By Jocelyn R. Wingfield
Before we concentrate on the sojourn of Queen Catherine of Aragon at Kimbolton starting in 1534, we must first set the scene. Sir Richard Wingfield, P.C. [Privy Councillor] came into possession of Kimbolton Castle, seventy miles north of London, in 1522 when he married Catherine Woodville, sister of King Edward IV’s Queen Elizabeth and widow of the executed Duke of Buckingham. “The Castelle is double diked and the building of it is metely strong. Sir Richard Wingfield builded new fair lodgyns and galeries upon the olde foundations of the Castelle”. Sir Richard was made a Knight of the Garter in 1524 and died the following year, leaving four sons: Charles, his heir; Thomas-Maria, twin of Charles, father-to-be of the future President Edward-Maria Wingfield of Jamestown, Virginia; Jaques, a future Master of the Ordinance in Ireland, and Lawrence.
Charles may well have had the great Sir Francis Knollys, as his guardian during his minority e.g. up to 1534, since Charles was to marry Francis’ sister, Johanna at about the time that Catherine of Aragon died, perhaps straight after. ‘Tis said that an Englishman’s home is his castle, but, in this instance Charles could not really call his castle his home until he was 22, since the king wanted to use it as a prison, although Charles could conceivably have been there throughout the period 1534 to 1536. Princess Catherine of Aragon [Spain], youngest child of the great Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile [Spain], had married Prince Arthur, heir of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York at St. Paul’s in November 1501. The very next April Arthur died, probably of consumption. In June of the following year Catherine was betrothed to Arthur’s brother, the new heir apparent, Prince Henry, and moved to Durham House on the Thames. In 1509 Henry VII died and his 18-year old heir succeeded to the throne as King Henry VIII, marrying the 23-year old Princess Catherine of Aragon. It was a glittering court.
On January 1st 1511 Queen Catherine gave birth to their second child, (the first, a girl, had been stillborn).. This was a son and heir, who was christened Henry. In his excitement the King could not wait for the Queen to complete her lying-in, but, straight after Twelfth Night, sped off to give thanks at “England’s Nazareth”, England’s second holiest shrine, (ranking after Canterbury), the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. From her bed the Queen promised to follow him as soon as she was fit. (Catherine finally managed a spring visit six years later, after a visit to the home of the King’s sister Mary at Westhorpe, Suffolk). The Prince who might have become King Henry IX lived but fifty-two days. In the fall of 1514 Princess Mary, sister of the King, was crowned Queen of France, as consort of Louis XII. Eighty-two days later Louis was dead. Fetched back to the glittering English court by Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk (whom she married secretly in Paris) and Sir Richard Wingfield, Deputy of Calais (the English enclave on the French coast), Mary accepted becoming godmother to Sir Richard’s second son, Thomas-Maria Wingfield, en route. A year later, in February 1516, Princess Mary was born to Queen Catherine.
By the time Sir Richard Wingfield, K.G. of Kimbolton Castle died in 1525, King Henry and Catherine still had no male heir and it was clear that Catherine would bear no more children. By late 1526 Henry VIII had developed a passion for Anne Boleyn, one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. In July 1532 the King and Queen “separated”. In January of the following year Henry had, with wide-sweeping implications, divorced Catherine and married Anne Boleyn.
By mid-May 1534, as “Princess Dowager”, Catherine of Aragon & England was incarcerated in Charles Wingfield’s family twin-moated home, Kimbolton Castle, having been at More (St. Alban’s) then Ampthill then nearby Buckden. Her jailers were Sir Edmund Bedingfield as her Steward and Sir Edward Chamberlaine, fittingly, as her Chamberlain. Whether Bridget nee Wiltshire, widow of Sir Richard Wingfield (his second wife) was still living there or not, 1 have been unable to discover. Bridget had married secondly Sir Nicholas Harvey, Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, who had died two years before Catherine’s arrival at Kimbolton. Bridget was at about this time, (according to various authorities, with whom I disagree) appointed Lady of the Bedchamber and “Mother of the Maids” for Anne Boleyn, and took as her third husband another courtier, Sir Robert Tyrwhitt, of Leighton Bromswold near Kimbolton. Thomas-Maria Wingfield, fatherto-be of Edward-Maria, had come down from Cambridge the year before having received his B.A. From that very April, just before Catherine of Aragon arrived there at Kimbolton, Thomas-Maria apparently held some property in Leighton Bromswold. He presumably came into it from his stepfather.
