Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and Her World (62 page)

Katherine emerged from the Bishop’s Palace to the sound of trumpets, shawms, and sackbuts, clad in white and gold satin. Beneath her wide-skirted gown she wore hoops—the first Spanish farthingale ever seen in England, which naturally drew much comment, as did her rich coronet and voluminous veil, or mantilla, of silk edged with a border of gold and precious stones, beneath which her long red-gold hair flowed loose down her back. She was escorted to her groom by her future brother-in-law (and husband), ten-year-old Henry, Duke of York, impressive in silver tissue embroidered with gold roses. Arthur, like his bride, was wearing white satin.

In the cathedral, the prince and princess “ascended the mount, one on the north and the other on the south side, and were there married by [Henry Deane] the Archbishop of Canterbury, assisted by nineteen bishops and abbots. The King, the Queen, and the King’s mother stood in the place aforementioned, where they heard and beheld the solemnization, which, being finished, the Archbishop and bishops took their way from the mountain across the platform, which was covered with blue ray cloth, into the choir, and so to the high altar. The prelates were followed by the bride and bridegroom. The Princess Cecily bore the train of the bride, and after her followed one hundred ladies and gentlewomen in right costly apparel. Then the mayor, in a gown of crimson velvet, and his brethren, in scarlet, went and sat in the choir whilst Mass was said.” For this, the young couple went through the rood screen and choir to the high altar. The Mass finished, they knelt to receive the blessing of the King and Queen, then proceeded to the church door, where Arthur publicly dowered his bride with one-third of his income as Prince of Wales, as the crowds outside roared their approval, crying, “King Henry! Prince Arthur!” and the trumpets, shawms, and sackbuts blared out once more in celebration. Katherine was now second lady in the land after the Queen.

Afterward the Prince and Princess of Wales were conducted in a grand procession led by Prince Henry to the Bishop’s Palace, where a great feast was prepared, “to which the Lord Mayor and aldermen were invited.” The latter had stationed themselves by the entrance to get a good view of the bride. The royal party and their guests were served on gold plate valued at £1,200 [£583,300], and the new Princess
of Wales dined off plate of solid gold ornamented with pearls and precious stones worth £20,000 [£9.7 million]. “It was wonderful to behold the costly apparel and the massive chains of gold worn on that day.”

At the end, the newly wedded couple were put to bed together in a ceremony witnessed by most of the court. The prince was escorted by his lords and gentlemen to the nuptial chamber, “wherein the princess before his coming was reverently laid and disposed,” and after the bed had been blessed and the newlyweds left alone to do their dynastic duty, the King and Queen departed for Baynard’s Castle.

There then followed one of the most controversial wedding nights in history. It was stated years later that fifteen-year-old Arthur claimed beforehand that he felt “lusty and amorous,” and it was reported at the time, by the herald who wrote an account of the wedding celebrations, that “thus these worthy persons concluded and consummated the effect and complement of matrimony.”

