Six Wives

David Starkey

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061842160
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Biografías históricas

"Extraordinary.... It is a tribute to Starkey's narrative drive, his puckish wit, and sharp discrimination that it doesn't seem a page too long.... With each queen, Starkey offers a vivid character study but also has fresh discoveries that subtly alter the picture he started out with."— Sunday Times (London)

The dramatic, legendary story of Henry VIII, his six wives, and the England they ruled—told by one of the world's preeminent historians of the Tudor era.

Perhaps no one in history had a more eventful career in matrimony than Henry VIII. His marriages were tumultuous and complicated, and made instant legends of six very different women. Henry took his first bride, Catherine of Aragon, when he was 17. Their 24-year marriage was a relatively stable prelude to what followed. Anne Boleyn, a pretty, French-educated Protestant who was the mother of Elizabeth I, was eventually beheaded. Jane Seymour served as a demure contrast to the vampish Boleyn, and gave birth to Henry's longed-for son (Edward VI). After a brief marriage to the plain Anne of Cleves, Henry married a flirtatious teenager, Catherine Howard, who would be the second of his brides to lose her head along with the king's favor. Finally, there was Catherine Parr, a shrewd Protestant bluestocking.

In this brilliant new work, one of the world's most respected historians weaves startling new facts and fresh interpretations into a spellbinding account of the emotional drama and political intrigue that attended Henry's six marriages. With a keen eye for both the personal and the global stage, David Starkey masterfully recaptures the Tudor era—and the wives of Henry VIII—as only he can.

PART ONE

Queen Catherine of Aragon

1. Parents: a power couple

Catherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII, was born on 16 December 1485. Her mother, the warrior-queen Isabella of Castile, had spent most of her pregnancy on campaign against the Moors (as the still-independent Islamic inhabitants of the southern part of Spain were known), rather than in ladylike retirement. Only after her capture of Ronda did she withdraw from the front, first to Cordoba and then to Alacala de Henares to the north-east of Madrid, where the child was born. The baby was named after Catherine, her mother’s English grandmother, who was the daughter of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. She took after the English royal house as well, with reddish golden hair, a fair skin and bright blue eyes.¹

The Englishness of her name and appearance proved prophetic. After a happy, secure childhood, Catherine’s life was to become a series of struggles: to get married, to have a child and, above all, to protect her marriage and her child against her husband’s determination to annul the one and bastardise the other. And the scene of these struggles was England.

Catherine’s parents, Ferdinand and Isabella, were the most remarkable royal couple of the age. They were both sovereigns in their own right: Isabella of Castile, Ferdinand of Aragon.

Castile formed the larger, western part of what we now call Spain, stretching from the Bay of Biscay in the north to the marches of the Islamic kingdom of Granada to the south. It was a country of torrid, sunburned mountains and castles and high plains roamed by vast flocks of sheep. The territories of Aragon lay to the east. They were smaller, but richer and greener, encompassing the foothills of the Pyrenees, the fertile valleys of the Mediterranean coast and the great trading city of Barcelona. The traditions of the two kingdoms were as distinct as their landscapes. Castile was insular, aristocratic and obsessed with the crusade against the Moors in which lay its origin and continuing raison d’être. Aragon, in contrast, was an open, mercantile society: it looked north, across the Pyrenees towards France, and east, across the Mediterranean towards Italy.

To a striking extent, the two sovereigns embodied the different characteristics of their realms. Isabella was intense, single-minded and ardently Catholic, while Ferdinand was a devious and subtle schemer. But he was much more: a fine soldier, who won more battles, both in person and by his generals, than any other contemporary ruler; a strategist, with a vision that was European in scale and grandeur; and a realist, who had the wit not to let his numerous successes go to his head. Understandably, Machiavelli worshipped him as the most successful contemporary practitioner of the sort of power politics he himself recommended: ‘From being a weak king he has become the most famous and glorious king in Christendom. And if his achievements are examined, they will all be found to be very remarkable, and some of them quite extraordinary.’²

Catherine manifestly took after her mother. But, I shall also argue, there was more in her of her father’s qualities, both for good and bad, than has been commonly realized.

