Dr. Gillian White specialises in the history and visual arts of late medieval and sixteenth-century England. She began her career at the Warwickshire Museum and then worked for the National Trust as Curator / Collections Manager at Hardwick Hall, about which she then wrote her PhD at Warwick University. She now teaches art history part-time in the Continuing Education Department at Oxford University, as well as freelance lecturing and teaching. This lecture is the third outing for Gillian with the Society.
We all know about Catherine of Aragon: she was ‘the first wife’. But what was she really like? Catherine was a remarkable and capable woman who steered a complicated course through Tudor England for more than thirty years. Well educated, courageous and politically shrewd, she was loved by the people and was in most ways an excellent royal consort. But she failed in one thing: to provide her husband with a son and heir. This talk tells Catherine’s largely forgotten story, from childhood in the palaces of Spain, through her short-lived first marriage, her traumatic fight for survival as a young widow, her triumphant second marriage and the catastrophe of ‘The King’s Great Matter’ that saw her set aside in favour of Anne Boleyn.
