The Unlikeliest Loophole
Eamon Duffy
·
Catherine of Aragon: Henry’s Spanish Queen by Giles
Tremlett
Faber, 458 pp, £9.99, April 2011, ISBN 978 0 571 23512 4
Faber, 458 pp, £9.99, April 2011, ISBN 978 0 571 23512 4
Catherine of Aragon was Henry VIII’s first and longest-lasting queen, at
the heart of his glittering court for almost two decades. In the early years of
their marriage, the Spanish princess, daughter of the most glamorous monarchs
in Europe, must have seemed every bit as regal as her husband. Yet in the
historiography of Tudor England she has become a shadowy figure, a sad frump
eclipsed by her savage husband and the brazen mistress who supplanted her.
Giles Tremlett’s splendid biography seeks to correct that perception.
Notoriously, Henry came to hate the cast-off wife he once doted on, but it’s
Tremlett’s contention that when Henry made Catherine his enemy, he found to his
cost that he had never encountered a tougher opponent, ‘on, or off, the
battlefield’. It is the book’s achievement to make that claim both intelligible
and persuasive.
For a new and insecure dynasty on the western fringe of Europe, a marriage
with the Spanish infanta was a tremendous prize. Catherine’s mother, Isabel of
Castile, was the most powerful woman in Europe, a defiantly hands-on female
ruler whose marriage to Ferdinand, king of the lesser Spanish kingdom of
Aragon, created the germ of modern Spain and marked the arrival of a formidable
new power in world politics. Their conquest of the Moorish emirate of Granada
and their deployment of the Inquisition, forced conversion and, eventually,
ethnic cleansing to rid Spain of its Jewish and Muslim populations, marked the
end of a period of religious coexistence in the peninsula, and in modern times
has made Ferdinand and Isabel seem bywords for blinkered bigotry. To
contemporaries, fearfully conscious of the menace of the Turkish empire on Europe’s
southern and eastern borders, they must have looked like the saviours of
Christian civilisation. In 1496 that worldly sophisticate Pope Alexander VI
recognised this by awarding Catherine’s parents the title of ‘Catholic
Monarchs’. Shrewd dynastic marriages for their children linked the Catholic
Monarchs to the rulers of Portugal, the Low Countries and Habsburg Germany and
ensured that their grandson Charles V would rule an empire encompassing much of
the known world. By these standards the betrothal of their fifth child to
Prince Arthur of England was small beer. But not for England: the marriage of
two successive heirs to the throne to the same daughter of the most formidable
and militantly Christian monarchy in Europe represented the arriviste Tudor
dynasty’s eager quest for international legitimacy and a potentially invaluable
ally against England’s traditional enemy, France.
For the 16-year-old Catherine, by contrast, marriage to the Prince of
Wales in November 1501 must have seemed like a parachute descent to an alien
and unappealing planet. She spoke not a word of English, and both she and her
entourage found English food, English social customs and English weather
difficult to adjust to. Within weeks of her arrival, and despite the lavish celebrations
that marked her wedding, she was desperately homesick, and her notoriously
tight-fisted father-in-law, Henry VII, was reduced to cheering her up by giving
her the run of the royal jewel-house. They were the last gifts she was to
receive from him, for the courts of England and Aragon were soon bitterly at
odds over delays in the delivery of her dowry.
Within a month of the wedding and in the dead of winter, she and her boy
bridegroom were dispatched from the comforts of the court at Richmond to spend
Christmas in the Welsh Marches so that Arthur could resume his duties as Prince
of Wales. There had been doubts about whether Catherine should go. Some feared
that too much sexual indulgence might sap the prince’s strength (Catherine’s
newly-wed teenage brother Juan had died, it was said, from just such
injudicious application to the duties of the marriage-bed). But in the end,
bride and groom went together. The transition within a few months from the
golden courts of the Alhambra to the dripping gloom of Ludlow Castle must have
been devastating. By the spring, both Catherine and Arthur had fallen ill,
perhaps with the sweating-sickness. She recovered, but on 2 April 1502, Arthur,
who may already have been suffering from tuberculosis, succumbed to the illness
and died.
