{ "item_title" : "Catherine of Aragon", "item_author" : [" Shane Larson "], "item_description" : "She was Queen of England for twenty-four years. The other five wives of Henry VIII, put together, managed about ten.That is not how she is remembered. In the dramas Catherine of Aragon is the preamble: the older, pious, Spanish wife who has to be cleared away before the story can start. The record says something else. She was the daughter of Isabella of Castile, born in a court at war and raised in its camps. She crossed to England at fifteen, was widowed at sixteen, and spent seven years as a diplomatic hostage, pawning her plate and serving as her father's accredited representative at the English court. In 1509 the new king, not yet eighteen and in a hurry, chose her over every other match in Europe. In 1513, with Henry in France, she governed England as regent, raised the northern army, and sent him a piece of the Scottish king's coat from the field at Flodden.Then came the case that ended the medieval English church. Henry decided the marriage had been sinful from the start, and Catherine fought him with the tools she had: canon law, the Pope, her nephew the Emperor Charles V, and a refusal to say the one word that would have made everything easy. She lost, but not in London. On 6 May 1527 her nephew's unpaid army sacked Rome, and the Pope who had to rule on her marriage spent the next years as the Emperor's effective prisoner. Rome finally found for her in March 1534, ten months after an English archbishop had declared her marriage null.This is a full life, not a hundred pages in a group portrait, and it is the first volume of a series on the six queens of Henry VIII. It begins in Granada, treats Ferdinand, Isabella and Charles V as characters, makes the canon law intelligible without a law degree, and shows the record at every set piece: who saw it, who wrote it down, and how long afterwards.What you'll learn: What Catherine actually said when she knelt before Henry at Blackfriars on 21 June 1529, and how much of the famous speech belongs to the man who wrote it down twenty-five years laterWhether her first marriage, to Henry's brother Arthur, was ever consummated, and why both sides had reasons to answer as they didWhat the 1507 credentials say, and whether the first woman ambassador claim survives themHow many times she was pregnant, and why historians count anywhere from six to tenWhen Henry's doubts began, and the evidence on each side of the question of whether conscience or Anne Boleyn came firstWhat the title Princess Dowager would have cost her, what the convent would have bought her, and why she refused bothWhether she wrote the deathbed letter, what her embalmer meant by a blackened heart, and whether Henry and Anne really wore yellowWhat her refusal cost her daughter Mary, counted honestlyThis book is for you if: You know the six wives as a procession and want the long reign at the head of it told at full lengthYou have seen the dramas and want the documented history under themYou want the annulment explained as law and politics, not as a love story with an obstacle in itYou read biographies of women who held power and want one who held it for a generationHenry VIII broke with the Pope, the Church and his own past. He never broke her.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers1.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/890/714/9798907140844_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "18.99", "online_price" : "18.99", "our_price" : "18.99", "club_price" : "18.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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