Katharine of Aragon was born to Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon on 16 December, 1485. Katharine was the fifth and last child of “The Catholic Kings”, the title bestowed upon Isabella and Ferdinand by the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, for driving the Moors from Southern Spain. Isabella was thirty-four when she bore Katharine, which was considered old for childbearing in the Late Middle Ages.
Katharine was born at the palace of Alcalá de Henares; the palace was situated in the town of the same name, just east of Madrid, with a stunning view of the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains. At the time of Katharine’s birth, Queen Isabella was engaged in her ten-year struggle to drive the moors from Spain; Isabella had never allowed pregnancy to stop her from performing her duties as Queen Regnant of Castile, nor from pursuing her goal of winning Granada back from the Infidel for Christendom.
And so a pregnant Queen Isabella made the three hundred mile journey north to Alcalá de Henares from Santa Fe, the ‘City of Faith’ she had built to house her soldiers as they fought to drive the Moors from their last bastion of the exquisite Palace of the Alhambra. The campaigning season ended in September; the journey north from Andalusia was long and slow, but Isabella reached Alcalá de Henares without incident, and it was there, on 16 December, 1485, that her last child was born.
The little princess was named for her great-grandmother, Catherine of Lancaster, the daughter of John of Gaunt and Constance of Castile. Catherine of Lancaster married into the royal House of Trastámara, to Henry III of Castile. Princess Katharine’s Plantagenet descent would later necessitate a dispensation for her marriage to her distant cousin, Prince Arthur. Katharine herself wrote the letter to Pope Alexander VI, requesting the dispensation.
As the youngest of three daughters, Katharine’s royal marriage prospects were somewhat limited; her elder sisters would make prestigious marriages with Portugal and the Holy Roman Empire. A match with England was not at first considered viable; the fledgling Tudor Dynasty seemed shaky, with King Henry VII having to quell the threat of a Yorkist pretender to his throne in Lambert Simnel, shortly after Katharine’s birth, and later, from Perkin Warbeck.
But it soon became apparent that Henry Tudor was quite capable of keeping his hold on the English crown. The people were weary of conflict after the Hundred Years War with France, and the internecine Wars of the Roses. They craved the peace that Henry had forged by marrying the daughter of his enemy; and just one year after winning his throne by right of battle, King Henry provided England with the added security of an heir, in Prince Arthur.
When Katharine was only three years old, the first negotiations for her hand in marriage began. The talks would result in the Treaty of Medina del Campo, which included a pact between England and Spain regarding France, lower tariffs for trade between the two countries, and a marriage alliance between England and Spain for Katharine and Arthur.
Katharine’s elder sisters, Isabella and Maria, would both become Queens of Portugal; her elder sister Joanna was destined to become Queen of Castile after Isabella’s death. Princess Katharine, too, would become a queen, but not as Prince Arthur’s wife. But that is another story...🥀🏵🥀
OUR PICTURES ARE: Katharine of Aragon; Prince Arthur; Queen Isabella; Isabella and Ferdinand’s wedding portrait; Katharine’s sisters, Isabella, Maria, and Joanna; Constance of Castile; Catherine of Lancaster; Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI; the Palace of Alcalá de Henares; the Palace of the Alhambra; the Sierra de Guadarrama; the covers of my Tudor novels🥀
FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO WOULD LIKE TO CONTINUE READING:
THE TUDOR CHRONICLES: Book One
The Nymph From Heaven
Chapter 6 (excerpt)
The Tower of London, July 1513
“Your Grace, these Commissions of Array, warrants, and requisitions require your royal signature,” said Bishop Ruthal.
Katharine, whose hands were never idle, laid down the banner she was stitching and picked up the stack of papers. “For which front are these?” she asked, skimming the parchments.
“For both, Your Grace, and some domestic business as well. The first paper is the commission for the removal of the Tower cannon. The second and third are requisitions, one for more green cloth, and the other for a consignment of sallets and gorgets to be sent to Calais. Oh, that one also includes three more culverins.”
