On a hot July day in 1507, a ship docked at the port of Valencia, a town on Spain’s Mediterranean coast. Ferdinand was back on his home soil—very much so, for Valencia is in Aragon. He made his way slowly into Castile, leaving his wife, Queen Germaine, safely behind within his own realm. This was not the time to introduce her to his daughter.
From now on, all would be well in Juana’s lands—or so Ferdinand and his supporters maintained. His letters to Katherine describe how, from the moment of his arrival, he was besieged by well-wishers; “the prelates and chief persons of the kingdom” had written expressing their “joy” at his return; there were deputations who rushed to say the same thing; there were “demonstrations of rejoicing” from crowds who met him at the Castilian border. “All tumults and disturbances” ended because of the “measures” he had taken. As for Juana, she could hardly have been more delighted to see her father. Their first meeting “had given them both equal pleasure,” he enthused. He went on to say that, following a series of discussions, Juana had agreed that he should do whatever he thought necessary “for the peace and security of the kingdom.” Order, stability, happiness, and trade would revive; he would look after everything.
A telling comment by an anonymous chronicler sums up the political reality with chilling shrewdness. Of course, chronicles should not be taken at face value. If they are official—and Isabella had realized the value of those—they can simply act as vehicles for propaganda, giving details that may be truth or spin; if they are unofficial, the accounts must be compiled using information gleaned from all manner of sources, not all of them reliable or accurate. But in this instance, the unknown chronicler voiced the accepted view of women in a patriarchal society. With Ferdinand at the helm, he recorded, Castile returned to its “previous happy prosperity, because, as the sacred scripture reads: ‘choose a man to govern the republic, and the people will live in peace.’ ” When even the plague died away, as though Ferdinand had waved a magic wand that worked only for men, Juana’s attempt at personal rule was doomed indeed.
And she knew it. Unwilling to confront her father’s authority, she had no choice but to sink back into the role of dutiful daughter. As the months passed, she had less and less say in what happened. Ferdinand took over her finances, he reorganized her household; it was as if Philip was back. She was being ignored. She signed nothing. She would never sign anything again; proclamations and instructions issued in her name were in fact signed by her father. He even insisted that Prince Ferdinand should be with him rather than with her. And it was her father who plotted Juana’s future.
Katherine knew only what Ferdinand reported, and she trusted her father. She had to, for she saw in him her only hope of marrying Prince Henry. Her situation in England was unenviable. Following Doña Elvira’s departure, Henry VII had suggested that Katherine and her entourage should live at court. But sensible though this seemed, she found herself part of the court yet apart from it, rather like a nineteenth-century governess who was neither a servant nor a member of the family. And while the king once wrote that she could live wherever she wanted, her reduced circumstances meant that she had little choice but to go where he placed her; and her apartments were often the most inferior in his palaces.
Since he rarely paid her expenses, trying to make ends meet was still the root cause of many of her problems. Henry’s handouts remained irregular, her debts multiplied, demands upon her from her household never stopped. Feeding, clothing, and safeguarding her attendants had been a worry for years, more or less since Arthur’s death, and she took her responsibilities seriously.
Caring for those who served her was a duty, and duty was always a concept close to her heart. Thus, while pressing for her own dowry payments, she frequently begged for money to help her ladies find theirs. Other than the cloister, marriage was the one respectable career open to females; Katherine, ever a woman of her age, did not want to condemn her ladies to the shame of a lifetime of dependent spinsterhood. As early as 1504, she had begged her father to assist these loyal women, especially six who had come with her from Spain:
Some of them were with the queen my lady (who have the holy joy), and they served her a long time; and for that it is reason that they should marry, and I have nothing for to give to them and to help them. I beseech your highness for to do me a grace, and that you will command to give unto their marriages, and that you will please for to write unto me the sum that your grace shall be pleased and served for to give them, for that I may make answer unto them that shall move of marriages unto them.
Unfortunately, since Ferdinand was finding it hard to assist even his own daughter, helping her attendants was low on his list of priorities. Katherine’s financial straits became so dire that one of her ladies, Francesca de Caceres, eloped to marry an elderly, but very rich, banker, Francisco de Grimaldi, much to the princess’s chagrin.
