CATHERINE OF ARAGON (1485-1536), queen of Henry VIII. of England, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, was born on Dec. 15, 1485. She left Spain in 15o1 to marry Arthur, prince of Wales, eldest son of King Henry VII., and landed at Plymouth on Oct. 2. The wedding took place on Nov. 14 in London, and soon afterwards Catherine accompanied her husband to Wales, where, in his 16th year, the prince died on April 2, 1502. On June 25, 1503, she was formally betrothed to the king's second son, Henry, now prince of Wales, and a papal dispensation for the alliance was obtained. The marriage, how ever, did not take place during the lifetime of Henry VII. Fer dinand endeavoured to cheat the English king of the marriage portion agreed upon, and Henry made use of the presence of the unmarried princess in England to extort new conditions, and es pecially to urge the marriage of his daughter Mary to the arch duke Charles, grandson of Ferdinand, and afterwards Charles V. Catherine was thus from the first the unhappy victim of state politics. Writing to Ferdinand on March 9, 1509, she describes the state of poverty to which she was reduced, and declares the king's unkindness impossible to be borne any longer.
Henry VIII. married her on June 11, 1509. At first he showed himself an affectionate husband, and the alliance with Ferdinand was maintained against France. During Henry's invasion of France in 1513 she was made regent ; she made the preparations for the Scottish expedition, and was riding north to put herself at the head of the troops when the victory of Flodden Field ended the campaign. After Henry's return next year there was a breach with Ferdinand, and the king angrily reproached his wife ; but she took occasion in 1520, during the visit of her nephew Charles V. to England, to urge the policy of gaining his alliance rather than that of France. Immediately on his departure, on May 31, 1520, she accompanied the king to France, on the visit to Francis I., when the sovereigns met at the Field of the Cloth of Gold; but in 1522 war was declared against France and the emperor again welcomed to England. She is represented by Shakespeare as pleading in 1521 for the unfortunate duke of Buckingham. Between Jan. 1510 and Nov. 1518 Catherine gave birth to six children (including two princes), who were all stillborn or died in infancy except Mary, born in 1516, and opinion ascribed this series of disasters to the curse on incestuous unions. To avoid a fresh dispute concerning the succession, and the revival of the civil war, a male heir to the throne was a pressing necessity. The question of the possible dissolution of the marriage occupied Henry's mind. It was doubtful whether the pope had the power to legalize his marriage with Catherine, his brother's betrothed, and the case for the desired divorce was therefore more hopeful.
Rumours, probably then unfounded, of an intended divorce had been heard abroad as early as 1524. But the creation in 1525 of the king's illegitimate son Henry, as duke of Richmond—the title borne by his grandfather Henry VII.—and the precedence granted to him over all the peers as well as the princess Mary, together with the special honour paid at this time by the king to his own half-sister Mary, were the first real indications of the king's thoughts. In 1526, and perhaps earlier, Wolsey had been making tentative inquiries at Rome on the subject. In May 1527 a col lusive and secret suit was begun before the cardinal, who, as legate, summoned the king to defend himself from the charge of cohabitation with his brother's wife; but these proceedings were dropped. On June 22 Henry informed Catherine that they had been living in mortal sin and must separate. During Wolsey's absence in July at Paris, where he had been commissioned to discuss vaguely the divorce and Henry's marriage with Renee, daughter of Louis XII., Anne Boleyn (q.v.) is first heard of in connection with the king, his affection for her having, however, begun probably as early as 1523, and the cardinal on his return found her openly installed at the court. In October 1528 the pope issued a commission to Cardinal Campeggio and Wolsey to try the cause in England, and bound himself not to revoke the case to Rome, confirming his promise by a secret decretal corn mission which, however, was destroyed by Campeggio. But the trial was a sham. Campeggio was forbidden to pronounce sen tence without further reference to Rome, and was instructed to create delays, the pope assuring Charles V. at the same time that the case should be ultimately revoked to Rome.
