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

indeed, at this time (1508-9) a self-willed, ambitious girl of strong passion, impatient of control, domineering and proud. Her position in England had been a humiliating and a hateful one for years. She was the sport of the selfish ambitions of others, which she herself was unable to control; surrounded by people whom she disliked and suspected, lonely and unhappy; it is not wonderful that when Henry VII. was gradually sinking to his grave, and her marriage with his son was still in doubt, this ardent Southern young woman in her prime should be tempted to cast to the wind considerations of dignity and prudence for the sake of her love for a man.

      She was friendless in a foreign land; and when her father was in Naples in 1506, she wrote to him praying him to send her a Spanish confessor to solace her. Before he could do so she informed him (April 1507) that she had obtained a very good Spanish confessor for herself. This was a young, lusty, dissolute Franciscan monk called Diego Fernandez, who then became a member of Katharine’s household. When the new outspoken ambassador, Fuensalida, arrived in England in the autumn of 1508, he, of course, had frequent conference with the Princess, and could not for long shut his eyes to the state of affairs in her establishment. He first sounded the alarm cautiously to Ferdinand in a letter of 4th March 1509. He had hoped against hope, he said, that the marriage of Katharine and Prince Henry might be effected soon; and the scandal might remedy itself without his worrying Ferdinand about it. But he must speak out now, for he has been silent too long. It is high time, he says, that some person of sufficient authority in the confidence of Ferdinand should be put in charge of Katharine’s household and command respect: “for at present the Princess’s house is governed by a young friar, whom her Highness has taken for her confessor, though he is, in my opinion, and that of others, utterly unworthy of such a position. He makes the Princess commit many errors; and as she is so good and conscientious, this confessor makes a mortal sin of everything that does not please him, and so causes her to commit many faults.” The ambassador continues that he dare not write all he would because the bearer (a servant of Katharine’s) is being sent by those who wish to injure him; but he begs the King to interrogate the man who takes the letter as to what had been going on in the Princess’s house in the last two months. “The root of all the trouble is this young friar, who is flighty, and vain, and extremely scandalous. He has spoken to the Princess very roughly about the King of England; and because I told the Princess something of what I thought of this friar, and he learnt it, he has disgraced me with her worse than if I had been a traitor.... That your Highness may judge what sort of person he is, I will repeat exactly without exaggeration the very words he used to me. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘that they have been telling you evil tales of me.’ ‘I can assure you, father,’ I replied, ‘that no one has said anything about you to me.’ ‘I know,’ he replied; ‘the same person who told you told me himself.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘any one can bear false witness, and I swear by the Holy Body that, so far as I can recollect, nothing has been said to me about you.’ ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘there are scandal-mongers in this house who have defamed me, and not with the lowest either, but with the highest, and that is no disgrace to me. If it were not for contradicting them I should be gone already.’” Proud Fuensalida tells the King that it was only with the greatest difficulty he kept his hands off the insolent priest at this. “His constant presence with the Princess and amongst her women is shocking the King of England and his Court dreadfully;” and then the ambassador hints strongly that Henry is only allowing the scandal to go on, so as to furnish him with a good excuse for still keeping Katharine’s marriage in abeyance.

      With this letter to Spain went another from Katharine to her father, railing bitterly against the ambassador. She can no longer endure her troubles, and a settlement of some sort must be arrived at. The King of England treats her worse than ever since his daughter Mary was betrothed to the young Archduke Charles, sovereign of Castile and Flanders. She had sold everything she possessed for food and raiment; and only a few days before she wrote, Henry had again told her that he was not bound to feed her servants. Her own people, she says, are insolent and turn against her; but what afflicts her most is that she is too poor to maintain fittingly her confessor, “the best that ever woman had.” It is plain to see that the whole household was in rebellion against the confessor who had captured Katharine’s heart, and that the ambassador was on the side of the household. The Princess and Fuensalida had quarrelled about it, and she wished that the ambassador should be reproved. With vehement passion she begged her father that the confessor might not be taken away from her. “I implore your Highness to prevent him from leaving me; and to write to the King of England that you have ordered this Father to stay with me; and beg him for your sake to have him well treated and humoured. Tell the prelates also that you wish him to stay here. The greatest comfort in my trouble is the consolation he gives me. Almost in despair I send this servant to implore you not to forget that I am still your daughter, and how much I have suffered for your sake.... Do not let me perish like this, but write at once deciding what is to be done. Otherwise in my present state I am afraid I may do something that neither the King of England nor your Highness could prevent, unless you send for me and let me pass the few remaining days of my life in God’s service.”

      That the Princess’s household and the ambassador were shocked at the insolent familiarity of the licentious young priest with their mistress, and that she herself perfectly understood that the suspicions and rumours were against her honour, is clear. On one occasion Henry VII. had asked Katharine and his daughter Mary to go to Richmond, to meet him. When the two princesses were dressed and ready to set out on their journey from Hampton Court to Richmond, the confessor entered the room and told Katharine she was not to go that day as she had been unwell. The Princess protested that she was then quite well and able to bear the short journey. “I tell you,” replied Father Diego, “that, on pain of mortal sin, you shall not go to-day;” and so Princess Mary set out alone, leaving Katharine with the young priest of notorious evil life and a few inferior servants. When the next day she was allowed to go to Richmond, accompanied amongst others by the priest, King Henry took not the slightest notice of her, and for the next few weeks refused to speak to her. The ambassador even confessed to Ferdinand that, since he had witnessed what was going on in the Princess’s household, he acquitted Henry of most of the blame for his treatment of his Spanish daughter-in-law. Whilst the Princess was in the direst distress, her household in want of food, and she obliged to sell her gowns to send messengers to her father, she went to the length of pawning the plate that formed part of her dowry to “satisfy the follies of the friar.”

      Deaf to all remonstrances both from King Henry and her own old servants, Katharine obstinately had her way, and the chances of her marriage in England grew smaller and smaller. It is not to be supposed that the ambassador would have dared to say so much as he did to the lady’s own father if he had not taken the gravest view of Katharine’s conduct and its probable political result. But his hints to Ferdinand’s ministers were much stronger still. “The Princess,” he said, “was guilty of things a thousand times worse” than those he had mentioned; and the “parables” that he had written to the King might be made clear by the examination of Katharine’s own servant, who carried her letters. “The devil take me,” he continues, “if I can see anything in this friar for her to be so fond of him; for he has neither learning, nor good looks, nor breeding, nor capacity, nor authority; but if he takes it into his head to preach a new gospel, they have to believe it.”[18] By two letters still extant, written by Friar Diego himself, we see that the ambassador in no wise exaggerated his coarseness and indelicacy, and it is almost incredible that Katharine, an experienced and disillusioned woman of nearly twenty-four, can have been ready to jeopardise everything political and personal, and face the opposition of the world, for the sake alone of the spiritual comfort to be derived from the ministrations of such a man. How far, if at all, the connection was actually immoral we shall probably never know, but the case as it stands shows Katharine to have been passionate, self-willed, and utterly tactless. Even after her marriage with young Henry Friar Diego retained his ascendency over her for several years, and ruled her with a rod of iron until he was publicly convicted of fornication, and deprived of his office as Chancellor of the Queen. We shall have later to consider the question of his relationship with Katharine after her marriage; but it is almost certain that the ostentatious intimacy of the pair during the last months of Henry VII. had reduced Katharine’s chance of marriage with the Prince of Wales almost to vanishing point, when the death of the King suddenly changed the