Early on the morning of Whit Sunday, May 27, 1520, Katherine’s ladies helped her into a gown of cloth of gold lined with ermine, carefully lowering strings of pearls over her small, neat head. For her, this was a very happy day: she was about to meet Charles, Juana’s eldest son, one of the most important men in Europe, for the very first time.
Now thirty-four, worn out by frequent pregnancies, Katherine looked very different from the young girl who had so enchanted everyone when she had arrived from Spain nineteen years before. Her face was plumper, the set of her jaw more decided, her skin less taut, her waistline thicker. But her demeanor was as regal as ever, her manner as gracious, and she was determined to look her best for her sister’s son.
She and Henry had left Greenwich on Monday, May 21, to travel to Canterbury, where they would wait for Charles to arrive. For Katherine in particular it had been nerve-racking, as no one was certain whether Charles would make the rendezvous before the English party had to set off for Calais, so news of his arrival off Dover on the late afternoon of Saturday the twenty-sixth gladdened her heart. Cardinal Wolsey, Archbishop of York, immediately rushed to welcome him.
Wolsey, the butcher’s son, was now rich beyond belief, his hubris increasing as his wealth multiplied. When he traveled, he did so with as much pomp as though he were a king or pope himself, accompanied by a bodyguard of two hundred archers and as many as two hundred gentlemen dressed in crimson velvet, heavy gold chains gleaming upon their breasts. Even his cardinal’s mule was covered in crimson velvet and boasted trappings of gold. He was, wrote an anonymous French gentleman who watched one of his progresses, “the proudest prelate that ever breathed.” His position as papal legate made him supreme within the English church, his overall authority surpassing that of Archbishop Warham of Canterbury, and his role as Henry’s minister and fixer was universally recognized. England’s government, the Venetian ambassador once reported, was “exclusively in the hands of the Cardinal of York.” It was Wolsey who ruled “the entire kingdom” and “may be considered King in so far as its administration is concerned,” the ambassador affirmed. The cardinal was “alter Rex,” the other king, a man whom it was never wise to antagonize.
The days when Henry might have asked Buckingham to greet Charles were long since gone; now Wolsey had that honor. So the moment he heard that Charles’s ships were off the coast, Wolsey and fifty of his gentlemen set off smartly from Canterbury to Dover to receive him in the king’s name. With Wolsey’s Latin address ringing in his ears, Charles was escorted to Dover Castle, where apartments had been prepared for him. Henry followed his minister as quickly as he could, although Charles was already in bed by the time the English king rode into the courtyard. Nonetheless, Charles, swiftly rising, “exchanged embraces and other loving compliments” with his aunt’s husband.
On the following morning, Katherine, resplendent in her cloth of gold and pearls, waited in Warham’s palace while Henry and Charles, who had ridden over to Canterbury from Dover together, went into the great church for prayers, accompanied by the ubiquitous Wolsey, the Dukes of Suffolk and Buckingham, and members of Charles’s entourage. Before the altar, Warham sprinkled holy water upon the two kings, gave them “the wood of the holy cross to kiss,” and began the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus, which the Venetian ambassador, possibly tongue in cheek, informs us “was suited … to the conference between the two Sovereigns, united by spiritual love and goodwill for the benefit of Christendom.”
As the last notes faded away, Henry and Charles progressed along a purple velvet carpet out of the church and to Warham’s official residence. After being met at the entrance by twenty-five of the “handsomest and best apparelled” court ladies, and passing along the corridor lined with twenty of Katherine’s pages sporting “gold brocade and crimson satin in checquers,” Charles and Henry went up the fifteen steps of the main marble staircase to where Katherine was waiting. Aunt and nephew embraced tenderly, she being unable to hold back the tears as she clasped the tall, thin young man in her arms and spoke to him for the very first time.
