That Katharine was striving desperately at this time to retain her influence over her husband, and her popularity in England, is certain from the letter of Ferdinand’s ambassador (6th December 1514). He complains that on the recommendation of Friar Diego Katharine had thrown over her father’s interests in order to keep the love of Henry and his people. The Castilian interest and the Manuels have captured her, wrote the ambassador, and if Ferdinand did not promptly “put a bridle on this colt” (i.e. Henry) and bring Katharine to her bearings as her father’s daughter, England would be for ever lost to Aragon.[26] There is no doubt that at this time Katharine felt that her only chance of keeping her footing was to please Henry, and “forget Spain,” as Friar Diego advised her to do.
When the King of France died on New Year’s Day, 1515, and his young widow—Katharine’s friend, Mary Tudor—clandestinely married her lover, Charles Brandon, Katharine’s efforts to reconcile her husband to the peccant pair are evidence, if no other existed, that Henry’s anger was more assumed than real, and that his vanity was pleased by the submissive prayers for his forgiveness. As no doubt the Queen, and Wolsey, who had joined his efforts with hers, foresaw, not only were Mary and Brandon pardoned, but taken into high favour. At the public marriage of Mary and Brandon at Greenwich at Easter 1515 more tournaments, masques and balls, enabled the King to show off his gallantry and agility in competition with his new brother-in-law; and on the subsequent May Day at Shooter’s Hill, Katharine and Mary, who were inseparable, took part in elaborate and costly al fresco entertainments in which Robin Hood, several pagan deities, and the various attributes of spring, were paraded for their delectation. It all sounds very gay, though somewhat silly, as we read the endless catalogues of bedizenment, of tilts and races, feasting, dancing, and music that delighted Henry and his friends; but before Katharine there ever hovered the spectre of her childlessness, and Henry, after the ceremonial gaiety and overdone gallantry to his wife, would too frequently put spurs to his courser and gallop off to New Hall in Essex, where Lady Tailebois lived.
A gleam of hope and happiness came to her late in 1515 when she was again expecting to become a mother. By liberal gifts—“the greatest presents ever brought to England,” said Henry himself—and by flattery unlimited, Ferdinand, almost on his death-bed, managed to “bridle” his son-in-law, to borrow a large sum of money from him and draw him anew into a coalition against France. But the hope was soon dashed; King Ferdinand died almost simultaneously with the birth of a girl-child to his daughter Katharine. It is true the babe was like to live, but a son, not a daughter, was what Henry wanted. Yet he put the best face on the matter publicly. The Venetian ambassador purposely delayed his congratulations, because the child was of the wrong sex; and when finally he coldly offered them, he pointedly told the King that they would have been much more hearty if the child had been a son. “We are both young,” replied Henry. “If it is a daughter this time, by the grace of God sons will follow.” The desire of the King for a male heir was perfectly natural. No Queen had reigned independently over England; and for the perpetuation of a new dynasty like the Tudors the succession in the male line was of the highest importance. In addition to this, Henry was above all things proud of his manliness, and he looked upon the absence of a son as in some sort reflecting a humiliation upon him.
Katharine’s health had never been robust; and at the age of thirty-three, after four confinements, she had lost her bloom. Disappointment and suffering, added to her constitutional weakness, was telling upon her, and her influence grew daily smaller. The gorgeous shows and frivolous amusements in which her husband so much delighted palled upon her, and she now took little pains to feign enjoyment in them, giving up much of her time to religious exercises, fasting rigidly twice a week and saints’ days throughout the year, in addition to the Lenten observances, and wearing beneath her silks and satins a rough Franciscan nun’s gown of serge. As in the case of so many of her kindred, mystical devotion was weaving its grey web about her, and saintliness of the peculiar Spanish type was covering her as with a garment. Henry, on the contrary, was a full-blooded young man of twenty-eight, with a physique like that of a butcher, held by no earthly control or check upon his appetites, overflowing with vitality and the joy of life; and it is not to be wondered at that he found his disillusioned and consciously saintly wife a somewhat uncomfortable companion.
