The Constant Princess

Oxford, Christmas 1501

They set off a few days before Christmas. Resolutely, they spoke to each other in public with utter courtesy, and ignored each other completely when no-one was watching. The queen had asked that they might at least stay for the twelve-day feast but My Lady the King’s Mother had ruled that they should take their Christmas at Oxford, it would give the country a chance to see the prince and the new Princess of Wales, and what the king’s mother said was law.

Catalina travelled by litter, jolted mercilessly over the frozen roads, her mules foundering in the fords, chilled to the bone however many rugs and furs they packed around her. The king’s mother had ruled that she should not ride for fear of a fall. The unspoken hope was that Catalina was carrying a child. Catalina herself said nothing to confirm or deny the hope. Arthur was silence itself.

They had separate rooms on the road to Oxford, and separate rooms at Magdalene College when they arrived. The choristers were ready, the kitchens were ready, the extraordinarily rich hospitality of Oxford was ready to make merry; but the Prince and Princess of Wales were as cold and as dull as the weather.

They dined together, seated at the great table facing down the hall, and as many of the citizens of Oxford who could get into the gallery took their seats and watched the princess put small morsels of food in her mouth, and turn her shoulder to her husband, while he looked around the hall for companions and conversation, as if he were dining alone.

They brought in dancers and tumblers, mummers and players. The princess smiled very pleasantly but never laughed, gave small purses of Spanish coins to all the entertainers, thanked them for their attendance; but never once turned to her husband to ask him if he was enjoying the evening. The prince walked around the room, affable and pleasant to the great men of the city. He spoke in English, all the time, and his Spanish-speaking bride had to wait for someone to talk to her in French or Latin, if they would. Instead, they clustered around the prince and chatted and joked and laughed, almost as if they were laughing at her, and did not want her to understand the jest. The princess sat alone, stiffly on her hard, carved wooden chair, her head held high and a small, defiant smile on her lips.

At last it was midnight and the long evening could end. Catalina rose from her seat and watched the court sink into bows and curtseys. She dropped a low Spanish curtsey to her husband, her duenna behind her with a face like flint. ‘I bid you goodnight, Your Grace,’ said the princess in Latin, her voice clear, her accent perfect.

‘I shall come to your room,’ he said. There was a little murmur of approval; the court wanted a lusty prince.

The colour rose in her cheeks at the very public announcement. There was nothing she could say. She could not refuse him; but the way she rose and left the room did not promise him a warm welcome when they were alone. Her ladies dipped their curtseys and followed her in a little offended flurry, swishing off like a many-coloured veil trailing behind her. The court smiled behind their hands at the high spirits of the bride.

Arthur came to her half an hour later, fired up by drink and resentment. He found her still dressed, waiting by the fire, her duenna at her side, her room ablaze with candles, her ladies still talking and playing cards as if it were the middle of the afternoon. Clearly, she was not a young woman on her way to bed.

‘Sire, good evening,’ she said and rose and curtseyed as he entered.

Arthur had to check his backwards step, in retreat at the first encounter. He was ready for bed, in his nightgown with only a robe thrown over his shoulders. He was acutely aware of his bare feet and vulnerable toes. Catalina blazed in her evening finery. The ladies all turned and looked at him, their faces unfriendly. He was acutely conscious of his nightgown and his bare legs and a chuckle of barely suppressed laughter from one of his men behind him.

‘I expected you to be in bed,’ he said.

‘Of course, I can go to bed,’ she returned with glacial courtesy. ‘I was about to go to bed. It is very late. But when you announced so publicly that you would visit me in my rooms I thought you must be planning to bring all the court with you. I thought you were telling everyone to come to my rooms. Why else announce it at the top of your voice so that everybody could hear?’

‘I did not announce it at the top of my voice!’

She raised an eyebrow in wordless contradiction.

‘I shall stay the night,’ he said stubbornly. He marched to her bedroom door. ‘These ladies can go to their beds, it is late.’He nodded to his men. ‘Leave us.’ He went into her room and closed the door behind him.

She followed him and closed the door behind her, shutting out the bright, scandalised faces of the ladies. Her back to the door, she watched him throw off his robe and nightgown so he was naked, and climb into her bed. He plumped up the pillows and leaned back, his arms crossed against his narrow bare chest, like a man awaiting an entertainment.

It was her turn to be discomforted. ‘Your Grace …’

‘You had better get undressed,’ he taunted her. ‘As you say, it’s very late.’

She turned one way, and then the other. ‘I shall send for Dona Elvira.’

‘Do. And send for whoever else undresses you. Don’t mind me, please.’

