Dan Snow's History Hit - How Catherine of Aragon Learnt to be Queen

Episode Date: November 12, 2021

The Spanish infanta Catalina of Aragon was raised to be a Queen, betrothed at the age of three to the heir apparent of the English throne, Arthur Prince of Wales. Eight years after Arthur's death, she became the first of Henry VIII's six wives. Catalina's mother - Queen Isabella I of Castile - was the most influential person in her life. Witness at an early age the expulsion of Jews, the defeat of the Moors in Spain, and the triumphal return of Christopher Columbus, Catherine grew up to be an intelligent, highly literate, multi-lingual woman, devoted to her Catholic faith, and a popular, charismatic Queen. In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb discovers more about the early life of Catherine with two leading experts: Dr Theresa Earenfight, Professor of History at Seattle University and author of a forthcoming biography of Catherine, and Emma Cahill Marron, whose dissertation is focused on the Queen's role as a patron of the arts in Tudor England. 

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It's that time of the week when we share one of the best episodes of one of our family of podcasts. This one is from not just the Tudors, Professor Susanna Lipscomb, the legend. Talked to Teresa Ehrenfeit, she's a Professor of History at Seattle University, and Emma Cahill-Marron, who's a biographer. All of them were talking about Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII's first wife. But it says not just the Tudors, and we're not just doing the Tudors, because we're talking about Catherine of Aragon largely before she came to England, when she was the Spanish Infanta Catalina of Aragon. She was the daughter of Queen Isabella of Castile,

one of the most influential women, one of the most influential people in 16th century Europe. She witnessed the expulsion of the Jews, the final defeat of the Moors in Spain, the triumphal return of Christopher Columbus. This is big stuff. It was the prologue to quite a life. Through watching her mother, through living through these events,

she learned how to become a queen. And she would need every single lesson. She'd need every single piece of experience and royal training when she arrived in England, the rainy backwater. To be married to the sign of the upstart Tudor family, Arthur, Henry VIII's older brother. This was a heck of a coup for Henry VII managing to arrange this wedding with one of Europe's finest bloodlines. So anyway, it's a fascinating tale. This is the backstory of Catherine of Aragon. Please go and check out not just the Tudors,

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sign up today. Historyhit.tv. In the meantime, here is a glittering cast with Susanna Lipscomb talking about Catalina of Aragon. So I am delighted to be joined today by both of you because I think the subject of how Catalina of Aragon learned to be queen and her early life is something that hasn't really been covered enough in the existing literature, although of course, Teresa, you're going to be changing that very soon. And both of you have published lots of articles about this that are really important. But let's have a chat about it also. Teresa, could you perhaps start us off by introducing us to Catherine's parents and to their

joint monarchy? For people who study Spain, Catherine's parents were one of the most famous marital couples in Spanish monarchical history. And they were very close in age. She was one year older than he was. They were both groomed to be heads of state, to be a king and a queen. Isabel's pathway to it was a little more rocky than Fernandos because there was a civil war. There were various other family members that wanted to get in the way of it. But by the time they decided to marry and join themselves in a marriage and join their two realms, it was one of the most momentous decisions made in Spanish history because it united a variety of disparate places, language, culture, a whole array of different kinds of things all came together under their marriage. They had five children, one son, four daughters, and Catherine of Aragon

is the youngest of the five. Her oldest brother was supposed to inherit, died young. And the other sisters went off to other kingdoms, largely Portugal, to marry. Juana married the Archduke of the Netherlands who died young and she came back and reigned as Juana I. So her family was royal through and through on both sides of the family. They're related. It's a connected family. And they were, for royal families, surprisingly close in terms of their personal bonds. Most royal families kind of get caught up in tensions, but they maintained fairly close bonds, which is something I'm really interested in looking at now is Catherine's relationship with her sisters. Yes, that's very interesting. I suppose, actually, I realize before we go much further, we should talk about her name because we call her Catherine of Aragon, sometimes spelt with a C and sometimes with a K.

That's not, Emma, the name she was given at birth, though. So what should we call her? How should we spell it? And after whom was she named? That's a very interesting question. I think it's a good idea to start by saying that her actual given name at birth was the Spanish form of Catherine, Catalina, C-A-T-A-L-I-N-A. I think the other second important thing to consider is that she was born just months

after the Battle of Bosworth Field. So as we know, one common practice amongst royalty is the repetition of given names. And in this case, the timing was just right for Isabel and Fernando to give a nod to the new King of England by naming their fifth child after the Queen's English grandmother, Catherine of Lancaster. the Queen's English grandmother, Catherine of Lancaster. Catherine of Lancaster had been King Henry III's consort in Castile, and when he died in 1406, she became regent until her death in 1418 due to their son's finality. So it was no coincidence that this baby girl, born in December 1485, was named after this outstanding female figure that pointed out that Catalina had royal English blood. So in the Spanish sources that cover these first years of her life, she's referred to as the Infanta Catalina, so I believe that would be the right way to call her in this period. I believe

the confusion between the C and the K spelling started when she began signing her letters in English as Catherine with a K. If we were using the same name in convention as we do with the Tudors, it is important to note that she belonged to the house of Trastamara. So technically, we could also call her Catalina Trastamara. I like that. Thank you. So she's born December 15th, 1485. Teresa, you've said that she was the fifth child in her family. What did it mean to be the fifth? It meant that she got all of her mother's attention, as the youngest child often does.

