The Six Wives & Many Mistresses of Henry VIII
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The welcome lasted all the way from London Bridge to Gracechurch Street, through Cornhill, Cheapside, the Standard at Chepe, on to her lodgings in the Bishop’s Palace, near St Paul’s. King Henry observed her arrival from the home of a merchant named Whiting, ‘not in very opyn sight’,9 along with his mother, queen and eldest son. His presence was meant to be a secret but the many Yeomen of the Guard positioned at the windows, leads and gutters and in the street below indicated his choice. The Privy Accounts list that Whiting received £6 13s and 4d for the occupation of his house. Catherine rode past ‘upon a great mule, richly trapped after the manner of Spain’ with Henry, Duke of York, on her right and the papal legate of Spain on her left. Her ‘fair auburn’ hair hung down past her shoulders, loose under the cap she wore, held in place by a gold ribbon.10 According to the Tudor chronicler Edward Hall, the streets were hung with velvet, satin, silk and tapestries, the roads themselves gravelled and railed off. Watching the procession was a twenty-three-year-old student of Lincoln’s Inn named Sir Thomas More, who wrote that Catherine ‘possessed all the qualities that make for beauty in a very charming young girl’, and hoped that the ‘highly publicised union [would] prove a happy omen for England’.11 Her young guide conducted her safely to St Paul’s, where she made an offering to St Erkenwald, then on to her lodgings in the Bishop’s Palace.
There was no doubt in anyone’s mind about the attractiveness of the diminutive princess. Concepts of beauty vary across location and time but, for the late medieval mind, they were particularly associated with the outward manifestation of health and fertility. In the summer of 1505, when Henry VII asked his ambassadors to report on the appearance of Queen Joan of Naples, his detailed instructions give a good picture of what was considered desirable among Catherine’s contemporaries. Joan’s face was considered pleasing, as it was unpainted, ‘amiable, round and fat’, her skin was reported as clear and her complexion was ‘fair, sanguine and clean’. Her teeth were described as ‘fair, clean and well set’, her brows were ‘like a wire of brown hair’ and her lips ‘somewhat round and full’, with no discernible hair growing on them. In attempting to get close to her person, they ‘never felt any savour of spices, and believe her to be of a sweet savour’. Critical for the creation of heirs, her figure was assessed at ‘somewhat round’ and ‘not of high stature’, with her breasts ‘somewhat great and full and trussed somewhat high’. Her limbs were in good proportion, arms round and large, her neck ‘full and comely’, her hands ‘full and soft’ and her fingers ‘right fair and small, and of a meetly length and breadth’.12 The teenaged Catherine, with her petite, plump figure and regal colouring, did not disappoint the English.
The afternoon before her wedding Catherine made the short trip to Baynard’s Castle, a huge, fortified royal palace on the riverbank practically next to St Paul’s. Waiting for her there was her future mother-in-law, Elizabeth of York, the beautiful Plantagenet princess Henry VII had taken as his queen after defeating her uncle at the Battle of Bosworth. Now the mother of six children, Elizabeth welcomed the young woman, called for musicians and spent the afternoon with her in ‘pleasure and goodly communication, dancing and disports’. Perhaps, on the eve of her wedding day, the queen imparted some motherly advice to Catherine regarding what she might expect. As the youngest daughter of a large family, with married elder sisters, Catherine was probably not naïve about the duties of a wife. The physical proximity suggested by royal architecture, the nature of the lying-in process, behavioural manuals and references in popular culture suggest that the sixteenth century was less squeamish about sex than a modern reader might expect. It also seems likely that Isabella would have seen this as her remit before her daughter departed Spanish shores. It may be that Catherine was fully aware of what lay ahead in the marital bedroom. Or, rather, what was supposed to lie ahead.
