Game of Queens

by Sarah Gristwood

  Katherine of Aragon finally arrived in England in 1501. Her marriage to its heir Prince Arthur was celebrated with extraordinary festivities. Isabella of Castile and her husband had displayed some qualms at sending their youngest to distant England, where the Tudor regime was still a fragile new arrival but Isabella was not the woman to let sentiment stand in the way of dynastic advantage.

  Any foreign princess faced a terrifying prospect as she arrived, exhausted and travel-worn, on the shores of a foreign land after a long and dangerous journey, knowing her entire future depended on pleasing the man (or boy) she was about to meet, and that, at best, she faced a future of juggling her loyalties to him and her responsibilities to her native country. It must have taken all the festivities – the tournaments and the tumblers, the pageants and the parades between the river palaces – to pin the ritual smile on Katherine of Aragon’s face. And she may, as Isabella’s daughter, have been taken aback to discover the limitations on a royal Englishwoman’s power.

  True, Henry VII’s mother, Margaret Beaufort – ‘My Lady the King’s Mother’ – exercised a good deal of influence but the same could not be said of his wife, Elizabeth of York. Moreover, both Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth of York had been required to set aside their blood rights to let Henry ascend his throne. There was no thought that a woman could rule in England, as she could in Castile, although Katherine could not have known how this assumption would come to haunt her.

  In January 1502 the young couple set out for Ludlow, Arthur’s seat as Prince of Wales. But less than five months after the wedding came tragedy. On 2 April 1502 Prince Arthur died after a short illness, leaving his parents devastated and his wife in the most painful uncertainty. Another royal bride widowed early; another princess left stranded in a foreign country without an obvious role to play.

  But marriage abroad was a princess’s lot. At the English court, one of Katherine’s new Tudor sisters-in-law was preparing for that destiny. Margaret Tudor had been born in 1489, the eldest daughter of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. She was not quite four when her elder brother Arthur was sent to Ludlow at six years old, to assume his role as Prince of Wales, leaving Margaret to be raised with her younger siblings Henry and Mary. The royal children largely grew up at Eltham Palace, just outside London. Desiderius Erasmus, the great humanist from the Netherlands, accompanying the English scholar Thomas More to pay his respects in 1499, portrays them as happy, although his report makes it clear the eight-year-old Henry (‘already with a certain royal demeanour’) expected, and was given, precedence over the two girls.

  There had already been discussions about Margaret Tudor’s future. In 1498 the Spanish ambassador reported to Ferdinand and Isabella on the proposed marriage between the eight-year-old Margaret and the 25-year-old James IV of Scotland but added that there were many ‘inconveniences’ involved. Henry VII said that his wife and his mother Margaret Beaufort had joined forces to protect little Margaret:

  The Queen and my mother are very much against this marriage. They say if the marriage were concluded, we should be obliged to send the Princess directly to Scotland, in which case they fear the King of Scots would not wait but injure her and endanger her health.

  Wait: as in wait to consummate the marriage. Here, Margaret Beaufort knew all too well what she was talking about. She had been married at twelve and a mother at thirteen; the birth had permanently damaged her slight physique. If the granddaughter named for her had inherited Margaret Beaufort’s small stature, this was a real and vivid concern. Nonetheless, on the 25th of January 1502 (just weeks after Arthur and Katherine set out for Ludlow) Richmond Palace saw the formal celebration of Margaret Tudor’s marriage to the King of Scots. Representatives of both countries signed the three agreements which made up the optimistically-named Treaty of Perpetual Peace, aimed at ending disputes between the ever-squabbling neighbours, and arranging the details of Margaret’s match and her £10,000 dowry.1

  The following day, after Mass was celebrated in the new royal chapel, a proxy wedding ceremony was performed in the queen’s great chamber, with the Earl of Bothwell standing in for the absent King James. Henry, his wife Elizabeth and Margaret herself were asked whether they knew of any impediment and whether Margaret were acting ‘without compulsion and of her own free will’. She affirmed that ‘if it please my Lord and Father the King and my Lady Mother the Queen’, she was content. A full and unqualified affirmation, in the eyes of the sixteenth century.

