Catherine of Aragon

"Katherine of Aragon" redirects here.
Katherine is the spelling accepted by scholars, used by the queen herself. Catherine is the popular, but modernized spelling.

Catherine of Aragon
Queen consort of England
Spouse	Henry VIII
Issue	Mary I 2 sons named Henry 3 other children
House	Trastámara
Father	Ferdinand II of Aragon
Mother	Isabella I of Castille

Katherine of Aragon (16 December 1485 – 7 January 1536), Castilian Infanta Catalina de Aragón y Castilla, was the Queen of England as the first wife of Henry VIII of England. Henry's attempt to have their twenty-four-year marriage annulled set in motion a chain of events that led to England's break with the Roman Catholic Church. Henry was dissatisfied with the marriage because all their sons had died in childhood, leaving only one of their six children, Princess Mary (later Queen Mary I) as heiress presumptive, at a time when there was no established precedent for a woman on the throne. When the Pope refused to allow the marriage to be annulled, Henry defied him and married Anne Boleyn in the hope of fathering a male heir to continue the Tudor dynasty.

Early life

Katherine was the youngest child of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. Her older siblings were Isabella, Princess of Asturias Queen of Portugal; John, Prince of Asturias; Joanna of Castile; and Maria of Castile and Aragon, Queen of Portugal. She was an aunt, among others, of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, John III of Portugal and their wives, Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor and Henry I of Portugal. She was a granddaughter of both John II of Castile and John II of Aragon. She was descended from the English royal house through her great-grandmother Katherine of Lancaster and her great-great-grandmother Philippa of Lancaster, both daughters of John of Gaunt and granddaughters of Edward III of England. She was thus a third cousin of her father-in-law, Henry VII, and a fourth cousin of her mother-in-law Elizabeth of York.

She was born at Laredo Palace in Alcalá de Henares (30 km from Madrid). At an early age, she was identified as a suitable wife for Arthur, Prince of Wales, first son of Henry VII of England and heir to the throne. They were married by proxy, and corresponded in Latin until Arthur turned fifteen and it was decided that the time had arrived for them to be married in person. She arrived in England in the autumn, with a retinue including George de Athequa, and the couple met at last on November 4, 1501, at Dogmersfield in Hampshire. Little is known about their first impressions of each other, but Arthur did write to his parents-in-law that he would be 'a true and loving husband' and he later told his parents that he was immensely happy to behold the face of his lovely bride. Ten days later, on 14 November 1501, they were married at St. Paul's Cathedral.

Katherine as a young widow, by Henry VII's court painter, Michael Sittow, c.1502

Princess of Wales

As Prince of Wales, Arthur was sent to Ludlow Castle on the borders of Wales, to preside over the Council of Wales and the Marches, and his bride accompanied him. A few months later, they both became ill, possibly with the sweating sickness which was sweeping the area. He died of it on April 2, 1502, and she nearly died; she recovered to find herself a widow.

At this point Henry VII was faced with the dilemma of how to avoid returning her dowry to her father. To avoid complications, it was agreed that she would marry the king's second son, Prince Henry, who was more than five years her junior. The marriage was delayed until the prince was old enough, and the king procrastinated so much that it looked doubtful whether the marriage would ever take place. She lived, almost as prisoner, at Durham House in London. Some of her letters to her father, complaining of her treatment, have survived.

Marriage to Arthur's brother depended on the Pope granting a dispensation because of the close relationship. Katherine testified that her marriage to Arthur was never consummated. The matter was considered of minor importance at the time, as the Pope had the power to overrule any objections to the marriage, whether or not they were forbidden by religious law.

Queen Consort of England

The wedding took place on 11 June 1509, seven weeks after the death of Henry VII, and was followed by a lavish double coronation on 24 June. Both as Princess of Wales and as Queen Consort, she was extremely popular with the English people. She governed the nation as Regent when Henry invaded France in 1513.

Six wives of Henry VIII
and years of marriage

Catherine of Aragon
m. 1509–1533

Anne Boleyn
m. 1533–1536

Jane Seymour
m. 1536–1537

Anne of Cleves
m. 1540

Catherine Howard
m. 1540–1542

Catherine Parr
m. 1543–1547

The marriage seems to have been a happy one until Henry became seriously worried about producing a male heir to his throne as the years went past. Their first child, a daughter, arrived stillborn on 31 January 1510. Prince Henry, Duke of Cornwall was born on 1 January 1511, but died 52 days later. In November 1513, she gave birth to another son named Henry, but he only lived a few hours. Her next pregnancy produced a stillborn daughter, in December 1514. On February 18, 1516 at the Palace of Placentia in Greenwich, London, she gave birth to a daughter named Mary (later Mary I of England) - the only child to survive infancy. Her final pregnancy ended with another stillborn daughter, on 10 November 1518.