Yet Katherine was a demanding mistress whom it was not always easy to please. Even before Queen Isabella’s death, she had asked Henry VII to help her deal with squabbles in her household. The king had refused, telling her that although he was “sorry that the few servants” she had could not “live in peace with each other,” the individuals were not under his jurisdiction and she should appeal to her parents if things did not improve. De Puebla and Fuensalida both felt the full force of her scorn, and so, sometimes, did her own personal attendants. Francesca de Caceres eloped only after the princess “sent her away” because of the “annoyance” de Caceres had caused her. And, while still trying to protect her household as best she could, Katherine also pointed out to Ferdinand that “not all” had served her “as they ought.” If only she had more money, she continued in the same letter, she could pay those who were decent and trustworthy while sending away those who gave her “great annoyance.”
One person who caused “annoyance” to others but never to herself was her confessor, Friar Diego Fernandez. This young friar became her rock. Ladies like Maria de Salinas did their best to comfort Katherine and keep up her spirits as she wandered through her rooms, fumed against her poverty, waited for her father’s letters, or looked for visits from his ambassadors who would tell her what was going on in Spain and what her father wanted her to do in England. But, lonely and worried, she gained the most support from Friar Diego. Her dependence on him led her to engage in conduct verging on the indiscreet.
Blind to any faults the young man had, Katherine wrote to tell her father that she considered Friar Diego “the best [confessor] that ever woman of my position had, with respect to his life, as well as to his holy doctrine and proficiency in letters.” He served her “with such labour and fatigue as no one else would have undergone,” being “faithful in his office” as well as “giving good advice and good example.” If only she could reward him as he deserved, she would feel less afflicted and grieved. She could not understand why others failed to spot in Diego the same selfless qualities that so enraptured her; Fuensalida behaved “badly” toward him, she reported in astonishment. Katherine, who had learned so much from de Puebla and who was acting as her father’s ambassador, becoming heavily involved in diplomacy in the process, could still behave with endearing, if surprising, naïveté.
To Fuensalida, the friar was not only a possible rival, he was dangerous. The ambassador may well have had a point. Diego got above himself, overstepping the mark. That Katherine mentions the friar giving her “good advice” speaks volumes: clearly she was listening to the dictates of her spiritual adviser in a political as well as a religious sphere. Neither a councillor nor an accredited envoy, Diego was intervening in areas that were not within his remit. One incident illustrates this perfectly.
It happened after Katherine suddenly felt ill and vomited—sadly, not an unusual occurrence for her. That same evening, Henry VII sent a message telling her to get ready so that she and Princess Mary could travel together to Richmond the next day. Katherine, eager to be with the king again, was ready at the appointed time, as was Princess Mary. Suddenly Diego interfered. Katherine, he said, should not go. “I am well; I do not wish to stay here alone,” protested the princess, but to no avail. Diego was adamant, using his office to exert his authority: “I tell you upon pain of mortal sin you do not go to-day.” Faced with Diego’s shameless threat to her soul, Katherine dared not go, pleading illness to Princess Mary, who had waited patiently for her for more than two hours. Few believed Katherine was really sick, because her “illness” had not prevented her attending Mass or eating heartily. The king “was very much vexed,” but Diego had his way, and Katherine had to set off on the following day instead.
Fuensalida reported the event venomously to Ferdinand. The ambassador was genuinely anxious, scenting an ominous whiff of scandal that might even scuttle Katherine’s projected marriage. The friar, he wrote, was “young, and light, and haughty,” he “governed” the princess’s household, she was “so submissive” that she obeyed him when he made her “do a great many things which it would be better not to do.” In a further epistle, this time to Ferdinand’s secretary, Almazan, the same man to whom Ferdinand had sworn that he had come to an agreement with Philip only because his own life was in peril, Fuensalida drove the point home:
I wrote to your Lordship about a friar who is here as confessor to the Princess, who would to God he were in his monastery, and not here, because he neither brings nor has brought any good, and if he is here much longer, he will bring greater injury on her Highness … may God destroy me if I see in the friar anything for which she should have so much affection, for he has neither learning, nor appearance, nor manners, nor competency, nor credit …
And the Katherine who could sob that she had barely enough cash to clothe herself, and who professed that she had “suffered martyrdom” for her country and her family, managed to secure sufficient resources to buy books for her beloved confessor. She also berated her chamberlain for trying to stop her from selling plate “to satisfy the follies of the friar,” as Fuensalida put it.
