A Journey Through Tudor England (29 page)

Dee was also called on for his geographical and navigational skills. In 1580, he presented two rolls to the Queen and Lord Burghley ‘proving’ that early Britons, including King Arthur, had visited North America which, he argued, gave England rights to conquest and colonisation in the New World: a brilliant piece of
ex post facto
history serving political interests. Remarkably, he was the first to coin the term ‘British Impire’ (in its original spelling). He was also frequently consulted on the search for passages through the north-east and north-west, and advised Martin Frobisher, who brought back a piece of ore from the New World that was mistakenly believed to be gold. It was in this role as ‘intelligencer’ on new lands and voyages that he may have worked as a secret agent for Elizabeth I. He signed his secret messages to the Queen with two zeros and a reverse long-division sign, making him the original ‘007’.

Things began to go wrong for Dee in 1582. In his alchemical search, he became obsessed with the esoteric world of scrying (almost literally crystal ball gazing), and was assisted by a man of dubious integrity called Edward Kelley. Kelley and Dee believed they could receive knowledge direct from angels that had been lost to mankind since the prophet Enoch. Over the next seven years, the pair became inseparable, and their search for the secret of transmuting metals into gold took them as far away as Bohemia and Poland. They finally fell out after Kelley received the message that he and Dee should hold everything in common, including swapping wives for one night.

Dee returned home destitute in 1589, and things deteriorated from there: his library and laboratory had been ransacked; his brother-in-law refused to return his house; and his eight children needed feeding. Little is known of his life in his later years, when his diary falls silent, except that forced by poverty he took a post as Warden of Christ’s College, Manchester, where many of his children and his wife died of the plague in March 1605.

Dee died in 1609. Despite his many works and great renown, his early promise, which first emerged at St John’s and Trinity, was never fully realised. He spent his life and brilliance chasing white rabbits, but found only dead ends.

Other Tudor treasures to see: Trinity has a copy, after Holbein, of the portrait of Henry VIII from the Whitehall Mural, which presides over the hall. Here, too, are portraits of Francis Bacon; Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex; and Mary I in 1554, after Antonis Mor. The Elizabethan Master’s Lodge also has a Tudor drawing room that contains portraits of all six of Henry VIII’s wives: this is open to the public once a year. Trinity Chapel was completed in 1567, although the woodwork is baroque and Georgian. In Vigani’s Room are Elizabethan bowls, made of negrum (a tropical hard wood), and the Wren Library, designed by Sir Christopher Wren in the seventeenth century, contains great treasures including, on display, a copy of Shakespeare’s first folio.

‘
I
beseech you for the love that has been between us, and, the love of God, let me have some justice.’

P
eterborough Cathedral is the final resting place of Katherine of Aragon: possibly the most abused and neglected Queen in England’s history.

People have worshipped on the site of Peterborough Cathedral since 655. The current cathedral (it was an abbey until 1541) was started in 1118 after a fire destroyed an earlier building. With its beautiful thirteenth-century Gothic west front, this striking cathedral looks very much as it would have done when Katherine of Aragon was buried here in 1536. Even the early sixteenth-century blue and gold starred ceiling at the east end above the High Altar and the intricate vaulted ceiling of the New Building would have been in place.

Although it is also the former burial place of Mary, Queen of Scots (her son, James VI and I, removed her body to Westminster Abbey in 1612), it is Katherine’s grave that has become a place of
pilgrimage. When I last visited, someone had laid pomegranates, fresh flowers and palm crosses on her tomb. The cathedral still holds a remembrance service for her every year in January. There is still sympathy for this constant, faithful but abandoned first wife after 500 years, and after what she went through, who would begrudge her this honour?

Katherine, born ‘Catalina’ in December 1485, was the fifth child of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. Her early life was spent travelling through Spain with her illustrious parents, and she lived at the Palace of the Alhambra from 1499 to 1501. She later adopted the pomegranate, the symbol of Granada, as her badge.

At the age of three, she was betrothed to the English prince, Arthur. Since the wedding was scheduled to take place after Arthur turned fourteen, Katherine lived her entire life knowing she would be Queen of England. Highly educated, with pretty auburn hair, she left her parents and her homeland in September 1501, as a teenager, landing in Plymouth on 2 October. Apart from a very brief visit by her sister, Juana, in February 1506, Katherine would never see her family again.

The would-be Queen arrived in London on 12 November 1501 in a magnificent procession. Just two days later she married her young bridegroom at St Paul’s. But within six months, Katherine was a widow: Arthur died on 2 April 1502 [see L
UDLOW
C
ASTLE
]. Later, when her marriage to Arthur’s brother, Henry, was challenged, she would swear that her marriage to Arthur had never been consummated.