Neither Castile nor Aragon had belonged to the front rank of medieval powers. And their standing was diminished further by a particularly bad case of the disputed successions and civil wars which afflicted most European monarchies in the fifteenth century. In both countries, under-mighty kings had bred overmighty subjects and the two royal houses had fissured into a tragicomedy of divisions: brother was pitted against brother and father against son. Only the royal women seemed strong, leading armies and dominating their feeble husbands. It was a Darwinian world, and none but the fittest, like Ferdinand and Isabella, survived.

They married in 1469, he aged seventeen, she a year or so older. Immediately Isabella was disinherited by her brother, Henry IV of Castile, in favour of his doubtfully legitimate daughter, Joanna. After the death of Henry IV in 1474, a civil war broke out between niece and aunt. This resulted in Isabella’s victory and proclamation as Queen of Castile, and Joanna’s retreat into a nunnery. Five years later, Ferdinand succeeded his father in Aragon. Ferdinand was the son of John II by his second marriage, and only after two deaths, both rumoured to be by poison, was he delivered the throne. Having fought everybody else to a standstill, Ferdinand and Isabella then threatened to come to blows themselves. He was determined to be King indeed in Castile; she was equally resolute to preserve her rights as Queen Regnant.

Finally their quarrel was submitted to formal arbitration. This established the principle of co-sovereignty between the two. Justice was executed jointly when they were together and independently if they were apart. Both their heads appeared on the coinage and both their signatures on royal charters, while the seals included the arms of both Castile and Aragon. And these were quartered, as a gesture of equality, rather than Ferdinand’s arms of Aragon ‘impaling’ Isabella’s arms of Castile, as was usual between husband and wife. Such power-couple equality was unusual enough in a medieval royal marriage. But, in fact, Isabella was the first among equals since, with the exception of the agreed areas of joint sovereignty, the administration of Castile was reserved to her in her own right.

Not surprisingly, Ferdinand jibbed. But he soon submitted and, united, the pair carried all before them. For, despite Ferdinand’s four bastards by as many different mothers, he and his wife were genuinely, even passionately, in love. But even in this there was rivalry. ‘My Lady,’ one of Ferdinand’s letters to the Queen begins, ‘now it is clear which of us two loves best.’ But they were in love with their growing power even more than with each other. Granada, the last stronghold of the Moors in Spain, surrendered in 1492 and the following year Columbus returned from his first voyage to America, having taken possession of several of the West Indies in the name of the ‘Catholic Kings’, as Ferdinand and Isabella were to be entitled by a grateful Pope in 1496. Catherine was at her parents’ side to witness both these momentous events.³

And there is no doubt which had the most effect. Years later, when she was sent a present of a ceremonial Indian chair and robe, she ignored them. But the memory of Granada was forever green.

This is shown by Catherine’s choice of badge. In both Spain and England it had become the practice for important people to have a badge as well as a coat of arms. A coat of arms was a given, as it was inherited. But a badge was a matter of personal selection. Some badges, it is true, ran in families–including many of the most famous ones, including the Red Rose of Lancaster or the White Rose of York. But even these were regularly modified, added to or discarded by individual family members to suit their own purposes or circumstances. Badges were also more freely used. They appeared on personal possessions, in interior decoration and on servants’ clothing. At one level, therefore, they were a mere form of labelling–like nametapes; at another, they were a personal symbol, even a form of self-expression in an age where such opportunities were limited.

