Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Manke.

Listener discretion is advised.

After a long and treacherous journey from her cloistered life in Spain, Princess Catherine

finally made it safely to English shores.

Catherine, the daughter of the illustrious Ferdinand in Isabella, was devoutly religious,

and so as soon as her ship had landed on the English coast, she insisted on going immediately

to church.

Though she was only 15, Catherine already felt like a woman.

Technically she was already married, to Arthur, the Prince of Wales, heir to the English

throne.

They had been married by proxy the year before, and they had been betrothed since she was

three.

And so the teenager knew how to carry herself like a woman, to carry herself as a representative

of her parents and of her nation, because she was.

She had never met her husband, although they had exchanged flowery letters in their mutual

language, Latin.

They wrote like teenagers pretending to be adults.

Their tutors had handily supplied them with phrases, promises of love and devotion,

and the long-awaited pleasure of gazing upon one another's faces.

Even after making it to England, it would still be days before Catherine met the man,

with whom she had promised to spend the rest of her life.

From the coast, Catherine and her party, Spanish servants and ladies and ambassadors and chaperones,

...