But did they? Doña Elvira stated some months later that they did not, and in 1503, King Ferdinand would tell his ambassador in Rome: “The truth is that the marriage was not consummated, and that the princess our daughter remained as whole as she was before she married.”
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Years afterward Katherine would swear that she and Arthur had spent just seven nights together, and that she emerged from her marriage “as intact and undefiled as she had come from her mother’s womb,”
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but Henry VIII, her second husband, professed to be not so sure about that. In 1529, when he was trying to move heaven and earth to have his marriage to Katherine dissolved, on the grounds that canon law forbade him to marry his brother’s widow, Lady Guildford, who was present at the wedding celebrations in 1501, would depose in the legatine court that Arthur and Katherine spent their wedding night in bed together, and that Queen Katherine had afterward told her that “they lay together in bed as man and wife all alone five or six nights after the marriage.” William Thomas, a groom of Arthur’s privy chamber, stated that he himself “made Arthur ready for bed, and conducted him clad in his nightgown unto the princess’s bedchamber often and sundry times; and that at the morning he received him at the said doors and waited upon him to his own privy chamber.”
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None of this proved that the couple had actually had sex, but naturally
Henry VIII needed testimony to show that the marriage had been consummated, and others were ready to come forward in 1529 to give evidence to that effect. The King’s close friend, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, declared that he had heard from Maurice St. John, the prince’s attendant, that Arthur’s decline in 1502 “grew by reason that [he] lay with the Lady Katherine.” Sir Anthony Willoughby recalled that, the morning after his wedding, “the prince spoke before divers witnesses these words: ‘Willoughby, give me a cup of ale, for I have been this night in the midst of Spain. It is good pastime to have a wife!’ Which words he repeated divers other times.” The fact he repeated them so often might suggest that Arthur was boasting to cover up his failure in bed, because he knew what was expected of him. St. John had also mentioned Arthur’s thirst to Robert Ratcliffe, now Viscount Fitzwalter, who recalled that St. John asked the prince why his throat was so dry, whereupon he replied, “I have been in Spain this night.”
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Predictably, the peers of England, in their scramble to ingratiate themselves with Henry VIII, were ready to brag about their own prowess at Arthur’s age. George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, affirmed that “the prince knew his lady carnally because he might be able to do so, as he himself had been, who knew his wife before he was sixteen.” That did not mean anything, of course. The Duke of Norfolk also boasted that he too “at the same age did carnally know and use a woman,” but also said he had heard “from credible persons that Prince Arthur did lay with the Lady Katherine five or six nights after.” His wife the duchess stated that the couple had been “alone in bed together the next night after their marriage.”
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In 1531, however, at a hearing in Zaragoza, one of Katherine’s attendants would testify that, on the day after the wedding, “Francesca de Caceres, who was in charge of dressing and undressing [her], and whom she liked and confided in a lot, was looking sad and telling the other ladies that nothing had passed between Prince Arthur and his wife.”
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Nowadays many people find it hard to accept that two teenagers shared a bed and did not have sex. It was incumbent upon them, after all, to produce an heir to ensure the future of the Tudor dynasty: the
consummation of their marriage was their duty. Others find it hard to believe that Katherine of Aragon, a devout woman of great integrity and principle, would vigorously maintain that her marriage to Arthur was not consummated if it had been. It has been said she might have lied to protect her position and her daughter’s status, but for the avoidance of doubt, the Pope had actually issued two dispensations allowing her to marry Henry, one providing for the first marriage having been consummated. So she had no need to lie, for in the eyes of the Church her second marriage was valid anyway.

It is important to remember that Henry VIII’s doubts of conscience came at a time when he was desperate to have a male heir—and to marry Anne Boleyn. But his adultery with Anne’s sister Mary placed him in the same forbidden degree of affinity to Anne as he was to Katherine by virtue of her marriage to his brother. When Katherine publicly challenged him to deny in open court that she had come to him “a true maid without touch of man,” he remained silent; and when she vowed to Pope Clement VII that she would accept whatever he decided about her virginity if her husband would swear under oath that he knew her marriage to Arthur had been consummated, Henry failed to respond.
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There was a prevalent belief that early indulgence in sex by young people who were not physically mature was detrimental to health, and there had been a recent example that appeared to prove it. In 1497, Katherine’s only surviving brother, the Infante Juan, Prince of Asturias, had died at nineteen—disastrously for the Spanish succession. The cause was possibly tuberculosis, but opinion generally held that overindulgence in the marriage bed had proved fatal. In 1533, Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, Henry VIII’s bastard son, was married at fourteen but not permitted to live with his bride because he was considered too young.

Henry VII had good reason to be cautious. A dispatch sent to Ferdinand of Aragon by his envoy, Gutierre Gomez de Fuensalida, in July 1500 reveals that the King had had concerns then about the health of Prince Arthur. Fuensalida had “understood from a reliable source that the King has decided that the Prince will know his wife sexually on the day of the wedding, and then separate himself from her for two or
three years, because it is said that in some way the Prince is frail, and the King told me that he wanted to have [Arthur and Katherine] with him for the first three years, so that the Prince should mature in strength.”
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Evidence that emerged later about the state of Arthur’s health in the months that followed the marriage (see
Chapter 16
) supports the theory that it was never consummated at all.

Twelve days of celebrations had been planned, and there was further excitement on November 14, when envoys from James IV arrived in London to arrange their master’s marriage to Princess Margaret. There were no entertainments on the day after the wedding, when Katherine and Arthur were allowed some privacy, but on Tuesday, November 16, the King and Queen returned in state by river from Baynard’s Castle and, with the newly wedded prince and princess, “came to Paul’s Church, where they made their offering, dined in the Bishop’s Palace, and so returned.” Afterward, the royal party went to Westminster by river, attended by the Lord Mayor, the aldermen, and the sheriffs. “For the more royalty of the going of the King and Queen, [and] of the prince and princess, unto Westminster by water,” it had been decreed “that the King and Queen and the prince have their barges apart and pompously rigged and dressed,” and that minstrels should play for them as they sailed along the Thames.

