Читать книгу The Wives of Henry the Eighth and the Parts They Played in History - Martin A. S. Hume - Страница 10

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The arrival of Katharine in England as his son’s affianced wife meant very much for Henry VII. and his house. He had already, by a master-stroke of diplomacy, betrothed his eldest daughter to the King of Scots, and was thus safe from French intrigue on his vulnerable northern border, whilst the new King of France was far too apprehensive of Ferdinand’s coalition to arouse the active enmity of England. The presence of Ferdinand’s daughter on English soil completed the security against attack upon Henry from abroad. It is true that the Yorkists and their friends were still plotting: “Solicited, allured and provoked, by that old venomous serpent, the Duchess of Burgundy, ever the sower of sedition and beginner of rebellion against the King of England;”[3] but Henry knew well that with Katharine at his Court he could strike a death-blow, as he soon did, at his domestic enemies, without fear of reprisals from her brother-in-law Philip, the present sovereign of Burgundy and Flanders.

Messengers were sent galloping to London to carry to the King the great news of Katharine’s arrival at Plymouth; but the roads were bad, and it was not Henry’s way to spoil his market by a show of over-eagerness, and though he sent forward the Duchess of Norfolk and the Earl of Surrey to attend upon the Princess on her way towards London, the royal party did not set out from Shene Palace to meet her until the 4th November. Travelling through a drenching rain by short stages from one seat to another, Henry VII. and his daughter-in-law gradually approached each other with their splendid troops of followers, all muffled up, we are told, in heavy rain cloaks to shield their finery from the inclemency of an English winter. Young Arthur, coming from the seat of his government in Wales, met his father near Chertsey, and together they continued their journey towards the west. On the third day, as they rode over the Hampshire downs, they saw approaching them a group of horsemen, the leader of which dismounted and saluted the King in Latin with a message from Ferdinand and Isabel. Ladies in Spain were kept in strict seclusion until their marriage, and the messenger, who was the Protonotary Cañazares, sent with Katharine to England to see that Spanish etiquette was not violated, prayed in the name of his sovereigns that the Infanta should not be seen by the King, and especially by the bridegroom, until the public marriage was performed. This was a part of the bargain that the cautious Puebla had not mentioned, and Henry was puzzled at such a request in his own realm, where no such oriental regard for women was known. Hastily taking counsel of the nobles on horseback about him, he decided that, as the Infanta was in England, she must abide by English customs. Indeed the demand for seclusion seems to have aroused the King’s curiosity, for, putting spurs to his horse, with but a small following, and leaving the boy bridegroom behind, he galloped on to Dogmersfield, at no great distance away, where the Infanta was awaiting his arrival. When he came to the house in which she lodged, he found a little group of horrified Spanish prelates and nobles, the Archbishop of Santiago, the Bishop of Majorca, and Count Cabra, at the door of the Infanta’s apartments, barring entrance. The Princess had, they said, retired to her chamber and ought not to be disturbed. There was no restraining a king in his own realm, however, and Henry brushed the group aside. “Even if she were in bed,” he said, “he meant to see and speak with her, for that was the whole intent of his coming.”

Finding that Spanish etiquette would not be observed in England, Katharine made the best of matters and received Henry graciously, though evidently her Latin and French were different from his; for they were hardly intelligible to one another. Then, after the King had changed his travelling garb, he sent word that he had a present for the Princess; and led in the blushing Prince Arthur to the presence of his bride. The conversation now was more easily conducted, for the Latin-speaking bishops were close by to interpret. Once more, and for the fourth time, the young couple formally pledged their troth; and then after supper the Spanish minstrels played, and the ladies and gentlemen of Katharine’s suite danced: young Arthur, though unable to dance in the Spanish way, trod an English measure with Lady Guildford to show that he was not unversed in courtly graces.[4]

Arthur appears to have been a slight, fair, delicate lad, amiable and gentle, and not so tall as his bride, who was within a month of sixteen years, Arthur being just over fifteen. Katharine must have had at this time at least the grace of girlhood, though she never can have been a great beauty. Like most of her mother’s house she had pale, rather hard, statuesque features and ruddy hair. As we trace her history we shall see that most of her mistakes in England, and she made many, were the natural result of the uncompromising rigidity of principle arising from the conviction of divine appointment which formed her mother’s system. She had been brought up in the midst of a crusading war, in which the victors drew their inspiration, and ascribed their triumph, to the special intervention of the Almighty in their favour; and already Katharine’s house had assumed as a basis of its family faith that the cause of God was indissolubly linked with that of the sovereigns of Castile and Leon. It was impossible that a woman brought up in such a school could be opportunist, or would bend to the petty subterfuges and small complaisances by which men are successfully managed; and Katharine suffered through life from the inflexibility born of self-conscious rectitude.

Slowly through the rain the united cavalcades travelled back by Chertsey; and the Spanish half then rode to Kingston, where the Duke of Buckingham, with four hundred retainers in black and scarlet, met the bride, and so to the palace at Kennington hard by Lambeth, where Katharine was lodged until the sumptuous preparations for the public marriage at St. Paul’s were completed. To give a list of all the splendours that preceded the wedding would be as tedious as it is unnecessary; but a general impression of the festivities as they struck a contemporary will give us a far better idea than a close catalogue of the wonderful things the Princess saw as she rode her white palfrey on the 12th November through Southwark, over London Bridge, and by Cheapside to the Bishop of London’s house adjoining St. Paul’s. “And, because I will not be tedious to you, I pass over the wise devices, the prudent speeches, the costly works, the cunning portraitures, practised and set forth in seven beautiful pageants erected and set up in divers places of the city. I leave also the goodaly ballds, the sweet harmony, the musical instruments, which sounded with heavenly noise in every side of the street. I omit the costly apparel, both of goldsmith’s work and embroidery, the rich jewels, the massy chains, the stirring horses, the beautiful bards, and the glittering trappers, both with bells and spangles of gold. I pretermit also the rich apparel of the Princess, the strange fashion of the Spanish nation, the beauty of the English ladies, the goodly demeanour of the young damosels, the amorous countenance of the lusty bachelors. I pass over the fine engrained clothes, the costly furs of the citizens, standing upon scaffolds, railed from Gracechurch to St. Paul’s. What should I speak of the odoriferous scarlets, and fine velvet and pleasant furs, and rich chains, which the Mayor of London with the Senate, sitting on horseback at the little conduit in Chepe, ware upon their bodies and about their necks. I will not molest you with rehearsing the rich arras, the costly tapestry, the fine cloths of silver and of gold, the curious velvets and satins, the pleasant silks, which did hang in every street where she passed; the wine that ran out of the conduits, the gravelling and railing of the streets, and all else that needeth not remembring.”[5] In short, we may conclude that Katharine’s passage through London before her wedding was as triumphal as the citizens could make it. Even the common people knew that her presence in England made for security and peace, and her Lancastrian descent from John of Gaunt seemed to add promise of legitimacy to future heirs to the crown.

