Six Wives (16 page)

    Philip reached Windsor on 31 January. Catherine arrived shortly after. The King-Archduke and the English King were lodged in intercommunicating suites and competed in elaborate courtesies. Then sessions of hard negotiation alternated with entertainment. The entertainments ranged from the savagery of horse-baiting to the almost Victorian domesticity of the Sunday afternoon
soirée
presented by Catherine and her sister-in-law, Princess Mary. First Catherine and one of her ladies, both in Spanish dress, danced, and then Mary and one of her English attendants. The atmosphere turned suddenly sour when Catherine asked Philip, who was engrossed in conversation with Henry VII, to dance. At first he refused, courteously enough. But when Catherine persisted, he replied brusquely that he was a mariner, 'and yet you would cause me to dance'.
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    This curious exchange has never been properly explained. It all goes back, of course, to Don Juan Manuel's plot and its debacle. Philip knew from Dona Elvira of Catherine's uncompromising support for Ferdinand, her father and his rival. Since De Puebla's revelations, all Catherine's wits had been devoted to preventing both Philip's voyage to Spain and his meeting with the King of England. Now Philip's rudeness, and the words in which he chose to express it, told her that he neither forgave nor forgot. 'I am a mariner,' he said, reminding her that she had tried to stop his voyage. 'And yet you would cause me to dance,' he continued, rubbing salt in the wound. Catherine had tried to prevent his meeting with Henry VII: why should he interrupt his confidential conversation with the King to dance with her, of all people? Mary offered Catherine sisterly comfort by going to sit with her on the edge of the carpet under the canopy of the cloth of estate.

    Juana had travelled separately and more slowly and did not reach Windsor till Tuesday, 10 February. Juana is known to history as 'The Mad'. At this stage, as her behaviour during the storm shows, it would be fairer to call her neurotic. Fearful perhaps of embarrassments, the English royal family received her privately: not at the public entrance to the King's apartments, but at the privy or backstairs which gave on to the park. There she was greeted by Henry VII, her sister-in-law Princess Mary and her sister Catherine. The three ladies seem to have spent the day together. The following day Catherine and Mary went to Richmond. There they were joined by the King, who was anxious to show off his new palace to his royal visitors, just as he had done to Catherine in the aftermath of her wedding to Arthur. But Juana never saw the marvels of Richmond. Instead, Philip packed her off to the coast, while he enjoyed the continued hospitality of his royal host.
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    In a later letter to Juana, Catherine recalled her joy at meeting the sister she had last seen ten years previously – and 'the distress which filled my heart, a few hours afterwards, on account of your hasty and sudden departure'. An older generation of historians blamed Henry VII for the cruelty of the separation. Instead, it is clear that the responsibility rests with Philip. He had snubbed Catherine a few days previously. Now he showed that he feared the influence she might have over her pliable sister. What if she recalled Juana to her filial duty to Ferdinand, as De Puebla had done so successfully with Catherine herself? What then of Philip's castles in Spain? Much safer to keep the sisters apart. Philip succeeded, and Catherine never saw Juana again.
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    All this was bad enough. But the malign consequences of Isabella's death now threatened Catherine with a worse separation still – from Prince Henry, the second husband to whom she was espoused and yet not married.

O
n 27 June 1505, the eve of Prince Henry's fourteenth birthday, a small party assembled in a certain lower chamber on the western side of the Palace of Richmond. But the mood was hardly festive. Prince Henry had come to renounce his marriage to Catherine.

    Before Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester and Lord Privy Seal, the Prince explained that he had entered into an agreement to marry Catherine. But the agreement was conditional since it had been made while he was a minor and could only be carried into effect when he came of age. Now, as he was 'attaining the years of puberty', he solemnly announced his intention not to proceed with the marriage. Instead
'contra
eundem reclamo et eidem dissentio'
, he said. 'I protest vehemently against it and am [utterly] opposed to it.' Henry's protestation was witnessed by the Royal Secretary, the King's Chamberlain and Vice-chamberlain, by Prince Henry's own Chamberlain, Henry Marney, and by Dr Nicholas West, Archdeacon of Derby.
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    West was a royal councillor and an expert in matrimonial law. When Henry, twenty-five years later, renounced his marriage to Catherine for the second time, West was to be a stalwart defender of both Catherine and the validity of the marriage. But in 1505 neither he nor anyone else told Catherine what Henry had done. She was left completely in the dark.
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    In renouncing his marriage to Catherine, Prince Henry affirmed that he had acted 'neither by force, fraud or entreaty . . . but willingly and freely, in no way compelled'. The truth, however, was that he had spoken as the mere mouthpiece of his father.
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* * *

