Out of the Shadow

CATHERINE OF ARAGON -- Garrett Mattingly--Little, Brown ($3.50).

When he read the letters of the Spanish ambassadors at the Tudor court, Author Mattingly realized, he says, "that the Queen Catherine they were talking about was a different person, more cultured and thoughtful, more forceful and decisive, than the one I had read about elsewhere, and . . . that the key ... to much of what went on in England for a third of a century, lay in the personality and the decisions of this queen."

Most people still think of Catherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII, as a woman who stood in shadow, queenly but helpless, brave but passive, while Henry and his gaudy parade passed her by. Actually this proud, learned and winsome daughter of Spain's Ferdinand and Isabe11a was neither helpless nor passive.

Catherine won a decisive military victory against the Scots at Flodden, while Henry was uselessly and foolishly campaigning in France. Catherine, not the envoys of Ferdinand, was the real Spanish ambassador to her husband's court, until her loyalty to England and her father's duplicity turned her against the Spanish King. Her decision to stand against Henry's desire for an annulment of their marriage was one of the incidents that led to England's Protestant revolution.

Catherine of Aragon is a smooth, vivid, ripely meditated job of historical reconstruction, which brings the luckless, dauntless queen into a full human light. Catherine changed the course of history not by riding with the tide of events but by standing against it, like a great rock in a stream.

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