So she was an infanta. Her other sisters were beloved. Isabel, the oldest, was much beloved, but went off to marry quite young. And so Catalina watched her siblings get married. And by the end, she was with her mother for the most of the last bits of her life before she moved to England in 1501, which is kind of a threshold moment for her. And thinking of naming, in the book, I struggle with her name. Like, what do you call her? So when she's in Spain, until the moment she crosses

the threshold to marry, gets into England, then she becomes Catrin, K-A-T-R-Y-N-E of Spain. And then she becomes Catherine, wife of Arthur. So at each moment, her name changes because of those different thresholds. But she learned at her mother's knee how to be a queen. She got firsthand experience. So she watched her mother and father as they persecuted Jews, the Spanish Inquisition, the conquest of Granada, the Colombian voyages began. So she was there, even though she was probably too young to actually appreciate what was going on. But she got to watch all of this. So she was much loved as a child. Let me pick up on this point about the devotion, because did you notice this as well, Emma, because it seems like we do seem to have an unusual amount

of evidence of Isabella's devotion to her children. And I mean, I suppose there's no reason to assume that most mothers throughout history weren't what Donald Winnicott has described as ordinary devoted mothers. And perhaps we know more about it because this is a royal family. But do you ever also get the impression that there's kind of a special love and devotion paid to the royal children of Spain? Yes, I do. And that is correct. But I would like to point out that we are extremely lucky because we have so many sources about Queen Isabel, more than any other queen in that time or woman. So I think that's something to take into consideration. There is a lot of information of her about being a hands-on mother. For example, she called her son, the Infante Juan, mi angel, my angel.

There are other examples of that, but the important thing that I would like to point out is that the devotion and attention that they paid to Juan's preparation to rule was not substantially different to that received by Arthur. I think Isabel was very different in the way she treated her four daughters. She was deeply committed to helping them become the most prepared princesses in Europe to become queens. We have examples of her also being stern and punitive against them, especially in the case of the Infanta Juana, who clearly had a difficult time to adjust to her mother's expectations and later become known as Juana la Loca or Joan the Mad. mother's expectations and later become known as Juana la Loca or Joan the Mad. But the Infanta Catalina was the youngest and probably the brightest sister in Clytus' studious and quiet life and with a very similar personality and physique to her mother. So I think it's very easy to get along with your mother when you're a golden child, don't you think? Yes, I agree. And to give a little bit of credit to the other kings and queens out there that may

have also loved their children, but we don't know about it. We are blessed in Spain with archival riches that make every other person in Europe envious. When I came back from doing my first research project, came back to the United States, one of my dissertation mentors was Marianne Koboleski. And I said to her, I have found 200 registers on the life of Maria of Aragon. And she looked at me and she said, how can that possibly be? And I said, it can possibly be because Barcelona was never bombed to smithereens. Ships didn't go down in the ocean. They are bureaucrats, pure and simple. Everything's in triplicate. We have records everywhere. I mean,

if you don't have it, not that it doesn't exist, it's just not in Spain. So I have a hunch that there may well be very strong affective relationships between kings, queens, and their kids. We just don't know about it because their records are lost or were never written down. Because it's true what Emma said, their records for Isabel are astounding. We have letters, which I have yet to delve into in greater detail because I haven't had a chance to go to Simancas or Valladolid lately. There are household accounts, and this is where I dove in because they were readily accessible. They are printed. They're wonderful sources of household daily life in the royal household, which is really, really wonderful. But we do have wills, we have inventories, we have letters, we have some of their objects, but not all of them. We have architectural remnants. We have an itinerary of where Catherine lived as a child because someone tracked out and recorded down where they all were. So those kinds of sources help us get to

where she went and what she saw and what she wore and what she ate and what kind of shoes she had and how she did her hair. The material culture is really, really rich. And I'll let Emma go into the archival sources because I think you've done more diving into those in the Spanish side than I have. Yes. Everything you said is spot on. There's two big groups of sources. So on the first side is the royal accounts include all these everyday life items and do speak volumes of the magnificence that surrounded her. Just to point out a nice example of Isabel's commitment to her children's development is that sometime during Catalina's second year of life, her mother had a little cart made for her so she could learn how to walk.

So they also trace important educational milestones like the assignment of tutors or the first books that they owned. In the case of Catalina, she had a bravery. The second group that Teresa was referring to was the correspondence. And this is specific to Catalina between Isabel and Fernando and the first permanent ambassador in England, Ruiz González de Puebla, who negotiated the alliance between the Chudos and the Trastámaras. So amongst these diplomatic documents, we find gems like Catalina's first signature as Princesa de Galiz, or Princess of Wales, dated on the 1st January 1497, that marked her entering her 12th year, meaning that she was able to consent to marriage. And

the important thing, I think, about this document is that unlike previous royal women anywhere in Europe, she could read Latin and understand what she was signing at just 11 years old. So I think that is very impressive. Let's build a bit of a picture of this court, though. I mean, in your work, Teresa, you've written about how the Spanish court was itinerant, that Catalina's childhood norm was traveling in these great royal processions. How do you think this shaped her? I think it gave her a cosmopolitan attitude, and it gave her a sense of the world is bigger than one single court. Because if you travel around the Iberian Peninsula, you run across at least 10 different languages when she was alive, different landscapes, different customs, different ways of eating, lands,

whether it's ocean or the Mediterranean or the high plains or the mountains or the north. She really saw a world that was quite diverse. And because it was a crossroads of trade, she saw people coming back and forth. So there were Muslims, Christians, Jews, different religions. There were Africans. There were people from the East. She had a very expansive outlook because she traveled around. I also think I picture her, you know, how like little children are when they go to the airport with their little rolly cart behind them. I imagine her sort of having a little bag that was just hers, the things that

really, really mattered to her. That's completely fictive and imaginary, but I just imagine that one of her governesses would say, Catalina, here's your little maleta, put your stuff in there, and then we're going to put it on the cart because she was all over the place. So she learned to eat different foods, speak to different people. And then the accounts tell us that whenever they would go to a new city, they would try to dress in the costume of the people in the city and eat the foods of those people. So she grew up with an open mind, which I think is a tremendous gift to give to your children. I don't think it was intentional. I think it was just the way they lived. That was for normal. And what do we know, Teresa, about Catalina's own entourage and her household, as it were?

but it's just that handful. We must have been many more. So what you have to do is kind of pull together the court of Isabel and then narrow it down to her smaller court. It kind of like the onion thing, right? That the center of it is her and maybe five or six people. We know that she had a cradle rocker. We know that she had a wet nurse. We know that she had tutors, Beatriz Gallindo.

