Catherine of Aragon Read Online Free Page A

she lies half-insensible, on fire with fever yet pouring with perspiration. People here call it the sweating sickness. Their main concern is for Arthur, from whom Catherine caught the illness. He seems gravely ill, and although the doctors have bled him, he gets no better.
    Doña Elvira says we should keep to our own rooms for fear of contagion, but Catherine calls for me in her delirium and how could I refuse to go to her? I sponge her face and body with warm water and dry her with a soft towel, but there is little else I can do except sit beside her so that she knows I am there. God protect her.
    Â 
    3rd April 1502
    Prince Arthur died yesterday. A rider has been sent to London, to tell the King. I cannot write much. The fever caught me in turn and I am very weak.
    20th April 1502
    Catherine is alive, though she is still not well. Arthur lies in his coffin in the round chapel, and the air is heavy with the smell of herbs used by the embalmer. They will take him from here in three days’ time to be buried in Worcester Cathedral.
    I still feel shaky and exhausted. My back aches and my fingers are sore from hours of sewing. Countless bales of black silk have had to be cut and stitched into mourning dress for all the people here. Seven courtiers have died of the sickness, and I do not know how many servants.
    4th May 1502
    They are back now from the long business of the funeral. We watched the procession leave the castle ten days ago in torrential rain. Two Spanish noblemen rode at its head to represent Catherine, for she is too weak and ill to leave the castle. The coffin on its bier was pulled by four horses that laboured and steamed in the deep mud, and the men who splashed alongside had a hard job to keep the black canopy above it in place, stumbling and slipping as they were.
    It got worse along the way, they tell me. The horses had to be replaced by oxen, whose powerful bodies and split hooves get a better grip. How shameful, though, that the corpse of gentle Prince Arthur should be hauled through the mire by beasts of the field.
    Don Alessandro was with them. The rain stopped, he says, when they got to Worcester, so at least they could approach the cathedral with fresh black horses and some semblance of dignity. The assembled bishops looked magnificent, he said. I wish I had been there to see them. The English embroidery done for the church is famous all over Europe – the opus Anglicanum, it is called. I saw something of it at Catherine’s wedding, but the robes worn for a funeral would be different, rich and dark.
    Even at this time of grief, the Tudor gift of theatricality did not desert them. The coffin was covered in cloth of gold, and each nobleman who came in added his own golden pall, so that the dead prince lay under a mound of gleaming softness. A man of arms rode a black horse down the aisle of the cathedral, bearing Arthur’s armour and his battle-axe, its head to the floor, and the court officials who carried golden staffs of office broke them in two and cast the pieces into the grave.
    Catherine is beginning to regain her strength, but she seems lost and confused. At sixteen, she is a widow. The courtiers still cling to a faint hope that she may be carrying Arthur’s child, but Doña Elvira shakes her head firmly at any mention of it. Catherine herself says nothing.
    17th June 1502
    At last the weather is dry. It is so good to go out of doors without the hems of one’s dress becoming fouled with mud and one’s shoes sodden. Catherine has had a letter from her mother, who has only just heard of Prince Arthur’s death. Queen Isabella wants Catherine to come home to Spain. She says Ludlow Castle is an unhealthy place, and her daughter must leave it at once. A flutter of hope ran through all the Spaniards here, for all of us long for the sun and for warm tiles under our feet instead of these stinking rushes – but Catherine will not go. Her mouth is set in the obstinate