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Marrying Arthur, 1501
When we shall make our wedding feast,
There shall be cheer for man and beast;
I mun be married a Sunday.1
The following morning, Sunday 14 November 1501, Catherine rose and said her prayers. No doubt she gave thanks that the match her parents had been planning since she was three years old was about to take place. As a devout Catholic and dutiful daughter, she would have remembered Ferdinand and Isabella and those she had recently left behind in the parched lands of sunny Spain. It was also the day of St Erkenwald, the Anglo-Saxon Bishop of London, at whose Westminster shrine she had left offerings only days before. Perhaps she also prayed for the health of the prince of this foreign land, whose language and customs seemed so strange to her, along with her new English family and homeland. Her welcome had been rapturous, the people enthused by her regal bearing, her beauty and Plantagenet descent. It was a good start: one day she would be their queen.
Catherine’s retinue of Spanish ladies bustled about her that morning, led by the formidable Dona Elvira Manuel, ‘first Lady of Honour and first Lady of the Bedchamber’, to whose care her mother had specifically trusted her. She laced Catherine into a wide Spanish petticoat stiffened with young, pliable green wood, which fell in a huge sweeping circle about her ankles. This would be the first time that Catherine’s future subjects saw a woman dressed in a ‘vertugardo’, which would later come to be known as a farthingale. In the cathedral it would cause a sensation. However, for a decade or so the reaction was more bemusement than emulation among the conservative English, with their rigorous sumptuary laws. Over the top of the petticoat the Spanish ladies pulled a white silk dress, decorated on the bodice and sleeves with large pleats. Catherine’s head was covered with a silk veil, hanging down as low as her waist, weighed down by the inch-and-a-half-wide strip of pearls, gems and gold that decorated its borders. The Receyt’s author considered it to be most like ‘unto menys clothing’.2
When Catherine emerged in her bejewelled finery, Prince Henry was waiting. His role was to conduct her into St Paul’s Cathedral and give her away, in place of her absent father. Like his elder brother, Henry wore a suit of spotless white velvet and gold that must have dazzled onlookers. Perhaps in later years some would remember the younger boy’s clothing, making an unusual visual trio of bride, groom and brother. The occasion had been designed as nothing less than a deliberate piece of theatre to establish the young couple as dynastic heirs and future monarchs in the minds of the congregation. The traditional royal wedding location of Westminster had been rejected in favour of St Paul’s, in order to maximise the size of the congregation witnessing this historic event. Henry VII, along with his wife and mother, had retreated to watch the ceremony from behind a screen so as not to overshadow the pair in terms of status. Everything proclaimed that England’s future lay with these young people. His job done, for the time being, Prince Henry stepped back.
Hand in hand, Catherine and Arthur mounted a specially built platform. Over a metre and a half from the ground and twelve feet wide, it allowed them to parade along its red worsted surface at eye level, ensuring maximum impact. The Receyt refers to it as a levy, or timber bridge, resting on wooden pillars, stretching for the entire length of the cathedral (around 600 feet long), with steps to ascend and descend. It also included a round stage where the ceremony was conducted.3 One chronicler commented that they made a ‘lusty and amorous’ couple. They turned to face the crowds, to the north and south, displaying themselves to the sound of cheering. Resplendent in their nuptial whiteness, on a level with the statues and icons of the cathedral, and full of youth, they must have seemed the embodiment of the infant sixteenth century.
