In the meanwhile Katharine felt keenly the wretched position in which she found herself. The plate, about which so much haggling was taking place, was being pawned or sold by her bit by bit to provide the most necessary things for her own use; her servants were in rags, and she herself was contemned and neglected; forbidden even to see her betrothed husband for months together, though living in the same palace with him. The more confident Henry grew of his own marriage with the Archduchess Margaret, or with Queen Juana, the less inclined he was to wed his son to Katharine. A French princess for the Prince of Wales, and the Queen of Castile for Henry, would indeed have served England on all sides. On one occasion, in April 1507, Henry frankly told Katharine that he considered himself no longer bound by her marriage treaty, since her dowry was overdue, and all the poor Princess could do was to weep and pray her father to fulfil his part of the compact by paying the rest of her portion, whilst she, serving as Ferdinand’s ambassador, tried to retain Henry’s good graces by her hopeful assurances about the marriage of the latter with Juana.
In all Katharine’s lamentations of her own sufferings and privation, she never forgot to bewail the misery of her servants. Whilst she herself, she said, had been worse treated than any woman in England, her five women servants, all she had retained, had never received a farthing since their arrival in England six years before, and had spent everything they possessed. Katharine at this time of trial (August 1507) was living alone at Ewelme, whilst Henry was hunting at various seats in the midlands. At length the King made some stay at Woodstock, where Katharine saw him. With suspicious alacrity he consented to a further postponement of the overdue dowry; and showed himself more eager than ever to marry Juana, no matter how mad she might be. Katharine was quite acute enough to understand his motives, and wrote to her father that so long as the money due of her dowry remained unpaid the King considered himself free, so far as regarded her marriage with the Prince of Wales. “Mine is always the worst part,” she wrote. “The King of England prides himself upon his magnanimity in waiting so long for the payment.... His words are kind but his deeds are as bad as ever.” She bitterly complained that Puebla himself was doing his utmost to frustrate her marriage in the interests of the King of England; and it is clear to see in her passionate letter to her father (4th October 1507) that she half distrusted even him, as she had been told that he was listening to overtures from the King of France for a marriage between Juana and a French prince. She failed in this to understand the political position fully. If Juana had married a Frenchman it is certain that Henry would have been only too eager to complete the marriage of his son with Katharine. But she was evidently in fear that, unless Henry was allowed to marry her sister, evil might befall her. Speaking of the marriage she says: “I bait him with this ... and his words and professions have changed for the better, although his acts remain the same.... They fancy that I have no more in me than what outwardly appears, or that I shall not be able to fathom his (Puebla’s) design.” Under stress of her circumstances Katharine was developing rapidly. She was no longer a girl dependent upon others. Doña Elvira had gone for good; Puebla she hated and distrusted as much as she did Henry; and there was no one by her to whom she could look for help. Her position was a terribly difficult one, pitted alone, as she was, against the most unscrupulous politicians in Europe, in whose hands she knew she was only one of the pieces in a game. Juana was still carrying about with her the unburied corpse of her husband, and falling into paroxysms of fury when a second marriage was suggested to her; and yet Katharine considered it necessary to keep up the pretence to Henry that his suit was prospering. She knew that though the Archduchess Margaret had firmly refused to tempt providence again by a third marriage with the King of England, the boy sovereign of Castile and Flanders, the Archduke Charles, had been securely betrothed to golden-haired little Mary Tudor, Henry’s younger daughter; and that the close alliance thus sealed was as dangerous to her father King Ferdinand’s interests as to her own. And yet she was either forced, or forced herself, to paint Henry, who was still treating her vilely, in the brightest colours as a chivalrous, virtuous gentleman, really and desperately in love with poor crazy Juana. Katharine’s letters to her sister on behalf of Henry’s suit are nauseous, in view of the circumstances as we know them; and show that the Princess of Wales was already prepared to sacrifice every human feeling to political expediency.
This miserable position could not continue indefinitely, for the extension of time for the payment of the dowry was fast running out. Juana was more intractable than ever. Katharine, in rage and despair at the contumely with which she was treated, insisted at length that her father should send an ambassador to England, who could speak as the mouthpiece of a great sovereign rather than like a fawning menial of Henry as Puebla was. The new ambassador was Gomez de Fuensalida, Knight Commander of Haro and Membrilla, a man as haughty as Puebla had been servile, and he went far beyond even Katharine’s desires in his plain speaking to Henry and his ministers. Ferdinand, indeed, by this time had once more gained the upper hand in Europe, and could afford to speak his mind. Henry was no longer so vigorous or so bold as he had been, and his desire to grasp everything whilst risking nothing had enabled his rivals to form a great coalition from which he was excluded—the League of Cambrai. Fuensalida offended Henry almost as soon as he arrived, and was roughly refused permission to enter the English Court. He could only storm, as he did, to Henry’s ministers that unless the Princess of Wales was at once sent home to Spain with her dowry, King Ferdinand and his allies would wreak vengeance upon England. But Henry knew that with such a hostage as Katharine in his hands he was safe from attack, and held the Princess in defiance of it all. But he was already a waning force. Whilst Fuensalida had no good word for the King, he, like all other Spanish agents, turned to the rising sun and sang persistently the praises of the Prince of Wales. His gigantic stature and sturdy limbs, his fair skin and golden hair, his manliness, his prudence, and his wisdom were their constant theme: and even Katharine, unhappy as she was, with her marriage still in the balance, seems to have liked and admired the gallant youth whom she was allowed to see so seldom.
It has become so much the fashion to speak of Katharine not only as an unfortunate woman, but as a blameless saint in all her relations, that an historian who regards her as a fallible and even in many respects a blameworthy woman, who was to a large extent the cause of her own troubles, must be content to differ from the majority of his predecessors. We have already seen, by the earnest attempts she made to drag her afflicted sister into marriage with a man whom she herself considered false, cruel, and unscrupulous, that Katharine was no better than those around her in moral principle: the passion and animosity shown in her letters to her father about Puebla, Fuensalida, and others whom she distrusted, show her to have been anything but a meek martyr. She was, 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 political position and rendered it necessary that the powerful coalition of which Ferdinand was the head should be conciliated by England.
Henry VII. died at Richmond on the 22nd April 1509, making a better and more generous end than could have been expected from his life. He, like his rival Ferdinand, had been avaricious by deliberate policy; and his avarice was largely instrumental in founding England’s coming greatness, for the overflowing coffers he left to his son lent force to the new position assumed by England as the balancing power, courted by both the great continental rivals. Ferdinand’s ambition had o’erleaped itself, and the possession of Flanders by the King of Castile had made England’s friendship more than ever necessary thenceforward, for France was opposed to Spain now, not in Italy alone, but on long conterminous frontiers in the north, south, and east as well.
Henry VIII. at the age of eighteen was well fitting to succeed his father. All contemporary observers agree that his grace and personal beauty as a youth were as remarkable as his quickness of intellect and his true Tudor desire to stand well in the eyes of his people. Fully aware of the power his father’s wealth gave him politically, he was determined to share no part of the onus for the oppression with which the wealth had been collected; and on the day following his father’s death, before himself retiring to mourning reclusion in the Tower of London, the unpopular financial instruments of Henry VII., Empson and Dudley and others, were laid by the heels to sate the vengeance of the people. The Spanish match for the young king was by far more popular in England than any other; and the alacrity of Henry himself and his ministers to carry it into effect without further delay, now that his father with his personal ambitions and enmities was dead, was also indicative of his desire to begin his reign by pleasing his subjects.