In death, if not in life, Juana had her due. While Katherine had been buried as a princess, Juana was entombed as a queen. In front of the altar in the Royal Chapel at Granada stand two magnificent marble mausoleums. Effigies of Ferdinand and Isabella, resplendent in royal robes, dominate one; the other has effigies of Juana and her husband, Philip, looking equally as regal and serene. Philip carries a sword, Juana a scepter.
Their bodies rest below the mausoleums. Just beneath the impressive tombs, approached by a narrow stairway and dominated by a plain wooden crucifix, is a small crypt. Here lie five simple lead coffins. Two are those of Ferdinand and Isabella. Juana is at her mother’s side. Next to Juana’s casket is a much smaller coffin containing the remains of her eldest sister’s son, Prince Miguel, the child upon whom had been pinned so many hopes. Close by, next to Ferdinand, is Philip. He and Juana are together in death, exactly where she always wanted them to be. They had reached Granada at last. But neither Juana’s story nor Katherine’s was over quite yet.
In 1553, seventeen years after Katherine had been interred at Peterborough and two years before Juana died, momentous events had taken place in England. The miracle that Katherine had prayed for had taken place: Mary had become queen.
The miracle had started on the very day that Katherine had been buried. A jubilant Chapuys had conveyed the stunning news to Charles that “the Concubine had an abortion [a miscarriage] which seemed to be a male child.” With the fickle Henry already tiring of her and giving “great presents” to the demure, well-coached Jane Seymour, Anne’s days had been numbered. Within five months of Katherine’s death, Anne faced the executioner’s sword on Tower Green, having been found guilty of adultery with five courtiers, one of whom had been her own brother. Her fall, according to Chapuys, had been “the judgment of God.”
Anne’s dramatic exit had not immediately resulted in Mary’s reconciliation with her father. Before that could happen, there had been the matter of the dreaded oath to be sorted out. Grieving for Katherine, bullied and threatened, Mary had at last given way and accepted everything that the oath implied: the invalidity of her mother’s marriage, her own bastardy, Henry as Supreme Head of the Church in England rather than the pope. Making such a complete denial of all that she really believed had almost broken her.
But it had worked. Graciously forgiven at last, Mary had returned to court, and with the sudden death of Henry’s son, the Duke of Richmond, she had taken a step nearer the throne. Her chances of inheriting had plunged when Jane Seymour, whom Henry had married with indecent haste almost before Anne’s body was cold, had given birth to the longed-for prince in October 1537. Named Edward, the child had seemed healthy and likely to live. But Jane’s premature death, followed by three more marriages for Henry, all of which were childless, had kept Mary very much in the line of succession. And Henry had recognized her claims in his will. Naturally, he had left everything to Edward and to his heirs, but Mary was to be next, with Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth, after her should she have no heirs.
Mary’s good fortune had continued when Edward, who had become king on Henry’s death in 1547, sickened and died in July 1553. He had not quite reached his sixteenth birthday. But Mary’s accession proved far from straightforward. Edward had hated Catholicism and everything associated with it so much that he could not bear to think of England, which he had pushed into Protestantism, being governed by his Catholic half-sister; all of his work would then have been swept away. So, determined to protect the religion that had dominated his life, the dying boy had left a will, a “device,” disinheriting both Mary and Elizabeth and bequeathing the crown to the equally fanatically Protestant Lady Jane Grey, the granddaughter of Katherine’s former friend, Mary “the French Queen.” The girl had been proclaimed queen and had taken up residence in the Tower.
But this had been to reckon without Mary. With the blood of Isabella the Catholic flowing through her veins, she knew a crusade when she saw one. And unlike her aunt Juana, who had tended to cogitate too long before taking action, Mary had grasped that hesitation could spell defeat. Ignoring the Spanish ambassador, who urged caution, she had fled to the security of Framlingham Castle in Norfolk—coincidentally, a stone’s throw from the church where the Duke of Richmond is buried—and declared herself queen. It had been a huge gamble, but it had succeeded. Jane’s forces had simply melted away, bowing to the justice of Mary’s cause. “Our Lord guided events,” Charles was to write to his son, Philip. Mary had expressed similar sentiments. “By God’s goodness and design, we have come to the enjoyment of our rights,” she affirmed.