A long raised gangway of timber handsomely draped ran from the great west door of St. Paul’s to the entrance to the choir. Near the end of the gangway there was erected upon it a high platform, reached by steps on each side, with room on the top for eight persons to stand. On the north side of the platform sat the King and Queen incognito in a tribune supposed to be private; whilst the corporation of London were ranged on the opposite side. The day of the ceremony was the 14th November 1501, Sunday and the day of St. Erkenwald, and all London was agog to see the show. Nobles and knights from every corner of the realm, glittering and flashing in their new finery, had come to do honour to the heir of England and his bride. Both bride and bridegroom were dressed in white satin, and they stood together, a comely young pair, upon the high scarlet stage to be married for the fifth time, on this occasion by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Then, after mass had been celebrated at the high altar with Archbishops, and mitred prelates by the dozen, a procession was formed to lead the newly married couple to the Bishop of London’s palace across the churchyard. The stately bride, looking older than her years, came first, followed by a hundred ladies; and whilst on her left hand there hobbled the disreputable, crippled old ambassador, Dr. Puebla, the greatest day of whose life this was, on the other side the Princess was led by the most engaging figure in all that vast assembly. It was that of a graceful little boy of ten years in white velvet and gold; his bearing so gallant and sturdy, his skin so dazzlingly fair, his golden hair so shining, his smile so frank, that a rain of blessings showered upon him as he passed. This was the bridegroom’s brother, Henry, Duke of York, who in gay unconsciousness was leading his own fate by the hand.

Again the details of crowds of lords and ladies in their sumptuous garments, of banquets and dancing, of chivalric jousts and puerile maskings, may be left to the imagination of the reader. When magnificence at last grew palling, the young bride and bridegroom were escorted to their chamber in the Bishop of London’s palace, with the broad suggestiveness then considered proper in all well-conducted weddings, and duly recorded in this case by the courtly chroniclers of the times. In the morning Arthur called at the door of the nuptial chamber to his attendants for a draught of liquor. To the bantering question of the chamberlain as to the cause of his unaccustomed thirst, it was not unnatural, considering the free manners of the day, that the Prince should reply in a vein of boyish boastfulness, with a suggestion which was probably untrue regarding the aridity of the Spanish climate and his own prowess as being the causes of his droughtiness. In any case this indelicate bit of youthful swagger of Arthur’s was made, nearly thirty years afterwards, one of the principal pieces of evidence gravely brought forward to prove the illegality of Katharine’s marriage with Henry.

On the day following the marriage the King and Queen came in full state to congratulate the newly married pair, and led them to the abode that had been elaborately prepared for them at Baynard’s Castle, whose ancient keep frowned over the Thames, below Blackfriars. On the Thursday following the feast was continued at Westminster with greater magnificence than ever. In a splendid tribune extending from Westminster Hall right across what is now Parliament Square sat Katharine with all the royal family and the Court, whilst the citizens crowded the stands on the other side of the great space reserved for the tilters. Invention was exhausted by the greater nobles in the contrivances by which they sought to make their respective entries effective. One had borne over him a green erection representing a wooded mount, crowded with allegorical animals; another rode under a tent of cloth of gold, and yet another pranced into the lists mounted upon a stage dragon led by a fearsome giant; and so the pageantry that seems to us so trite, and was then considered so exquisite, unrolled itself before the enraptured eyes of the lieges who paid for it all. How gold plate beyond valuation was piled upon the sideboards at the great banquet after the tilt in Westminster Hall, how Katharine and one of her ladies danced Spanish dances and Arthur led out his aunt Cicely, how masques and devices innumerable were paraded before the hosts and guests, and, above all, how the debonair little Duke of York charmed all hearts by his dancing with his elder sister; and, warming to his work, cast off his coat and footed it in his doublet, cannot be told here, nor the ceremony in which Katharine distributed rich prizes a few days afterwards to the successful tilters. There was more feasting and mumming at Shene to follow, but at last the celebration wore itself out, and Arthur and his wife settled down for a time to married life in their palace at Baynard’s Castle.

King Henry in his letter to the bride’s parents, expresses himself as delighted with her “beauty and agreeable and dignified manners,” and promises to be to her “a second father, who will ever watch over her, and never allow her to lack anything that he can procure for her.” How he kept his promise we shall see later; but there is no doubt that her marriage with his son was a great relief to him, and enabled him, first to cast his net awide and sweep into its meshes all the gentry of England who might be presumed to wish him ill, and secondly to send Empson and Dudley abroad to wring from the well-to-do classes the last ducat that could be squeezed in order that he might buttress his throne with wealth. Probably Arthur’s letter to Ferdinand and Isabel written at the same time (November 30, 1501) was drafted by other hands than his own, but the terms in which he expresses his satisfaction with his wife are so warm that they doubtless reflect the fact that he really found her pleasant. “He had never,” he assured them, “felt so much joy in his life as when he beheld the sweet face of his bride, and no woman in the world could be more agreeable to him.”[6] The honeymoon was a short, and could hardly have been a merry, one; for Arthur was obviously a weakling, consumptive some chroniclers aver; and the grim old castle by the river was not a lively abode.

Before the marriage feast were well over, Henry’s avarice began to make things unpleasant for Katharine. We have seen how persistent he had been in his demands that the dowry should be paid to him in gold, and how the bride’s parents had pressed that the jewels and plate she took with her should be considered as part of the dowry. On Katharine’s wedding the first instalment of 100,000 crowns had been handed to Henry by the Archbishop of Santiago, and there is no doubt that in the negotiations Puebla had, as usual with him, thought to smooth matters by concealing from both sovereigns the inconvenient conditions insisted by each of them. Henry therefore imagined—he said that he was led to believe it by Puebla—that the jewels and plate were to be surrendered to him on a valuation as part of the second instalment; whereas the bride’s parents were allowed to suppose that Katharine would still have the enjoyment of them. In the middle of December, therefore, Henry sent for Juan de Cuero, Katharine’s chamberlain, and demanded the valuables as an instalment of the remaining 100,000 crowns of the dowry. Cuero, astounded at such a request, replied that it would be his duty to have them weighed and valued and a list given to the King in exchange for a receipt for their value, but that he had not to give them up. The King, highly irate at what he considered an evasion of his due, pressed his demand, but without avail, and afterwards saw Katharine herself at Baynard’s Castle in the presence of Doña Elvira Manuel, her principal lady in waiting.

What was the meaning of it, he asked, as he told her of Cuero’s refusal to surrender her valuables in fulfilment of the promise, and further exposed Puebla’s double-dealing. Puebla, it appears, had gone to the King, and had suggested that if his advice was followed the jewels would remain in England, whilst their value would be paid to Henry in money as well. He had, he assured the King, already gained over Katharine to the plan, which briefly was to allow the Princess to use the jewels and plate for the present, so that when the time came for demanding their surrender her father and mother would be ashamed of her being deprived of them, and would pay their value in money. Henry explained to Katharine that he was quite shocked at such a dishonest suggestion, which he refused, he said, to entertain. He had therefore asked for the valuables at once as he saw that there was craft at work, and he would be no party to it. He acknowledged, however, that the jewels were not due to be delivered until the last payment on account of the dowry had to be made. It was all Puebla’s fault, he assured his daughter-in-law, which was probably true, though it will be observed that the course pursued allowed Henry to assert his eventual claim to the surrender of the jewels, and his many professions of disinterestedness cloaked the crudeness of his demand.