After breakfast came Mass. Henry and Charles, each sparkling in cloth of gold and silver and arrayed in precious jewels, walked in procession to their special pew to the right of the altar, a pew decorated with gold-and-silver brocade embroidered with roses and carpeted in crimson velvet. Once the two kings were settled, it was Katherine’s turn to make a grand entrance. Now changed into a gown of cloth of gold lined with violet velvet, her underskirt of silver clearly visible, her hair covered by a black-and-gold headdress dotted with jewels, and wearing a magnificent necklace of “very large pearls” from which hung a diamond cross, the queen entered a second pew situated to the left of the altar. With her was her sister-in-law Mary, “the French Queen,” in silver cloth, gold, and pearls. Wolsey, in crimson and ermine, sat on a gilt chair close to the altar as Warham celebrated the Mass.
There was another Mass on the following day, Whit Monday, and again Katherine’s ladies dressed their mistress sumptuously, this time in a dress of cloth of gold and violet velvet, intricately embroidered with flowers of gold thread and pearls. Around her neck they arranged a pearl necklace with a diamond pendant of Saint George killing the dragon. Wonderful though she appeared, as did Charles in his silver-and-gold brocade, nobody quite matched Henry himself. In cloth of gold and gray velvet, a jeweled belt around his thickening waist, buttons made from rubies, sapphires, and diamonds, and a breathtaking jeweled collar, Henry stole the show.
After dinner, Henry joined in the dancing while Charles quietly watched. In the evening came a banquet at which the guests included Henry’s leading nobles, key figures from Charles’s retinue, and the ambassadors from France, Spain, and Venice. Henry, Charles, Katherine, Mary “the French Queen,” and Wolsey sat at the top table. There was so much food that the banquet lasted for four hours; there were special dances, there were entertainments. The festivities went on throughout the night, no one getting to bed before daybreak.
As Katherine rested on the following day, Charles and Henry, no doubt with the attentive and indispensable Wolsey on hand, “sat in council until late in the evening.” For Katherine, it was enough to have seen Charles and perhaps start the process of renewing Anglo-Spanish amity. Charles wanted to renew that amity, too, but he also wanted something more concrete. In theory, he was incredibly mighty, certainly infinitely mightier than Henry and, on paper, mightier even than Francis. But Charles knew that the discontent he had left behind in Spain could erupt at any minute, that his treasury was depleted, that the office of Holy Roman Emperor gave him a title but limited power, that the Turks were forever pushing toward the empire’s eastern frontiers, and that Francis would never rest until he had extended his control in Italy, largely at Charles’s expense. To cap it all, an obscure German monk, Martin Luther, had caused a sensation with his outspoken criticisms of Holy Mother Church, outlined in his 95 theses that he had nailed to the church door at Wittenburg in Germany in 1517.
The problems facing Charles were immense. He suspected that the universal peace and brotherhood to which he was ostensibly committed would quickly evaporate. When trouble came, he wanted Henry with him, not against him. So if he could disengage Henry from Francis, preferably scuttling his meeting with the French king and breaking up the proposed marriage of Princess Mary and the dauphin, he would be in a much healthier position. He argued in vain. With the prospect of sailing to Calais imminent, Henry made it plain to Charles that he was adhering to the Treaty of London, to Francis, and to Mary’s marriage to the dauphin. However, he did agree to meet Charles again once his French summit had ended.
So Charles did not come away from Dover entirely empty-handed. And he had made contact with his aunt: she could be a willing channel to Henry. Ever a pragmatist, Charles was ready to flatter and court Wolsey, as did everyone else (the Venetians were busily selecting sixty “beautiful and choice carpets” for his delectation), but the ties of flesh and blood were likely to prove more reliable than putting his faith in the wily Wolsey. Katherine, Charles appreciated, was at heart still Spanish. Since her parents had sent her to England she had acted as Spain’s ambassador, and she was as willing as ever to foster excellent relations between the two countries and do what she could to advance the interests of her native land. This did not necessarily mean she would encourage war against France, nor that she would dare openly to support Spain over England, for Katherine knew that, should her nephew’s relationship with Henry founder, she could bear the brunt of English rage.
