Catherine of Aragon Read online

  CATHERINE OF ARAGON

  Henry’s Spanish Queen

  A Biography

  GILES TREMLETT

  For Edward and Berenice Tremlett, my parents

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations

  Map of c15th Iberia

  Family Trees

  Introduction

  1 Bed

  2 Queen

  3 Birth

  4 Betrothed

  5 Infanta

  6 Alhambra Princess

  7 Adios

  8 Land

  9 On Show

  10 Wedding

  11 Silence and Sadness

  12 Married Life

  13 My Husband’s Brother

  14 Bleed Me

  15 Deceived

  16 Confessions

  17 Ambassador

  18 Married Again

  19 Party Queen

  20 An Heir

  21 Motherhood

  22 Bedroom Politics

  23 War

  24 And Peace

  25 Daughters

  26 A Match for Mary

  27 My Sister’s Son

  28 Infertility and Infidelity

  29 Bastard

  30 Divorce: the King’s Secret Matter

  31 Virginity

  32 Disease

  33 Never with the Mother

  34 God and My Nephew

  35 The People’s Queen

  36 Spies and Disguises

  37 Defiance

  38 Ghostly Advice

  39 Carnal Copulation

  40 The Lull

  41 Poison

  42 Alone

  43 The Queen’s Jewels

  44 Secrets and Lies

  45 That Whore

  46 A ‘Bastard’ Daughter

  47 Hang, Draw, Quarter

  48 Prisoner

  49 The Terror

  50 Death and Conscience

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Index

  Plates

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  List of Illustrations

  Portrait of an Infanta. Catherine of Aragon? c.1496. by Juan de Flandes. Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid. Photo: Album/Oronoz/akg-images.

  Portrait of Arthur, Prince of Wales, c.1499 by English School, (15th century). Private Collection, Courtesy of Philip Mould/Philip Mould Ltd, London/The Bridgeman Art Library.

  Queen Isabel I, the Catholic. Portrait by Juan de Flandes. Patrimonio Nacional, Madrid. Copyright © Patrimonio Nacional.

  King Ferdinand V of Spain, King of Aragon (1452–1516). Spanish School, 15th century. c.1470–1520. The Royal Collection © 2010 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

  King Henry VII by Unknown artist © National Portrait Gallery, London.

  Elizabeth of York by Unknown artist © National Portrait Gallery, London.

  Portrait of a woman, possibly Catherine of Aragon (1485–1536), c.1503/4 by Michel Sittow (1469–1525). Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria/The Bridgeman Art Library.

  Catherine of Aragon as the Magdalene by Michel Sittow (1469–1525). Detroit Institute of Arts, USA/Founders Society purchase, General Membership Fund/The Bridgeman Art Library.

  Laughing child, possibly Henry VIII, c.1498. Painted and gilded terracotta by Guido Mazzoni. The Royal Collection © 2010 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

  Portrait of Henry VIII (1491–1547), c.1509 by English School, (16th century). © The Berger Collection at the Denver Art Museum, USA/The Bridgeman Art Library.

  Portrait of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (c.1475–1530) by English School, (16th century). National Portrait Gallery, London, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library.

  Lord Cromwell, Wearing the Order of St George by Hans Holbein (1497/8–1543) (school of) © The Trustees of the Weston Park Foundation, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library.

  Portrait of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, mid-16th century by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8–1543) (follower of). Private Collection/ © Philip Mould Ltd, London/The Bridgeman Art Library.

  Juan Luis Vives. Spanish humanist and philsosopher (1492–1540.) Portrait. Photo: Album/Oronoz/akg-images.

  Emperor Charles V (1500–58) c.1515 by Flemish School, (16th century) Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library.

  Queen Mary I attributed to Lucas Horenbout © National Portrait Gallery, London.

  Catherine of Aragon attributed to Lucas Horenbout © National Portrait Gallery, London.

  Henry VIII, c.1525–27 by Lucas Horenbout (fl.1534–44). Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library.

  Catherine of Aragon (with marmoset) by Lucas Horenbout. Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry Collection.

  Anne Boleyn, 1534 by English School, (16th century). Hever Castle, Kent, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library.

  King Henry VIII by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8–1543). Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid, Spain/The Bridgeman Art Library.

  Iberia: kingdoms and territories, late fifteenth century

  THE TUDORS

  Dates refer to years of birth and death

  SPAIN’S ROYAL FAMILY, CASTILE AND ARAGON

  Dates refer to years of rule

  The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow.

  G. M. TREVELYAN, An Autobiography and Other Essays (1949)

  Introduction

  Zaragoza, the Cathedral. 11 June 1531

  Salvador Felipe stood at the doors of the great cathedral in Zaragoza and began to read aloud. It was mid-June, 1531, and the infernal summer heat that replaces the biting winter winds of Spain’s central Ebro Plain must have been settling in. The cathedral had been packed for Sunday morning mass and Felipe should have had a good crowd when he raised his voice to name the king of England, Henry VIII. The English king, Felipe announced, was being summoned before a tribunal in the city. If he wanted to hear what others were saying about him, then Henry must appear at the cathedral cloisters on the following Wednesday. If the king did not wish to come himself, he could send a legal representative.