The next day Henry sent for Bishop Ayala, who was Puebla’s colleague and bitter enemy, and told him that Prince Arthur must be sent to Wales soon, and that much difference of opinion existed as to whether Katharine should accompany him. What did Ayala advise? The Spaniard thought that the Princess should remain with the King and Queen in London for the present, rather than go to Wales where the Prince must necessarily be absent from her a good deal, and she would be lonely. When Katharine herself was consulted by Henry she would express no decided opinion; and Arthur was worked upon by his father to persuade her to say that she wished to go to Wales. Finding that Katharine still avoided the expression of an opinion, Henry, with a great show of sorrow, decided that she should accompany Arthur. Then came the question of the maintenance of the Princess’s household. Puebla had again tried to please every one by saying that Henry would provide a handsome dotation for the purpose, but when Doña Elvira Manuel, on the eve of the journey to Wales, asked the King what provision he was going to make, he feigned the utmost surprise at the question. He knew nothing about it, he said. The Prince would of course maintain his wife and her necessary servants, but no special separate grant could be made to the Princess. When Puebla was brought to book he threw the blame upon the members of Katharine’s household, and was publicly rebuked by Henry for his shiftiness. But the Spaniards believed, probably with reason, that the whole comedy was agreed upon between the King and Puebla to obtain possession of the plate and jewels or their value: the sending of the Princess to Wales being for the purpose of making it necessary that she should use the objects, and so give good grounds for a demand for their value in money on the part of Henry. In any case Katharine found herself, only five weeks after her marriage, with an unpaid and inharmonious household, dependent entirely upon her husband for her needs, and conscious that an artful trick was in full execution with the object of either depriving her of her personal jewels, and everything of value, with which she had furnished her husband’s table as well as her own, or else of extorting a large sum of money from her parents. Embittered already with such knowledge as this, Katharine rode by her husband’s side out of Baynard’s Castle on the 21st December 1501 to continue on the long journey to Wales,[7] after passing their Christmas at Oxford.

The plague was rife throughout England, and on the 2nd April 1502 Arthur, Prince of Wales, fell a victim to it at Ludlow. Here was an unforeseen blow that threatened to deprive both Henry and Ferdinand of the result of their diplomacy. For Ferdinand the matter was of the utmost importance; for an approachment of England and Scotland to France would upset the balance of power he had so laboriously constructed, already threatened, as it was, by the prospect that his Flemish son-in-law Philip and his wife would wear the crowns of the Empire, Flanders, and Burgundy, as well as those of Spain and its possessions; in which case, he thought, Spanish interests would be the last considered. The news of the unexpected catastrophe was greeted in London with real sorrow, for Arthur was promising and popular, and both Henry and his queen were naturally attached to their elder son, just approaching manhood, upon whose training they had lavished so much care. Though Henry’s grief at his loss may have been as sincere as that of Elizabeth of York certainly was, his natural inclinations soon asserted themselves. Ludlow was unhealthy, and after the pompous funeral of Arthur at Worcester, Katharine and her household prayed earnestly to be allowed to approach London, but for some weeks without success, and by the time she arrived at her new abode at Croydon, the political intrigues of which she was the tool were in full swing again.

When Ferdinand and Isabel first heard the news of their daughter’s bereavement at the beginning of May they were at Toledo, and lost no time in sending off post haste to England a fresh ambassador with special instructions from themselves. The man they chose was the Duke de Estrada, whose only recommendation seems to have been his rank, for Puebla was soon able to twist him round his finger. His mission, as we now know, was an extraordinary and delicate one. Ostensibly he was to demand the immediate return of the 100,000 crowns paid to Henry on account of dowry, and the firm settlement upon Katharine of the manors and rents, securing to her the revenue assigned to her in England, and at the same time he was to urge Henry to send Katharine back to Spain at once. But these things were really the last that Ferdinand desired. He knew full well that Henry would go to any length to avoid disgorging the dowry, and secret instructions were given to Estrada to effect a betrothal between the ten-years-old Henry, Duke of York, and his brother’s widow of sixteen. Strict orders also were sent to Puebla of a character to forward the secret design, although he was not fully informed of the latter. He was to press amongst other things that Katharine might receive her English revenue punctually—Katharine, it appears, had written to her parents, saying that she had been advised to borrow money for the support of her household; and the King and Queen of Spain were indignant at such an idea. Not a farthing, they said, must she be allowed to borrow, and none of her jewels sold: the King of England must provide for her promptly and handsomely, in accordance with his obligations. This course, as the writers well knew, would soon bring Henry VII. himself to propose the marriage for which Ferdinand was so anxious. Henry professed himself very ready to make the settlement of the English income as requested, but in such case, he claimed that the whole of the Spanish dowry in gold must be paid to him. Ferdinand could not see it in this light at all, and insisted that the death of Arthur had dissolved the marriage. This fencing went on for some time, neither party wishing to be the first to propose the indecorous marriage with Henry that both desired.[8] It is evident that Puebla and the chaplain Alexander opposed the match secretly, and endeavoured to thwart it, either from an idea of its illegality or, more probably, with a view of afterwards bringing it about themselves. In the midst of this intrigue the King of France suddenly attacked Ferdinand both in Italy and on the Catalonian frontier, and made approaches to Henry for the marriage of his son with a French princess. This hurried the pace in Spain, and Queen Isabel ordered Estrada to carry through the betrothal of Katharine and her brother-in-law without loss of time, “for any delay would be dangerous.” So anxious were the Spanish sovereigns that nothing should stand in the way, that they were willing to let the old arrangement about the dowry stand, Henry retaining the 100,000 crowns already paid, and receiving, when the marriage was consummated, the remaining 100,000; on condition that in the meanwhile Katharine was properly maintained in England. Even the incestuous nature of the union was to be no bar to its being effected, though no Papal dispensation had been yet obtained. Isabel sought salve for her conscience in this respect by repeating Doña Elvira Manuel’s assurance that Katharine still remained intact; her marriage with Arthur not having been consummated. To lure Henry into an armed alliance against France once more, the old bait of the recovery of Normandy and Guienne was dangled before him. But the King of England played with a firmer hand now. He knew his worth as a balancing factor, his accumulated treasure made him powerful, and he held all the cards in his hand; for the King of Scots was his son-in-law, and the French were as anxious for his smiles as were the Spanish sovereigns. So he stood off and refused to pledge himself to a hostile alliance.

In view of this Ferdinand and Isabel’s tone changed, and they developed a greater desire than ever to have their daughter—and above all her dowry—returned to them. “We cannot endure,” wrote Isabel to Estrada on the 10th August 1502, “that a daughter whom we love should be so far away from us in her trouble.... You shall ... tell the King of England that you have our orders to freight vessels for her voyage. To this end you must make such a show of giving directions and preparing for the voyage that the members of the Princess’s household may believe that it is true. Send also some of her household on board with the captain I am now sending you ... and show all signs of departure.” If in consequence the English spoke of the betrothal with young Henry, the ambassador was to show no desire for it; but was to listen keenly to all that was proposed, and if the terms were acceptable he might clinch the matter at once without further reference. And then the saintly Queen concludes thus: “The one object of this business is to bring the betrothal to a conclusion as soon as possible in conformity with your instructions. For then all our anxiety will cease and we shall be able to seek the aid of England against France, for this is the most efficient aid we can have.” Henry was not for the moment to be frightened by fresh demands for his armed alliance against France. The betrothal was to be forwarded first, and then the rest would follow. Puebla, who was quite confident that he alone could carry on the marriage negotiation successfully, was also urged by mingled flattery and threats by his sovereign to do his utmost with that end.