  After the business was concluded and the trumpets sounded, Queen Elizabeth ‘incontinently’ (as a contemporary chronicle of the proceedings describes it) took her daughter by the hand and, two queens together, they ‘dined both at one mess covered’; a covered dish indicating their regal status. Jousts and a supper banquet followed and the Te Deum was sung at St Paul’s. The next morning the twelve-year-old Queen of Scots came into her mother’s great chamber and ‘by the voice of’ the officer of arms gave thanks to all the noblemen who had jousted for her and distributed prizes ‘by the advice of the ladies of the court’. Praise went to one young gentleman, Charles Brandon, of whom more would be heard a few years later. It was agreed Margaret should be sent north not later than September 1503 but for the moment, she was to be left in her mother’s charge.

  There is a story that Prince Henry wept with rage when he realised his sister, as a queen, now outranked him. But Henry was about to become much more important in the scheme of things. Barely two months after Margaret Tudor’s wedding came news of their brother Arthur’s death in Wales. And worse was to follow. As Margaret’s sombre mourning clothes were softened by sleeves of white and then of orange, she would have known her mother was pregnant again. Elizabeth of York had thought she had put her childbearing years behind her but with Arthur gone, there was an heir but no spare. In February 1503, just days after bearing a short-lived daughter, Queen Elizabeth died.

  Margaret Tudor had, that coming summer, to travel north towards her new life without her mother behind her. On 8 July she set off, as the ‘Somerset Herald’ recorded, ‘richly dressed, mounted upon a fair palfrey . . . very nobly accompanied, in fair order and array’, to be crowned Queen of Scotland in Edinburgh. She was not yet fourteen years old.

  She met her thirty-year-old husband at Haddington, just inside Scotland. The Herald’s account shows, with unusual clarity, the stages of two people getting to know each other under these trying circumstances. When James IV was brought to what was now Margaret’s great chamber she met him at the door and the two ‘made great reverences, the one to the other, his head being bare, and they kissed together’. The greeting to the rest of her party being made, they ‘went aside and communed together by long space’.

  Returning the next day, James found Margaret playing cards in her room and she kissed him ‘of good will’. When bread and wine were brought to him, he served her before himself and played for her on the clarichords and the lute, ‘which pleased her very much’. The next day, seeing the stool on which she was seated for supper ‘was not for her ease’, he gave her his chair. A letter to her father Henry in England, sent in the early days of her marriage, breathes homesickness and the uncertainties of an adolescent trying to negotiate her path through the power plays of a foreign court. ‘I would I were with your Grace now and many times more’, she told her father, as many another princess must have wished to do. All the same, it sounds as if, by the standards of the day, Margaret had been lucky.

  Katherine of Aragon’s situation, by contrast, was the worse for the death of her kindly mother-in-law Elizabeth of York, although for a brief time it seemed that new, if controversial, possibilities might open. King Henry was a widower, just as his son’s wife, Katherine of Aragon, was a widow. Marriage between the two looked, for a moment, a good way of resolving the equation and keeping Katherine’s dowry and the Spanish connection: good to Henry, at least. But Katherine’s mother Isabella of Castile was horrified when she heard the rumours; such a marriage between father and daughter-in-la
w would be ‘a very evil thing – one never before seen and the mere mention of which offends the ears – we would not for anything in the world that it should take place’.

  Instead, in June 1503, the seventeen-year-old Katherine of Aragon was betrothed to Arthur’s eleven-year-old brother Prince Henry, amid some confusion as to whether she was betrothed as Arthur’s widow in the fullest sense, or as the virgin survivor of an unconsummated marriage. But there was another extended row between Henry VII and Ferdinand over the question of Katherine’s dowry, with Katherine caught between her father’s and her father-in-law’s diplomacy. Events in Spain, moreover, were about to make Katherine less attractive as a marital possibility.

  In November 1504 Isabella of Castille died, leaving questions about what would happen to her country. From the English perspective, this meant that an alliance with Katherine now represented only an alliance with her father’s Aragon, rather than also one with the more important Castile. In June 1505, Prince Henry was instructed by his father to repudiate his betrothal to her. While her sister-in-law Margaret Tudor seemed comparatively secure in Scotland, Katherine was once again left without clear prospects in a strange land.

