In March 1503, royal officials settled some outstanding bills. Among them we can find one of five shillings for John Cope, a London tailor. His task, entrusted to him by Queen Elizabeth, had been to line and cover a litter with black cloth and to edge it with black ribbons and black fringe. It had been designed for a somber purpose.
When she lost her elder son so tragically at Ludlow, the queen had played no part in arranging his burial. Her task was with the living, and the living was her daughter-in-law, Katherine. Once the widowed princess was strong enough to travel, Doña Elvira and her ladies gently helped her into the litter so thoughtfully sent by her mother-in-law, and Katherine journeyed slowly toward London. It was spring, that loveliest of English seasons, a time when the burgeoning leaves are still a soft yellow, blossom is beginning to emerge from bud, and the fresh, pure air promises rebirth and hope. Enveloped inside her litter, shielded from the prying populace, Katherine saw little of the beauties of the countryside. Her thoughts had to be more pragmatic.
Those of her parents certainly were. “The news of the death of Prince Arthur,” they wrote to de Puebla, still one of their London ambassadors, revived “the affliction caused by all their former losses.” Nonetheless, continued these most devout of monarchs, “the will of God must be obeyed.” Condolences expressed, they applied themselves to practicalities, aiming to maintain the alliance with England at all costs. The international situation, uneasily calm for a while, was becoming increasingly ugly. “The King of France wishes to attack us, and to make war upon us and our kingdom, with all his forces, without cause or reason,” they told another of their London ambassadors, the Duke of Estrada. Should fighting break out, Henry would be useful, especially since he could seize the chance to make war on the French himself so that Louis XII would be committed on two fronts. There was therefore only one course of action open to Ferdinand and Isabella: “to conclude with Henry … a marriage between their daughter Katherine and his son Henry, Prince of Wales.” That was the instruction given to Estrada. “In order … to have this affair of the betrothal concluded, use all the eloquence that you may see to be requisite,” they ordered him, “not omitting anything which may prove advantageous to it.”
Unfortunately, their control over what might prove disadvantageous was limited. One area, in particular, was central: Had the marriage been consummated or not? With Arthur decaying in his tomb, only Katherine really knew the answer, and she told neither Henry and Elizabeth nor the Catholic Monarchs. Despite later rumors, the latter did not receive blood-spattered sheets smuggled aboard a Spanish ship for only them to see.
As her parents attempted to discover the truth and frantically schemed to get her installed in Prince Henry’s bed, Katherine quietly recuperated at Durham House, the London palace of the Bishop of Durham. The house was splendid. Sited close to the Strand, near Charing Cross and Covent Garden, the three-hundred-year-old mansion boasted a huge hall supported by impressive marble pillars, and its well-tended gardens stretched down to the banks of the River Thames. If Katherine was destined to become a queen, she could have asked for no better residence.
Yet perhaps she was to become a mother instead. Cases of widows giving birth after their husband’s death were far from uncommon, and were indeed very close to home. Henry himself had been born almost three months after his father, Edmund Tudor, died from plague and Katherine’s sister-in-law, Margaret of Burgundy, had had a miscarriage shortly after Prince Juan’s death. Interestingly, contrary to Ferdinand and Isabella’s letter dated May 10, 1502, addressing him as the Prince of Wales, young Prince Henry was not given the title immediately. This delay suggests that Henry VII and Elizabeth believed that the marriage of Katherine and Arthur had been consummated and that they were waiting to see if Katherine menstruated. Clearly she did, because Prince Henry was recognized as Prince of Wales at the end of June and given the title officially eighteen months later.
The question of consummation was important because the pope’s consent in the form of a dispensation was needed if Katherine was to marry Prince Henry. According to the Church, she had become related to him “in the first degree of affinity” by marrying his brother, Arthur. The Catholic Monarchs were old hands at getting a thorny problem like this sorted out; after all, they had successfully obtained a dispensation for their third daughter, Maria, to marry Manuel of Portugal on the death of their eldest daughter, Manuel’s first wife. The Arthur-Henry difficulty was surely a mirror image of the Portuguese situation, and since the pope had proved accommodating then, there was no reason to suppose the current pope would be any less helpful now. A dispensation could be issued whether or not consummation had taken place; it was just that the wording would be different in each case. And it was vital that the dispensation be precise and correct to head off potential repercussions in the future.