As events unrolled after Isabella's death, Henry VII became increasingly doubtful about the benefits of the Spanish marriage. He was also determined that, should it ever take place, it would be only when the marriage portion – every last escudo and crown of it – had been paid.

    The attitude of Catherine's own father, Ferdinand, was more or less a mirror image. In principle, he was unshakably committed to the marriage. Catherine must, he told his daughter more than once, 'speak of your marriage always as of a thing of which you have no doubt and no suspicion, and which God alone can undo'.

    In practice, however, raising and sending the money for the second instalment of the marriage portion was another matter. There were other, infinitely more pressing, demands on Ferdinand's time and resources as he struggled to hold together the multitudinous kingdoms the possession of which was his lifetime's work. Excuses, to Catherine and to Henry VII, were always easier to find than cash.

    Catherine thus found herself pig-in-the-middle as her father and her father-in-law entered into a sort of competition as to who could display the greater callousness about her plight. For mistreating Catherine, Henry VII quickly realised, was his best hope of putting pressure on Ferdinand to pay up. He was breathtakingly frank about this, telling De Puebla that, in behaving harshly towards her he acted out of Catherine's best interests, 'hoping to induce the King her father by that means sooner to send her marriage portion'.
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    Ironically, the event which precipitated the sudden decline in Catherine's fortunes was the final departure of her rejected duenna, Dona Elvira. Relations between them had been difficult for months. But her presence had guaranteed a sort of continuity. When Dona Elvira at last left for the Netherlands at the beginning of December 1505, the ground slipped from beneath Catherine's feet. Innocently, Catherine wrote to Henry VII, to ask either for the appointment of 'an old English lady' to act as chaperone in place of Dona Elvira, or that her father-inlaw would offer her his direct protection 'and take me [in]to his Court'.

    With his usual opportunism, Henry VII pounced. He gave Catherine what she wanted and took her to Court. But not in the fashion she expected. Instead, he used the move to strip her of her expensive and (to English eyes) useless male Household; he also separated her from her hoard of textiles, plate and jewellery, which he deposited in a place of safekeeping.
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    Catherine's patience (or was it her sense of decorum?) snapped. 'Hitherto', she wrote to her father, 'I have not wished to let Your Highness know the affairs here, that I might not give you annoyance.' Now she poured out her troubles: 'for two months I have had severe tertian fevers, and this will be the cause that I shall soon die!'
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* * *

