Six Wives (5 page)

    This range of meanings was to play itself out, usually ironically, against the events of Catherine's life. But for her, I suspect, the fruit which she had seen growing in the gardens of the Alhambra came, more than anything else, simply to represent home.

C
atherine belonged to a large family as her parents had five children who survived infancy. The eldest, named Isabella after her mother, was born within a year of the marriage. Then there was a lengthy gap, occasioned in part by miscarriages possibly triggered by the Queen's active service in the wars against the Moors. At last, a son, Juan, was born in 1478, followed in quick succession by three younger children, all girls: Juana, Maria and finally Catherine, the baby of the family.

    Juan, as heir, was the apple of his parents' eye. But Catherine, as the youngest, was something of a favourite too. Ferdinand proclaimed that he loved her 'entirely': 'for ever', he explained, 'she hath loved me better than any of my other children'. For the Queen, actions spoke louder than words, and in 1489, when Catherine was only three, Isabella held her up in public to watch a ceremonial bull-fight.
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    Nor was this an isolated gesture, since Isabella was as hands-on as a parent as she was at everything else. She kept her daughters with her even on campaign and in 1491, for instance, at the siege of Granada, Catherine, her mother and sisters had to flee in the night when the Queen's tent caught fire. More importantly, Isabella also supervised the girls' education herself. She has been much praised – especially in this feminist age – for giving them almost as academically serious an education as their brother. But, as we shall see, there were some curious gaps in their training which in time were to cost Catherine dear.

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Isabella's own education had been entirely conventional. She had been taught the rudiments of the Faith, housewifely skills and how to read and write Spanish. All these, especially the first, she passed on to her daughters. But, as an adult sovereign, she had also learned some Latin. There were practical reasons for this, since Latin was the prime language of law, government and, above all, of the diplomacy which she and Ferdinand were weaving across the courts of Europe like a spider's web. But Isabella, like Ferdinand, also had a larger vision and it seems certain that she saw the New Learning (as the reformed Classical curriculum came to be known) in the same light as the New World, as a territory to be conquered for her family and her Faith. And her daughters were to share in this inheritance as much as her son.

    Isabella was greatly aided in her efforts by the close relations between Spain and Italy, which were the fountainhead of the New Learning. Leading Italian Humanists, as exponents of the new studies were known, flocked to Spain and some of the best were retained in Isabella's service to educate her children. The most important was Pietro Martire d'Anghierra, known in English as Peter Martyr. His specific brief lay in the re-education of the nobility and the royal children above all. 'I was the literary foster-father of almost all the princes, and of all the princesses of Spain,' he boasted. Catherine's personal tutors, however, were two brothers: Antonio Geraldini and, after his death, his younger sibling, Alessandro.

    Under their supervision, Catherine embarked on a formidable course of Latin literature. But it was not by the Pagan authors familiar to us. This is because they were considered risqué or, in the case of the poets, downright corrupting. So Catherine's direct acquaintance with works of the Golden Age of the Roman Republic and Empire was limited: to the moralists, including Seneca, and to the historians, who were also studied as a source of moral example. Otherwise, her reading was drawn largely from the first centuries of the Christian world: the Christian Latin poets, Prudentius and Juventus, and the Latin Fathers of the Church, Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory and Jerome.

    This was Classical Lite, a mélange of authors who, with the exception of Augustine, are now largely forgotten, at least as literature. But then they were highly valued – as was Catherine's achievement in mastering them. She 'loves good literature, which she has studied with success since childhood', wrote the great Dutch scholar Erasmus, who later got to know her well. But what excited his admiration most was the fact that she had done all this as a woman. She 'is astonishingly well read', he wrote on another occasion, 'far beyond what would be surprising in a woman'.

    What are also surprising, however, are the gaps in Catherine's education. She, like her siblings, was taught to dance and she performed confidently in public. Otherwise, there are no signs of musical skills or training, either instrumental or vocal. She was familiar with one of the great cycles of chivalric romance – if the presence in her mother's library of three well-thumbed volumes, in Spanish, of the tales of King Arthur and the Round Table is anything to go by. But it seems unlikely that she had read anything of the poetry of Courtly Love, and it is practically certain that she had never joined in its fancifully erotic games. Now, for a Christian Humanist, like Erasmus, the omission of such trivialities from Catherine's education was a positive virtue. But then Erasmus never had to make his way in royal Courts. Catherine and her sisters did: they were destined to have to woo husbands, to win friends and to influence people. In all of these, the Courtly arts, music, poetry and the game of love were the favoured instruments – especially for a lady. Isabella's daughters were sent out utterly untrained in them. Was it because Isabella herself was too mannish, or at least too successful a woman in a man's world, to care about such things? Was it because Isabella's entourage, perpetually on the move and almost always at war, was too much of a camp and too little of a Court for a Court culture to develop? Or was it, finally, because Spain was too isolated from the European mainstream?

