Tudor Queens of England (17 page)

nicler put it.10 She had,
however, died full of years and honours and although her obsequies were fully observed there is no sign that the King mourned unduly. He was too full of the opportunities of his own sunrise. Catherine was equally happy. ‘These kingdoms … are in great peace, and entertain much love to the king my lord and to me. Our time is spent in continual festival’, she wrote to her father, who was as surprised and gratifi ed as anyone by what had happened.

For the time being Henry was behaving like the overgrown schoolboy that he was. He would burst in on Catherine and her ladies at unseasonable hours and in all sorts of elaborate disguises, expecting her to be endlessly diverted and amused. She responded to this exuberance with tolerance and good humour and all the evidence suggests that at this time their relationship was both warm and loving.

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They had, after all, much in common. Their intellectual tastes and educational background were very similar, allowing for the gender differences of the time. Both loved fi nery and display, both rode well and hunted with enthusiasm. Catherine took great pains with her physical appearance and was punctiliously deferential to her Lord in public – and probably in private too. He was, after all, worthy of her respect. He was not only an effective and conscientious king, he was also an intelligent man, with a splendid body. What more could any girl want?

It is probable that her piety was both deeper and more heartfelt than his – he was always inclined to be rather intellectual in his faith – but the deep fl aws of personality that the strains of life were subsequently to make only too clear were not obvious in the Henry of 1509. Meanwhile, Catherine was far more than a bedfellow. Her credentials as an ambassador had, of course, come to an end with the old king’s death and had not been renewed in the new circumstances but her function continued. It is unlikely that Henry needed any prompting in the direction of alliance with Ferdinand, or war with France, but if he did, Catherine provided it. Her political experience was far greater than his and her intelligence just as sharp. Added to which the King was at ease in her company – far more so than with leading councillors such as William Warham or Sir Henry Marney. How much Catherine may have known of the domestic affairs of England is uncertain. Her knowledge of the language had come on by leaps and bounds since she was accredited as ambassador and now as Queen she was no longer inclined to seek the companionship of Spanish-speaking familiars. Instead she showed an unobtrusive but effective capacity for friendship and quietly rebuilt the good will of some aristocratic families, which the old king had treated with indifference or hostility – the Duke of Clarence’s widowed daughter, Margaret Pole being a good case in point.

The nature of her sexual relationship with her husband can only be deduced from circumstantial evidence. The chances are that both were virgins when they married and although that would not be surprising in the case of a well brought-up royal princess – even if she was 24 – it would have been unusual for such a vigorous specimen of young manhood as Henry. However his name had never been linked with any woman, even in the most salacious gossip, and it seems that in that respect at least, Fuensalida was right. When it came to the test, it seems likely that Henry’s sexual performance never had the stallion-like qualities that he liked to pretend and that it was left to his equally inexperienced but perhaps more worldly wise wife to coax him into action. If that was the case, she succeeded very well, because she conceived within weeks of her wedding – a circumstance that seems to have given her husband rather more confi dence than he deserved. Catherine’s pregnancy was part of the general euphoria of the court 92

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in the autumn of 1509. There were further jousts and this time Henry wore her favour in the lists and laid his trophies at her feet. Then there was a hitch, which looks more ominous with hindsight than it did at the time. In January 1510

the Queen was delivered of a child – only instead of the healthy son that her mother-in-law had managed in similar circumstances, this child was a girl, born prematurely and dead. In Spain, Ferdinand heard the news at the same time that he learned that his daughter’s other great project – the Anglo-Spanish treaty of alliance, was sig

ned and sealed.11

The royal couple shrugged off the misfortune of the still-birth. These things happened. They were both young and, more importantly, had proved their fertility. Within a few weeks, as the diplomatic preliminaries to war with France continued to build, Catherine conceived again. For the time being, at least, there was nothing wrong with their sexual relationship – and the Queen was certainly a trier. This time her pregnancy ran its full course and on New Year’s day, 1511, she was delivered of a son. The whole country exploded with joy. The prince was named Henry, and baptized with great magnifi cence. The King, with what everyone thought was a proper sense of priorities, made a pilgrimage to Walsingham to give thanks for the birth of his heir, before turning his attention to more secular festivities. When celebrating, the King’s mind was nothing if not conventional. A great tournament and feast was decreed, and Henry appeared in the guise of ‘Coeur loyale’ to win the chief prize (of course) and lay it at Catherine’s feet.

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It is to be hoped that she, recently convalescent and newly churched, was suitably impressed. Their joy, however, and that of the country, was shortlived, because on 22 February the young Prince died in his magnifi cent cradle at Richmond. We have no idea what killed him. There was no recorded birth defect and the modern suspicion would be an infection of some kind but at the time it was seen as a judgement of God. Modern research suggests that something like 40 per cent of aristocratic children who were born alive failed to survive their fi rst year but without the benefi t of such knowledge, Henry and Catherine were devastated. If
it was a judgement – who was being judged?13
In the event of a miscarriage or still birth it was customary to blame the woman but this was neither and the Queen’s life was conspicuously blameless. Could it be Henry himself who was under the cross and, if so, why? Catherine spent agonized hours in prayer, seeking for a solution. The King, more resilient or less introspective, after a brief agony of self-pity, turned his attention to other things. In May he sent an expeditionary force of 1,000 archers under Lord Darcy to assist Ferdinand against the Moors. The result was a fi asco because the King of Spain changed his mind and sent them home again. Henry would probably have been a good deal more chagrined than he was if he had not been at the same time engaged

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in joining the Holy League, with Ferdinand and the Pope, which gave him the perfect pretext for the war that he was seeking against France. He shrugged off his disappointment over Darcy’s dismissal and began to prepare for a much larger expedition in 1512, which was to form part of an Anglo-Spanish attack on Aquitaine, designed (in Henry’s eyes at least) to recover England’s ‘ancient right’

to Gascony, which had been lost 60 years before.

