Katherine of Aragon was born in Alcala de Henares in Spain as a princess to King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella. She died as a former queen, having been exiled to Kimbolton to live out her final years before being buried in Peterborough Abbey in 1536.
At the time, clothing and materials were used as a sign of status, with only the most privileged able to use the best materials and colours. The finest materials involved the combination of threads such as silk and fine strands of metal which were woven together to create glimmering fabrics, the most famous being cloth of gold. Silk was a very time consuming material to create and even more so when it was woven into velvets and dyed. So what was used for the funeral of a former queen?
Black silk velvet was chosen to cover Katherine's funeral wagon and members of the funeral cortege also wore black velvet too. It was a material that denoted superiority; it would almost certainly have been made in Genoa, Italy, where the best black velvet was created.1 The thread, the weave and the dyeing process made it a status symbol, but the plain style meant that it could be worn by anyone from the staff of royal households to their pets and not cause offence or break status barriers.
A writer of the time described the cloth placed over Katherine's body as she travelled in the wagon as 'a cloth of gold frieze with a cloth of crimson velvet'2, which would have stood out amongst the black velvet and black cloth used to cover the horses in the cortege. We can imagine people seeing the cortege as it travelled through the countryside and into Peterborough, the cloth of gold and black velvets leaving no one in any doubt that a lady of great importance was travelling to her final resting place.
References:
1. ‘Henry VIII: February 1536, 6-10’, Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 10: January-June 1536 (1887), pp. 98-108
2. M. Watt, Renaissance Velvet Textiles, The Met Museum, 2011, <https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/velv/hd_velv.htm> [accessed January 20 2021]
Image by 1200219 from Pixabay
