Gracechurch Street, at the road’s widest point, the second pageant soared into the air – a battlemented, turreted castle, covered with more of the dynasty’s emblems and badges and, hovering above it, a huge red dragon. Standing in the castle’s gatehouse, a man dressed as a Roman senator addressed the princess and the assembled multitudes. His name, he said, was Policy. Among the stock allegorical figures, the pageant deviser had managed to insinuate a character resembling nothing so much as one of Henry’s lawyer-counsellors who represented good and accountable government, with his ‘eye on the commonwealth’. Policy was evidently meant to send out a reassuring note to the onlooking subjects: Henry’s counsellors were not an unaccountable cabal; rather, they were tireless servants of the public interest. It was a touch typical of Henry VII – or perhaps of the reception’s co-ordinator, Richard Fox.39
Moving slowly up Gracechurch Street, the party then turned left, down Cornhill, the city’s financial heart. The next three pageants enacted elaborate astrological variations on the marriage. As Catherine and her retinue approached, each in succession came alive: musicians playing, cogs whirring, mechanical constellations operated by costumed children puffing around treadmills. Constructed over Cornhill’s barrel-shaped conduit, the Tun, the third pageant, of the moon, was the most ingenious, extravagant and costly of the set-pieces, featuring lengthy prognostications of nuptial bliss expounded by Catherine’s ancestor, Alfonso X. But the going was so slow that the short November afternoon had already begun to wane. Having ‘well aviewed the goodly device’, the princess had to leave the orating Alfonso behind, and move on, past the Stocks Market and up the great commercial thoroughfare of Cheapside, whose goldsmiths were, according to one Italian visitor, mouth agape, more impressive than ‘all the shops in Milan, Rome, Venice and Florence put together’. Here the last three pageants were waiting, together with Henry VII and Prince Arthur, who had ‘somewhat privily and secretly’ taken a vantage point halfway up the street.40
During the reception and wedding Henry’s carefully calibrated public appearances would present him as the wellspring of honour, justice and power, the unknowable, all-seeing sovereign who, as the Milanese ambassador Soncino nicely observed, appeared in public ‘like one at the top of a tower looking on at what is passing in the plain’.41 Henry had done exactly this at Exeter in 1497 when, in the wake of Warbeck’s failed invasion, he had received the submission of captured rebels while lodged at the treasurer’s house on the cathedral green. With half the trees on the green cut down so that he could enjoy the view, and standing at a ‘fair large’ window knocked through for the purpose, he watched, imperious, as the commons of Devon, in only their shirts and with halters round their necks, knelt with ‘lamentable cries for our grace and remission’, before lecturing them on the obedience he expected of them.42
Now, rejecting the usual arrangement of a grandstand, he had commandeered the house of a rich London haberdasher, one of a number of wide-windowed multi-storeyed merchant houses that lined the south side of Cheapside.43 Henry’s elite security force, the three-hundred-strong yeomen of the guard, had secured the area. With their spiked, bladed halberds, and white-and-green jackets stamped with the red rose, they swarmed all over the house, taking up positions ‘in windows, leads, gutters and battlements’. Surrounded by a cluster of his close counsellors, including Arthur’s godfather the earl of Oxford and Richard Fox, Henry stood at the window in ‘open sight’, lifted above the crowds, remote, untouchable.44
At the king’s side, the royal chronicler documenting proceedings noted the first indications of Catherine’s approach: the expectant shifting of the crowds, and the royal heralds pushing them back. Then came the young lords and their attention-seeking gallants, ‘making gambads’, pirouetting their decorated horses to shouts of approbation from the onlookers.45 Following them, surrounded by a mass of footmen, rode the animated Prince Henry and, alongside him, Catherine. A tiny, upright figure on muleback, she wore a hat of deep red, her auburn hair falling down about her shoulders. Bringing up the rear came the ladies of Queen Elizabeth’s household paired with Catherine’s. The spectacle seemed to convince even the most coolly appraising of London’s bourgeoisie, including the sceptical, ascetic young legal student Thomas More. More wrote to his former schoolmaster John Holt that everything about the reception was superb, apart from Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting who, he sneered, looked like ‘refugees from hell’ – Isabella had evidently not seen fit to prioritize Henry and Elizabeth’s pleas for comeliness. But when it came to the princess herself, More was positively dreamy: ‘Take my word for it, she thrilled the hearts of everyone; she possesses all those qualities that make for beauty in a very charming young girl. Everywhere she receives the highest of praises, but even that is inadequate.’ He concluded, though, on a slightly hesitant note: ‘I do hope this highly publicized union will prove a happy omen for England.’ It was as if, in their staggering magnificence and heaping up of favourable portents and astrological conjunctions, More felt that the festivities were somehow tempting fate.46