We know who her confessor was, things like that, but they were also associated with Isabel's court. So there's overlap of the two. And at some point in these years, the decision was made to marry her to the heir of the English throne, Arthur, Prince of Wales. As you said, Emma, why do you think Isabel and Fernando made this choice of spouse for her, Emma? Well, I think the answer is plain and simple, to isolate France. Granted, we've talked about Isabel's power and the connections between the Castilian side of the family and English royalty, but Fernando was a powerful king too.

After all, he inspired Machiavelli to write The Prince. We already know he was king of Aragon and Kinstel, but he had an expanding empire in the Mediterranean and a big presence in Italy, where the French were very active too. He was king of Sicily, of Naples, and of Sardinia. And he had an ongoing battle with the French king over certain territories he believed belonged to him. So his children's marriages became a long-term

strategy to gain allies that would help him neutralize France as the leading power in Europe. England was key in this alliance and very important in protecting the passageway to another crucial territory for his wife's kingdom, Flanders, in the Netherlands. Both Isabella and Fernando were descendants of the House of Trastamara that had its origins in this northern territory that was flourishing with art and culture. There were a lot of important commercial and economic exchanges happening between both kingdoms. So England was a natural ally, especially if you wanted to protect the dangerous trip from Castile to Flanders and vice versa, if you were avoiding France. So the alliance with England was beneficial both to Castile and Aragon. So that's why it was decided that the best husband for Catalina would be the

Prince of Wales. And can you go on to tell us about what happened at Medina del Campo in 1489 when Catalina was three years old? Of course. Well, the account we have was written by one of the English envoys sent by Henry VII to the northern Spanish town of Medina del Campo to sign a treaty with Isabel and Fernando to marry the Infanta Catalina to Arthur Tudor. So after reaching the northern coast of Spain, they were received in Burgos by the merchants of the city. Burgos was vital in the important medieval wool market that was established between Castile and England, so an alliance with the Tudors was a reason to rejoice. The description

is also rich in details pertaining royal protocol and magnificence and richness in the court of Isabel and Fernando in a pivotal moment in their reigns. On each occasion he saw the Spanish royal family together, the herald describes the protocol around them and pays special attention to their attire. The descriptions of the number of jewels that all the members of the royal family wore is impressive, but above all, the descriptions of the magnificence of Queen Isabel are the most detailed and remarkable. On one occasion, the monarch is dressed in full gold and adorned with jewels covered with precious gems. The herald confesses that he had never seen such an expensive outfit ever before. It is also the first time we catch a glimpse of the presence of the Infanta Catalina, who at three years old and already addressed as Princess of Wales, was present at one of the audiences with the Spanish monarchs resting on her mother's waist.

That's such a wonderful seed. And I love the way you contextualize that, Emma, because people who don't know Spain don't know that Burgos really was a key place. And it was part of the connection to Flanders. That wool trade was vital. So they were one of the Burgundian realms where some of the most art-rich, lavish realms in Europe at that point in time. So it was like this competition in a way. Like, you may not know Burgos, but now you will know who we are. So that adds a whole lot to the notion of Catalina at age three

sitting on her mom's lap, being held up like a little doll. Well, the fact, of course, is you can get engaged at three, but under canon law, you have to wait to marry, thankfully, for a girl to 12 and a boy to 14. So we've got time to wait whilst Catalina's growing up, knowing one day, if things go right, she'll be Princess of Wales. And we know the year or so later, she attended her sister Isabel's wedding in Sevilla

to the heir of the Portuguese throne. What do we know about that? We do have some notions of what happened there. Those court festivities and that wedding was the showcasing of the Portuguese court as a place where Renaissance was bubbling. We don't catch glimpse of Catalina because she's not obviously getting married and she obviously is not first in line to the throne, but she was there.

And we do have an idea by the annual accounts of what she was wearing. And we know by other events, the kind of protocol that they followed. So I think that in that case, once again, like Teresa pointed out before, she was being exposed to this magnificence, not only in Castile and Aragon, but now in Portugal, where at that time was one of the most outstanding courts in Europe. So I believe she was getting again, that glimpse of the push, not only of the magnificence, but of the Renaissance that was spreading throughout the Iberian Peninsula. Teresa, one thing you've written about is how Catalina was staying in magnificent palaces, whether it's in Sevilla or the city palace of the Alhambra. Can you describe them to us,

give us a sense of how they should shape our understanding of her? I think it's fascinating thinking about castles like that because one of the things that struck me was how different her experience of living in castles would have been in Spain than it would have been when she came to Ludlow or when she was in England. Because these are places that are exposed to the elements, different elements, sunnier. The rooms are a little bit bigger. There's carpets, especially in the southern part of Spain and Andalusia. There's a very strong Islamic presence. So she would have seen decorated walls, beautiful carpets. She would have seen palace gardens that would just sort of sweep around her. When you get to places like Sevilla and you look at the Alcazar and you realize that a child dancing around in those gardens that are

beautifully irrigated with palm trees and music and dancing and just the sort of the smell, the fragrance of it is powerful. And the contrast is so striking. When I got to, I was in Ludlow a couple of years ago and it was July and it was cold and it was kind of gray and dark. And I'm thinking, what did she experience? How did that feel to go from someplace that was warm and sunny and where there were oranges and almonds and figs? And then she gets to Ludlow where there's no oranges, no figs, no almonds, no sunshine. So she grew up in this lavish but really rich visual culture. Yes, I imagine that those scents, if she ever got them again, would have

absolutely taken her back. But it is fascinating because they talk about the winter in 1501-1502, the winter in Ludlow was particularly harsh. All the accounts say, wow, it rained all the time. It was really cold. And so when later biographers, Mattingly and Tremlitt and people like that talk about how she was sick that winter. They talk about she was just a frail girl. Maybe she had a hard period. They're like, no, this is hard. And Emma, you must feel this now coming from Spain to Minneapolis, that sense of like, where am I?

