Catalina’s first-hand knowledge of the princess’s bedsheets became a matter of national importance.īy this point Catalina had left Catherine’s service and England, marrying a Moorish crossbow-maker called Oviedo in Ezcaray, northern Spain. Catherine insisted her first marriage had never been consummated. Henry sought an annulment on the grounds that Catherine’s marriage to Arthur invalidated their union. Intriguingly, one Spanish account reports that Catalina ‘was present the first time the Queen and Henry were united as one’, suggesting she was a witness to their first sexual encounter.īy 1527, Catherine was menopausal and only one living daughter was born to the couple. Catherine married the teenage king and Catalina was once more in attendance at the royal bed. In 1509 the accession of Henry VIII changed Catalina’s circumstances once again. The African trumpeter John Blanke, who probably also arrived in England as part of Catherine’s retinue, entered the service of Henry VII by 1507. Catalina continued to serve Catherine, although other Spanish attendants left to serve the English royal court. In April 1502 Arthur died and the widowed Catherine moved to London, transporting her household into a miserable seven years of increasing penury and discomfort. There was little time for Catalina to adjust to her new life. That question became of vital importance in the decades ahead. Carrying the linen sheets to and from the royal bedchamber, Catalina was in a unique position to know whether Catherine and Arthur’s marriage was ever consummated. There, it was Catalina’s duty to make Catherine’s bed and attend ‘to other secret services’ of an intimate nature. On Catherine’s marriage, her Spanish household travelled with Prince Arthur to his court at Ludlow. Garbed in Granadan dress and sandals, Catalina was almost certainly one of those described – with more rhetorical flourish than cultural sensitivity – by Thomas More as ‘barefoot pygmy Ethiopians’. Her Spanish ladies wore ‘busteous and marvellous’ hooped gowns. When Catherine entered London that November she made a public display of her foreignness, riding ‘a mule richly trapped after the manner of Spain’, her auburn hair capped by a large braided hat. What is certain is that Catalina was among the 60 servants who travelled with Catherine to her new home in 1501. Since she shared it with Catherine of Aragon, she might have followed the custom of adopting her mistress’ name. This is almost certainly how Catalina gained her name. Most slaves in royal service converted to Christianity, changing their names in the process.
The Spanish rulers proclaimed the widening horizons of their empire by enslaving and displaying their power over its people. By then, there were several slaves in royal service, including those seized from recently claimed territories in the Canary Islands and the New World. When the city of Malaga finally fell in the siege of 1487, Ferdinand and Isabella condemned the entire population to slavery or death. In some cases, enslavement was a reprisal for resisting the ‘Catholic monarchs’. Corsairs seized and enslaved Moorish travellers, while others were enslaved as punishment for such crimes as pleading for alms without a permit, or gathering in groups of more than four. In the wake of the Reconquista of Granada by Ferdinand and Isabella, Muslim moors were considered the spoils of war. But before 1501 she was enslaved, probably converted and placed in the service of Catherine of Aragon. As such, she almost certainly grew up a Muslim moor. She was born in Motril, Granada, which until 1492 was an autonomous Muslim kingdom.
She is not accorded a surname and Catalina was probably not her real name. In the records, Catalina is identified as a slave and royal bedmaker. Yet she may have known the truth about an enigma that still beguiles us five centuries later. With Catherine of Aragon on that journey was another Catalina, one whose real identity has been obscured by enslavement and historical conflation. On disembarking at Plymouth, la infanta Catalina, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, had her name anglicised to Catherine and prepared to marry Prince Arthur, heir of Henry VII.
In the summer of 1501 an adolescent called Catalina left Moorish Granada to begin a new life in England.
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