“Besieging the Castle: Rape, Spectacle, and Nation (London, 1501)”
Shayne Aaron Legassie

The marriage of Katherine of Aragon to Price Arthur of England in 1501 embodied the triumph of Tudor diplomacy and was to herald England’s rise as an international power in Europe. The importance of this union to Henry VII’s political ambitions was reflected in the expense of the civic spectacles that were staged in London to celebrate the princess’ arrival and marriage to Arthur. Among the accounts of the pageantry, disguisings of 1501 the anonymous “Receit of the Lady Katherine” stands out as the most thorough record of the ceremonies. Written from the perspective of one of Henry’s attendants, the “Receit” chronicles the events surrounding the arrival of the princess, her marriage, the ensuing masks and tournaments, as well as the funeral of Arthur, who died soon after his union with Katherine.

The “Receit”’s narrative is marked by an ambivalence toward the Anglo-Spanish union. While the alliance augured the rise of England as a European power, it also kindled anxieties about Spain’s perceived political and financial superiority. The “Receit” reflects English concerns from the outset of its narrative, staging a conflict between Henry VII and Katherine’s Spanish retinue that results in the articulation of the King’s sovereignty within his “realm and Empire of England.” Of all of the “Receit”’s articulations of English anxieties, the most complex and troubling is the text’s description of and commentary on a disguising that took place after the royal wedding, in which a group of knights, having had their romantic overtures rebuffed by a castle of ladies, storm and conquer the resistant fortress. While the disguising ends in the joyous dancing of the knights and ladies, half of whom are dressed in Spanish and half of whom are dressed in English clothing, both the symbolisim deployed in the drama and the rhetoric of the “Receit” suggest that this disguising embodies the English fantasy of a feminized Spain, domesticated and under English control.

Through an analysis of the “Receit”’s depiction of this disguising and through its treatment of Spanish women (including Katherine, her attendants, and the conspicuously absent Queen Isabel), this essay argues that political concerns about Spanish power are expressed through the mystification of Spanish women, largely through discourses of race, class and gender transgression. While these concerns may have found temporary cathartic relief in an allegorized spectacle of sexual violence, the “Receyt”’s subsequent rhetoric of nation and empire reveal the text’s fragile attempts to forge a sense of English national identity in the face of a feminized, but still intractable, Spain.