By then she had endured approximately five years of “the pains of Purgatory on earth” at Henry’s hands. She had also suffered routine assaults on her fertility by Henry’s deputies who (conveniently forgetting the existence of the Princess Mary) tried to convince her that her marriage to the king was an abomination in the sight of God “by the curse of sterility.” And she had endured the cruel separation from her daughter. Henry refused to allow Mary and Katherine to cohabit because he feared that the imperial ambassador Eustache Chapuys might spearhead an attempt to spirit Mary out of the country so she could rally the Spanish against him.
On May 23, 1533, after Henry had been married to Anne Boleyn for four months, the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer declared the king’s marriage to Katherine null and void on the ground that she had consummated her marriage with his brother Arthur, and no dispensation could remove the impediment imposed by God in the words of Leviticus.
But even after Anne’s coronation on June 1, 1533, Katherine insisted on being referred to as the queen, rather than accept the demoted title of Princess Dowager. Warned that her stubbornness might redound on Henry’s treatment of their daughter, she replied that she would place her trust in his mercy. And when Katherine was threatened with prosecution for treason, she insisted, “if it can be proved that I have given occasion to disturb my lord, the king, or his realm in any wise, then I desire that my punishment according to the laws should not be deferred . . . but should I agree to your persuasions I should be a slanderer of myself and confess to have been the king’s harlot these four and twenty years. . . . As long as the King, my lord, took me for his wife, as I was and am, I am also his subject, but if the King take me not as his wife, I came not into this realm as merchandise, nor yet to be married to any merchant. . . .”
On March 24, 1534, approximately fourteen months after Henry had wed Anne Boleyn, Pope Clement finally declared that the marriage between Katherine and Henry was valid in the eyes of God and Church. But by that time the judgment was moot. Henry had settled the matter by declaring himself Supreme Head of the Church in England, and as such he recognized no law made by Rome. Six weeks later, a deputation from the king visited Katherine at the damp and drafty Buckden, for the purposes of extracting from “the old Princess Dowager” and her remaining household staff the oath affirming on pain of treason that the king’s first marriage was unlawful; that his union with Anne was good and valid; and their daughter Elizabeth was the legitimate heir to the throne. Katherine refused to take the oath, as did every one of her courageous attendants.
England was ripe for rebellion that year, with many of the most prominent and powerful nobles not only supporting Katherine’s cause but deeming Henry’s hijacking of the Church unlawful, and his conduct with regard to his marriage an offense to both God and reason. Meeting with them covertly, the imperial ambassador Eustache Chapuys was the secret link between all of these discontented men. Although he may not have been aware that his kingdom was a powder keg, Henry told his council in 1535, “The Lady Katherine is a proud, stubborn woman of very high courage. If she took it into her head to take her daughter’s part she could quite easily take the field, muster a great array and wage against me a war as fierce as any her mother Isabella ever waged in Spain.”
Luckily for the king, Katherine considered herself to be his loyal wife to the very end and refused to conscience any form of rebellion.
At the end of December 1535, Henry received the news that Katherine lay dangerously ill. Although he refused to see her, in her waning days, Katherine wrote one last letter to the king, forgiving him for his sins of casting her aside and averring her everlasting passion for him.
My most dear Lord, King and husband. The hour of my death now drawing on, the tender love I owe you forces me, my case being such, to commend myself to you, and to put you in remembrance with a few words of the health and safeguard of your soul, which you ought to prefer before all worldly matters and before the care and pampering of your body, for the which you have cast me into many calamities and yourself into many troubles.
For my part, I pardon you everything, and I wish and devoutly pray God that He will pardon you also. For the rest, I commend unto you our daughter Mary, beseeching you to be a good father unto her, as I have heretofore desired. . . .
Lastly, I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things.
The letter was signed “Katherine the Queen.”
In her final days Katherine had a crisis of conscience, debating whether her decision to maintain her status as queen, come hell or high water, had done the kingdom more harm than good. Standing her ground had compelled Henry to break with Rome, thereby allowing the new religion to take hold. If she had accepted the invitation to step aside and enter a convent, would everything have been different?