    If it were the last, the puzzle of Catherine's education deepens. For it was, precisely, the mission of Catherine and her sisters to end Spanish isolation. They were to marry foreign princes and, deploying the superior education which they had been given for the purpose, to bend their husbands and their husbands' lands to the service of Spanish interests. That at least was the theory. The practice was less impressive. For not only were these girls entirely lacking in Courtly skills, they were also sent out, as consorts to foreign rulers, with no training in foreign languages. They could speak Spanish, which scarcely anyone spoke abroad, and Latin, which only the clergy and diplomats did. But their education did not equip them to converse in the languages of their husbands. It was not an education for effective pillow-talk.
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18 
April 1490 must have been a day of high excitement for Catherine, Maria and Juana. Isabella, their eldest sister, was being betrothed to Prince Alfonso of Portugal in Seville and the little girls formed part of the royal party. Catherine was aged five when she received this first lesson in the reality of royal marriages. Other lessons were soon to follow.
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    For the Catholic Kings, Ferdinand and Isabella, took the customary view that a royal marriage existed not for the personal satisfaction of the participants but as a means to a political end. Historians call this use of family connexions to achieve political goals 'dynasticism'. And Ferdinand and Isabella carried it, as they did all forms of policy, to a high level of strategic sophistication. Like their foreign policy, from which it was indeed barely distinguishable, their dynastic policy had two principal aims. Within the Iberian peninsula, they wanted to consolidate their power by bringing Portugal, the only remaining independent crown, within the Spanish sphere of influence. And further abroad, they were determined to contain and challenge France. France was the greatest European power of the day; it also blocked Ferdinand's plans to recover his family's former territories in southern Italy and on either side of the Pyrenees. The marriage of his daughter Isabella would deliver Portugal to Ferdinand; his other children were available to bind France in a chain of golden wedding rings that would, he hoped, turn into a ring of steel.

    His plans received an immediate setback when Isabella's husband died at the age of twenty, and Isabella returned to Spain a youthful widow. Undeterred, the Catholic Kings pressed on. The year 1496–7 was the climacteric. On 22 August 1496 their daughter Juana sailed from Laredo in a great fleet captained by the Admiral of Castile. Its destination was the Netherlands, where Juana would marry the Archduke Philip.

    Philip was another product of a successful dynastic marriage. His mother Mary was heiress of Burgundy (which included modern Belgium, the Netherlands and much of north-eastern France), while his father, Maximilian von Habsburg, was Archduke of Austria and Holy Roman (that is, German) Emperor. There was a long-standing hostility between Burgundy and France, which Ferdinand cleverly exploited. To make absolutely sure of the Burgundian alliance, he also secured a second marriage, and, on its return journey to Spain after delivering Juana, his fleet carried the Archduke Philip's sister Margaret, previously jilted by the King of France, as bride-to-be of Ferdinand's son and heir, Juan.
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    On the way, the fleet was hit by tremendous storms and Margaret, in fear of her life, wrote a wry epitaph:

    The bride and groom were then left in Valladolid, while the King and Queen, together with their unmarried daughters, Catherine and Maria, went on Progress down the valley of the Douro to the town of Valencia de Alcantara on the Portuguese frontier, there to deliver Isabella to her new husband. For death was not to interfere with the Catholic Kings' determination to secure the Portuguese alliance. Manoel had succeeded his brother Alfonso as heir apparent to the Portuguese throne, so it was decided that he should succeed his brother in his marriage bed also. Isabella was reluctant but resigned. In the middle of the celebrations, however, came terrible news. The Infante Juan was seriously ill. Ferdinand rode furiously back to Valladolid. But Juan died. His parents had been warned of the risks of over-enthusiastic consummation of the marriage for the eighteen-year-old groom but Isabella had brushed aside the warnings. 'Whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder,' she had quoted.
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    There was still hope for the future of the dynasty in Margaret's swollen belly. But, after a terrible labour, the baby was born dead. Then in 1498, Isabella, the young Queen of Portugal, died in childbirth. But at least she left behind a healthy boy. Two years later this child died, too.

    This string of deaths of her children and grandchildren came near to breaking Isabella, as nothing else could have done. Her health declined and her religious fervour increased. But nothing, not her health and happiness, nor her children's, was to get in the way of the fulfilment of dynastic ambition. So Maria was sent off to Portugal to marry Manoel, though the Prince of Portugal had already been her brother-in-law twice over. It was a case of third-time lucky and the couple had a multitude of fine, healthy children. Finally, there came good news from the Netherlands too: in 1500, Juana was delivered of a boy. He was christened Charles, after his Burgundian great-grandfather. If he lived, he would be heir to a greater dominion than any ruler since an earlier namesake: the Emperor Charlemagne (that is, 'Charles the Great').

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Maria's departure had left only Catherine in the nest. Her mother Isabella hesitated and prevaricated before letting her go. But finally Catherine, too, was sent forth from Spain, magnificently arrayed and accompanied like a sacrificial animal, to meet her marital destiny, far away in England.

T
hat day in the spring of 1489 at Medina del Campo—was it, perhaps, Catherine's earliest memory? She was wearing lovely new clothes and had been given fourteen young ladies, also prettily dressed, to wait on her. There were roaring crowds and a bullfight. Her mother, rough with jewels and stiff with cloth of gold, held her up to see the spectacle. Then peculiarly dressed men, speaking a language which she did not understand, saluted her with low bows and a strange, unfamiliar title: 'our princess of England, Donna Catherine'. It was the Embassy come from England to negotiate a treaty of alliance between England and Spain, which was to be sealed with Catherine's marriage to Arthur, Prince of Wales.
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    The intended bridegroom was two years old; Catherine, the bride, just over three.

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    But subsequently, both England and Gaunt's House of Lancaster had a roller-coaster ride. The issue, as usual, was dynastic division. Gaunt's grandson Henry V had come within a whisker of uniting England and France in a Dual Monarchy. But Henry V died prematurely and, under his son Henry VI, who succeeded at the age of six months, his inheritance fell apart. First France was lost; then the English turned on themselves in civil war.