So it mattered very much whether Katherine and Arthur had done more than merely sleep in the same bed. Her former tutor, now her chaplain, Alessandro Geraldini, obviously believed that more had indeed been done, and hinted as much to de Puebla. Katherine herself wrote letters to her parents but obviously drew a modest veil over the intimate secrets of her nights with Arthur, because two days after mentioning that they had received her missives, Ferdinand told Estrada “to get at the truth as regards the fact whether the Prince and Princess of Wales consummated the marriage, since nobody has told us about it.” Shortly afterward, someone did tell them, but that someone was Doña Elvira, furious that Alessandro had confided what he thought he knew to de Puebla. She wrote a personal letter to Isabella telling her that Katherine was definitely still a virgin. Although Doña Elvira’s original letter has long since disappeared, we know of its existence because the queen referred to it when writing to Estrada. “It is already known for a certainty that the said Princess of Wales, our daughter, remains as she was here, for so Doña Elvira has written to us,” Isabella declared. Doña Elvira’s word was good enough for the queen. Negotiations with the pope, however, dragged on.
And so did the other question that vexed the Catholic Monarchs: that of money. On the same day that she had married Arthur, the first half of Katherine’s dowry had been handed over, in cash. The other half was due in two further installments, the first within six months of the marriage and the remainder, to be paid partly in cash and partly from the jewels and plate that Katherine had brought from Spain, within twelve months of the marriage. Unfortunately, Arthur had died five months after the ceremony. Ferdinand and Isabella were adamant not only that they would not pay the second half of the dowry but that they expected Henry to return the first half. They also thought he should grant Katherine her jointure rights, the allowance made to a widow from her deceased husband’s estates.
Although warned by their ambassador, de Ayala, that “if gold coin once enters his [Henry’s] strong boxes, it never comes out again,” Ferdinand and Isabella pressed their demands. Repeatedly. And they got nowhere.
In fact, they were getting nowhere over the entire marriage project, for, unlike when he was almost begging for Katherine’s marriage to Arthur, Henry was taking his time over her marrying Prince Henry. By now, the king had been on the throne for more than sixteen years. His grasp on power was firmer; he was richer; he had fought off rebellions and executed plotters; he had beheaded Warbeck and Margaret Pole’s brother, the Earl of Warwick. True, one key rival, Warwick’s cousin, Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, was still at large, protected by Maximilian and Philip, but perhaps an agreement with Philip might be brokered one day. All in all, there was no need to rush into a match for his only son and heir; he would take his time, consider all options.
Katherine, the subject of these negotiations, played no part in them. She grew steadily stronger at Durham House, surrounded by familiar servants and her ladies, leading a comfortable, tranquil, if boring, existence. While her parents painted a poignant picture of their daughter’s plight as a widow “overwhelmed by grief,” there is no evidence that she was anything of the kind. It is impossible to say how deeply her emotions were affected by Arthur’s death. While her marriage had been political and had lasted for less than six months, the pair had been closeted together at Ludlow and she was bound to feel a natural sadness at a life cut short. However, she had not given way. She had certainly been ill, as she often was in her early years in England, but she coped with Arthur’s sudden death with a stoicism of which her mother would have been proud. Katherine’s eldest sister, the queen of Portugal, had almost collapsed under the weight of her sorrow when her first husband, Prince Afonso, was fatally injured. “No other Princess ever endured more grief … or led such a sad and bitter life,” Isabella had written to Estrada at the time. Not so Katherine. Made of sterner stuff than her elder sister, Katherine was her mother’s daughter in this regard as well as in so many others.
And as Henry dawdled and the pope deliberated, Isabella was busily scheming to finalize her daughter’s next marriage. Katherine was a royal princess with plenty of childbearing years ahead of her, and royal princesses were meant to be wives and serve their countries; that was what Isabella was set on achieving. The queen’s methods reveal much of her inner character, a character so similar to Katherine’s own.
Committed Catholic though she was, Isabella had the lucky gift of convincing herself that what she believed was good for Spain was also good for God. In a letter concerning war against France that she sent to de Puebla in 1495, part of which is so obscured by water stains as to be undecipherable, she writes, “Though this business is the business of God and of the Church, to defend which all we Christian Princes are obliged, there might be mixed in it something of [here it is unreadable] our own interest.” In other words, while defending God, there was no reason why she could not defend her own interests as well. To her mind, politics and religion could work in tandem.
And she was quite prepared to lie in what she felt was a just cause, as she had done in 1496 when the King of Scotland had asked to marry one of her daughters. If Katherine married Arthur, the queen wanted to prevent skirmishes on the Scottish border, so, knowing perfectly well that all her daughters were spoken for, she had instructed de Puebla not to stress these prior commitments. Instead, she said: “We must not deprive the King of Scots of his hope of having our daughter. On the contrary we must amuse him as long as possible.” She had been perfectly happy to deceive the Scottish monarch if that was the way to achieve her ends. As her letters reveal, she tried the same approach with Henry VII.