She had returned to London in triumph, the people wearing themselves out in cheering her to the skies, fears of the consequences of female rule dissipating in the general euphoria as bonfires were lit in the streets to celebrate Katherine’s daughter at last coming into her rightful inheritance. But the pretty young princess who had danced, sung, and played to the ambassadors had long since gone. She was thirty-seven, her features had hardened, her short-sightedness had become so pronounced that many commented on her piercing stare. “Of low stature,” like her mother, she was very thin and still prone to the various minor ailments that had plagued her all her life. She was also unmarried and knew nothing of administration or how to govern. No matter, God was with her—or so she thought.
Therefore, as quickly as she could, Mary had followed in her mother’s footsteps as “Defendress of the Faith.” She had set herself to do everything in her power to lead her people back to Rome. Cranmer, the man whose Dunstable Judgement had given the coup de grâce to Katherine’s marriage, had been arrested and imprisoned, his archbishopric taken by Margaret Pole’s son, Reginald Pole. In a ceremony in which Mary knelt with tears of happiness running down her face, England was reconciled to the papacy. The Mass was restored, the churches refurbished, priests reinstated, heresy attacked. Those who would not abjure Protestantism would eventually burn at the stake, crowds watching their agonized writhings as the flames licked around their bodies.
Katherine, who had looked on helplessly as her beloved faith had been attacked from all sides, would have been overjoyed by her daughter’s godly endeavors. She had taught her well. She would have been still more ecstatic when Mary decided to marry, for her choice was Charles’s son, Philip, who had been widowed when his first wife, Maria Manuel, had died so suddenly. Nothing could have pleased Katherine more than to have the Anglo-Spanish union reawakened though the marriage of her daughter with her sister’s grandson. So much that the Catholic Monarchs had worked to engineer through their lengthy negotiations with Henry VII half a century before could now be fulfilled.
All that was needed now was the birth of a son. Then the past would reach down to touch the present and shape the future. Juana, the successful advancement of her own dynasty forever in her mind, would have prayed for that. And she knew about the wedding, because when Philip had come to see her for the last time about a year before her death, it had been to bid her farewell before embarking for England to marry his cousin, Mary.
The marriage, naturally, was one of convenience for both sides. Charles had realized the potential of a union with England almost as soon as he had heard that Mary was safely, if remarkably, on the throne. Too old and ill to marry her himself even if she was hardly in the first flush of youth, he found the ideal solution in sending his son instead. Though Philip was eleven years younger than his intended bride, and was already partway through negotiations for another Portuguese match, Mary’s hand was a prize worth winning: controlling English ports would give Spain a massive advantage against France should the French attack the Netherlands. A Spanish gentleman, Rue Gomez de Silva, summed up the situation with admirable clarity. The queen, he said, was “old and flabby”; that would not matter, because Philip fully realized “that the marriage was concluded for no fleshly consideration, but in order to remedy the disorders of this kingdom and preserve the Low Countries.”
Mary had thought about marriage very carefully. As a sovereign queen, she knew she risked male influence, even domination, if she married. But to stay a spinster was irresponsible. As things stood, Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth, was next in line. To allow “the Lady’s” child to wear Saint Edward’s crown was unthinkable: her religion was suspect, her mother the cause of Katherine’s misery. Only by marrying and having an heir of her own could Mary save England from heresy and prevent her half-sister from taking over and leading the country back toward damnation. And marriage could bring other benefits. Mary could gain the support of a loving husband, an ally in any possible wars against France. And in marrying Philip she would bring her mother’s country and her father’s together again. Philip, the son of the man to whom Mary had once been betrothed, was bound to be an ideal husband. Thus the decision had been straightforward.
For a while, at least, Mary found that she liked having a husband. Writing to Charles, she confided that the marriage “renders me happier than I can say, as I daily discover in the King my husband and your son, so many virtues and perfections that I constantly pray God to grant me grace to please him and behave in all things as befits one who is so deeply embounden to him.” Clearly her feelings for Philip were similar to those experienced by her aunt, Juana, for Philip’s grandfather all those years before. That did not bode well.
