Catherine of Aragon: a victim of state

In a new biography, Giles Tremlett describes a strong yet dutiful queen ruined by her inability to produce a future king.

An illustration of Catherine being summoned to court before King Henry VIII.

When Catherine of Aragon, the daughter of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, sailed to England in 1501, she could reasonably have expected a pleasant life. Her parents had used her as a bargaining chip to cement an alliance with the new Tudor dynasty of England.

Henry VII, the first of that line, had successfully negotiated for her betrothal to Prince Arthur, his eldest son and heir, and although such an arrangement lacked the spontaneity and passion a girl of 15 might crave, it was certainly nothing new to her, raised as she had been in the power-politics atmosphere of the Alahambra and conditioned from the nursery to consider herself an instrument of state.

She could expect to be well treated (she travelled with an extensive dowry and the promise of more), and she could always hope to at least like her intended husband. And as Giles Tremlett tells the story in his solid, enjoyable new biography of Catherine, the two teenagers, communicating through the halting schoolroom Latin that was their only common language, perhaps got along well during the preliminaries to their marriage.

Cold reality intervened almost immediately. In the 16th century, as in most centuries, there was no concept of connubial privacy where royalty was concerned, and although Arthur indulged in a boastful jest the next morning (calling for beer and saying he was thirsty because he'd "been in Spain" the previous evening), attendants who were watching for tell-tale virginal blood on the sheets found none. Stories began to circulate, saying that Arthur had been seen leaving Catherine's bed chamber very soon after entering it, and that Catherine herself was heard the next day lamenting that her bridegroom wasn't made of sterner stuff. Even so, it might not have been important: Arthur and Catherine were both 15, after all, with plenty of time to grow comfortable with each other.

Except Arthur died only a few months later, and Catherine found herself thrown upon the mercy of Henry VII, who notoriously lacked that virtue. Henry lodged her in a dismal country manor, allowing her finances to fall into disarray while he bargained with her father. Henry had not yet been paid her whole dowry; he was reluctant to send her back to Spain without receiving it. Ferdinand was reluctant to pay anything more without knowing Henry's intentions.

Years dragged on, and Tremlett does a fascinating job of detailing the various twists and turns Catherine's life took, including the hope the widowed Henry VII briefly entertained of marrying Catherine's sister Juana, the hereditary queen of Castile: "Ferdinand told Henry that he had placed him on top of the long list of those who wanted to marry her. The list, however, was just that. It had no purpose beyond keeping Henry quiet. Ferdinand had no intention of marrying his daughter off. While she remained a widow, and one obsessed by her dead husband, Castile was his to rule."

The story of what happened to conclude this unhappy stalemate is well known: when the old king died, his second son became Henry VIII and promptly married Catherine. As Tremlett writes, her life changed in an instant: "The turnaround in her fortunes could not have been more complete. In the few weeks it took to renegotiate the marriage after Henry VII's death, the whole sorry episode of her lonely, bitter, frantic wait disappeared into a suddenly remote past." There followed happy years full of courts, dances, politics, warfare (Henry left Catherine as regent while he fought in France, and she presided over a significant victory over the Scots in his absence). There was also an open emphasis on learning that Tremlett winningly refers to as "a small revolution". Catherine became beloved of the English court and people, and even such caustic visitors as the Dutch humanist Erasmus could find nothing but good things to say about her. Henry played affectionate pranks on her and showed every sign of being a high-spirited man in love.

There was only one problem, but under the circumstances it was a gigantic one: Catherine couldn't provide Henry with a son and heir. Princess Mary (later England's "Bloody Mary") was the only one of their children to survive the nursery - all the others were either born dead or died in weeks or days. This had two effects on Henry: it made him urgent about his succession, and it made his already lusty nature impatient. He had always been inclined to amorous intrigues, but by the 1520s he was seeking more than simple release. In 1523 he loaded his illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy with impressive titles (among other things, the six-year-old boy was made Admiral of England), inciting the normally placid Catherine to rage: "Henry was trampling on his own daughter and [Catherine] let him know it. He was shocked by the sudden display of Castilian temper." But of course, the worst was still to come.

Henry's infatuation with Anne Boleyn is the crucible of Catherine's life. Anne was unwilling to be yet another mistress producing yet more bastard children: she wanted to be queen, and Henry could deny her nothing. And here is where those pristine wedding-night sheets from 20 years before become damningly important: Henry sought a papal annulment of his marriage to Catherine on the grounds that it was sinful for a man to marry his brother's wife. The Church had already granted Henry a dispensation in order to let him marry Catherine, a dispensation based in large part on the widespread belief that Arthur and Catherine had never actually been man and wife to each other - that the marriage had never been consummated.

All at once, English history turned on the question of what two teenagers did or didn't do in bed one summer. The Queen swore she had come to Henry a virgin, and as Tremlett admits: "The truth about Catherine's virginity will never be known. Whatever the case, she must already have worked out that no one could disprove what she said." Henry became savage when his will was crossed - he banished Catherine from his sight and his court and declared his daughter Mary a bastard, and when the Church (perhaps cowed by Catherine's nephew the Holy Roman Emperor, or perhaps insufficiently bribed, or perhaps just unconvinced) refused to grant him his annulment, he broke with the Church itself, declaring himself Supreme Head of the Faith in England and touching off four centuries of religious strife - all because one woman, Catherine of Aragon, refused to be pushed aside. As Garrett Mattingly put it in his own 1941 biography of Catherine (an extremely popular and oft-reprinted work whose existence Tremlett largely ignores): "Surely Catherine's decisions influenced English history - and therefore the history of the whole world - as vitally, and unexpectedly, as the decisions of her husband Henry VIII."

Henry couldn't break Catherine's resolve. She "had crossed a line," Tremlett writes. "She would be queen or they could kill her. It was very clear and very simple. For Catherine this was both dangerous and liberating." All he could do was make her miserable, which he set about doing with all the spite of a thwarted eight-year-old. He deprived her of most guests, all court correspondence, and most cruelly, all contact with her daughter. As Shakespeare has his Anne Boleyn say: "It is a pity/Would move a monster," but Henry was not moved. He married Anne Boleyn in defiance of the Church and the will of his own people, and Catherine fought every one of his attempts to rewrite her history, utterly refusing such makeweight titles as "Dowager Princess" and insisting to the end that she was Henry's rightful queen, and that Mary was his only rightful heir.

Catherine died in 1536 "her mind still troubled by whether she had been good to a country that in the end had been bad to her", and Henry continued his famous procession through the rest of his six wives. Only one of them, Jane Seymour, produced his much-desired male heir, but Edward VI was as sickly as Arthur had been and soon died. The future of the Tudor dynasty belonged to Mary - and to Anne Boleyn's daughter Elizabeth.

Steve Donoghue's work has appeared in The Columbia Journal of American Studies, The Historical Novel Review and Kirkus. He is managing editor of Open Letters Monthly.