On Thursday, November 18, the first of the planned tournaments was held. The wide yard before Westminster Hall had been strewn with gravel and sand “for the ease of the horses,” and lists were set up. Around the grounds were flower displays and artificial trees heavy with fruit. To the south was a stand hung with cloth of gold and furnished with cushions of the same costly fabric. “As soon as dinner was done in the court,” the Queen, the Princess of Wales, Cecily, Viscountess Welles, the other princesses, and a train of “two or three hundred ladies and gentlewomen” entered this stand from the right, and the King, Prince Arthur, Prince Henry, and many lords entered from the left.

“Round the whole area were stages built for the honest common people, which at their cost was hired by them in such numbers that nothing but visages presented themselves to the eye, without any appearance
of bodies. And when the trumpets blew, the nobility and chivalry engaged to tilt appeared in the arena, riding under fanciful canopies borne by their retainers.” The Earl of Essex must have drawn many eyes, as he “had a mountain of green carried over him as his pavilion, and upon it many trees, rocks, and marvelous beasts climbing up the sides,” and “on the summit sat a goodly young lady, in her hair [with loose hair], pleasantly beseen.” The Queen’s half brother, Dorset, “had borne over him a rich pavilion of cloth of gold, himself always riding within the same, dressed in his armor.” Elizabeth’s brother-in-law, Lord William Courtenay, made his appearance “riding on a red dragon led by a giant, with a great tree in his hand.”

Twenty or thirty contestants rode around the arena, cheered on by the commons, then the tournament began, and they engaged in the tilt “with sharp spears, and in great jeopardy of their lives, breaking a great many lances on each other’s bodies.” Fortunately, no one was killed. When the jousts were over, the royal party, followed by throngs of lords and Londoners, proceeded into Westminster Hall, where a royal dais had been erected, and a magnificent cupboard—which stretched the whole length of the wall of the Court of Chancery—was laden with a display of plate, mostly of solid gold. Elizabeth, Margaret Beaufort, and the Princess Katherine sat down at elevated seats at the King’s left hand, with their ladies and the royal children on their side of the hall, while Prince Arthur sat at his father’s right hand, with the nobles seated according to degree on his side.

Stages with scenes of a castle, a fully rigged ship with sails, and a “Mount of Love” were wheeled in, and pageants performed. The castle—representing Castile—was lit enticingly from inside, and eight gentlewomen could be seen looking out of its windows. At the top sat a lady wearing Spanish dress, representing Katherine of Aragon, and in the towers were the children of the King’s Chapel in full chorus. The castle was drawn by “marvelous beasts”—men dressed as gold and silver lions harnessed with huge gold chains. The ship was manned by mariners “who took care to speak wholly in seafaring terms,” and in it were men dressed as sailors and a girl playing a Spanish infanta. The princess in the castle was courted by “two well-behaved and well-beseen gentlemen called Hope and Desire,” who emerged from the
ship, but she disdained them, at which point eight knights emerged from the “Mount of Love” and stormed the fortress, forcing the ladies to surrender, whereupon they emerged from the castle, partnered the victors and danced with them “goodly roundels and divers figures,” before vanishing out of sight.

Arthur now led his aunt Cecily onto the floor, “and danced two
basse
dances,
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and then departed up again, the prince to his father and Lady Cecily to the Queen her sister.” Next, the Princess Katherine and one of her ladies, both wearing Spanish dress, danced two
basse
dances, then “both departed up to the Queen.” After this things livened up. Ten-year-old “Henry, Duke of York, having with him his sister, Lady Margaret, in his hand, came down and danced two dances, and went up to the Queen.” There was such applause that the pair came down again, and young Henry “suddenly threw off his robe and danced in his jacket with the Lady Margaret in so goodly and pleasant a manner that it was to the King and Queen a great and singular pleasure. Then the duke departed to the King and the Princess Margaret to the Queen.” At the end of the evening a hundred lords and knights paraded into the hall with gold cups of hippocras and gold plates of spices.