Why is it so cold here? And you get sick and depressed. Yes, yes. The change in the weather does affect you. And I believe that you're spot on to say that, yes, she did experience probably a traumatic experience going from the nice sunny weather in Spain. Although I'm from the north and that's not quite true up there. But to England and to Wales specifically in the first months, because let's not forget that she was not in London. She was in Ludlow. That's right.

So I agree. One thing we can't go much further without mentioning is the piety and faith of the Spanish court. So Emma, could you tell us a bit about how religion was shaping her early years? Yes. First, I think it's important to point out that this is a controversial topic because our perception about the faith in the Spanish court at this time is shaped by events like the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 or the early days of the Spanish Inquisition. And of course, those events shaped the way the young infantas understood their relationship to religion. But what research has proven is that the biggest influence on Catalina's faith was her mother, Queen Isabel. Known for her piety and

for always putting God first, she played a huge role in the introduction of the Devotio Moderna to the Spanish court. This was a spiritual movement that followed a premise, to imitate the life of Christ in the case of men, and in the case of women, to follow the example of the Virgin Mary. And this was a big deal for both mother and daughter. To prove this point even further, we must say that both queens belonged to the lay branch of the Franciscan order, linked to this new religious movement, and that both stated in their wills that they wanted to be wearing the habit of the order. So, in my opinion, I think that the Virgin Mary, her mother, and the Franciscan movement were the biggest influences in her faith.

And they continue throughout her life. I mean, it's the thing that holds her together in many, many ways. And that was just in New York City and at the Morgan Library, they have a book of hours that Catherine, it's one of the rare things that we have that's commissioned by Catherine and owned by her. And it's this lovely prayer book. You get the sense of her later on in her life that these are the things that really, really mattered. Her faith was what held her together when everything started to fall apart. Completely agree with that. I think that once again, using the example of her mother, faith was the thing that helped her throughout the darkest times. And you mentioned Emma there, and you had mentioned already earlier, Teresa,

this is a period in which there are some momentous things happening among the Spanish. Could you tell us a bit more, Teresa, you know, setting the scene about 1492 and the other great events of the time, and how much you think Catalina would have known of what was happening? She was seven, almost eight, when the Castilian army defeated the Emir of Granada. So I have this picture of her being there. She was present there. She was old enough to know the age of seven and like the Christian faith is the age of reason, right? The age in which you know the difference between right and wrong. So to her, it was right that the Christians would have defeated the Muslims. It was right, and she would not have defied her mother, right that the Christians expelled the Jews. She had this sense in her

heart about this, and yet she must have known a number of conversos. So she's aware of people at court whose last names are like Hebreo, right? Someone who clearly is a conversa. So what's puzzling to me, and I don't think anybody has yet studied it, is Catherine's relationship with Jews. No one that I know of has looked at it. I know that later on in her life in 1529 at court, there is a play produced called Godly Queen Hester, which compares Catalina Catherine to Queen Esther. I've got a student working on this and she said, this person writing this play knew nothing about Jewish history. And so I thought, well, what did Catherine know? And I don't know because the only Jews that would have been at court would have been ambassadors

or trades people. And I don't know if there were any conversos. So I don't know. They had a fair amount of conversos working, especially in the administrative branch of things. But I don't know how much they were able to expose about Jewish culture if they were conversos, if they had converted into the Christian faith. Probably they were trying to lay low and not talk a lot about their previous religion. So yeah, that's a very, very interesting question that you brought up. As regarding Muslims, I don't know what her experience would have been except for the conquest and then the eventual expulsion of Muslims, but I don't know what her experience would have been except for the conquest and then the

eventual expulsion of Muslims, but I do not know. I think that in the case of Muslims, she did have throughout her life an active role because there was always the threat of the Turk with her nephew, Charles V. And in some of her letters, she mentions the Turk as this big entity of link to Islam. And I think it always represented a threat for her, the double threat, France and the Turk as this big entity of link to Islam. And I think it always represented a threat for her, the double threat, France and the Turk. Probably wasn't aware of their culture practices. It was more just an enemy. Yeah.

Well, and I think it shapes her relationship or her understanding of the Reformation when it begins to take shape in England, that she is naturally defensive about it. She's just like this. No, this is the way it's supposed to be. Those people are misinformed. They're in error. And I think the turn in England during the ascendancy of Anne Boleyn and then the whole reformation in England in general really just threw her. I think that really, really was upsetting. And I think to even point something further is that I think she was a leading figure of the

first Catholic Reformation that was cut short by the Anglican Reformation because she was a very educated woman and she believed that the Catholic faith should progress, especially in ways linked to humanism. So yes, I think she must have been extremely upset when that broke out. And she did commission some anti-Reformation works to some scholars. So we know she was active in that sense. Yeah, her connection to Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives, I think are the most noteworthy ones. I'd love it if we could know more. I mean, I think the next area of research is her relationship to the Reformation. Because after her death, she becomes a recusant martyr in a lot of ways. And if you look at the books that she owned, the things that she touched, they get erased or they get marked up in some way to sort of like deface Catholicism.