Henry considered a male heir essential. The Tudor dynasty was new, and its legitimacy might still be tested. The last time a female had inherited the English throne (Henry I of England's daughter, the Empress Matilda), a long civil war (1135–1154) had been fought. The disasters of civil war were still fresh in living memory from the Wars of the Roses (1455–1485).

In 1520 her nephew Emperor Charles V paid a state visit to England, and she urged Henry to enter an alliance with Charles rather than with France. Immediately after his departure, May 31, 1520, she accompanied the king to France on the celebrated visit to Francis I, the so-called Field of the Cloth of Gold. Within two years, war was declared against France and the Emperor was once again made welcome in England, where plans were afoot to betroth him to Princess Mary.

Henry's annulment

In 1525, Henry VIII became enamoured with Anne Boleyn, a maid-of-honour to the Queen, and began his pursuit of her. By this time Katherine was not in a physical condition to undergo further pregnancies. Henry began to believe that his marriage was cursed and sought confirmation from the Bible, which says that if a man marries his brother's wife, the couple will be childless. If she had lied when she said her marriage to Arthur had not been consummated, it meant that their marriage was wrong in the eyes of God. It is possible that the idea of annulment had suggested itself to the King much earlier than this, and it is highly probable that it was motivated by his desire for a male heir. Before Henry's father Henry VII ascended the throne, England had been beset by civil warfare over rival claims to the English crown and Henry wanted to avoid a similar uncertainty over the succession.

It soon became the one absorbing object of the King's desires to secure an annulment. He set his hopes upon a direct appeal to the Holy See, acting independently of Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, to whom he at first communicated nothing of his plans. William Knight, the king's secretary, was sent to Pope Clement VII to sue for the annulment of the marriage, on the ground that the dispensing bull of Pope Julius II was obtained by false pretences.

As the pope was at that time the prisoner of Katherine's nephew, Emperor Charles V, Knight had some difficulty in obtaining access to him. In the end the king's envoy had to return without accomplishing much. Henry had now no choice but to put his great matter into the hands of Thomas Wolsey, and Wolsey did all he could to secure a decision in the King's favour. How far the pope was influenced by Charles V in his resistence, it is difficult to say, but it is clear Henry saw that the Pope was unlikely to give him an annulment from the Emperor's aunt. The pope forbade Henry to proceed to a new marriage before a decision was given in Rome. Wolsey had failed and he was dismissed from public office in 1529. He then began a secret plot to have Boleyn forced into exile and he began communication with Katherine and the Pope, to that end. When this was discovered, Henry ordered Wolsey's arrest and had it not been for his death from a terminal illness in 1530, he might have been executed for treason. A year later, Katherine was banished from court and her old rooms were given to Boleyn. When Archbishop of Canterbury William Warham died, the Boleyn family's chaplain, Thomas Cranmer, was appointed to the vacant position. In November 1531, Katherine wrote to her nephew: "My tribulations are so great, my life so disturbed by the plans daily invented to further the king's wicked intention, the surprises which the king gives me, with certain persons of his council, are so mortal, and my treatment is what God knows, that it is enough to shorten ten lives, much more mine".

Later years

Upon returning to Dover in England, Henry and Boleyn went through a secret wedding service. The King's second wife soon became pregnant and, as was the custom with royalty, there was a second wedding service, which took place in London on 25 January 1533. Events now began to move at a quick pace. On 23 May 1533, Cranmer, sitting in judgment at a special court convened at Dunstable Priory to rule on the validity of the king's marriage to Katherine, declared that marriage null and void. Five days later, on 28 May 1533, Cranmer declared the marriage of Henry and Anne to be good and valid. Until the end of her life she would refer to herself as Henry's only lawfully-wedded wife and England's only rightful Queen Consort; her faithful servants continued to address her by that title. Henry refused her the right to any title but "Dowager Princess of Wales" (in recognition of her position as his brother's widow).

In 1535 she was transferred to the decaying and remote Kimbolton Castle. Confining herself to one room, leaving it only to attend Mass, she prepared to meet her end. While she was permitted to receive occasional visitors, she was forbidden to see her daughter Mary. She was also forbidden to communicate with her, but discreet sympathizers ferried secret letters between mother and daughter. Henry offered them both better quarters and the company of one another if they would acknowledge Anne Boleyn as his new Queen. Neither did.

In late December 1535, sensing death was near, she made out her will, wrote to her nephew the Emperor Charles V asking him to protect her daughter, and penned one final letter to Henry, "my most dear lord and husband":

My most dear lord, King and husband,

The hour of my death now drawing on, the tender love I owe you forceth me, my case being such, to commend myself to you, and to put you in remembrance with a few words of the health and safeguard of your soul which you ought to prefer before all worldly matters, and before the care and pampering of your body, for the which you have cast me into many calamities and yourself into many troubles. For my part, I pardon you everything, and I wish to devoutly pray God that He will pardon you also. For the rest, I commend unto you our daughter Mary, beseeching you to be a good father unto her, as I have heretofore desired. I entreat you also, on behalf of my maids, to give them marriage portions, which is not much, they being but three. For all my other servants I solicit the wages due them, and a year more, lest they be unprovided for. Lastly, I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things.

