Displacement, exile, and homesickness

Displacement, exile, and homesickness are not merely passing sadness for Catalina; they are the emotional cost of a royal marriage that makes England her home while separating her from Spain, her family, and the landscape of her childhood. She embraces her identity as Princess of Wales and future queen, yet the distance from her mother and homeland remains present even in moments of happiness with Arthur, Prince of Wales. The novel gives that distance a vivid shape through recalled architecture, weather, birds, and the imagined possibility of going home.

A remembered home

Catalina makes Spain present to Arthur by describing the Alhambra in concrete detail. Its entrance, she explains, first appears like a little room, no grander than a merchant’s hall or a modest house in Ludlow. The palace’s distinction lies elsewhere: a hedge cut straight as a wall, a gateway and arch reflected in water, and delicate stucco screens like white embroidery. Her account turns from buildings to the birds that race in circles above the courtyard by day, then disappear at night and return at dawn. These are not simply features of a place she remembers; they are a landscape she continues to see inwardly, even as she lives far away.

Arthur recognizes the longing beneath the description. He understands that however happy he makes her, she will still miss home. Catalina accepts this as natural and connects memory to identity: she does not forget who she is or what she was born to be. Her homesickness therefore coexists with her royal role. England may be where her duties and future lie, but it cannot replace the past that gives her a sense of herself.

England as an unfamiliar home

A diary passage set in the spring of 1502 makes the contrast between the two countries bodily and immediate. After a week of February snow comes a thaw, slush, and more rain. The cold ground, standing pools, and dark ice feel unlike the rain in Spain, which falls on hot earth and brings the warm scent of dust and plants. In England, the weather keeps Catalina from walking in the garden, riding out, or even going into town by mule. The difference is not abstract geography: it is a daily experience of being unable to move freely through a landscape that does not feel like hers.

She imagines that Arthur might travel with her to Spain, meet her parents, and see the Alhambra for himself. But even as she entertains the wish, she knows that no king would let his precious son and heir leave England. She then considers whether she might go alone. The thought of being separated from Arthur even for a night is painful, yet so is the prospect of never again feeling her mother’s hand in her hair or seeing her smile. The two attachments pull against each other, and neither cancels the other.

The decisive realization is that marriage has made England her permanent home. Catalina knew she would become Princess of Wales and one day Queen of England, but had not fully understood that this might mean never returning to Spain. She had expected to hear from her mother often. Instead, Isabella of Castile sends instructions through the ambassador, treating Catalina as a princess who must receive orders; personal communication between mother and daughter is rare. The separation is thus political as well as physical: royal obligations preserve a channel for command while leaving little room for ordinary intimacy.

Catalina measures her loss against the lives of her sisters. Isabel returned home after being widowed, although she later married again and had to leave. Juana writes that she will visit home with her husband. Catalina feels the unfairness of being the one who cannot go, and stresses how young she is: at sixteen, she does not feel ready to live without her mother’s advice. She looks for that guidance every day and finds her mother absent. Her husband’s mother, Elizabeth of York, cannot fill the role; Catalina sees her as constrained within her own household and unable to command her time. Margaret Beaufort, by contrast, governs much of the household but seems to Catalina hardhearted and incapable of mothering her. The court around her is populated, yet it offers no substitute for the maternal presence she misses.

Exile expressed through story and dream

Catalina gives her longing a literary counterpart when she tells Arthur a poem about a palm tree born far from its native land. The tree and the speaker share the condition of being strangers in foreign soil, separated from family and friends. Arthur hears the poem’s simplicity; Catalina explains that its plain statement of a true thing is characteristic of the people who love such words. The poem lets her express displacement indirectly before she admits that she misses and worries about her mother, who kept her youngest daughter close for as long as she could.

The scene makes the feeling visible without requiring Catalina to explain it at length: lying beside Arthur, she has a wet cheek. He takes her hand and kisses her fingertips, then assures her that she will grow accustomed to life in England and its many days. She answers quickly that she is happy with him, but her voice trails off when she turns to her mother. Affection in her marriage is real; it simply cannot answer every form of absence.

A dream carries her across the distance that waking life cannot overcome. Catalina flies like a swift over New Castile, Córdoba, and the land south toward Granada, passing the walls of the Alhambra and descending into the Court of Myrtles. There, beside the pool, she sees her mother walking in the warm evening air and thinking of her daughter in faraway England. The dream gives the separation a reciprocal tenderness: Catalina longs for Isabella, and imagines that Isabella is thinking of her too. But the reunion occurs only in vision, which preserves the ache rather than resolving it.

The journey to London and the cost of duty

After Arthur’s death, Catalina travels toward London behind the closed, black-trimmed curtains of her litter. The countryside is coming into bloom, and people along the route greet and bless the Princess, but she does not see or hear them. The narrative distinguishes her public passage from her private experience: others read her silence as grief, while she turns inward and thinks about how to fulfill Arthur’s last request and shape England according to the future he had imagined.

In that journey she also remembers missing Margaret Beaufort’s friendship and hard-won wisdom. She imagines the older woman advising resignation and submission to God’s will, while admitting to herself that she would not follow such counsel. The recollection complicates Catalina’s earlier judgment of Margaret as an inadequate mother. Whatever their differences, Margaret’s steady gaze and advice have become something Catalina misses in her isolation. Displacement has deprived her not only of home and family, but also of familiar sources of counsel and companionship.

The thread of homesickness therefore persists through a change in circumstance: first as longing for Spain while Catalina shares a bed and memories with Arthur, then as the loneliness of a young wife who cannot visit her mother, and finally as the inward silence of a bereaved princess traveling through England. Her royal position gives her rank and a future, but not the freedom to cross the distance that matters most. The remembered courtyard, the absent mother, and the curtained litter mark different forms of the same separation: Catalina must live within the life her marriage has made for her, while carrying another home in memory.