Catalina bit her lip. He could see her uncertainty. She could not bear to be stripped naked in front of him. She turned and went out of the bedchamber.

There was a rattle of irritable Spanish from the room next door. Arthur grinned, he guessed that she was clearing the room of her ladies and undressing out there. When she came back, he saw that he was right. She was wearing a white gown trimmed with exquisite lace and her hair was in a long plait down her back. She looked more like a little girl than the haughty princess she had been only moments before, and he felt his desire rise up with some other feeling: a tenderness.

She glanced at him, her face unfriendly. ‘I will have to say my prayers,’ she said. She went to the prie-dieu and kneeled before it. He watched her bow her head over her clasped hands and start to whisper. For the first time his irritation left him, and he thought how hard it must be for her. Surely, his unease and fear must be nothing to hers: alone in a strange land, at the beck and call of a boy a few months younger than her, with no real friends and no family, far away from everything and everyone she knew.

The bed was warm. The wine he had drunk to give him courage now made him feel sleepy. He leaned back on the pillow. Her prayers were taking a long time but it was good for a man to have a spiritual wife. He closed his eyes on the thought. When she came to bed he thought he would take her with confidence but with gentleness. It was Christmas, he should be kind to her. She was probably lonely and afraid. He should be generous. He thought warmly of how loving he would be to her, and how grateful she would be. Perhaps they would learn to give each other pleasure, perhaps he would make her happy. His breathing deepened, he gave a tiny little snuffly snore. He slept.

Catalina looked around from her prayers and smiled in pure triumph. Then, absolutely silently, she crept into bed beside him and, carefully arranging herself so that not even the hem of her nightgown could touch him, she composed herself for sleep.

You thought to embarrass me before my women, before all the court. You thought you could shame me and triumph over me. But I am a princess of Spain and I have known things and seen things that you, in this safe little country, in this smug little haven, would never dream of. I am the Infanta, I am the daughter of the two most powerful monarchs in the whole of Christendom who alone have defeated the greatest threat ever to march against it. For seven hundred years the Moors have occupied Spain, an empire mightier than that of the Romans, and who drove them out? My mother! My father! So you needn’t think I am afraid of you – you rose-petal prince, or whatever they call you. I shall never stoop to do anything that a princess of Spain should not do. I shall never be petty or spiteful. But if you challenge me, I shall defeat you.

Arthur did not speak to her in the morning, his boy’s high pride was utterly cut to the quick. She had shamed him at his father’s court by denying him her rooms, and now she had shamed him in private. He felt that she had trapped him, made a fool of him, and was even now laughing at him. He rose up and went out in sullen silence. He went to Mass and did not meet her eyes, he went hunting and was gone all day. He did not speak to her at night. They watched a play, seated side by side, and not one word was exchanged all evening. A whole week they stayed at Oxford and they did not say more than a dozen words to each other every day. He swore a private bitter oath to himself that he would never, ever speak to her again. He would get a child on her, if he could, he would humiliate her in every way that he could, but he would never say one direct word to her, and he would never, never, never sleep again in her bed.

When the morning came for them to move on to Ludlow the sky was grey with clouds, fat-bellied with snow. Catalina came out of the doorway of the college and recoiled as the icy, damp air hit her in the face. Arthur ignored her.

She stepped out into the yard where the train was all drawn up and waiting for her. She hesitated before the litter. It struck him that she was like a prisoner, hesitating before a cart. She could not choose.

‘Will it not be very cold?’ she asked.

He turned a hard face to her. ‘You will have to get used to the cold, you’re not in Spain now.’

‘So I see.’

She drew back the curtains of the litter. Inside there were rugs for her to wrap around herself and cushions for her to rest on, but it did not look very cosy.

‘It gets far worse than this,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Far colder, it rains or sleets or snows, and it gets darker. In February we have only a couple of hours of daylight at best, and then there are the freezing fogs which turn day into night so it is forever grey.’

She turned and looked up at him. ‘Could we not set out another day?’

‘You agreed to come,’ he taunted her. ‘I would have been happy to leave you at Greenwich.’

‘I did as I was told.’

‘So here we are. Travelling on as we have been ordered to do.’

‘At least you can move about and keep warm,’ she said plaintively. ‘Can I not ride?’

‘My Lady the King’s Mother said you could not.’

She made a little face but she did not argue.

‘It’s your choice. Shall I leave you here?’ he asked briskly, as if he had little time for these uncertainties.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Of course not,’ and climbed into the litter and pulled the rugs over her feet and up around her shoulders.