After fond goodbyes, Charles set off for the port of Sandwich to board his ship for the Netherlands while Katherine and Henry traveled to Dover to sail the twenty or so miles to Calais. The meeting with Francis could not be delayed. Any Channel crossing was unpredictable. With millpond seas and a favorable wind, it could be done in three hours; equally, if the weather turned, it could take a day or two, possibly even longer. Fortunately, this time the weather was perfect and the royal fleet spied Calais’ defensive walls within a few hours of setting off from Dover.
Henry and his queen were not alone. Buckingham and Suffolk were in attendance, along with Wolsey, Sir William Compton of the privy chamber, Sir Nicholas Carew, one of Henry’s favorite jousting companions, Sir Edward Boleyn, and his brother, Sir Thomas, the latter a man often close to Henry these days. Ten earls, twenty-one barons, three Knights of the Garter, several bishops, and countless knights from the shires, all sailed with their king on this wonderful adventure. Erasmus’s friend Thomas More, Henry’s secretary, who was fast becoming a man to be reckoned with, was present too. The lists of names goes on and on and on. Nor is that the end of it, for each knight or nobleman was entitled to bring a prescribed number of family members and a fixed number of servants. Buckingham was permitted five chaplains, ten gentlemen, sixty other servants, and thirty horses. Not surprisingly, Wolsey allocated himself an entourage that was larger than those of Buckingham, Suffolk, and Archbishop Warham combined.
Katherine too was entitled to her own establishment, just as she had her own household for her normal day-to-day existence. Some were male: we hear of Lord Morley, whose wife was a distant relation of Margaret Beaufort; Lord Mountjoy, Katherine’s chamberlain; Lord Willoughby, Maria de Salinas’s husband. Then there were the Earl of Derby and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, as well as knights like Sir John Shelton and Sir Robert Poyntz. Katherine’s almoner, Robert Bekynsall, came with her; so did her doctor, her apothecary, Master John, and her chaplains, Dr. Peter and Dr. Christopher. And just like her husband, Katherine was served by an army of domestics, there to ensure that her every need was catered to.
Most of all, she needed her women. Maria de Salinas was there, and so was Lady Morley. Lady Mountjoy (alas, not Agnes de Vanegas, who had sadly died, but Mountjoy’s next wife, Lady Alice), Lady Elizabeth Boleyn, Sir Thomas’s wife, Lady Anne Boleyn, Sir Edward’s wife, and many, many more are named as being part of Katherine’s party. Included among the gentlewomen was Sir Thomas Boleyn’s pretty young daughter Mary, who had recently married William Carey. Boleyn’s other daughter, Anne, was currently one of Queen Claude’s ladies, so perhaps the Boleyns were able to snatch a family reunion.
One sadness for Katherine was that she had to leave her daughter behind; such a junket was hardly suitable for a four-year-old child. Entrusted to the safe and loving hands of Margaret Pole, Mary stayed at Richmond, where she was visited by those members of Henry’s council left to run the country while the king was away. The little girl was “right merry and in prosperous health,” her parents were informed, and was “daily exercising her self in vertuous pastymes and occupacions,” much as Katherine would have expected.
Another absentee was Henry’s mistress, Elizabeth Blount, now Lady Tailboys, who was rarely seen at court these days. That, at least, did not displease Katherine. Elizabeth had readily made the transition from dance floor to bedroom, presenting the king with a bouncing baby whom he acknowledged as his. To add to Katherine’s distress, the baby was a boy, christened Henry after his father and always known as Henry Fitzroy; her rival had given him the son that she could not.
Fitzroy’s birth had been humiliating to Katherine, but if she shed tears, she did so privately. Kings had had affairs since time immemorial; Henry’s fling was no worse than those of her own father. And Katherine was confident in her own status; Elizabeth was Henry’s mistress, she was his wife. In any case, she still hoped that her prayers would be answered and she would have a son, a son who survived as Prince Henry had not. Then again, if there was to be no son, her daughter Mary would rule England as Isabella had Spain. Either way, Katherine’s position was sacrosanct. So, casting aside her hurt about Fitzroy, she performed her duties in Calais with the serene dignity that was her trademark.