The death of Prince Arthur provoked consternation both in London and
Granada. Though England still had an heir to the throne in the ten-year-old
Prince Henry, the queen, Elizabeth of York, now dangerously old at 36,
immediately sought to make assurance doubly sure by conceiving again: the
pregnancy was to kill her. Isabel and Ferdinand, however, wanted to maintain
the alliance that the marriage of Catherine and Arthur had cemented between
England and Spain. For his part, Henry VII was determined never to relinquish
Catherine’s dowry. It was agreed, therefore, that Catherine should marry little
Prince Henry, just as soon as he reached puberty. But there was a hitch:
marriage to a deceased brother’s wife was forbidden by the Church. Fortunately,
the pope, for a consideration, could dispense with inconvenient laws of this
kind. Here, however, ominous differences of interpretation emerged. Some
theologians thought that not even the pope could legitimise a marriage between
brother and sister-in-law, if the union had been consummated. The Spanish court
soon asserted that, all appearances to the contrary, Catherine’s marriage with
the sickly Arthur had never been consummated, and she was still a virgin. Years
later, Catherine was to be a good deal more specific, swearing solemnly that
Arthur had shared her bed on no more than seven occasions, on none of which had
penetration been achieved. There was, on this account, no bar to the proposed
alliance.
The English court took a different view. Though no one at the time
probed the facts about consummation or non-consummation, even the unlikeliest
loophole in the papal dispensation might cast doubt on the legitimacy of any
offspring, and hence on the succession to the English throne. King Henry
therefore insisted that the dispensation must specify that a marriage to Prince
Henry would be valid and licit whether or not Catherine came to it a virgin. As
King Ferdinand complained furiously to his ambassador to the Vatican, the truth
of the matter was well known, but ‘the mad English … believe that the
dispensation should say the marriage was consummated.’ In the end Pope Julius
II hedged his bets and sent a dispensation permitting the marriage of Catherine
to Henry, even though the marriage with Arthur had ‘perhaps’ been consummated.
On that ambiguity, her happiness, and England’s allegiance to the Catholic
Church, would one day founder.
Catherine’s life was now put on hold, and she was to remain an unhappy
widow for another seven years. The death of Queen Isabel in 1504 reduced her
dynastic desirability, for her elder sister Juana the Mad succeeded to the
throne of Castile, and a marriage alliance with Ferdinand’s smaller and poorer
kingdom of Aragon seemed no great catch for England. Disputes over her dowry
enabled the less and less enthusiastic Henry VII to stall, while the young
dowager princess was kept a virtual prisoner in Durham House in London.
Mourning for her mother, desperately short of cash, and smarting under the
humiliations of her sudden fall from favour, Catherine’s health deteriorated
and her menstrual cycle became erratic. She took comfort in religion, her
devout obedience to her rather dodgy Spanish confessor a matter of exasperation
to King Henry. Starved of funds by her grasping father-in-law, she kept herself
financially afloat and revenged herself on Henry by pawning items from her
dwindling dowry.
But it was in these years too that her adamantine strength of character
emerged. She proved quietly but unflinchingly defiant in the face of her
father’s neglect and her father-in-law’s insolent bullying. She developed a
talent as an adroit and determined political operator, and in 1507 Ferdinand
appointed her his ambassador to the English court, a move that she made the
most of and which led to a marked improvement in her status. And then,
unexpectedly, her situation was decisively transformed by the death of Henry
VII in April 1509. Within days of his accession, the 17-year-old King Henry
VIII announced his intention to honour the marriage treaty and marry his
brother’s widow. On 11 June 1509, in a quiet wedding ceremony at Greenwich,
Catherine became queen of England.
Despite the difference in their ages – Henry had been a mischievous page
at Catherine’s first wedding – the auguries for the marriage were good. The
royal couple from the start seemed devoted to each other. They were, for one
thing, physically well-matched. Catherine was never a raving beauty, but she
had the glow of youth and new-found happiness, luxuriant pale auburn hair and a
pretty rounded face, altogether much more the English rose than the Hispanic
siren. She had a flair for the endearing public gesture and soon became hugely
popular with Londoners. For his part, Henry was handsome, athletic and always
dressed to kill: as an Italian observer noted, he was ‘above the usual height,
with an extremely fine calf to his leg, his complexion very fair and bright,
with auburn hair … and a round face so very beautiful that it would become a
pretty woman’.
And in their first years together, Henry seemed besotted not only with
his bride but even with her father. Henry loved the idea of chivalry – jousting
was a favourite pastime – and his father-in-law seemed a figure out of medieval
romance: Ferdinand was the most successful crusader in Europe, the man who by
force of arms rid Spain of its Islamic populations, the triumphant champion of
a militant Christendom. There is a note of hero worship in Henry’s early
correspondence with Ferdinand that went well beyond the usual compliments of
diplomatic exchange.
