Six Wives (24 page)

    Just before she left Richmond, Catherine had briefly to turn away from English affairs and deal with the aftermath of her husband's victories in France. Wolsey had informed her that Henry's prize trophy, the Duke of Longueville, was being sent to England, where he was to be lodged in her household. Catherine protested that the proposed arrangement was impossible. She was about to depart for the front, while her Chamberlain, Lord Mountjoy, who was the only person of status to 'attend upon him', was also about to leave to take over as Captain of Calais. In the circumstances she suggested that Longueville should be kept in the Tower. Her advice was acted on and Catherine herself authorised the payment of £13 6s 8d 'for lodging and boarding Duke Langevile and six persons with him in the Tower'. But her mind was on other, more important things: pray God, she begged Wolsey, 'to send us as good luck against the Scots as the King hath there'.
¹⁴

    She had her prayer. Surrey tried first to lure James IV from the protection of his camp on Flodden Edge by a knightly challenge to battle. James replied that it was not for an Earl to dictate terms to a King. Chivalry having failed, Surrey resorted to stratagem. He marched off to the north, apparently with the intention of launching a counter-invasion of Scotland. But he halted overnight, and, very early on the morning of 9 September, swung to attack the Scots from the north, where the slope of the ground was gentle and offered little protection. At first the Scots did well. They scattered the extreme right of the English under Surrey's youngest surviving son, Sir Edmund, and Lord Thomas, who commanded the vanguard and the artillery, in despair tore the
Agnus Dei
from his neck and sent it to his father in a plea for reinforcements. But the day turned. The English guns and archers needled the Scots into mass charges which came to grief on English pikes. James and his Household charged with the rest and the King of the Scots fell only a spear's length from Surrey's banner.

    The day now became a rout. For once figures tell the true story: with the King died an archbishop, a bishop, two abbots, twelve earls, fourteen lords and at least 10,000 ordinary folk. The English, in contrast, lost no more than 1,500. In the confusion and among the piles of bodies, most of which were quickly stripped and reduced to the anonymity of nakedness, James's corpse was not at first identified. It was learned from Scottish prisoners that he had either been captured or killed but his actual fate still remained unknown when Surrey sent the first news of victory to Catherine.
¹⁵

    The messenger probably reached Catherine within a little over twenty-four hours – say, late on the 10th or early on the 11th. She wrote immediately to her husband in Lille, where Henry was staying as the honoured guest of Maximilian and Margaret. Her letter has not survived. But a report of its contents went round the city like wildfire on the 13th.

The writer is the Milanese ambassador. No doubt his tale lost nothing in the telling. But he is usually well-informed and the tone of Catherine's actual letter of the 16th is only a little less triumphalist. Its contents are of a piece as well. It compares, favourably, her own achievements with Henry's, and it also refers to an earlier promise to send him James as a prisoner (in return, no doubt, for Longueville). The Milanese report, in short, is to be believed.
¹⁶

    By the time of this further letter, Catherine was fully informed about the outcome of Flodden. James's body had been found on the 10th by one who 'knew him well by his privy tokens'. When the body was stripped, it was discovered that he had died of two serious wounds, one inflicted by an arrow and the other by a pike. Surrey sent part of James's coat-armour (that is, his surcoat of the royal arms of Scotland) to Catherine, along with letters, to her and to Henry, fully describing the battle. Then he had the Scottish King's corpse disembowelled, cauterised and embalmed to await a decision about burial. For James had died under the threat of excommunication, and excommunicates were denied Christian burial.
¹⁷

    As soon as Catherine learned the full extent of the Scottish defeat, she halted her march north, disbanded her troops and began to travel east on a very different mission. And it was from her stopover at Woburn Abbey on the 16th that she wrote her only letter of this momentous year that is addressed directly to Henry himself, rather than mediately to Wolsey.

    Catherine begins her letter formally enough: 'Sir'. But she quickly becomes more intimate: 'my husband', even 'my Henry'. And her tone is frankly exultant. 'To my thinking, this battle hath been to your Grace and all your realm the greatest honour that could be, and more than ye should win all the crown of France.' She is also competitive. She had not been able to send the piece of James's coat-armour by the previous messenger; it comes with this, she told Henry. 'In this your Grace shall see how I can keep my promise, sending you for your banners a King's coat.' 'I thought,' she continues, referring to her earlier promise, 'to send himself unto you [as a prisoner], but our Englishmen's hearts would not suffer it'. James's fate is a cue for a reflection on the due deserts he has had for his perfidy: 'It should have been better for him to have been in peace than have this reward.' 'All that God sendith is for the best,' she concludes piously. She ends the letter with a formal submissiveness that its contents rather belie, 'Your humble wife and true servant'. And she signs simply 'Katherine'.

    Catherine's piety was undoubtedly real. But it was also a touch complacent. This is understandable enough, since the last few months had granted her everything she could wish. The war, her war as well as Henry's, had been a triumphant success. Together, they had proved the doubters wrong: England could fight and win. The doubters had been headed by Catherine's own father. Now he would have to eat his words. Catherine was also avenged: the eventual fate of James IV's body parallels the wretched humiliations of Sir Edward Howard's abused corpse. Catherine even found time to settle accounts with her former rebellious servant, Francesca de Carceres, whose elderly husband had died, leaving her unprovided for. Ferdinand suggested putting her in the service of his daughter Maria; Wolsey in that of the Archduchess Margaret. Catherine would have none of it. 'She is so perilous a woman that it shall be dangerous to put her in a strange house,' she insisted. She must be sent back to Spain and to a nunnery. The French, the Scots, and her own servant had all found that it was dangerous to cross Catherine.

