December 1535

In late December 1535, sensing her death was near, Katherine of Aragon made her will and wrote to her nephew, the Emperor Charles V, asking him to protect her daughter. It has been claimed that she then penned one final letter to Henry:

My most dear lord, king and husband,The hour of my death now drawing on, the tender love I owe you forceth me, my case being such, to commend myself to you, and to put you in remembrance with a few words of the health and safeguard of your soul which you ought to prefer before all worldly matters, and before the care and pampering of your body, for the which you have cast me into many calamities and yourself into many troubles. For my part, I pardon you everything, and I wish to devoutly pray God that He will pardon you also. For the rest, I commend unto you our daughter Mary, beseeching you to be a good father unto her, as I have heretofore desired. I entreat you also, on behalf of my maids, to give them marriage portions, which is not much, they being but three. For all my other servants I solicit the wages due them, and a year more, lest they be unprovided for. Lastly, I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things.

Katharine the Quene.

The authenticity of the letter itself has been questioned, but not Katherine's attitude in its wording, which has been reported with variations in different sources.

Portrait by an unknown painter formerly identified as Catherine Parr, this was re-identified as Katherine of Aragon in 2012.

Sources:

The History of England from the Earliest Period to the Death of Elizabeth, by Sharon Turner,

Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII's Spanish Queen, by Giles Tremlett, p. 422.