Arthur led the way out of Oxford, bowing and smiling at the people who had turned out to cheer him. Catalina drew the curtains of her litter against the cold wind and the curious stares, and would not show her face.

They stopped for dinner at a great house on the way and Arthur went in to dine without even waiting to help her from the litter. The lady of the house, flustered, went out to the litter and found Catalina stumbling out, white-faced and with red eyes.

‘Princess, are you all right?’ the woman asked her.

‘I am cold,’ Catalina said miserably. ‘I am freezing cold. I think I have never been so cold.’

She hardly ate any dinner, they could not make her take any wine. She looked ready to drop with exhaustion; but as soon as they had eaten Arthur wanted to push on, they had twenty more miles to go before the early dusk of winter.

‘Can’t you refuse?’ Maria de Salinas asked her in a quick whisper.

‘No,’ the princess said. She rose from her seat without another word. But when they opened the great wooden door to go out into the courtyard, small flakes of snow swirled in around them.

‘We cannot travel in this, it will soon be dark and we shall lose the road!’ Catalina exclaimed.

‘I shall not lose the road,’ Arthur said, and strode out to his horse. ‘You shall follow me.’

The lady of the house sent a servant flying for a heated stone to put in the litter at Catalina’s feet. The princess climbed in, hunched the rugs around her shoulders, and tucked her hands in deep.

‘I am sure that he is impatient to get you to Ludlow to show you his castle,’ the woman said, trying to put the best aspect on a miserable situation.

‘He is impatient to show me nothing but neglect,’ Catalina snapped; but she took care to say it in Spanish.

They left the warmth and lights of the great house and heard the doors bang behind them as they turned the horses’ heads to the west, and to the white sun which was sinking low on the horizon. It was two hours past noon but the sky was so filled with snow clouds that there was an eerie grey glow over the rolling landscape. The road snaked ahead of them, brown tracks against brown fields, both of them bleaching to whiteness under the haze of swirling snow. Arthur rode ahead, singing merrily, Catalina’s litter laboured along behind. At every step the mules threw the litter to one side and then the other, she had to keep a hand on the edge to hold herself in place, and her fingers became chilled and then cramped, blue from cold. The curtains kept out the worst of the snowflakes but not the insistent, penetrating draughts. If she drew back a corner to look out at the country she saw a whirl of whiteness as the snowflakes danced and circled the road, the sky seeming greyer every moment.

The sun set white in a white sky and the world grew more shadowy. Snow and clouds closed down around the little cavalcade which wound its way across a white land under a grey sky.

Arthur’s horse cantered ahead, the prince riding easily in the saddle, one gloved hand on the reins, the other on his whip. He had stout woollen undergarments under his thick leather jerkin and soft, warm leather boots. Catalina watched him ride forwards. She was too cold and too miserable even to resent him. More than anything else she wished he would ride back to tell her that the journey was nearly over, that they were there.

An hour passed, the mules walked down the road, their heads bowed low against the wind that whirled flakes around their ears and into the litter. The snow was getting thicker now, filling the air and drifting into the ruts of the lane. Catalina had hunched up under the covers, lying like a child, the rapidly cooling stone at her belly, her knees drawn up, her cold hands tucked in, her face ducked down, buried in the furs and rugs. Her feet were freezing cold, there was a gap in the rugs at her back and now and then she shivered at a fresh draught of icy air.

All around, outside the litter, she could hear men chattering and laughing about the cold, swearing that they would eat well when the train got into Burford. Their voices seemed to come from far away; Catalina drifted into a sleep from coldness and exhaustion.

Groggily, she woke when the litter bumped down to the ground and the curtains were swept back. A wave of icy air washed over her and she ducked her head down and cried out in discomfort.

‘Infanta?’ Dona Elvira asked. The duenna had been riding her mule, the exercise had kept her warm. ‘Infanta? Thank God, at last we are here.’

Catalina would not lift her head.

‘Infanta, they are waiting to greet you.’

Still Catalina would not look up.

‘What’s this?’ It was Arthur’s voice, he had seen the litter put down and the duenna bending over it. He saw that the heap of rugs made no movement. For a moment, with a pang of dismay, he thought that the princess might have been taken ill. Maria de Salinas gave him a reproachful look. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘It is nothing.’ Dona Elvira straightened up and stood between the prince and his young wife, shielding Catalina as he jumped from his horse and came towards her. ‘The princess has been asleep, she is composing herself.’

‘I’ll see her,’ he said. He put the woman aside with one confident hand and kneeled down beside the litter.

‘Catalina?’ he asked quietly.

