The Wives of Henry the Eighth and the Parts They Played in History. Martin A. S. Hume

marriage until he returned to Spain was of value to him; for he was determined, now that a special providence carefully prepared had removed Philip from his path, that once more all Spain should bear his sway whilst he lived, and then should be divided, rather than his dear Aragon should be rendered subordinate to other interests.

      The encouraging talk of Henry’s marriage with Juana, with which both Katharine and Puebla were instructed to beguile him, was all very well in its way, and the King of England became quite joyously sentimental at the prospect of the new tie of relationship between the houses of Tudor and Aragon; but, really, business was business: if that long overdue dowry for Katharine was not sent soon, young Henry would listen to some of the many other eligible princesses, better dowered than Katharine, who were offered to him. With much demur Henry at length consented to wait for five months longer for the dowry; that is to say, until Michaelmas 1507, and in the meanwhile drove a bargain as hard as that of a Jew huckster in the valuation of Katharine’s jewels and plate, which were to be brought into the account.[16] It is easy to see that this concession of five months’ delay was granted by Henry in the hope that his marriage with Juana would take place. The plan was hideously wicked, and Puebla made no secret of it in writing to Ferdinand. “No king in the world would make so good a husband to the Queen of Castile, whether she be sane or insane. She might recover her reason when wedded to such a husband, but even in that case King Ferdinand would at all events be sure to retain the regency of Castile. On the other hand, if the insanity of the Queen should prove incurable it would perhaps be not inconvenient that she should live in England. The English do not seem to mind her insanity much; especially since it is asserted that her mental malady would not prevent her from childbearing.”[17] Could anything be more repulsive than this pretty arrangement, which had been concocted by Henry and Puebla at Richmond during a time when the former was seriously ill with quinsy and inaccessible to any one but the Spanish ambassador?

      In the meanwhile Katharine felt keenly the wretched position in which she found herself. The plate, about which so much haggling was taking place, was being pawned or sold by her bit by bit to provide the most necessary things for her own use; her servants were in rags, and she herself was contemned and neglected; forbidden even to see her betrothed husband for months together, though living in the same palace with him. The more confident Henry grew of his own marriage with the Archduchess Margaret, or with Queen Juana, the less inclined he was to wed his son to Katharine. A French princess for the Prince of Wales, and the Queen of Castile for Henry, would indeed have served England on all sides. On one occasion, in April 1507, Henry frankly told Katharine that he considered himself no longer bound by her marriage treaty, since her dowry was overdue, and all the poor Princess could do was to weep and pray her father to fulfil his part of the compact by paying the rest of her portion, whilst she, serving as Ferdinand’s ambassador, tried to retain Henry’s good graces by her hopeful assurances about the marriage of the latter with Juana.