So you can kind of track her as a recusant figurehead for revival of Catholicism, which of course during the reign of her daughter takes shape and then reverses itself again. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We've got an episode of not just the Tudors on about Catherine of Aragon. More after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores. scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies

teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Teresa, the other thing, of course, of about 1492, as well as the expulsion of the Jews, is that we've got Columbus heading west and discovering America, in inverted commas, discovering America. And obviously, in April 1493, he returns to Spain, complete, actually, with a group of Native Americans that he's brought back to show off. Do you think Catalina would have

seen the reception of Columbus? I do. They were in Barcelona and she traveled at that point in time, the whole, they all went as a pack. So she would have been there. There's no real mention of her that says she was there. She was dressed like this, but she had to have been there because there's nowhere else she would have been. They would not have left her behind because they never left anyone behind. Yeah, I agree. She was, most probably she was there, yes. And Emma, of course, also, I mean, this momentous year,

this is the year of the conquest of Granada. How much was the campaign against the Moors the work of her mother? In other words, do you think that we can look for an example of a sort of warrior queen here for Catalina Catherine as she later is? Well, I believe that as the go-getters they were, both Isabel and Fernando took the task early on to conquer the last Moorish kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula. This had been an obsession for the Christian kings in all the kingdoms of the

peninsula, Portugal, Aragon, Kisil, but at the end of the 15th century, the last one was Granada. One of the constants in all of Isabel and Fernando's actions is what they believed was the will of God. So to them, conquering the kingdom and taking over the palace and the capital city meant a huge success in God's eyes that, by the way, was celebrated in all of Europe. I think that not only Granada, but also in the Castilian Civil War that Teresa mentioned before, the presence of the queen traveling with the troops and supporting her husband, who was fighting the battles, was huge because they still had this medieval idea that the presence of the monarch was essential for success in battle.

In that sense, Isabel acted as a figure of protection, and because she was pregnant a lot during these years, she also became a motherly figure, just like the Virgin Mary. Yeah, there's all kinds of wonderful stories of Isabel. Some of them, who knows if they're exaggerated or apocryphal, but wonderful stories about her pregnant, on horseback, leading troops, giving birth on the battlefield. We know that the children often had to be hustled away from one side or another. So when they're in the South, when the armies are approaching Granada, Fernando's at the battlefield, Isabel's going back and forth, and the kids are back in Seville or they're in Cordoba or they're somewhere, but they're not

on the battlefield. They heard stories. I mean, I can't imagine that Isabel would come home and not tell her children what had happened because she was so proud of it. It was her way of educating them. So again, it's kind of adding something that we don't have an actual record for, but it's in keeping with Isabel's character. And I think it reflects, you can see it in the Battle of Flodden in 1513 when Catherine is so like, hey, I can do this. I know what I'm doing here. I've been trained well. So it's part of her education. Yes, I think even when she's pregnant with Catalina, we see this because that's when the war is really raging. And I believe that it

was very important for her sense of duty and her sense of how dangerous it was to be a queen or a king at this time still, and how important their presence and their personal charisma meant for the troops. So I think, although it was hard, there's even accounts that there was a fire in the tent of the children and they had to be evacuated. So I think it did instill in her a sense of constant war, if you want to say it like that. And I think she applied that very well when she was Queen of England. Her connection with her subjects when she was in England was, used the word charisma. And I think it's a fair word to use because she had this sense of her personality just sort of was present in all of that. And I think she got that from her mother,

the sense that it's really important to get yourself out there and meet your subjects, see them, let them know who you are. And Teresa, of course, she adopted the pomegranate as her badge as well. So that suggests that she had held on to the importance of this idea. And I think the pomegranate is so fascinating. I'd never really paid attention to pomegranates in England until I started working on Catherine. And then if you look around, all I have to do is stand in a church and somewhere there's going to be a pomegranate. It's just amazing to me how prevalent it was that it was so important to her. It was part of her badge, part of her emblem. It shows up on her coronation odes that were the illustrations of that from Thomas More's coronation

ode. I mean, it's just fascinating. And that notion of fertility, the notion of that sense of fullness, health, the salubrious quality of a pomegranate, which we all know now is so important for things like our immune systems. So I think the pomegranate is also very important because we have art historians in England, for example, using it to date artistic works or like Teresa mentioned in manuscripts, in the elimination of manuscripts, and all those things go back to Catherine. I like the way she chose that because it has the notions of fertility, it had notions of links to Christ, and also because I think it was a very foreign

thing in England, and she wanted to mark herself as someone new, as someone who was bringing in something different and exotic in a way. And Henry, when he started erasing her memory, that's what he went for. The first thing he went for was for pomegranates. And there's accounts of him ordering to take them out and to erase any pomegranate. And then Mary later on in her reign, Mary I brings back the pomegranate and we have another set of sources with pomegranate. And then Mary, later on in her reign, Mary I brings back the pomegranate, and we have another set of sources with pomegranates. But it was Catherine that introduced that badge and had an influence because there's other cultures like Sir Henry Guildford, who adds the pomegranate to his badge. So I think the pomegranate represents her very well in the complexity of meanings it has. And if you have a sort of belief in tragic foretelling, the story of the

pomegranate and Persephone to me is really, really fascinating because there is a moment when Catherine, she's really relegated to the underworld and that's sad to me. So if you believe that, thinking about the erasure of the pomegranate, one of the things that was just like, it took my breath away when I saw it. There is a book in the British library that has the arms of, you know, the Port Colossal Beaufort arms, the Tudor arms, the Tudor rose on one cover and in the back, in the top, they're stacked. Pomegranate is on top and someone has taken a knife and literally scraped it away. And you just get this feeling of like hostile, vengeful, like take that. I'm going to get rid of you. This sense of erasure. And you see it in

most of the books that are owned by Catherine. At some point, somebody erases things. Even the Book of Hours that's at the Morgan Library in New York City. There are whole passages that are literally scraped out. And so my job now is to go back and reconstruct what was there that was so offensive. So we've talked about her faith, Emma. We've talked about her mother as a warrior. What else do you think she learned from her mother? Is there anything else we should pick up on? Yes.

