Katherine's Cross

Katherine of Aragon (also spelt as Catherine, historical Spanish: ) (1485–1536) was the youngest child of Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon. In 1501 she married Arthur, Prince of Wales, eldest son of King Henry VII of England. After Arthur's death the same year, Katherine married the king's second son, Henry VIII on his accession in 1509. By the 1520s, Henry's frustration with their joint failure to produce a male heir, and his fascination with Anne Boleyn, led him to divorce Katherine in 1526, a decision which heralded the English Reformation. Katherine was expelled from court and confined to a series of country houses, including Ampthill Castle, dying at Kimbolton Castle in…

The monument takes the form of a cross, standing on a stepped, octagonal base. The base is decorated with tracery and the arms of the cross end in miniature crosses in foliage. Charles O'Brien, in his Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire and Peterborough volume in the Pevsner Buildings of England series, revised and reissued in 2014, notes the "close and dainty" nature of the decorative work. The structure is to a Gothic revival design, and incorporates a heraldic shield with the coats of arms of England and Aragon. The construction material is stone. The wider estate, now a public park, features landscaping by Capability Brown.}}