For purity and steadfastness of devotion and duty, Katharine stands unsurpassed in the history of the world, and Shakespeare has conceived no more pathetic figure than that of the patient Queen living in the midst of an unscrupulous Court.

Daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, she was betrothed at the age of five to Arthur, Henry VII.’s eldest son. Though known as the Princess of Wales, it was not till 1501, when only sixteen years old, that she was married to Prince Arthur. She had scarcely been married six months when Arthur died, at the early age of fifteen, and she was left a widow. Henry VII., in his desire to keep her marriage dower of 200,000 crowns, proposed a marriage between her and Arthur’s brother. Katharine wrote to her father saying she had “no inclination for a second marriage in England.” In spite of her remonstrances and the misgivings of the Pope, who had no wish to give the necessary dispensation for her to marry her deceased husband’s brother, she was betrothed to Henry after two years of widowhood. But it was not till a few months after Henry VIII. came to the throne, five years later, that they were actually married. Henry was five years younger than Katharine, but their early married life appears to have been very happy. She wrote to her father, “Our time is ever passed in continual feasts.”

The cruel field sports of the time the Queen never could take any delight in, and avoided them as much as possible. She was pious and ascetic and most proficient in needlework. Katharine had a number of children, all of whom died shortly after birth. It was this consideration in the first instance which weighed in Henry’s mind in desiring a divorce. The first child to survive was Princess Mary, born in February, 1516. Henry expressed the hope that sons would follow. But Katharine had no further living children. Henry hoped against hope, and undertook, in the event of her having an heir, to lead a crusade against the Turks. Even this bribe to fortune proved unavailing. Henry’s conscience, which was at best of the utilitarian sort, now began to suffer deep pangs, and in 1525, when Katharine was forty years old and he thirty-four, he gave up hope of the much-needed heir to the throne. The Queen herself thought her childlessness was “a judgment of God, for that her former marriage was made in blood,” the innocent Earl of Warwick having been put to death owing to the demand of Ferdinand of Aragon.

The King began to indulge in the superstition that his marriage with a brother’s widow was marked with the curse of Heaven. It is perhaps a strange coincidence that Anne Boleyn should have appeared on the scene at this moment. Katharine seems always to have regarded her rival with charity and pity. When one of her gentlewomen began to curse Anne as the cause of the Queen’s misery, the Queen stopped her. “Curse her not,” she said, “but rather pray for her; for even now is the time fast coming when you shall have reason to pity her and lament her case.”Undoubtedly Katharine’s most notable quality was her dignity. Even her enemies regarded her with respect. She was always sustained by the greatness of her soul, her life of right doing and her feeling of being “a Queen and daughter of a King.” Through all her bitter trials she went, a pathetic figure, untouched by calumny. If she had any faults they are certainly not recorded in history. Her farewell letter to the King would seem to be very characteristic of Katharine’s beauty of character. She knew the hand of death was upon her. She had entreated the King, but Henry had refused her request for a last interview with her daughter Mary.

With this final cruelty fresh in her mind she still could write: “My lord and dear husband,—I commend me unto you. The hour of my death draweth fast on, and my case being such, the tender love I owe you forceth me with a few words, to put you in remembrance of the health and safeguard of your soul, which you ought to prefer before all worldly matters, and before the care and tendering of your own body, for the which you have cast me into many miseries and yourself into many cares. For my part I do pardon you all, yea, I do wish and devoutly pray God that He will pardon you.”