During Catherine’s imprisonment, were Richard and Bridget Wingfield’s children there at this Wingfield-owned castle? Were Charles, Thomas-Maria (father-to-be of the founder of Virginia), Margaret, Mary, Cicely, Jaques (later to be Master of the Ordinance in Ireland), Lawrence, Jane, Elizabeth and Catherine Wingfield (surely called Catherine after the Queen!), all, or some of them, around the castle, watching and whispering? It would seem unlikely. Four of the girls married, but it is not clear whether this was before this time. Some of them may have been at Sir Richard’s great house, Wingfield House in Candlewick Street in London (if it was still in the family), or at their mother’s house, Stone Castle near Gravesend on the Thames (held in trust for Charles). Or perhaps King Henry ordered Sir Anthony Wingfield, M.P., a rising star with the young King, to have them at Letheringham Old Hall in Suffolk or at his great Oxford House at London Wall, or in his house at Stepney [Limehousel near Blackwall. Records as yet fail us.
At Kimbolton Catherine lived in one room on the ground floor, whence she could see part of the deer park and Stonely Hill across the meandering little River Kym, where stood just over the top out of sight, moated Stonely Priory, a small neglected Augustinian Priory with cells for six monks, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, with its little “Our Lady Chapel” and its leafy approach called St. Mary Way. How Catherine must have yearned to visit it! The Dissolution of the monasteries was proceeding apace at this very time. Within a year of Catherine’s arrival at Kimbolton, Stonely Priory was to be disestablished. But three years later the priory lands were to be sold to to Oliver and Francis Leeder; and in 1544 the Leeders sold “the site and appurtenances”. (the Leeders, in their turn, were in 1552 to sell Stonely Priory to Thomas-Maria Wingfield, Sr. and his wife Margaret, who in 1550 had given birth to Edward-Maria Wingfield, later (1607) of Jamestown, Virginia. Stonely Priory was where Edward-Maria was to spend his formative years).
‘Tis nowadays said that there was a secret passage up the hill to Stonely from Catherine’s bower. It would have had to go under the Kym. It is a nice tale, but there is no such passage. For nearly a year Catherine never communicated directly with her jailers. She never left her room, except to go to the castle chapel or to walk in the narrow walled garden behind the chapel. Her staff consisted of Jorge de Atheca, Bishop of Llandaff in Wales, her chaplain; Father Thomas Abell, her Spanish-speaking confessor; Francisco Felipez, her maitre d’; her physician, the faithful Miguel De La Sa; apothecary Joan de Soto; Philip Greenacre, three maids of honour and six to eight English maids. How was she to fare in this home of the Wingfields, house that within twenty years would become very well known to the man who was to found the Jamestown Colony in Virginia. Would Spanish Ambassador Chapuys be able to “spring” dear “Catherine of Kimbolton” to lead a revolt in the island that had broken with Rome?
In July 1534 the Spanish Ambassador at the Court of King Henry VIII, Eustache Chapuys, failed again to obtain royal permission to visit Catherine of Aragon, who was imprisoned at Kimbolton Castle, seventy miles north of London. And so he announced to all his friends that he was going on a pilgrimage to “England’s Nazareth”, England’s second holiest site (ranking after Canterbury), to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk, over a hundred miles north of the court and capital.
Chapuys asked leading Spanish merchants to accompany him and assembled sixty horsemen, accoutred and caparisoned as if they were on a royal progress. He surely knew that Queen Catherine had been on pilgrimage to Walsingham back in 1517 and that her dread lord, King Henry had paid three visits there, ’twas said, walking the mile or two from the Chapel of St. Catherine near East Barsham Hall to Walsingham itself. One visit was to pray for his then son and heir, Prince Henry, in 1511. In the following year the King paid £23-11-4 for “the glazing of Our Lady’s Chapel at Walsingham” and had initiated a standing order for “the King’s candle” to be kept burning before Our Lady of Walsingham and the wages for a priest to say Mass there. This was still in force. Chapuys planned to go north for some 65 miles to St. Neots and then, instead of proceeding north-east to Walsingham, to make a 5-mile dash noth-west through the hamlet of Stonely to Kimbolton. But the King was not ;co’ed. He knew Walsingham well. Indeed his very own candle still burned there. He knew that the Pilgrim’s Way lay through Newmarket, thirty miles east of St. Neots.
