Mary Tudor (4 page)

Isabella was determined that her four daughters be educated properly and have what she had been denied. She had received only a meager schooling as a child and had later taught herself to read Latin while campaigning. Along with learning the “female arts” of dancing, music, needlework, and embroidery, Katherine learned the works of the Latin Fathers of the Church—Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory, and Jerome—and those of the Latin Christian poets. But whereas her brother, Juan, was educated to rule, Katherine and her sisters were expected to cement foreign policy alliances as the wives of European princes. First Isabella, Katherine’s eldest sister, was married to Prince Alfonso of Portugal, then Juana to the Archduke Philip of Burgundy, and later Maria to Prince Manoel of Portugal. When it was Katherine’s turn, her parents looked to England.

Ferdinand and Isabella wanted an Anglo-Spanish alliance as a counterpoise to French aggression in Italy. For Henry VII a union with Spain was a great diplomatic coup, a means to bolster the fledgling Tudor dynasty and England’s place in Europe. Founded on their common interest of restraining the growing power of France, the Treaty of Medina del Campo of March 28, 1489, provided for mutual cooperation. It would form the basis of an Anglo-Spanish bond that would endure for the first half of the sixteenth century.

Isabella “made very particular honour [of the English ambassadors], for she prized her Lancastrian kinship with Henry, and saw a connection with England, as with Burgundy, important to pre-eminence in Europe.”
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And so, from the age of three, Katherine knew her future would be as an English queen. Her mother was reluctant for her to go: she was the youngest of her children and the last to marry; but finally, aged sixteen, Katherine set sail for England to marry Henry VII’s son Arthur.
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Upon the Spanish princess’s arrival at Plymouth, the licentiate Alcares wrote to tell Isabella that “she could not have been received with greater rejoicings if she had been the Saviour of the World.”
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Katherine and Arthur were married on November 14, 1501, at St. Paul’s Cathedral. It was a magnificent ceremony and one that heralded the Anglo-Spanish alliance—the defining moment of the Tudor dynasty.
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After a week of splendid banquets and tournaments, the royal couple journeyed to Ludlow in Shropshire to govern the Principality of Wales, as was the ancient custom for the heir to the throne. But though long in the making, the marriage was to last less than six months. On April 2, Arthur, then sixteen, died suddenly; most accounts suggest it was tuberculosis, or “consumption.” The foundations on which the Anglo-Spanish entente had been constructed had crumbled.

Yet it was an alliance too important for either party to lose. As soon as news reached Spain of Arthur’s death, Ferdinand and Isabella mooted the possibility of Katherine marrying the new heir to the throne, ten-year-old Prince Henry. Because of their consanguinity, a dispensation had to be sought from Pope Julius II, although Katherine insisted that her marriage to Arthur had never been consummated. On June 23, 1503, a new treaty was signed and agreement reached for Prince Henry and Katherine to be married in five years’ time. But when Queen Isabella died in November 1504, the personal union of
Castile and Aragon, founded on her marriage with Ferdinand, was shattered. Isabella had bequeathed Castile to her daughter Juana, who was married to Philip of Burgundy. He claimed the throne in her name, while Ferdinand of Aragon took power as regent. Katherine’s worth as a bride fell dramatically. She was no longer princess of the Iberian Peninsula, and an alliance with Aragon alone was of limited value. Henry VII now abandoned marriage negotiations with Ferdinand.

Katherine, meanwhile, was stranded. She remained in England, mourning the loss of her mother, with little money and no clear status. She petitioned her father to come to her aid, describing how she was in debt and how greatly she needed money “not for extravagant things” but “only for food”; she was “in the greatest trouble and anguish in the world.”
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ON APRIL
21, 1509, amid scenes of great celebration, seventeen-year-old Prince Henry was proclaimed king of England. “Heaven and earth rejoices,” wrote Lord Mountjoy to the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus; “everything is full of milk and honey and nectar. Avarice has fled the country. Our King is not after gold, or gems, or precious metals, but virtue, glory, immortality.”
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Soon after his accession, Henry sought to establish his European status by reasserting England’s claim to the French Crown. He needed allies and looked to renew the alliance with Ferdinand of Aragon and marry his brother’s widow, Katherine. On June 11 they exchanged vows at the Franciscan church at Greenwich.

