stubbornsoul:Catherine and the English AmbassadorsCatherine’s first appearance to English eyes was w
stubbornsoul:Catherine and the English AmbassadorsCatherine’s first appearance to English eyes was when she was present at a meeting between her parents and the English ambassadors in March 1489, at the Castilian town of Medina del Campo. The English ambassadors Thomas Savage and Richard Nanfan were here to meet the royal couple who headed what was rapidly becoming one of Europe’s most powerful monarchies, but also to cast their eyes over a tiny princess. Henry VII the founder of the Tudor dynasty would betroth his eldest son and heir, Arthur, to the Spanish royal family’s fourth daughter, Catherine. The ambassadors had spent two days at their comfortable lodgings, hung with fine tapestries, in the town. At seven o’clock in the evening, as dusk fell, the messengers from the king and queen arrived at their quarters. Two bishops, a count, the comendador of an order of knights involved in the battle for Granada and a string of other nobles, officials and ‘great persons’ appeared. A torch-lit procession took them to the doors of the royal palace where the monarchs had established their movable court. The palace in Medina del Campo was a compact network of halls, courtyards and galleries. They were conducted into a great room where they found the kings seated under a rich cloth of gold. In the centre of this great cloth of state was an escutcheon quartered with the arms of Castile and Aragon. The monarchs both wore robes woven entirely of gold. The king’s was lined with the finest sable fur. It was the queen, however, who provoked a literary gasp of awe from Machado. The spectacular clothes and jewels she wore that evening – and the other outfits worn over the following days as the ambassadors were entertained with feasts, jousts, bull-fights and dances – were worthy, in his mind, of minutely detailed reporting. The queen’s heavy jewellery dazzled as much as her dress. She wore on her neck a rich gold necklace composed entirely of white and red roses, each rose being adorned with a large jewel. Besides this she had two ribbons suspended on each side of her breast, adorned with large diamonds, balass and other rubies, pearls, and various other jewels of great value to the number of a hundred or more. Over all this dress she wore a short cloak of fine crimson satin furred with ermine, very handsome in appearance and very brilliant. It was thrown on [negligently] cross-wise over her left side. Her head was uncovered, excepting only a little coiffe de plaisance at the back of her head without anything else.The formal hand-kissing and speech-making that followed was slightly spoilt by the fact that the man appointed to speak on behalf of the Spanish monarchs, the ancient Diego de Muros, bishop of Ciudad Rodrigo, had lost most of his teeth. The English visitors strained their ears, but failed to understand the Latin words that babbled past his toothless gums and out between his lips. The next twelve days of negotiating and entertainment were planned with absolute precision. The ambassadors were alternately charmed, amused, overwhelmed and conducted to the negotiating table.They also got their first glimpse of the young girl who Machado would refer to as either ‘the princess of England’ or the ‘princess of Wales’, Catherine of Aragon. The three-year-old had missed out on the jousting and banquets, though her elder siblings Juan and Isabel had danced for the ambassadors with their Portuguese teachers. The ambassadors’ first meeting with Donna Catherine, as Machado also called her, appears to have been stage-managed to look like a simple family affair. Isabella and Ferdinand, together with the elder three children, led them into a gallery hung with fine tapestries. Here they found little Catherine and her sister María, then aged six, both as lavishly dressed as their mother. They had with them their junior court of fourteen maidens (aged fourteen or younger) ‘all of them dressed in cloth of gold, and all of them daughters of noblemen’. Catherine was still too young to dance for her visitors, but little María gamely took the floor with ‘a young lady of her age and size, and led her to dance’. The following day the ambassadors caught another glimpse of Catherine, this time in a less formal atmosphere. It was a day of fun and games, with the visitors being introduced to that most Spanish of activities, the bull-fight. Isabella brought Catherine with her to watch and, it seems, she showed herself an affectionate and attentive mother. ‘It was beautiful to see how the queen held up her youngest daughter,’ Machado recalled. Two days later, after a hard final session of bargaining, the Treaty of Medina del Campo was signed. England and Spain sealed their alliance. The ambassadors said their goodbyes to the monarchs and little Catherine later that day, though it was the Spanish royal family who left Medina del Campo first. They were off, once more, to wander their kingdoms, though their first stop was to be a visit to Catherine’s maternal grandmother – whom Isabel visited regularly – at nearby Arévalo. The ambassadors went off laden with gifts. These included a Spanish war-horse, a smaller Moorish jennet, a couple of mules, yards of silk and sixty marks of silver each. Source: Giles Tremlett, Catherine of Aragon -- source link