Whilst this diplomatic haggling was going on in London for the disposal of the widowed Katharine to the best advantage, a blow fell that for a moment changed the aspect of affairs. Elizabeth of York, the wife of Henry VII., died on the 11th February 1503, in the Tower of London, a week after giving birth to her seventh child. She had been a good and submissive wife to the King, whose claim to the throne she had fortified by her own greater right; and we are told that the bereaved husband was “heavy and dolorous” with his loss when he retired to a solitary place to pass his sorrow; but before many weeks were over he and his crony Puebla put their crafty heads together, and agreed that the King might marry his widowed daughter-in-law himself. The idea was cynically repulsive but it gives us the measure of Henry’s unscrupulousness. Puebla conveyed the hint to Isabel and Ferdinand, who, to do them justice, appeared to be really shocked at the suggestion. This time (April 1503) the Spanish sovereigns spoke with more sincerity than before. They were, they told their ambassador, tired of Henry’s shiftiness, and of their daughter’s equivocal and undignified position in England, now that the Queen was dead and the betrothal still hung fire. The Princess was really to come to Spain in a fleet that should be sent for her, unless the marriage with the young Prince of Wales was agreed to at once. As for a wife for King Henry there was the widowed Queen of Naples, Ferdinand’s niece, who lived in Valencia, and he might have her with the blessing of the Spanish sovereigns.[9] The suggestion was a tempting one to Henry, for the Queen of Naples was well dowered, and the vigour of Isabel’s refusal to listen to his marriage with her daughter, made it evident that that was out of the question. So Henry at last made up his mind at least to execute the treaty which was to betroth his surviving son to Katharine. In the treaty, which was signed on the 23rd June 1503, it is set forth that, inasmuch as the bride and bridegroom were related in the first degree of affinity, a Papal dispensation would be necessary for the marriage; and it is distinctly stated that the marriage with Arthur had been consummated. This may have been a diplomatic form considered at the time unimportant in view of the ease with which a dispensation could be obtained, but it is at direct variance with Doña Elvira Manuel’s assurance to Isabel at the time of Arthur’s death, and with Katharine’s assertion, uncontradicted by Henry, to the end of her life.

Henry, Prince of Wales, was at this time twelve years old; and, if we are to believe Erasmus, a prodigy of precocious scholarship. Though his learning was superficial and carefully made the most of, he was, in effect, an apt and diligent student. From the first his mother and father had determined that their children should enjoy better educational advantages than had fallen to them, and as Henry had been until Arthur’s death intended for the Church, his learning was far in advance of that of most princes and nobles of his age. The bride, who thus became unwillingly affianced to a boy more than five years her junior, was now a young woman in her prime, experienced already in the chicane and falsity of the atmosphere in which she lived. She knew, none better, that in the juggle for her marriage she had been regarded as a mere chattel, and her own inclinations hardly taken into account, and she faced her responsibilities bravely in her mother’s exalted spirit of duty and sacrifice when she found herself once more Princess of Wales.

When Ferdinand, in accordance with his pledge in the treaty, instructed his ambassador in Rome to ask for the Pope’s dispensation, he took care to correct the statement embodied in the document to the effect that the marriage of Arthur and Katharine had been consummated; though the question might pertinently be asked, why, if it had not been, a dispensation was needed at all? The King himself answered the question by saying that “as the English are so much inclined to cavil, it appeared prudent to provide for the case as if the previous marriage had been completed; and the dispensation must be worded in accordance with the treaty, since the succession to the Crown depends on the undoubted legitimacy of the marriage.”[10] No sooner was the ratification of the betrothal conveyed to Ferdinand than he demanded the aid of Henry against France, and Estrada was instructed to “make use of” Katharine to obtain the favour demanded. If Henry hesitated to provide the money for raising the 2000 English troops required, Katharine herself was to be asked by her kind father to pawn her plate and jewels for the purpose. Henry, however, had no intention to be hurried now that the betrothal had been signed. There were several things he wanted on his side first. The Earl of Suffolk and his brother Richard Pole were still in Flanders; and the greatest wish of Henry’s life was that they should be handed over to his tender mercies. So the armed coalition against France still hung fire, whilst a French ambassador was as busy courting the King of England as Ferdinand himself. In the meanwhile Katharine for a time lived in apparent amity with Henry and his family, especially with the young Princess Mary, who was her constant companion. In the autumn of 1504 she passed a fortnight with them at Windsor and Richmond, hunting every day; but just as the King was leaving Greenwich for a progress through Kent the Princess fell seriously ill, and the letters written by Henry during his absence to his daughter-in-law are worded as if he were the most affectionate of fathers. On this progress the Prince of Wales accompanied his father for the first time, as the King had previously been loath to disturb his studies. “It is quite wonderful,” wrote an observer, “how much the King loves the Prince. He has good reason to do so, for he deserves all his love.” Already the crafty and politic King was indoctrinating his son in the system he had made his own: that the command of ready money, gained no matter how, meant power, and that to hold the balance between two greater rivals was to have them both at his bidding. And young Henry, though of different nature from his father, made good use of his lesson.

Katharine’s greatest trouble at this time (the autumn of 1504) was the bickering, and worse, of her Spanish household. We have already seen how Puebla had set them by the ears with his jealousy of his colleagues and his dodging diplomacy. Katharine appealed to Henry to bring her servants to order, but he refused to interfere, as they were not his subjects. Doña Elvira Manuel, the governess, was a great lady, and resented any interference with her domain.[11] There is no doubt that her rule, so far as regarded the Princess herself, was a wise one; but, as we shall see directly, she, Castilian that she was and sister of the famous diplomatist Juan Manuel, took up a position inimical to Ferdinand after Isabel’s death, and innocently led Katharine into grave political trouble.

In November 1504 the death of Isabel, Queen of Castile, long threatened after her strenuous life, changed the whole aspect for Ferdinand. The heiress of the principal crown of Spain was now Katharine’s sister Juana, who had lived for years in the latitudinarian court of Brussels with her consort Philip. The last time she had gone to Spain, her freedom towards the strict religious observances considered necessary in her mother’s court had led to violent scenes between Isabel and Juana. Even then the scandalised Spanish churchmen who flocked around Isabel whispered that the heiress of Castile must be mad: and her foreign husband, the heir of the empire, was hated and distrusted by the “Catholic kings.” Isabel by her will had left her husband guardian of her realms for Juana; and from the moment the Queen breathed her last the struggle between Ferdinand and his son-in-law never ceased, until Philip the Handsome, who thought he had beaten wily old Ferdinand, himself was beaten by poison. The death of her mother not only threw Katharine into natural grief for her loss, which truly was a great one; for, at least, Isabel deeply loved her youngest child, whilst Ferdinand loved nothing but himself and Aragon; but it greatly altered for the worse her position in England. Philip of Austria and his father the Emperor had begun to play false to Ferdinand long before the Queen’s death; and now that the crown of Castile had fallen to poor weak Juana, and a struggle was seen to be impending for the regency, Henry VII. found himself as usual courted by both sides in the dispute. The widowed Archduchess Margaret, who had married as a first husband Ferdinand’s heir, was offered to Henry as a bride by Philip and Maximilian and a close alliance between them proposed; and Ferdinand, whilst denouncing his son-in-law’s ingratitude, also bade high for the King of England’s countenance. Henry listened to both parties, but it was clear to him that he had now more to hope for from Philip and Maximilian, who were friendly with France, than from Ferdinand; and the unfortunate Katharine was again reduced to the utmost neglect and penury, unable to buy food for her own table, except by pawning her jewels.

