Catherine and Anne: rival queens

Catherine of Aragon
daughter and sister of reigning queens.
Public domain

Catherine of Aragon

Catherine was born in December 1485, the fifth child and fourth daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. In March 1489 at the age of three she was betrothed to Henry VII’s son Prince Arthur at Medina del Campo in what Henry regarded as a diplomatic coup for his still insecure dynasty. 

Isabella had received little formal education but she made sure that her daughters learned Latin, and this was the language with which Catherine first communicated with Arthur. Her daughters were also taught music, dancing, needlework, falconry, horse-riding and hunting. She was later to sew her husband’s shirts, and continued to do so after her marriage broke up - much to the fury of Anne Boleyn. Surprisingly, no attempt was made to teach her English, and when she did learn to speak it, it was with a strong Spanish accent.

Catherine at the age of 11
by Juan de Flandres,
showing the red hair she had
inherited from Isabella
Public domain

In May 1501 she finally set off from the Alhambra for England. She and her future husband were both 13. She did not reach Plymouth until October. She and Arthur were married in St Paul’s Cathedral on 14 November. The wedding night is the most disputed in English history. Was the marriage consummated? 

After the wedding she accompanied Arthur to Ludlow Castle, the border fortress that was the temporary home of the Prince of Wales. On 2 April 1502 the prince died. Catherine returned to London and settled into Durham House on the Thames. As a childless widow, her position was vulnerable. Far from ordering her back to Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella wanted her to marry again and they set their sights on Arthur’s brother, Henry, now the heir to the throne, and six years younger than Catherine.

Legally, Catherine was Princess Dowager of Wales. But was she? Her ‘lady mistress’, Doña Elvira insisted that she was still a virgin. Ferdinand and Isabella took the claim seriously, but there was no way of verifying it. In 1503 it was agreed that Catherine should marry Henry, and both the English and Spanish sides agreed that a papal dispensation was needed. The wording of the dispensation allowed for the fact that the marriage had 'perhaps' been consummated.

Over the next few years Catherine was often ill and depressed and she was short of money while Henry VII and Ferdinand squabbled over her dowry. In 1505 on the eve of his 14th birthday, Prince Henry denounced the marriage treaty. This was a diplomatic ploy in order to extract more of the dowry from Ferdinand.  

Catherine as queen

Then just when her fortunes were at their lowest ebb, Henry VII died on 21 April 1509. On 11 June Catherine married Henry VIII.

Catherine's badge as queen,
the crowned pomegranite

Advocate of Spain: When a queen married, she was faced with a potential conflict of loyalties. Her marriage had been arranged by her parents for diplomatic reasons and she was expected to further the interests of her native country. But as queen, she also owed loyalty to her new country and it was often a difficult balancing act to reconcile the two.

Catherine was always fervently pro-Spanish and at first she furthered the interests of her father, Ferdinand. This meant supporting Henry's war against France. When he left for France in June 1513 she became ‘Regent and Governess of England, Wales and Ireland’. This meant that she could raise armies, appoint sheriffs, approve church appointments and control the nation’s finances.  But she was dismayed when her father backed out of the war and signed a peace treaty with France. After this her loyalty was to England.


While Henry was in France, a Scots army under James IV crossed the Tweed. Catherine sent artillery, gunners, and a fleet of eight ships north. She put the earl of Surrey in command of the English army and ordered a second army to be raised from the East Midland counties. In the autumn she began to move north. Contemporaries began to compare her to her mother, Isabella. She was in Buckinghamshire when she heard the news of the English victory at Flodden.

Surrey sent her part of the dead king’s coat as a trophy, which she sent on to Henry. She would also have liked to send his embalmed body as well but English squeamishness would not allow her. She said to Wolsey, 

To me is it…the greatest honour that ever a prince had; for his subjects in his absence not only to have victory, but also to slay the king and many of his noblemen. 

Intercessor: Catherine played another important queenly role – that of merciful intercessor – when she appealed for the lives of the Evil May Day rioters, who had launched attacks on foreigners. 

After this, she was very popular with the Londoners and her popularity was to present Henry with a problem. 


The great failure: In December 1510 Catherine gave birth to a son but he died in February 1511 at the age of nine weeks. 