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So Henry had got his war but success continued to elude him. The Marquis of Dorset duly arrived at Fuentarrabia in June 1512 to fi nd none of the support services promised by Ferdinand in place and he was stranded without supplies and with no agreed plan of campaign. Meanwhile the Spaniards used his presence as a cover for the seizure of Navarre. After several weeks of inaction, the English force became mutinous and taking advantage of an illness that had laid low their commander the offi cers hired ships and returned to England. Henry was furious and Ferdinand self-righteous. ‘The King of Aragon was sore discontent with their departing, for they spent much money and substance in his country, and said openly that if they had tarried he would have invaded G

uienne …’15

Whether there was any truth in this protestation we do not know but the King of England certainly felt betrayed. He was too deeply committed to the war to back out but he lost his appetite for combined operations in the south. Instead he turned his attentions to Picardy and his target for the campaign of 1513

became the city and fortress of Tournai. Whether his suspicious relationship with Ferdinand had any affect upon his marriage is hard to tell. According to rumours picked up by Don Luis Caroz, now the Spanish ambassador in London, Henry was casting lustful eyes upon Anne Hastings and Elizabeth Ratcliffe, two married sisters of the Duke of Buckingham. From the same source we learn that this led to a furious spat with the Duke and to the dismissal of Elizabeth from the Queen’s service. As the lady was a favourite of Catherine’s, this in turn led to a domestic quarrel of some ferocity

.16 Car
oz, however, was not particularly close to the Court and the Queen kept him at an arms length. She might no longer be offi cially ambassador but no one was going to usurp her position when it came to mediating between her father and her husband.

The rumours probably arose not from any actual infi delity on Henry’s part but from his enthusiasm for a kind of charade known as ‘courtly love’. This was a game played by bored courtiers wherein a man would chose a ‘mistress’ from among the available ladies, would bombard her with trivial gifts and amorous verses and profess his undying devotion. She would then respond as the mood took her, with coy encouragement or furious disdain – usually the latter. This game could go through several rounds, and the ‘winners’ were those who kept up the pretence longest and most convincingly – particularly the ones who produced 94

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the most elegant verses or songs. Real relationships were not supposed to be in question but, human nature being what it is, they sometimes were. The King himself was much in demand as a partner in such games and, after two or three years of playing exclusively with his wife, had probably decided to broaden his fi eld a little. Beyond the inevitable tiffs and sulks, there is no reason to suppose at this stage that his relationship with Catherine was under any sort of real stress. When he went campaigning in France in June 1513 he named her as Governor of the Realm and Captain General in his absence. This was supposed to be a largely honorifi c position and there is plenty of evidence that the King’s council continued to govern from his camp, wherever that might be, but it turned out to be rather more real than either of them had anticipated. On 11 August a Scottish herald turned up at Henry’s camp and issued a formal declaration of war.

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In spite of being married to the King’s sister, James IV was unable to resist the temptation to resurrect the ‘auld alliance’ and to seize an opportunity while Henry was distracted. This turned out to be a big mistake because Catherine, with exemplary speed and effi ciency, raised an army and despatched it north under the command of the Earl of Surrey. More than that, she also raised a back-up force, which she commanded in person. On 9 September Surrey annihilated the Scots at Flodden, and James fell on the fi eld of battle. When the news reached Catherine as she advanced to Leicester, she disbanded her army and went home – as well she might. When Henry took fi rst Therouanne and then Tournai, and won the somewhat notional battle of the Spurs, he sent his trophies home to his Queen but she already had the bloodstained coat that James had worn at Flodden. There is an unsubstantiated report from James Banisius, an Imperial agent in London, that Catherine was in an advanced state of pregnancy at the time of the Scottish invasion and gave birth soon after to a live son, who lived for a few days. However, there is no conclusive proof of this, which would have been surprising had it been a fact, and her personal command of the reserve army suggests that she was in no such condition.

There is more than a suggestion that the Queen sided with her husband when his relations with her father became strained, and her communications with the latter became perfunctory. When Ferdinand contracted out of the Holy League in February 1514, they virtually ceased. This time Henry had every right to feel betrayed, but the rumours that he was thinking of taking this resentment out on his wife by divorcing her appear to be later rationalizations. Caroz complained that Catherine was forgetting Spain in order to court the favour of the English and this time he seems to have been right. By September 1514 she was pregnant again and this time her condition is suffi ciently authenticated, because in January 1515 she was delivered of a stillborn son ‘of eight months’. There was grief and

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lamentation – not as sharp as in 1511, but just as heartfelt. Time was no longer on the Queen’s side. She was 30 and beginning to run to fat. Her physical beauty was fading, she had endured three, or possibly four pregnancies and still there was no child. At the same time, her role as a ‘pillow councillor’ was diminishing. For several years after his accession, Henry had continued to rely on his father’s councillors, but by 1514 he had a man of his own. That man was Thomas Wolsey, originally his father’s chaplain, whom he had appointed almoner a few months after his accession. This in itself was not a great promotion but it did give opportunities for contact with the King, which Wolsey was quick to exploit. In 1511 he was entrusted with the logistics of Lord Darcy’s abortive mission and its failure was no refl ection on his effi ciency. He became a member of the Council, again not a matter of great signifi cance but a sign of growing confi dence. Then in 1512 he managed, not only Dorset’s campaign but also the more successful naval operations that took place around Br