  6

  Repositioning

  The Netherlands, Spain, England, Scotland, 1505–1512

  There were others on the far side of the English Channel whose place on the political board would be affected even more directly by the death of Isabella of Castile. One was Katherine of Aragon’s former sister-in-law Margaret of Austria, and another was Katherine’s sister, Juana.

  Juana was her mother Isabella’s heir, but from the first she showed little sign of taking the reins of power into her own hands. The tussle was between Juana’s husband Philip of Burgundy – Margaret’s brother – and Juana’s father Ferdinand of Aragon, Isabella’s widower, who was reluctant to relinquish the larger part of the lands he had co-ruled for many years.

  News of her inheritance reached Juana as she was with her husband in the Netherlands and the couple set about making preparations for their return to Spain. Storms forced Philip and Juana into harbour on the coast of England, which gave Katherine of Aragon the thrilling possibility of seeing her sister, but Philip purposely kept Juana away from Henry’s court until he himself was firmly established as the star visitor, which left Katherine only a few hours to spend with the sister she was likely never to see again.

  But back in Spain, in September 1506, Philip of Burgundy died suddenly of a fever. The comportment of his widow Juana made it easy for her male relatives to outmanoeuvre her. Juana would shortly be declared incapable (insane), although the diagnosis is now suspect. Juana herself had written to her father that while the Castilians ‘want to make out that I am not in my right mind . . . if I did fly into passions and failed to keep up my proper dignity, it is well known that the only cause of my doing so was jealousy’. It is however possible that her husband forced her to write the letter.

  Juana would be no player in the game of queens. Most of her life was spent incarcerated; it remains uncertain to what degree this was inevitable. Certainly she was effectively the victim of a stitch up, in which her husband had been at least as complicit as her father. A deal was struck whereby Castile would be controlled by Juana’s father Ferdinand during the minority of her six-year-old son, Charles.

  But what of the Netherlands, which Charles had also inherited on his father’s death and where Philip and Juana had left him when they sailed to Spain? Regency of the Netherlands passed to Charles’s other grandfather, Maximilian, but Maximilian resided in his own, Austrian, lands. Instead, with the approval of all involved, he devolved his powers on to his Netherlands-born, recently widowed (and thus fortuitously available) daughter, Margaret of Austria. In the weeks before Philip of Burgundy’s death, Maximilian’s agent described how he ‘daily pressed [Margaret] during a whole month’ to consent to marriage with England’s Henry VII. Maximilian had assured the English king that he himself would travel to Savoy to persuade her. But now her family had found another use for her, and at twenty-seven, Margaret had found the part she was born to play.

  When fate, and her brother’s death, placed the government of the Netherlands in her hands, she took to the role with ability. Margaret of York had died in 1503 but Margaret of Austria set up court in her godmother’s old home, Mechelen, where council meetings were held twice a week, though most of the hundred and fifty people who made up her household lived around the city.*

  Sworn in as governess-general in March 1507, Margaret took her nephew Charles on a tour of his domain, promising on his behalf to preserve the rights and privileges of each of the seventeen provinces, receiving their oath of fidelity and convening the Estates-General to raise a tax with which to redeem Charles’s mortgaged lands, since Philip had left his territories in very poor array. A good deal of her time was occupied in international diplomacy and the pursuance of her father’s policies.

  Her own hand in marriage was a pawn Maximilian was still attempting to play. But Margaret of Austria continued to resist all blandishments, resolutely refusing to marry Henry VII of England, although her father assured her that she would be able to return to her own domains for three or four months of every year and thus ‘will not feel yourself a prisoner in England . . . with a headstrong man’. She was, however, persuaded to write Henry a number of flattering letters and thus keep up her father’s alliance with England.

