that left her in ‘unearthly spirits’ of jubilation. Finally, she felt able to do something decisive. Her latest letters, though, were not those of the inscrutable Gioconda she now felt herself to be, but of a young girl utterly at the mercy of events. She told her father about a recent exchange with Henry, just before his departure on progress that summer, in which she had passed on Ferdinand’s latest positive dispatch to the king and ‘explained the ciphers to him’. Henry – unsurprisingly – had shown himself ‘much gratified’, and had made positive noises to the effect that obstacles to Catherine’s wedding would be soon overcome. But, he mentioned offhandedly, there was just one thing. He had heard that the king of France, Louis XII, was interested in concluding a new alliance with Spain: at the heart of it would be a marriage between Juana and Louis’ nephew, the count of Foix, something which would, he told Catherine, cause ‘much discord’. He wasn’t, he added, telling her this by way of ‘warning or advice’, he just thought he would mention it, as a matter in which she was ‘personally interested’.39
A new Franco-Spanish treaty would threaten England, wreck Henry’s marriage plans – and, he implied gently, Catherine’s own. She took the hint. Writing breathlessly to her father, she begged Ferdinand not to marry her sister off to Louis XII’s nephew but, she implied, to Henry. If Catherine had set out to act as her father’s agent, she was, wittingly or not, rapidly turning into an English mouthpiece. Ferdinand, who had clearly not been telling his daughter anything like the whole story – and who had evidently only sent her ciphers that she could safely ‘explain’ to the English king without any detriment to Spanish diplomacy – had seen this coming.
Late in August, Catherine journeyed up the Thames valley to join Henry and his son in a state of nervous anticipation about the payment of her marriage portion. She arrived at Woodstock to find that her father had postponed the payments yet again, by another six months. Finally cornering Henry, she asked how the latest delay left her prospects. Welcoming her with the air of a benevolent uncle, Henry told her that he was perfectly happy to accept the postponement. As far as he was concerned, the equation remained the same. Neither he nor his son was bound by any marriage commitment, and until Ferdinand put his money where his mouth was, he had no intention of reassessing the situation. ‘My son and I’, he told Catherine, ‘are free.’ Indeed, Henry added, almost as an afterthought, he had heard from a reliable source at the French court that Ferdinand’s ambassador had recently told Louis XII that he did not believe Catherine’s marriage would ever take place.40 If that were the case, Henry said, Ferdinand would be most welcome to start lining up other prospective suitors for Catherine if he so wished. For all Catherine’s new-found resourcefulness, this latest exchange was shattering.
It also confirmed what had begun to dawn on her: that Henry was perfectly happy to keep rescheduling the payments, although, as she wrote to her father in her latest letter, ‘he would make us believe the reverse’. Henry’s words were kind; his deeds, though, ‘were as bad as ever’. But doubts over her father’s behaviour had also begun to seed themselves in her mind. Surely, she asked Ferdinand, it couldn’t really be that he had told her one thing about her marriage and the French king something entirely different?
Ferdinand’s procrastinating seems to have been as much about disorganization as deception. On progress around Spain, he tended to dump large chests and coffers full of paperwork at whatever house he happened to be at. This was no kind of filing system, as he discovered the following year when unsuccessfully scrabbling around for the Treaty of Medina del Campo, the first marriage agreement between England and Spain that had been signed almost twenty years previously.41 But there was no doubt that Henry’s two-pronged efforts to marry into Spain had complicated the picture. Already thoroughly alarmed by Princess Mary’s impending betrothal to his grandson Charles of Castile, the idea of Henry marrying Juana filled him with horror.
In a fulsome letter to Ferdinand, Henry had painted a glorious vision of the benefits a new Anglo-Spanish entente would bring. His marriage to Juana would profit not just their two countries, but Christendom itself. Not only would Henry be prepared to make the long journey to Spain in person, but he would even go to war on Ferdinand’s behalf – something Ferdinand had been trying to make him do for the best part of two decades. He would go on crusade to North Africa, against the infidel Moors, or, if Ferdinand preferred, against the Turks in Hungary. Henry’s offer, as ever, was not as straightforward as it looked, given that he was trying to prise Ferdinand away from Pope Julius’s anti-Venetian alliance. But there was no doubting his obsession with Juana.