In the van of Chapuys’ grand procession he placed all the trumpeters and drummers that he could find to hire in the capital, London’s pop groups of 1534. His cortege, displaying the arms of the Ambassador of Spain & the Holy Roman Empire, unfurled banners billowing and pennants streaming proudly in the midsummer wind, wound like a giant viper down one London street and up the next, before setting off up the great road that led in the direction of the Wingfields’ castle. It was hot and dusty, noisy but organised. Although those in the procession were in carnival mood, to some of the watching Londoners and those who lived on the route there was perchance also an air of mutiny. They must have all known that Chapuys was not going to Walsingham – not with all that grandeur.
Chapuys had ridden but a quarter of the way to Kimbolton, when a messenger from the King rode up and warned him not to visit “the Princess Dowager”. Chapuys and his party continued north. At St. Neots, the 65-mile mark, just as Chapuys had halted preparatory to turning off for the last five miles on the Stonely-Kimbolton road, and thereby finally showing his real intention, another messenger came cantering up. This one came from the direction of Stonely Hill. It was Francisco Felipe, sent by Catherine. Chapuys should not proceed, since her lord, the King, had forbidden him -with the emphasis on him – to visit; however, a welcome at the castle of game and wine awaited his escort.
Consequently Chapuys sent off at speed with Felipe his beautifully equipped Spanish horsemen, cantering over the Kym near the Priory of Great Staughton, past Agden Windmill, along the river flowing lazily below Stonely Priory and its little Our Lady Chapel, over the Kym again and up to the double-moated fortified home of young Charles Wingfield. Catherine and her staff surely heard the rising crescendo from downstream of Spanish songs, of cheering and huzzas, as in a great swirling riot of whirling, prancing colourful horsemen, bits and spurs jangling, Catherine’s jubilant countrymen thronged outside the double-moat. She must have wept for joy.
Chapuys’ jester tumbled off his horse and literally played the fool on the water’s edge, as the party begged Bedingfield’s guards on the drawbridge to let them in. As the jester fell into the moat amidst much laughter from within as well as without, he appeared to lose control of his jester’s staff and its attached casket, which happened to fly up in a parabola over the castle wall landing near the deposed Queen or one of her staff. Chapuys had reestablished communication. Taken completely off his guard, Catherine’s Steward, Sir Edmund Bedingfield allowed the Spaniards inside the castle, where they were entertained to dinner in the Great Hall. That November Queen Anne Boleyn’s child, Henry, was born and died.
In early 1535 Queen Catherine’s daughter, the Princess Mary, fell ill. Both parents suspected Anne Boleyn. King Henry quickly despatched to see Mary his physician, Dr. Butts, who at once called in Catherine’s physician, De La Sa. Both doctors suspected deliberate poisoning, but Mary said she was getting better. Catherine however, wrote to Ambassador Chapuys from Kimbolton Castle on 12th February begging him to try and persuade the King to send Princess Mary to join her at Charles Wingfield’s place, to be nursed there by Catherine herself. This letter must have been vetted by Catherine’s jailer, Bedingfield, since Chapuys read it to King Henry (who surely by then knew of its contents anyway!)
Henry refused to allow Mary to be moved there. Looking Chapuys straight between the eyes, the King said he could not risk sending Mary to such an isolated place as the home of the Wingfields there on the Kym since ill-intentioned persons, without the knowledge of the “Princess Dowager” were out to spring her out of the castle, to use her to foment rebellion and then to spirit her out of the realm. Henry then said he would however, permit Mary to move closer to Kimbolton Castle, but that Catherine would not be permitted to visit her daughter.
What did the future now hold for the poor wretched prisoner incarcerated within the late Sir Richard Wingfield’s “Castelle metely strong. with new fair logyns and galeries”?
Although unqueen’d, yet like a queen, and daughter of a king, inter me. I can no more. —Catherine, Shakespeare, Henry VIII, Act 5, Sc.II, Kimbolton
When Catherine of Aragon received a dispatch from Ambassador Chapuys, stating that King Henry would move Princess Mary nearer to Charles Wingfield’s doi ible-moated castle at Kimbolton, but that she might not visit her, she was distraught. She wrote back resignedly, pathetically, from Kimbolton that, even if Mary were to be moved within a mile [e.g. as close as Stonely Priory], she had not the means to visit her. She asked Ambassador Chapuys to continue urging the King to send Mary to Kimbolton. But Mary was never allowed to come closer than thirty miles.
