Arthur to leave their guests and spend their first night together as man and wife. Just as the ceremonies and services were traditional and public, so too was the putting to bed of the newly married couple.
Arthur’s companions joined him for some last-minute ribaldry. There was, one of the chronicles says circumspectly, dancing, pleasure, and “myrthe” to cheer and encourage the studious young prince before the time came for him to be escorted to the bedchamber where he was expected to fulfill his duties. As Arthur gathered his courage, and Doña Elvira cast a last-minute glance around the bedroom to make sure all was in order, Katherine’s ladies helped their mistress out of her wedding finery and into her night robe. Custom dictated that the bride should be put to bed first, and so she was. Tucked up among the soft pillows and crisp linen sheets of the flower-strewn bed, she waited for Arthur in the candlelit room.
Katherine did not have to wait for long. A joking, laughing group of nobles and gentlemen ostentatiously escorted their prince to her chamber door. The Earl of Oxford was there, along with the future Earl of Shrewsbury and the Marquis of Dorset; so too came young Anthony Willoughby, whose father, Sir Willoughby de Broke, had welcomed Katherine when she first set foot on English soil. Among the other merrymakers was William Thomas, one of Arthur’s servants allowed access to the prince’s privy chamber, the most private and intimate part of his suite of rooms. His tasks included helping his master to dress and, significantly, to undress. As they gathered to watch Arthur climb into bed beside Katherine, who was lying demurely beneath the covers, little did these young men imagine that in twenty-five years, they would be questioned intimately on all that they thought they saw and heard that night. Nor did they conceive that their answers, and the circumstances under which they gave them, would be forensically dissected by lawyers, then skeptically assessed again by historians almost five centuries later. We can read those answers in printed Victorian summaries, but, safely stored in the British Library, for those who can decipher them, are the original sixteenth-century manuscripts, fortunately preserved despite the passage of time. And those documents make gripping reading.
If these statements are to be believed, everything certainly seemed to go according to plan. The Marquis of Dorset said Katherine lay “under the coverlet” as Arthur climbed in beside her; Sir Anthony Willoughby said that he saw the bridal bed “wherein the said prince was laid with the princess”; Robert, Viscount Fitzwater, said that he saw Arthur in the bed “where he believed surely the princess lay”; Mary, Countess of Essex, was to assert that she saw Katherine and Arthur in the same bed after the wedding, a statement echoed by the Duchess of Norfolk, who declared that she saw them “lie … in one bed” and that she left them there all night. While not specifically referring to the wedding night, William Thomas remembered helping the prince into his nightgown and taking him “unto the princess’s bedchamber door often and sundry times.” Arthur and Katherine always called each other “prince and princess, man and wife,” Thomas continued.
And it was as man and wife that Katherine and Arthur nestled beneath the covers waiting, not just for the assembled group of nobles to leave them, but for a priest to arrive for a final blessing. When he walked into the room, the priest intoned the prayers heard by many a young Tudor couple. He began by blessing the bed itself, asking God to protect its occupants from “phantasies and illusions of devils”; there should be no bad dreams as Katherine and Arthur should feel safe and protected. The priest went on to bless the prince and princess themselves. “May the hand of the Lord be over you,” he prayed, “and may he send his holy angel to guard and tend you all the days of your life.” After sprinkling them both with holy water, the priest left, his duty done. He was followed by the onlookers. Sir Anthony Willoughby tells us that “at the departing of the noble men every man said to the prince and princess, God give you joy together.”
Whether or not they did have “joy together,” either then or at any other time in their brief months of marriage, was to become an issue that would later rock the very foundations of Tudor England, giving rise to passionate, often partisan, debate. Only two people really knew the truth: Katherine and Arthur. Once the door closed behind the boisterous revelers, prince and princess were alone; there could be no witnesses to what ensued. Anything said by anyone other than the two people involved would be no more than hearsay.
