A few short months and Arthur’s death had left the little Spanish Princess, then not seventeen years old, a widow in a strange land; while fatherly kindness wrangled furiously over the cost of her maintenance and the disposition of her dowry. It was well for the immediate fortunes of Catherine of Aragon that she soon found a husband in Arthur’s younger brother Prince Henry, though perhaps, could she have read the future, she would have preferred to decline the honour.
De Puebla, the Spanish Ambassador entrusted by Ferdinand with the greater part of the marriage negotiations, had also tried his hand during the years that he resided in England, at enticing the King of Scotland into the anti-French web. The friendship between France and Scotland was of ancient date; but De Puebla felt that the offer of a royal bride from the Spanish Court would make a deep impression on King James’s susceptible vanity, and since, at the date when this idea occurred to him, all the Spanish Infantas were either married or betrothed, he suggested instead Doña Juana, one of Ferdinand’s illegitimate daughters, concealing as he believed with considerable statesmanship the fact of the bar sinister. Ferdinand, when he heard of it, was most contemptuous. Such a deception, he wrote, could not possibly be maintained and therefore was not worth the lie. Let De Puebla, on the other hand, hold out false hopes if he could of one of the real Princesses, and by this bait induce the Scottish monarch to quarrel with France. Even moderate success in this strategy would prove of considerable value.
James IV. did not marry a Spanish Princess but Catherine of Aragon’s sister-in-law Margaret Tudor; and what harm he might inflict on Spain and her Allies in French interests was a mere pin-prick to the stab administered by Ferdinand’s immediate family. On the death of Prince Miguel in July, 1500, Joanna, Archduchess of Austria, became heiress to the throne of Castile and Aragon; and, though there was cause for rejoicing that a son had been born to her early in the same year and thus the succession was assured, yet the situation arising from the new importance of her position tended every day to grow more critical. Joanna and her husband had been from the first an ill-matched pair, his light careless nature acting like a spark to fire the mine of her sullen temper and quick jealousy; and his faithlessness and her lack of self-control combined to keep the Flemish Court in a perpetual flame of scandal.
Had they been merely private individuals, the evil effects of their passions might have spread no further than the street or town in which they lived; but unfortunately Joanna had gone to Flanders not merely as a bride but as an agent to influence her husband’s policy in her father’s favour, and the odium and exasperation her behaviour aroused reacted to the detriment of Spain. Philip had nothing in common with the Castilian race. Their pride irritated him, their deep religious feeling awoke his incredulity, their sense of reverence and gravity a flippant scorn and boredom, that his selfishness found it difficult to disguise. Personal tastes inclined him rather to the volatile, easy-mannered Frenchman; and, as domestic differences increased, so also did his dislike for the Aragonese and sympathy with their enemies.
“The French rule everything,” wrote Fuensalida, the Spanish Ambassador at the Archduke’s Court despairingly. “They alone surround him and entice him from feast to feast, from mistress to mistress.”
TILTING ARMOUR OF PHILIP THE FAIR
FROM “SPANISH ARMS AND ARMOUR”
REPRODUCED BY COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR, MR. A. F. CALVERT
Fuensalida suggested that Philip and his wife should be induced to visit Castile as soon as possible, before the evil habits into which the Archduke had fallen took permanent hold of him; and Ferdinand and Isabel warmly seconded this idea. Their son-in-law’s behaviour had been scandalous; but their daughter’s conduct caused them if anything more uneasiness. At times full of loving memories of her old home, so that she confessed “she could not think of her mother and how far she was separated from her for ever without shedding tears,” Joanna, on other occasions, was taciturn or even defiant when approached by special emissaries from Spain. Their questions she met by silence, their allusions to her parents or to the religious enthusiasm that had stirred her youth, by indifference. It seemed that jealousy and wounded pride could in a moment slip like a dark curtain across her mind and blot out all save a brooding fury at her wrongs.
The mental balance, once a flaw has shaken its equilibrium, is of all scales the most difficult to adjust; and Isabel’s hopes that a personal supervision of her daughter would effect a cure were doomed to disappointment. Philip and Joanna came to Spain in 1502; but their presence was an unwilling acknowledgment that custom required their recognition as Prince and Princess of Castile by the national Cortes. That business concluded, the Archduke was fully determined to return to his own land, if possible as he had come by way of France, for the reception he had been accorded in Paris made him eager to renew its delights.
It was his ambition that his son, Charles, heir not only of his Austrian archduchy and county of Flanders but of all the wide dominions of Spain, should marry Claude, the infant daughter of Louis XII., a scheme of alliance by which he himself would be enabled to pose as the arbiter of European politics, adjudicating between the two great rival nations with whom he had formed connections. Ferdinand might be pardoned if he regarded the Archduke somewhat dubiously in the proposed rôle; and indeed quarrels over the terms of the Partition Treaty and the subsequent war in Naples were soon to wreck the would-be arbitrator’s hopes. Yet, even before this failure was assured, mutual suspicion had thrown a restraint over the intercourse of father-in-law and son-in-law, and had even poisoned the relations between Isabel and her daughter.