Katharine the Queen.

She died at Kimbolton Castle, on 7 January 1536. The following day, news of her death reached the King and he reportedly decked himself in bright yellow clothing. Henry called for public displays of joy regarding her death. Rumours then circulated that she had been poisoned by Anne and/or Henry. The rumours were born after discovery during her embalming that her heart was blackened. Modern medical experts are in agreement that her heart's discolouration was due not to poisoning, but to cancer, something which was not understood at the time. She was buried in Peterborough Cathedral with the ceremony due to a Princess Dowager of Wales, not a Queen. Henry did not attend the funeral, nor did he allow Princess Mary to do so. She would be the only one of his wives to see her fiftieth birthday.

Her tomb in Peterborough Cathedral can be seen and is frequently decorated with flowers. It bears the title 'Katharine Queen of England.' Peterborough is twinned with the Castilian city of Alcalá de Henares, her birthplace.

Historiography

Katherine has been admired by many for her willingness to contest the divorce and fight for her daughter's rights. She became a symbolic representation of the wronged woman.

However, she has also had her detractors. In 1860, the German historian G. A. Bergenroth said he believed that her universal praise needed "to be less." David Starkey is another modern historian who criticized her in his book Six Wives but he insisted he had meant no disrespect, and argued that her tactics in political intrigue were a tribute to her intelligence.

She has remained a popular biographical subject to the present day. The American historian Garrett Mattingly was the author of a popular biography Catherine of Aragon in 1942. In 1967, Mary M. Luke wrote the first book of her Tudor trilogy, Catherine the Queen which portrayed her and the controversial era of English history she lived through from an impartial viewpoint. In recent years, the historian Alison Weir took a more sympathetic line in her biography The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Antonia Fraser also covered her extensively in her own 1992 biography of the same title.

Modern historians are of the general opinion that neither she nor Anne Boleyn were at fault for the roles they played during that turbulent time in English history. Both simply reacted to the circumstances in which they found themselves. The American feminist Karen Lindsey believes that the true culprit for her misery in her final years was her husband, Henry.

Grave of Katherine of Aragon in Peterborough Cathedral

Spelling of her name

"Catherine" is the most common modern English spelling of her name. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography states that her name should be spelled "Katherine" in a professional publication. In most official documents, her name is spelled with a K, and she herself signed her name "Katharine" and "Katherina". Loveknots built into his various palaces by her husband, Henry VIII, display the initials "H & K". Her tomb in Peterborough Cathedral is marked "Katharine Queen of England". The Spanish spelling is "Catalina", and in Catalan, which was the language spoken in Aragon, the spelling is "Caterina".

Legacy in fiction, film and television

Although Katherine is often portrayed in film and on stage as having possessed the stereotypical Spanish traits of dark hair and an olive complexion, she was in fact a grey or blue eyed, fair-skinned woman with reddish-blonde hair, not too unusual for northern Spaniards such as those from her father's land of Aragon. Furthermore, she herself was part English, through her two English great-grandmothers, Katherine of Lancaster and Philippa of Lancaster, who were both daughters of Prince John, Duke of Lancaster.

• She was first portrayed on the silver screen in 1911 by Violet Vanburgh in a short film production of William Shakespeare's play Henry VIII.
• Nine years later, the German actress Hedwig Pauly-Winterstein played her in the film Anna Boleyn.
• Actress Rosalie Crutchley played her in The Sword and the Rose an account of Mary Tudor's romance with the Duke of Suffolk in 1515. Crutchley later played Henry's sixth queen Catherine Parr in The Six Wives of Henry VIII.
• It was not until 1969, in Hal B. Wallis's acclaimed movie Anne of the Thousand Days that she appeared again. This time she was played by the Greek actress Irene Papas.
• In a 90-minute television drama produced by the BBC, British actress Annette Crosbie played the most historically-accurate version of Katherine in a piece simply entitled Catherine of Aragon as part one in the channel's series The Six Wives of Henry VIII. The drama began on the night she arrived in England and followed through until her early marriage to Henry VIII. It re-commenced almost a decade later, with Henry's manoeuvres to get an annulment in order to marry Anne Boleyn. The play, which co-starred the Australian actor Keith Michell as Henry VIII, Dame Dorothy Tutin as Anne Boleyn and Patrick Troughton as the Duke of Norfolk, then chronicled her life until her death in January 1536.
• In 1979 Claire Bloom played her in another adaptation of Shakespeare's play.
• In the 1973 film Henry VIII and his Six Wives, Frances Cuka played her, and Keith Michell reprised his role as Henry VIII. A scene was incorporated between Frances Cuka and Charlotte Rampling (playing Anne Boleyn) to show their quiet, glacial enmity.
• It was not until 2001 that she again appeared on the screen. This time it was in Dr. David Starkey's documentary series on Henry's queens. She was portrayed by Annabelle Dowler, with Julia Marsen as Anne Boleyn.
• In 2003 she appeared twice on British television. In January, Spanish actress Yolanda Vasquez made a brief appearance as the character in The Other Boleyn Girl, opposite Jared Harris as Henry VIII and Natascha McElhone as Mary Boleyn. In October, the ITV 2-part television drama, Henry VIII starred Ray Winstone in the title role and Assumpta Serna as the Queen. Part 1 chronicled the king's life from the birth of his bastard son, Henry Fitzroy until the execution of Anne Boleyn (played by Helena Bonham Carter) in 1536. David Suchet co-starred as Cardinal Wolsey.

