Aidan Harvey-Craig praises Queen Catherine of Aragon’s courageous witness to the inviolability of marriage and to the Catholic faith as a timely example for our times of matrimonial breakdown and religious relativism.
Imagine being in a foreign country, abandoned by your spouse, stripped of your identity, your life in clear and present danger. And, at the same time, you hold the fate of English Catholicism in your hands. A decision that you alone can make might dictate whether England remains a Catholic country, or spends the next five hundred years with its spiritual heart ripped out. This is the position in which Catherine of Aragon found herself in the 1530s.
The decision was whether or not to accept Henry VIII’s diktat that their marriage of over twenty years had been unlawful in the eyes of God. Accepting this meant that he would treat her well, sending her quietly off to a nunnery with as many comforts as she required. It would mean that she would be allowed to see her beloved daughter Mary who had been so cruelly kept from her. It would mean that Henry would no longer need to fight the Pope, and England could continue with the Catholic faith that the English people loved so deeply.
Rejecting Henry meant the opposite: never knowing if she would ever see her daughter again, or be moved again to another part of the country, or lose another of her dwindling number of beloved and loyal friends. It would mean never knowing if the rumours of her murder were well-founded and that this day might be her last. But most importantly to Catherine, it meant opening the door to heresy in England and putting the souls of her husband and his subjects at risk.
To accept was so much easier. All she had to do was give up on the truth – admit that she had been nothing but Henry’s concubine, and that her daughter was a bastard.
But the truth did matter to Catherine. That is why she had pushed so hard for the matter of the validity of the marriage to be decided by the Pope himself. Somewhat too late, she was vindicated by Rome and Henry’s protestation that the marriage was invalid was utterly rejected by the Church.
What Henry had failed to take into account all along was that Catherine was no ordinary woman. She was, after all, the daughter of Isabel of Castille, herself a formidable monarch. Isabel took the crown of Castille on the death of her half-brother Enrique the Impotent. As the name suggests, he had been a weak monarch, leaving a country divided by factions and uncertainty.
Isabel presided over Enrique’s funeral at San Martin’s Church in Segovia. But the moment the funeral was finished, she stepped outside, dropped her black mourning cloak and revealed her brightly coloured and richly decorated garments beneath. The statement was clear – she was the queen. Having been formally declared as such, she then processed through the town preceded by her maestresala who was carrying a bare sword by the tip, with the handle up. This was a Spanish custom, indicating to those present that the person coming towards them was someone who had the power to cut down the guilty with royal authority.
So audacious was this confident, dramatic statement of intent that even Isabel’s husband Ferdinand, away at the time dealing with his affairs in Aragon, was shocked. He is reported as saying, ‘I have never heard of a queen who usurped this masculine attribute.’ Queen Isabel was not someone to be underestimated and the daughter who resembled her most was her youngest: Catherine.
Catherine was, indeed, her mother’s daughter. As Queen Regent, while Henry was fighting in France, Catherine oversaw the defeat of the Scottish at the Battle of Flodden Field. Indeed, recently uncovered documents show that she was deeply involved in directing events leading up to this famous victory. For example, it was Catherine who ordered one thousand five-hundred sets of almain rivets – a light armour which covered the upper body and thighs – to be loaded into barrels and sent north for the army she was mustering as a second line of defence should the English army suffer defeat at Flodden.
Catherine seems to have gathered this reserve force in Buckingham, and it was here that she received news of the great English victory at Flodden Field. Catherine was staying in Castle House, just a few minutes’ walk from where I write this. She arrived on 14 September 1513 as an honoured guest of the Fowler family. It may even have been to this house that the Earl of Surrey sent part of the defeated Scottish king’s coat of armour as a trophy and evidence of the victory.
However, Catherine was no war monger. Later on, when Henry was pressing her for a divorce, he was keenly aware that her nephew was the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. He was also Archduke of Austria, Lord of the Netherlands, Duke of Burgundy and King of Spain. With such vast power, Henry did not want to provoke retaliation for his mistreatment of his Spanish wife, who was also Charles’ Aunt as his mother was one of Catherine’s elder sisters. With such a connection Catherine could have pushed for Charles to use force and at least threaten war in the face of her humiliation by Henry. Instead, she consistently moved in the other direction, often refuting the calls for war from her devoted Spanish friends and advisors. She displayed an astonishingly noble loyalty to her errant husband and her adopted country, borne of her deep Catholic faith.
It was not just in outward displays of strength that Catherine showed herself to be like her mother. Isabel taught herself Latin as an adult and ensured that all of her daughters learned the language to the extent that they could converse in it. So well educated was Catherine that Erasmus later stated, ‘The Queen is well instructed – not merely in comparison with her own sex, and is no less respected for her piety than her erudition.’ This is clearly why Henry VII, her future father-in-law, wishing to raise Catherine’s spirits when she was feeling homesick on her first arrival in England, invited her to the new library he had built at Richmond.
However, of all the traits that Catherine inherited from her mother, the deepest one was surely her devotion to the Catholic faith. Isabel is known as the ‘Catholic queen’ and there has long been a call for her canonisation. She was officially given the title ‘Servant of God’ in March 1974 due not least to her constant devotion to the poor and her evangelisation of America. Isabel was a strong and compassionate queen, wife and mother because she allowed herself to be guided by her faith.
So it is little surprise that Catherine should display the same devotion. Her journey to England was delayed significantly by her insistence on visiting Santiago de Compostela en route. And she was almost certainly the last queen to undergo a pilgrimage to the shrine of our Lady of Walsingham in thanks for the victory of Flodden Field. But perhaps most significantly, it was her devotion to her faith that meant she would rather die a martyr than betray the sacrament of marriage.
There lay her conundrum: she would always remain rock solid in her faith, but in doing so she knew that she might play a part in opening the door to heresy in England. As early as 1530 she was pleading with the Pope to make a swift judgement clearly stating that her marriage to Henry was valid. Failure to do so risked creating, ‘a new hell that will be worse to mend than the one they have created so far.’
Catherine stood firm. All the weight of the English establishment – its monarch, its nobles, almost all of its bishops, its legal system, its parliament – could not force this one woman to give up her faith and to give up the truth. Shortly before she died, she wrote to Henry referring to him as, ‘My most dear Lord, King, and husband.’ She forgives him and asks that he look after their daughter, her three remaining ladies in waiting and her servants. Catherine of Aragon, Queen of England, died on 7th January 1536. She had been married to Henry for over 26 years. Just nineteen weeks later, Anne Boleyn was beheaded.
Article first published in Dowry No63, Spring 2024
Cover Image: Portrait by Juan de Flandes thought to be of 11-year-old Catherine. c. 1496, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid. (Wikimedia Commons)