Catherine of Aragon

1485 – 1536 · Generation XXII · House of Tudor

Catherine of Aragon was born on 16 December 1485 in the archbishop’s palace at Alcalá de Henares, the youngest surviving child of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. She was named after her great-grandmother Catherine of Lancaster, a daughter of John of Gaunt, which made her a descendant of Edward III of England. Her parents gave her an unusually thorough education. Under the tutor Alessandro Geraldini she studied Latin, history, philosophy, theology and both canon and civil law, and Erasmus later praised her love of good literature.

She was three when her parents promised her to Arthur, Prince of Wales, eldest son of Henry VII, in an alliance aimed at France. The two corresponded in Latin for years. Catherine sailed from A Coruña in August 1501 and married Arthur at Old St Paul’s Cathedral on 14 November, when both were fifteen. They set up court at Ludlow Castle on the Welsh border, where both fell ill within months. Arthur died on 2 April 1502. Catherine recovered to find herself a widow of sixteen in a foreign country.

Seven uncertain years followed. Henry VII did not want to return her dowry, her father was slow to pay the rest of it, and a plan to marry her to the king’s second son, Henry, hung unresolved while she lived at Durham House in London, short of money and closely confined. In 1507 her father made her his ambassador to the English court, which makes her the first woman known to have held such a post in Europe. A papal dispensation was obtained so that she could marry her late husband’s brother, and Catherine always maintained that her first marriage had never been consummated. When Henry VIII came to the throne in 1509 he married her within weeks, on 11 June at Greenwich, and they were crowned together at Westminster Abbey on Midsummer’s Day.

For many years the marriage was a success. In 1513 Henry left her as regent, with the title of Governor of the Realm and Captain General, while he campaigned in France. When the Scots invaded she raised troops and rode north, and after James IV was killed at Flodden she sent Henry a piece of the dead king’s bloodstained coat to use as a banner. She was a patron of the new learning, a friend of Erasmus and Thomas More, and commissioned Juan Luis Vives to write The Education of a Christian Woman. She pleaded successfully for the lives of the rioters condemned after the Evil May Day. But of the six children she bore, only one lived, Mary, born in February 1516. A son born in 1511 lived less than two months.

By the mid-1520s Henry had no male heir, Catherine was past childbearing, and he had fallen in love with Anne Boleyn. He persuaded himself, citing the book of Leviticus, that marriage to his brother’s widow was cursed, and asked Pope Clement VII for an annulment. Catherine would not yield. Urged to retire to a convent, she replied that she was the king’s true and legitimate wife. Before the court that a papal legate opened in England in 1529 she refused to accept its authority and appealed to Rome, where the Pope, under the sway of her nephew the Emperor Charles V, would not give Henry what he wanted. The deadlock brought down Cardinal Wolsey and in the end led Henry to break with the papacy altogether. Catherine was sent from court in 1531 and never saw her husband or her daughter again. In May 1533 Archbishop Cranmer pronounced the marriage void.

She refused the title of Dowager Princess of Wales and called herself queen to the last. Moved from house to house, she came in 1534 to Kimbolton Castle, where she kept to a single room. Henry offered her better lodging and the company of her daughter if she would acknowledge Anne as queen, and both mother and daughter refused. She died at Kimbolton on 7 January 1536, probably of cancer, and was buried at Peterborough with the rites of a princess dowager. Her daughter took the throne as Mary I in 1553 and had Parliament declare her parents’ marriage lawful. The tomb in Peterborough Cathedral, later damaged by Cromwell’s troops, now bears the words “Katharine Queen of England”, and visitors still leave pomegranates on it, her heraldic badge.

Place in the family

• Catherine of Aragon married Arthur Tudor, a brother of King Henry VIII.

Images

• The joint coronation of Henry VIII and Catherine in a woodcut of 1509, beneath the Tudor rose and her pomegranate badge (Unidentified engraver, public domain)
• Catherine watches Henry VIII joust, from the Westminster Tournament Roll of 1511 (Thomas Wriothesley, public domain)
• Catherine pleading her case before Henry VIII, as imagined by a nineteenth-century painter (Henry Nelson O’Neil, public domain)
• Her grave in Peterborough Cathedral (Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0)

One of 11 people of House of Tudor (1485–1603) in this archive. Welsh in origin and only a handful of monarchs long — it broke with Rome and ended with Elizabeth I.

Read more on Wikipedia

Partners

• Married Arthur Tudor (1486 – 1502) in 1501
• Married King Henry VIII (1491 – 1547) in 1509; the marriage was dissolved in 1533 — one child together

Children

• Queen Mary I (1516 – 1558)

Life

• 1485 — Born
• 1501 — Married Arthur Tudor
• 1509 — Married Henry VIII Tudor
• 1533 — Separated from Henry VIII Tudor
• 1536 — Died

Sources

1. Catherine of Aragon · Wikipedia
2. Katherine of Aragon · Historic Royal Palaces
3. Catherine of Aragon · Encyclopaedia Britannica
4. Catherine of Aragon · World History Encyclopedia
5. Katharine of Aragon · Peterborough Cathedral