  The summons was extraordinary. Monarchs were not the kind of people to be dragged against their will before the ecclesiastical courts. Even this far away, though, many people would have known that England’s king was proving to be anything but ordinary. His name was already well known to people here in the capital city of the kingdom of Aragon. He was, after all, married to the woman who introduced the kingdom’s name into English history – Catherine of Aragon. She had left her native land long ago, but people had not forgotten she was the daughter of two great Spanish monarchs – Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabel of Castile.

  Catherine was now at the centre of one of the greatest scandals being gossiped about across Europe. Henry no longer wanted his wife of twenty-two years. He wanted, instead, a clever and ambitious young Englishwoman called Anne Boleyn. Henry was doing all he could to get rid of Catherine, but his wife was proving a formidable opponent. Catherine had dug in her heels. She was fighting for her marital rights with intelligence and, above all, rock-like obstinacy.

  This was why Miguel Jiménez de Embum, abbot of the powerful Cistercian abbey at Veruela, fifty miles away at the foot of the imposing Mount Moncayo, had called the tribunal. He was acting at the request of Paulo di Capisuchi – dean of the Vatican appeal court of the Rota – and, so, ultimately, of the pope. His task was to gather evidence for and give his opinion on what in England was already known as ‘the great matter’. This was not a divorce, as it is understood today, though many people used that word to describe it. It was, rather, an attempt to have the pope declare Catherine’s marriage illegitimate from the very beginning. Henry’s determination to wriggle out of a marriage that was as much about European politics as anything else was felt keenly by some proud Spaniards. She had, after all, been a model wife and queen consort. Her husband had even left his kingdom in her hands while he fought in France. As queen regent in his absence, she had inflicted an historic defeat on his Scottish enemies.

  Few people would have felt more deeply for Catherine than those listening to Felipe, who was the tribunal’s herald, in Zaragoza. The cathedral’s handsomely decorated walls, with their blue, turquoise and green ceramic tiling inlaid into elaborate patterns of mudéjar brickwork, were proof of the city’s wealth and importance. Zaragoza sat on the bank of the broad, fast-running River Ebro and at the heart of the kingdom once ruled by her father. Catherine was of the most illustrious Spanish stock. Her mother, the mighty and pious Queen Isabel, had been ruler in her own right of the even greater kingdom of Castile. Her parents had conquered the last remnants of Moorish Spain and brought their kingdoms together to form a new and powerful country. Ferdinand and Isabel having died, this was now ruled by Catherine’s nephew Charles, the grandly titled Holy Roman Emperor whose lands stretched across swathes of Europe. With this pedigree, Catherine was not a woman who could be cast aside lightly. Nor was she the kind to allow herself to be unceremoniously dumped onto the matrimonial rubbish heap. Her tenacious defence had already seen the case moved from a court in England to the Rota. She had, in fact, kept Henry from get
ting his ‘divorce’ for the past four years.

  Salvador Felipe read out the citation in Latin. Then he read a translation in Spanish. He pinned the precious original document to the cathedral’s door. After an hour, he took it down, replaced it with a copy and left. With this, the legal formalities were done. If the English king did not appear – and it was, in any case, impossible for him to do so at three days’ notice – they would start without him. The evidence, inevitably, would be centred on the queen’s sex life as a young bride. This was key to the whole question.

  Zaragoza was not the only place where hearings into Catherine’s marriage were being held. One had already, most famously and dramatically, been called at Blackfriars in London two years earlier. The English witnesses there backed their king against Catherine. They claimed she could not have remained a virgin during her previous, five-month marriage to Henry’s elder brother Arthur – who left her a widow at just sixteen. The fact that his wife had slept with his brother was enough, by Henry’s reckoning, to prove their own marriage unlawful in God’s eyes. It was true that the pope had given written permission for them to wed. But the pope had been wrong. The Bible, Henry insisted, told him as much. It also left him free, or so he claimed, to marry again. His bride-to-be, Anne Boleyn, was waiting impatiently for her wedding day.

  Something entirely different, however, was said in Zaragoza. The witnesses there included people who had travelled with the fifteen-year-old Catherine three decades earlier on her terrifying sea journey from northern Spain to Plymouth to join her future family. Their full testimony, transcribed into Latin and buried in a yellowing, parchment-covered manuscript that sat in the monastery’s archive for centuries, has either been unavailable or largely ignored until now. The hundred-page original – or at least the copy held by the monastery – was moved to Madrid in the nineteenth century. It has sat in the archive of the Real Academia de la Historia ever since. It appears to be the only surviving record of what the witnesses for Catherine, who were heard in several other places, said during the ‘divorce’ proceedings.