The procession came to a halt in front of the house commandeered by the king, and the fifth pageant. Built over the Standard, another of London’s conduits and a notorious place of punishment, the tableau was a stylized heaven in which mellifluous choirs of angels – Cornish’s highly trained child singers – surrounded an enthroned godlike figure dressed entirely in gold. A second character dressed as a bishop, gesturing towards the onlooking Henry VII, compared him with the costumed deity: ‘Right so,’ he declaimed, ‘our sovereign lord the king/ May be resembled to the king celestial/ As well as any prince earthly now living.’ Looking from one to the other, the onlookers must have been struck by the uncanny resemblance: the costumed god of the pageant was made up to look like Henry himself. Under the king’s approving eye, the enthroned actor showered the princess with benedictions, blessing ‘the fruit of your belly’. Kingliness, as embodied by Henry VII, was next to Godliness.47
At the top of Cheapside, Catherine reached the final pageant. The Little Conduit, in front of the church of St Michael Le Querne, marked the eastern entrance to St Paul’s churchyard. Here, the costumed figure of Honour showed Catherine that she had reached the end of her quest, indicating as he did so two vacant thrones, containing crowns and sceptres, on either side of him, awaiting the happy couple. Receiving gifts of gold and plate from London’s dignitaries, the party then progressed around the streets bounding the churchyard before entering the cathedral where, giving thanks and making offerings, Catherine was blessed by the archbishop of Canterbury. When she emerged, the procession broke up, Catherine and her retinue withdrawing to the bishop of London’s palace on the north side of St Paul’s churchyard. Prince Arthur headed southwest, where the city shelved steeply towards the river in a tangle of backstreets, to his lodgings at the Great Wardrobe, one of the inner-city royal houses.48 Prince Henry, meanwhile, overnighted at the bishop of Durham’s great house on the Strand. The various nobles, servants in tow, retired to their ‘places, lodgings and inns’ scattered throughout the city.
The following day, Saturday, the king received the Spanish ambassadors at Baynard’s Castle, his lavishly rebuilt residence on the Thames, east of Blackfriars.49 With the two princes at his right and left, he listened as the ambassadors itemized the terms of the forthcoming marriage, in particular, the ‘assureness’ of Catherine’s virginity. As the afternoon wore on, Catherine was brought down the hill to Baynard’s Castle for an introduction to Queen Elizabeth, in whose frank brown-eyed gaze, cupid’s-bow mouth and strawberry-blonde hair so characteristic of the Plantagenets Catherine would have immediately seen the resemblance to the boy who had accompanied her through London’s streets the previous day. The queen and young princess immediately clicked. Formalities over, the afternoon dissolved into something altogether more relaxed: conversation flowed, unforced; Elizabeth called for ‘disports’, music and dancing. Late in the evening, ‘with torches lit to a great number’, Catherine was conveyed through the dark, silent streets back up the hill to her lodgings.50
Mid-morning on Sunday 14 November, the gates of the bishop of London’s palace swung open. Through them, surrounded by a multitude of English and Spanish nobility and with Prince Henry at her side, Catherine emerged, a vision in white satin, Spanish style, along a wide carpet of blue cloth. She wore a hooped, pleated dress and a headdress of white silk bordered by gold and precious stones, her face veiled. Henry VII’s courtiers, meanwhile, had dressed to impress – and impressed the onlookers duly were, London’s merchants pricing everything they saw. The highlight was, predictably enough, Buckingham, whose gown, worth a staggering ?1,500 – the cost of all the pageants put together – elicited gasps from the crowd. Trumpet fanfares blared out as the party paraded across the square and up the broad steps to the cathedral’s west door, where the marriage agreements, including the paperwork for the long-negotiated dowry, were exchanged between the English and Spanish dignitaries.51
Inside, the cathedral’s cavernous interior was transformed, its walls hung with massive tapestries.52 Under its stained-glass rose window, the high altar glinted with gold plate, ornaments and relics encrusted with precious stones. And from the west door, an elevated walkway covered in fine red cloth stretched the length of cathedral, some six hundred feet, to a stage in the round where the ceremony was to take