It might be better, she pretended, for Katherine to return home rather than stay in England. “You shall say to the King of England,” she told Estrada, “that we cannot endure that a daughter whom we love should be so far from us when she is in affliction, and that she should not have us at hand to console her.” Besides, she said, Katherine would feel more at liberty to express her sorrow in Spain than in England: “The Princess of Wales can show the sense she entertains of her loss better here, and give freer vent to her grief because the customs of this country better permit it than do those of England.”
In a move clearly calculated to pressure Henry into agreeing to the new marriage, the ambassadors were frequently told to make ostentatious preparations for Katherine’s departure. Yet, the queen reiterated to her ambassador, “the one object … is to bring the betrothal to a conclusion as soon as you are able.” Whether she remembered to tell Katherine of her machinations or whether the princess thought that she really was about to go home is unknown.
Still the English king took his time. With nothing concrete from the pope as yet, he felt no urgency. And he anticipated a personal joy: Queen Elizabeth was pregnant. Toward the end of January 1503, she moved into her private apartments within the Tower of London to prepare for the birth of her baby. The child, a daughter rather than the longed-for son, was born “suddenly” (presumably prematurely) on February 2. She was named Katherine in honor of one of the queen’s sisters. Sadly, the child was sickly, and Elizabeth herself soon became dangerously ill. Henry, worried about the woman who had been his wife for seventeen years, sent urgently to Kent for one of his most trusted physicians, Dr. Aylesworth. But even he could not save the queen, who died eleven days later on the morning of her thirty-seventh birthday, her baby lasting but a few days longer.
Coming so soon after the death of Arthur, the news was devastating for the royal family. We have no record of Katherine’s response; she was perhaps too young to voice independent condolences, and she did not attend the queen’s funeral. Ferdinand and Isabella said that the “tidings have, of a truth, caused us much grief.” Arthur’s former tutor, Bernard André, summed up the feelings of many who had known the queen when he wrote: “She exhibited from her very cradle, towards God an admirable fear and service; towards her parents a wonderful obedience; towards her brothers and sisters an almost incredible love; towards the poor, and the ministers of Christ, a revered and singular affection.”
The most affected were, of course, Elizabeth’s children and her husband. Now almost twelve, her remaining son, Prince Henry, found her death very difficult to bear. “News of the death of my dearest mother” was “hateful intelligence,” he would write a few years afterward.
The normally taciturn, self-controlled King Henry kept sufficient hold upon his emotions to give the necessary orders for his wife’s funeral and then “departed to a solitary place to pass his sorrow, and would no man should resort to him but those whom he had appointed,” his action offering us a rare glimpse into the personal feelings of this most private of kings.
Elizabeth’s funeral was as elaborate as that of Arthur. Her body was embalmed and enclosed in a lead coffin. She lay in state within the Tower, her ladies and attendants keeping watch over her both day and night as prayers were said and Masses were sung. She rested in the Tower for the next eleven days before she was taken to her grave.
The silent streets of the City of London were lined with people carrying lighted torches and candles as her coffin, placed on a chariot draped with black velvet, drawn by six horses also draped in black, traveled slowly toward St. Peter’s, Westminster. Finally the casket was lowered into a hastily prepared vault within the great abbey church to await the day when it would be moved into the specially constructed marvel that is now Henry VII’s Chapel, where she lies to this day. Maybe coins did not flow readily from his treasure chests, but Henry was not parsimonious in matters of state; his wife’s funeral expenses totaled £2,800.
Elizabeth’s demise impacted Katherine in an unexpected fashion. The succession to Henry VII’s hard-won throne now depended on just one son and two daughters. At forty-six, the king was perfectly capable of fathering more children; he just needed a new wife. With Elizabeth barely cold, he began to cast his eyes around for a suitable bride. What appears to us as indecent haste was, by the standards of the age, simply common sense. Death came swiftly then, indiscriminately striking down rich and poor, old and young, male and female with terrifying ease; Elizabeth was not the first queen to die in childbed, nor would she be the last. And a spare heir was always advisable, as Henry had discovered from bitter experience.
