This review of Giles Tremlett’s book Catherine of Aragon is from The Guardian.

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This article titled “Catherine of Aragon: Henry’s Spanish Queen by Giles Tremlett – review” was written by Kathryn Hughes, for The Guardian on Friday 29th October 2010 23.07 UTC

In the soap opera that has become the private life of Henry VIII, Catherine of Aragon tends to get shuffled into the Prologue, something to be rushed through as quickly as possible. You can’t help feeling, along with Henry himself, that things would be so much pacier if only Spanish Catherine would hurry up and cede her place to that home-grown minx, Anne Boleyn. Only then can the real business of the Tudor court – its knockabout swagger, juicy beheadings and parade of pretty wifelets – really begin.

This, though, is the Carry On Henry version of events. In fact, as Giles Tremlett shows in this rigorous yet accessible biography, Catherine of Aragon was much more than a dowdy cipher for first wives everywhere. Not only was she married to Henry for longer than all her successors put together, but she was really the only one who mattered. The daughter of two Iberian monarchs and aunt to the all-important Holy Roman Emperor, Catherine was a power player of the first order. Divorcing her meant, famously, that the religious map of Europe would have to be redrawn, with consequences that we are still dealing with today (if there had been no Catherine then there would be no Anglican congregation in Folkestone bustling self-importantly back to Rome). Henry’s other wives were mostly the daughters of the tumbledown houses of aristocratic England. Dumping them might be momentarily tricky, but nothing that couldn’t be sorted out by bullying their brothers or locking up their aunts. Catherine, though, was different. Catherine was connected.

She first came to England in 1501 to marry Prince Arthur, Henry VII’s eldest son and sickly heir. The prissy little princess wasn’t impressed with what she found. The English were grubby, garrulous and lazy. The men were drunk, and the women smelt. Her new subjects, by contrast, were touchingly pleased with the beautiful teenager with long auburn hair, whose farthingale – a sort of padded doughnut that pushed out her skirts – was a source of wonder in a world where fashion travelled slowly. The wedding night was satisfactory, at least as far as anyone could tell. In time there would be, God and Arthur’s health willing, a string of lusty male babies.

But God wasn’t willing and Arthur’s poor health meant that no one could be certain that the two anxious 15-year-olds who whispered together in Latin really had managed to consummate their marriage during the five months that remained to them. In April 1502 Arthur was carried off by the sweating sickness, and the problem of what to do with Catherine began. Sending her back to her parents would be difficult, because the king, always a man with an eye on his balance sheet, didn’t want to return her dowry. One solution – creepy even by Tudor standards – was for the 45-year-old Henry to wed his own daughter-in-law, who, despite her second-hand status, remained an important link to strategically vital Spain. Another possibility was to marry her to Arthur’s brother. For this to happen, though, everyone needed to get their stories straight. If it could be agreed that the dying Arthur had been incapable of husbandly duties, then his brief marriage to Catherine could be declared null and void. Only then would the way be clear for Prince Henry to climb into his late brother’s bed with a clean conscience.

The greatest revelation of Tremlett’s biography to the non-specialist reader is the way Queen Catherine took up her new executive role with such fierce relish. Before she had even married Henry she had been appointed Spanish ambassador to Britain, the first woman to hold such a post. Now, with her husband away fighting the French, she stepped up as Queen Governor and proceeded to wage brutal war on the Scots. For a devout Christian she was disconcertingly bloodthirsty, too, announcing to faraway Henry that she had been all set to send him the disembowelled body of James IV, fallen at Flodden Field. The only thing that stopped her, the young queen explained wistfully, was that “our Englishmen’s hearts would not suffer it”.

The problems really began when, after over two decades of marriage, Henry caught sight of Anne Boleyn and her delicious “dukkys” and decided he couldn’t live without her, or them. Catherine, who had failed to present him with the all-important son, now seemed less like a flame-haired warrior and more like a dumpy sourpuss whose “dukkys”, after six pregnancies, were almost certainly on the slide. Henry’s grounds for divorce depended on the fact that Catherine had previously been married to Arthur and was therefore his “sister”. Catherine lashed back by insisting that she had come to Henry as a virgin.

It was at this point that some of the most sophisticated minds in Europe pitched in to discuss the state of Catherine’s vagina. Erudite scholars puzzled over whether her maidenhead had been left unbroken during her first, abbreviated, marriage. Elderly courtiers tried to recall whether Prince Arthur had looked smug or dejected on the morning after his wedding night. Pensioned-off maidservants were called in to report on what they could remember about the state of the royal bed sheets all those years ago. Cardinal Wolsey upped the ante by telling the pope that Catherine was now suffering from such a hideously deforming venereal disease that no decent man could be expected to sleep with her. Yet just who was supposed to have given her the pox was left insinuatingly vague.

In fact this scrutiny of her physical self was nothing new for Catherine, and one of Tremlett’s most impressive achievements is to show us how the story of royal and noble women in the late medieval period was always, in an important sense, written on the body. During the seven awful years of purdah as Arthur’s widow, Catherine had used starvation to control a world that felt frighteningly out of control. This, in turn, derailed her menstrual cycle to the extent that, once married to Henry, she often found it impossible to tell when she was and wasn’t pregnant. On at least one occasion her all-controlling mind managed to trick her body into a phantom pregnancy. The damage done by those early bouts of anorexia may also account for the stream of still-births and infant deaths that further taxed her system. Ironically, then, the fierce public focus on Catherine’s adolescent body when she first arrived in England as a broodmare hobbled her ability to fulfil her crucial biological and political task, that of producing a bonny baby boy.

Writing about historical subjects from so long ago is never easy. Their interior lives are pretty much unrecorded, and what we are left with is a series of snapshots of chess pieces in all their public pomp. Tremlett, though, has done an excellent job of accessing Catherine of Aragon’s more private moments. He resists suggesting that inside that quaint little body with its puffy skirts there lurked a woman with a 21st-century mind. Instead he sticks mainly to the sources, using his imagination only to try to understand a world in which one girl’s psychodrama really could change the course of British history.

Kathryn Hughes’s The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton is published by HarperPerennial.

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