Catherine of Aragon (3 page)

There are alarming rumours about the Scottish king. If we do indeed behave like dogs, then he is a very active one, running after every bitch in sight. He has several children already, it is said, by different women whom he has loved but not married, and yet by all accounts he is a civilized man, scholarly and thoughtful, fond of music and art and keenly interested in science. According to Don Pedro de Ayala, he possesses instruments for the pulling out of teeth, but if he is called on to do this he pays the patient for the pain he has caused. He sounds a strange man, but an interesting one.

Uncle Rod says James did not really want to marry Margaret because he was deeply devoted to a woman called Margaret Drummond and refused to give her up. The court advisers were at their wits' end – and then Mistress Drummond conveniently died. It was poison, they say. Her two sisters who shared that final meal with her died also. I was appalled when I heard this. I asked Uncle Rod who had done it, but he shook his head. There are some things it is better not to know, he said.

15th February 1502

How long will this winter go on? I am sick with longing for Spain, where the sun shines even in these short days, and at night there is a blaze of stars. Here there is nothing but clouds and greyness and mud and the smell of wet stone. The Spanish courtiers share my discontent, and the only man here with any sense of purpose is Don Alessandro Geraldini, who taught Catherine and me when we were children and is now the priest who hears our confession. He at least is busy, trying to reassure us that we are not forgotten by God in this gloomy place.

27th March 1502

Catherine is ill. It began with a shivering fit that worsened by the hour, and now she lies half-insensible, on fire with fever yet pouring with perspiration. People here call it the sweating sickness. Their main concern is for Arthur, from whom Catherine caught the illness. He seems gravely ill, and although the doctors have bled him, he gets no better.

Doña Elvira says we should keep to our own rooms for fear of contagion, but Catherine calls for me in her delirium and how could I refuse to go to her? I sponge her face and body with warm water and dry her with a soft towel, but there is little else I can do except sit beside her so that she knows I am there. God protect her.

 

3rd April 1502

Prince Arthur died yesterday. A rider has been sent to London, to tell the King. I cannot write much. The fever caught me in turn and I am very weak.

20th April 1502

Catherine is alive, though she is still not well. Arthur lies in his coffin in the round chapel, and the air is heavy with the smell of herbs used by the embalmer. They will take him from here in three days' time to be buried in Worcester Cathedral.

I still feel shaky and exhausted. My back aches and my fingers are sore from hours of sewing. Countless bales of black silk have had to be cut and stitched into mourning dress for all the people here. Seven courtiers have died of the sickness, and I do not know how many servants.

4th May 1502

They are back now from the long business of the funeral. We watched the procession leave the castle ten days ago in torrential rain. Two Spanish noblemen rode at its head to represent Catherine, for she is too weak and ill to leave the castle. The coffin on its bier was pulled by four horses that laboured and steamed in the deep mud, and the men who splashed alongside had a hard job to keep the black canopy above it in place, stumbling and slipping as they were.

It got worse along the way, they tell me. The horses had to be replaced by oxen, whose powerful bodies and split hooves get a better grip. How shameful, though, that the corpse of gentle Prince Arthur should be hauled through the mire by beasts of the field.

Don Alessandro was with them. The rain stopped, he says, when they got to Worcester, so at least they could approach the cathedral with fresh black horses and some semblance of dignity. The assembled bishops looked magnificent, he said. I wish I had been there to see them. The English embroidery done for the church is famous all over Europe – the opus Anglicanum, it is called. I saw something of it at Catherine's wedding, but the robes worn for a funeral would be different, rich and dark.

Even at this time of grief, the Tudor gift of theatricality did not desert them. The coffin was covered in cloth of gold, and each nobleman who came in added his own golden pall, so that the dead prince lay under a mound of gleaming softness. A man of arms rode a black horse down the aisle of the cathedral, bearing Arthur's armour and his battle-axe, its head to the floor, and the court officials who carried golden staffs of office broke them in two and cast the pieces into the grave.