Worse still, the friar seemed to know how he was compromising the princess. When taxed by Fuensalida about the gossip, he said casually, “in this house there are evil tongues, and they have slandered me, and not with the lowest in the house, but with the highest.” It was as if he was boasting that his name could be linked to that of the princess. He would have left, he exclaimed, except that there was “no disgrace” in him and only by staying could he prove his worthiness. Fuensalida was so outraged he told Ferdinand that he came “almost beyond power of restraint from laying hands on him.”
No matter what Fuensalida said, Katherine would have none of it. She needed the friar, she dreaded his leaving her. In a letter to her father berating the ambassador, she entreated Ferdinand to write himself to the friar “commanding him to continue and not to forsake” her. “For the greatest comfort in my troubles is the consolation and the support he gives me,” she wrote wretchedly. She seems to have had no conception that her devotion to the friar, even if it were justified, could be construed as going beyond the accepted norms of courtly demeanor; and Henry VII did not preside over a court notorious for scandal.
Fuensalida appreciated the potential fallout only too well. After the episode in which Katherine did not go to Richmond on the day Henry ordained, the king did not see her for almost three weeks and did not check to see how she was after she became ill again. That, and the fact that Henry did not bother to intervene when tales of the young friar reached the royal ears, seemed ominous to the ambassador. Negotiations for the princess’s marriage were forever delicate: giving Henry free ammunition to call off the match was foolhardy. Despite Fuensalida’s best efforts, though, Ferdinand did not recall Diego. Perhaps he did not want to upset his daughter any further. So the young friar remained firmly ensconced for some time.
If the friar really was Katherine’s “greatest comfort,” she certainly had need of him, for the diplomatic intrigues and bargaining in which she was becoming involved were incredibly complex. Her marriage to Prince Henry, though the core issue to her, became intermingled with other unions and with the European situation as a whole. And in that mix, her sister Juana would also be a player, albeit a silent one.
Still reeling from Arthur’s death in April 1502, Henry VII had been dealt an additional blow when Queen Elizabeth had died after childbirth less than a year later. With only one son and two daughters left, he had very quickly turned his thoughts toward remarriage, having his portrait painted to show that, at forty-six, he was still a fine figure of a man. Whether or not he seriously considered Katherine as a contender, he was soon scouring Europe for a new wife, bringing his usual perspicacity and thoroughness to bear. When Ferdinand and Isabella had suggested Ferdinand’s niece, the widowed Queen Joanna of Naples, Henry had been eager to find out just what she looked like. In addition to having poor de Puebla request that the Catholic Monarchs send a picture “portraying her figure and the features of her face,” Henry sent out his own envoys to discover how old she was, her height, what her face was like in shape, expression, and complexion. He also wanted to know about her hands and fingers, her breasts, whether she had hair on her lips, whether her breath was sweet, and if she had “any sickness of her nativity, blemish or deformity.” Clearly, Henry was not about to waste himself on a woman he found repulsive. In fact, once he had established that the queen had no lands or wealth to offer, his interest, despite her sweet breath and “somewhat great and full” breasts, evaporated remarkably fast.
Soon Henry was searching elsewhere. And one of the front-runners was Katherine’s sister Juana, who after all was a queen and whom the king had already met during her brief visit to Windsor.
Since he appears to have broached the subject with Katherine first, he obviously saw how useful she could be as a go-between for himself and her father, especially after a proud Katherine delivered a “letter of credence” to him proving that Ferdinand regarded her as one of his accredited ambassadors. For the next couple of years, Katherine promoted her own interests, her father’s interests, and a potential union with Juana assiduously and vociferously. For if Henry married Juana, the Spanish alliance would be finally secure, and her own marriage with Prince Henry much more certain.
Katherine threw herself into the project wholeheartedly. Once she had established that Ferdinand was interested in the proposal, she took up her pen to write to her sister urging it. In an intriguing letter, which treats Juana as quite sane, she began by assuring her sister that Henry had felt just as disappointed at seeing her for so short a time at Windsor as Katherine herself had been. Had the king not been advised by his council “not to interfere between husband and wife,” he would have kept her at court longer. As it was, Juana’s abrupt departure had “weighed much upon his heart.” Then, despite her own complaints about how badly Henry had treated her since Arthur’s death, she launched into a eulogy of his excellent character. He was endowed, she said, “with the greatest virtues”; he was “feared and esteemed … by all Christendom, as being very wise and possessed of immense treasures,” as well as “having at his command powerful bodies of excellent troops.” And her sister should not forget, Katherine continued, how beneficial the marriage would be to Castile, and how it would “double the affection” existing between Henry and Ferdinand. Playing next on Juana’s maternal feelings, she vowed that the match would be useful to her son Charles, too. Katherine even pressed the religious button: should the marriage take place, Ferdinand would be able to go on a crusade against the Moors of North Africa, which would bring the entire continent under Christian rule.
