Free Six Wives by David Starkey Page B

Every dozen miles or so there was a halt. The first stop was Honiton, 'a fair long thoroughfare and market-town', with, then as now, handsome houses strung along the highway which also doubled as the main street. Honiton was open, welcoming and snugly prosperous: it would be hard to imagine a greater contrast to the compact, fortified towns and villages of south and central Spain: red- or white-built, with thickly clustered houses and dense warrens of lanes. 5
        Two or three miles before the next staging post at Crewkerne, Catherine crossed the county boundary. The notables of Devon and Cornwall, who had accompanied her from Plymouth, bade her farewell and handed her over to the dignitaries of Somerset. They included Sir Amyas Paulet and Sir John Speke, who were figures in central as well as local politics. Their country houses lay to the north, that is to the left of the road, where the ground rose quickly: the Paulets at Hinton St George, where Sir Amyas had built 'a right goodly manor place of free stone, with two goodly high towers embattled (that is, with battlements) in the inner court', and the Spekes at White Lackington. Perhaps they pointed out the general direction to Catherine, focusing her eye on another novelty: the English landscape. It was hilly: 'but plentiful of corn, grass and elmwood, wherewith most part of all Somersetshire is enclosed'. No meseta , then, but a patchwork of fields, trim hedgerows and, above all, intense, variable greens now shading into the brighter colours of autumn and the greys and browns of early winter. 6
        Catherine's journey continued, first through Dorset, with halts at Sherborne and Shaftesbury, where she spent the great feast of All Saints Day (1 November) in the Abbey, and then across Cranborne Chase to Amesbury Abbey on the borders of Wiltshire and Hampshire. At Amesbury, where she arrived on the 2nd, there was another formal reception in which she was introduced to one of the greatest English families: the Howards. 7
        The Howards had narrowly escaped disaster when they fought on the wrong side at Bosworth. The head of the House, John, Duke of Norfolk, was killed, and his son and heir Thomas, Earl of Surrey, was captured and attainted (that is, declared legally dead) by the triumphant Henry VII. But he was brought back to political life through his willingness to transfer his loyalty to the new King. He was restored first to his earldom, then to his estates and finally, in 1501, was made Lord Treasurer. His eldest son, another Thomas, was even allowed to marry the Lady Anne, the sister of the Queen, Elizabeth of York. 8
        The Earl of Surrey was the nearest thing Catherine had yet encountered to one of the great Spanish nobles or grandees of her parents' court. He was a man of honour, proud of his lineage, mistrustful of novelty and, above all, a fighter. Fighting came as naturally to him as it did to the conquistadors of Spain: their foe was the Infidel; Surrey's enemy was the French and their sidekicks, the Scots. Accompanying Surrey at Amesbury was his aged relative, the Duchess Elizabeth, the widow of the last Mowbray Duke of Norfolk. The Duchess Elizabeth would have made her own impact on Catherine: she was a formidable personality, whose stained-glass portrait at Long Melford Church in Suffolk served as the model for Tenniel's drawing of the fiery Red Queen in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland . 'Off with her head!' the Red Queen cried. The Howards and their extended family experienced more than their fair share of beheadings in the course of the following decades: sometimes as Catherine's allies, more often as her bitterest enemies. 9
        The Duchess Elizabeth of course spoke no Spanish. So, to assist her in greeting Catherine, she was assigned the services of William Hollybrand, who gave a speech of welcome in the Duchess's name 'in the Spanish tongue'. The speech, like everything else, had been the subject of minute preparation and