slight, fair, delicate lad, amiable and
gentle, and not so tall as his bride, who was within a month of sixteen
years, Arthur being just over fifteen. Katharine must have had at this
time at least the grace of girlhood, though she never can have been a
great beauty. Like most of her mother's house she had pale, rather hard,
statuesque features and ruddy hair. As we trace her history we shall see
that most of her mistakes in England, and she made many, were the natural
result of the uncompromising rigidity of principle arising from the
conviction of divine appointment which formed her mother's system. She had
been brought up in the midst of a crusading war, in which the victors drew
their inspiration, and ascribed their triumph, to the special intervention
of the Almighty in their favour; and already Katharine's house had assumed
as a basis of its family faith that the cause of God was indissolubly
linked with that of the sovereigns of Castile and Leon. It was impossible
that a woman brought up in such a school could be opportunist, or would
bend to the petty subterfuges and small complaisances by which men are
successfully managed; and Katharine suffered through life from the
inflexibility born of self-conscious rectitude.

Slowly through the rain the united cavalcades travelled back by Chertsey;
and the Spanish half then rode to Kingston, where the Duke of Buckingham,
with four hundred retainers in black and scarlet, met the bride, and so
to the palace at Kennington hard by Lambeth, where Katharine was lodged
until the sumptuous preparations for the public marriage at St. Paul's
were completed. To give a list of all the splendours that preceded the
wedding would be as tedious as it is unnecessary; but a general impression
of the festivities as they struck a contemporary will give us a far better
idea than a close catalogue of the wonderful things the Princess saw as
she rode her white palfrey on the 12th November through Southwark, over
London Bridge, and by Cheapside to the Bishop of London's house adjoining
St. Paul's. "And, because I will not be tedious to you, I pass over the
wise devices, the prudent speeches, the costly works, the cunning
portraitures, practised and set forth in seven beautiful pageants erected
and set up in divers places of the city. I leave also the goodaly ballds,
the sweet harmony, the musical instruments, which sounded with heavenly
noise in every side of the street. I omit the costly apparel