Katherine was moved to Durham House in London and, on 23 June 1503, it was agreed that she would marry the new heir, Henry, when he reached fifteen, three years later. So she waited. It must have been a terrible time for her. Consider: widowed, purposeless, her planned marriage far from certain, separated from her family in a country where she did not speak the language and
kept in relative poverty by her father-in-law: it is no wonder that she was frequently ill. A recent biography by Giles Tremlett suggests that during these years Katherine displayed the symptoms of an eating disorder, such as anorexia nervosa, and regularly went several months without menstruating. In the spring of 1509, she wrote to her father, ‘it is impossible for me any longer to endure what I’ve gone through … I’m still suffering from the unkindness of the King and the manner in which he treats me’. She begged to return to Spain to join a convent.

Luckily for her, Henry VII died on 21 April 1509, and the new King, Henry VIII, promptly married Katherine on 11 June at Greenwich Palace. Observers noted that the young couple were very much in love, a claim borne out by the fact that Katherine was frequently pregnant. Sadly, however, she miscarried in January 1510 and had a stillborn boy in 1514, while two children died in infancy, including a son and heir, Henry, at seven weeks old in 1511.

Henry evidently trusted his wife: in 1513, when he went to war in France, Katherine was appointed Queen-Regent and Governor of the Realm. In this role, she presided over the war with Scotland, including the slaughter at the Battle of Flodden Field.

In February 1516, Katherine finally gave birth to a healthy baby, Mary, but by the early 1520s she was no longer regarded as attractive, and it was becoming clear that she was now infertile. It must have been especially galling for her when Henry’s bastard son Henry Fitzroy [see F
RAMLINGHAM
] was titled in 1525.

Katherine turned a blind eye to Henry’s love affairs but, in 1527, she would have realised that his latest infatuation was of a different order, after hearing about a secret tribunal held by Cardinal Wolsey to investigate their marriage. Her suspicions were confirmed when Henry paid a visit to her in June: he told her that he believed they had been living in mortal sin for the past eighteen years, and must now live apart.

The story of Henry’s ‘Great Matter’, his love affair with Anne Boleyn and ‘divorce’ from Katherine, with the justification that Leviticus 20:21 forbade a man to take his brother’s wife for fear of childlessness, is very familiar. Yet, it is still remarkably poignant. Katherine’s appeal, on her knees, to her husband at the trial at Blackfriars under Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio in May 1529 is heartrending:

I beseech you for the love that has been between us, and the love of God, let me have some justice … This twenty years or more I have been your true wife and by me you have had divers children, although it hath pleased God to call them out of this world …

After twenty-two years of marriage, she saw Henry for the last time in July 1531 when he left to go hunting with Anne; he did not even wish Katherine goodbye. Soon after, she was also separated from her daughter: Katherine was sent to The More, Hertfordshire, while Mary was sent to Richmond. They would never see each other again, despite Katherine’s pleading to be allowed to do so when Mary was ill in September 1534 and February 1535.

The final indignities came in September 1532, when Henry ordered Katherine to hand over her jewels for Anne’s use, and in June 1533, when Anne was crowned queen and Katherine demoted to Princess Dowager, a title she never accepted. Although Rome pronounced her marriage to Henry ‘valid and canonical’ in March 1534, it was too little, too late.

At Kimbolton in Huntingdonshire, in December 1535, Katherine grew very ill. When her loyal friend Maria de Salinas, Lady Willoughby joined her on 29 December, Katherine had not eaten or slept properly for days, and the pain in her stomach was so great she could barely sit up. After a brief remission, she died at 2 p.m.
on 7 January 1536. Her embalmer found all her organs to be healthy except her heart, which was ‘quite black and hideous to look at’. Poison was suspected, but it was probably cancer.

After lying in state, her coffin, covered in black velvet and drawn by six horses, processed from Kimbolton to Peterborough Abbey. On 29 January, three funeral masses were said; neither Henry nor Mary attended.

Katherine’s original tomb was destroyed in 1643 by Oliver Cromwell’s troops. The modern black slab was given in 1895 in response to an appeal to those with the name of Katherine. It is engraved with the coats of arms of sixteenth-century England and Spain, Katherine’s pomegranate badge, and the words:

Here lies the body of Katharine of Aragon Queen of England: first wife of King Henry VIII: who died at Kimbolton Castle, on the 8th day of January 1536 aged 49 years.

‘The burden that is fallen upon me makes me amazed, and yet, considering I am God’s creature ordained to obey his appointment, I will thereto yield.’

H
atfield was Elizabeth I’s childhood home, but it doesn’t look exactly as she might remember it. Five years after her death, another great house was built at Hatfield, giving us not one, but two great houses — Hatfield Old Palace and Hatfield House — to visit. Of all the Elizabethan royal residences, Hatfield is the most strongly identified with her, and for good reason.

One of Henry VII’s ministers, Cardinal Morton, Bishop of Ely built Hatfield Palace as a grand episcopal residence between 1485 and 1497. Rather like an Oxbridge college, it was designed as four great buildings of russet-red brick around a central quadrangle. Today only one side remains: the Great (or Banqueting) Hall.