The hero worship did not last. Christian champion or not, Ferdinand was
the most devious of politicians, and in 1512 he lured Henry into a futile
Continental adventure, ostensibly for a joint invasion of Aquitaine (to which
England laid claim) but in fact designed to annex Navarre to the Spanish crown:
Henry had been tricked into an expensive military shambles to serve Ferdinand’s
ends. The episode drove a wedge between Ferdinand and Catherine, now fluent in
English and determinedly identifying herself with English interests.
Unexpectedly, she proved a far greater asset to Henry than his father-in-law
could ever be. In 1513, when Henry launched a fresh military campaign in
France, he left Catherine in charge at home as queen regent. She took to the role
with panache: when the Scottish King James IV tried to exploit Henry’s absence
by declaring war, Catherine revealed a decisive gift for organisation,
masterminding the equipping and dispatch of English forces north. She even
commissioned a jewelled armoured helmet and set out for Scotland herself. The
rout of the Scottish army at Flodden and the death of the Scottish king crowned
Catherine’s triumph (though she never came anywhere near the fighting).
The crucial victories of a queen consort were won in the bed, however,
not on the battlefield, and there things were going much less well. Catherine
had presented Henry with the longed-for male heir on New Year’s Day 1511, but
the boy survived only a few weeks, and as the years went by multiple
stillbirths and miscarriages made it clear that Catherine was not a good
breeder. Only one of their children was to survive into adulthood, a girl,
Mary, born in February 1516. Henry professed himself delighted, and in due
course the little Princess of Wales was sent to the castle at Ludlow to assume
the duties of the heir to the throne. But it was not to beget daughters that
Henry had married Catherine. As the years passed, and the queen’s puppy fat
congealed into stoutness, Henry’s eye began to wander. In 1519, one of Catherine’s
maids-in-waiting, Elizabeth Blount, presented the king with a bastard son,
Henry Fitzroy, whom Henry acknowledged and showered with affection and titles.
Catherine remained an honoured presence at Henry’s side, a patron of the
fashionable humanistic learning, a valuable link with her nephew, Emperor
Charles V, and influential enough in Henry’s counsels to arouse the jealousy of
his chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey. But she had to learn to turn a smiling
face on their fading personal idyll.
In 1527, the bombshell fell. Anne Boleyn, a pert young Frenchified
Norfolk girl, trained to royal service in Brussels and Paris, had returned to
England in 1521 and become a notable presence at the English court. Her married
sister, Mary, was already one of Henry’s mistresses. He now fell hopelessly in
love with Anne: shrewder than her sister, Anne set a wedding ring as the price
of admission to her bed.
No one knows for sure who planted the idea of annulling the marriage in
Henry’s head. According to Henry, the French ambassador, in the course of
negotiations for a marriage between Princess Mary and a member of the French
royal family, suggested that Mary might be a bastard because of the doubts
surrounding the papal dispensation for her parents’ marriage. Catherine was
convinced that Wolsey was the culprit, determined to oust her and drive a wedge
between Henry and Charles V, who had refused to support Wolsey’s ambitions for
the papacy. Whoever had the idea, Henry now set his heart on having his
marriage declared null and void. The Bible sent conflicting messages. A verse
in Leviticus cursed any marriage with a dead brother’s wife; a verse in
Deuteronomy recommended marriage with and children by a dead brother’s wife as
a pious family obligation. Henry claimed his conscience was tormented by the
curse in Leviticus: he and Catherine had sinned in sleeping together, and this,
he said, was why he was childless (a convenient and characteristic obliteration
of Mary’s existence). Secret commissions of lawyers and theologians assembled
the case, university faculties of law and theology were nobbled or bullied,
envoys were sent to Rome laden with bribes and rumours that Catherine had
horrible genital deformities. No one mentioned Anne Boleyn, though everyone
knew that was what the whole thing was about. Henry may initially have hoped
that Catherine would accept defeat and honourable retirement to some country
house as princess dowager. If so, he misjudged her. For the next six years she
would protest undying love and obedience to her husband, while she resolutely
defied and brilliantly sabotaged all his attempts to be rid of her. She was to
fight the divorce proceedings to her final breath.
‘The King’s Great Matter’ divided the political elite of England and
brought Henry’s regime close to ruin. Catherine was popular, cheered to the
rafters whenever she appeared in public, especially by women: when Anne was
eventually crowned queen of England, sullen crowds would watch her coronation
procession in silence. Popular prophets like the visionary ‘nun of Kent’,
Elizabeth Barton, predicted God’s curse on Henry if he discarded his queen: she
and her followers were executed. The leaders of the Church and the political
elite one by one caved in to royal pressure to support the king’s proceedings:
those who would not, like Bishop Fisher of Rochester and Thomas More, went to
the block, protesting that they died for the Catholic religion.
