The little prince was christened Henry on 5 January, at Richmond ‘with very great pomp and rejoicing’. On New Year’s Day 1511, Katherine was happily ‘delivered of a Prince, to the great gladness of the realm’. ‘At this time the Queen was great with child, and shortly after this pastime she took her chamber’ for her confinement, remaining there while the King kept Christmas in open court. Katherine did not participate in the festivities in 1510. Twelfth Night on 5 January brought the twelve days of celebrations to a close, but the Yuletide season officially ended with the solemn celebration of Candlemas, the feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary, on 2 February, when the King and Queen went in procession to Mass. Gifts were exchanged on New Year’s Day, and in 1510 Katherine’s first Yuletide present from Henry was a beautifully illuminated missal.Ĭhristmas was an occasion when carols were danced and sung in the great hall while the Yule log crackled on the hearth, ‘to the great rejoicing of the Queen and the nobles’. Predictably, when the masks were removed, Robin Hood turned out to be the young King in disguise.
But musicians struck up a tune and they entered into the spirit of the occasion, dancing with the ‘outlaws’. Her first Christmas as Queen, in 1509, was a joyful one, and saw the earliest pageant staged in Henry VIII’s reign, when twelve men dressed as Robin Hood and his Merry Men burst unannounced into Katherine’s chamber, ‘whereof the Queen, the ladies and all other there were abashed’.
Seven years later, his brother Henry VIII succeeded to the throne and married Katherine. It was during that Christmas that it first became apparent that Arthur’s health was in decline. We know that Katherine was homesick for Spain, and being so far from her family in a cold country in the depths of winter must have been hard, but that was not the only thing to make her sad. She had been married little more than a month when she spent her first Christmas in England, and it was not observed in the traditional way, for the young couple had left court on 21 December and were on their way to Ludlow Castle at a time when they would normally have been enjoying the festivities.
Henry’s first wife, Katherine of Aragon, came to England in 1501 to marry his older brother Arthur. That was sometimes the reality of the festive season for the hapless wives of Henry VIII. Christmas in Tudor England is always described as a season of great feasting and revelry, but, then as now, it was a time when sadness was more poignant.
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