The object of all parties was now to persuade Catherine to enter a nunnery and thus relieve them of further embarrassment. While Henry's envoys were encouraged at Rome in believing that he might then make another marriage, Henry himself gave Cath erine assurances that no other union would be contemplated in her lifetime. But Catherine with courage and dignity held fast to her rights, demanded a proper trial, and appealed not only to the bull of dispensation, the validity of which was said to be vitiated by certain irregularities, but to a brief granted for the alliance by Pope Julius II. Henry declared the latter to be a forgery, and endeavoured unsuccessfully to procure a declaration of its falsity from the pope. The court of the legates accordingly opened on May 31, 1529, the queen appearing before it on June 18 for the purpose of denying its jurisdiction. On the 21st both Henry and Catherine presented themselves before the tribunal, when the queen threw herself at Henry's feet and appealed for the last time to his sense of honour, recalling her own virtue and helplessness. Henry replied with kindness, showing that her wish for the revocation of the cause to Rome was unreasonable in view of the paramount influence then exercised by Charles V. on the pope. Catherine nevertheless persisted in making appeal to Rome, and then withdrew. After her departure Henry, according to Caven dish, Wolsey's biographer, praised her virtues to the court. "She is, my lords, as true, as obedient, as conformable a wife as I could in my phantasy wish or desire. She hath all the virtues and qual ities that ought to be in a woman of her dignity or in any other of baser estate." On her refusal to return, her plea was over ruled and she was adjudged contumacious, while the sittings of the court continued in her absence. Subsequently the legates paid her a private visit of advice, but were unable to move her from her resolution. Finally, however, in July 1529, the case was, ac cording to her wish, and as the result of the treaty of Barcelona and the pope's complete surrender to Charles V., revoked by the pope to Rome: a momentous act, which decided Henry's future attitude, and occasioned the downfall of the whole papal authority in England. On March 7, 153o Pope Clement issued a brief for bidding Henry to make a second marriage, and ordering the resti tution of Catherine to her rights till the cause was determined; while at the same time he professed to the French ambassador, the bishop of Tarbes, his pleasure should the marriage with Anne Boleyn have been already made, if only it were not by his author ity (Cal. of State Papers, For. and Dom. iv., 629o). The same year Henry obtained opinions favourable to the divorce from the English, French and most of the Italian universities, but unfavour able answers from Germany, while a large number of English peers and ecclesiastics, including Wolsey and Archbishop Warham, joined in a memorial to the pope in support of Henry's cause.
Meanwhile, Catherine was still treated by Henry as his queen. On May 31, 1531 she was visited by 3o privy councillors, who urged the trial of the case in England, but they met only with a firm refusal. On July 14 Henry left his wife at Windsor, remov ing himself to Woodstock, and never saw her again. In August she was ordered to reside at the Moor in Hertfordshire, and at the same time separated from the princess Mary, who was taken to Richmond. In October she again received a deputation of privy councillors, and again refused to withdraw the case from Rome. In 1532 she sent the king a gold cup as a new year's gift, which the latter returned, and she was forbidden to hold any communica tion with him. Her cause found champions and sympathizers among the people, among the court preachers, and in the House of Commons, while Bishop Fisher had openly taken her part in the legatine trial. Subsequently Catherine was removed to Bishops Hatfield, while Henry and Anne Boleyn visited Francis I. Their marriage, anticipating any sentence of the nullity of the union with Catherine, took place after their return about Jan. 25, On May 1 o Archbishop Cranmer, opened his court, and declared on the 23rd the nullity of Catherine's marriage and the validity of Anne's. On Aug. 10 the king caused proclamation to be made for bidding her the style of queen; but Catherine refused to yield the title for that of princess-dowager. Not long afterwards she was removed to Buckden in Huntingdonshire. Here her household was considerably reduced, and she found herself hemmed in by spies, and in fact a prisoner. A project for removing Catherine from Buckden to Somersham, in the isle of Ely, with a still nar rower maintenance, was prevented by her resistance. The attempt in November to incriminate the queen in connection with Elizabeth Barton failed.
She passed her life now in religious devotions. On March 23, the pope pronounced her marriage valid, but by this time England had thrown off the papal jurisdiction, the parliament had transferred Catherine's jointure to Anne Boleyn, and the decree had no effect on Catherine's fortunes. She refused to swear to the new act of succession, which declared her marriage null and Anne's infant the heir to the throne, and soon afterwards she was re moved to Kimbolton, where she was well treated. On May she was visited by the archbishop of York and Tunstall, bishop of Durham, who vainly threatened her with death if she persisted in her refusal. She was kept in strict seclusion, separated from Mary and from all outside communications, and in Dec. 1535 her health gave way. She died on Jan. 8, 1S36, not without suspicions of poison, which, however, may be dismissed. She was buried by the king's order in Peterborough cathedral. Before her death she dictated a last letter to Henry, according to Polydore Vergil, ex pressing her forgiveness, begging his good offices for Mary, and concluding with the astounding assurance—"I vow that mine eyes desire you above all things." The king himself affected no sorrow at her death, and thanked God there was now no fear of war.
Catherine is described as "rather ugly than otherwise ; of low stature and rather stout ; very good and very religious; speaks Spanish, French, Flemish, English; more beloved by the islanders than any queen that has ever reigned." She was a woman of con siderable education and culture, her scholarship and knowledge of the Bible being noted by Erasmus, who dedicated to her his book on Christian Matrimony in 1526. She endured her bitter and un deserved misfortunes with extraordinary courage and resolution, and at the same time with great womanly forbearance, of which a striking instance was the compassion shown by her for the fallen Wolsey.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. See the article in Dict. of Nat. Biog. by J. Gairdner, Bibliography. See the article in Dict. of Nat. Biog. by J. Gairdner, and those on Henry VIII. and Wolsey, where the case is summed up very adversely to Henry and J. A. Froude, The Divorce of Catherine of Aragon (1891) where it is regarded from the contrary aspect ; Cambridge Modern History, vol. ii. (19o3) ; A. F. Pollard, Henry VIII. (19o5) ; M. Hume, The Wives of Henry VIII. (2905).