Catherine is beginning to regain her strength, but she seems lost and confused. At sixteen, she is a widow. The courtiers still cling to a faint hope that she may be carrying Arthur's child, but Doña Elvira shakes her head firmly at any mention of it. Catherine herself says nothing.

17th June 1502

At last the weather is dry. It is so good to go out of doors without the hems of one's dress becoming fouled with mud and one's shoes sodden. Catherine has had a letter from her mother, who has only just heard of Prince Arthur's death. Queen Isabella wants Catherine to come home to Spain. She says Ludlow Castle is an unhealthy place, and her daughter must leave it at once. A flutter of hope ran through all the Spaniards here, for all of us long for the sun and for warm tiles under our feet instead of these stinking rushes – but Catherine will not go. Her mouth is set in the obstinate line I know so well, and nothing will move her. The English must keep their side of the bargain, she says. She came here out of duty to marry Prince Arthur, on the promise that she would receive one third of the income from Wales, Chester and Cornwall. “They will not shuffle me off so easily,” she says. And means it.

24th June 1502

One battle, at least, has been won. We are to move to London next week.

25th July 1502

We are at Durham House in the Strand, a road which runs by the River Thames in London. It's a grand house, built for the bishops of Durham but used mostly by visiting ambassadors. There's a garden laid out in the Italian style, with low hedges of clipped yew and rosemary, and high walls on either side with peach and plum trees trained against them. Stairs lead down to the river, where one may step into a boat to be rowed up to Westminster – far pleasanter than being jolted over the cobbles in a carriage.

Inside, there's a great hall, as there has been in all the other mansion houses I've seen, with a gallery at one end where musicians can play. This is summer, so it's not so cold, but smoke drifts past the carved screen from the kitchen and its fires, all part of the same room.

I'd hoped London streets would be cleaner than the muddy lanes of Wales, but there seems to be little difference. The paving hardly exists, and to make things worse, great troupes of oxen go through with barrels of water on their backs, churning up the mud and adding to it with their droppings. In the heavy warmth of the English summer the stink is dreadful.

Uncle Rod was here yesterday on official business. He brought the new envoy from Spain, a tall man called Hernan, the Duke of Estrada. They went to a long meeting from which Doña Elvira emerged looking flushed and angry, and I was longing to know what had happened. I caught my uncle in the garden for a few moments, and he told me there is a huge argument going on about Catherine's dowry. King Ferdinand paid the first half of it – 100,000 crowns – at the time of the wedding, but he now refuses to pay the second half. His daughter no longer has a husband, he says, so the English cannot claim that their side of the bargain has been kept. What's more, he wants the first half returned.

King Henry is furious, of course. He was counting on the money from Spain, and if he doesn't get it, he will not give Catherine her promised income. Indeed, he has not done so up until now, which is why none of her Spanish attendants has yet been paid. I told Uncle Rod how discontented we all feel, and asked if he could persuade the King to release just a little of the money, but he pursed his lips and shook his head. It would be indelicate to speak of money just now, he said, when the King and Queen are still in mourning for their son. I suppose diplomats have to learn to be patient.

26th July 1502

A letter has come from my mother. She has written only once before, in answer to my letter, and then she was full of concern for my welfare, but this time she mentions larger things. King Louis of France has invaded Italy, and there is a danger that Spain will be surrounded by hostile French forces. The English must stand by us, Mama says. Can't Uncle Rod start negotiating for a new marriage between Catherine and the King's younger son, Harry?

She doesn't realize that young Harry is still only eleven years old. A boy is not of legal age to marry until he is fourteen, so there are three years to wait. I think Catherine wishes it were otherwise, for there is something about Harry's broad-shouldered stance and direct, ruthless stare that disturbs every female heart, young though he is.