The death of Louis XII., Maximilian, and Ferdinand, and the peaceful accession of young Charles to the throne of Spain and the prospective imperial crown, entirely altered the political aspect of Europe. Francis I. needed peace in the first years of his reign; and to Charles it was also desirable, in order that his rule over turbulent Spain could be firmly established and his imperial succession secured. All the English ministers and councillors were heavily bribed by France, Wolsey himself was strongly in favour of the French connection, and everybody entered into a conspiracy to flatter Henry. The natural result was a league first of England and France, and subsequently a general peace to which all the principal Christian potentates subscribed, and men thought that the millennium had come. Katharine’s international importance had disappeared with the death of her father and the accession of Charles to the throne of Aragon as well as to that of Castile. Wolsey was now Henry’s sole adviser in matters of state and managed his master dexterously, whilst endeavouring not entirely to offend the Queen. Glimpses of his harmonious relations with Katharine at this time (1516-1520) are numerous. At the splendid christening of the Princess Mary, Wolsey was one of the sponsors, and he was “gossip” with Katharine at the baptism of Mary Tudor Duchess of Suffolk’s son.
Nor can the Queen’s famous action after the evil May Day (1517) have been opposed or discountenanced by the Cardinal. The universal peace had brought to London hosts of foreigners, especially Frenchmen, and the alien question was acute. Wolsey, whose sudden rise and insolence had deeply angered the nobles, had, as principal promoter of the unpopular peace with France, to bear a full share of the detestation in which his friends the aliens were held. Late in April there were rumours that a general attack upon foreigners by the younger citizens would be made, and at Wolsey’s instance the civic authorities ordered that all the Londoners should keep indoors. Some lads in Chepe disregarded the command, and the Alderman of the Ward attempted to arrest one of them. Then rose the cry of “’Prentices and Clubs! Death to the Cardinal!” and forth there poured from lane and alley riotous youngsters by the hundred, to wreak vengeance on the insolent foreigners who took the bread out of worthy Englishmen’s mouths. Sack and pillage reigned for a few hours, but the guard quelled the boys with blood, the King rode hastily from Richmond, the Lieutenant of the Tower dropped a few casual cannon-balls into the city, and before sunset all was quiet. The gibbets rose at the street corners and a bloody vengeance fell upon the rioters. Dozens were hanged, drawn, and quartered with atrocious cruelty; and under the ruthless Duke of Norfolk four hundred more were condemned to death for treason to the King, who, it was bitterly said in London, loved outlanders better than his own folk. It is unlikely that Henry really meant to plunge all his capital in mourning by hanging the flower of its youth, but he loved, for vanity’s sake, that his clemency should be publicly sought, and to act the part of a deity in restoring to life those legally dead. In any case, Katharine’s spontaneous and determined intercession for the ’prentice lads would take no denial, and she pleaded with effect. Her intercession, nevertheless, could hardly have been so successful as it was if Wolsey had been opposed to it; and the subsequent comedy in the great Hall at Westminster on the 22nd May was doubtless planned to afford Henry an opportunity of appearing in his favourite character. Seated upon a canopied throne high upon a daïs of brocade, surrounded by his prelates and nobles and with Wolsey by his side, Henry frowned in crimson velvet whilst the “poore younglings and olde false knaves” trooped in, a sorry procession, stripped to their shirts, with halters around their necks. Wolsey in stern words rebuked their crime, and scolded the Lord Mayor and Aldermen for their laxity; ending by saying they all deserved to hang. “Mercy! gracious lord, mercy!” cried the terrified boys and their distracted mothers behind; and the Cardinal and the peers knelt before the throne to beg the life of the offenders, which the King granted, and with a great shout of joy halters were stripped from many a callow neck, and cast into the rafters of the Hall for very joy. But all men knew, and the mothers too, that Wolsey’s intercession was only make-believe, and that what they saw was but the ceremonial act of grace. The Queen they thanked in their hearts and not the haughty Cardinal, for the King had pardoned the ’prentices privately days before, when Katharine and her two sisters-in-law, the widowed Queens of France and Scotland, had knelt before the King in unfeigned tears, and had clamoured for the lives of the Londoners. To the day of the Queen’s unhappy death this debt was never forgotten by the citizens, who loved her faithfully to the end far better than any of her successors.
