DISNEY princesses never had it easy. Their paths to a happy ending were always strewn with formidable obstacles: evil stepmothers, jealous witches, tentacle-bottomed sea sorceresses – you name it.
In real life, female royalty the world over face fewer fantastical threats, but that doesn’t mean their lives are all glittering halls and joyful rides in bullet-proof Rolls-Royces.
Take a recent example. This week, the Olive Press reported a social media scam involving AI-manipulated images of Spain’s Princess Leonor right in the midst of her final year at the Air and Space Academy.
The country’s heir to the throne was rightfully upset by the move and is seeking legal advice.
It comes after the authorities in Chile opened an investigation into the dissemination of private images of Leonor taken without consent at a shopping centre during her naval training.
While that of course would be totally legal under European press laws, it being a public space, the situation is rather different in South America.
If those seem like trivial matters to worry about, wait until you read what our feature writer Michael Coy has put together for us this weekend – as he turns the clock back on two darker tales of Spanish royalty, divorce, and the exploitation of trusting women by ruthless men.
One princess walked the corridors of power some 500 years ago; the other still moves through Spain’s modern courts, very much alive today.
CATHARINE OF ARAGON
The first wife of England’s legendary king Henry VIII, Catharine of Aragon, certainly had it far from easy.
Born in Spain in 1485, she lived most of her life in England, under house arrest, and died at the age of 50 on January 7, 1536, half a millennium ago.
Catharine was the daughter of the so-called Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabel, the couple who united Spain as a nation for the first time.
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An alliance with England seemed like a valuable ‘deal’ to the new king and queen of Spain, so they promised Catharine in marriage to king Henry’s older brother Prince Arthur when she was three years old!
Arthur was first in line to the throne and if he had lived into adulthood, Henry would never have been king – and how different history would have been!
Catharine was a teenager when she travelled to England, the nation whose queen she was destined to be for three decades.
She and Arthur – her fiancé – could communicate only in writing. Their common language was Latin, but they’d been taught different ways of pronouncing it, so they didn’t understand each other when they tried to converse!
She married Arthur in 1501 – but it didn’t last long. They were sent to live in Ludlow Castle, on the Welsh border (Arthur was the Prince of Wales), where they both fell gravely ill with what was called back then the ‘sweating sickness’.
Catharine eventually pulled through, but Arthur died.
What was the English royal family then to do with this 15-year-old widow?
Catharine was an embarrassment in various ways. The Tudors had seized the throne in a coup d’état in the year of her birth: in fact, she had a better claim to the English throne than the Tudors (she was a descendant of John of Gaunt).
Now that Arthur was dead, the wedding dowry would have to be repaid to Spain.
The neat solution was to marry her off to Arthur’s brother, Henry.
The couple married in 1509, and weren’t fully divorced until 1533.
Sex was, in many ways, Catharine’s downfall. She had to give very embarrassing evidence that she and Arthur had never consummated their marriage.
During her time with Henry, she gave birth five times, but only Mary survived (Henry was obsessed with producing a male heir). And, from 1525 onwards, Henry was far more interested in Ann Boleyn than in Catharine.
Today, the Spanish girl who was twice Queen of England lies buried in Peterborough Cathedral.
THE INFANTA CRISTINA
Any Spanish princess who is in direct line to the throne is known as an ‘infanta’.
Cristina de Borbón, now 60 years old (she was born in 1965) is the sister of the current Spanish king Felipe VI.
She had an enviable early life until her choice of marriage in 1997 to Iñaki Urdangarin, a Basque who seemed to be going places (as it turned out, prison is where he went!).
Iñaki was an athlete and Spanish hero. At the age of 18 he became a professional handball player, and quickly made his mark as a member of Spain’s national handball team.
He represented his country at three distinct Olympic Games (1992, 1996 and 2000), and on the last occasion as the team captain.
They fell deeply in love and in the early years of the new millennium, things were looking good for the royal couple.
Cristina had studied Political Science and had a Master’s Degree from New York, and in 2001 was appointed UNESCO ‘goodwill’ Ambassador for Spain.
Iñaki retired from playing handball, and was given directorships in an array of companies, including ‘Noos’, an organisation which installed sporting facilities in schools and public buildings. Or didn’t, as it happens.
For a decade, Urdangarin went backwards and forwards all over Spain, signing contracts with regional councils for the building of basketball courts, running tracks and so forth.
And trousering the cheques. Literally.
When it all came out, it was proved that no sports facilities had been constructed, and Iñaki had concealed six million euros in shady bank accounts in both Belize and the UK.
Worse, he had persuaded Cristina to sign some of his crooked contracts. She was charged with fraud on 7 January, 2014.
She was somehow able to avoid a custodial sentence – unlike Urdangarin, who got five years.
Unsurprisingly, she divorced him!
Today, the Infanta Cristina lives a relatively low-key life, primarily residing in Geneva, Switzerland, where she works for the Aga Khan Foundation as head of their international programs division.
Although she remains technically a member of the extended Spanish Royal Family, the scandals involving her ex-husband and her own court appearance led to her and her children being largely excluded from official royal duties and public life in Spain.
Following her divorce, she continues her professional career, maintaining a distance from the monarchy’s spotlight.
Despite the five centuries separating their lives, the trials of Catharine of Aragon and the Infanta Cristina reveal a pattern: while both were born into privilege and expectation, they found their destinies tragically intertwined with the ambitions and betrayals of the men they married.
For Catharine, it was Henry VIII’s desperate quest for a male heir that stripped her of her title and freedom.
For Cristina, it was Iñaki Urdangarin’s greed and criminal exploitation that led to scandal, public humiliation, and her exclusion from the royal fold.
Their stories – one ending in house arrest and death, the other in legal judgment and self-imposed exile – serve as a stark reminder that even within the most gilded cages of royalty, a woman’s fate can be ruthlessly dictated by the consequences of another’s actions.
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