    But God's goodness to her was not over. On the 16th she told Henry 'now [I] go to our Lady at Walsingham that I promised so long ago to see'. She was at the shrine on 23 September and, among other prayers, offered up thanks for the fact that she was with child.
¹⁸

C
atherine's war regency was the climacteric of her life. It had promised much. But the promises turned to dust. Her pregnancy ended mysteriously – presumably in a miscarriage. War, in which she had thrived, turned to peace, in which there was no political role for her. And her husband broke decisively with her father. The Anglo-Spanish alliance had been the
raison d'être
of her marriage. Without it, and without children, what was her marriage worth? Within six months of the 'loving meeting' between the King and Queen after Henry's return from France in October 1513, Catherine started to find out.
¹

* * *

    But Ferdinand immediately had second thoughts. He calculated that France, conveniently weakened by Henry's successful assault, would be so anxious to make peace with Spain that it would be willing to pay for it. And he persuaded the flighty Maximilian that he, too, could benefit more from such a settlement. The Franco-Spanish truce was renewed in March 1514 and was joined by Maximilian shortly thereafter. And the wedding of Mary and Charles, due to take place by 14 May, was hastily postponed.
²

    Now, there was nothing new about Ferdinand betraying England. As we have seen, Ferdinand's perfidy had become a fixed event in the political calendar. What was new this time was Henry's reaction. Instead of turning a blind eye as before, he reacted with fury. And he decided to turn the tables.

    Henry's triumphs of the previous year had given him a fresh confidence. He had proved he could fight a war; now he would show that he could win a peace. Moreover, he had spent so much on the war (£500,000 in the single month of June 1513), that peace was a tempting prospect on financial grounds alone. Finally, he had a new minister: Thomas Wolsey.

    Wolsey, after a series of false starts, had joined the royal service at the end of Henry VII's reign. And his rise continued under Henry VIII, when he was made royal Almoner. Nominally, the Almoner was a middleranking clerical official of the Court who was responsible for the King's charitable doles of food. But Wolsey's real job was to act as Court agent for Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester. Henry never really trusted Fox: 'Here in England they think he is a fox', he told Caroz, 'and such is his name.' But Fox was the weightiest councillor and leader of the peace party. So long as the peace party was in the ascendant, Wolsey served Fox with his inimitable enthusiasm and efficiency. But after the defeat of the peace party at the crucial Council meeting in October 1511, Wolsey changed tack. He read, correctly, Henry's commitment to war, and adapted himself to it. And in promoting Henry's war aims, he was as successful as he had been in serving his former master, Fox. The will driving the war might have been Catherine's, as Pasquaglio suggested, but the organising and strategic genius behind the triumphs of 1513 was Wolsey's.
³

    And it was Wolsey, not Catherine, who benefited. In his modest Almoner's robes, he had been the
éminence grise
of the French campaign, always at Henry's side and acting, significantly, as intermediary even between Henry and his wife. But thereafter the modest garb and demeanour were cast off, and Wolsey became in quick succession Bishop of Tournai (Henry's grandest acquisition of the French campaign), Bishop of Lincoln and (after the mysterious death of Bainbridge in Rome) Archbishop of York. Finally, in 1515, he pushed Warham aside and became Chancellor as well. With each promotion, his plumage became more magnificent, his wealth greater and his hold over Henry more complete. The King, one of Wolsey's creatures informed him, spoke of him as 'though ye were his own father'. Where would that leave Henry's wife?
⁴

* * *

Under Wolsey's guidance the diplomatic revolution of 1514 moved apace. Early in the new year, secret negotiations were opened with France. They were greatly facilitated by the enforced presence in London of Longueville, who found himself transformed from honoured prisoner into a trusted go-between. The logic of the negotiations was simple. England had been France's most dangerous enemy in 1513, therefore France would pay even more to make peace with England. Louis XII indeed was prepared to concede almost anything: Tournai, a massively increased pension (as it was called by the French) or tribute (as the English preferred to describe it), even himself. And what Louis offered, Henry and Wolsey were happy to accept. On 10 August, peace between England and France was proclaimed, and, three days later, it was re-affirmed by a proxy marriage.
⁵

    And this, it turned out, was the most astonishing
volte-face
of all. For instead of Mary marrying the youthful Prince Charles of the Netherlands, her groom was to be the ageing Louis of France. According to the Venetian ambassador, who was present at the betrothal, Mary was 'so pleased to be Queen of France' that she was prepared to overlook the fact that her new husband was, at fifty-two, nearly three times her own age and sickly. Mary herself later said that she had protested at the marriage; indeed she claimed she had only agreed to it after making Henry promise that, next time, she could marry whom she wished. Perhaps. But being Queen of France, as the Venetian said, was a fine thing. And the betrothal gave her a foretaste of the glories of her future position.
⁶

    The ceremony took place at Greenwich. Archbishop Warham officiated and preached the sermon. Longueville impersonated Louis. Mary, in so far as she was allowed to be, was herself. Longueville took her right hand and recited the oath. Mary took his right hand and made her promises. Then each signed the written agreement, the Princess writing her name as 'Marye'. Finally, Longueville gave her a ring which she placed on the fourth finger of her right hand. She was now Queen of France. As for Longueville, he was now a rich man, as Henry gave him his cloth of gold gown and a reward of 10,000 crowns. It was worth it, Henry VIII probably felt, for the pleasure of dishing Ferdinand.
⁷

    Ferdinand's daughter, Catherine, was present at the ceremony. She was dressed almost identically to the bride, who was now her equal in status. We do not know her thoughts. But probably she felt pity for the childish excitement of her sister-in-law and womanly sympathy for what she suspected Mary might face in the marriage bed. But her worst fears should have been reserved for herself. For Mary's French marriage undid everything that Catherine had done since she came to England from Spain. It might even undo her own marriage.