Catherine’s choice fell on the pomegranate. This was a tribute to her parents’ decision to add the pomegranate to the Spanish coat of arms in a punning reference to the conquest of Granada. (The wordplay does not really work in English. But it is clear in a Romance language like French, where the name of the fruit and the city is the same: grenade.) But there were other layers of meaning as well. In classical mythology the pomegranate is the symbol of Proserpina, the queen of the underworld, whose return to earth each spring heralds the reawakening of life after the death of winter. Christianity borrowed this idea, like so much else, and turned the pomegranate into a symbol of the Resurrection. Finally it represented the two, opposed aspects of female sexuality. These derived from the fruit’s appearance. The outside is covered in a hard, smooth skin. But the inside (always revealed in Catherine’s version of the badge by a cut in the surface of the fruit) teems with a multitude of seeds, each surrounded with succulent, blood-red jelly. The hard exterior suggested chastity; the teeming interior fertility.

This range of meanings was to play itself out, usually ironically, against the events of Catherine’s life. But for her, I suspect, the fruit which she had seen growing in the gardens of the Alhambra came, more than anything else, simply to represent home.

2. Education for power

Catherine belonged to a large family as her parents had five children who survived infancy. The eldest, named Isabella after her mother, was born within a year of the marriage. Then there was a lengthy gap, occasioned in part by miscarriages possibly triggered by the Queen’s active service in the wars against the Moors. At last, a son, Juan, was born in 1478, followed in quick succession by three younger children, all girls: Juana, Maria and finally Catherine, the baby of the family.

Juan, as heir, was the apple of his parents’ eye. But Catherine, as the youngest, was something of a favourite too. Ferdinand proclaimed that he loved her ‘entirely’: ‘for ever’, he explained, ‘she hath loved me better than any of my other children’. For the Queen, actions spoke louder than words, and in 1489, when Catherine was only three, Isabella held her up in public to watch a ceremonial bullfight.¹

Nor was this an isolated gesture, since Isabella was as hands-on as a parent as she was at everything else. She kept her daughters with her even on campaign and in 1491, for instance, at the siege of Granada, Catherine, her mother and sisters had to flee in the night when the Queen’s tent caught fire. More importantly, Isabella also supervised the girls’ education herself. She has been much praised–especially in this feminist age–for giving them almost as academically serious an education as their brother. But, as we shall see, there were some curious gaps in their training which in time were to cost Catherine dear.

Isabella’s own education had been entirely conventional. She had been taught the rudiments of the Faith, housewifely skills and how to read and write Spanish. All these, especially the first, she passed on to her daughters. But, as an adult sovereign, she had also learned some Latin. There were practical reasons for this, since Latin was the prime language of law, government and, above all, of the diplomacy which she and Ferdinand were weaving across the courts of Europe like a spider’s web. But Isabella, like Ferdinand, also had a larger vision and it seems certain that she saw the New Learning (as the reformed Classical curriculum came to be known) in the same light as the New World, as a territory to be conquered for her family and her Faith. And her daughters were to share in this inheritance as much as her son.

Isabella was greatly aided in her efforts by the close relations between Spain and Italy, which were the fountainhead of the New Learning. Leading Italian Humanists, as exponents of the new studies were known, flocked to Spain and some of the best were retained in Isabella’s service to educate her children. The most important was Pietro Martire d’Anghierra, known in English as Peter Martyr. His specific brief lay in the re-education of the nobility and the royal children above all. ‘I was the literary foster-father of almost all the princes, and of all the princesses of Spain,’ he boasted. Catherine’s personal tutors, however, were two brothers: Antonio Geraldini and, after his death, his younger sibling, Alessandro.

Under their supervision, Catherine embarked on a formidable course of Latin literature. But it was not by the Pagan authors familiar to us. This is because they were considered risqué or, in the case of the poets, downright corrupting. So Catherine’s direct acquaintance with works of the Golden Age of the Roman Republic and Empire was limited: to the moralists, including Seneca, and to the historians, who were also studied as a source of moral example. Otherwise, her reading was drawn largely from the first centuries of the Christian world: the Christian Latin poets, Prudentius and Juventus, and the Latin Fathers of the Church, Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory and Jerome.

This was Classical Lite, a mélange of authors who, with the exception of Augustine, are now largely forgotten, at least as literature. But then they were highly valued–as was Catherine’s achievement in mastering them. She ‘loves good literature, which she has studied with success since childhood’, wrote the great Dutch scholar Erasmus, who later got to know her well. But what excited his admiration most was the fact that she had done all this as a woman. She ‘is astonishingly well read’, he wrote on another occasion, ‘far beyond what would be surprising in a woman’.

