[3] Hall’s Chronicle.
[4] Leland’s Collectanea.
[5] Hall’s Chronicle.
[6] Spanish Calendar, vol. 1.
[7] The Spanish agent believed that Henry would have preferred that Katharine had not accompanied Arthur to Wales, but for his desire to force her to use her valuables, so that he might obtain their equivalent in money. Both Doña Elvira and Bishop Ayala told Henry that they considered that it would be well that the young couple should be separated and not live together for a time, as Arthur was so young. But Puebla and the Princess’s chaplain, Alexander (Fitzgerald), had apparently said to the King that the bride’s parents did not wish the Princess to be separated from her husband on any account. Doña Elvira’s opinion on the matter assumes importance from her subsequent declaration soon after Arthur’s death that she knew the marriage had not been consummated.
[8] Spanish Calendar, vol. 1, 271.
[9] There is in the Biblioteca Nacional at Madrid (I. 325) a Spanish document, apparently a contemporary translation of the report sent to Henry from Valencia by the three agents he sent thither in 1505 to report upon the appearance of the two widowed Queens of Naples resident there. James Braybrooke, John Stile, and Francis Marsin express an extremely free, but favourable, opinion of the charms of the younger queen, aged twenty-seven. Katharine appears to have given letters of recommendation to the envoys. The Spanish version of the document varies but little from the printed English copy in the Calendar. The date of it is not given, but it must have been written in the late autumn of 1505. Henry was evidently anxious for the match, though he said that he would not marry the lady for all the treasures in the world if she turned out to be ugly. The Queen of Naples, however, would not allow a portrait to be taken of her, and decidedly objected to the match. The various phases of Henry’s own matrimonial intrigues cannot be dealt with in this book, but it appears certain that if he could have allied himself to Spain by marrying the Queen of Naples, he would have broken his son’s betrothal with Katharine, and have married him to one of the young princesses of France, a master-stroke which would have bound him to all the principal political factors in Europe.
[10] Spanish Calendar, vol. 1, p. 309.
[11] She insisted—in accord with Ferdinand and Isabel—that Katharine should live in great seclusion as a widow until the second marriage actually took place, and Katharine appears to have done so at this time, though not very willingly. Some of her friends seem to have incited her to enjoy more freedom, but a tight hand was kept upon her, until events made her her own mistress, when, as will be seen in a subsequent page, she quite lost her head for a time, and committed what at least were the gravest indiscretions. (See Spanish Calendar, vol. 1 and Supplement.)
[12] The protest is dated 24th June 1505, when Henry was fourteen.