  The death of Philip of Burgundy brought potential benefits to another woman. Henry VII now sought a marriage with the widowed Juana, unperturbed, so the Spanish ambassador reported, by any thought of insanity, ‘especially since I have assured them [the English] that her derangement of mind would not prevent her from bearing children’. As Juana’s sister, Katherine of Aragon became involved, at Henry’s request, in the negotiations. Katherine had every reason to long for Juana’s presence at Henry’s side, which might not only help her free herself from limbo but also relieve her endless money worries. The disputes about her dowry had dragged on, and she sent frantic pleas to her father that she was spending not on frivolities but on necessities. (The Spanish ambassador, de Puebla, was famous for eating at court to save money.) It was at this point that she was able to deliver a ‘letter of credence’ to her father-in-law that made her officially her father Ferdinand’s ambassador

  But Ferdinand was never going to give Henry VII the controlling hand in Spanish affairs he might have had as Juana’s husband. Katherine of Aragon’s minor triumph notwithstanding, the desperate tone of her letters in the final years of Henry VII’s reign is more pathetic than anything later in her story.

  Margaret Tudor’s life in Scotland, by contrast, continued for some time on the same gracious note with which it had begun, and she had probably her husband to thank for that. James was a complex character – devote and romantic – determined some day to go on crusade but meanwhile amusing himself with a variety of studies, including the practice of dentistry.* But James IV was also an ardent practitioner of the amatory arts and from the very first Margaret had to cope with evidence of his infidelity. In the autumn, James took her (and her ladies and her musicians and eighteen wagons of ‘gear’) on a tour of her traditional dower land, starting at the romantic loch-side palace of Linlithgow. When they moved on to Stirling, however, Margaret found that her dower castle was a nursery for the king’s half a dozen illegitimate children.

  But James’s long devotion to his mistress Janet Kennedy may have made it easier for him to show restraint in other directions. It was more than three years after her arrival in Scotland that in 1507, by then seventeen, Margaret gave birth to a son. James was ecstatic, and not forgetful of Margaret, who after the birth lay dangerously ill. James went on pilgrimage to the shrine of St Ninian, on the Galloway coast, to pray for her recovery: on foot, taking seven days for the 120-mile journey. At exactly the moment he knelt at the tomb, Margaret’s fever abated. Or so it was reported through all Christian countries.

  Tragically, just ove
r a year later, the baby died but Margaret Tudor was again pregnant. However, when she gave birth (to a girl) in July 1508, the baby died the same day. It was, of course, too soon to see how closely events in England would replicate this story. But Margaret’s fertility, or lack thereof, had implications for England; since the death of Prince Arthur, she was second in line to the English throne.

  Margaret Tudor was, like so many princesses, a living pledge of an international alliance, and the Anglo-Scottish accord had at first seemed to being going well. But by 1508 James IV was receiving embassies from Louis XII of France, whose alliance with Maximilian against the growing power of Venice did not include England. James was, moreover, irritated when his father-in-law arrested his cousin, the Earl of Arran, for passing through his kingdom without official permission. Henry VII sent north, to kiss and make up, an able new young English official by the name of Thomas Wolsey. Margaret was tasked with winning Wolsey an audience, since her husband declared, ominously, that he was too busy ‘shooting guns and making gunpowder’. After five days, she managed it; albeit with an inexperience in the smooth ways of diplomacy that had her contradicting any Scot who said her father in England had done anything wrong.

  When Henry VII died, on 21 April 1509, Margaret Tudor (once again pregnant) was now the heir to the English throne. While James and the new king Henry VIII confirmed the Treaty of Perpetual Peace, Margaret’s baby, born in October at Holyrood, was christened Arthur, a name of great significance in recent and legendary English history. This Arthur was to die at a year old but of course, there was by that point every reason to hope that Henry VIII and his new queen would have children of their own.

  When Henry VII of England died, his son Henry VIII instantly marked his accession by marrying Katherine of Aragon, his brother’s widow. Henry wrote to Margaret of Austria in the Netherlands, truly or falsely, that this was by the dying Henry VII’s ‘express command’. The wedding took place quickly and privately but their joint coronation, less than a fortnight later, was huge and public. That ceremony took place on 24 June 1509 and although a sudden shower forced the drenched queen to shelter under the awning of a draper’s stall, Katherine’s dreary years were at an end – for the moment, anyway.