s desires in his plain speaking to Henry and his
ministers. Ferdinand, indeed, by this time had once more gained the upper
hand in Europe, and could afford to speak his mind. Henry was no longer so
vigorous or so bold as he had been, and his desire to grasp everything
whilst risking nothing had enabled his rivals to form a great coalition
from which he was excluded--the League of Cambrai. Fuensalida offended
Henry almost as soon as he arrived, and was roughly refused permission to
enter the English Court. He could only storm, as he did, to Henry's
ministers that unless the Princess of Wales was at once sent home to Spain
with her dowry, King Ferdinand and his allies would wreak vengeance upon
England. But Henry knew that with such a hostage as Katharine in his hands
he was safe from attack, and held the Princess in defiance of it all. But
he was already a waning force. Whilst Fuensalida had no good word for the
King, he, like all other Spanish agents, turned to the rising sun and sang
persistently the praises of the Prince of Wales. His gigantic stature and
sturdy limbs, his fair skin and golden hair, his manliness, his prudence,
and his wisdom were their constant theme: and even Katharine, unhappy as
she was, with her marriage still in the balance, seems to have liked and
admired the gallant youth whom she was allowed to see so seldom.

It has become so much the fashion to speak of Katharine not only as an
unfortunate woman, but as a blameless saint in all her relations, that an
historian who regards her as a fallible and even in many respects a
blameworthy woman, who was to a large extent the cause of her own
troubles, must be content to differ from the majority of his predecessors.
We have already seen, by the earnest attempts she made to drag her
afflicted sister into marriage with a man whom she herself considered
false, cruel, and unscrupulous, that Katharine was no better than those
around her in moral principle: the passion and animosity shown in her
letters to her father about Puebla, Fuensalida, and others whom she
distrusted, show her to have been anything but a meek martyr. She was,
indeed, at this time (1508-9) a self-willed, ambitious girl of strong
passion, impatient of control, domineering and proud. Her position in
England had been a humiliating and a hateful one for years. She was the
sport of the selfish ambitions of others, which she herself was unable to
control; surrounded by people whom she disliked