1st August 1502

The Spanish retainers here are growing louder in their complaints. They had hoped that Estrada was going to persuade the King to release some money so they would be paid, but nothing has happened and we are all penniless, Catherine as well. Fewer candles burn in the big iron holders, and the cooks present us with thin soup and tough meat, and their faces are full of contempt. Uncle Rod warns me to be careful what I say, but he explained privately that the King's prime concern is not with Catherine or Spain, but to bring about the wedding between Margaret and King James of Scotland. He needs this strong link, because he is always afraid that the Scots, who have no great love for England, will side with France. Margaret and James would have been married by now had it not been for Arthur's death and the mourning that followed it, and Henry is full of plans for sending his daughter on the long journey to Edinburgh, with all the great train of soldiers, attendants and courtiers who must go with her. So we will have to wait.

2nd August 1502

Today Doña Elvira flounced into the sewing room and flopped down so heavily that she sent scraps of silk flying everywhere, and burst into tears. Maria and I patted and consoled her, asking what was the matter, and she blurted out indignantly that she had only tried to be helpful. At a meeting with the King and my uncle and various dignitaries, she had said there was no reason why Catherine should not marry Henry's younger son, because her marriage to Arthur had not been “a proper one”.

She was so agitated that she found herself blurting out what nobody has ever told me. It seems we do indeed copulate in the same way as animals, but when this happens to a girl for the first time, it causes her to bleed a little. In Catherine and Arthur's case, this did not happen, Doña Elvira says. She would have known, and so would the servants who changed the bed linen.

Apparently this makes a legal difference to Catherine's status. If her marriage to Arthur was not “consummated”, as they call it, then it has no standing in law. Catherine remains a virgin – and this, Doña Elvira says, is a good thing because there is a passage in the Bible which forbids a man to marry his brother's widow. If Catherine really was Arthur's proper wife, then she could not marry his brother. Spain and England need a second marriage, so why are they not glad to know it is perfectly possible? She burst into noisy tears all over again, deeply offended that she had been told to be quiet and that she could not know what she was talking about.

I ran across to Uncle Rod's lodgings in the Strand this evening – a poor place, but he, too, has not been paid for months – and asked him to explain. Doña Elvira had put her foot in it rather badly, it seems, though she didn't know the other side of it. If Catherine was indeed not Arthur's “proper wife”, then she has no right to the title of Princess of Wales, and no claim to be supported by King Henry. She cannot call herself a royal widow, because she was never a royal wife. She is nothing.

What a nightmare! We are caught in the middle of a dispute between kings, and either way, Catherine is the loser. I wish she would abandon this hopeless struggle, and go home. But she won't.

10th August 1502

The King's wife, Queen Elizabeth, has given Catherine some money. It's not a lot, Catherine confided as we sat stitching by the open window this afternoon, but at least she can pay her servants something of what they are owed. She glanced round to make sure the door was shut, then leaned towards me and said, “Do you know how she got it? She pawned some of the gold plate! Just fancy!”

I'm sure the King does not know. He lives with penny-pinching meanness, counting each candle and refusing to have a fire in his room even though he suffers from asthma and coughs constantly. How many candles will he have to save to pay for sending his daughter in splendour to marry the Scottish king? But as my uncle points out, Henry's concerns about Scotland come first at the moment. “I will keep trying, my dear,” he said. “After all, I am a Spaniard. All my sympathies are with Catherine. But I have to be careful.” No wonder he looks so tired sometimes.

23rd August 1502

Thomas Fish was here today, bringing Catherine some linen cloth and a length of fine lawn for a pair of embroidered sleeves. He had just come from Windsor, where he takes cloth regularly for the Queen. He also took her some cherry jam made by his wife, for Queen Elizabeth is pregnant again, and has a great longing for the sharp taste of cherries. She has a pet monkey, he says, and this morning it tore to shreds a notebook in which the King keeps his private accounts. His roars of rage made the whole palace tremble, Fish said, and the monkey leapt to Elizabeth for protection. It would be safe with her, for she is a kind woman. Everyone prays she will have a healthy son to replace the lost Arthur. According to Fish, she told her grieving husband, “We are both young enough.”