Sometimes you can be misled by a book’s cover, writes Alf Bennett.

For instance, I took one look at the paperback Catherine of Aragon and assumed it was a bodice-ripping historical romance.

My mistake – because then I saw the author was Giles Tremlett whose first book was Ghosts of Spain, a first-class dissection of post-dictatorship Spain.

Tremlett is The Guardian newspaper’s Madrid correspondent and he brings his journalistic skills to bear on an engrossing 500 year-old story.

That story may be half a millennium old but there is still enough drama and intrigue in it to provide plenty of material for any modern-day soap opera.

Catherine of Aragon was the daughter of the Ferdinand and Isabel of Spain, the powerhouse royal coupling which banished the Moors from the country.

History recognises Catherine primarily as the first wife of Henry VIII but in fact she was married first to Henry’s older brother Arthur.

She was just three when ambassadors from England travelled to see her parents and arrange her betrothal to Arthur.

This was of course nothing to do with romance and everything to do with forging an alliance against the hated mutual antagonist France.

The deal was done but the ceremony would not take place for another dozen years.

And when it did it lasted barely six months before Arthur, still only 15, succumbed to one of the numerous illnesses that regularly cut a swathe through 16th Century Europe.

In the morbid manner of the time his body was (quotes) “disembowelled, embalmed and filled with spices” before being laid out.

The author, taking advantage of previously unavailable sources, is particularly readable on the social mores of the day and on the labyrinthine courtly intrigue which surrounded the monarchy, both in England and the rest of Europe.

Children, and family generally, were less beloved kinfolk than pawns to be shifted round the chessboard of international relations.

After a sticky period on those shifting sands, Catherine eventually gets her new man, the newly-crowned King Henry VIII.

It was the job for which she believed she was born and over the years the deeply religious Catherine won the hearts of the nation as their queen – while simultaneously losing the affection of her husband to Anne Boleyn.

Her six-year battle to stop her husband divorcing her is a monument to a remarkable woman of history.

In the end of course Henry got his way, with momentous repercussions for England as the country turned away from Rome.

Catherine died either from a poisoned glass of Welsh beer or, more likely, from cancer.

Anne Boleyn got her man but much good did it do her. She was beheaded just 19 weeks after the passing of Catherine as Henry’s fancy turned to his latest flame Jane Seymour.

But that, as the historians say, is another story.

The paperback Catherine of Aragon: Henry’s Spanish Queen by Giles Tremlett is published by Faber at £9.99.