Cromwell was hands on, supervising the surveyance of property and overseeing transfers and various settlements of the clergy and nuns who ran the monasteries, as well as dealing with travellers, the poor and the sick, and converting these properties into funds. Cromwell usually oversaw every stage personally and frequently came up against protest and obstruction; in these cases he was instructed by Wolsey to use money to make the problem go away.
His skill with property was as useful as his skill with languages; in Wolf Hall, Wolsey asks if he has any Spanish, as he feels that it might be more useful to have friends in the queen’s household. With the king’s growing misgivings about his first marriage to Katherine of Aragon, sometime between 1526 and 1527, Mantel’s Wolsey is talking about spies who might report back on what the queen said in unguarded moments thinking she would not be overheard or understood when she heard the news that the king wished to marry another woman.
As Wolsey notes, this is not Henry’s problem or Katherine’s problem – it is the Cardinal’s.
KATHERINE OF ARAGON
In Wolf Hall we are told Cromwell admires Katherine. Outwardly she wears the clothes of a queen, ‘gowns so bristling with gemstones that they look as if they are designed less for beauty than to withstand blows from a sword’; however, underneath ‘she wears the habit of a Franciscan nun’.
Katherine of Aragon had more royal blood than Henry and all his wives put together, a far superior royal education, and more royal dignity. Born during a military campaign, she was a woman whose military knowledge was equal to that of any prince of Europe. A woman who loved, lost, and never wavered in her determination that Henry could not dismantle her life on a whim. Perceptions of Henry’s first queen are often coloured by what became known as the king’s ‘great matter’, but there is more to Katherine than the divorce, she is more than an unhappy element in a love triangle.
Katherine was born into one of the most powerful families of Europe, the daughter of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, both monarchs in their own right, who founded an impressive dynastic power. She grew up in the sophisticated, unrivalled majesty of the Alhambra, the palace fortress complex in Granada, Spain, her parents ensuring she and her sisters received the same education as their brother, Juan. Under her tutor Alessandro Geraldini, Katherine studied arithmetic, canon and civil law, classical literature, genealogy and heraldry, history, philosophy, religion, theology and languages such as Spanish, Latin, French and Greek. She was a highly desirable catch, just what the Tudors needed. The match raised some eyebrows, as the Spanish ambassador at the Tudor court, Rodrigo de Puebla, remarked: ‘Bearing in mind what happens every day to the kings of England, it is surprising that Ferdinand and Isabella should dare think of giving their daughter at all.’
Katherine had a legitimate and stronger claim to the English throne than King Henry VII. She was the great-great-grand-daughter of the second wife of John of Gaunt, Constance of Castile. In contrast, Henry VII was a descendant of Gaunt’s third marriage to Katherine Swynford, whose children were all illegitimate. The advantageous alliance of Katherine and Prince Arthur, who represented the union of the houses of Lancaster and York, now further validated the House of Tudor, gaining the acceptance of European monarchs and the Pope, and their claim to the English throne. The match was approved and they were married by proxy on 19 May 1499.
T
HE
S
PANISH
P
RINCESS
Katherine arrived in England in 1501, and Henry VII immediately wished to view England’s prize. Growing impatient with her slow progress from the coast, in an impetuous gesture he rides down to meet the Spanish party. In Wolf Hall, Wolsey describes King Henry striding into the rooms where Katherine was staying, where upon seeing her for the first time he is rendered speechless. Katherine was a beautiful, 16-year-old princess and her marriage to the 15-year-old Prince Arthur excited the entire country, with its promise of prosperity, unity with the great kingdom of Spain, and a long succession of progeny. Katherine and Arthur were wed, moving first to Baynard’s Castle, then Windsor, and finally to Ludlow in Wales, where the young couple would set up royal residence. Tragically, within a year, Arthur was dead, and Katherine quickly made it known that the marriage had never been consummated. Whether this declaration was calculated, or whether she was telling the truth, we shall never know. In Wolf Hall, Cromwell contemplates a young, widowed Katherine he never knew, who insisted she was still a virgin. Perhaps they should have verified her statement at the time, he thinks – Katherine, although fearful, would not have objected:
‘But they never asked her to prove what she claimed; perhaps people were not so shameless in those days.’
Only six years older than the young Prince Henry, Katherine still possessed all the qualities found in an ideal queen, but it seemed that both Henry and his father, the recently widowed Henry VII, had their eye on her. Thankfully, Katherine’s parents rejected the proposal of the elder king and it was agreed that Prince Henry would wed his brother’s widow.
The decision to betroth her to Arthur’s brother, Henry, rescued both dowry and alliance, and pleased both sets of parents. But there was an issue: the marriage between Katherine and Arthur had created an affinity between Katherine and Henry. The devout Ferdinand requested a papal dispensation, and accordingly a papal