That summer of 1535, as Thomas Cromwell’s men made inventories of the religious houses to be plundered, Sir Thomas More’s gull-pecked head atop its pike obscenely displayed on the Southwark end of London Bridge grew shrivelled. On 15th October ex-Queen Catherine wrote from Kimbolton to the new Pope, Paul III: “I and my daughter we await a remedy from God and Your Holiness. It must come speedily or the time will be past.” She also wrote to Dr. Ortiz and to her nephew, the Emperor Charles V, who had been so well served by Edward Maria’s great uncle, Sir Robert Wingfield and by Edward-Maria’s grandfather, Sir Richard, each in turn as Henry’s ambassador. (Chapuys’ messenger carrying these secret despatches was kidnapped in Rome by the Emperor’s ambassador there and so three of Catherine’s letters from Kimbolton were much delayed, but that is another story).
In November poor Catherine had a recurrence of nausea and had to keep to her bed. She put this down to moated houses always being damp. By the time of the noisy Tandry Fair on 11th December, which, like Kimbolton’s Friday market-days, was held in the village (well within earshot, indeed on the same side of the castle as Catherine’s room and the chapel), she had still not heard anything from the continent or Chapuys. And so she wrote again to Dr. Ortiz to say that the Bills of Attainder condemning her and Princess Mary to death were about to be put before Parliament.
Four days after a miserable Christmas Day there at Kimbolton, De La Sa summoned Chapuys to come there at once. Catherine, now dying, was asking to see both him and her daughter, Mary.
After much prevarication at Greenwich Palace, Chapuys obtained the King’s permission to ride to Kimbolton to visit “Madame,” as the King now called her. As the Duke of Suffolk issued Chapuys with a laissez-passer to show to Bedingfield, he said: “When she’s dead there will be no barrier between my King and the Emperor, your Master!”
Accompanied by Cromwell’s escort (and spy), Stephen Vaughan, and a small escort of his own, Chapuys rode north in the rain on that dank, rainy January 1st-2nd 1536, finally squelching along past Stonely Priory up on Stonely Hill, Edward-Maria Wingfield’s home ere long, to clatter over the Kimbolton Castle drawbridge. It was a miserable time and miserable weather.
England’s former Queen lay pale and suffering, propped up on her pillows, her jailers (whom she had not deigned to give audience for over a year), Sir Edmund Bedingfield , her Steward and Sir Edward Chamberlain, her Chamberlain, together with her own staff, stood ranged about her bed. Visitors to Kimbolton had never been allowed to converse in Spanish. But now the ex-Queen welcomed her old friend in English, adding sotto voce in Spanish: “I can die now in your arms, not abandoned – like one of the beasts.” Slowly and deliberately in Spanish Chapuys told her that the King and the whole Kingdom and the Emperor were keen for news of her recovery; adding that the King had promised finally to pay her staff their back-pay and (here he lied) had said that she could select any Manor to retire to when she was better. He stressed that the peace, the welfare and indeed the unity of all Christendom depended on her recovery.
Having released Chapuys to rest in his own room, Catherine very soon summoned him again, back to her bedside, where they conversed for a full two hours. No Englishwoman could then make a will while her husband still lived, but Catherine wanted Chapuys to persuade Henry to allow Mary to inherit her gold collar from Spain and all her old furs. She asked to be buried in a Convent of the Observant Friars, but no such convents remained. The “neglected” Priory of Stonely, had literally just been dissolved a few months before, right under (or rather above) Catherine’s nose. The same applied to nearby Great Staughton. (Stonely was to lie abandoned for two more years). Catherine wanted five hundred masses to be said for her soul, agonising that England’s break with Christendom would be blamed on her. Chapuys stayed three or four days, comforting her, and then on the Feast of the Epiphany, since she seemed so much better, he left.
In foul weather, the night before Chapuys’ departure, Catherine’s former Lady-in-Waiting, Baroness Maria de Salinas, now the Dowager Lady Willoughby de Eresby, having failed to get “any letter of licence to repair thither,” drenched and mud-spattered rode up demanding entrance at the castle gatehouse (later to be named after Catherine of Aragon). Bedingfield refused to let her in. The Baroness protested that she was badly injured from a fall from her horse. Then, perhaps because she was the mother-in-law of the powerful Duke of Suffolk, Sir Edmund relented “and since that time, they never saw her,” he was to report pathetically to Cromwell. It would appear that she just dismounted and rushed to the dying Catherine.