Things only got worse. The following April, Henry VII made explicit the link between Catherine's short commons and her father's failure to hand over the marriage portion. Catherine's reply – that 'I believed that in time to come your highness would discharge it' – only confirmed the English king's worst fears about Ferdinand's financial reliability.
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    For Catherine, the pains of exile were now exacerbated by those of poverty. 'I have', she wrote to her father, 'nothing for chemises; wherefore, by Your Highness's life, I have sold some bracelets to get a dress of black velvet, for I was all but naked: for since I departed from Spain I have [had] nothing except two new dresses, for till now those I have brought from thence have lasted me; although I have now nothing but the dresses of brocade.' Poverty in black velvet and brocade is only comparative, but for Catherine, who had never wanted for anything, it was real enough.
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    Worst of all, however, was the sense of being a stranger in a strange land. The previous year, Ferdinand, as part of his policy of setting Catherine's position in England in stone, had asked the English ambassadors about her progress in language. 'I am greatly desirous', he had said, 'that she shall be an English woman and to learn for to speak English.' The ambassadors had reassured him. 'Her Grace could speak some and that she understood much more', they had replied. As ever, diplomats spoke diplomatically. What was probably the real position was set out by Catherine in her letter to her father of April 1506. She had been without a confessor ever since Alessandro's enforced departure in 1503. Now she begged her father to send her a Spanish friar of the Order of Observant Franciscans. The issue was not so much his orthodoxy or nationality as his language, 'because', she admitted, 'I do not understand the English language nor know how to speak it'. So far, her years in England had been locust years: they had devoured her youth and given her nothing in return.
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    Catherine reached the nadir, she thought, on the Feast of St John the Baptist, 24 June 1506. This was the final day provided for the delivery of the second instalment of her marriage portion. The day came and went and nothing arrived. Even the excuses of the Spanish were late and it was not until 15 March 1507, when Ferdinand was in Naples, that he wrote to Henry VII and Catherine. Each was given a different reason for the delay. To Henry VII, Ferdinand explained that the money was already collected and in the safekeeping of Isabella's trustees and awaited only his personal authority for payment on his return to Spain. Catherine likewise was assured that the money was ready. But, to her, Ferdinand blamed her brother-in-law, the King-Archduke Philip, who was 'always . . . hostile to him and to all his daughters', for preventing the payment. The inconsistencies are obvious, and, for the record, neither version was true.
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    At least Ferdinand's letters made good speed to England, reaching Catherine and De Puebla in only a fortnight. Ambassador De Puebla had the coolest reception when he delivered the letter to Henry VII to the King's hands. Henry VII scarcely bothered to pretend to believe Ferdinand's reasons and, through his own ambassador, he lectured his brother monarch on the importance of honouring debts. 'Punctual payments', he later wrote to Ferdinand directly, 'is so sacred a duty and the sum of money is so moderate for so great a King as the King of Spain that he had not expected to be again requested to consent to a new postponement of the payment'. Nevertheless, after much persuasion, Henry VII agreed to a deferment until Michaelmas, 29 September 1507.
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    Catherine's letters in reply to her father were equally frank. Please do not default again, she begged. 'For the contempt shown to her when the money of her portion did not arrive was great. Does not wish again to undergo such a humiliation. Though submissive, cannot forget that she is the daughter of the King of Spain.' But worse still than the poverty and the contempt was the fact that she was 'so seldom [allowed] to see the Prince of Wales, although he lived in the same house with her'.
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* * *

There is, in fact, a curious parallelism in the lives of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon in these years. Henry's mother died in February

1503. He was only eleven years old. Henry had been as close to Elizabeth of York as Catherine was to Isabella of Castile, and the loss affected him deeply. The news of his mother's death, he later wrote to Erasmus, had been 'hateful intelligence'. But the consequences were more than psychological. Elizabeth's death, following hard on the heels of the death of his brother Arthur, brought about a change in Henry's life – just as Isabella's death had done in Catherine's.
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    Hitherto, as Duke of York, Henry had been brought up away from Court, under the general supervision of his mother. He had his own Household, which attended on him and his sisters as they moved between the smaller home-counties palaces including Eltham and Hatfield. Now everything changed. At the beginning of 1504, Parliament stripped him of his lands and title as Duke of York. On 23 February 1504 he formally stepped into Arthur's shoes with his creation as Prince of Wales. On 28 June he celebrated his fourteenth birthday and immediately afterwards, at the beginning of July, he joined his father at Richmond and accompanied him on the summer Progress. Like Catherine, Henry had been summoned to his father's Court.
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    The summons came at a crucial moment. Henry was growing up fast. Soon, the Spanish ambassador would note, 'he is already taller than his father and his limbs are of gigantic size'. But the King was reluctant to recognize his son's near-adulthood. It seems clear that he blamed himself for having given Arthur his head too soon. He could not afford to make the same mistake with Henry. So access to the young Prince was carefully controlled and his sports and pastimes were strictly supervised. In particular, he was forbidden to joust. Jousting was the sixteenthcentury football. Star jousters made their fortunes and they were idols even to royal Princes. Henry's physique was ideally suited to the tiltyard. But all his father would do was let him take part in the training bouts known as riding at the ring. 'The object of this sport', according to a modern authority, 'was to catch a suspended ring on the point of one's lance. It was far safer than jousting . . . [and it was] a way of practising for jousting.' It was also, for a young man like Henry, sissy. He sat chafing at the bit as his seniors slugged it out with lances in the joust and hacked at each other with swords in the tourney.
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