The sweating sickness in the autumn of 1517 sent Henry and his wife as far away from contagion as possible, for sickness always frightened the big bully into a panic. During his absence from London, Wolsey was busy negotiating a still closer alliance with France, by the marriage of the baby Princess Mary to the newly born Dauphin. It can hardly have been the match that Katharine would have chosen for her cherished only child, but she was a cypher by the side of Wolsey now, and made no open move against it at the time. Early in the spring of 1518 the plague broke out again, and Henry in dire fear started upon a progress in the midlands. Richard Pace, who accompanied him, wrote to Wolsey on the 12th April telling him as a secret that the Queen was again pregnant. “I pray God heartily,” he continued, “that it may be a prince to the surety and universal comfort of the realm;” and he begs the Cardinal to write a kind letter to the Queen. In June the glad tidings were further confirmed, as likely to result in “an event most earnestly desired by the whole kingdom.” Still dodging the contagion, the King almost fled from one place to another, and when at Woodstock in July Henry himself wrote a letter to Wolsey which tells in every line how anxious he was that the coming event should be the fulfilment of his ardent hope. Katharine had awaited him at Woodstock, and he had been rejoiced at the confident hope she gave him. He tells Wolsey the news formally, and says that he will remove the Queen as little and as quietly as may be to avoid risk. Soon all the diplomatists were speculating at the great things that would happen when the looked-for prince was born; and it was probably the confident hope that this time Henry would not be disappointed, that made possible the success of Wolsey’s policy and the marriage of the Princess Mary with the infant Dauphin. Of Wolsey’s magnificent feasts that accompanied the ratification of peace and the betrothal on the 5th October, feasts more splendid, says the Venetian ambassador, than ever were given by Caligula or Cleopatra, no account can be given here. It was Wolsey’s great triumph, and he surpassed all the records of luxury in England in its celebration. The sweet little bride dressed in cloth of gold stood before the thrones upon which her father and mother sat in the great Hall of Greenwich, and then, carried in the arms of a prelate, was held up whilst the Cardinal slipped the diamond wedding-ring upon her finger and blessed her nuptials with the baby bridegroom. That the heir of France should marry the heiress of England was a danger to the balance of Europe, and especially a blow to Spain. It was, moreover, not a match which England could regard with equanimity; for a French King Consort would have been repugnant to the whole nation, and Henry could never have meant to conclude the marriage finally, unless the expected heir was born. But alas! for human hopes. On the night of 10th November 1518, Katharine was delivered of a daughter, “to the vexation of as many as knew it,” and King and nation mourned together, now that, after all, a Frenchman might reign over England.
To Katharine this last disappointment was bitter indeed. Her husband, wounded and irritated, first in his pride, and now in his national interests, avoided her; her own country and kin had lost the English tie that meant so much to them, and she herself, in poor health and waning attractions, could only mourn her misfortunes, and cling more closely than ever to her one darling child, Mary, for the new undesired infant girl had died as soon as it was born. The ceaseless round of masking, mummery, and dancing, which so much captivated Henry, went on without abatement, and Katharine perforce had to take her part in it; but all the King’s tenderness was now shown not to his wife but to his little daughter, whom he carried about in his arms and praised inordinately.[27] So frivolous and familiar indeed had Henry’s behaviour grown that his Council took fright, and, under the thin veil of complaints against the behaviour of his boon companions, Carew, Peachy, Wingfield, and Brian, who were banished from Court, they took Henry himself seriously to task. The four French hostages, held for the payment of the war indemnity, were also feasted and entertained so familiarly by Henry, under Wolsey’s influence, as to cause deep discontent to the lieges, who had always looked upon France as an enemy, and knew that the unpopular Cardinal’s overwhelming display was paid for by French bribes. At one such entertainment Katharine was made to act as hostess at her dower-house of Havering in Essex, where, in the summer of 1519, we are told that, “for their welcomyng she purveyed all thynges in the most liberalist manner; and especially she made to the Kyng suche a sumpteous banket that he thanked her hartely, and the strangers gave it great praise.” Later in the same year Katharine was present at a grand series of entertainments given by the King in the splendid new manor-house which he had built for Lady Tailebois, who had just rejoiced him by giving birth to a son. We have no record of Katharine’s thoughts as she took part here in the tedious foolery so minutely described by Hall. She plucked off the masks, we are told, of eight disguised dancers in long dominos of blue satin and gold, “who danced with the ladies sadly, and communed not with them after the fashion of maskers.” Of course the masqueraders were the Duke of Suffolk (Brandon) and other great nobles, as the poor Queen must well have known; but when she thought that all this mummery was to entertain Frenchmen, and the house in which it passed was devoted to the use of Henry’s mistress, she must have covered her own heart with a more impenetrable mask than those of Suffolk and his companions, if her face was attuned to the gay sights and sounds around her.
KATHARINE OF ARAGON