After the ceremony Arthur stood aside in order to conduct the formal business of paperwork, allowing Henry to take his sister-in-law by the arm. He escorted Catherine back along the platform to the wedding feast in the Bishop’s Palace, where trumpeters greeted their arrival and the walls were hung with expensive cloth of arras. She was served with four courses of ‘the moost delecat deynties and curious mets’ from ‘the hool realm of Englond’
.4 The 1501 wedding menu does not survive but those dishes served to Archbishop William Warham at his enthronement at Canterbury in 1503 may give some idea of the kind of luxury fare enjoyed by the young couple. Warham’s ceremony fell on a fish day, when he was presented with sturgeon and whelks in foil, roast eels and carp in a sharp sauce. Sweet dishes included florentine cream, honey tart, baked quince and orange, apple fritters and royal custard followed by comfits, sugar plate and hippocras to drink.5
The food and its service were designed to display the royal wealth to the full. Arthur and Catherine would have been honoured by the creation of subtleties, sculptured in marzipan, of allegorical, historical and religious figures. Warham’s table had been graced by one design featuring a king seated on a throne, surrounded by kneeling knights and flanked by two gentlemen on horseback. A second design centred on St Eustace kneeling in a park under a great tree of roses, with a white hart bearing a crucifix between its horns. Another featured King Ethelred being taught about Christianity by St Augustine, all the figures being made of marzipan.6 The subtleties for Arthur and Catherine’s wedding would have featured symbols of their dynasties and relevant saints. In 1501, observer Walter Ogilvie noticed the ‘jewel-encrusted goblets’ and ‘dishes of purest gold’ on display in the cupboards to dazzle the guests. After the feast, young Henry danced with his elder sister, Margaret, casting off his jacket in a gesture of impulsive confidence. There were disguisings and interludes, one featuring an arbour with a gate that was rotated before the king, another made in the shape of a large circle, covered in fine lawn and lit from the inside by over a hundred lights. Ladies danced inside, showing up as shadows within.7
The celebrations lasted five hours, after which the party shifted to Baynard’s Castle. There the marital bed chamber was ceremonially prepared according to custom and scattered with drops of holy water. The bed itself had been carefully chosen, with rich hangings and furnishings fit for a future king and queen. Typically they might have been made from velvet and silk, in strong colours like red, black, green and blue, with panels of cloth of gold and silver. These were often fringed with taffeta and ribbon and heavily embroidered with floral and dynastic motifs, or coats of arms. When Arthur’s grandmother, Cecily Neville, died in 1495, she had bequeathed him a set of bed hangings decorated with the image of the wheel of fortune; perhaps these were used on this occasion, with their poignant reminder about the brevity of life. In readiness, the sheets were smoothed and pillows plumped. The Lord Chamberlain, John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, had the job of testing the bed, lying on both sides to ensure there was no weapon or spike secreted among the bedclothes.
Undressed by her ladies, Catherine was ‘reverently laid and reposed’ as Arthur’s gentlemen led him to her side.8 The consummation of a match was the final stage of the process, essential in religious and legal eyes to validate the union and prevent later annulment; in 1469, Isabella’s bloodstained bedsheets had been displayed after her first night with Ferdinand as proof that intercourse had taken place. Although the English did not go this far, some act of intimacy was required to satisfy and dispel the onlookers who accompanied the newlyweds into the chamber, with their advice and blessings, bawdy jokes and music. First the bride and groom partook of the wine and spices designed to fortify them through the night, warm the constitution and sweeten the breath. Then, as in the case of Arthur’s sister Mary thirteen years later, they may have been required to touch skin as a symbol of the act to come. This was usually a quick, shy contact of bare legs, before the chamber doors were closed and the young couple were left alone. Writing in the 1540s, when it was politic to believe in the consummation of the match, Edward Hall wrote that ‘this lusty prince and his beautifull bride were brought and ioyned together in one bed naked, and there dyd that acte, whiche to the performaunce and full consummacion of matrimony was moost requisite and expedient’.9 However, only two people knew what really happened on that night.
Presumably the young couple knew what was expected of them. Lying between their perfumed sheets, listening to the roar of the fire and the receding footsteps of the court, it was the first time they had been alone together. Arthur had just turned fifteen, and Catherine was nine months older. Neither had any intimate experience with the opposite sex and Arthur’s diminutive height might indicate he had not yet experienced the growth spurt of puberty that led his grandfather, father and brother to be above average height. Communication was difficult, as Catherine’s English would remain poor for years and they had already discovered that their common language, Latin, sounded almost unrecognisable when pronounced in a foreign tongue. Equally, neither of them would have realised that any urgency was required. Hindsight informs us that the clock was ticking but, at the time, the two would have considered themselves at the start of a lifelong partnership. There was no hurry. Perhaps, exhausted after the days of ceremony, they simply fell into a welcome sleep. It may even be that, 14 November falling on a Sunday (also a major Saint’s day), the Catholic pair bowed to strict canonical teaching regarding abstinence on the Sabbath. It is possible that Catherine may have been disappointed, or equally she may have felt relieved. Arthur’s boast to his gentlemen the next morning, about being in the midst of Spain, may have owed more to bravado than experience.