In the ensuing intrigues Doña Elvira Manuel was on the side of the Queen of Castile, as against her father; and Katharine lost the impartial advice of her best counsellor, and involved herself in a very net of trouble. In the summer of 1505 it was already understood that Philip and Juana on their way to Spain by sea might possibly trust themselves in an English port; and Henry, in order to be ready for any matrimonial combinations that might be suggested, caused young Henry to make solemn protest before the Bishop of Winchester at Richmond against his marriage with Katharine.[12] Of this, at the time, of course the Spanish agents were ignorant; and so completely was even Puebla hoodwinked, that almost to the arrival of Philip and his wife in England he believed that Henry was in favour of Ferdinand against Philip and Maximilian. Early in August 1505, Puebla went to Richmond to see Katharine, and as he entered one of the household told him that an ambassador from the Archduke Philip, King of Castile, had just arrived and was waiting to see her. Puebla at once himself conveyed the news to Katharine; and to his glee served as interpreter between the ambassador and the Princess. On his knees before her the Fleming related that he had come to propose a marriage between the Duchess of Savoy (i.e. the widowed Archduchess Margaret) and Henry VII., and showed the Princess two portraits of the Archduchess. Furthermore, he said that Philip and his wife were going by overland through France to Spain, and he was to ask Henry what he thought of the plan. Puebla’s eyes were thus partially opened: and when a few days later he found that Doña Elvira had not only contrived frequent private meetings between Katharine and the Flemish ambassador, but had persuaded the Princess to propose a meeting between Philip, Juana, and the King of England, he at once sounded a note of alarm. Katharine, it must be recollected, was yet young; and probably did not fully understand the deadly antagonism that existed between her father and her brother-in-law. She was much under the influence of Doña Elvira, and doubtless yearned to see her unhappy sister Juana. So she was induced to write a letter to Philip, and to propose a meeting with Henry at Calais. When a prompt affirmative reply came, the Princess innocently showed it to Puebla at Durham House before sending it to Henry VII. The ambassador was aghast, and soundly rated Katharine for going against the interests of her father. He would take the letter to the King, he said. But this Katharine would not allow, and Doña Elvira was appealed to. She promised to retain the letter for the present, but just as Puebla was sitting down to dinner an hour afterwards, he learnt that she had broken her word and sent Philip’s letter to Henry VII. Starting up, he rushed to Katharine’s apartments, and with tears streaming down his face at his failure, told the Princess, under pledge of secrecy, that the proposed interview was a plot of the Manuels to injure both her father and sister. She must at once write a letter to Henry which he, Puebla, would dictate; and, whilst still feigning a desire for the meeting, she must try to prevent it with all her might, and beware of Doña Elvira in future. Poor Katharine, alarmed at his vehemence, did as she was told; and the letter was sent flying to Henry, apologising for the proposal of the interview. Henry must have smiled when he saw how eager they all were to court him. Nothing would please him better than the close alliance with Philip, which was already being secretly negotiated, though he was effusively assuring Ferdinand at the same time of the inviolability of their friendship; promising that the marriage—which he had secretly denounced—between his son and Katharine, should be celebrated on the very day provided by the treaty, and approving of some secret plot of Ferdinand against Philip which had been communicated to him.

Amidst such falsity as this it is most difficult to pick one’s way, though it is evident through it all that Henry had now gained the upper hand, and was fully a match for Ferdinand in his altered circumstances. But as things improved for Henry they became worse for Katharine. In December 1505 she wrote bitterly to her father from Richmond, complaining of her fate, the unhappiness of which, she said, was all Puebla’s fault. “Every day,” she wrote, “my troubles increase. Since my arrival in England I have not received a farthing except for food, and I and my household have not even garments to wear.” She had asked Puebla to pray the King to appoint an English dueña for her whilst Doña Elvira was in Flanders, but instead of doing so he had arranged with Henry that her household should be dismissed altogether, and that she should reside at Court. Her letter throughout shows that at the time she was in deep despondency and anger at her treatment; and especially resentful of Puebla, whom she disliked and distrusted profoundly, as did Doña Elvira Manuel. The very elements seemed to fight on the side of the King of England. Ferdinand was, in sheer desperation, struggling to prevent his paternal realms from being merged in Castile and the empire, and with that end was negotiating his marriage with the French king’s niece, Germaine de Foix, and a close alliance with France, in which England should be included, when Philip of Austria and his wife, Juana of Aragon, Queen of Castile, sailed from Flanders to claim their kingdom at Ferdinand’s hands. They too had made friends with France some time before, but the marriage of Ferdinand with a French princess had now drawn them strongly to the side of England; and as we have seen, they were already in full negotiation with Henry for his marriage with the doubly widowed and heavily dowered Archduchess Margaret.

The King and Queen of Castile were overtaken by a furious south-west gale in the Channel and their fine fleet dispersed. The ship that carried Philip and Juana was driven by the storm into Melcombe Regis, on the Dorset coast, on the 17th January 1506, and lay there weather-bound for some time. Philip the Handsome was a poor sailor, and was, we are told by an eye-witness, “fatigate and unquyeted in mynde and bodie.” He doubtless yearned to tread dry land again, and, against the advice of his Council, had himself rowed ashore. Only in the previous year he had as unguardedly put himself into the power of the King of France; and his boldness had succeeded well, as it had resulted in the treaty with the French king that had so much alarmed and shocked Ferdinand, but it is unlikely that Philip on this occasion intended to make any stay in England or to go beyond Weymouth. The news of his coming brought together all the neighbouring gentry to oppose or welcome him, according to his demeanour, and, finding him friendly, Sir John Trenchard prevailed upon him to take up his residence in his manor-house hard by until the weather mended. In the meanwhile formidable English forces mustered in the country around, and Philip began to grow uneasy; but Trenchard’s hospitality was pressing, and to all hints from the visitor that he wanted to be gone the reply was given that he really must wait until the King of England could bid him welcome. When at last Philip was given to understand that he was practically a prisoner, he made the best of the position, and with seeming cordiality awaited King Henry’s message. No wonder, as a chronicler says, that Henry when he heard the news “was replenyshed with an exceeding gladnes ... for that he trusted his landing in England should turn to his profit and commoditie.” This it certainly did. Philip and Juana were brought to Windsor in great state, and met by Henry and his son and a splendid train of nobles. Then the visitors were led through London in state to Richmond, and Philip, amidst all the festivity, was soon convinced that he would not be allowed to leave England until the rebel Plantagenet Earl of Suffolk was handed to Henry. And so the pact was made that bound England to Philip and Flanders against Ferdinand; the Archduchess Margaret with her vast fortune being promised, with unheard-of guarantees, to the widowed Henry.[13] When the treaty had been solemnly ratified on oath, taken upon a fragment of the true Cross in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, Philip was allowed to go his way on the 2nd March to join his ship at Falmouth, whither Juana had preceded him a fortnight before.

