Catherine of Aragon in England, 1501-1504

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Chapter 14 A Precarious Household: Catherine of Aragon in England, 1501-1504

Theresa Earenfight

In the late summer of 1501, the Spanish infanta (princess) Catalina (1485-1536) left her home in Spain and travelled by sea to England to marry Arthur Tudor in October. Six months later, she was a widow in a foreign realm where she barely spoke English. Most of her Spanish companions had returned to Spain after the wedding. Worse yet, Arthur’s death in April 1502 rendered her status, and thus her household, indeterminate. The widowed bride was at the center of a prolonged battle of royal families: her parents Isabel of Castile (b. 1451, r. 1474-1504) and Fernando II of Aragon (b. 1452, r. Castile 1475-1504, r. Aragon 1479-1516) against Arthur’s parents Henry VII (b. 1457, r. 1485-1509) and Elizabeth of York (1466-1503). Catalina not only had changed her name to Catherine, she had experienced three dramatic life-changing transitions: in status, from Spanish infanta to the bride of an English prince to a seventeen-year-old widow; in location, from Spain to England; and in wealth, from living in an amply funded big household to making do with a small and impecunious household in lodgings on the Strand rented from the Archbishop of Durham. With these changes, she suffered a loss of autonomy and personal dignity. Despite these fluctuations, she retained substantial latent power as a princess from one of the most influential families in Europe and dynastic power as a potential wife of a king and mother of an heir. Throughout this period in her life, however, there was one constant: The small group of Spanish and English women and men of her household who were closest to her formed a steady emotional foundation for her that rejoiced with her in 1509 at her second wedding to Arthur’s younger brother, Henry VIII, and some stayed with her to her death in 1536, not as Henry’s queen but as his rejected Princess Dowager.1

1 The standard scholarly biography of Catherine of Aragon is by Garrett Mattingly, Catherine of Aragon (Boston, 1941); see also Theresa Earenfight, “Raising Infanta Catalina de Aragón To Be Catherine, Queen of England,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 46:1 (2016): 417-43; idem, “Regarding Catherine of Aragon,” in eds Carole Levin and Christine Stewart-Nuñez Scholars and Poets Talk About Queens (Basingstoke, 2015), pp. 137-57; and Timothy Elston, “Almost the Perfect Woman: Public and Private expectations of Catherine of Aragon, 1501-1536,” PhD dis-

The bureaucracy of the royal household was well established by 1501 and it stipulated that as a royal princess, she was entitled to the care and support of her immediate family until she married. Catherine came to England with ample provisions, a dowry that was to be paid in installments (the payment of which was the bone of contention between Fernando and Henry VII), and hun- dreds of ladies and lords to accompany her to her wedding in London and make her feel at home in new land. Once married, she and her husband, Arthur, would be supported by her husband’s family until Henry VII’s death, at which point she would be granted a queen’s household, with a full staff of officers and an income separate from that of the king. Those well-laid plans would proba- bly have worked out smoothly, but nowhere was the possibility of early widow- hood considered, and certainly not at a time when the widow’s marital fate was a point of debate. When Arthur died, Catherine’s fate in England was unclear and so were her household and her finances. From April 1502, she had little control over her actions except to plead with both her father and father- in-law for financial support. This essay examines the women in Catherine’s household during the indeterminate years from 1501 to 1504. The deaths of her mother-in-law in 1503 and mother in 1504 mark an emotional pivot point as well as a documentary one: the records of her household are either rare or nonexistent from 1504 until 1509. I begin from a premise that for a woman, the royal household was a precarious and sometimes lonely place where her actions and the very substance of her life depended on circumstances outside of her control. Yes, a widow can exercise considerable power and authority as the head of a household, as Linda Mitchell argues for Joan de Valence in Chapter 4. But as a widowed noble- woman, Joan had property that she could manage on her own, which gave her a social and economic autonomy and security that Catherine did not have until her wedding in 1509 to Arthur’s younger brother, Henry VIII. She had no property in England. After Arthur’s death, Catherine was protected by her mother-in-law, Elizabeth of York, who paid some of Catherine’s expenses after the death of Arthur and until her death on 11 February 1503.2 For another

sertation, The University of Nebraska (Lincoln), 2004; For Isabel, see Peggy Liss, Isabel the Queen: Life and Times 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, 2004) and Barbara Weissberger, Isabel Rules: Constructing Queenship, Wielding Power (Minneapolis, 2004). For Henry VII, see Sean Cunningham, Henry VII (London, 2007); and for Elizabeth of York, Arlene Naylor Okerlund, Elizabeth of York (Basingstoke, 2009). For Arthur, see Louise M. Haywood, “The Princess and the Unicorn: Arthur, Prince of Wales, and Catherine of Aragon?” in eds Ian Mac Pherson‬ and Ralph John Penny‬, The Medieval Mind: Hispanic Studies in Honour of Alan Deyermond (London, 1997), pp. 189-204. 2 Okerlund, Elizabeth of York, pp. 113, 194.