Katherine of Aragon

Less than a year after Arthur's death, she lost the one person at court who cared enough to really help her. Elizabeth of York, Arthur's mother, died trying to give her husband another son.

Then Katherine's own mother died. Her death hit her young daughter hard - not only because she lost a mother she loved, but also because her mother's death lessened her importance in the royal marrying stakes. For years, she became a pawn for her father and Henry VII to squabble over. Sometimes a wanted pawn, most often not.

By time of Henry VII's death all she wanted was to come home and be allowed to take the veil. But his death meant a new King: Henry VIII: a youth of not yet eighteen.

One of his first acts as England's uncrowned King was to marry his brother's widow. And not just because he thought it right to do. Before almost yearly childbearing in the first seven years of marriage, usually followed by grief for another dead baby, dragged her down and thickened her body, Katherine was a very pretty woman, very tiny, possessing beautiful red/gold hair. Except for Anne Boleyn, Henry always liked his women so.

But twenty or so years later, five or six dead babies and only one girl for his heir made the King decide his marriage to Katherine was cursed by God and indeed no marriage.

Not surprisingly, Katherine didn't agree. Her first marriage was to a boy; she vowed she came to Henry virgin, untouched by man. She loved Henry. She believed in him. To her dying day, she blamed their separation on those surrounding him.

Katherine loved God with all the passion of her Spanish heredity. The many trials she suffered in life only served to make this love stronger. She believed that "We never come to the kingdom of Heaven but by troubles." With all her troubles, this belief must have been an almost daily mantra.

Love and duty her life's lodestars, such was her character the ordinary people of England always loved her. They took her to hearts when she first came to their shores: a lonely girl, exiled forever from the land of her birth. A girl well taught to do her duty. She did that and more, but her duty always went first to God.

Katherine lived her life with great courage and resolution. Garrett Mattingly, her best-known biographer, called her granite shaping the final course

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