The whys and whens behind the 200-year hegemony of a Protestant-led Anglophonia centred in London and more recently in Washington DC is a club with many members but the standout and perennial favourite remains the urge of Henry VIII to secure a divorce from Catherine of Aragon.
Today is a bit player in one of history’s greatest what-ifs, what if Henry’s elder brother and husband of Catherine had survived, succeeded Henry VII, and produced heirs.
Context is all. In 1485, Henry Tudor had beaten the Plantagenet King Richard, he of humpback fame, at the Battle of Bosworth Field. He became Henry VII, a ruthless manager who promptly went about ripping medieval England from the stupor of feudalism and ridding it of the poverty of an extended civil war.
In foreign policy Henry was faced with the usual problem, what to do with rival France. In this, he looked to Spain, or more correctly the Aragon and Castile of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic monarchs. These two were on the up. In 1492, they would defeat Granada, the last Muslim state in western Europe, and would sponsor the voyages of one Christopher Columbus across the Atlantic. Incidentally, he would land in and name Guadelope on 4 November 1493.
In 1489, the rulers agreed for a common policy against France, reduced tariffs, and the marriage of their children Catherine and Arthur. The treaty provides an interesting aside on Henry’s ruthlessness, with Catherine later bemoaning that the “miseries and disasters” of her life fell from Henry’s decision to execute the young and long imprisoned last male heir of the Plantagenets “to induce King Ferdinand to give his daughter, this Catharine, in marriage to Prince Arthur.”
Arthur and Catherine were married by proxy in 1499 and they exchanged letters written in Latin until September 1501 when Arthur reached 15 and a wedding was arranged. The wedding took place in London in mid-November, conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury assisted by the Bishop of London.
The latter as subsequent archbishop would conduct the wedding of Arthur’s brother Henry and Arthur’s widow Catherine. In the meantime the bishop finished his November 1501 duties as a witness in the bedding ceremony, wherein he blessed the bed and prayed for a fruitful marriage before leaving the couple alone.
In some ceremonies the witnesses would remain to observe intercourse, although this appears not to have happened on this occasion. The question of whether the couple ever had sex would become a major issue much later, as if there was no sex there was no binding marriage and Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine – contrary to the argument underpinning his case for a divorce – was valid. Anyway, there was not much time for fruit as Arthur died four or so months later.
Tradition has it that the young couple first met ten days before the wedding, on 4 November 1501. They spoke in the language of their letters, Latin, although their regional differences in pronunciation meant that their respective bishops had to step in and translate.
The expression “the empire on which the sun never sets” is well known to Anglophiles. The phrase was first used to describe the European and American lands under the control of Charles, Catherine’s nephew. Whether a British Empire would have risen over the following centuries, had the two fifteen year olds gone from stilted Latin chat to a fruitful marriage remains to fascinate.
