One child alone remained with Ferdinand and Isabel, Catherine their youngest; and in the following year she also fulfilled her destiny and carried her father’s olive-branch to a northern home. Born in December, 1485, she had been betrothed almost from her infancy to Arthur, Prince of Wales, Henry VII.’s eldest son; and Roger Machado, on his visit to the Spanish Court, did not in his amazement at jewels and fine clothes neglect to mention his future Queen, and how beautiful he had thought her, held up in her mother’s arms to watch a tilting-match. So firmly settled was the alliance, grounded on mutual hatred of England and Aragon for France, that already at the early age of three the little Infanta was styled “Princess of Wales”; but the intervening years before the union could be realized did not on this account pass her over in silence. The correspondence of the time is filled with frequent disputes between the Catholic sovereigns and Henry VII. as to the exact financial value of their respective offspring; and the discussion ranged from Catherine’s marriage portion and the size of her household to the comeliness of the ladies-in-waiting, who would accompany her;—the latter a point on which the English King laid great stress. At length, however, all was satisfactorily settled; and Henry, having welcomed the bride, could write to her parents that although they could not see the gentle face of their beloved daughter, they might be sure that she had found a second father, who would ever watch over her happiness, and never permit her to want anything he could procure her. A few short months and Arthur’s death had left the little Spanish Princess, then not seventeen years old, a widow in a strange land; while fatherly kindness wrangled furiously over the cost of her maintenance and the disposition of her dowry. It was well for the immediate fortunes of Catherine of Aragon that she soon found a husband in Arthur’s younger brother Prince Henry, though perhaps, could she have read the future, she would have preferred to decline the honour.