What are also surprising, however, are the gaps in Catherine’s education. She, like her siblings, was taught to dance and she performed confidently in public. Otherwise, there are no signs of musical skills or training, either instrumental or vocal. She was familiar with one of the great cycles of chivalric romance–if the presence in her mother’s library of three well-thumbed volumes, in Spanish, of the tales of King Arthur and the Round Table is anything to go by. But it seems unlikely that she had read anything of the poetry of Courtly Love, and it is practically certain that she had never joined in its fancifully erotic games. Now, for a Christian Humanist, like Erasmus, the omission of such trivialities from Catherine’s education was a positive virtue. But then Erasmus never had to make his way in royal Courts. Catherine and her sisters did: they were destined to have to woo husbands, to win friends and to influence people. In all of these, the Courtly arts, music, poetry and the game of love were the favoured instruments–especially for a lady. Isabella’s daughters were sent out utterly untrained in them. Was it because Isabella herself was too mannish, or at least too successful a woman in a man’s world, to care about such things? Was it because Isabella’s entourage, perpetually on the move and almost always at war, was too much of a camp and too little of a Court for a Court culture to develop? Or was it, finally, because Spain was too isolated from the European mainstream?

If it were the last, the puzzle of Catherine’s education deepens. For it was, precisely, the mission of Catherine and her sisters to end Spanish isolation. They were to marry foreign princes and, deploying the superior education which they had been given for the purpose, to bend their husbands and their husbands’ lands to the service of Spanish interests. That at least was the theory. The practice was less impressive. For not only were these girls entirely lacking in Courtly skills, they were also sent out, as consorts to foreign rulers, with no training in foreign languages. They could speak Spanish, which scarcely anyone spoke abroad, and Latin, which only the clergy and diplomats did. But their education did not equip them to converse in the languages of their husbands. It was not an education for effective pillow-talk.²

3. Power weddings

18 April 1490 must have been a day of high excitement for Catherine, Maria and Juana. Isabella, their eldest sister, was being betrothed to Prince Alfonso of Portugal in Seville and the little girls formed part of the royal party. Catherine was aged five when she received this first lesson in the reality of royal marriages. Other lessons were soon to follow.¹

For the Catholic Kings, Ferdinand and Isabella, took the customary view that a royal marriage existed not for the personal satisfaction of the participants but as a means to a political end. Historians call this use of family connexions to achieve political goals ‘dynasticism’. And Ferdinand and Isabella carried it, as they did all forms of policy, to a high level of strategic sophistication. Like their foreign policy, from which it was indeed barely distinguishable, their dynastic policy had two principal aims. Within the Iberian peninsula, they wanted to consolidate their power by bringing Portugal, the only remaining independent crown, within the Spanish sphere of influence. And further abroad, they were determined to contain and challenge France. France was the greatest European power of the day; it also blocked Ferdinand’s plans to recover his family’s former territories in southern Italy and on either side of the Pyrenees. The marriage of his daughter Isabella would deliver Portugal to Ferdinand; his other children were available to bind France in a chain of golden wedding rings that would, he hoped, turn into a ring of steel.

His plans received an immediate setback when Isabella’s husband died at the age of twenty, and Isabella returned to Spain a youthful widow. Undeterred, the Catholic Kings pressed on. The year 1496–7 was the climacteric. On 22 August 1496 their daughter Juana sailed from Laredo in a great fleet captained by the Admiral of Castile. Its destination was the Netherlands, where Juana would marry the Archduke Philip.

Philip was another product of a successful dynastic marriage. His mother Mary was heiress of Burgundy (which included modern Belgium, the Netherlands and much of north-eastern France), while his father, Maximilian von Habsburg, was Archduke of Austria and Holy Roman (that is, German) Emperor. There was a long-standing hostility betwe...