‘I am frozen with cold,’ said a little thread of voice. She lifted her head and he saw that she was as white as the snow itself and her lips were blue. ‘I am so c … cold that I shall die and then you will be happy. You can b … bury me in this horrible country and m … marry some fat, stupid Englishwoman. And I shall never see …’ She broke off into sobs.

‘Catalina?’ He was utterly bemused.

‘I shall never see my m … mother again. But she will know that you killed me with your miserable country and your cruelty.’

‘I have not been cruel!’ he rejoined at once, quite blind to the gathering crowd of courtiers around them. ‘By God, Catalina, it was not me!’

‘You have been cruel.’ She lifted her face from the rugs. ‘You have been cruel because –’

It was her sad, white, tearstained face that spoke to him far more than her words could ever have done. She looked like one of his sisters when their grandmother scolded them. She did not look like an infuriating, insulting princess of Spain, she looked like a girl who had been bullied into tears – and he realised that it was he who had bullied her, he had made her cry, and he had left her in the cold litter for all the afternoon while he had ridden on ahead and delighted in the thought of her discomfort.

He reached into the rugs and pulled out her icy hand. Her fingers were numb with cold. He knew he had done wrong. He took her blue fingertips to his mouth and kissed them, then he held them against his lips and blew his warm breath against them. ‘God forgive me,’ he said. ‘I forgot I was a husband. I didn’t know I had to be a husband. I didn’t realise that I could make you cry. I won’t ever do so again.’

She blinked, her blue eyes swimming in unshed tears. ‘What?’

‘I was wrong. I was angry but quite wrong. Let me take you inside and we will get warm and I shall tell you how sorry I am and I will never be unkind to you again.’

At once she struggled with her rugs and Arthur pulled them off her legs. She was so cramped and so chilled that she stumbled when she tried to stand. Ignoring the muffled protests of her duenna, he swept her up into his arms and carried her like a bride across the threshold of the hall.

Gently he put her down before the roaring fire, gently he put back her hood, untied her cloak, chafed her hands. He waved away the servants who would have come to take her cloak, offered her wine. He made a little circle of peace and silence around them, and he watched the colour come back to her pale cheeks.

‘I am sorry,’ he said, heartfelt. ‘I was very, very angry with you but I should not have taken you so far in such bad weather and I should never have let you get cold. It was wrong of me.’

‘I forgive you,’ she whispered, a little smile lighting her face.

‘I didn’t know that I had to take care of you. I didn’t think. I have been like a child, an unkind child. But I know now, Catalina. I will never be unkind to you again.’

She nodded. ‘Oh, please. And you too must forgive me. I have been unkind to you.’

‘Have you?’

‘At Oxford,’ she whispered, very low.

He nodded. ‘And what do you say to me?’

She stole a quick upwards glance at him. He was not making a play of offence. He was a boy still, with a boy’s fierce sense of fairness. He needed a proper apology.

‘I am very, very sorry,’ she said, speaking nothing but the truth. ‘It was not a good thing to do, and I was sorry in the morning, but I could not tell you.’

‘Shall we go to bed now?’ he whispered to her, his mouth very close to her ear.

‘Can we?’

‘If I say that you are ill?’

She nodded, and said nothing more.

‘The princess is unwell from the cold,’ Arthur announced generally. ‘Dona Elvira will take her to her room, and I shall dine there, alone with her, later.’

‘But the people have come to see Your Grace …’ his host pleaded. ‘They have an entertainment for you, and some disputes they would like you to hear …’

‘I shall see them all in the hall now, and we shall stay tomorrow also. But the princess must go to her rooms at once.’

‘Of course.’

There was a flurry around the princess as her ladies, led by Dona Elvira, escorted her to her room. Catalina glanced back at Arthur. ‘Please come to my room for dinner,’ she said clearly enough for everyone to hear. ‘I want to see you, Your Grace.’

It was everything to him: to hear her publicly avow her desire for him. He bowed at the compliment and then he went to the great hall and called for a cup of ale and dealt very graciously with the half-dozen men who had mustered to see him, and then he excused himself and went to her room.

Catalina was waiting for him, alone by the fireside. She had dismissed her women, her servants, there was no-one to wait on them, they were quite alone. He almost recoiled at the sight of the empty room; the Tudor princes and princesses were never left alone. But she had banished the servants who should wait at the table, she had sent away the ladies who should dine with them. She had even dismissed her duenna. There was no-one to see what she had done to her apartments, nor how she had set the dinner table.

She had swathed the plain wooden furniture in scarves of light cloth in vivid colours, she had even draped scarves from the tapestries to hide the cold walls, so the room was like a beautifully trimmed tent.