File:Tudors-KatherineofAragon.jpg

Maria Doyle Kennedy as Katherine in The Tudors

• Maria Doyle Kennedy portrays the role in the 2007 Showtime television series The Tudors opposite Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Henry and Natalie Dormer as Anne Boleyn.
• The 2007 film adaptation of the novel The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory stars Ana Torrent as Katherine, with Eric Bana as Henry, Scarlett Johansson as Mary Boleyn and Natalie Portman as Anne Boleyn.
• There have also been several fictionalized versions of her story, including Catharine of Aragon, by historical romance author Jean Plaidy, and The Constant Princess, by Philippa Gregory.
• Also, for younger readers, her story is told in Patience, Princess Catherine by Carolyn Meyer.

Ancestry

Ancestors of Katherine of Aragon

16. John I of Castile (1358-1390) (=24)

8. Ferdinand I of Aragon (1380-1416)

17. Eleanor of Aragon (1358-1382) (=25)

4. John II of Aragon (1397-1479)

18. Sancho of Alburquerque (1342-1375)

9. Eleanor of Alburquerque (1374-1435)

19. Infanta Beatriz of Portugal (c. 1347-1374)

2. Ferdinand II of Aragon (1452-1516)

20. Admiral Alonzo Henriques (?-1429)

10. Frederick Henriques, Conde de Melgar (?-1473)

21. Juana González

5. Juana Enríquez (1425-1468)

22. Diego Fernandez de Cordova (?-c. 1435)

11. Mariana de Córdoba

23. Inez de Toledo (?-c. 1453)

1. Katherine of Aragon (1485-1536)

24. John I of Castile (1358-1390) (=16)

12. Henry III of Castile (1379-1406)

25. Eleanor of Aragon (1358-1382) (=17)

6. John II of Castile (1405-1454)

26. John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster (1340-1399)

13. Katherine of Lancaster (1372-1418)

27. Constance of Castile (1354-1394)

3. Isabella of Castile (1451-1504)

28. John I of Portugal (1357-1433)

14. Infante João of Portugal (1400-1442)

29. Philippa of Lancaster (1360-1415)

7. Isabel of Portugal (1428-1496)

30. Afonso, 1st Duke of Braganza (1370-1461)

15. Isabella of Braganza (1402-1445)

31. Beatriz Pereira de Alvim (?-1420)

See also

• List of English consorts

References

• Henry VIII and his Court by Neville Williams (1971).
• The Life and Times of Henry VIII by Robert Lacey (1972).
• Henry VIII by J. J. Scarisbrick (1972) ISBN 978-0520011304.
• Anne Boleyn by N. Lofts (1979) ISBN 0-698-11005-6.
• The Wives of Henry VIII by Lady Antonia Fraser (1992) ISBN 067973001X.
• English Reformations by Christopher Haigh (1993).
• Europe and England in the Sixteenth Century by T. A. Morris (1998).
• New Worlds, Lost Worlds by Susan Brigden (2000).
• Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII by David Starkey (2003) ISBN 0060005505.

Further reading

• The Six Wives of Henry VIII by Alison Weir (1991) ISBN 0802136834.
• Divorced Beheaded Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII by Karen Lindsey (1995) ISBN 0201408236.
• British Kings & Queens by Mike Ashley (2002) ISBN 0-7867-1104-3.
• Henry VIII: The King and His Court by Alison Weir (2002) ISBN 034543708X.

External links

• tudorhistory.org - A good overview of her life, accompanied by an excellent portrait gallery
• englishhistory.net - An in-depth look at her life and times
• A geo-biography of the Six Wives of Henry the VIII on Google Earth
• Guardian unlimited, letter from her to Pope Clement VII