Wolsey had invested a good deal of time in arranging the meeting with Francis, working out dates, negotiating the number of retainers that each king would bring, organizing supplies, arranging for ships and horses; the sheer scale of the task stretched even his considerable logistical talents. But he managed it, as he managed everything else. The plan was for Henry to stay in Calais, the only English part of France remaining after the military victories of the Hundred Years’ War. After a few days he would move on to the small town of Guisnes, about five miles south of Calais, where a temporary palace had been erected for the royal party. It was at this remarkable construction that Katherine and Henry arrived on June 5, 1520.
Though temporary, the palace was a masterpiece of engineering. The chronicler Edward Hall has left us one of the many descriptions of what he called “the most noble and royal lodgynge before sene.” Stone foundations supported walls of brick and wood, into which tall diamond-shaped windows set with particularly clear glass were installed. There were towers and arches, there were monumental statues of ancient princes and heroes, there were battlements, there was a gilded fountain topped by an image of Bacchus from which red and white wine flowed freely. The high ceilings of the palace were hung with silk or embellished with gilt and gold; floors were carpeted in silks; tapestries adorned the walls, their silver and gold threads iridescent in the shafts of light streaming through the windows or from the tiny flames of hundreds of flickering candles. There was even a chapel, its walls lined with cloth of gold, where worshippers could see the glint of gold everywhere they looked. There were golden ornaments and basins; five pairs of huge golden candlesticks stood on the gold and pearl-draped altar; jewel-encrusted vestments brought specially from St. Peter’s at Westminster lay ready for use. And when Henry or Katherine wanted to pray, they did so in individual enclosures that were draped with cloth of gold and whose altars were furnished with glittering religious images and crucifixes laden with precious stones. “I suppose never suche like were seen,” boasted the patriotic Hall.
The palace contained four separate sets of apartments: one each for Henry, Katherine, and the king’s sister, Mary “the French Queen,” and the last reserved for Wolsey. The king and queen had chambers embellished and decorated with the finest materials that money could buy and with silver and gold plate bursting from open-fronted cupboards. However, as Katherine retired to her own chambers, walking past the vibrant and costly tapestries described by an awestruck onlooker as “marvellous” and with figures who “really seemed alive,” she would have done well to ponder some of their subject matter. One sumptuous set of hangings that Henry had brought with him depicted King David, an Old Testament king for whom he had a perennial fascination. But David had a darker side: his lust for the married Bathsheba led him to incur the wrath of God and earned him divine punishment when the couple’s only son died soon after birth.
The palace was but a backdrop to the seemingly endless round of jousts and banquets and mummeries and masques all so beloved by Henry and all so magnificent that the whole extravaganza came to be referred to as the Field of Cloth of Gold, an eighth wonder of the world. It was in these jollities that Katherine had to play her part. The talks, squeezed in between the serious business of tilting, feasting, and dancing, were for Francis, Henry, and Wolsey, not for any of the women. She was there to smile, to be gracious, to entertain. Together with Queen Claude she presided over several of the jousts, sitting almost enthroned within her private enclosure, presenting diamonds and rubies as a reward to the valiant Francis while Queen Claude charmingly did the same for a delighted Henry. When Claude put on a banquet in Henry’s honor, Katherine followed suit for Francis. Good manners, chivalrous behavior, and courtesy were the order of the day, even if nobles on both sides found it hard to hide their mutual distrust and the English took smug pleasure in hearing that the French king’s enormous, and very expensive, pavilion had blown down in the wind.
Finally, about two weeks after Henry and Francis first rode out of their respective camps to talk to each other, almost inevitably in a golden tent, the two kings and their wives bade each other farewell. All were laden with gifts, Henry and Francis each having vied not to be outdone by his counterpart. In the jewelry stakes, they were about equal, Henry’s gift of a jeweled collar with a ruby pendant similar in value to Francis’s offering of a jeweled bracelet. In horseflesh, though, Francis seems to have triumphed, for it was said that a proud mare Francis gave to Henry was worth more than the entire string of beasts that Henry bestowed upon him. Katherine gave Claude horses too, each “well trapped,” receiving in return a cloth-of-gold litter that came complete with mules.
