Catherine of Aragon Read Online Free

1501
    There is hardly room for us all in this house, a cold place although Arthur has had glass put in the windows. We will move again to Ludlow Castle, on the borders of Wales, they say.
    I am hurrying to finish embroidering a kerchief for Catherine’s birthday in six days’ time. It is a design of two birds and a twining of vine leaves, done in our Spanish blackwork, a style much admired here by the English ladies.
    The weather is turning very cold.
    15th January 1502
    Today, Margaret will be officially betrothed to James IV of Scotland, though we will not be there to see it. Everyone says we are not missing much – a betrothal is not the same as a full-blown wedding – but any diversion would be welcome. This castle is dank and forbidding, and the misted mountains of Wales loom in a constant shroud of rain.
    The procedures of royal weddings are very strange. Tomorrow there will be a proxy marriage, which is not the real thing but an exchange of vows made by stand-ins. Uncle Rod stood in for Catherine at her proxy wedding years ago, and I can’t imagine anyone who looks less like a bride. Or even, for that matter, like a groom. Poor Uncle Rod – his wife died when Gonsalvo was born, and he has never replaced her, or even seemed to want to.
    The court ladies here eye Catherine constantly – looking, I suppose, for that swelling of the waistline which means a baby is on its way. She remains as slim as ever, and spends much of her time praying in the strange, circular chapel (where every sound echoes in such a ghostly way). Praying for what? For a child, perhaps. Every royal family prays earnestly and constantly for sons, so that a supply of future kings may never be in doubt.
    Maria whispers to me that in Arthur and Catherine’s case there is doubt. One of the English chambermaids told her there was no blood on the royal sheets after their wedding night, and it seems there should have been if, as the woman put it, “they was properly married”. This, too, I do not understand. Maria suggests that we are just the same as dogs and cats and horses – but surely human beings must be different? But the more I think of it, the more I fear she may be right.
    There are alarming rumours about the Scottish king. If we do indeed behave like dogs, then he is a very active one, running after every bitch in sight. He has several children already, it is said, by different women whom he has loved but not married, and yet by all accounts he is a civilized man, scholarly and thoughtful, fond of music and art and keenly interested in science. According to Don Pedro de Ayala, he possesses instruments for the pulling out of teeth, but if he is called on to do this he pays the patient for the pain he has caused. He sounds a strange man, but an interesting one.
    Uncle Rod says James did not really want to marry Margaret because he was deeply devoted to a woman called Margaret Drummond and refused to give her up. The court advisers were at their wits’ end – and then Mistress Drummond conveniently died. It was poison, they say. Her two sisters who shared that final meal with her died also. I was appalled when I heard this. I asked Uncle Rod who had done it, but he shook his head. There are some things it is better not to know, he said.
    15th February 1502
    How long will this winter go on? I am sick with longing for Spain, where the sun shines even in these short days, and at night there is a blaze of stars. Here there is nothing but clouds and greyness and mud and the smell of wet stone. The Spanish courtiers share my discontent, and the only man here with any sense of purpose is Don Alessandro Geraldini, who taught Catherine and me when we were children and is now the priest who hears our confession. He at least is busy, trying to reassure us that we are not forgotten by God in this gloomy place.
    27th March 1502
    Catherine is ill. It began with a shivering fit that worsened by the hour, and now