I think that above all, she learned resilience, sense of duty and confidence in her own criteria. So Isabel, like we said, had a lot of presence and personal charisma. And so did Catherine, like we pointed out. So much that we all know she became a very popular queen consort. And she even outshines Henry in the annulment trial when it comes to the affection of the regular folk, especially the women. I think that the idea of her mother always gave her strength to carry on and to believe that she was sent by God to serve a mission to be Queen of England. And I am inclined to think that in her later years, when she was separated from her daughter

Mary and threatened to be executed for treason, the memory of her mother probably helped her to stay firm and to never give in to the bullying. But above all, I think that she had her mother as a role model for her own life and behavior because she truly believed that Isabel was the person, the right person, to teach her about queenship. She also learned one more thing, which I think is both ironic and sad, and that is how to deal with a husband who has mistresses. Because Fernando was not faithful. Her mother taught her, like, darling, just get through it. You're queen. Don't ever

forget that. And certainly Catherine put that to use. Yes, she did. So if we move the story along, you know, in these years, the marriage proceedings, the negotiations with England hadn't gone along without incident. There'd been some sort of backwards and forwards, some quibbles, as it were, along the way. What was going on, Teresa, in that? Well, on the English side of it, it was pretenders to the throne of Henry VII. And I think that's probably the biggest impediment to having it move nice and smoothly. They were really worried about sending their daughter someplace where there might be a coup any minute. And so there was this real concern of all the people who were waiting in the wings just to overthrow Henry VII.

It's like every year there's some new crisis, some new pretender, something going on that's making them very, very anxious. And we mentioned earlier that Catalina was unusually well-educated. Emma, could you tell us about her studies? educated. Emma, could you tell us about her studies? Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or

fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Well, as we stated before, the four daughters of Isabel and Fernando were educated like no other princesses had been before. And that was, I think,

due to several factors, like everything else in this podcast, I think, due to several factors, like everything else in this podcast, I think, not just that. So just to point out a few, first and foremost, again, the parents wanted them to be prepared to be perfect consorts in foreign alliances. The second, I think, is the fact that Queen Isabel took on learning Latin and other subjects in her adult life. I think the third is the special legal status that noble women had in Spain, where they had a lot more presence in the public sphere and therefore a lot more need to be instructed and educated, to be able to write, to be able to read. And the

fourth is the cultural revolution that Isabel and Fernando fostered in the court with the patronage of arts and humanities. So human scholars were in favor of female education, and in fact, even thought it was essential for a woman to behave like a good Christian. This was radical thinking if we consider that for more than two centuries, there had been an ongoing debate about female education known as carer de femme, but at this point, it hadn't become a mainstream practice. So we can take the example of Arthur's sisters, for example, and as far as we know, they didn't receive any formal training, and we know they didn't speak

Latin. So in the case of specific Catalina, alongside her sister, the Infanta Maria, she was taught from the age of seven, like Teresa pointed out before, by an Italian instructor, Alexandro Seraldini, who was also herplain. He was a leading humanist that helped Columbus in his quest for financial support from Queen Isabel in his famous first voyage to the West. And I believe she valued this education she received in Spain highly because later in life, she took on her own daughter's education and was an active patron of humanists Juan Luis Vives, Erasmus, and other leading humanists. One of the most active and innovative aspects of her cultural patronage in England was female education.

And the manual she commissioned on this topic to the Spanish scholar Juan Luis Vives, the education of a Christian woman, was the most influential female education manual in the Renaissance. So I believe that she was all about empowering women with education. I agree totally. And I think Isabel was keenly aware that she was not educated to be queen, that she herself, and she spent so much time overcoming that, like, this is not going to happen to my daughters. They're going to be prepared for anything that comes their way. Sounds like every other mother, doesn't it? It does. It does. It humanizes her in good ways. Yeah, it does? It does. It does. It humanizes her in good ways.

It does. It does. It does. Now, around the time that marriage negotiations are moving forward, perhaps as part of it, we have what seems to be the earliest portrait of Catherine Catalina. Teresa, tell us about this one. I love that portrait so much. Juan de Flandes, John of Flanders, if you want to translate it, was a resident artist at the court of Isabella and Fernando. He did two portraits that we're pretty sure of are the Infantas. One is probably Juana and one is Catalina. And the one of Catalina is absolutely, I think, one of the sweetest portraits ever painted of anyone. She has this fresh, sweet glow. She's young. Her hair is Mediterranean style hair. She's got yards and yards of green ribbons wound through her hair. She's got this very sweet, fresh face, and she's dressed in this

lovely little dress, very modest. Everything's very pretty. And then she's holding this little bud of a rose as if to say to the Tudors, here's your new. And then she's holding this little bud of a rose, as if to say to the tutors, here's your new tutor rose. She isn't quite blooming yet. She's still just a little bud, but she's all yours. And it's just this beautiful painting. And it's typical, as Emma had said, of the cultural patronage of Isabel and Fernando. They were prominent patrons of the arts. And I think that's another thing that Catherine learned from her mother, that when she was queen, she had very strong connections, particularly with the Netherlandish artists, because I think she knew that she, I'm going to note that she actually sat for the portrait. It's unclear. She probably did

because there's a facial resemblance between both the Juana portrait and the Catalina portrait. We're not sure if it's because they look similar or because the artist had a prototype face that he just kind of used. But it's a beautiful painting. Absolutely beautiful. And I think there's a copy now in the Tizen, I think it is. The Tizen in Madrid has the most famous copy. And to add to that, I would say that if you do see this portrait in Madrid, then you can go to Prado and see the portrait of Isabel, her mother, and you can see that they look a lot alike. They're very similar.

