Re-imagining a Renaissance Queen: Catherine of Aragon among the Victorians

Abstract

During the first few years of her reign, from 1837 to 1839, the young Queen Victoria spent hours discussing English literature, history, and politics with her senior statesman, Lord Melbourne. She recorded these conversations in some detail in her diaries, thus giving us a window into the developing mind of a young woman whose schooling had been above the standards for a female of the period, but hardly scholarly. Several times, Lord M., as she called him, touched on the personalities around the time of Henry VIII, including Henry’s first queen, Catherine of Aragon. 1 Victoria recounts Lord M. as saying that Catherine was always troubled by the fact that her first marriage to Prince Arthur depended on the “inhuman murder” of the Earl of Warwick—”that Catherine felt this all along and observed that it dwelt upon her and ‘that it did not go well with her in the world’ for this reason.” 2 On a later occasion when Lord Melbourne declared that “we owed the Reformation” to Henry VIII, Victoria writes, “I said his motives for that were not the best; but Lord M. said that didn’t signify. Talked of Henry VIII Lord M. said, ‘Those women bothered him so.’ I observed he had ill-treated Catherine of Aragon so. ‘That was his conscience,’ said Lord M. funnily; ‘he thought he was living in a state of concubinage, not of marriage’” (2: 158).

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