Philip has not left us his true thoughts on his “old and flabby” wife. In public he was punctiliously polite and considerate. He never left her side; he helped her “to mount and dismount”; he dined with her; he danced with her. And he was happy to accept her gifts. Among the items she gave him was a “richly wrought” dagger studded with gems. On another occasion, she presented him with two robes, one of which was “as rich and beautiful as could be imagined.” Then there was a velvet cap decorated with jewels and pearls. And for her, diamonds from Philip, “dresses and coifs” from Philip’s sister that were so lovely she could not stop “looking at them and rejoicing over them,” and a wonderful pearl known as “La Pelegrina” from Charles V (which would one day be bought by the actor Richard Burton for his wife, Elizabeth Taylor).
If the royal couple seemed happy, many of the English were not. Even from the start, the marriage was unpopular. “The English hate us Spaniards worse than they hate the Devil, and treat us accordingly,” a Spanish gentleman was to write to his friend. English fears of a Spanish takeover meant that the marriage treaty was intended to be watertight in preserving English independence, and Philip was hemmed in by restrictions on his powers. Mary was to make the major decisions; posts were to be filled only by Englishmen; Philip could not take her out of the country without her consent; and should she die childless, he was to have no further claim to England.
In 1555, ten months after his glorious nuptials in Winchester Cathedral, Philip received the news of Juana’s death at Tordesillas. Initially he tried to prevent Mary from hearing of it, because by then she was said to be carrying the child that they both longed for. Already she had taken to her chamber at Hampton Court to prepare herself for the ordeal of childbirth. Somehow the news filtered through to her, however, and she was quick to order that suitable obsequies should be said in St. Paul’s for the woman who had been Philip’s grandmother and her aunt as well as a sovereign queen. Family, especially her Spanish family, mattered to her just as much as it always had done to Juana. Indeed, Giacomo Soranzo, the Venetian ambassador, once remarked that “being born of a Spanish mother,” she “was always inclined towards that nation, scorning to be English, and boasting of her descent from Spain.”
At a cost of over £1,000, the obsequies, held on June 17, 1555, in the very building where Katherine and Arthur’s wedding had taken place fifty years before and where Henry VIII had ordered a Te Deum sung to mark Charles’s election as Holy Roman Emperor, were more than merely suitable. London craftsmen toiled for almost a month on the preparations. Merchants ordered copious supplies of black cloth, which was needed both to drape the dazzling interior of the church and for dozens of tailors to use to make mourning garments. Twenty-one pounds of black silk fringe and twelve pounds of “fringes of Venice gold” were used to edge the canopy, which would be placed over the hearse provided for a symbolically empty coffin. Huge quantities of wax were amassed to make hundreds of candles. Artists gilded and painted banners, skillfully turning brightly colored bolts of red, blue, and white cloth into a visual delight glowing with images of saints and representations of family arms. The Dean of St. Paul’s settled down quietly in his “fair old house” at the side of the churchyard to compose his sermon. One hundred and twenty poor men, who would chant the obligatory prayers to help Juana’s soul on its journey to God, tried on the black cloth mourning robes they were issued. The official mourners, some English, some Spanish, all gathered in London, ready to play their part in the proceedings.
And when those proceedings took place, everything went according to plan. In death, Juana attracted more attention in England than she had done in life. Indeed, her only time on English soil had been when she and Philip had been shipwrecked on their way to Spain to claim Isabella’s thrones. Mary, who was waiting in her darkened apartments at Hampton Court, eager to feel the first pangs of labor, could have done no more for her mother’s sister.
Unfortunately, the pains did not come. Mary waited and waited as the weeks passed, but nothing happened. Eventually Philip, her ladies, her doctors, and finally Mary herself faced the sad truth that she was not about to give birth. We cannot know precisely what had happened: perhaps her swollen stomach was due to a phantom pregnancy, perhaps it was the result of a tumor. But just as Katherine had once done when the “twin” her doctors had confidently asserted that she was carrying had proved illusory, Mary had no choice but to emerge from her rooms and brazen it out.