On that evening of 6th January, Catherine seemed well enough, but just after r. idnight she asked for Mass as soon as it was permitted; but, would not allow the Bishop of Llandaff to bend the rules and say it before dawn, quoting various authorities as to why this was forbidden. As the first rays of morning light streamed into the castle, the pallid Spanish princess fervently received the Sacrament and then dictated to De La Sa a letter to the Emperor and one to the King, in which she pardoned him everything and asked his pardon in return. She also commended to him “our daughter, Mary,” and asked him to pay her staff including their “marriage portions.” “Lastly, I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things.”
At 10 a.m. Catherine received extreme unction, making the responses strongly. She then prayed for two hours for Princess Mary, for the souls of all the people of England and especially for King Henry. She died at 2 p.m.
When the castle chandler (the candlemaker) with one other servant in attendance opened up Catherine’s body to embalm it, he found that her heart had turned black and had a large black growth upon it. Although De La Sa was sure that this was a result of poison, even though all her food was tasted first by one of her servants, it does seem likely that Catherine may have died of cancer, perhaps brought on by extreme worry.
Few or none of her last wishes were fulfilled. She would have been horrified to hear that in that very year eleven Walsingham locals were sentenced to be drawn, hanged, beheaded and quartered for speaking out against the dissolution of England’s second holiest shrine. Two years later Walsingham’s sub-prior was burned alive there and the images of Our Lady of Walsingham – so long revered by Henry and Catherine alike – were burnt at Chelsea on the orders of the King. (Then too was King Henry’s candle finally extinguished).
De La Sa (despite being asked by Cromwell to enter the King’s service), and de Soto, were to take service with Princess Mary, Mary who was to come to the throne in less than twenty years. How thrilled Catherine would have been! The other Spaniards were to return to Spain.
King Henry ordered that Catherine’s funereal departure from Charles Wingfield’s home was to be unobtrusive. She was buried in Peterborough Cathedral, 25 miles to the north. The Chief Mourner was the Lady Eleanor, daughter of Henry’s sister Mary the French Queen (who had died the year before Catherine arrived at Kimbolton). The new Duchess of Suffolk, Catherine Willoughby, daughter of Catherine’s dear Baroness Maria de Salinas, was the second mourner. It was said that Maria was buried in Catherine’s tomb some ten years later. The Duchess, her daughter, an old friend of Catherine’s, was to become one of the key Protestant figures of the Reformation.
When the King, then at Greenwich, was informed of his ex-wife’s death, he at once threw a ball and told the Court: “God be praised, the old harridan is dead, now there is no fear of war.” She was a mere six years older than the 45-year old monarch, but his new Queen was only aged about 31 or so.
The ghost of Queen Catherine is today said to haunt Kimbolton Castle and its environs, but I have yet to see it. I always wonder when I pass the castle, who might have been watching when on that winter’s day in 1536 when the horse-drawn black-draped bier set off bearing the body of the gracious God-fearing lady of Spain and England to her last resting place. Was an aunt or an uncle or even Thomas-Maria, the father-to-be of the founding father of the first permanent English colony in the Spanish-cum-Portuguese Americas, watching that great Spaniard depart?
At last the young Wingfields of Kimbolton were able to get on with their lives again. Thomas-Maria Wingfield Sr., had been Rector of Warrington, Derbyshire since the age of thirteen – purely a sinecure. But he seems to have renounced ideas of the church as a career, even though he was shortly afterwards granted the a dvowson (right to appoint the parson) of Walgrave, twenty miles west of Kimbolton. Now at last some happiness was to come to Kimbolton Castle again. The twin of Thomas-Maria, Charles, possibly Sir Charles, now married Johanna sister of the great Sir Francis Knollys of Rotherfield Greys, Berkshire and within three or four years there were young Wingfield boys bawling and laying where Catherine had been imprisoned. Charles was appointed Sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire and was painted by Holbein, the court painter. Normality had returned to the Wingfield home.
President Edward-Maria Wingfield of near by Stonely Priory, which looked down on the castle, was but a generation later to spend many a year fighting the might of Spain. From Jamestown, in his first report that he sent home, he wrote: “We entreat your succours with all expedition lest that all-devouring Spaniard lay his ravenous hands upon these gold showing mountains,” but a year later he was to write: “I confess I always admired any noble virtue and prowess, as well in the Spaniards (as in other nations)” I like to think that he may well have learned at his father’s knee to admire “noble virtue” in a Spaniard, from stories of Catherine of Aragon and her sojourn at the home of his Uncle Charles: Kimbolton Castle.
