(Cover image – © Unknown Artist – The National Portrait Gallery)
It goes well without saying that from the moment of her birth, Catherine had the world on her shoulders as a result of her parents’ high expectations of her. She was, after all, born to a highly respected King and Queen belonging to a long line of kings and queens before them. And in the eyes of her parents, she was destined to become a Queen herself—only it would be through a political marriage, not through inheriting the throne from her parents, as women were not seen as suitable rulers of a kingdom unless they married a King.
Let’s just say it was a very sexist time, trust me.
The reasons surrounding the decision to betroth Catherine of Aragon to Prince Arthur Tudor were purely political. It is important to note that of the year of their engagement being arranged, both King Henry Tudor / Henry VII (Arthur’s father) and King Ferdinand II (Catherine’s father) were using their toddler children to gain further power and influence over the world of which they ruled in. For Henry and Ferdinand, they were both using their children as pawns to secure international alliances as well as secure the containment of foreign support against France; their mutual enemy and another growing force in the early-modern world.
And so, on the 27th March of 1489, both the English and the Spanish governments established the ‘Anglo-Spanish treaty of Medina del Campo’ which outlined the first set of plans for the two young future-rulers to marry as well as orchestrated trade agreements (e.g., what could be traded between the two countries or what the trading taxes might be etc.,) and concluded on what basis the countries would both use their forces against the French. This was something that both Henry and Ferdinand would have heavily been involved in, considering how they were to rely on one another for support against France on the basis of their children coming together in holy matrimony.
At this time, both Catherine and Arthur were only around four years of age— royal children were often betrothed at a young age in order to secure the kingdom’s future as well as ensure international alliances remain intact.
Naturally, alike any fresh treaties between countries, the ‘Anglo-Spanish treaty of Medina del Campo’ was eventually shifted out the window, so to speak, and replaced with a new one on the 18th July 1497 which now stated that Catherine would come to England when Prince Arthur was at the still-tender age of fourteen to be married.
Shocking to hear that in the Tudor era, children married at the young age of fourteen?
Well, fortunately now, the age for consenting to marry is at a much suitable sixteen with parental consent in England and only from eighteen in Spain. Sadly, some countries nowadays still allow child marriage to go ahead and even sadder, in the early-modern world, it was seen as normal to be married from as young as fourteen for women and twelve for men (as this was based on what ages each gender reached puberty, which allowed them to conceive and therefore permitted them to be married).
However, as we will discuss later on, neither Catherine or Arthur seemed dismayed by the idea of marrying a complete stranger at just fourteen. In fact, they seemed rather content with their futures!
Huh, maybe this political marriage would prove to be a happy one, just like that of Arthur’s parents; Henry Tudor and Elizabeth of York.
It would seem, by any rate, that the marriage arrangements between Arthur and Catherine were going smoothly and quite suitably for Ferdinand and Henry as the couple were official betrothed in August 1497 by proxy (which was a common practice of where the couple weren’t physically in the same room and a Spanish emissary stood in for Catherine in England and an English one for Arthur in Spain) and officially married in 1499, again by proxy, after both Arthur and Catherine had wrote formal, heart-felt appeals to the Pope in Rome to grant them the necessary dispensation that would permit them to marry before their coming of age; which was the agreed-upon age of fourteen, nearly fifteen.
To think that both of them had written such appeals to the Pope over marrying someone whom they had never met before is quite astonishing. Perhaps the letters they wrote to one another throughout their long engagement, one of which we will study in further depth in this post, spurred their desire to marry even further?
And whilst things were going well for King Henry in England, who had not only secured the future of his line by arranging a suitable marriage for his eldest child and male heir but had rid himself of a potential threat to his claim upon the throne by executing the pretender Perkin Warbeck who pretended to be the son of Edward IV, the father of Henry’s own wife, Elizabeth of York—things could not be said for King Ferdinand in Spain. No, it was quite a stressful time for the Spanish King.
Horrifyingly enough, at a time when King Ferdinand and his Queen Isabella should have been joyous over their daughter marrying the future King of England, their lives were about to take a miserable turn.
Between the years of 1497 and 1498, tragedy struck the Spanish royal family as the sudden deaths of her older brother Juan (‘John’ in the English tongue) and his wife’s unborn child were shortly followed by the unfortunate death of Catherine’s elder sister and her parents’ eldest child, Princess Isabella.
The sudden deaths of two of the royal children would not only have deeply shocked and upset the King and Queen as well as their nation but it would have ignited a deep worry for the safety and security of their line; meaning that Catherine’s marriage to Arthur would have been of the upmost importance. For them, she secured the future of their family as she was now only one of the three living children belonging to Ferdinand and Isabella. And what would have infuriated her father more would be the fact that his three living children happened to be daughters who outlived his only male heir.
Of course, not long after the deaths of two of their beloved children, the problems coming from Ferdinand and Isabella’s side began to arise; from Ferdinand being concerned with sending his daughter’s rather large dowry over to her new father-in-law to Isabella being reluctant to part with her child and it is said that she was even considering calling off the engagement for the sake of not losing yet another child.
This, however—to my great surprise, did not impact the civility between the monarchs with many letters being exchanged between them during the whole of the 1490s, with one even being from the hand of Elizabeth of York who often asked about the health of her daughter-in-law and in the letter, she expresses her desire that Catherine learn French (which was commonly used in the court of Henry VII) as it was believed that Catherine was not a skilled linguistic and could not properly learn the English language. This desire would prove to be an unnecessary one as Katherine was taught neither French or English and, as I will mention later on, any communication that the young Spanish Princess had with her husband was through the ancient language of Latin, of which they both spoke fluently.
And considering the length of which they wrote to one another, it, in no way, lessened the affection that the couple held for one another.
So, the great question is—who was this affectionate Prince whom Catherine had married at a young age; who was Prince Arthur?
Look out for the continuation of this in the upcoming ‘Part Two’ post!
- Have a ‘Tudor-fic’ week!
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