It was all very persuasive; every base was covered (although she did not tell Juana how the match might hasten her own wedding with Prince Henry). For Katherine, everything she wrote to encourage her sister to marry Henry VII was true. And over the coming months, she continued to do all she could to make it happen. She wrote to her father frequently, she talked to Henry, she acted as intermediary between the two kings, she met with de Puebla and with Fuensalida. And, using all the skills she was so rapidly acquiring, she acted on her own initiative, venturing, albeit diffidently, to proffer advice to her own father. When Henry, growing impatient with the lack of progress, asked her to write to Cisneros on his behalf, she did just that, although she assured Ferdinand that she wrote only in general terms. Then, growing in confidence, she recommended that her father should give the archbishop the letter only if Cisneros was “very much devoted” to Ferdinand’s service. She really was learning; de Puebla could be gratified with his student.
But she had not graduated yet; she was still outclassed by her father. Just because Katherine believed in the match did not mean that either Juana or Ferdinand was as committed as she was. Juana’s views were not considered important, so we cannot really know what she thought, but for the rest of her life she made sure that she never did anything that might endanger her son Charles’s inheritance. Another child by another husband might just do that. On the one occasion when her father risked allowing the English envoy, John Stiles, to visit her, she refused to be drawn out on the marriage, adopting her usual practice of promising nothing.
As for Ferdinand, the current situation, with himself in full control and Juana excluded, suited him admirably. Giving Henry an excuse to interfere in Castilian affairs might be most unwise. It would be exchanging Philip for a much shrewder and craftier opponent. No, probably better to leave things as they were, but there was no need to spell it out to Henry or Katherine: the prudent course was to leave the door open in case things changed. Ferdinand always was a man who liked to run with the fox and hunt with the hounds.
Unfortunately, as Katherine became uncomfortably aware, her marriage to Prince Henry was more than ever on a knife’s edge, because it now seemed to depend on Henry’s marriage to Juana. In a dispatch so typical of the wily Spanish monarch, therefore, Fuensalida was told to keep dangling the prospect of the latter, but without giving a formal pledge, while at the same time pushing for Katherine. “It would be well” if the ambassador did not “hold out a certain prospect of effecting his [Henry’s] marriage with the Queen,” but he “should not deprive him of all hope whatever.” Complex intrigue and double-dealing were second nature to Ferdinand. If Katherine thought herself an expert dissembler, she was but a novice compared to her father.
At length Ferdinand came to a decision: Katherine’s marriage mattered enough to give way to Henry, not over Juana, but over something that was even closer to Henry’s heart—money. For years, Katherine had begged, badgered, wept over the outstanding sums on her dowry; for just as long, Ferdinand had procrastinated, fretting over how much her plate would be worth, whether the English goldsmiths would undervalue it, how he was to find the coin to make up the difference as well as for the agreed cash payment, entreating Henry for postponement after postponement. By the middle of 1508, Ferdinand had made up his mind. If it secured the actual ceremonies, he would give way. Fuensalida was ordered to tell Henry that Ferdinand would settle the remaining amount in cash, removing Katherine’s plate from the equation. The banker Grimaldi, the very one who had married one of the princess’s ladies, would be able to sort out the sum required.
It was a massive concession, but Ferdinand was increasingly worried that there would be no wedding for his daughter no matter what he did. Perhaps Henry might take the rumors about Friar Diego seriously; perhaps he might arrange for Prince Henry to marry a different bride; perhaps he would betroth him to a French princess. Anything could happen.
Katherine clung to her hopes. Despite all her complaints, despite all that had happened to her, her belief that she would triumph one day is apparent in virtually every letter she wrote. Just once, in 1509, as she defended her friar, sent diatribes against the ineptitude of Fuensalida, and worried herself almost to the point of illness over whether Prince Henry might wed another, she indulged in uncharacteristic defeatism and begged Ferdinand to either help her or bring her home so that she could spend her “few remaining days in serving God.”
The person with “few remaining days,” however, was not the princess. Toward the end of April 1509, just a month after Katherine’s despairing letter, Henry VII lay dying at his favorite palace of Richmond. Katherine’s future would now lie in the hands of his seventeen-year-old son.