Joanna was well aware of her husband’s intention of leaving Spain at the first possible moment; but she herself was expecting a child and knew the long journey would be beyond her powers. The thought that Philip would leave her behind, intensified by the fear that he would do so with keener pleasure than regret, assumed in her disordered brain the monstrous proportions of a plot to keep her a prisoner in Castile. In vain she entreated him to stay until she should be well enough to accompany him; the Archduke, his ambition once satisfied by the homage of the Cortes of Toledo and of Saragossa, impatiently counted the days until he could cross the French border, and all the Catholic sovereigns’ efforts to entertain him failed dismally.
In December, 1502, he left Madrid; and Joanna, at his going, sank into a mood of sullen despondency from which even the birth of her son, Ferdinand, in March of the following year, could not rouse her. At length she received a letter from Philip suggesting her return to Flanders; but war had broken out between France and Spain, making the journey, if not impossible, at least fraught with danger.
Ferdinand was with his army in Roussillon, and Isabel who was ill in Segovia sent imploring messages to her daughter at Medina del Campo, begging her to do nothing rash. Joanna was however obsessed by the notion that she was the victim of a plot, and in her passionate desire to escape from Spain was deaf to warnings and petitions. One evening, lightly clad and followed by her scared attendants, she started on foot from the castle and was only prevented from leaving the city by the Bishop of Burgos, who had been placed by the Queen in charge of her household and who gave orders that the gates should be closed. The Archduchess commanded that they should be opened, and even descended to prayers and entreaties, when she found her authority was of no avail; to all the Bishop’s persuasions that she should return home she replied by an uncompromising refusal. Through the long night, in the darkness and the cold, she maintained her vigil; and when messengers arrived from Segovia the next day, begging her in her mother’s name to resist from her project, she would only consent to move into a poor hovel hard by the gates.
On the second evening, Isabel, who had dragged herself from her sick-bed at the tale of her daughter’s mad folly, appeared in Medina del Campo; but Joanna at first greeted her with reproaches and anger, “speaking” wrote the Queen in her account of the interview to Fuensalida, “so disrespectfully and so little as a child should address her mother, that if I had not seen the state of mind she was in, I would not have suffered it for a moment.”
JOANNA “THE MAD,” DAUGHTER OF QUEEN ISABEL
FROM “HISTORIA DE LA VILLA Y CORTE DE MADRID” BY AMADOR DE LOS RIOS
In the end Joanna’s stubborn obstinacy was conquered, and she returned to the castle; but after such a scene few could doubt that she was at any rate temporarily insane; and the Queen, conscious that her own days were drawing to a close, trembled at the thought of her country’s future, delivered to the moods of such a ruler.
“Cursed fruit of the tree that bore her; ill-fated seed of the land that gave her birth, was this daughter for her mother,” wrote Peter Martyr bitterly; and Isabel’s star, which had risen in such splendour out of the murk of Henry IV.’s misgovernment, was destined to sink amid the shame of Joanna’s folly.
In the spring of 1504 the Archduchess sailed to Flanders; and Queen Isabel, guessing the scandals that would follow her footsteps when her own restraining influence was removed, said good-bye to her with a sick heart. Feeble in body, so that every task seemed an effort, she herself turned more and more from worldly matters to the prayers and meditations that drew her ever closer in touch with the land of her desire towards which she was hastening. Yet neither her kingdom nor people were far from her thoughts.
In 1503, when Ferdinand had gone north to protect the border counties from what was rumoured to be an enormous invading army, her old martial spirit had revived; and she busied herself in Segovia, as in the old days, in collecting troops and despatching them to the seat of war. With the news of Spanish victories her conscience smote her. The flying French! These also were a Christian race, fighting for their own land. Recoiling from the thought of such a slaughter, she wrote to Ferdinand, praying him to stay his hand; and, whether moved by her wish or his own foresight, he contented himself with driving his foes across the border. Soon afterwards Louis XII. agreed to an armistice that freed the Pyrenean provinces from war.