A poignant moment. Catherine watches a joust held to
celebrate the birth of her son.
Public domain

Her daughter, Mary, was born in February 1516. Her last pregnancy was in 1518. The details of her pregnancies are often obscure, but she seems to have had three live births and at least three stillbirths or miscarriages. She was six years older than Henry and by the mid-1520s, it was obvious she was not going to present him with a son. However, Mary was an instrument of Henry's diplomacy, and in 1521 she was betrothed to her cousin, Charles V. Catherine was mortified when the betrothal was broke off four years later.

Mary at the time of her engagement
to Charles V.
National Portrait Gallery
Public domain.

As the daughter of a reigning queen, she saw no reason why Mary could not inherit the throne and be a successful ruler, but for Henry the lack of a male heir was a real problem. Then, when he became infatuated with Anne Boleyn in 1526, he began to question his marriage. If Catherine had had a son, the issue of her marriage to her husband’s brother, raised by a text in Leviticus, is unlikely to have arisen, but the lack of an heir, added to the pressure from Anne Boleyn, brought her world crashing about her.

Anne Boleyn: courtier's daughter

Because Anne Boleyn's great-grandfather, Geoffrey Boleyn, made his fortune as a merchant in the City of London, much has been made of her comparatively humble origins. However, most of her ancestors were from the nobility. Her mother, Lady Elizabeth Howard, was the daughter of the 2nd Duke of Norfolk. On her father's side she was related to the Dukes of Ormonde. 

Thomas Boleyn, her father, was a diplomat and courtier. In 1512 he was sent on a diplomatic mission to the Low Countries and the court of the Archduchess Margaret. As a result of this mission, he was able to arrange for his daughter to be educated there as a fille d'honneur. In 1513 she wrote her first known letter from this court to her father (in clumsy French). From Margaret's household, she transferred to the household of the king's sister, Mary, the queen of France. From this she gained a position at the French court, first with Mary, the wife of Louis XII, then with Queen Claude, wife of François I. 

Anne Boleyn by Hans Holbein
One of the few contemporary portraits.
Public domain

In 1521 she was recalled to England in order to marry James Butler the heir to the earl of Ormonde. But there were confusing claims to the earldom, and while this was being sorted out, Anne became maid of honour to Queen Catherine. Her first recorded appearance at court was at a Shrovetide masque in 1522. She quickly became renowned for her dark looks (at a time when fairness was the ideal), her long neck, her skill in French, singing, and dancing, and her wit. 

This was a conventional career for the daughter of a courtier, brought up to make an advantageous marriage. The complication arose when the king fell in love with her. 

Henry and Anne

This probably occurred at the Shrovetide joust in 1526. The next conventional thing would be for Anne to become Henry's mistress, like her sister Mary. Yet this is where Anne did not play by the book. Between 1527 and 1528 Henry wrote her seventeen undated letters, which make it clear that, though certain liberties seem to have been granted, there had been no full sexual consummation, The letters are written in the conventional language of courtly love, but this was not a conventional situation. 

By the spring of 1527 Henry had convinced himself that his first marriage was not lawful and must be annulled. He now believed that Anne offered him two things: sexual fulfilment and the hope of a son. 

Catherine and Anne

From 1527 Henry found himself between two strong, stubborn women. Anne's weapons were her comparative youth, her sexual attractiveness, and the promise of her son. But Catherine had her own powerful armoury. One was her popularity. The other was her own character. She had inherited her mother’s stubbornness and strong-mindedness, and she refused to bow to the pressure to enter a convent. Above all, she had the support of her nephew, Charles V. On 6 May 1527 his troops sacked Rome. Pope Clement VII was now at his mercy, which meant that Cardinal Wolsey's attempts to bring about the divorce were bound to fail. 

The break with Rome

In June 1529 Catherine defended herself before Cardinal Campeggio at the Legatine Court at Blackfriars. 