Yet perhaps there was a deeper reason for her feelings of guilt, as well as her motive for wearing the coarse order of the Franciscans beneath her gowns for the last years of her life. Katherine may very well have lied—to Henry, to his commissioners and delegations, and to God. The documents unearthed by the Victorian historian G. A. Bergenroth showed Katherine’s historically honorable character to be somewhat less than saintly. If she had indeed consummated her marriage to Arthur, as the papers suggest, then her performance during the sham trial regarding the legality of her marriage to Henry was as farcical as the king’s. And in that case, no wonder she felt the need to perpetually atone before the cross. As devout as she was, she must have believed that for this sin, she would surely roast in hell.
Katherine had never been averse to lying if it accomplished certain desirable diplomatic goals. In 1507 she had proudly told her father—a past master of dissembling—“I bait [the widowed Henry VII] with this [the possibility of a marriage to her sister Joanna]” in order to achieve better treatment from the English king. She also boasted to Ferdinand of her ability to manipulate the Spanish ambassador, de Puebla: “I dissimulate with him and praise all that he does . . . I say everything I think may be useful for me with the king, because in fact, de Puebla is the adviser of the king and I would not dare to say anything to him, except what I should wish the king to know.”
In 1510, Katherine lied to two monarchs and an ambassador when she continued to maintain the illusion of a pregnancy, fooling an entire kingdom, except for a handful of people in the know.
So why wouldn’t she have lied about consummating her marriage with Arthur? She kept her mouth shut after their wedding, giving every impression that the couple had enjoyed a normal sex life—fearing she’d be packed off to Spain, a failure in her primary mission. And immediately after Arthur’s death (although her duenna told another story), Katherine could not contradict reports of their active sex life because she needed to maintain the image, fictional or otherwise, that she was legitimately the Princess of Wales, so she could remain in England.
But when her great hope became a marriage to Henry, the future king, she couldn’t let that prospect slip away. So it became convenient to be a virgin again, precisely because of the Leviticus problem. Then, she had to maintain at all costs that she had never been Arthur’s true wife, in order for the plans to go forward with as few hitches as possible.
So Katherine was a politician as well as a penitent. Not for nothing was she the daughter of those arch-pragmatists, Ferdinand and Isabella. If she deliberately lied about being a virgin on her wedding night to Henry, she chose to place that sin upon her conscience in preference to destroying Spain’s vital diplomatic alliance with England—her raison d’être for coming to England in the first place. More important, Katherine chose to lie for the greater good of protecting her daughter Mary’s rights of succession—which, in the long run, it did. And Katherine chanced a dance with the devil for the greater good of Catholicism as well. With Mary on the throne, Katherine knew that the true religion would be restored. She could not have foreseen at what cost, and that it would not last.
On January 7, 1536, just days aft
er her fiftieth birthday, Katherine died in the arms of her dear friend and former lady-in-waiting, Maria de Salinas, the Dowager Countess of Salisbury—mother-in-law to the Duke of Suffolk, Charles Brandon. It is generally accepted that a cancerous tumor on the queen’s heart claimed her life. But the physician who examined her corpse suspected that “a slow and subtle poison” might have been put into the glass of beer that Katherine drank in her final hours because her heart tissue was black all the way through, as was the tumor on it, and Katherine’s supporters were keen to believe the worst. The cause of her death has never been conclusively proved, but for centuries romantics have liked to say that one way or another she died of a broken heart.
Charles V donned black mourning and declared that he never understood how Henry could have put aside “so sage and virtuous and sainted a wife” for a whore. However, within a few months of his aunt’s passing he was eager to resume diplomatic relations with England. Upon hearing of Katherine’s demise Henry and Anne Boleyn donned ensembles of yellow; that night the king gave a ball in Greenwich, gaily displaying baby Elizabeth to his guests and jubilantly exclaiming, “God be praised, the old harridan is dead, now there is no fear of war.”