It was the first of many disappointments she would endure. Katherine’s life had been blighted by her failure to bear a son, Juana’s by the ruthless ambition of the men around her. Mary had the great misfortune to be beset by both of these calamities. For she quickly found that Philip was hardly the stuff of dreams.
Like his grandfather, Juana’s husband, Philip was not one to sit back quietly and accept a subservient role. He was a king in his own right, because Charles had granted him the titles of King of Naples and Milan so that he could marry Mary on an equal footing; he was an experienced ruler, for Charles used him as regent and relied upon him; and, above all, he was male. Thus he readily acquiesced when his father advised him to “busy” himself in the “affairs of government.” In a letter to his sister, Juana, who was then acting as their father’s regent in Spain, Philip confirmed that busying himself in government was precisely how he was spending his time. And there was plenty of state business for him to attend to, for Mary’s Council organized the translation of all state papers into Latin or Spanish so that Philip, or “the King,” as he was increasingly known, could access them. And they did so only two days after the marriage ceremonies and subsequent consummation had occurred.
Remarkably quickly, Philip was becoming enmeshed in political matters. The reign of Queen Mary soon became that of King Philip and Queen Mary. In official documents, which it was agreed that both would sign, his name came before hers. His face, as well as hers, was on the coins. And with the establishment of the so-called Select Council, a kind of overseeing Council of State very much on the lines of that used in Spain, Philip became involved in a myriad of decisions ranging from appointments to the economy, from defense to foreign policy. Philip was no mere figurehead.
He also soon became an absentee husband. After the fiasco of her false pregnancy, having spent just over thirteen months in England, he left for the Netherlands. He returned for three months or so in 1557, solely to persuade Mary to give him the troops he wanted for his French war. She did, but since the result was the loss of Calais, England’s last bastion on the French mainland, the outcry in England was phenomenal. Expensive and difficult to maintain though it might be, Calais was a symbol of English might; to lose it was as devastating to Mary as to her xenophobic people.
Still Philip stayed away. Realizing that his middle-aged wife would never have a child, no matter how many hours she spent on her knees praying for one, Philip read the Select Council’s reports to keep abreast of events in his English realms but devoted his time to his many other responsibilities, responsibilities that increased when an exhausted Charles abdicated in 1557 to spend the final year of his life in a palace complex he had built next to the monastery of San Jeronimo de Yuste in Castile (interestingly, one of the possessions he took with him was his mother’s set of “golden hangings” tapestries). Philip sent Mary his best wishes for her good health, he sent apologies for his absence, but once he had the forces he required for his French wars, he never saw her again.
And there is a story reported in the State Papers that illustrates just how far her initial happiness had evaporated. Receiving news from Philip that displeased her, she vented her frustration on his portrait. Unable to berate the man, she berated his picture, which she then “kicked out of the chamber.”
Thus, like her mother before her, Mary faced death with the knowledge that she had failed. There was no child; her marriage had turned into little more than a sham; she had lost Calais; her people were dying from hunger after poor harvests and from the “great maladies” of a terrible outbreak of influenza. The Catholic faith might be officially restored, but she had not been able to bring back more than a tiny handful of monasteries, for no one wanted to relinquish the monastic land they had acquired, and despite the horrible burnings, Protestantism was alive and well.
And perhaps the hardest thing of all to bear, she had no option but to endorse Elizabeth’s accession. The Concubine’s daughter would wear a crown after all. While Juana triumphed in Europe as her descendants ruled and multiplied, the victor in England was not Katherine but Anne Boleyn. In 1558, it was Henry’s “own sweetheart” who triumphed from her unmarked grave within the Tower’s high walls: at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, Elizabeth heard the news of Mary’s death and held the ring that had so recently been on her finger. She rode from Hatfield to London and into English legend. Ever Anne’s daughter, Elizabeth would find her own solution to the dilemma of female monarchy.
The hopes nurtured by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1501 when they had sent their youngest child to marry into the English royal family and usher in an era of friendship and alliance finally crumbled. Philip began his own crusade against the land he had once ruled as king. In 1588, he ordered a fleet of ships, which would become known as the Spanish Armada, to set sail. This time priests and soldiers, instructed to conquer England and restore the true faith, were on board rather than a young princess.