Sir, I beseech you for all the love that hath been between us, and for the love of God, let me have justice. Take of me some pity and compassion, for I am a poor woman and a stranger born out of your dominion. I have here no assured friends, and much less impartial counsel. … I have been to you a true, humble and obedient wife, ever conformable to your will and pleasure, that never said or did any thing to the contrary thereof, being always well pleased and contented with all things wherein you had any delight or dalliance, whether it were in little or much. … This twenty years or more I have been your true wife and by me ye have had divers children, although it hath pleased God to call them out of this world, which hath been no default in me. … When ye had me at the first, I take God to be my judge, I was a true maid without touch of man. … I most humbly require you, in the way of charity and for the love of God… to spare me the extremity of this new court until I may be advised what way and order my friends in Spain will advise me to take. And if ye will not extend to me so much impartial favour, your pleasure then be fulfilled, and to God I commit my cause.

With the failure of the court to reach a resolution, Henry VIII made the momentous decision to summon what became known as the Reformation Parliament. In its long-term implications, it is perhaps the most significant event in English history, and it came about because both Catherine and Anne were equally determined to hold on to what they saw as their rights. If Catherine had simply agreed to retire to a convent, if Anne had agreed to be a mistress not a wife, events would almost certainly have turned out very differently.

On 14 July 1531, with the court at Windsor, Henry and Anne rode off to Chertsey for hunting, and Catherine never saw him again. At the age of 45, she was now alone. She was sent to The More in Hertfordshire, and when her daughter Mary was sent to Richmond, she never saw her again.

At the end of 1532, as the Reformation Parliament moved - slowly at first, then with increasing momentum - to set up a Church independent of Rome, with the king as its head - Anne Boleyn allowed herself to become pregnant. In January 1533, she and Henry married secretly. On 1 June, six months pregnant, she was crowned in a lavish ceremony. 

The death of Catherine

Catherine was degraded to the title of 'Princess Dowager. From 1534 she was living in semi-imprisonment at Kimbolton in the Fens, with Charles V unwilling to mount the invasion of England that alone could have restored her to the throne. She died, almost certainly of cancer, on 7 January 1536, and was buried, as Princess Dowager, at Peterborough Cathedral on 29 January. At the end of her life, her conscience was troubled by the fact that it was her obstinacy that had brought about the break with Rome.  

An amazing survival from Ightham Mote, Kent:
the pomegranate of Granada, the arrows
of Aragon, and the castle of Castile.
Not all of Catherine's iconography was destroyed.
My photograph

The fall of Anne Boleyn

But if Catherine was vulnerable, it turned out that Anne was even more so. In September 1533, she gave birth, not to the longed-for son, but to a daughter. Until she had a son, her position was potentially weak. Unlike Catherine, she was not popular. More importantly, as an Englishwoman, and a subject, she had no powerful continental allies. 

Although Anne showed unseemly delight at Catherine's death, it made her more vulnerable. While she lived, Henry was committed to his marriage to her; now he was freer to look around. By strict Catholic standards, he was a widower. On the day of Catherine's funeral, she miscarried of a foetus that was probably male.

 She also had a rival. Since the summer of 1535, Henry had become preoccupied with Jane Seymour, whose placid and submissive demeanour seemed a welcome contrast to Anne's haughtiness and volatility.

On 2 May 1536 Anne was arrested at Greenwich. She was taken by water to the Tower and on 15 May she and her brother, George, Viscount Rochford, were tried for adultery and plotting the king's death. On 17 May he and four other alleged lovers were executed on Tower Hill. On 19 May Anne was executed. On the following day, Henry was secretly betrothed to Jane Seymour. On 30 May they were married.

The most extraordinary aspect of Anne's fall is its extreme suddenness. Historians are divided about its reasons. A minority believe Anne guilty of adultery, but others have seen her as the victim of a coup launched by Thomas Cromwell. But why did he plot the coup? Was it in order to bring about an imperial alliance or because he and Anne had come to disagree about religion?

An alternative explanation, is that Anne was simply brought down by gossip and careless speech. She had not been unfaithful to Henry but she had been indiscreet and given him the excuse he needed to get rid of her.

Conclusion

1. The stories of Catherine and Anne show how the failure to produce a male heir could make a queen extremely vulnerable, particularly when another woman was waiting in the wings.
2. But although she did not realize it until it was too late, Anne was more vulnerable than Catherine. There was always the possibility (though it never materialized) that Charles V would intervene on her behalf. But when Henry turned against her, Anne was completely friendless. 
3. Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that their two daughters were to become reigning queens.