Catherine Of Aragon's Heart Was Black When They Opened Her

Eight hours after she died, the household candle-maker opened her. Every organ was sound. The heart was black all the way through. Catherine of Aragon was not the sad first wife the schoolbook left behind. She was Isabella’s daughter, governor of England in 1513, and the woman who sent Henry a piece of James IV’s coat after Flodden. She knelt at Blackfriars and walked out. She crossed the title “Dowager Princess of Wales” off every document that reached her. She died at Kimbolton on 7 January 1536 still signing herself queen. Chapuys was told the heart would not wash clean. For centuries that was taken as poison. A pathologist reading the same description in 1885 said a melanotic tumour. There has never been an exhumation. Henry spent seven years and a Reformation trying to move her. Something in her chest did it instead. This is the real story of the pomegranate queen — and of a refusal no act of Parliament could rewrite. If you love the private dispatches behind Tudor verdicts and the wives history filed as the first discarded, subscribe for more.