So, far from condemning him for indecent haste and callousness, the Catholic Monarchs, and Katherine, sympathized with Henry’s plight. They drew the line, however, at any suggestion that Katherine should replace Elizabeth as Henry’s next queen. When de Puebla informed Isabella that such a union was “spoken of in England,” she was quick to put a stop to it. Such a thing, she wrote, “would be a very evil thing—one never before seen, and the mere mention of which offends the ears—we would not for anything in the world that it should take place.” Whether Henry himself really had suggested the match, or de Puebla merely repeated unfounded gossip, is uncertain. In any case, Katherine was too marketable a property for Isabella to waste her on the aging king; Isabella and Ferdinand wanted Katherine to be a queen consort for as long as possible. Even the new Prince of Wales, they said prophetically, was not as well suited to their daughter as Arthur had been “on account of her age.” He was, after all, six years younger than she. Still, he was the only English prince available, so they stepped up their efforts.
Finally it seemed as if they were getting somewhere because Henry, having weighed up the alternatives, concluded that Katherine was, after all, a suitable wife for his beloved son, and a tentative treaty was signed in June 1503. The couple would wed, it was stated, once Prince Henry was fifteen, which he would be in two years. But the treaty, so welcome in Spain and in Durham House, contained glaring pitfalls.
One was the wording of the clause referring to the knotty question of consummation, and the need for both Henry and the Catholic Monarchs to “employ all their influence with the Court of Rome” to secure a papal dispensation. Instead of affirming Katherine’s virgin status, the clause confirmed that her marriage to Arthur “was solemnised according to the rites of the Catholic Church, and afterwards consummated.” Surprisingly, the usually shrewd Ferdinand seemed disinclined to haggle. In a letter to his ambassador in Rome he said:
In a clause of the treaty which mentions the dispensation of the Pope, it is stated that the princess Katherine consummated her marriage with Prince Arthur. The fact, however, is, that although they were wedded, Prince Arthur and Princess Katherine never consummated the marriage. It is well known in England that the Princess is still a virgin. But as the English are much disposed to cavil, it has seemed to be more prudent to provide for the case as though the marriage had been consummated …
Evidently, the Catholic Monarchs did not let the issue rest, however. By December 1503, the dispensation had been obtained and its wording changed to “perhaps” consummated. There things stood. Katherine, living in a state of uncertainty while her future was being thrashed out by her elders, was as relieved as her parents that at least a dispensation was granted, but the ambiguity concerning the question of consummation would eventually come to haunt her.
In comparison to this, the financial part of the treaty appeared almost tame. Ostensibly, all was straightforward. Her parents conceded that the first part of the dowry for her original wedding, which Henry had safely locked away in his treasure chests, would form the first part of her new dowry. The second half would be paid just as had been authorized previously. Ferdinand and Isabella concurred with Henry that their daughter should give up the widow’s jointure that she had been owed on Arthur’s death, provided that Prince Henry settled the same sums upon her when they married. Unfortunately, despite the appearance that everything was settled, the financial details were to become yet another cause of anguish for the young princess over the next few years.
With the final treaty having been duly signed, and a betrothal ceremony performed, Katherine emerged from Durham House affianced. Providence, and her parents, had decreed that her duty was to be queen of England; so be it. King Henry treated her kindly, even allowing her to see the papal dispensation for added reassurance, and he brought her to court. In the brief period before Arthur’s death, she had visited some royal residences; now she did so once more. She stayed at Richmond, the palace of which the king was most proud because of the major improvements he had instituted there, and at Windsor she went hunting in the park and in the forest, a pastime she loved. She met her future husband again, and she formed an enduring friendship with the king’s younger daughter, Princess Mary.
But the strain was all too much for her. She found it hard to adjust to the English climate, and that, combined with the heady round of gaiety, to which she was unaccustomed, and the relief of the betrothal, all took their toll. She became ill with “ague and derangement of the stomach,” and after seeming to recover, suffered a relapse that left her more prostrate than before. A solicitous Henry had her conveyed back to Durham House to recuperate. He inquired after her every day, sent messages of comfort to her, offered to visit her, and was eager to send doctors to tend her; he could not have done more. Katherine’s own physicians resorted to the traditional remedies of purging and bleeding, not entirely successfully, as on two occasions “no blood came.” She looked pale, she lost her appetite, and she suffered every day “from cold and heat.” Yet Katherine had a natural resilience and an inner strength; within a few weeks she was much better. And the episode served a useful purpose in helping her to develop her relationship with the king. He “rejoices to hear that she is recovered,” he wrote to her, and “is glad that she wishes to hear from him so greatly.” Katherine was, at this stage, the perfect daughter-in-law-to-be.
But her happiness would be short-lived once more. Before 1504 was out, news came from Spain that would change her sister’s life irrevocably and would bring Katherine nothing but misery.