Ten days of disguisings, dancing and other entertainments followed. A few days later, as part of the jousting, the pageant of a ‘goodly ship’ appeared outside Westminster Palace, full of sailors firing serpentines and other guns.10 On another occasion, a chariot of cloth of gold was pulled by four marvellous ‘beasts’: a red lion, a white lion, a white hart with gilt horns and an ibex, although the author of the Receyt noticed that the legs of two men operating each creature were visible below.11 Later, a pageant of mountains was created in Westminster Hall. The first was green and planted with ‘fresh’ olive, laurel, orange and fir trees, as well as herbs, flowers and fruit, so it was a ‘great delite … to behold’. The second mountain was like a dark rock, scorched and burned in the sun, studded with ‘ors of sundry metals’, including gold, silver, lead, copper, with crystal and amber ‘subtly pictured and painted’, all drawn along on gold chains. Both disgorged people in costume, who danced to the tabor, harp and recorder.12
Eventually the party relocated to the king’s new palace at Richmond, a fantasia of fruit-filled gardens, octagonal turrets and fountains in marble-lined courtyards.13 The days were given over to pleasure, with tennis courts, archery butts and a bowling alley and games of chess, cards and dice. A Spanish tightrope walker juggled with swords and hung by his toes and teeth, while a ‘man-mermaid’ adorned a two-storied pageant. Henry led a great hunt in Richmond Park, where the ‘th’Erl of Hispayne strake a dere with his crossbow’ and the slaughtered creatures were given to the Spanish guests to eat.14 When the time came for Catherine’s retinue to depart, on 29 November, Henry alleviated her sorrow by offering her a choice from a display of rich gems, although he was privately fuming that the second half of her dowry remained unpaid.15 The next day, Arthur wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella from the palace that he ‘had never felt so much joy in his life as when he beheld the sweet face of his bride. No woman in the world could be more agreeable to him.’ He promised to be a good husband.16 King Henry also wrote that their ‘beloved daughter’ had found a ‘second father who will ever watch over her happiness and never permit her to want anything’.17 As it turned out, neither Tudor would keep their promise.
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Ludlow, 1502
The harbinger of death
To me I see him ride
The cough, the cold, the gasping breath,
Doth bid me provide
A pickaxe and a spade
And eke a shrouding sheet
A house of clay for to be made
For such a guest so meet.1
Whatever had happened on their wedding night, Catherine and Arthur were now man and wife, yet Henry had doubts about whether they should live together at once. The initial plan, reported to Ferdin
and and Isabella by Gutierre Gómez de Fuensalida, was for consummation to take place to seal the match, followed by two or three years of separation.2 This was confirmed by Pedro de Ayala, who was summoned by Henry at the end of November in order to discuss the matter. According to the Spaniard, the king was reluctant to act ‘except in accordance with her wishes’, a phrase that Catherine shrewdly echoed back when asked for her opinion. Henry’s councillors were divided over the consummation, with some saying ‘it would be good for the princess to go to Wales, and others saying no’.3 It seems that the pair were considered too young, and that Catherine would have been too isolated in Ludlow given that Arthur’s administrative commitments would require him to travel and leave her for long periods of time. Henry asked ‘the prince to use his influence with the princess’ to make her declare she would rather depart with him. Catherine stuck to her guns, though, with the single-mindedness and politic use of formality that would later characterise her dealings with Henry VIII, and insisted that she had no other will than Henry’s and would be content with whatever he decided.4