At the time, it was assumed that sexual intercourse did take place. After the blessing of the bed, one of the chroniclers writes, “thise worthy persones concludid and consummat the effecte and complement of the sacrement of matrimony.” Perhaps. There certainly seemed no reason to suppose otherwise. Though Arthur was just fifteen and Katherine almost sixteen, both were considered old enough to consummate the wedding; Margaret Beaufort had, after all, given birth to Henry VII before her own fourteenth birthday. And while he might have lacked the ebullience and glaring good health of his brother, Prince Henry, Arthur was no weakling. He had, said the Marquis of Dorset, a quarter of a century later, “a good and sanguine complexion”; “lusty” was what Charles Brandon had heard said of the prince.
Nor could there be any doubt of what was expected. Katherine’s knowledge of the precise details of how procreation occurred was likely to be vague at best, but like all her sisters, she had been brought up with the dynastic principle firmly entrenched in her psyche. She had never been in any doubt that her God-given role in life was that of a wife and mother; even the pageants she had witnessed on the streets of London emphasized that. The same was true for Arthur. England had emerged from a period of civil war; if the Tudor regime was to survive, progeny were essential, and as the heir, it was up to him to ensure that progeny ensued. So, as the two young people shyly faced each other in that darkened bedchamber, both were thoroughly aware of their responsibilities. But it had been a very long and a very arduous day. Maybe they did their best, managed an embarrassed adolescent fumble, but fatigue and inexperience meant that Arthur did not achieve full penetration; maybe they quite simply fell asleep. Or perhaps, as so many “witnesses” confidently asserted when their king demanded their responses in a court of law, true consummation did in fact take place once all had left and Arthur and Katherine were, at long last, by themselves.
Arthur is alleged to have been full of the joys of marriage next morning as he joked with his gentlemen. If nothing had occurred to end his own virgin state, he was certainly not going to risk losing face among more experienced men of the world by admitting failure. On being jocularly told that he looked “well uppon the matter,” Arthur had happily boasted that he looked “well for one that hath been in the midst of Spain.” Then, just in case his jest had not been fully appreciated, he went on to make it even plainer, announcing, “it is good pastime to have a wife.” Such comments would appear to decide the matter; the trouble is that his alleged remarks were not repeated and publicly aired until Arthur lay cold in his tomb and the times had become dangerous.
Immediately after the wedding night, Katherine herself was suitably silent. This is entirely understandable and in character. While the odd bawdy comment was almost de rigeur for a man, it would have been highly unbecoming and demeaning for any woman, and especially for a princess. Katherine spent the following day quietly resting, closeted with her ladies. One of them, of course, was Doña Elvira. If Katherine needed to share the secrets of her bridal bed, her most likely confidante was this woman, whom Queen Isabella had personally chosen to care for her daughter and who guarded her charge jealously. For the moment, Doña Elvira too kept her own counsel, but it may be significant that there was no ostentatious display of bloodstained bedsheets as there had been after the wedding of Ferdinand and Isabella. Had the sheets been spotted with Katherine’s virgin blood, Doña Elvira might well have been proud to emulate this Spanish ritual in England.
The brief rest was needed, as the exhausting round of celebrations continued for several days following the solemnization of the marriage in St. Paul’s. Now Princess of Wales, Katherine took her place at Arthur’s side within the court as Henry, still delighted with his daughter-in-law, prolonged the festivities despite the cost or his reputation as a king who “coveted to accumulate treasure.” Hoard he did, but he also knew when it was politic to spend, and this was one of those times. And at each joust and banquet the importance of the Spanish alliance, which Katherine embodied, was constantly reiterated.