      In all Katharine’s lamentations of her own sufferings and privation, she never forgot to bewail the misery of her servants. Whilst she herself, she said, had been worse treated than any woman in England, her five women servants, all she had retained, had never received a farthing since their arrival in England six years before, and had spent everything they possessed. Katharine at this time of trial (August 1507) was living alone at Ewelme, whilst Henry was hunting at various seats in the midlands. At length the King made some stay at Woodstock, where Katharine saw him. With suspicious alacrity he consented to a further postponement of the overdue dowry; and showed himself more eager than ever to marry Juana, no matter how mad she might be. Katharine was quite acute enough to understand his motives, and wrote to her father that so long as the money due of her dowry remained unpaid the King considered himself free, so far as regarded her marriage with the Prince of Wales. “Mine is always the worst part,” she wrote. “The King of England prides himself upon his magnanimity in waiting so long for the payment.... His words are kind but his deeds are as bad as ever.” She bitterly complained that Puebla himself was doing his utmost to frustrate her marriage in the interests of the King of England; and it is clear to see in her passionate letter to her father (4th October 1507) that she half distrusted even him, as she had been told that he was listening to overtures from the King of France for a marriage between Juana and a French prince. She failed in this to understand the political position fully. If Juana had married a Frenchman it is certain that Henry would have been only too eager to complete the marriage of his son with Katharine. But she was evidently in fear that, unless Henry was allowed to marry her sister, evil might befall her. Speaking of the marriage she says: “I bait him with this ... and his words and professions have changed for the better, although his acts remain the same.... They fancy that I have no more in me than what outwardly appears, or that I shall not be able to fathom his (Puebla’s) design.” Under stress of her circumstances Katharine was developing rapidly. She was no longer a girl dependent upon others. Doña Elvira had gone for good; Puebla she hated and distrusted as much as she did Henry; and there was no one by her to whom she could look for help. Her position was a terribly difficult one, pitted alone, as she was, against the most unscrupulous politicians in Europe, in whose hands she knew she was only one of the pieces in a game. Juana was still carrying about with her the unburied corpse of her husband, and falling into paroxysms of fury when a second marriage was suggested to her; and yet Katharine considered it necessary to keep up the pretence to Henry that his suit was prospering. She knew that though the Archduchess Margaret had firmly refused to tempt providence again by a third marriage with the King of England, the boy sovereign of Castile and Flanders, the Archduke Charles, had been securely betrothed to golden-haired little Mary Tudor, Henry’s younger daughter; and that the close alliance thus sealed was as dangerous to her father King Ferdinand’s interests as to her own. And yet she was either forced, or forced herself, to paint Henry, who was still treating her vilely, in the brightest colours as a chivalrous, virtuous gentleman, really and desperately in love with poor crazy Juana. Katharine’s letters to her sister on behalf of Henry’s suit are nauseous, in view of the circumstances as we know them; and show that the Princess of Wales was already prepared to sacrifice every human feeling to political expediency.

      This miserable position could not continue indefinitely, for the extension of time for the payment of the dowry was fast running out. Juana was more intractable than ever. Katharine, in rage and despair at the contumely with which she was treated, insisted at length that her father should send an ambassador to England, who could speak as the mouthpiece of a great sovereign rather than like a fawning menial of Henry as Puebla was. The new ambassador was Gomez de Fuensalida, Knight Commander of Haro and Membrilla, a man as haughty as Puebla had been servile, and he went far beyond even Katharine’s desires in his plain speaking to Henry and his ministers. Ferdinand, indeed, by this time had once more gained the upper hand in Europe, and could afford to speak his mind. Henry was no longer so vigorous or so bold as he had been, and his desire to grasp everything whilst risking nothing had enabled his rivals to form a great coalition from which he was excluded—the League of Cambrai. Fuensalida offended Henry almost as soon as he arrived, and was roughly refused permission to enter the English Court. He could only storm, as he did, to Henry’s ministers that unless the Princess of Wales was at once sent home to Spain with her dowry, King Ferdinand and his allies would wreak vengeance upon England. But Henry knew that with such a hostage as Katharine in his hands he was safe from attack, and held the Princess in defiance of it all. But he was already a waning force. Whilst Fuensalida had no good word for the King, he, like all other Spanish agents, turned to the rising sun and sang persistently the praises of the Prince of Wales. His gigantic stature and sturdy limbs, his fair skin and golden hair, his manliness, his prudence, and his wisdom were their constant theme: and even Katharine, unhappy as she was, with her marriage still in the balance, seems to have liked and admired the gallant youth whom she was allowed to see so seldom.

      It has become so much the fashion to speak of Katharine not only as an unfortunate woman, but as a blameless saint in all her relations, that an historian who regards her as a fallible and even in many respects a blameworthy woman, who was to a large extent the cause of her own troubles, must be content to differ from the majority of his predecessors. We have already seen, by the earnest attempts she made to drag her afflicted sister into marriage with a man whom she herself considered false, cruel, and unscrupulous, that Katharine was no better than those around her in moral principle: the passion and animosity shown in her letters to her