CATHERINE OF ARAGON

Queen of England, daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile; b. Alcalá, Spain, December 1485;d. Kimbolton, England, Jan. 7, 1536. In October 1501, she arrived in England for her marriage to Arthur, Prince of Wales, the eldest son of Henry VII. The marriage took place in November 1501, at St. Paul's Cathedral, London. Unfortunately, Arthur died in April 1502, but in 1503 Catherine was betrothed to Prince Henry, Henry's sole surviving son. Because of consanguinity, a papal dispensation was obtained for the proposed union. Catherine was for years a mere pawn in a shabby diplomatic game played between her own father and Henry VII, and she suffered accordingly; but soon after henry viii's accession in 1509, he married Catherine, and her life was for some time a comparatively happy one. The king was a devoted husband and Catherine bore him four children; the court was brilliant.

Catherine was an able regent while Henry was at war in France in 1513, and she took every possible means of maintaining the Anglo-Spanish alliance. But the capture of the French king, Francis I, by charles v (1525) upset the balance of power in Europe, and early in 1527 England offered her support to France against Spain.

Meanwhile, probably in the latter part of 1526 or the beginning of 1527, Henry began to feel an attraction for Anne Boleyn, one of Catherine's ladies-in-waiting, and in the spring, 1527, he professed doubts about the validity of his marriage. He commenced to think of its dissolution by the pope. In May, Cardinal wolsey and William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, arranged a collusive suit, and Henry was cited to answer a charge of having lived for 18 years in incestuous relationship with his brother Arthur's widow.

The international situation complicated English affairs. The armies of Charles V sacked Rome in May 1527, and made Pope clement vii their prisoner. Eventually a commission was issued to the papal legates, Wolsey and Cardinal campeggio, to hear the divorce suit in open court in England and to pronounce a decision, if necessary. This legatine court first met in May 1529. Catherine appeared before it in June, refused to recognize its jurisdiction, and appealed to the pope. On July 23, 1529, Campeggio adjourned the court until October. It never met again. In 1530, Thomas cranmer appealed to the European universities about the validity of the marriage. The pope, in November 1532, warned Henry not to divorce Catherine or to remarry. But in January 1533, he married Anne Boleyn secretly, and in May, Cranmer, as the new Archbishop of Canterbury, pronounced sentence of divorce. At length (in March 1534) the pope declared Catherine's marriage to Henry to be valid. Catherine, after her final separation from the king in July 1531, was subjected to increasingly harsh treatment, until she died at Kimbolton, having previously been imprisoned at a number of other places. see reformation, protestant (in the british isles).

Bibliography: g. cavendish, The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey, ed. r. s. sylvester (1st ed. pub. 1641; Early English Text Society 243; London 1959). g. mattingly, Catherine of Aragon (Boston 1941). p. hughes, The Reformation in England, 3 v. in 1 (5th, rev. ed. New York 2963),⁵. j. e. paul, Catherine of Aragon and Her Friends (London 1965).

[j. e. paul]