As a result of Henry’s desperation for an annulment of his marriage to Katherine, he ignored the opinions of the Pope at peril of his own excommunication, proclaimed himself head of the Church in England, and a reformed religion was born, which would eventually morph into the Church of England—but not without bloodshed, mass destruction, and threats of war. The monasteries were dissolved and their property absorbed by the Royal Exchequer. Many glorious medieval buildings were razed in the zeal to rid England of the Roman Church’s corrupt influence. Dissidents were executed for speaking against the validity of Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn.
Ironically, Katherine’s death hastened Anne’s downfall and demise. By the spring of 1536, Henry was sick of her, as she, too, had failed to give him a son; but he had dared not consider putting her aside while Katherine still lived.
Katherine of Aragon was buried with modest pomp at Peterborough. At her funeral the arms of England were ungilded and the chaplet she wore was the open circlet of a princess rather than the closed crown of a queen. The bishop who delivered the funeral sermon boldly lied, informing the bereaved that in a deathbed confession Katherine had admitted that she had never been England’s rightful queen.
Nineteen-year-old Princess Mary, bastardized and stripped of her royal title, was insulted by the paltry trappings. And not until the twentieth century did Katherine’s resting place receive the honors it deserved when Mary of Teck, the queen consort of George V, ordered the symbols of queenship to be displayed over Katherine’s tomb. The two banners bearing the royal arms of England and Spain hang there still.
MARY ROSE TUDOR 1495/6-1533
QUEEN OF FRANCE: 1514-1515
and
LOUIS XII OF FRANCE
1462-1515
RULED FRANCE: 1498-1515
married 1514-1515
and
CHARLES B RANDON,
DUKE OF SUFFOLK
1484-1545
married 1515-1533
“How lovingly the King my husband dealeth with me. . . .”
—Mary Tudor, in a letter to her brother, Henry VIII, soon after her marriage to Louis XII of France
“. . . remembering the great virtues which I have seen and perceived heretofore in my Lord of Suffolk, to whom I have always been of good mind, as ye well know, I have affixed and clearly determined to marry with him . . .”
—Mary’s letter to her brother, Henry VIII, February 1515
IN GENERAL, THERE TEND TO BE TWO KINDS OF ROYAL marriages: those that are a fulfillment of duty and the ones that spring from desire. Mary Rose Tudor, the younger, and favorite, sister of Henry VIII, is one royal who experienced both types of unions.
From her mother, Elizabeth of York, who died in 1503 when Mary was seven or eight, she inherited the fair coloring and blue eyes of the Woodville women. But Mary was also a Tudor through and through, from her red-gold hair to her stubbornness and pride, her passion for luxury, her impatience and desire to impress, her willfulness, and her quick temper.
Mary grew to be tall, graceful, and fine-boned—one of Europe’s most beautiful princesses, as well as one of its greatest pawns. Her first offer of marriage came when she was three years old, from the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, on behalf of his son. Although that proposal was rejected, in 1507, at the age of twelve, Mary was betrothed to Archduke Charles of Austria—the son of Joanna the Mad and Philip the Handsome—and the heir to the throne of Spain. A proxy wedding was conducted on December 1, 1508, and from then on, Mary was referred to as the Princess of Castile.
But the wedding plans were scotched when the boy’s grand-fathers, Ferdinand of Aragon and the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian—both of whom had been allied with England against the French—went behind Henry VII’s back and signed a truce with France. Years later, on July 30, 1514, Mary was made to renounce her compact with Charles as Henry VIII, now King of England, repudiated the Hapsburg marriage his father had brokered for her. And on August 13, pursuant to a peace treaty negotiated a week earlier by Thomas Wolsey, Mary, “a nymph from heaven,” was married instead by proxy to Louis XII, the decrepit, fifty-two-year-old French monarch—thereby allowing England to trump the Spanish ruler and the Holy Roman Emperor after all.
