Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [6]
Her mother, Katherine, was the daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, her father the son of Henry Tudor (Henry VII) and Elizabeth of York. Both sets of grandparents had brought unity to their war-torn kingdoms after years of disputed successions. Henry Tudor’s defeat of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 had ended thirty-three years of incipient civil war between the Houses of York and Lancaster, two rival branches of the Plantagenet family that had ruled England since the twelfth century. Henry, a Lancastrian, claimed the throne through his mother, Margaret Beaufort, and her descent from John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, the son of Edward III. Following the accession of the Yorkist king, Edward IV, in 1471, Henry had fled to Brittany for fear that Edward would act against him as the remaining Lancastrian claimant. Twelve years later, after Edward had died, his brother Richard, duke of Gloucester, usurped the throne. He imprisoned, and most likely murdered, his nephew Edward V, and was crowned King Richard III on July 6, 1483. Realizing Richard’s unpopularity, Henry saw an opportunity to win the throne. He set sail from Brittany with French men and ships and landed at Milford Haven in August 1485. On the twenty-second he overwhelmed the king’s forces at Bosworth, near Leicester, and killed Richard III in the midst of the battle. Five months after his accession, Henry married Elizabeth of York, the eldest daughter and surviving heir of the Yorkist king, Edward IV, thereby uniting the warring Plantagenet family. The establishment of the Tudor dynasty was made secure by the birth of their first son and heir, Arthur, on September 19, 1486, a daughter Margaret, and a second son, Prince Henry, five years later, to be followed by another daughter, Mary.
Mary’s grandmother Isabella of Castile had also fought to win her throne, after her father disinherited her. Alongside her husband Ferdinand, king of Aragon, she campaigned for five years in a bitter civil war before emerging triumphant and claiming the crown of Castile. The only queen regnant in fifteenth-century Europe, she doggedly reasserted her position in the face of her husband’s attempts to share her power. It would be a marriage of equals, with both sovereigns ruling in their own right. Ferdinand and Isabella became the foremost monarchs in Europe, with a crusading zeal that characterized the Spanish monarchy. Their shared aim became the Reconquista of Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in Spain. The Reconquista was to be the climax of the Crusade, the medieval Christian enterprise against the Muslims that had begun in the twelfth century. Isabella, determined, single-minded, and fervently Catholic, saw the campaign as her divine purpose and rode with her knights, rallying her troops. The war lasted for ten years before finally, on January 2, 1492, the last Muslim leader, Muhammad II, surrendered complete control of Granada. It was the culmination of several centuries of reconquest and a great Christian triumph. In the years that followed, the Spanish Inquisition, established first in Castile and then in Aragon, secured the expulsion of all remaining Jews and Muslims. “The Catholic Kings,” as they were entitled by Pope Alexander IV, had created a unified Spain and an entirely Catholic kingdom.
Katherine, the youngest of Ferdinand and Isabella’s five children, was born on December 16, 1485, in the midst of the Reconquista at the archbishop of Toledo’s palace northeast of Madrid. She was named after her mother’s English grandmother, a daughter