This new treaty made poor Katharine of little value as a political asset in England; since it was clear now that Ferdinand’s hold over anything but his paternal heritage in the Mediterranean was powerless. Flanders and Castile were a far more advantageous ally to England than the King of Aragon, and Katharine was promptly made to feel the fact. Dr. Puebla was certainly either kept quite out of the way or his compliance bought, or he would have been able to devise means for Katharine to inform her sister Juana of the real object of Henry’s treaty with Philip; for Ferdinand always insisted that Juana was a dutiful daughter, and was not personally opposed to him. As it was, Katharine was allowed to see her sister but for an hour just before Juana’s departure, and then in the presence of witnesses in the interests of Philip. Only a few weeks after the visitors had departed Katharine wrote to her father, in fear lest her letter should be intercepted, begging him to have pity upon her. She is deep in debt, not for extravagant things but for food. “The King of England refuses to pay anything, though she implores him with tears to do so. He says he has been cheated about the marriage portion. In the meanwhile she is in the deepest anguish, her servants almost begging for alms, and she herself nearly naked. She has been at death’s door for months, and prays earnestly for a Spanish confessor, as she cannot speak English.”[14]

How false Ferdinand met his “dear children,” and made with his daughter’s husband that hellish secret compact in the church of Villafafila, that seemed to renounce everything to Philip whilst Ferdinand went humbly to his realm of Naples, and his ill-used daughter Juana to life-long confinement, cannot be told here, nor the sudden death of Philip the Handsome, which brought back Ferdinand triumphant. If Juana was sane before, she certainly became more or less mad after her husband’s death, and moreover was morbidly devoted to his memory. But what mattered madness or a widow’s devotion to Henry VII. when he had political objects to serve? All through the summer and autumn of 1506 Katharine had been ill with fever and ague, unhappy at the neglect and poverty she suffered. Ferdinand threw upon Castile the duty of paying the rest of her dowry; the Castilians retorted that Ferdinand ought to pay it himself: and Katharine, in the depth of despondency, in October 1506 learnt of her brother-in-law Philip’s death. Like magic Henry VII. became amiable again to his daughter-in-law. He deplored her illness now, and cordially granted her the change of residence from Eltham to Fulham that she had so long prayed for in vain. The reason was soon evident; for before Juana had completed her dreary pilgrimage through Spain to Granada with her husband’s dead body, Henry had cajoled Katharine to ask her father for the distraught widow for his wife. Katharine must have fulfilled the task with repulsion, though she seems to have advocated the match warmly; and Ferdinand, though he knew, or rather said, that Juana was mad, was quite ready to take advantage of such an opportunity for again getting into touch with Henry. The letter in which Ferdinand gently dallied with Henry’s offer was written in Naples, after months of shifty excuses for not sending the rest of Katharine’s dowry to England,[15] and doubtless the time he gained by postponing the answer about Juana’s marriage until he returned to Spain was of value to him; for he was determined, now that a special providence carefully prepared had removed Philip from his path, that once more all Spain should bear his sway whilst he lived, and then should be divided, rather than his dear Aragon should be rendered subordinate to other interests.

The encouraging talk of Henry’s marriage with Juana, with which both Katharine and Puebla were instructed to beguile him, was all very well in its way, and the King of England became quite joyously sentimental at the prospect of the new tie of relationship between the houses of Tudor and Aragon; but, really, business was business: if that long overdue dowry for Katharine was not sent soon, young Henry would listen to some of the many other eligible princesses, better dowered than Katharine, who were offered to him. With much demur Henry at length consented to wait for five months longer for the dowry; that is to say, until Michaelmas 1507, and in the meanwhile drove a bargain as hard as that of a Jew huckster in the valuation of Katharine’s jewels and plate, which were to be brought into the account.[16] It is easy to see that this concession of five months’ delay was granted by Henry in the hope that his marriage with Juana would take place. The plan was hideously wicked, and Puebla made no secret of it in writing to Ferdinand. “No king in the world would make so good a husband to the Queen of Castile, whether she be sane or insane. She might recover her reason when wedded to such a husband, but even in that case King Ferdinand would at all events be sure to retain the regency of Castile. On the other hand, if the insanity of the Queen should prove incurable it would perhaps be not inconvenient that she should live in England. The English do not seem to mind her insanity much; especially since it is asserted that her mental malady would not prevent her from childbearing.”[17] Could anything be more repulsive than this pretty arrangement, which had been concocted by Henry and Puebla at Richmond during a time when the former was seriously ill with quinsy and inaccessible to any one but the Spanish ambassador?

In the meanwhile Katharine felt keenly the wretched position in which she found herself. The plate, about which so much haggling was taking place, was being pawned or sold by her bit by bit to provide the most necessary things for her own use; her servants were in rags, and she herself was contemned and neglected; forbidden even to see her betrothed husband for months together, though living in the same palace with him. The more confident Henry grew of his own marriage with the Archduchess Margaret, or with Queen Juana, the less inclined he was to wed his son to Katharine. A French princess for the Prince of Wales, and the Queen of Castile for Henry, would indeed have served England on all sides. On one occasion, in April 1507, Henry frankly told Katharine that he considered himself no longer bound by her marriage treaty, since her dowry was overdue, and all the poor Princess could do was to weep and pray her father to fulfil his part of the compact by paying the rest of her portion, whilst she, serving as Ferdinand’s ambassador, tried to retain Henry’s good graces by her hopeful assurances about the marriage of the latter with Juana.

