But Ferdinand's best allies in England were the English nobility. Fighting came as naturally to them as it did to the
hidalgos
and
grandees
of Spain. The leaders of the pack were the Howards. Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, had three fine sons by his first wife, Elizabeth Tilney: Thomas, the heir, Edward and Edmund. Now each was spoiling for a fight: on land or at sea, in the tilt-yard or on the battlefield. All were expert jousters. But they preferred the real thing since the risks and the rewards of war were greater. The problem was that England remained officially at peace. Then, in June 1511, two Scottish ships captained by Andrew Barton entered English waters. The Scots claimed that Barton, a favourite of King James IV, was a privateer: in other words, that he had been licenced by his sovereign to carry out specific reprisals to redress wrongs done. The English called him a pirate. Sir Edward Howard (who was acting as deputy to the ageing Lord Admiral, the Earl of Oxford) and his brother Lord Thomas, fought a naval battle with Barton off the Downs. Barton was killed, his two ships captured and his men brought back in triumph to London in September 1511.
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The swaggering return of the Howard brothers with their prisoners and their spoils brought the divisions in the King's Council to a head. James IV was Henry VIII's brother-in-law and, thanks to the renewal of the Anglo-Scottish treaty in June 1509, his ally also. On both grounds, the King of Scotland was outraged by the treatment the Howards had meted out to Barton. He wrote to remonstrate with Henry accordingly. But Edward Howard was shameless in his aggression ('wanton' is how a contemporary describes his attitude) and 'marvellously incendith [fires] the King against the Scots'. The result was a letter from Henry that added insult to James's injury. It was no business of a prince, Henry loftily told his brother monarch, to equate 'doing justice on a pirate or a thief ' with a breach of amity and alliance.
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The feverish atmosphere at Court was further heightened when Darcy returned to Windsor, nursing his grievances. The King and Caroz co-operated to repair his damaged ego and his injured purse. Caroz paid him an over-the-odds daily rate for his men; Henry turned his loan of £1,000 for the expedition into an outright gift. 'Thus the King's money goeth away in every corner', one of the peace party complained.
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Meanwhile, Henry's envoy, Dr John Young, had been sent to France to demand that Louis XII make proper submission to the pre-eminence of the Pope. Louis had returned a dusty answer and Young complained that 'never man had worse cheer than he in France'.
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Events, in short, were on a knife-edge and the set-piece debate in the Council on the choice of war or peace was a close-run thing. At first, the peace party carried the day. But the return of Young, with Louis's dismissive message, provided Henry with the ammunition he needed to reverse the verdict. Responding to the King's cry of 'the Church in danger', the Council decided on war.
In November 1511, England joined the 'Holy League' of Ferdinand of Aragon, the Emperor Maximilian and Pope Julius. Thus, ironically, Henry, the future Supreme Head of the Church of England, fought his first battles in defence of the most extravagant temporal claims of the Papal monarchy. For, in return for his attack on the 'schismatic' Louis XII, Pope Julius had promised to transfer the kingdom of France to Henry – providing he defeated the French first.
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* * *
While the debate about war or peace still raged, Catherine had wisely kept in the background. Whatever her influence behind the scenes, the decision was Henry's and had to be seen as Henry's. But, once war was decided upon, Catherine began to emerge as an important force in her own right. Her first role was to help hold together the Anglo-Spanish alliance, which proved shaky from the start. This was inevitably difficult, since it cast her yet again as pig-in-the-middle between her husband and her father. Her actions were ambiguous then and they remain a little hard to interpret even today.
The plan of campaign was for England and Spain to launch a joint attack on France by 1 April 1512. Ferdinand suggested that the attack take place in the area of Guienne. Situated in the extreme south-west of France, just across from the Spanish frontier, it formed part of the Duchy of Aquitaine to which the King of England had a historic claim. An impressive expeditionary force set sail under the Marquess of Dorset and landed at the frontier town of Fuenterrabia. But then Ferdinand indeed made April fools of his allies by repeating his tricks of the previous year. Instead of his army under the Duke of Alba joining the English in laying siege to Bayonne, it overran the defenceless little Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre.