They both have blue eyes. They're both ginger, which is something that is connected to that origin in Northern Europe. And they both have very similar features, too. Teresa's right. We don't know if that is because of the standards of beauty at the time or it truly did look so much alike. This portrait is magnificent. And I would be really surprised if they weren't thrilled to receive it in England, considering the portraits that they were doing in England at the time. They weren't very good. So this Renaissance piece,

if it traveled to England, must have marveled them and that's why they wanted her in england as soon as possible they were like this is the right one this is the one because it has this beautiful glow even if you just sort of stand in front of the painting there is this sort of glowing quality to it and skill of the artist is clear but there is a sense of lifelikeness of al aliveness, of a vivacity, even though she's very solemn. She's not telling jokes and laughing or anything. It's very solemn, but it's just so vibrant. Well, the artist was in that innovative Renaissance style portraitist. So he did a very good job of, at the you know, they did have to have a straight face.

This is royalty. They can't show emotion. But at the same time, he picks on from Italian artists like Botticelli and other artists. And it's truly a remarkable painting. I would consider going to visit that painting. When I was there in Madrid, I had a stand-up moment and I was almost crying and people around me were like, what's this lady doing? But I was very happy in that moment when I saw her. The way he does her hair, because it's like this lovely, it's contained, but there's like a few locks that are like fleeing away from things. And you get

this sense of like controlled sensuality for a seven-year-old kid. It's just quite wonderful. So it's about this time that Catherine gives her consent to the marriage. And then this leads to the proxy wedding in May 1499 in England. And we know that letters are exchanged between the two, or at least we know that Arthur writes to Catherine. And advice also arrived from Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby, from Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby, his mother to King Henry VII of England, and his wife, Elizabeth of York, Queen of England,

to Catherine. You both want to tell me about this. But Emma, what advice did they give her? Well, this is a very intriguing letter because it is one of the only times we hear from the women in the Tudor court in a diplomatic exchange that went on for over a decade. And it is also very relevant to note that the letter confirms the power that the Countess of Richmond had over the court life in England.

Yes. So the first piece of advice both women had for the teenager was to get used to drinking wine, claiming that the water in England wasn't drinkable. We don't have any evidence to show if she started following this advice, but we do know that she was never too much of a party animal, although she did participate in courtly festivities, especially in the early years of her reign. The other piece of advice was about learning a new language, since stated in the letter, none of the ladies at the Tudor

court knew Latin or Spanish. So aware of the presence of Margaret of Austria in the Trastamara court due to her marriage to the Infante Juan, they suggested that the two should speak in French so the princes of Wales could learn the language and have a viable means of communication once in England. So by letter correspondence, we know that she did follow this advice and that once established in England, she also became proficient in English, especially after being appointed Spanish ambassadress by her father in 1507 to negotiate her second marriage to Prince Henry, future Henry VIII. Catherine's English was so good by 1513, like Teresa pointed out before,

that she gave a speech in full armor to the troops as regent while Henry was fighting in France before the Baton of Floddenfield. She appealed to national pride and divine providence that, quote, fired the soldiers into the biggest victory in Henry's reign. The death of King James IV of Scotland in this battle paved the way for Henry's later claim to the throne. So I don't know how Henry probably took this. Probably not well, considering we know a lot about how much he liked to be the main protagonist of things. Well, we know that the story goes that he had captured the Duke of Longueville when he was in France at the Battle of Terroir. And that she was responsible or her English troops were responsible

for the death of James IV. And there's this little competition, like you're sending me a living duke and I'm sending you a dead king, right? That sense of like, just so you know, Henry. Just to point out, Catherine wins. Yes, she does. And yes, and Henry does not have

quite the same exploits in France. I think there is that sense of toughness. But I love the point about Margaret Beaufort, because she really is influential in so many ways. And she gets some credit by scholars, but I think we need more on Margaret because she's a powerhouse. I think the Spanish Princess show that I'm sure you've both watched, I didn't like the portrayal of the Countess of Richmond very much in that sense, because I do think that she did like Catherine and that she thought she was the perfect bride for Arthur. So maybe a new show?

Yeah, I agree. It was very entertaining, but it wasn't necessarily historically accurate. If she was the perfect bride for Arthur, Emma, why did Isabel delay sending Catherine to England? Once again, I believe there were a lot of moving pieces in any of the alliances established by Catherine's parents. First and foremost, let's consider the human factor and say that in the leading years to her departure to England, the Spanish court was in constant mourning and in serious trouble, dynastically speaking.

The succession was at stake. First, the death of the Infante Juan on the 4th of October, 1497. That meant that Catherine's eldest sister, Isabel, now Queen of Portugal, was the new heir to both the Castilian and Aragonese thrones alongside her husband. But unfortunately, she died on the 23rd August 1498, giving birth to her son, the Infante Miguel de la Paz, who became heir to all the crowns in the Iberian Peninsula. His father, King Manuel I of Portugal, allowed for the baby to be brought up by his grandmother,

the aging Queen Isabel, and there are many accounts of the devotion, once again, that she had for this grandson, but he too died on the 19th July 1500, leaving three courts in mourning. The succession was now in the hands of the Archduchess of Austria, Juana, and her husband, Philip of Habsburg, and they were already having big marital problems at this point. So once Maria was sent to marry the Portuguese king to fill her desk sister's role in this alliance, Catalina was the only one left with her parents. But there were also political reasons. It seems likely that Isabel and Fernando

never had the intention of sending Catalina before her coming of age, not only for marriage, but also to bear children. Considering that Arthur was a year younger than her, this became a factor too. Her sister Juana left for Flanders when she was 16, and Juan married Margaret of Austria at the age of 18. So I think that in Spain, they just had a different perception of what was an acceptable age for marriage than in England. The official reason given to Henry was the absence of the king in court

due to the uprising of the Moors. On paper, that sounded reasonable enough for them to have an excuse for the delay, so I think they just went with that. So she only finally set off on the 21st of May, 1501, at 50 and a half. She'd spent the vast majority of her life waiting for this journey. But before she went, Kathleen ordered, you've noticed, Teresa, a prodigious number of pairs of shoes. I love this detail because it's a sense that she's trying to create security and maybe memory before her great journey. And I think, as Emma mentioned before,

