By the time of Torquemada's death in 1498, the Inquisition had burned some two thousand men and women. Nowadays, the Spanish talent for turning sadism into spectacle finds its expression in the bullfight. Then, its manifestation was the
auto da fé
(act of faith). This was the name given to the grand public ceremonies in which the victims of the Inquisition were condemned and executed. They were held at more or less frequent intervals in every city and substantial town of Spain, and each was a theatrical triumph of the Church Militant. Choirs and clergy processed, carrying the banners and relics of saints and wearing their finest vestments. The heretics were specially clothed, too, in a bizarre, humiliating parody of clerical dress. Sermons were preached and sentence pronounced. Then, before ecstatic crowds, the condemned were stripped, chained to stakes and incinerated.
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* * *
It was to avoid this awful fate that the Moors rose in rebellion in 1500 – thus, incidentally, delaying Catherine's departure for England. We have no idea of Catherine's thoughts on the events which led to the Revolt. But she is most unlikely to have disapproved. She was a conventional, fervently pious Catholic – in this, as in so much else, her mother's daughter. She had been with her parents in Granada when they had promulgated the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. She was at her mother's side when Isabella boasted that, in her eagerness to root out Unbelief: 'I have caused great calamities, and depopulated towns, lands, provinces and kingdoms.' Finally, it is clear that Ferdinand and Isabella hoped that the English alliance, of which Catherine was the pledge, would lead to England adopting the policies of the Inquisition. Prodded by the Spanish ambassador's denunciation of refugees in England, 'who have fled from the Inquisition [and] who speak ill of Spain and wish to excite hatred against her', Henry VII had made extravagant protestations. 'By the faith of his heart' he swore that the enemies of Spain were his enemies and that 'he would punish soundly any Jew or heretic to be found in his realm'.
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In the event, nothing much was done. But Catherine would have been an effective ambassadress for a policy of aggressive persecution, for she undoubtedly embraced the dogmatic attitude to Truth which underpinned it. Like all good Catholics, she understood 'religious belief as something objective, as the gift of God and therefore outside the realm of free private judgement'. She also understood that Holy Church was the exclusive custodian and repository of this objective and divine Truth – and also its appointed protector and defender.
The Church established by Christ, as a perfect society, is empowered to make laws and inflict penalties. Heresy not only violates her law but strikes at her very life, unity of belief.
The penalties must therefore be appropriate: a life for a life. So Catherine believed. And so the best of her contemporaries, including Sir Thomas More, believed also.
But life was to play a cruel trick on Catherine (and indeed on More). For England, where her destiny lay, came to reject the fundamental principles of Catholic dogma. The conscience of her husband and King was to be put above the consensus of the Church. The English nation, not the Universal Church, was to be made the vehicle of God's purpose on earth. The new dogma was as aggressive and intolerant as the old. It also created a new nation. But Catherine was to stick to the old ways of her native Spain. The result was that the daughter of the unimpeachably orthodox Isabella became a dissenter in her adoptive country, and the persecutrix (at least by complicity) found herself a victim.
10. The journey
B
y 1500 the Moors of Las Alpujarras were crushed. Another rebellion broke out around the city of Ronda, perched defensively on its great ravine. But Ferdinand bought the new rebels off. He had more important business in hand: to bid farewell to his last child remaining in Spain, Catherine, the daughter whom he claimed to be his favourite. For Ferdinand and Isabella had, at last, given Henry VII a definite promise that Catherine would leave Spain for England on the Feast of St John the Baptist, 24 June 1501.
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But the sea voyage would be only the last leg of her journey, since Catherine was with her parents in the rebellious Moorish province of Andalusia in the extreme south of Spain. This meant she had to traverse over five hundred miles of mountain passes, river valleys and the vast central plateau known as the
meseta
– dusty, dry and featureless under the summer sun – before she even reached her port of embarkation on the northern coast.
On 15 May Ferdinand returned from the front to join his wife and daughter in Granada. But Catherine herself was too unwell to leave immediately. Her illness was described as 'an ague' or fever. It might equally have been the pain of departure, since she knew that she would, almost certainly, never see her parents or her country again.
