Catherine was one of the great queens consort of England. The outlines of her life are well documented in both scholarly and popular biographies. She was born in 1485, daughter of the powerful Spanish sovereigns Isabel of Castile and Fernando II of Aragon (b. 1452, r. Castile 1475–1504, r. Aragon 1479–1516). Her names reveal her blended cultural identity. She was christened Catalina, the Castilian version of the name of her grandmother, Catherine, the daughter of Constanza of Castile and John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster. In early childhood, she was betrothed to Arthur, the Prince of Wales, and afterwards in Castile she was called la princessa de Gales, and in England, the Princess of Wales. They were married in November 1501, but five months later she was a widow. Seven years later, she married his brother Henry, later King Henry VIII (b. 1491, r. 1509–47), and became Queen Catherine of Aragon. Catherine was fluent in Spanish, Latin, French, and English and was patron of humanist luminaries such as Erasmus, Juan Luis Vives, and Thomas More. She was one of Henry’s closest advisers on international diplomacy, she supervised a complex household at half a dozen royal courts, and she managed the operations of her reginal properties. She served as regent of England during a war with Scotland and was the mother of the queen regnant of England, Mary I (b. 1516, r. 1553–58). Her power diminished as it became apparent that she would not bear a son for Henry, but she remained faithful to him as his attentions turned to other women and when he ultimately sought a divorce to marry Anne Boleyn. In January 1536, at age fifty, she died nearly alone in a castle in Cambridgeshire and was buried in a simple tomb in Peterborough Cathedral.
To her English subjects she was Kateryne of Spayne, a foreign-born bride who brought to England her Castilian accent and entourage and seemingly exotic customs. For her symbol as queen, she adopted the pomegranate. This fruit, not native to England, is the “apple of Granada” and the symbol of the Muslim Nasrid kingdom of Granada, which had been recently conquered by her parents. For the members of her household, the pomegranate was a symbol of belonging, an affiliation with the queen, and a mark of social status. For Catherine, it was a memento of a childhood spent in a warmer climate eating figs and oranges and growing up in a society inhabited by Christians, Jews, and Muslims while witnessing the inquisition and expulsion of Jews. But a pomegranate was a doubly ironic choice, symbolizing fertility yet a poignant reminder of Persephone’s annual season in the underworld.
Catalina’s travels began shortly after her birth on 15 December 1485 at Alcalá de Henares. Since she was the fifth child and a girl, the political importance of her birth was not as momentous as that of her brother, Juan. Still, it was the Christmas season, and the family stayed at court and celebrated her birth with banquets and gift-giving. She was swaddled in Breton linen and dressed in green-and-white velvet dresses with gold lace for her baptism, and her maid, Elena de Carmona, was paid 11,100 maravedíes for her service (for comparison, the bishop of Palencia, who baptized Catalina, received 3,650 maravedíes). Fernando left soon after to wage war against the Nasrid leader of Granada while the family spent the winter of 1486 in the north. Isabel took the children to her birthplace, Madrigal, where the royal residences blended Romanesque, Gothic, and Mudéjar styles. They then moved on to Arévalo, a small town of tremendous symbolic importance. Steeped in the legends of ancient Iberians, the Visigoths, and the Christian victory at Las Navas de Tolosa during the Reconquest, it was also where her mother, Isabel of Portugal, was born. This gave the queen a moment to spend time with her mother, show off her new baby daughter, and use the occasion to show her children how to serve their parents personally. It was a brief sojourn, however. In the spring, Isabel went to the royal monastery of Guadalupe with all the children, but because they arrived during Lent, there were no royal entry festivities. After Easter, they turned southward to be closer to Fernando. On 11 June, they were in Córdoba to celebrate Fernando’s victory over Boabdil with a solemn procession in which Queen Isabel and infanta Isabel processed on foot from the Great Mosque-Cathedral to the parish church of Santiago. The chroniclers do not say exactly where Catalina would have been in all this, but at six months of age it is doubtful that she would have been active in the ceremonies. The queen then moved on to Illora, Granada, and Moclín, but again the chronicles are silent on the whereabouts of the young children until late June, when Isabel and the children stopped at Córdoba. She dropped off Juan, María, and Catalina at Jaén while she and Fernando went north to Santiago de Compostela. In late fall, the family was reunited in Salamanca and Ávila and spent the winter at Alcalá de Henares.
Tucked away in regional museums in Spain and England are fragments of Catherine’s life, the scattered bits of clothing and shoes that she wore or books she read, the tapestries and little stools that furnished her rooms, and the amulets and votives of saints that were part of her devotional life. These things were saved for centuries because they mattered to her and to those she held dear—the gifts she gave loved ones at New Year’s celebrations, the hooped skirts and gabled headpieces she wore, the jewelry that adorned her neck and fingers, and her shoes. Enameled miniatures worn close to the body were emotional links between Catherine and the people closest to her. Objects owned by Catherine or connected to her in some way can be found in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of London, and regional archives in the English hinterlands. But the work demands patience and persistence. Modern curatorial practices at, for example, the Victoria and Albert Museum group objects related to Catherine by function (World Ceramics), geography (British Galleries), or material (Textiles). This makes sense from a formal typological or iconographic standpoint, but in practice it erases Catherine from the history of British art. Yet her late medieval Spanish sensibility and taste had a profound influence on the Tudor style, from her chapines and her verdugados to a taste for exotic tooled-leather book covers and the demand for Spanish silks, Spanish embroidery, and jewelry. Catherine links them, even though the catalog does not specifically refer to them as relating to her. A connection to Catherine is made explicit only for a lavish wooden writing box and an intricately carved boxwood rosary, and only then because the arms of her second husband, Henry VIII, also decorate both the box and the rosary.
- Theresa Earenfight, Catherine of Aragon. Infanta of Spain, Queen of England
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