  The voices in the manuscript tell a different story from that narrated by the English witnesses. In their version of events, Catherine’s first wedding night was a disaster. The robust young Arthur painted by the English as swaggering out of her bedroom in the morning, flushed with adolescent pride, is transformed into a sickly, traumatised fifteen-year-old. The Spaniards saw a young man overwhelmed by his failure to fulfil the mighty marital, sexual and dynastic obligations present in that big, formal, wedding-night bed.

  It is, of course, possible that these Spaniards lied, or dressed up the truth, to protect their beloved princess. It is also possible that they did not. Either way, they were no more or less likely to be lying than the witnesses in England. That makes their testimony as valid as that of those who claimed to have met an ebullient Arthur demanding beer to quench the thirst of a night of hard love-making. Their words add, if not a definitive tilt, then some extra grains of sand to one side of the moral balance on which Catherine is habitually weighed. That balance measures whether she was the pious victim of a cruel, selfish husband or a consummate liar hiding behind an apparently saintly exterior. Judgements of her have swung backwards and forwards from one extreme to the other over the centuries – and still divide people today. A woman whose life and decisions were crucial to the murderous religious upheavals and revolutionary changes that swept through sixteenth-century England leaves few people indifferent.

  The Spanish witnesses also add details to some other events in Catherine’s life. Their voices have been included in this author’s attempt to approach Catherine, at least initially, via her native Spain and her Spanish family rather than through her Tudor in-laws.

  Catherine can, of course, be measured on many more scales than just that which deems her either truthful or deceiving. The most important traits of her character have, in fact, little to do with honesty or falsehood. What really matters about her is the strength of that character. A protected childhood amid a family of intense, self-demanding Spanish women does much to explain where this came from. Catherine grew up to become a woman of deep, even exaggerated, intensity. The complex and unhappy early English years, with their constant illnesses, eating problems and stern written instructions from the pope to avoid the self-harm of excessive fasting, give the first few clues to that nature. These were the reactions of a young, perfectionist woman who found herself lonely, lost and unloved in a foreign land.

  That same intensity and perfectionism explain, too, both her success and popularity as a queen consort and her final embrace of potential martyrdom. Exactly how close Catherine got to execution and (in her terms) martyrdom, we cannot be sure. She was not alone in believing that a violent end awaited her and, of course, Henry showed few qualms about beheading later wives. What is abundantly clear, however, is that she was ready – even happy – to die for her own cause. That, by the measure of her time, is an example of extreme passion. For, in her day, passion was a matter of love, faith, suffering and, above all, of religious conviction. A woman of Catherine’s convictions and education would have learned that the greatest example of unfettered love was that suffered by Jesus Christ before and during his own martyrdom. Christ’s ‘passion’, indeed, was something she would have dwelt on during her own hours of devotion. To someone like Catherine, then, there was nothing more passionate or virtuous than dying for one’s faith – even though, in the sixteenth century, most Christian martyrs belonged to a dark and distant past. Catherine also had the mettle that would have allowed her to take her peaceful defiance all the way to the executioner’s block. Such people are, at most times in history, a rarity.

  For this writer, who is not a Roman Catholic, it is Catherine’s intensity of character that sets her apart. It makes her much more than a passive victim caught in the tumultuous river of history. Catherine of Aragon, in short, made her choices. She was fully aware of the extreme consequences these could bring both for her and for England. Her strength lay as much in what she did as in the knowledge of what may have happened as a result. Henry VIII, indeed, never met a tougher opponent on, or off, the battlefield.

  Catherine’s importance to English (and European) history is beyond doubt. It is not just that she lasted as long as Henry’s five other wives put together. Her husband’s reign introduced four remarkable women to England’s story: Catherine of Aragon and her daughter ‘Bloody’ Queen Mary; and Anne Boleyn with her daughter, ‘Good’ Queen Elizabeth. ‘From this contest, between two mothers and their daughters, was born the religious passion and violence that inflamed England for centuries,’ says the historian David Starkey. Reformation, revolution and Tudor history would all have been vastly different without Catherine of Aragon. Without her, England might be a very different place today. As a shy Spanish teenage bride, awaiting her boyish groom in a large English ‘bed of state’ in 1501 – thirty years before the tribunal met in Zaragoza – Catherine could not have been aware of any of this. That moment, however, is where this story starts.

  Giles Tremlett, Zaragoza, 20 September 2009

  1 Bed

  London, the Bishop’s Palace. 14 November 1501

  The Spanish girl with the long, light auburn hair lay in bed waiting. It had been an exhausting day. She had been on show, watched by thousands of pairs of foreign eyes, since she first stepped out of the Bishop’s Palace and into the cold, early winter morning air of London. She had done what was bid, maintaining her composure during the interminable hours of wedding ceremony and mass. She, the bride, had walked elegantly across the raised walkways and stages in the cathedral, turning from one side to the other to show herself to the sea of staring faces below. Onlookers had gawked down from windows and rood-lofts to get a view of her in her white silk Spanish dress with its strange, hooped skirt. Cheering crowds had gathered on the streets and, inside, the tumult had been such that some found it hard to follow what was happening. Her new in-laws were delighted.