Meanwhile, the English, without the victuals and transport which Ferdinand had promised, were stuck in Fuenterrabia, where, very conveniently from Ferdinand's point of view, they blocked the path of any French force sent to rescue Navarre. Dorset's soldiers behaved as English youths do in Spain. They ate too much garlicky food, drank too much wine, caught the sun and got diarrhoea. They chatted up Spanish girls and got into fights with Spanish men. Finally, when Henry, giving in at last to Ferdinand's cajolery, instructed them to join the Spanish army in Navarre and over-winter abroad, they refused. Dorset, faced effectively with mutiny, had to agree to return to England.
The debacle was almost entirely Ferdinand's responsibility. But he resolved to brazen it out and sent envoys to England to throw the blame on Dorset's mismanagement and the English lack of experience in warfare.
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The Spanish envoys had separate letters of credence to Catherine and naturally sent first to her. She, however, replied that it would be improper for her to receive them before they had audience with her husband. Instead she gave them good advice. Don't rush things, she advised: 'the King was already informed how shamefully the English had behaved, and that he was very angry with them'. The ambassadors were then invited to a show 'trial', in which the English captains all accepted Ferdinand's version of events and likewise threw the blame on Dorset, who, handily, was absent and seriously ill. Finally the ambassadors had a private audience with the Queen. She informed them that 'she had told the King and some of his councillors that they ought to give money to [King Ferdinand] with which to carry on the war in Guienne, if they wished to win that duchy'.
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What was Catherine doing? If we accept the Spanish despatches at face value there is no doubt: Henry's wife had sided with her father. She was using her superior age and worldly wisdom to lead her inexperienced husband by the nose to the benefit of Spain and the detriment of England. It is not a pretty portrait of a marriage. Henry appears weak to the point of simplicity and Catherine deceitful, even treacherous. But the picture depends on assuming, with the Spanish envoys, that Henry really had swallowed Ferdinand's bluster. In fact, we have Catherine's own word for it that Henry had been aware of Ferdinand's duplicity for months. As early as September, he had been speculating on the possibility of having to carry on the war effort alone in the event of Ferdinand and the Pope backing out – though in public he protested that he 'firmly believed that neither . . . would ever desert him'. Likewise Henry's ministers wrote of Ferdinand's 'slackness' and dismissed his envoy as a 'man full of words'. But equally Henry, his advisers and, above all, his Queen were aware that Ferdinand was England's only serious ally in the war against France. If Henry wanted to keep Ferdinand on his side for the campaign of 1513, he had to pretend to accept Ferdinand's version of the Guienne campaign of 1512. And he had to make the pretence convincing.
This is where Catherine came in.
She
told the Spanish envoys that Henry accepted their master's version of events. Then the King and his ministers laid on the show trial to give substance to Catherine's words. There are signs that the Spanish themselves suspected that they might be being taken for a ride. Most of the proceedings of the 'trial' were conducted in English, and they had to rely on Henry's Latin translation of what the accused captains said in their excuse. Clearly suspicious about the unanimity of the replies, as translated by Henry, the envoys afterwards asked some councillors in Latin and five others in French for their version of the answers. Exactly the same formulae were repeated. The element of collusion and rehearsal is obvious. The participants even found it hard to keep a straight face. Half way through, apparently, the accused asked and were granted permission to rise from their knees to await the verdict. Such consideration was a rare luxury in a Tudor court of law. Moreover, the 'trial' was extra-judicial. Despite the confessions of the accused, no one was punished, and no one, not even Dorset himself, seriously lost favour. Instead Dorset went on to play a leading part in the French campaign of the following year. But the ritual humiliation of the English commanders (most of whom deserved it anyway for their spinelessness in the face of their badly behaved men) had done enough. Honour was satisfied all round and Ferdinand's ambassadors could proceed to renew the treaties for another year of campaigning against France. Catherine's final comment in her private audience with the Spaniards held out the additional bait of an English subsidy for a new invasion of Guienne: sign on the dotted line for cash, Ferdinand was told.