When the jousts began on the Thursday after her marriage, Katherine joined her husband, the king, the queen, Margaret Beaufort, Prince Henry, and Arthur’s two sisters, Margaret and Mary, together with leading courtiers in the special box constructed for them at the north end of the tiltyard at Westminster. At the opposite end of the field, Sir John Shaa and the most important of the city dignitaries sat in another box, their round of royal duties far from over. As she watched the contenders going through the various combats, Katherine was left in no doubt of her own role as her country’s ambassador. Buckingham, who took a prominent role in the jousts’ opening day, not only sported ostrich feathers, the acknowledged symbol of the Prince of Wales, in his helmet, but rode a horse whose blue velvet trappings included four castles to symbolize Castile. And on the final day, a carriage used for a ceremonial entry by some of the competitors was drawn by beasts (actually men inside animal costumes) including a silver lion and an ibex; the silver lion represented León, one of Queen Isabella’s provinces, and the ibex was renowned as a Spanish animal.
That Katherine was the living symbol of the Anglo-Spanish alliance was also hammered home to her in various after-supper entertainments performed in Westminster Hall. Sometimes the spectacles ended with a carefully choreographed dance performed by the actors, sometimes it was the audience who danced. Katherine danced sedately with one of her ladies; Arthur danced with his aunt, Lady Cecily; and young Henry, throwing off his outer gown in the heat of the moment, danced exuberantly with his sister, Princess Margaret, much to the delight of the onlookers. All seemed perfect.
And yet, if we are to believe what she would later swear twenty-five years later, Katherine nursed a secret, for she knew that all was not as it seemed: her marriage was, so far at least, unconsummated. Perhaps it was this that prompted her sudden lapse into childish temper. She was alleged to be visibly very much out of sorts, “annoyed and pensive” say the chroniclers, when many of the Spanish grandees who had come with her from Spain returned home. Yet the chroniclers generously attribute her changed mood to homesickness; they may be right, the documents give us no more insight. Or perhaps Katherine was only too aware that she could not fulfil her destiny as a wife and mother, working for the interests of Spain as well as England, until she achieved full intercourse with Arthur. Merely sleeping in the same bed was not enough.
King Henry, ignorant of what went on between Katherine and Arthur in their bridal bed and assuming that her changed mood was indeed due to homesickness, decided to console her by showing her his extensive library at Richmond and allowing her to choose a jewel from a selection that he produced for her perusal. Henry’s strategy seems to have worked, and Katherine seemed herself again, in public at least.
But the rounds of entertainments and frivolities could not continue forever. Affairs of state intervened. As Prince of Wales, Arthur had to return to his principality and to his base at Ludlow Castle on the Welsh borders. And after much discussion between the king, his council, the Spanish ambassador Don Pedro de Ayala (whose responsibilities were shared, sometimes uncomfortably, with Dr. de Puebla), and the princess herself, who dutifully professed herself happy to do whatever was thought best, it was decided that the new Princess of Wales should accompany her husband. Although the king was alleged by the ambassador to have used his son to pressure Katherine into agreeing to go to Wales, it is extremely unlikely that Henry would have consulted his son in this matter; sons were expected to obey their fathers. De Ayala was very unhappy about the journey, suspecting that it was all a devious ruse by Henry to ensure that Katherine was forced to use some of the plate that she had brought with her from Spain and that, if damaged, would no longer be counted as part of her dowry. Knowing Henry, that was an eminently reasonable suspicion. De Ayala’s additional concern was that the newly married pair would have far too many opportunities for intercourse, which was popularly believed to be unhealthy for very young men. Indeed, Juana’s future son, Charles V, would one day assert that “an undue indulgence” in “the pleasures of marriage” at too young an age had caused the untimely death of Prince Juan, the Catholic Monarchs’ only male heir.
For Katherine, though, the trip to Wales was probably welcome for the very reason that frightened Ayala: if the wedding night really had not proved eventful, living in close proximity with Arthur, well away from the formalities of Henry’s court, might just be the answer. Her God-given destiny was to be a wife and mother, so the sooner she started on her mission the better. Thus, on a cold December morning in 1501, with her husband at her side, Katherine, Princess of Wales, began the long journey to Ludlow Castle. She little suspected that she would return as a widow.