Navarre

Navarre is both a coveted kingdom and the concealed prize at the center of an English-Spanish military maneuver. Ferdinand II of Aragon had wanted it for years; when he finally moved against it, English troops served not as the force that conquered it but as a diversion that helped make its capture possible. The kingdom’s significance lies in this double role: it is an object of expansion, and the measure by which the allies discover how differently they understood their campaign.

Navarre in Spain’s territorial ambitions

Catalina places Navarre within her father’s larger design for Spain. She describes a realm being made from al-Andalus and names Castile, Aragon, and Granada among the territories already held, before identifying Navarre as the next object of Ferdinand’s ambition. Naples follows in her account, with the south and western regions of France as further possible aims. The list gives Navarre a specific position in an expanding political horizon: it is not an incidental borderland but a kingdom Ferdinand has resolved to acquire.

Her account also links territorial ambition to the family’s understanding of its own rise. Earlier, Catalina has described her parents’ marriage as a love match in which their personal interests and the making of their kingdom came together. That story of union sits beside a more unsentimental account of expansion. When Arthur asks about Ferdinand’s intentions, Catalina predicts that the borders he wants for Spain are not yet complete. Navarre appears in that prediction as evidence of a continuing project, not a settled frontier.

A long-standing objective

In a later exchange about an alliance between Ferdinand and Louis XII of France, Catalina insists that her father’s policy should be understood through his aims in Naples and Navarre. Ferdinand, she says, will obtain them one way or another; Louis may believe he has gained an ally, but the alliance will carry a high price. Her assessment is personal as well as political: she claims to know her father’s habits, describing him as a patient strategist who usually gets his way.

That perspective complicates the English view of the alliance. Henry VII’s son is troubled that Ferdinand would cooperate with England’s enemy, while Catalina argues that Ferdinand’s actions in the south keep France occupied and therefore serve English interests. The competing interpretations foreshadow the later campaign. What looks to the English like an alliance directed against their plans can also provide Ferdinand with cover to pursue his own long-standing objective in Navarre.

The English force as a diversion

During the later campaign, Catalina recognizes that the English troops’ inactivity is not an accident. She recalls that there had been no battle plan for them when they arrived, and that Ferdinand did not send them into combat. Because she had spent much of her childhood on campaign with him, she knew he did not ordinarily leave soldiers idle: he kept his men working and even kept his horses from growing fat. Their idleness therefore becomes a clue. If he left the English in camp, she reasons, he needed them there.

Reports from the English commanders confirm her interpretation. Their troops complain of pointless inaction, conduct exercises on the border, see the French army, and are seen by it, but receive no order to engage. Ferdinand is using them as a counterweight: their presence at Fuenterrabia alarms the French and keeps them in a defensive posture. While France watches the English force, Ferdinand advances with his own troops into Navarre, which Catalina describes as unprotected. The English have not been asked to take the kingdom; their stationary presence has helped prevent the French from interfering with Ferdinand’s march.

Capture and consequences for the alliance

Henry VIII initially reads the campaign as a failure and wants to court-martial the English commander. Catalina answers that the troops have accomplished what Ferdinand required of them. Their apparent inactivity pinned down the French, and France has lost Navarre. The reversal is sharp: the English force has done nothing in the visible sense of fighting, yet that very inaction has helped bring about the campaign’s decisive territorial result.

Catalina also points to the cost and the bargaining position left afterward. England still has its army and has lost only two thousand men; Ferdinand remains its ally and, she says, owes it for the year’s campaign. She anticipates that the next year’s expedition against France will be different: Ferdinand will fight for the English rather than using English troops to advance his own interests. Navarre thus marks both the success of Ferdinand’s strategy and the unresolved debt between allies. Its capture is not merely a change in territorial possession; it reveals who set the campaign’s terms, what the English force was made to accomplish, and why its meaning must be contested after the fact.