What do we know of Catherine of Aragon, the first to suffer the pains of the so-called Reformation?
All Catholics know the Salve Regina, the “Hail, Holy Queen,” the Marian antiphon sung in praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Queen of Heaven, who is without doubt and without question the most sung of all the heroes of Christendom. It is, therefore, in the light of her heroism that we should view other holy queens who are heroines of Christendom. We think of those holy queens who have been canonized by the Church, such as St. Elizabeth of Portugal or St. Margaret of Scotland, but it is not likely that we should think of those who have not been canonized, such as Catherine of Aragon or Mary, Queen of Scots. It is to the first of these unhailed holy queens that we will now turn our attention.
It is truly astonishing how little most people know about Catherine of Aragon, apart from the fact that she was the first wife of Henry VIII, whom he divorced following his ill-fated infatuation with Anne Boleyn. Yet whereas Anne was truly a femme fatale, whose seductive charms would lead both the king and his realm into apostasy, Catherine was a femme formidable, a woman of faith and fortitude, who remained true to her wedding vows and to the sacrosanct dignity of holy matrimony.
While Queen of England, she was known for her virtue. After the riots in London, known as the Evil May Day, she successfully appealed for the lives of the rioters, for the sake of their families. She was admired for her pioneering labors for the relief of the poor and was known as a patron of Renaissance humanism, forming friendships with the great scholars Erasmus and Thomas More. She would bear six children, only one of whom survived, before Henry deserted her for Anne Boleyn. She was banished from court, and Anne moved into her old rooms.
Catherine wrote in 1531,
My tribulations are so great, my life so disturbed by the plans daily invented to further the King’s wicked intention, the surprises which the King gives me, with certain persons of his council, are so mortal, and my treatment is what God knows, that it is enough to shorten ten lives, much more mine.
Henry was determined to have his marriage to Catherine annulled in spite of papal opposition. Intriguingly, the annulment was also condemned by the Protestant leaders Martin Luther and William Tyndale, as well as by the prominent English Catholics John Fisher and Thomas More, both of whom would be martyred for their opposition to the king’s tyrannical pursuit of his own monomaniacal will.
Following the king’s illegitimate marriage to Anne Boleyn, Catherine was placed under house arrest. She was confined in various castles and palaces, finally ending up at Kimbolton Castle in Cambridgeshire. She confined herself to one room, leaving only to attend Mass, and she fasted continuously. She was forbidden to see her daughter, Mary, or even to write to her. Henry offered both mother and daughter more comfortable living arrangements and permission to see each other if they would acknowledge his marriage to Anne Boleyn, but both refused.
As for Catherine’s piety and faith, she was a member of the Third Order of St. Francis and followed devoutly her religious obligations as a Franciscan, integrating her duties as queen with her personal piety. “I would rather be a poor beggar’s wife and be sure of heaven,” she said after her banishment, “than queen of all the world and stand in doubt thereof by reason of my own consent.” She died at Kimbolton Castle in January 1536, dearly loved by the English people and admired by all, even by her enemies. “If not for her sex,” wrote Thomas Cromwell, her adversary, “she could have defied all the heroes of History.”
“For the gentle, simple and dignified Queen Catherine all men felt sympathy,” wrote Hilaire Belloc. “They were familiar through portraiture and report with her broad smiling presence, her fair features…her admitted goodness.” In addition, Belloc continued,
[h]er misfortunes [had] endeared her to the English people. She had borne child after child to her husband and had suffered disappointments, for all those children save one had died in infancy or had come still-born, and her miscarriages were known.
William Cobbett was as effusive in his praise of her as he was withering in his condemnation of her abusive husband:
She had been banished from court. She had seen her marriage annulled by Cranmer, and her daughter and only surviving child bastardized by act of parliament; and the husband, who had had five children by her…had had the barbarity to keep her separated from, and never to suffer her, after her banishment, to set her eyes on that only child! She died, as she had lived, beloved and revered by every good man and woman in the kingdom, and was buried, amidst the sobbings and tears of a vast assemblage of the people, in the Abbey-church of Peterborough.
Today, almost five hundred years after Catherine of Aragon’s death, England is still living with the disastrous consequences of her husband’s betrayal of her. Although she has not been canonized by Holy Mother Church, the pilgrim can still pray at the tomb of England’s brokenhearted queen. Time heals all wounds and eternity enshrines the holy. Long after the temporal temples of contemporary secular England have passed away—the gloss, the glass, the mock-marble, and the stainless steel—one will remain beneath the stones of Peterborough Cathedral, unhailed but ever glorious and stainless still.
Republished with gracious permission from Crisis Magazine (September 2025).
This essay is part of a series, Unsung Heroes of Christendom.
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The image of a portrait of Catherine of Aragon (1525), by Lucas Horenbout, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.