she also had a lot of them not just to wear, but to give as gifts. So there's a lot of things we can mark in terms of fashion, all kinds of things in England based on when Catalina arrived. So the shoemakers, the headdress people, the mantilla makers, the dressmakers were incredibly busy. If you add up the number of yards of fabric, it's just colossal. And I think it took them probably fully a year to get the nearly a hundred pairs of shoes and slippers that she brought with her. And she brought with her those really wonderfully extravagant shoes that a pop star today would just be so happy to have that are measured in fingers. So some of them are three fingers high and some of them are five fingers high. So she brought corkscrew platform shoes with her to England. And I think that she gave some of them as gifts. I think some of them that she actually wore. We know that she had a pair of those shoes in her possession when she died. So that fashion stayed with her the whole time. It never really took on in England

until recently, but they were there. They were a very Mediterranean kind of shoe, a sort of slide, and you would wear a little velvet slipper inside of it to keep your toes warm. Yeah, actually her shoemaker was from Valencia, one of them. The other one was from Madrid. One of them was from Valencia. And that area still has very good shoes. If you ever go around there, the shoes are magnificent. So it's something that's carried out throughout time well what I wish we had thinking about your question Susana about all these things that were made I wish we had records of what was in her trousseau what she actually carried with her and kept there because we have bits of it but we don't have a lot of like I don't know what kinds of all the textiles that came with her. Although I know that Ana Cabrera at the Museo de Traje in Madrid is working on

what kind of textiles Catherine brought with her, the embroidery. She's documented that the embroidery that once was considered Sicilian is now Spanish. She's done all kinds of work on the dyes and the fabrics. So we know that she brought a lot. She brought books. We know that she brought her jewelry. She brought her hair objects so that when she landed at Plymouth, there was a lot of Spain in her bags with her. Emma, could you describe her journey north to set sail for England and just ponder, I suppose, for us that sense of knowing that she was very unlikely to ever see her parents again. Yeah, I think she was fully aware that once she left the Spanish court, it was very much likely that she would never see her father and her mother again. And she never did. After Arthur's death, some of her first letters in Spain are to ask about her mother,

whose health quickly deteriorated. And she finally died on the 26th of November, 1504, just before Catherine's 19th birthday. After this, we know she had a long period of health complications, most probably linked to mourning. So Isabel had been the most influential person in her life, and now she was in a foreign land and her mother had died. So Catalina left Granada with a big entourage and a lot of baggage that included, like pointed out, dresses, household items, plate, jewels, manuscripts, printed books, and other types of luxurious items. The goal was to travel by land to Santiago de Compostela and then continue to La Coruña to set sail for England.

Compostela and then continued to La Coruña to set sail for England. We know that she visited the important monastery of Guadalupe in Guadalajara and that she was received in the city of Zamora, further north, with great festivities and rejoicing. And it's important to point out the fact that we're doing a pilgrimage too. We have evidence that the Infanta visited the relic of the same patron of Spain, Santiago, St. James, probably to ask for protection for her upcoming journey. And then they had to wait for the right weather to face a dangerous trip at sea. They weren't lucky with their first predictions and in their first attempt to cross over to England, they hit a storm and were forced to sail back to northern Spain,

where they stayed for more than a month on a coastal village of Laredo. The Infanta's doctor sent word to court that Catalina was sick, and he had several medical supplies sent to him to treat her. When word reached the Tudor court, Henry VII decided to send his best sailors to escort them to England, and so on the 2nd of October, 1501, the Princess of Wales set foot in Plymouth and she had finally arrived to England. And after her arrival in England, the point you made earlier, Teresa, is that Catalina became Catherine.

And we're going to leave her here in Plymouth. But before we do, what do you think the psychological impact of that new name, that new identity might have been? That's such a good question. And it's such a 2021 kind of question, isn't it? This notion of our identities, like who we are, because we are aware of the fluidity of identity that it changes over time.

I think she used those almost eight months between May and October to sort of psychologically prepare herself. We know that her mother was just like so sad to see her go, just like, oh my God, there goes my baby. How can I do this? But it gave Catherine that time to sort of say goodbye to Spain, to say goodbye to her childhood, to say goodbye to her family. She'd already had lost several of her siblings to death. And I think it was a pilgrimage, but it was also like a long goodbye to that life. So that I think when she set off in Plymouth, she's like, okay, I'm ready for this. I can do this now. She'd never been to England at all before. So it was all new to her, but I think she knew how to deal with new

places because she'd spent most of her childhood growing up, going from Seville to Ecuador, to Barcelona, to Valencia, to Madrigal. So she knew how to act. She was multilingual. So she was pretty sure she could talk to whomever she encountered. I don't think she was prepared for beer because apparently she was not a beer drinker. She said it tasted like the vinegar that they used on the sponge to dip in Christ's wound. And I'm thinking, okay, so you're not a beer drinker. But I think she was ready. I don't know that she was ready for the geography, but I think she knew how to deal with high ranking people. Well, thank you both very much for bringing Catherine of Aragon, thank you both very much for bringing Catherine of Aragon, Catalina, to English shores. I feel tempted to say let's come back and talk about her later life, if you'll be willing, at some future

point. But it's been a wonderful introduction to a bit of her life that we don't think enough about. And in honour of this conversation, I have here two pomegranates that I intend to eat for dinner tonight. And I shall think of our conversation and indeed of Catalina. Thank you both so much. This is really wonderful. Thank you so very much.

Yes, it was a lot of fun. Thank you very much. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, Thanks for listening everyone that was an episode of Not Just The Tudors on my feed Professor Susanna Lipscomb is a complete legend she's one of my greatest friends and colleagues

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