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On the 21st she was fit to begin her journey. She travelled without Ferdinand and Isabella, since it was hoped that her comparatively small suite could journey more quickly unencumbered by the vast, slowmoving entourage of her parents' Court. And – also for speed – it was planned that she would lodge modestly, 'at inns and small villages' en route. But haste and the Spanish climate do not agree. 'The heat', Ferdinand and Isabella reported to England, 'is so great that she cannot make long [daily] journeys.' The pace indeed was snail-like: by 5 July she had only reached Guadalupe, the monastery and pilgrimage-site to the south-west of Toledo. After six weeks she was still less than half way to the coast. And she did not arrive in the maritime province of Galicia till early August. The fleet to escort her to England had been assembled in the port of Coruna for months. But she had one last duty to perform in her native land: a pilgrimage to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela to benefit from the indulgence which had been granted for the Jubilee year of 1501, when the Feast of St James (25 July) fell on a Sunday. The final ceremonies were performed and last farewells said and on 17 August she set sail.
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* * *
Within three weeks, she was in Spain once more, driven back by appalling Biscayan storms. The fleet had come near to foundering and had barely made land at Laredo, near Bilbao. The leading nobles escorting her, the Archbishop of Santiago and the Count of Cabra, managed to get word to England. But Henry VII had already heard of their plight and had despatched one of his best captains, Stephen Brett, 'to be on the look for the Princess, and to convey her in the best way to England'.
On Monday, 27 September at 5 o'clock in the afternoon Catherine and her fleet set sail again. The weather was reasonable until they rounded Cape Ushant, which juts into the Atlantic at the western tip of Brittany. Then, as they swung into the Channel, they were struck by gusting southern winds, huge seas and 'thunderstorms every four or five hours'. 'It was impossible not to be frightened,' one of Catherine's suite wrote to her mother.
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The intention had been that Catherine should land at Southampton, since, Isabella had heard, it was 'the safest harbour in England'. But needs must and at 3 p.m. on Saturday, 2 October, the fleet gratefully put in at the first possible English port, Plymouth, far to the west.
Catherine's first act was to go in procession to the church, to offer up thanks for her safe arrival. There, as one of the Spaniards piously observed, 'it is to be hoped that God gave her possession of all these realms for . . . long enough to enable her to enjoy life and to leave heirs to the throne'. They were fine hopes. But they were cruelly to be disappointed. Were the storms, as Catherine is later supposed to have seen them, an evil omen?
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11. Arrival
T
here were no signs of such gloomy thoughts when the towns folk of Plymouth welcomed ashore their future Princess of Wales and Queen. 'She could not have been received with greater rejoicings if she had been the Saviour of the World,' Isabella was told in a phrase that must have swelled her mother's heart with blasphemous pride. The English took early to Catherine, and her hold on popular affection always remained secure.
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What makes it the more impressive is that Plymouth's welcome was entirely spontaneous. The English of course had made elaborate preparations for Catherine's reception. But everything had been based on the assumption that she would land at Southampton. So when she came ashore instead at Plymouth, the townsmen and local gentry were left to their own devices to offer their own, impromptu welcome. The town had already begun to enjoy the prosperity which, in the course of the next century, made it home to Francis Drake and the Pilgrim Fathers – those two contrasting products of the Reformation and English Imperialism that were to be the nemesis of Catherine, her House and her country. For now, however, Catherine benefited from the profits of Plymouth's trade and fishing, staying in 'the goodly house towards the haven' built by 'one Painter, a rich merchant'.
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She remained there over a week, as the arrangements for her official welcome were hastily revised. Plymouth is one hundred and fifty miles from Southampton, where the official welcoming party under Lord Willoughby de Broke was assembled. So it was decided that Catherine should be met part-way, at Exeter. First the slowest moving element of the cavalcade – a relatively plain horse litter, for Catherine, and twelve palfreys (or riding horses) for her ladies – was despatched to Honiton. Then Broke himself followed in post, with a new, hastily drafted schedule that itself bore traces of further alterations as Henry VII's administrators adjusted to events on the ground. Having picked up the advance horses and litter, Broke was to arrive at Exeter on 17 October 'at the furthest'. By this time, Catherine had already left Plymouth with an escort of local gentry and nobles. The escorts had also been organised by Broke, who, fortuitously, was the most powerful landowner round Plymouth, and they had been instructed to cover the forty-four miles from Plymouth to Exeter to get Catherine there on the 19th for her formal reception.