For the king’s marriage had opened Pandora’s box. The pope, that gutless
Medici by-blow Clement VII, was in the power of Catherine’s nephew Charles V,
whose armies sacked Rome in 1527. Whatever he thought of his predecessor’s
dispensation, Clement was afraid to grant Henry’s request. He took to weeping
in public about his dilemma: if only the queen of England would simply die! He
dispatched a legate, Cardinal Campeggio, to hear the case in a special court in
London alongside Wolsey. Campeggio pleaded with the queen to let the pope off
the hook and release her husband by taking a vow of chastity and retiring to a
convent. She refused. And in June 1529 she brilliantly exploited Campeggio’s
Legatine Court and confounded Henry in a magnificent coup de théâtre. The court
itself, held publicly at Blackfriars, was sensational enough, with the king and
queen of England summoned before two cardinals to have their grievances aired
in public. Henry, all anguished innocence, paraded his lacerated conscience,
only to be struck dumb when Catherine threw herself at his feet, protested her
love and absolute devotion to him, and challenged him on his honour as a king
and a man to deny that she had come to him a virgin. Henry blustered, but
neither then nor ever afterwards did he contradict her, the most telling piece
of evidence that she spoke the truth. She then swept from the court, refusing
its jurisdiction because she could not have a fair hearing in England, and
appealed directly to the pope. It was game, set and match for Catherine. But it
was also the beginning of the end of Catholic England.
In the early 1520s, Henry had rivalled the Catholic orthodoxy of his
Spanish in-laws by launching a vigorous campaign against the first stirrings of
the Protestant Reformation. Protestant books, and some of their authors, were
condemned and burned, and the king wrote a treatise against Martin Luther, for
which the pope gave him the title Defender of the Faith. But the Church was now
failing Henry over the divorce. If the pope would not oblige, then the king
would make himself pope in England. Stooge theologians concocted a theory of the
spiritual sovereignty of English kings, and a bogus history to back it, and in
1534 England broke finally away from papal obedience.
For Catherine, life was now an unrelenting struggle against adversity.
As Henry’s animosity against her festered, indignities were heaped on her: her
entourage was dismissed, she was stripped of the name and honours of a queen,
her jewels were confiscated and given to Anne Boleyn. Worst of all, she was
separated permanently from Princess Mary, a crushing blow for both of them, and
possibly the most despicable act of Henry’s despicable life. She remained
dignified and defiant, and, with the possibility of rebellion in her favour at
home and the threat of invasion from abroad, a real danger to her husband. She
refused to have anyone about her who would not call her queen and declared her
willingness to die to vindicate her truthfulness. Execution was a real
possibility, but privation and disease released her from her jail in Kimbolton
on 7 January 1536.
Henry and Anne Boleyn celebrated the news of her death with a succession
of parties. But Anne’s days too were numbered. She had been no more successful
than Catherine in providing a male heir. She was a good deal more assertive in
public with Henry than Catherine had ever been. She made many enemies and few
friends, and she had aroused the hostility of the king’s chief minister, Thomas
Cromwell. She was arrested at the beginning of May 1536 on trumped up charges
of incest, adultery and plotting to murder the king, and beheaded on Tower
Green on 19 May. Tremlett does not say, but it was widely rumoured that the
same morning, the candles round Catherine’s grave in Peterborough Cathedral
burst spontaneously into flame.
Any biography of Catherine has to stand
comparison with David Starkey’s brilliant full-length portrait in Six
Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII. Starkey has an unrivalled grasp of
the intricacies of Tudor court politics, and his portrait of Catherine offers a
richer and surer sense of the wider ramifications of her marital problems. But
Tremlett is fuller on Catherine’s Spanish background, and he differs from
Starkey in allowing more credence to Catherine’s repeated insistence that her
marriage with Arthur was never consummated. After their wedding night Arthur
boasted that he had been all night ‘in the midst of Spain’, and Starkey is
inclined to believe him. Ultimate judgments on Catherine depend on whether one
gives more weight to the sexual boastings of a boy with face to lose, or the
solemn oaths of a devout and courageous woman. The flustered Spanish cleric who
heard her final confession forgot to ask her, so, as both Starkey and Tremlett
admit, only God knows for sure. We are fortunate in having the two books to
choose between. Maddeningly, one has to go online to consult Tremlett’s
footnotes; but his biography is popular historical writing as it should be
done, securely based on the sources and superbly written.
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