In all Katharine’s lamentations of her own sufferings and privation, she never forgot to bewail the misery of her servants. Whilst she herself, she said, had been worse treated than any woman in England, her five women servants, all she had retained, had never received a farthing since their arrival in England six years before, and had spent everything they possessed. Katharine at this time of trial (August 1507) was living alone at Ewelme, whilst Henry was hunting at various seats in the midlands. At length the King made some stay at Woodstock, where Katharine saw him. With suspicious alacrity he consented to a further postponement of the overdue dowry; and showed himself more eager than ever to marry Juana, no matter how mad she might be. Katharine was quite acute enough to understand his motives, and wrote to her father that so long as the money due of her dowry remained unpaid the King considered himself free, so far as regarded her marriage with the Prince of Wales. “Mine is always the worst part,” she wrote. “The King of England prides himself upon his magnanimity in waiting so long for the payment.... His words are kind but his deeds are as bad as ever.” She bitterly complained that Puebla himself was doing his utmost to frustrate her marriage in the interests of the King of England; and it is clear to see in her passionate letter to her father (4th October 1507) that she half distrusted even him, as she had been told that he was listening to overtures from the King of France for a marriage between Juana and a French prince. She failed in this to understand the political position fully. If Juana had married a Frenchman it is certain that Henry would have been only too eager to complete the marriage of his son with Katharine. But she was evidently in fear that, unless Henry was allowed to marry her sister, evil might befall her. Speaking of the marriage she says: “I bait him with this ... and his words and professions have changed for the better, although his acts remain the same.... They fancy that I have no more in me than what outwardly appears, or that I shall not be able to fathom his (Puebla’s) design.” Under stress of her circumstances Katharine was developing rapidly. She was no longer a girl dependent upon others. Doña Elvira had gone for good; Puebla she hated and distrusted as much as she did Henry; and there was no one by her to whom she could look for help. Her position was a terribly difficult one, pitted alone, as she was, against the most unscrupulous politicians in Europe, in whose hands she knew she was only one of the pieces in a game. Juana was still carrying about with her the unburied corpse of her husband, and falling into paroxysms of fury when a second marriage was suggested to her; and yet Katharine considered it necessary to keep up the pretence to Henry that his suit was prospering. She knew that though the Archduchess Margaret had firmly refused to tempt providence again by a third marriage with the King of England, the boy sovereign of Castile and Flanders, the Archduke Charles, had been securely betrothed to golden-haired little Mary Tudor, Henry’s younger daughter; and that the close alliance thus sealed was as dangerous to her father King Ferdinand’s interests as to her own. And yet she was either forced, or forced herself, to paint Henry, who was still treating her vilely, in the brightest colours as a chivalrous, virtuous gentleman, really and desperately in love with poor crazy Juana. Katharine’s letters to her sister on behalf of Henry’s suit are nauseous, in view of the circumstances as we know them; and show that the Princess of Wales was already prepared to sacrifice every human feeling to political expediency.

This miserable position could not continue indefinitely, for the extension of time for the payment of the dowry was fast running out. Juana was more intractable than ever. Katharine, in rage and despair at the contumely with which she was treated, insisted at length that her father should send an ambassador to England, who could speak as the mouthpiece of a great sovereign rather than like a fawning menial of Henry as Puebla was. The new ambassador was Gomez de Fuensalida, Knight Commander of Haro and Membrilla, a man as haughty as Puebla had been servile, and he went far beyond even Katharine’s desires in his plain speaking to Henry and his ministers. Ferdinand, indeed, by this time had once more gained the upper hand in Europe, and could afford to speak his mind. Henry was no longer so vigorous or so bold as he had been, and his desire to grasp everything whilst risking nothing had enabled his rivals to form a great coalition from which he was excluded—the League of Cambrai. Fuensalida offended Henry almost as soon as he arrived, and was roughly refused permission to enter the English Court. He could only storm, as he did, to Henry’s ministers that unless the Princess of Wales was at once sent home to Spain with her dowry, King Ferdinand and his allies would wreak vengeance upon England. But Henry knew that with such a hostage as Katharine in his hands he was safe from attack, and held the Princess in defiance of it all. But he was already a waning force. Whilst Fuensalida had no good word for the King, he, like all other Spanish agents, turned to the rising sun and sang persistently the praises of the Prince of Wales. His gigantic stature and sturdy limbs, his fair skin and golden hair, his manliness, his prudence, and his wisdom were their constant theme: and even Katharine, unhappy as she was, with her marriage still in the balance, seems to have liked and admired the gallant youth whom she was allowed to see so seldom.

It has become so much the fashion to speak of Katharine not only as an unfortunate woman, but as a blameless saint in all her relations, that an historian who regards her as a fallible and even in many respects a blameworthy woman, who was to a large extent the cause of her own troubles, must be content to differ from the majority of his predecessors. We have already seen, by the earnest attempts she made to drag her afflicted sister into marriage with a man whom she herself considered false, cruel, and unscrupulous, that Katharine was no better than those around her in moral principle: the passion and animosity shown in her letters to her father about Puebla, Fuensalida, and others whom she distrusted, show her to have been anything but a meek martyr. She was, indeed, at this time (1508-9) a self-willed, ambitious girl of strong passion, impatient of control, domineering and proud. Her position in England had been a humiliating and a hateful one for years. She was the sport of the selfish ambitions of others, which she herself was unable to control; surrounded by people whom she disliked and suspected, lonely and unhappy; it is not wonderful that when Henry VII. was gradually sinking to his grave, and her marriage with his son was still in doubt, this ardent Southern young woman in her prime should be tempted to cast to the wind considerations of dignity and prudence for the sake of her love for a man.

She was friendless in a foreign land; and when her father was in Naples in 1506, she wrote to him praying him to send her a Spanish confessor to solace her. Before he could do so she informed him (April 1507) that she had obtained a very good Spanish confessor for herself. This was a young, lusty, dissolute Franciscan monk called Diego Fernandez, who then became a member of Katharine’s household. When the new outspoken ambassador, Fuensalida, arrived in England in the autumn of 1508, he, of course, had frequent conference with the Princess, and could not for long shut his eyes to the state of affairs in her establishment. He first sounded the alarm cautiously to Ferdinand in a letter of 4th March 1509. He had hoped against hope, he said, that the marriage of Katharine and Prince Henry might be effected soon; and the scandal might remedy itself without his worrying Ferdinand about it. But he must speak out now, for he has been silent too long. It is high time, he says, that some person of sufficient authority in the confidence of Ferdinand should be put in charge of Katharine’s household and command respect: “for at present the Princess’s house is governed by a young friar, whom her Highness has taken for her confessor, though he is, in my opinion, and that of others, utterly unworthy of such a position. He makes the Princess commit many errors; and as she is so good and conscientious, this confessor makes a mortal sin of everything that does not please him, and so causes her to commit many faults.” The ambassador continues that he dare not write all he would because the bearer (a servant of Katharine’s) is being sent by those who wish to injure him; but he begs the King to interrogate the man who takes the letter as to what had been going on in the Princess’s house in the last two months. “The root of all the trouble is this young friar, who is flighty, and vain, and extremely scandalous. He has spoken to the Princess very roughly about the King of England; and because I told the Princess something of what I thought of this friar, and he learnt it, he has disgraced me with her worse than if I had been a traitor.... That your Highness may judge what sort of person he is, I will repeat exactly without exaggeration the very words he used to me. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘that they have been telling you evil tales of me.’ ‘I can assure you, father,’ I replied, ‘that no one has said anything about you to me.’ ‘I know,’ he replied; ‘the same person who told you told me himself.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘any one can bear false witness, and I swear by the Holy Body that, so far as I can recollect, nothing has been said to me about you.’ ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘there are scandal-mongers in this house who have defamed me, and not with the lowest either, but with the highest, and that is no disgrace to me. If it were not for contradicting them I should be gone already.’” Proud Fuensalida tells the King that it was only with the greatest difficulty he kept his hands off the insolent priest at this. “His constant presence with the Princess and amongst her women is shocking the King of England and his Court dreadfully;” and then the ambassador hints strongly that Henry is only allowing the scandal to go on, so as to furnish him with a good excuse for still keeping Katharine’s marriage in abeyance.

