Catherine of Aragon is not a name that slips easily off the lips of most English schoolboys, unless they’ve been educated as Catholics, still a minority breed. Few early students of English history have failed to memorise where she was in the Tudor pecking order: ‘divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, and survived. ’ Oh yes, Catherine was the one who was divorced first.
Of Henry V111’s eight wives, it is Catherine who has endured in the collective memory of the English people, arguably for the wrong reasons. Catherine was mythified as a grey, pious figure that not only made life impossible for a popular, courageous, and dashing King, but also conspired against him. She became a target of xenophobic typecasting that grew with the Reformation and still permeates schoolboy texts to this day. Catherine was portrayed as a intruding foreigner, worse still a untrustworthy Spaniard, posing a dark threat to English values-whatever they are-, as much part of the Black Legend, as the Inquisition and the Armada.
Today Catherine of Aragon would be barely remembered in London were it not for a plaque near Southwark Bridge stating that it was there that she slept a night on first arriving in the capital. One can only imagine that it was so, for the house that stands there today was built more than a century after she died, and was occupied by Christopher Wren. Only in Peterborough Cathedral where Catherine is surely buried, is she commemorated each year on the 29th January, the day of her death, in a poorly publicised ecumenical service that nonetheless draws devotees from around the world.
Catherine of Aragon deserves better than that. She was the daughter of the great Spanish royals, Ferdinand and Isabella, and lived most of her life in England, serving first as Princess of Wales to the young Prince Arthur and, following his death, as Queen and first wife of Henry V111, becoming a key protagonist during a particular tumultuous period of European history.
Briefly as Queen Regent , when Henry was away in France, she saw off an invasion from the Scot. Then for much of her reign, she helped preside over a delicate balance of power elsewhere in Europe , maintaining links with her powerful cousin the Holy Roman Emperor Charles Vth, and , to her dying day, resisting calling in the powerful Spanish imperial army to her rescue. She proved a loyal wife, dutiful ruler, and a compassionate Queen.
When she was defending herself against her husband’s unilateral divorce proceedings, she knelt at his feet and asked his permission to appeal to the Pope. She ran extensive programmes for the poor and befriended and learnt from some of the great Renaissance thinkers – Erasmus, Thomas More, and Juan Luis Vives (although Tremlett suggests that More stuck up more for his Faith than for Catherine when confronted by Henry’s wrath). In fact Catherine was a hugely educated and self-assured woman before she set foot on English shores. Her tragic flaw was her failure to produce a male heir for her husband Henry. To this day the jury is out on whether her refusal to grant him a divorce was a supreme moral act by a courageous woman, or simply a stubborn blindness to where her royal duties really lay. Thomas Cromwell quipped that had it not been for sex Catherine would have defied all history’s heroes. Shakespeare was kinder, declaring her the most noble of all earthly Queens.
Some of this and much more is contained in Giles Tremlett’s entertaining biography. It is a real page turner, written in a hugely accessible style, filled with character, and clearly the result of some diligent research, not least among early Spanish hand-written Spanish manuscripts.
Nonetheless this does not aspire to be an academic work, nor does it bring us major new revelations. But it deserves to succeed in drawing a broader audience towards a subject that has been misunderstood in the past. Tremlett’s is popular history verging on the novelistic, written with a sensitivity for matters Catholic (although Tremlett is not religious). Antonia Fraser meets Bernard Cornwell. Far from frivolous, this biography has colour, pace, incident, and a fascinating dramatis personae, led by Catherine and Henry themselves and their coterie of servants and hangers-on, along with astute if partisan observers in the guise of Charles V’s intelligent ambassador and Bishop John Fisher who were among those who stuck up for the Queen.It tells a story that seems, in parts, to be disarmingly relevant to more recent times we have lived through.
Tremlett’s opening chapter is clearly written with an eye for the mass market. It includes a graphic account of what Catherine and Arthur may or may not have got up on their on their wedding night before unraveling the dynastic chaos that is provoked by a British Royal -Arthur’s younger brother Henry-caught between wife and mistress. Sex is not just something dreamed up by TV producers to spice up the recent series on the Tudors. It is central to the central human drama that provoked Henry’s historic schism with Rome and has haunted the British royal family to this day.
And yet Tremlett is no tabloid hack. He is a widely respected Madrid correspondent of the Guardian whose last book, The Ghosts of Spain, reported and analysed the legacy of dictatorship and complexities of modern Spain in a series of brilliant essays. He now , paradoxically, writes about a Spanish Queen that was much admired by Franco
Tremlett’s biography vividly brings alive scenes and characters of a more remote period of history, brilliantly contrasting the magical palace of the Alhambra where Catherine spent her early years, with the increasingly oppressive state that encircled her in her final days in England , threatening to eradicate the pervading Catholic character of the nation at the time.
Amidst the courtroom intrigue, there are spinners and plotters aplenty, but the diplomatic reports of Catherine’s increasing popularity among ordinary English men and women seen convincing enough. Indeed Tremlett’s portrait of Catherine is generally a sympathetic one, although well short of hagiographic. The People’s Queen is fair and just but suffers from false pregnancies and other symptoms of neurosis. Tremlett suggest that Catherone may have lied on occasions, and suffered a minor crisis of conscience on her death bed.
On balance she is portrayed as a far more selfless person than her husband. Beneath the veneer of a King anxious to ensure an orderly succession lies an egoistic bounder who treats his wives and mistresses equally badly, and is similarly cruel to his daughter Mary. No wonder Mary Tudor became so bloody.