Henry pursued every possible diplomatic avenue, marshalling his own ambassador to the Spanish court and lobbying influential opinion-formers such as Ferdinand’s close adviser, the fiercely intellectual Cardinal Jimenez de Cisneros. As ever, he leaned on the obliging de Puebla, whose dispatches to Ferdinand described a similarly rose- tinted view of the prospective marriage, while adding a few choice details of his own. Henry, de Puebla told Ferdinand, had an ‘incredible love’ for Juana, and was desperate to marry her even if she were indeed a stranger to reason. Frankly, he added, Henry would want the match ‘even if worse things were said of the daughter of your Highness’. He would be a much better husband to her than Philip had ever been, and in his loving company she would quickly recover her sanity – besides which, any mental derangement would hardly affect Juana’s ability to procreate. Catherine, too, added to the barrage of correspondence.42
Writing to her father – in cipher, of course – Catherine described proudly how she had suddenly become useful to the English. She told Ferdinand how she ‘baited’ Henry with apparently ingenuous talk of her sister, all the while maintaining her demure, innocent facade. Henry and his counsellors, she said, ‘fancy I have no more in me than appears outwardly’. But as much as Catherine tried to play this new, dissimulating role, it was one that she found impossible to sustain. The tone of her correspondence veered wildly from desperate self-assertion to panic about her own situation, which she begged her father to resolve, ‘since it is in [your] power to alter the state of things’, stating that she would ‘rather die in England’ than give up her marriage to the prince.43 Catherine saw her future inextricably linked to England’s and, she probably felt, her fate now hinged on the king’s marriage with Juana. If she could help cement it, her own wedding to Prince Henry would surely follow.
Catherine’s new-found boldness with her father masked that she was, in fact, prepared to do whatever Henry asked of her. Not only did the letters she wrote separately to Juana that autumn urge her to marry Henry, their phrasing seemed to come straight out of the English diplomatic handbook. Henry was, she told her sister, ‘a very passionate king’, ‘very wise’ and ‘endowed with the greatest virtues’. The phrasing was such that Henry might as well have been standing over her, dictating while she wrote.44
Ferdinand replied to Catherine and to Henry in much the same way. He was not sure if Juana could be persuaded to remarry – Philip’s death had left her horribly bereaved – but, if so, Henry would of course be first in the queue. In truth, Ferdinand, now undisputed regent of Castile, had no intention whatsoever of relinquishing Juana: the prospect of Henry inheriting the kingdom of Castile in her name, and of Juana giving birth to a brood of Anglo-Spanish heirs, was unthinkable. It was just as well, he gave out, that he had gone to Castile when he did, for he had arrived to find a country in a mess, ‘in great upheaval and scandal before my return’. Although Juana was ‘serene’, she was, he implied, plainly incapable of governing in her own right. Soon, stories emanated from Spain of how, insane with grief for her late husband, she rebuffed all attempts to persuade her to bury him; instead, she careened around the country with his coffined corpse in her baggage train. Highly resentful of Ferdinand’s duplicity over the years, Henry suspected that he was now playing up his daughter’s madness in order to hold on to her throne. It only added fuel to the fire.45
Meanwhile, de Puebla was doing his best to push forward Catherine’s own prospects. As Henry embarked on his intensive round of Juana-related diplomacy, so the ambassador sensed that Ferdinand might, finally, be prepared to pay Catherine’s marriage portion. Trying to smooth the path, de Puebla wrote with advice on financial practicalities, proposing suitable merchant-banking firms in Spain who could draw up bills of exchange ‘for the whole sum of the marriage portion to be accepted in London’. Among the most suitable brokers, he opined, were the Genoese Grimaldi, whose London agent John Baptist ‘enjoys great credit’ and was ‘well known to the King of England’.46
For de Puebla, a great player of the long game, Catherine’s marriage had become his life’s work, a project he had progressed inch by inch, patiently rebuilding it after each collapse. But Catherine, panicky and miserable – hers was ‘always the worst part’, she wrote to her father – had had enough. As ever, she took it out on de Puebla. For years she had been asking Ferdinand to recall him; now, she rehearsed all the old arguments again. Low-born, deceitful and wheedling, he did no honour to Spain, nor to her. The English, she said, found him contemptible, saying that he only came to court to take advantage of the free meals, and he had become a laughing-stock – even Henry found the jokes funny. He had gone native, and was in Henry’s pay; he had done more than anybody else to block her marriage; and he was, besides, old, ill, and ‘nearer death than life’.47 Catherine wanted somebody else: somebody who was fine, upstanding, aristocratic, trustworthy and – not to put too fine a point on it – a good Christian. She was to regret not having been more careful about what she wished for.
Late in September, as the hunting season drew to a close, the royal household moved back down the Thames valley towards London, in slow stages. It stopped at the spacious brick-built manor house at Ewelme, which Henry
