The House of Tudor (10 page)

14 The betrothal of Prince Arthur and Catherine of Aragon; an early sixteenth-century Flemish tapestry.

15 Catherine of Aragon as a young girl; a portrait by Michel Sittow.

They took the journey slowly, going by way of Abingdon, Oxford (where they spent Christmas, probably as guests of Magdalen College) and then north to Kenilworth. Here they turned westward, crossing the Severn at Bewdley and reaching the gloomy, medieval fortress of Ludlow Castle early in the New Year. We know very little of their life together but Arthur, who is said to have been ‘very studious and learned beyond his years’, would be kept busy working with his tutor, attending meetings of his council to listen while they debated points of local law and administration, and riding out on hunting expeditions when the weather was fine. Perhaps Catherine went with him sometimes, otherwise she would have had little to do but read or sit sewing with her ladies. There is nothing to suggest that she and Arthur ever succeeded in establishing any sort of close relationship. The prince was a quiet, shy boy, apparently content to stay in the background even at his own wedding, and the fact that they had no common language, apart from Latin and some schoolroom French, cannot have helped to break the ice. Catherine did not complain - she had been trained from babyhood to accept that her destiny would lie with strangers in a strange land - but it is hard to believe that she was happy.

There were some diversions, of course. The Welsh chieftains, led by that old friend of the family Rhys ap Thomas, came in to pay their respects and Rhys left his son Griffith to serve the Prince and Princess of Wales. Catherine made another friend at Ludlow - Margaret Plantagenet, now married to Sir Richard Pole (not to be confused with the de la Poles incidentally), chamberlain of Arthur’s household. Margaret, tall, elegant and aristocratic, was the sister of the Earl of Warwick whose death had helped to make England safe for the Tudors, and for Catherine of Aragon. One might imagine that this would have created an impassable barrier between the two young women, but such situations were not uncommon in great families and the survivors learned to accept them with well-bred stoicism.

In January 1500 Dr. de Puebla, the little Jewish lawyer who was King Ferdinand’s resident ambassador at Henry’s Court, had written triumphantly to his master that since Warwick’s execution England had never been so tranquil or so obedient, and that not a drop of doubtful royal blood remained. De Puebla was being rather more optimistic than accurate. There was still quite enough doubtful, that is, Plantagenet, royal blood in circulation to cause Henry Tudor intermittent anxiety, and during the summer of 1501 disaffection centering round the remaining de la Pole brothers had been simmering under the surface of the wedding preparations. Sometime in July or August, the eldest, Edmund, an arrogant and irresponsible young man who had nevertheless been treated with a good deal of forbearance by the King, fled to the Continent taking his next brother, Richard, with him. Richard sensibly adopted a career as a professional soldier and caused no further trouble to anyone, but Edmund, self-styled Duke of Suffolk and since 1499 the authentic White Rose, was taken up in a rather desultory way by the volatile Emperor Maximilian. Although Edmund de la Pole never looked like becoming a serious threat to the Tudor peace, Henry could not be quite comfortable in his mind while there was a Plantagenet on the loose in Europe.

Apart from this familiar vexation, in the spring of 1502 Henry was at peace with his neighbours and could congratulate himself on the fact that, after many months of patient negotiation, he had finally succeeded in signing a treaty of friendship with Scotland - soon to be sealed by another marriage, between his daughter Margaret and the Scottish king. So when tragedy struck early in April, it came out of a comparatively clear sky.

We are never likely to know exactly what Arthur died of. ‘A consumption’ say some authorities, but although the prince was almost certainly tubercular it wasn’t that alone which killed him. Some accounts blame the sweating sickness and if they are right Fate could scarcely have played a crueller joke on the House of Tudor, for this disease - a violent malarial type of fever, often fatal within twenty-four hours -had first appeared in England in 1485, brought over by the Norman mercenaries who landed at Milford Haven with Henry and Jasper. Of course, Arthur may equally well have picked up some respiratory infection which an already consumptive adolescent had been unable to withstand. Whatever the cause, on 2 April the Rosebush of England, embodiment of all his father’s hopes and dreams, was dead at the age of fifteen.

Richard Pole’s courier found the Court at Greenwich in the early hours of the following Tuesday. The King’s confessor undertook to break the news but it was the Queen who supported her husband through the first raging storm of his grief and shock, reminding him that his mother ‘had never no more children but him only and that God had ever preserved him and brought him where he was’. They still had a fair prince and two fair princesses, and there might yet be more children. ‘God is where he was and we are both young enough’, said Elizabeth gallantly - she was thirty-six now and Henry forty-five.

Later, though, back in her own apartments, the Queen’s brave front collapsed. ‘Natural and motherly remembrance of that great loss smote her so sorrowful to the heart’, says the chronicler, ‘that those about her were fain to send for the King to comfort her; and then his Grace, of true gentle and faithful love, in good haste came and relieved her, and showed her how wise counsel she had given him before and he, for his part, would thank God for his sons, and would she should do in likewise.’

While the King and Queen clung together in their sorrow, struggling to come to terms with the will of a deity who could take their precious elder son on the very threshold of his manhood, and solemn dirges were sung in all the London churches, Arthur’s body lay in his own room at Ludlow, the black-draped coffin surrounded by candles burning day and night. On St. George’s Day it was carried in procession to the parish church, with Griffith ap Rhys walking in front bearing the banner of the prince’s arms and ‘fourscore poor men in black mourning habits holding fourscore torches, besides all the torches of the town’ bringing up the rear. Two days later the cortege set out for Worcester, the nearest cathedral, in the sort of weather which only an English April can produce - wild, wet and bitterly cold. The wind tore at the banners and trappings, pouring rain soaked the robes and hoods of the mourners and turned the road into a quagmire, so that at one stage oxen had to be used to draw the hearse. But the day of the funeral itself was mercifully fine and no detail of pomp or ceremony was omitted. The Earl of Surrey was chief mourner, supported by the Earls of Shrewsbury and Kent, and four bishops waited to conduct the service. ‘He would have had a hard heart that wept not’, remarked one eyewitness of the scene inside the cathedral and when the time came for the prince’s household officers to break their staves and cast them into the open grave, everyone was in tears.