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But is this really a more attractive picture of Catherine's behaviour? Does it not simply reverse her role and show her deceiving her father on behalf of her husband? Actually, as Catherine well knew, you had to be up very early in the morning to deceive Ferdinand. Rather, she was telling him what he wanted to hear. And she was doing so to preserve his great creation: the Anglo-Spanish alliance.
Since her marriage, as Catherine was also aware, the alliance had worked to Ferdinand's benefit. Now she threw herself into making sure that England reaped at least equal reward.
* * *
The decision to continue the war in 1513 offered the opportunity. Wisely, Henry and his advisers had decided to learn from their mistakes in 1512 and do better. Catherine was in the thick of the attempt, working alongside her husband and using her unique position and her own expertise to complement his efforts.
She played an important role in the diplomacy. One of the key advantages of England as a member of the Holy League was that, with the Pope as an ally and fighting in his name, it could call on the censures of the Church to demoralise its enemies and keep waverers and neutrals on the side. But these spiritual weapons had to be handled carefully. If they were deployed in too obviously partisan a way they lost their edge: as James IV of Scotland sneeringly told the English ambassador, Henry VIII 'was fortunate that ye had such a Pope so favourable to your Highness, and that was entered the League'. Catherine was especially useful in heading off such criticism. As Henry's confidante as well as his consort, she was known to speak for him. And yet, as Queen Consort, she had no constitutional role. Instead, she was a sort of 'official spokesman', authoritative yet disavowable.
And it was in this capacity that she intervened decisively in AngloScottish relations.
England's drift to war with France had placed the little kingdom of Scotland in an awkward dilemma. Its historic traditions tied it to France in the 'Auld Alliance'; more recently, Ferdinand had brokered the settlement with England as part of his policy of encircling France. Would Scotland return to its old alignment or stick with the new? No one, including James IV himself, quite knew. And neither he nor his brotherin-law Henry handled things well. Henry was heavy-handed, using the stick when the carrot would have been more effective. Meanwhile, the mercurial James played with fire, assuring England of peace on the one hand while, on the other, renewing the 'Auld Alliance' with France and making threatening manoeuvres against the great Border fortress of Berwick-on-Tweed.
Amid all this male posturing, Catherine played a cool feminine hand and on 18 September 1512 she wrote to Richard Bainbridge, CardinalArchbishop of York, who was in Rome. There Bainbridge had an important double role: he was the English ambassador to the Pope; he was also, as a resident cardinal, a leading member of the Papal Court and a personal favourite of Pope Julius II himself. In both capacities, he was frankly partisan: a true John Bull in a cassock. The French ambassador in Rome, wrote Bainbridge, was 'as partial a Frenchman as I am an Englishman' – 'I pray God give him an evil trist!' he added uncharitably. Catherine's letter to Bainbridge was ostensibly purely personal, a 'familiar letter'. And it contained only news, beginning with a highly coloured account of James IV's manoeuvres against Berwick and going on to describe how the English had countered by sending the Earl of Surrey to the Borders to shake up the military organisation of the north. There was no hint of what Bainbridge might do with this information, much less instructions as to what he should do – instructions which Catherine of course was not empowered to give.
Yet Bainbridge did not hesitate. Catherine's letter reached him in early November. The moment he read it he hurried to Pope Julius and, by 24 November, had obtained a Papal Brief or letter threatening James with excommunication for attacking Henry while Henry was engaged in Holy War against the French, the enemies of the Church.
The following spring, the Brief and a Bull giving effect to the threat were delivered to James by Dr Nicholas West, the English ambassador to Scotland. James blamed the excommunication on Bainbridge's meddling, 'albeit', he said, 'it was by information given from England'. This West denied. 'It was the Pope's own motion, helped on by the Cardinal,' he asserted smoothly. Thanks to the fact that Bainbridge's 'information' had come from Catherine rather than from Henry, West stood – just – on the right side of the truth.
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