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Broke was an obvious choice for the honour of receiving Catherine and conducting her to London. As one of the handful who had shared Henry Tudor's exile in Brittany before he became King, he was a member of the inner circle of Tudor government. He was also, as Lord Steward, the senior officer and administrator of the King's Household. And he was most carefully briefed. The rendezvous went according to plan – as did the rest of the new itinerary, which was stuck to with impressive precision. Catherine would have been struck immediately. Her parents were mighty monarchs, more powerful by far than the English King. But their domestic life and etiquette were relatively informal. Now she was in a different world. Instead of her summer ramble across Spain, there was the military precision of her English journey: she was being inducted into one of the most pompous and ceremonialised courts of Europe.
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Catherine's route to London followed roughly the line of the present A30. Every dozen miles or so there was a halt. The first stop was Honiton, 'a fair long thoroughfare and market-town', with, then as now, handsome houses strung along the highway which also doubled as the main street. Honiton was open, welcoming and snugly prosperous: it would be hard to imagine a greater contrast to the compact, fortified towns and villages of south and central Spain: red- or white-built, with thickly clustered houses and dense warrens of lanes.
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Two or three miles before the next staging post at Crewkerne, Catherine crossed the county boundary. The notables of Devon and Cornwall, who had accompanied her from Plymouth, bade her farewell and handed her over to the dignitaries of Somerset. They included Sir Amyas Paulet and Sir John Speke, who were figures in central as well as local politics. Their country houses lay to the north, that is to the left of the road, where the ground rose quickly: the Paulets at Hinton St George, where Sir Amyas had built 'a right goodly manor place of free stone, with two goodly high towers embattled (that is, with battlements) in the inner court', and the Spekes at White Lackington. Perhaps they pointed out the general direction to Catherine, focusing her eye on another novelty: the English landscape. It was hilly: 'but plentiful of corn, grass and elmwood, wherewith most part of all Somersetshire is enclosed'. No
meseta
, then, but a patchwork of fields, trim hedgerows and, above all, intense, variable greens now shading into the brighter colours of autumn and the greys and browns of early winter.
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Catherine's journey continued, first through Dorset, with halts at Sherborne and Shaftesbury, where she spent the great feast of All Saints Day (1 November) in the Abbey, and then across Cranborne Chase to Amesbury Abbey on the borders of Wiltshire and Hampshire. At Amesbury, where she arrived on the 2nd, there was another formal reception in which she was introduced to one of the greatest English families: the Howards.
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The Howards had narrowly escaped disaster when they fought on the wrong side at Bosworth. The head of the House, John, Duke of Norfolk, was killed, and his son and heir Thomas, Earl of Surrey, was captured and attainted (that is, declared legally dead) by the triumphant Henry VII. But he was brought back to political life through his willingness to transfer his loyalty to the new King. He was restored first to his earldom, then to his estates and finally, in 1501, was made Lord Treasurer. His eldest son, another Thomas, was even allowed to marry the Lady Anne, the sister of the Queen, Elizabeth of York.
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The Earl of Surrey was the nearest thing Catherine had yet encountered to one of the great Spanish nobles or
grandees
of her parents' court. He was a man of honour, proud of his lineage, mistrustful of novelty and, above all, a fighter. Fighting came as naturally to him as it did to the
conquistadors
of Spain: their foe was the Infidel; Surrey's enemy was the French and their sidekicks, the Scots. Accompanying Surrey at Amesbury was his aged relative, the Duchess Elizabeth, the widow of the last Mowbray Duke of Norfolk. The Duchess Elizabeth would have made her own impact on Catherine: she was a formidable personality, whose stained-glass portrait at Long Melford Church in Suffolk served as the model for Tenniel's drawing of the fiery Red Queen in Lewis Carroll's
Alice in Wonderland
. 'Off with her head!' the Red Queen cried. The Howards and their extended family experienced more than their fair share of beheadings in the course of the following decades: sometimes as Catherine's allies, more often as her bitterest enemies.
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