The ceremony was conducted in the Great Hall in Greenwich before the entire court and the wedding festivities proceeded as though the groom himself had been there. Among Louis’s wedding gifts to his new bride was a portrait of himself (since Mary had never seen him), and a vast amount of plate and jewels, including “the Mirror of Naples,” a diamond as long as a man’s finger from which was suspended a pear-shaped pearl “the size of a pigeon’s egg.” After all the banqueting, the young bride was placed in the huge bed of estate, and Louis’s proxy, the duc de Longueville, “consummated” the marriage on his sovereign’s behalf by removing his red hose and touching one of Mary’s bare legs with his own.
Mary would also bring a sizeable dowry to France, including 400,000 gold crowns—half in plate and jewelry and the balance representing the cost of equipping her for her new role. Aware of Louis’s ill health, Henry VIII had insisted on a clause protecting England’s investment: if Mary survived her husband and returned to England, then France was to refund the cost of her journey to Abbeville and Mary would retain the personal property she had brought to the marriage. The worth of her personal wardrobe alone was estimated at £43,000—nearly $30 million today.
On Louis’s side of the Channel a proxy wedding was held on September 14. The following day he renewed his vow to pay a million crowns to England for Mary’s hand, on pain of excommunication if he defaulted. Henry VIII had put a high price tag on his kid sister’s womb—500,000 gold coins, in addition to the acquisition of three key port cities in France: St. Quentin, Boulogne, and Thérouanne.
On the Continent, the news of Mary’s union with Louis was greeted with disgust. The Dutch were shocked “that a feeble, old, and pocky man should marry so fair a lady.” And the Holy Roman Emperor feigned surprise that Mary should be sacrificed to “an impotent, indisposed, and so malicious prune.” One reason Louis was so prematurely aged was that he had spent three years in prison during the 1480s after a failed attempt to form a regency on behalf of his imbecilic brother-in-law. An adventurous life and a rich diet hadn’t helped.
Vis-à-vis Louis’s infirmity, on October 2, as she prepared to embark from Dover, Mary reminded her brother of the promise she had extracted from him: that if she were to become widowed, she would choose her own husband the second time around. Wishing his kid sister bon voyage, Henry conveniently pretended he hadn’t heard her.
Mary Tudor was Louis’s third wife. In 1476 he had entered a dynastic union with his twelve-year-old second cousin, Jeanne of France. Claiming she was lame and hunchbacked and therefore incapable of conceiving, a
lthough Jeanne protested that he hadn’t really tried, Louis managed to secure an annulment to marry Anne of Brittany, the widow of his predecessor, Charles VIII. Louis and Anne enjoyed a tolerably happy marriage, but their alliance was also strategic, bringing the vast and wealthy duchy of Brittany under French sovereignty. Louis’s many reforms, which greatly eased the lives of his poorer subjects, earned him the nickname Le Père du Peuple—the father of his people—but he was unable to father any sons with his first two wives. Anne bore him two daughters, Claude and Renée, but because the succession in France was under Salic law, the crown could only pass to a male heir.
After Anne of Brittany died on January 9, 1514, Louis was keen to hop back into the matrimonial saddle as soon as possible. He was riddled with gout and a variety of other ailments, and since Anne’s death had harbored presentiments of his own imminent demise. His elder daughter, the fifteen-year-old Claude, was wed that May to François d’Angoulême. That meant if Louis XII and Mary conceived no sons, upon Louis’s death his son-in-law would become King of France.
Louis was so eager to catch a glimpse of his beautiful new bride that he flouted the strict court etiquette that prohibited a meeting in advance of their official introduction, staging a chance encounter during a hawking expedition.
Various descriptions of this event survive. The Italian-born chronicler Pietro Mártire d’Anghiera wrote that Louis was “perched elegantly” on a fine Spanish warhorse, “licking his lips and gulping his spittle” at the sight of the beauteous Mary in her jaunty cap of crimson satin. Pietro didn’t hold out much hope for the king’s health, however. “You may promise yourself five hundred autumns” if Louis lived to greet the spring, he wrote sardonically, adding, “What an old valetudinarian suffering from leprosy, can want with a handsome girl of eighteen.” Pietro was kinder to Mary, describing her as beautiful and without artifice, noting that the French couldn’t stop gazing at her because she looked “more like an angel than a human creature.”
Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire Page 10