Doomed Queens (25 page)

ANSWER KEY

1, all of the above. 2, b: We don’t know what regrets or memories she took with her to the convent. 3, c. 4, b: Based on how he treated Blanche. 5, c: Trick question. We don’t know for sure if Joan lied. To the best of our knowledge, mariticide isn’t accepted anywhere.

CHAPTER FOUR

Renaissance Revels

OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES

Commend me to his Majesty, and tell him that he has ever been constant in his career of advancing me. From a private gentlewoman he made me a marchioness, from a marchioness a Queen; and now that he has no higher degree of honour left, he gives my innocence the crown of martyrdom as a saint in heaven.

Anne Boleyn

T
he humanist glories of the Renaissance did not extend to the royal women of this era. During this dangerous period, there were two primary forces threatening to push queens off their thrones: infertility and religion.

England was an especially treacherous place for queens, four of whom lost their lives after embracing King Henry VIII as husband. Henry married a total of six times in hopes of scoring a male heir. The king, in his infinite wisdom, judged his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, infertile when she proved incapable of giving birth to a son who could live past infancy.

Ironically, it may have been Catherine of Aragon’s surplus of piety that contributed to her woes. A devout Catholic, Catherine fasted to win God’s favor—lack of male issue was believed to be punishment for one’s sins—which most likely affected her menstrual cycles, making conception problematic at best.

Aside from religion, what were other popular cures for infertility? Since there were no reproductive endocrinologists at this time, remedies leaned toward the DIY variety. These included limiting intercourse, increasing foreplay, uterine fumigation (as unpleasant as it sounds), and elaborate herbal remedies that were inserted into the vagina; one such concoction consisted of galangal, marjoram, and mushrooms (presumably not of the hallucinogenic variety). Conceiving a boy was a whole other ball of wax. Some advised that the couple should gaze into each others’ eyes while they mated, an act that supposedly balanced their bodily humors.

To shed Catherine as his spouse, Henry pioneered the use of divorce, founding a new and Protestant church in the process. Afterward, the king fell back on beheading as his preferred
méthode de mort
—dead wives were less trouble when it came to remarrying.

Henry’s new church led to years of religious struggles and royal fatalities beyond his reign. After the king’s death, both Jane Grey and Mary, Queen of Scots, lost their heads for God and England; Jane was Protestant and Mary, Catholic. On the Continent, Jeanne of Navarre was also entrenched in the Protestant struggle, which may have led to her demise.

In other parts of the globe, queens lost their thrones because of maternal death, insanity, and inbreeding—not necessarily in that order.

1536

ity poor Catherine of Aragon. As soon as she was born in 1485, it was clear what her fate would be: an imperial womb for sale. Even her choice of royal badge not so subtly reflected this. Catherine selected the pomegranate, an ancient symbol of feminine fertility. The queen’s fortunes would rise and fall based on the unpredictability of her menstrual cycles—as would those of countless others.

Catherine was the youngest and prettiest of the four daughters born to Isabella and Ferdinand, Spain’s power couple. By the time Catherine was three, her parents had already decided her future: She would wed Arthur, the two-year-old Prince of Wales, to buy an alliance between England and Spain. Over a decade passed before the little princess journeyed to England to marry, accompanied by a dowry of 200,000 crowns; another 200,000 was to be paid later. Catherine was led down the aisle by Arthur’s younger brother, Henry, who threw off his robe to dance wildly at the reception.

The joy at the wedding did not last long: Arthur died suddenly four months later. According to Catherine, since they were too young to consummate the marriage, the pomegranate remained untouched. At the age of sixteen, she was a widow in a distant land. Arthur’s father took the opportunity to squeeze Ferdinand for the second part of Catherine’s dowry; Ferdinand refused to pay, abandoning Catherine to genteel poverty. Seven years passed before Arthur’s dancing brother, now King Henry VIII, stepped up to the plate and married her, rescuing her from royal limbo.

How was Henry able to marry his brother’s widow? Church law prohibited it based on a passage from the Book of Leviticus: “And if a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing…they shall be childless.” But Henry took Catherine at her chaste word and received a papal dispensation. Scorning the public glitz of Catherine’s first wedding, the slightly scandalous couple wed in private. Henry had saved Catherine from an uncertain fate to make her queen—she would always love him for this.

Initially, Henry and Catherine were happy. But though three royal sons arrived, none of them survived. Twenty-four years of marriage, many pregnancies, and one living daughter—Mary—later, Henry decided that Leviticus was right. Behind Catherine’s back, he petitioned the pope unsuccessfully for another dispensation, this one to annul his marriage so he could wed again for a male heir.

Catherine caught wind of this. She confronted Henry with a tear-filled testimony: “I take God and all the world to witness that I have been to you a true, humble, and obedient wife…. I was a true maid, without touch of man.” Henry did not refute her. But his mind was made up.

Henry offered Catherine the refuge of the convent as an easy out. But the heartbroken queen refused. She wasn’t only fighting for herself—she was protecting Mary’s royal claim, since if the marriage was annulled, the princess would be rendered illegitimate. Henry responded by thumbing his nose at Rome and called quits on the marriage himself. He moved Catherine to a faraway castle, where she remained a prisoner until her death three years later. Her autopsy revealed that her heart was as black and misshapen as a dried pomegranate.

or

When Love Leads to Death

Henry Tudor had more wives than most of his contemporaries had horses—and their horses had safer lives. Here’s a diagram for telling those Catherines and Annes apart.