Ferdinand's Spanish army

Ferdinand's Spanish army occupies two roles in the narrative: it is the force through which Katherine of Aragon imagines a powerful Christian alliance, and the instrument of her father’s independent strategy. She expects the alliance to bring the English and Spanish armies together against France, but the 1512 campaign reveals that shared aims and a treaty do not guarantee shared risks. The English are left waiting while Ferdinand advances into Navarre, turning the proposed partnership into a lesson in military leverage and political mistrust.

An army within Katherine’s political vision

Katherine’s earliest understanding of the Spanish army is bound to her upbringing and to a religious-political vision of Spain’s place in the world. She believes that England should join Spain in defending Christendom and carrying war against Muslim powers beyond Europe. In that worldview, English wealth and especially English ships would give Spain the means to extend its campaigns. The ambition is not simply an alliance against a neighboring kingdom: Katherine imagines a continuing crusade reaching Africa and the Ottoman Empire, and even further east. The narrative presents this conviction as her belief, not as a neutral account of the people she describes as enemies.

That outlook helps explain why military partnership with her father seems to Katherine both a matter of state and a fulfilment of her identity. She has watched Ferdinand II of Aragon conduct campaigns throughout her childhood and has never seen him lose. When she later calls herself a commander like her parents, the claim draws on a memory of warfare as a family inheritance. For her, the Spanish army represents not only force in the field but the experience and authority of the parent whose approval she has long sought.

The planned joint campaign of 1512

In the spring of 1512, the English force sails to join Ferdinand II of Aragon’s campaign against France. Katherine has supervised the provisioning of ships, the stocking of armories, and the equipment of soldiers. The work recalls her mother’s preparations during her father’s wars and has taught her that battles depend on reliable supply as well as courage. She takes pride in sending out an expeditionary fleet she considers better organized than any England has previously dispatched.

The plan is for the English and Spanish armies to meet and invade southwestern France through Guienne and the Duchy of Aquitaine. Katherine expects Ferdinand to take a share of the spoils but also to honor his promise to campaign alongside the English and help recover territory for England. She believes that reducing France’s power will make Christendom safer. English King Henry VIII and Katherine therefore welcome the expedition with confidence, persuaded by Ferdinand’s prediction that victory will be swift and profitable. The English ships sail in fine order, and the sight of them departing makes the campaign seem, at first, like the realization of the alliance Katherine has imagined.

Fuenterrabia and the use of the English force

The promised meeting does not take place as Katherine expects. During the summer, the English army waits at Fuenterrabia for the Spanish to join it. The soldiers endure heat, poor food, and idleness. Katherine understands that a midsummer Spanish climate can wear down an army even without a battle. She conceals her alarm from English King Henry VIII and the council, writes privately to her father to ask about his intentions, and questions his ambassador; neither can tell her when the troops will march.

As the delay continues, Katherine recognizes that she is not being treated as an equal ally in her father’s plans. When the English army is eventually left in camp, her knowledge of Ferdinand’s command habits sharpens her suspicion: she has never known him to leave soldiers idle without purpose. Reports of exercises near the border, sightings of the French army, and the refusal to order an engagement confirm her reading. The English presence keeps French forces alert to the threat on their flank. Meanwhile, Ferdinand leads his own troops into the unprotected kingdom of Navarre and takes the territory he has long wanted, at no expense or danger to himself. In Katherine’s assessment, her father has used the English army as a stationary diversion rather than as a partner in the agreed invasion.

Defeat, explanation, and political consequence

In December, the English army returns in disarray. Lord Dorset’s troops have waited without the orders and reinforcements they expected; mutiny, hunger, exhaustion, and illness have taken their toll, with two thousand men lost to illness. Their return stands in painful contrast to the confident, well-equipped fleet that had sailed earlier in the year. The campaign has failed in its visible purpose of bringing the English and Spanish armies together against France, even as Ferdinand has secured Navarre.

Katherine comforts English King Henry VIII by separating the soldiers’ performance from the failure of the alliance. She assures him that the English have not been shown to lack courage, then explains that the outcome served her father’s purpose: the troops did what Ferdinand needed them to do by keeping the French occupied. Her account recasts an apparent military humiliation as a strategic success for Ferdinand and a diplomatic defeat for England. She concludes that any future treaty with him will require the English to be as politically astute as he is. The episode makes the Spanish army a measure of the gap between Katherine’s hope of acting as her father’s equal and the reality that he can deploy English power for Spanish ends.

Military partnership and its limits

The campaign’s significance rests on the difference between cooperation in principle and coordination in practice. The English expedition is carefully supplied and sent abroad, but the narrative gives no comparable account of a joint operation: the expected Spanish rendezvous and invasion do not happen. Instead, the English army’s presence influences French deployments while Ferdinand’s army pursues a separate territorial objective in Navarre. The result is a strategic gain for Ferdinand coupled with hardship and disgrace for the English force.

Later, Katherine’s command against the Scots provides a contrast to the earlier campaign. She plans for reserves, routes of retreat, and the defense of London, and insists that a commander must prepare for defeat as well as speak of victory. The contrast is not evidence of a later operation by Ferdinand’s Spanish army; it clarifies what Katherine has learned about command, risk, and the costs of leaving troops inactive or exposed. The Spanish army thus remains central to her political education: first as the apparent means to a grand Christian alliance, then as the force behind a campaign that teaches her to distinguish a treaty’s promises from the purposes of the power that made it.