Catherine of Aragon

Catherine of Aragon (Spanish: Catalina de Aragon) was born on 16 December 1485 at the Archbishop's Palace of Alcala de Henares in Spain, the youngest surviving child of the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. She grew up at the height of Spain's transformation: the completion of the Reconquista with the fall of Granada in 1492, Columbus's voyages, and the unification of the peninsula. From childhood she received an unusually rigorous education in classical literature, canon and civil law, theology, philosophy, and history. She spoke Castilian Spanish and Latin fluently and read French and Greek. Erasmus later remarked that she "loved good literature, which she had studied with success since childhood."

Betrothed to Arthur, Prince of Wales, in childhood, she landed in England in October 1501 and married him at Old St Paul's Cathedral on 14 November, both aged fifteen. Within five months she was a widow: Arthur died at Ludlow Castle on 2 April 1502, probably of the sweating sickness. The next seven years were among the harshest of her life. Caught between her father-in-law Henry VII's reluctance to return her 200,000-ducat dowry and her own father's refusal to pay the second instalment, she lived as a virtual prisoner at Durham House in London, often short of money. In 1507 she became the first known female ambassador in European diplomatic history, representing the Spanish crown at the English court. In a letter to her father from this period she wrote, "I choose what I believe, and say nothing. For I am not as simple as I may seem."

Her fortunes reversed on Henry VIII's accession. The eighteen-year-old new king insisted on marrying her in a private ceremony on 11 June 1509, and they were jointly crowned at Westminster Abbey on Midsummer's Day. The early years of the marriage were genuinely affectionate. In 1513, when Henry campaigned in France, Catherine was appointed Regent and Captain General. She organised the defence of the northern border against a Scottish invasion, ordered Thomas Lovell to raise troops in the Midlands, rode north in full armour while heavily pregnant, and delivered a speech to her army on courage and patriotism that was reported as far as Valladolid. The English victory at Flodden on 9 September 1513, where King James IV of Scotland was killed, was largely her work; she sent Henry a piece of James's bloodied coat to fly as a banner at the siege of Tournai.

As queen Catherine sponsored the new humanist learning. She patronised the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives, commissioning his pioneering treatise The Education of a Christian Woman (1523), dedicated to her, which argued that women had a right to a serious intellectual education. She befriended Erasmus and Thomas More, supported the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, established educational salons for daughters of the nobility, and organised systematic poor relief that anticipated later social legislation. In May 1517, after the Evil May Day riots in London during which Spanish residents had been attacked, she successfully begged Henry for the lives of the convicted rioters, winning lasting popularity. Her later adversary Thomas Cromwell admitted, "If not for her sex, she could have defied all the heroes of History."

The marriage's central tragedy was reproductive. After multiple miscarriages, stillbirths and infant deaths, only one child survived: Princess Mary, born in 1516, the future Queen Mary I. By 1525 Henry had become infatuated with Anne Boleyn, a lady-in-waiting in Catherine's household, and convinced himself, citing Leviticus 20:21 ("if a man shall take his brother's wife... they shall be childless"), that the marriage had offended God. The ensuing "King's Great Matter" became one of the great causes of early modern Europe. Catherine insisted to her dying day that her marriage to Arthur had never been consummated, removing the canonical impediment Henry invoked. With Pope Clement VII effectively the prisoner of her nephew Emperor Charles V after the 1527 Sack of Rome, the matter remained deadlocked in Rome. On 23 May 1533, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer unilaterally declared the marriage invalid at Dunstable Priory; Henry had already secretly married the pregnant Anne. The Acts of Supremacy followed in 1534, severing England from Rome.

Catherine refused throughout to accept the annulment, signing her letters "Katherine the Queen" and rejecting the title of Dowager Princess of Wales. Banished from court and confined to a single room at Kimbolton Castle, she wore the Franciscan hair shirt, fasted, and was forbidden to see her daughter Mary. In late 1535 she dictated her will and wrote to her nephew Charles V asking him to protect Mary. A letter widely attributed to her, addressed to Henry, ends with the words "mine eyes desire you above all things," though its authenticity is debated. She died at Kimbolton on 7 January 1536, probably of cancer, despite the contemporary rumour of poisoning. The black mass found on her heart at embalming, once read as evidence of poison, is now understood as a metastatic tumour. The local people of Cambridgeshire, who had quietly addressed her as Queen throughout her exile, formed a procession of 500 to accompany her coffin to Peterborough Cathedral. Her tomb still bears the title she insisted on to the end: "Katharine Queen of England." When her daughter Mary became England's first undisputed queen regnant in 1553, Parliament reversed the annulment and restored Catherine's marriage to legal validity.