With this letter to Spain went another from Katharine to her father, railing bitterly against the ambassador. She can no longer endure her troubles, and a settlement of some sort must be arrived at. The King of England treats her worse than ever since his daughter Mary was betrothed to the young Archduke Charles, sovereign of Castile and Flanders. She had sold everything she possessed for food and raiment; and only a few days before she wrote, Henry had again told her that he was not bound to feed her servants. Her own people, she says, are insolent and turn against her; but what afflicts her most is that she is too poor to maintain fittingly her confessor, “the best that ever woman had.” It is plain to see that the whole household was in rebellion against the confessor who had captured Katharine’s heart, and that the ambassador was on the side of the household. The Princess and Fuensalida had quarrelled about it, and she wished that the ambassador should be reproved. With vehement passion she begged her father that the confessor might not be taken away from her. “I implore your Highness to prevent him from leaving me; and to write to the King of England that you have ordered this Father to stay with me; and beg him for your sake to have him well treated and humoured. Tell the prelates also that you wish him to stay here. The greatest comfort in my trouble is the consolation he gives me. Almost in despair I send this servant to implore you not to forget that I am still your daughter, and how much I have suffered for your sake.... Do not let me perish like this, but write at once deciding what is to be done. Otherwise in my present state I am afraid I may do something that neither the King of England nor your Highness could prevent, unless you send for me and let me pass the few remaining days of my life in God’s service.”

That the Princess’s household and the ambassador were shocked at the insolent familiarity of the licentious young priest with their mistress, and that she herself perfectly understood that the suspicions and rumours were against her honour, is clear. On one occasion Henry VII. had asked Katharine and his daughter Mary to go to Richmond, to meet him. When the two princesses were dressed and ready to set out on their journey from Hampton Court to Richmond, the confessor entered the room and told Katharine she was not to go that day as she had been unwell. The Princess protested that she was then quite well and able to bear the short journey. “I tell you,” replied Father Diego, “that, on pain of mortal sin, you shall not go to-day;” and so Princess Mary set out alone, leaving Katharine with the young priest of notorious evil life and a few inferior servants. When the next day she was allowed to go to Richmond, accompanied amongst others by the priest, King Henry took not the slightest notice of her, and for the next few weeks refused to speak to her. The ambassador even confessed to Ferdinand that, since he had witnessed what was going on in the Princess’s household, he acquitted Henry of most of the blame for his treatment of his Spanish daughter-in-law. Whilst the Princess was in the direst distress, her household in want of food, and she obliged to sell her gowns to send messengers to her father, she went to the length of pawning the plate that formed part of her dowry to “satisfy the follies of the friar.”

Deaf to all remonstrances both from King Henry and her own old servants, Katharine obstinately had her way, and the chances of her marriage in England grew smaller and smaller. It is not to be supposed that the ambassador would have dared to say so much as he did to the lady’s own father if he had not taken the gravest view of Katharine’s conduct and its probable political result. But his hints to Ferdinand’s ministers were much stronger still. “The Princess,” he said, “was guilty of things a thousand times worse” than those he had mentioned; and the “parables” that he had written to the King might be made clear by the examination of Katharine’s own servant, who carried her letters. “The devil take me,” he continues, “if I can see anything in this friar for her to be so fond of him; for he has neither learning, nor good looks, nor breeding, nor capacity, nor authority; but if he takes it into his head to preach a new gospel, they have to believe it.”[18] By two letters still extant, written by Friar Diego himself, we see that the ambassador in no wise exaggerated his coarseness and indelicacy, and it is almost incredible that Katharine, an experienced and disillusioned woman of nearly twenty-four, can have been ready to jeopardise everything political and personal, and face the opposition of the world, for the sake alone of the spiritual comfort to be derived from the ministrations of such a man. How far, if at all, the connection was actually immoral we shall probably never know, but the case as it stands shows Katharine to have been passionate, self-willed, and utterly tactless. Even after her marriage with young Henry Friar Diego retained his ascendency over her for several years, and ruled her with a rod of iron until he was publicly convicted of fornication, and deprived of his office as Chancellor of the Queen. We shall have later to consider the question of his relationship with Katharine after her marriage; but it is almost certain that the ostentatious intimacy of the pair during the last months of Henry VII. had reduced Katharine’s chance of marriage with the Prince of Wales almost to vanishing point, when the death of the King suddenly changed the political position and rendered it necessary that the powerful coalition of which Ferdinand was the head should be conciliated by England.

Henry VII. died at Richmond on the 22nd April 1509, making a better and more generous end than could have been expected from his life. He, like his rival Ferdinand, had been avaricious by deliberate policy; and his avarice was largely instrumental in founding England’s coming greatness, for the overflowing coffers he left to his son lent force to the new position assumed by England as the balancing power, courted by both the great continental rivals. Ferdinand’s ambition had o’erleaped itself, and the possession of Flanders by the King of Castile had made England’s friendship more than ever necessary thenceforward, for France was opposed to Spain now, not in Italy alone, but on long conterminous frontiers in the north, south, and east as well.

Henry VIII. at the age of eighteen was well fitting to succeed his father. All contemporary observers agree that his grace and personal beauty as a youth were as remarkable as his quickness of intellect and his true Tudor desire to stand well in the eyes of his people. Fully aware of the power his father’s wealth gave him politically, he was determined to share no part of the onus for the oppression with which the wealth had been collected; and on the day following his father’s death, before himself retiring to mourning reclusion in the Tower of London, the unpopular financial instruments of Henry VII., Empson and Dudley and others, were laid by the heels to sate the vengeance of the people. The Spanish match for the young king was by far more popular in England than any other; and the alacrity of Henry himself and his ministers to carry it into effect without further delay, now that his father with his personal ambitions and enmities was dead, was also indicative of his desire to begin his reign by pleasing his subjects.

The death of Henry VII. had indeed cleared away many obstacles. Ferdinand had profoundly distrusted him. His evident desire to obtain control of Castile, either by his marriage with Juana or by that of his daughter Mary with the nine-year-old Archduke Charles, had finally hardened Ferdinand’s heart against him, whilst Henry’s fear and suspicion of Ferdinand had, as we have seen, effectually stood in the way of the completion of Katharine’s marriage. With young Henry as king affairs stood differently. Even before his father’s death Ferdinand had taken pains to assure him of his love, and had treated him as a sovereign over the dying old king’s head. Before the breath was out of Henry VII., Ferdinand’s letters were speeding to London to make all things smooth. There would be no opposition now to Ferdinand’s ratification of his Flemish grandson’s marriage with Henry’s sister Mary. The clever old Aragonese knew there was still plenty of time to stop that later; and certainly young Henry could not interfere in Castile, as his father might have done, on the strength of Mary Tudor’s betrothal. So all went merry as a marriage bell. Ferdinand, for once in his life, was liberal with his money. He implored his daughter to make no unpleasantness or complaint, and to raise no question that might obstruct her marriage. The ambassador, Fuensalida, was warned that if the bickering between himself and the Princess, or between the confessor and the household, was allowed to interfere with the match, disgrace and ruin should be his lot, and Katharine was admonished that she must be civil to Fuensalida, and to the Italian banker who was to pay the balance of her dowry. The King of Aragon need have had no anxiety. Young Henry and his councillors were as eager for the popular marriage as he was, and dreaded the idea of disgorging the 100,000 crowns dowry already paid and the English settlements upon Katharine. On the 6th May, accordingly, three days before the body of Henry VII. was borne in gloomy pomp to its last resting-place at Westminster, Katharine wrote to her delighted father that her marriage with Henry was finally settled.