We have already noticed Louis XI.’s desire to establish his influence over Navarre, as shown in his support of Eleanor, Countess of Foix, and her French husband, and in the marriage of his sister Madeleine with their son Gaston.[[7]] His hopes were realized by Eleanor’s accession to the throne on the death of her father, John II. of Aragon in 1479, though she did not live to enjoy for more than a few weeks the sovereignty she had purchased at the price of a sister’s blood. She was succeeded by her grandson, Francis Phœbus, and he on his death in 1483 by his sister, Catherine.
Ferdinand and Isabel at once suggested the marriage of this eligible heiress of thirteen with their five-year-old son; but her mother Madeleine of Valois, infinitely preferred to ally her child with one of her own race; and Catherine carried her inheritance to the French House of Albret. Spain was for the moment foiled; but a wedding many years later, its more than doubtful claims on Navarre enforced by arms, was yet to gain for Ferdinand the southern half of the mountain kingdom, whose double outlook across the Pyrenees had been the source of so much crime and bloodshed.
Another alliance proposed for Prince John was with Anne of Brittany, heiress of a duchy, whose independence had always threatened the peace of France. It would have been a fitting revenge for French interference in Navarre and Aragon; but here again Spain was forestalled; and Anne of Beaujeu, regent of France on the death of her father Louis XI., succeeded in marrying her younger brother, Charles VIII., to Anne of Brittany thus linking to the French Crown the most important of its great provincial dependencies.
As it happened, this marriage was to set free a bride for the Spanish Infante, Margaret of Hapsburg, daughter of Maximilian, King of the Romans, a Princess betrothed in her early youth to the Dauphin Charles and even sent to France for her education, but now repudiated in favour of a more advantageous match. Maximilian was by no means a proud man, but even his careless nature burned with resentment at his daughter’s return home under such circumstances; and he welcomed the idea of her union with a son of Ferdinand the Catholic, France’s antagonist for so many years. To make this Hapsburg-Aragonese friendship the more obvious and complete, the wedding became a double one; and Philip, Archduke of Austria and Count of Flanders, Maximilian’s son and heir, took as his bride the Spanish sovereigns’ second daughter, Joanna.
With many misgivings Isabel bade the latter good-bye and consigned her to the grand fleet in the harbour of Lerida that was to convey her to the Netherlands and bring back from thence the Prince of Asturias’ betrothed. The Infanta Joanna, in spite of her careful training, had shown at times an alarming lack of mental balance. She could be clever and witty, but also morose or, if roused, recklessly passionate in her speech. From a home, where the air breathed decorum and self-control, she now went to a pleasure-loving Court presided over by a fickle Adonis. Would she cling tenaciously to the orthodox views in which she had been bred amid surroundings palpably lax and cynical? Would she know how to keep her jealousy in leash, if Philip “the Fair,” as in all probability, proved faithless? Would she hold her head high and steer her course with dignity amid the many political pitfalls, that would be laid for her in a strange land?
The Queen could only sigh in answer to these questions. Joanna in many ways resembled her grandmother and namesake, the Admiral’s daughter, Joanna Enriquez, and that passionate temperament would in a moment of crisis be its own councillor. Advice and warning were of little avail.
The Spanish bride in her ship of state sailed away northwards; and Isabel watched the clouds gather with gloomy forebodings. Weeks passed, and she was tortured with anxiety till at length news came that, although the fleet had been compelled to shelter in English harbours and several of the vessels had been lost, yet her daughter was safe in Flanders and soon to be married at Lille.
Early in March, 1497, Margaret of Austria after an equally adventurous voyage, whose dangers induced her to compose light-heartedly her own epitaph, landed in Spain and was welcomed with all the state and ceremony befitting a future Queen.
How this matrimonial venture, introducing into the close air of the Spanish Court a Paris-bred gaiety and insouciance, would have stood the test of time we cannot tell. The Prince and his bride were young; and, if her contempt of convention scandalized the Castilian grandee, he could blame her youth and build hopeful arguments on feminine adaptability. Thus the brief honeymoon, a triumphal progress from one large town of the kingdom to another, was a period of unmixed rejoicing in Spain. All promised well. Even the Princess Isabel had put aside her long mourning and consented at last to share the throne of Portugal with her patient suitor, demanding however with the fanaticism of her race, so strangely in contrast with her natural sweetness, that Emmanuel’s wedding-gift to her should be the expulsion of the Jews from the land to which she went.