“Most illustrious Prince,” Henry was asked, “is it your will to fulfil the treaty of marriage concluded by your father, the late King of England and the parents of the Princess of Wales, the King and Queen of Spain; and, as the Pope has dispensed with this marriage, to take the Princess who is here present for your lawful wife?” Both parties answered, “I will.”
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Two weeks later, Henry and Katherine were crowned together at Westminster Abbey. He was eighteen, handsome, and athletic; she was twenty-three and described as “the most beautiful creature in the world.” Well educated and accomplished, she loved music, dancing, and hawking almost as much as Henry did. She was, in many ways, the
ideal royal bride. Both were equally learned and pious and were keen readers of theological works. Katherine spent hours at her devotions, rising at midnight to say Matins and at dawn to hear Mass, and, very much her mother’s daughter, she proved to be politically able and determined. As Henry prepared for war with France in 1512, Katherine was closely involved. “The King is for war, the Council against and the Queen for it,” one Venetian diplomat reported.
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While Henry embarked on his campaign, capturing the towns of Thérouanne and Tournai in northern France, Katherine remained in England as “Regent and Governess of England, Wales and Ireland,” with authority to raise troops and supervise preparations for war against the Scots. Ten years earlier, when James IV of Scotland had married Henry’s elder sister, Margaret, he had sworn “perpetual peace” with England. He had now been persuaded by the French to renew their “auld alliance” against England. War was declared in August, and James launched an invasion across the border. As Peter Martyr, the contemporary Italian historian, reported:

The Scottish king was killed at Flodden Field. It was one of England’s most resounding victories over the Scots and Katherine’s finest hour. She wrote triumphantly to Henry, “In this your grace shall see how I can keep my promise, sending you for your banners a King’s coat. I thought to send himself unto you, but our Englishmen’s hearts would not suffer it.”
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Following in the footsteps of her mother, Isabella, she had proved to be a great warrior queen, mustering troops and delivering rousing orations. Ironically, it would be the womanly “duties” of pregnancy and childbirth—her inability to provide a male heir—that would be her undoing.

O
NCE MARY HAD BEEN CHRISTENED, KATHERINE ENTRUSTED HER
care to the staff of the royal nursery. Katherine carefully selected each of them: a lady mistress, Lady Margaret Bryan, formerly one of Katherine’s ladies-in-waiting, headed the small establishment; a wet nurse, Katherine Pole, suckled the young princess; three “rockers” took it in turn to soothe her; and a laundress performed the endless task of washing the infant’s clothes. In the inner room of her nursery suite, Mary slept in an “everyday” cradle. In the outer chamber, she received visitors in a specially constructed “cradle of estate,” draped in a quilt of ermine and framed by a canopy embossed with the royal arms.
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Courted by princes from around the world, she was at once dependent infant and esteemed European princess.

Her father doted on her. According to Sebastian Giustiniani, one day the king showed him the Princess Mary, then two years old, in her nurse’s arms. “He drew near, knelt and kissed her hand, for that alone is kissed by any duke or noble of the land.” Henry then said proudly to the envoy,
“Domine Orator, per Deum immortalem, ista puella nunquam plorat”
—this child never cries—to which Giustiniani replied, “Sacred Majesty, the reason is that her destiny does not move her to tears; she will even become Queen of France.” These words pleased the king greatly.
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The twenty-five-year-old King Henry looked to hold his own against Francis I, the young new king of France, and Charles, duke of Burgundy, just sixteen, who had become king of Spain weeks before. Mary would increasingly become a pawn in their European rivalry.

Francis had triumphed in the latest conflict over Milan in Italy, and the warring kings had come to terms in the Treaty of Noyon. With neither side looking to England for an offensive alliance against the other, Thomas Wolsey, Henry’s chief minister, sought to preserve England’s status by becoming champion of peace. The Treaty of London, brokered by Wolsey in early October 1518, bound all the great powers to perpetual concord, to maintain peace and act together against any aggressor.
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Sponsored by Pope Leo X, its declared aim was a European crusade against the Ottoman Turks, but for Henry and Wolsey it was a means of countering the growing threat of France. The treaty was underpinned by an Anglo-French rapprochement that hinged on a future marriage between Mary and the French dauphin, François, then just a few months old.
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Although Mary was not to be delivered to France until she was sixteen and the dauphin fourteen, the betrothal sealed a new era of Anglo-French relations, which was to be celebrated the following year at a meeting of the two kings.

AT EIGHT O’CLOCK
on the morning of Tuesday, October 5, 1518, Mary, just two and a half years old, was taken to her mother’s chamber at Greenwich Palace in preparation for her betrothal. There her parents, the papal legates, Cardinal Wolsey and Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio, the queen dowager of France, and numerous French dignitaries headed by the lord admiral, Guillaume Bonnivet, gathered to receive her. As Giustiniani described it, “all the court were in such rich array that I never saw the like either here or elsewhere.”
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Dressed “in cloth of gold, with a cap of black velvet on her head, adorned with many jewels,” Mary was a vision of royal extravagance.
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When Cuthbert Tunstall, the bishop of Durham, delivered his sermon in praise of marriage, she grew restless and was picked up and “taken in arms” by her lady mistress, Margaret Bryan.
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Her betrothed, the six-month-old François, was spared the monotony of the ceremony, the lord admiral acting in his place.