For everyone, there was much to think about as Francis, Claude, and their army of nobles, attendants, and servants departed for French territory on June 24. Wolsey had done his best to cement the French agreement that Charles would have loved to destroy, but there was another meeting to attend before Henry and Katherine could return home, one to which she was eagerly and anxiously looking forward: Charles was due again, and this time he was bringing Katherine’s childhood friend Margaret, the woman who had married Katherine’s only brother, Juan, and who was back in charge of the Netherlands now that Charles had other, more onerous commitments. Again Wolsey undertook the complex preliminary negotiations, during which time Katherine and Henry rested at Calais.
Finally, on Tuesday July 10, Henry, together with Wolsey, Buckingham, and Suffolk and about three hundred courtiers and council members, set off toward the small town of Gravelines, some twenty miles west of Calais, which Charles controlled. It had been agreed that he would escort the English party to Gravelines, having met them all about halfway along the route. Henry, naturally, donned cloth of gold and silver, as did Charles, and they rode together into the town where Margaret was already waiting. The two had met before when a slightly younger Henry, flushed with his victories against the French, had joined her at Lille in 1513.
Two days later, it was Henry’s turn to reciprocate Charles’s lavish hospitality. The key buildings in Calais, including the Staple Hall and the Exchequer, had been exquisitely furnished for the royal group, lodgings arranged within the town for everyone else, hay provided in abundance for the horses, cooks preparing the food with which the tables would soon be laden. Masques, entertainments, and banquets were planned, many intended to be held in an enormous, specially erected pavilion whose decoration was primarily the responsibility of Thomas More’s brother-in-law, John Rastell. Everything was to be splendid, if on a lesser scale than at the Field of Cloth of Gold. For Katherine at least, the next few days were a sheer delight.
When the two kings and Margaret reached Calais, Katherine was awaiting them impatiently. Good though it was to see her nephew again, it was also wonderful to see her former sister-in-law. It had been twenty years since the two women had last met. Then, both had been young, both had believed their futures established and secure. Now fast approaching middle age, they had learned the hard way that life can hold tragic surprises. But as they kissed and embraced on that Thursday evening at Calais, their lives seemed to have settled down. Margaret had been widowed again after Juan’s death, and with no babies of her own, her family had become Charles and his sisters, Juana’s children. As regent of the Netherlands, a post she filled with vigor and ability, she had also tasted power, just as Katherine had so briefly when given charge of England while Henry was gallivanting in the French wars.
As for Katherine, she too had faced her demons and conquered them. Her marriage to Henry was steady rather than passionate, her political influence reduced, and she had only a daughter, a fact that she knew distressed her husband, but she was a royal consort in the realm that had been chosen for her by her parents and that, as things stood, the Catholic Monarchs’ granddaughter would inherit. Katherine had not let down her family. And for a couple of days, she could talk to Margaret of times past, of people they had both known, of experiences they had shared, leaving Henry and Charles to discuss and debate state affairs.
On Saturday, July 16, Margaret and Charles departed for Bruges. Not all had gone according to plan. The pavilion’s roof blew off in a storm, much to its architect’s chagrin, but the banquets still took place and Henry dressed up and danced to his heart’s content. As for the talks, Charles did not get what he wanted. Henry made it clear that he was still unwilling to ditch the French marriage plan or the Treaty of London’s ethos of collective security. On the other hand, no one had quarreled, and the new emperor had made himself very popular among the English, possibly because of the scale of his welcome in Gravelines, possibly because of his courteous demeanor, most likely because he was not French.
Katherine, for whom family ties had been reestablished, would never see Margaret again, and it would be two years before she and Charles met one final time. By then, Juana had faced danger and temptation in Spain and the diplomatic carousel had revolved yet again.