“And the rest?”
“Writs and warrants for the executions of a thief and two murderers, Your Grace.”
Katharine sighed. She would not admit it even to herself, but the ordinary business of running the government combined with mustering the home force and provisioning war on two fronts was beginning to exhaust her. In the past weeks she had sent Surrey north to raise the tenantry, had commissioned myriad messengers and what heralds could be spared to warn the people all along the border, and to rally the call to arms throughout the land. She and her council had worked up to twenty hours each day for weeks on end to see to the double task of preparing for the invasion in the north, and managing the never-ending requests from Henry and Wolsey for supplies for the French war. Her waking hours had become a rapid blur of sewing, signing papers, and attending council meetings.
Every female person at court capable of doing so had been put to work sewing the tabards and badges, the easiest of the tasks. Katharine had decided that not a man who went north to fight for England would lack some personal symbol of the homeland he went to defend.
“But, Your Grace,” the men of the council had argued. “The Scots wear a distinctive dress, of plaid material. It is true that the plaids are all different, but none but a Scot would wear them. There will be no problem understanding who is whom.”
“That is not my reasoning,” Katharine had countered calmly. One of the characteristics that the council most admired about the queen was her grace under pressure. She never raised her voice; she never argued. She simply considered all angles of a question then calmly rendered her decision. A woman in a million. “I have experience of war. I know that men, especially poor men such as we will be consigning to the coming battles in the north, fight better when they have some tangible symbol to which to cling. It reminds them of that for which they fight.” If she had her way, in addition to the standards and banners, which more experienced hands such as hers were making, every man who fought for England should have a green and white tabard to wear over his peasant clothes, or at least a Tudor badge to pin to his outermost garment. Green and white were the Tudor colors; each badge was in the shape of a shield, green on one side and white on the other. Onto each was sewn a red and white Tudor rose. The queen smiled. “Consider what a tourney would look like, My Lords, if the knights wore only homespun,” Katharine said. “And the women need some task to keep them busy. To keep them from fretting over much.”
Understanding dawned on the men’s faces.
Katharine frowned as she read the requisition for the weapons. A sudden memory of her childhood flashed through her mind as she took up her quill to sign it. She and her sisters, Isabella, Joanna and Maria, had been brought up in the shadow of war. They had not been sheltered from its horrible sights as some royal princesses might have been. Queen Isabella did not believe in families living apart, and so the royal children had stayed in the military camp at Santa Fe all during the long siege of the Palace of the Alhambra, indeed, had been made useful.
Many was the day Katharine and her royal sisters had spent their daylight hours in the camp hospital rolling bandages, as the wounded and maimed men were carried past them on makeshift stretchers. Katharine had been raised with the sight of dying, bleeding men, the eye that had been pierced by an arrow, the bloody stump where an arm had been hacked off in battle. At sunset sometimes the girls would go out for a breath of the cooler evening air, and would play amongst the burial mounds, each grave adorned with its little twig-and-twine cross. Katharine knew that a dead man lay beneath each mound, but this did not frighten her, even in the dark. Many of them were soldiers she had known, nursed perhaps. And she also knew that for each mound there was a grieving mother, father, wife, daughter, son.
As Katharine stared at the munitions requisition, tears sprang into her eyes, and in the swimming words she saw only the deaths of men. I am becoming fanciful, she thought. Did my sainted mother ever behave so? Katharine had always thought of her mother, Queen Isabella, as invincible, but she knew that it was not so. Isabella had wept on the day of Katharine’s departure for England. Isabella had been a queen and a warrior; but she was also a woman. Katharine signed the paper and held a candle to the wax for her seal. She lifted the heavy gold handle and impressed the seal into the red wax. For a moment, it looked like blood. She moved on to the death warrants, which were easier to contemplate for some reason. Perhaps it was because these men had committed crimes, and deserved to die.🏵🥀
Comments
Post a Comment