ght across what is
now Parliament Square sat Katharine with all the royal family and the
Court, whilst the citizens crowded the stands on the other side of the
great space reserved for the tilters. Invention was exhausted by the
greater nobles in the contrivances by which they sought to make their
respective entries effective. One had borne over him a green erection
representing a wooded mount, crowded with allegorical animals; another
rode under a tent of cloth of gold, and yet another pranced into the lists
mounted upon a stage dragon led by a fearsome giant; and so the pageantry
that seems to us so trite, and was then considered so exquisite, unrolled
itself before the enraptured eyes of the lieges who paid for it all. How
gold plate beyond valuation was piled upon the sideboards at the great
banquet after the tilt in Westminster Hall, how Katharine and one of her
ladies danced Spanish dances and Arthur led out his aunt Cicely, how
masques and devices innumerable were paraded before the hosts and guests,
and, above all, how the debonair little Duke of York charmed all hearts by
his dancing with his elder sister; and, warming to his work, cast off his
coat and footed it in his doublet, cannot be told here, nor the ceremony
in which Katharine distributed rich prizes a few days afterwards to the
successful tilters. There was more feasting and mumming at Shene to
follow, but at last the celebration wore itself out, and Arthur and his
wife settled down for a time to married life in their palace at Baynard's
Castle.

King Henry in his letter to the bride's parents, expresses himself as
delighted with her "beauty and agreeable and dignified manners," and
promises to be to her "a second father, who will ever watch over her, and
never allow her to lack anything that he can procure for her." How he kept
his promise we shall see later; but there is no doubt that her marriage
with his son was a great relief to him, and enabled him, first to cast his
net awide and sweep into its meshes all the gentry of England who might be
presumed to wish him ill, and secondly to send Empson and Dudley abroad to
wring from the well-to-do classes the last ducat that could be squeezed
in order that he might buttress his throne with wealth. Probably Arthur's
letter to Ferdinand and Isabel written at the same time (November 30,
1501) was drafted by other hands than his own, but the terms in which he
expresses his satisfaction with his wife are so wa