But in spite of disappointment and heartbreak, life and politics had to go on.

Prince Henry, on whose health and well-being everything now depended, must be trained to take his brother’s place, and the future of the widowed Princess of Wales must be settled. When the news of Arthur’s death reached Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella’s immediate reaction had been to ask for the return of their daughter. ‘We cannot endure that a daughter whom we love should be so far away from us in her trouble’, wrote Isabella. They also demanded that Henry should put the princess in possession of her widow’s jointure - one-third of the revenues of Wales, Cornwall and Chester - and repay the first instalment of her dowry - 100,000 gold crowns. All this, though, was no more than the opening move in a fresh round of diplomatic bargaining intended to repair the broken link.

The House of Tudor was not alone in its recent misfortune. The Spanish king and queen had lost three heirs in quick succession - their only son, their eldest daughter, Isabella of Portugal, and Isabella’s son, Dom Miguel. The kingdoms of Aragon and Castile would now pass to their next daughter, Juana, wife of Philip von Hapsburg, Duke of Burgundy and son of the Emperor Maximilian. Juana’s marriage, like Catherine’s, had originally been a part of the general policy of containing France in a ring of pro-Spanish alliances, but by the early 1500s it had assumed a special significance; for it was Juana’s son, Charles of Ghent, who would eventually inherit not only the rich Burgundian Netherlands and the Austrian domains of the Hapsburg family, but the crowns of Spain as well.

To see why the English alliance had become so important to the rulers of Spain, it is only necessary to look at the map. An unfriendly England or, worse, an unfriendly England allied with France, would be able to bar the Straits of Dover any time she pleased and thus effectively cut the future Spanish Empire in half. So when Hernan Duque, special envoy of the Catholic kings, arrived in London that summer, he brought with him full powers to negotiate a second marriage for Catherine - a marriage with her brother-in-law, ‘the Prince of Wales who now is’.

The King of England received the proposal courteously, but was in no hurry to commit himself. Henry had no wish to break with Spain, whose friendship could only work to his advantage - especially bearing in mind that the Netherlands were far and away England’s most valuable trading partners; but he was in a much stronger bargaining position now than he had been ten years ago. He had not forgotten the way Ferdinand had made him wait on Spanish pleasure during their previous dealings, making it humiliatingly clear that Spain was conferring a favour on his house. Now Ferdinand was the suitor and Henry would enjoy playing hard to get.

No one, it seems, thought of asking for Catherine’s views on the subject, but there was one point on which she, or a senior member of her household, would have to be consulted. The princess had been ill, probably with the same infection that had killed Arthur, and it was several weeks before she was fit enough to leave Ludlow and travel slowly south in a black-curtained litter; but as soon as she reached London and had been installed at Durham House in the Strand to complete her period of strict mourning, Dr. de Puebla began to make some discreet enquiries on a rather delicate matter. To put no finer point on it, he needed to know whether or not the Princess of Wales was still a virgin.

Of course, the mere fact that she had been through a church ceremony with Prince Arthur had created a canonical obstacle to her projected union with Prince Arthur’s brother. If that first marriage had been consummated, then, under canon law, she and Prince Henry would be related in the first degree of affinity, a rather more serious impediment. In either case the Pope could issue the appropriate dispensation - it was simply a question of being sure of one’s facts before approaching the Vatican.

De Puebla, therefore, had a quiet word with Don Alessandro Geraldini, Catherine’s chaplain and confessor. Don Alessandro, possibly with the idea of being helpful, was quite definite. Certainly the marriage had been consummated, he declared, there might even be issue. Well, of course, if Catherine was by any chance pregnant, if she were to bear a posthumous child and that child were to be a boy, then the whole situation changed. But while de Puebla was digesting the implications of this interesting information, he heard a very different story from Doña Elvira Manuel. Doña Elvira was furious. How dared the chaplain and the ambassador gossip about the princess behind her back? The marriage had not been consummated. Doña Elvira and all the matrons of their lady’s household were prepared to swear a solemn oath that, of their personal knowledge, the princess was still 
virgo intacta
 - an assertion which could, if necessary, be easily verified. And having reduced de Puebla to an apologetic jelly, the duenna swept off to write her version to Queen Isabella. De Puebla believed her, and so did the Queen. ‘It is already known for a certainty that the said Princess of Wales, our daughter,
remains as she was here
,’ she wrote to Hernan Duque in July 1502.

All the same, after a full discussion between the King, his council and the Spanish envoys, it was decided - presumably on the principle that it was better to be safe than sorry - to proceed on the assumption that Arthur had indeed had carnal knowledge of his wife, and the Pope was asked to dispense accordingly.

Some months before matters reached this advanced stage, the English royal family suffered its second bereavement within a year. By the late summer of 1502 Elizabeth of York had begun her eighth pregnancy and on 2 February 1503, while the Court was paying a visit to the City, she went into premature labour at the Tower of London. (The Queen had intended to be delivered at the comfortable, modem palace of Richmond and it was normal practice for a royal mother-to-be to retire from public gaze at least a month before the expected date of her confinement.) The baby, born ‘upon Candlemas Day, in the night following the day’, was a girl, christened Katherine; but Elizabeth, exhausted by successive child-bearing, died a week later, on or about her thirty-eighth birthday, and the infant princess ‘tarried but a small season after her mother’.