Catherine of Aragon
Catherine of Aragon was married to two English princes, was queen of England for twenty-four years, refused to the end to say that she had not been, and the refusal is the reason England has its own church. She was born in 1485, the youngest daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, and was promised at three to Arthur, the heir of Henry VII, as the seal of the Anglo-Spanish alliance against France. She married him in November 1501 and he died in April 1502, at fifteen; whether the marriage had been consummated became, thirty years later, the question on which the Reformation in England turned, and she said under oath that it had not. Henry VII kept her in England for seven years as a hostage for her dowry, and the new king Henry VIII married her within weeks of his accession in 1509, when she was twenty-three and he seventeen. She was a capable queen: regent while Henry was in France in 1513, when the Scots were beaten at Flodden and she sent him the dead Scottish king's coat; the patron of Erasmus and Vives; the mother of six children of whom one, Mary, lived. By 1527 Henry wanted Anne Boleyn and a son, and asked Rome to find that the dispensation for marrying his brother's widow had been void. Catherine fought it as a lawsuit and as a nephew's aunt: Charles V, her sister's son, held the pope, and the pope would not decide. At the legatine court at Blackfriars in 1529 she knelt to Henry in public, asked what she had done to deserve it, appealed to Rome and walked out. Henry married Anne in January 1533, Cranmer pronounced the first marriage null in May, and the Act of Supremacy of 1534 made the king head of a church that could not be appealed past. She was styled Princess Dowager, kept from her daughter, and moved from house to damp house; she signed her last letter to Henry as his wife and died at Kimbolton in January 1536. Henry wore yellow that day.
- Lived: 1485 CE – 1536 CE
- Nationality: Spanish
- Roles: queen, consort
