Such was the attractive figure of D. John when he began to be a real personage at the much-discussed Court of his brother.
Certainly that Court was not then, if it ever was, the gloomy, austere convent, represented to us by those who believe, or seem to believe, in an awesome legendary Philip II, surrounded by holocausts and gallows, and Inquisitors and friars.
Nor was it either the united family of devout maidens and saintly matrons, venerable old men and immaculate pages, which those make out who would, in all good faith, imprison the colossal Philip II in the rickety form of a devout monk.
The Court of Philip II was certainly the strictest of its day, but it was also the most magnificent, sumptuous and full of harmless amusement and the knight errantry of those times, without lacking, as was natural, intrigues, plots and scandals between gallants and ladies. These D. Philip sometimes put down openly with a firm hand, at others corrected secretly, and not a few he pretended not to notice, for reasons which must always remain unknown.
The Court was divided, as nearly always happens, into two absolutely different camps—the courtly and the political.
The principal personages of the former at that time were two princesses, as remarkable for their virtue as for their beauty, and united by the bonds of the tenderest friendship. They were the Queen Isabel de Valois and the widowed Princess of Portugal, Doña Juana, the first aged only twenty and the other thirty at this date.
Their circle included the numerous ladies of both their suites, belonging to the highest Spanish nobility, although the Queen's included a few Frenchwomen and the Princess's several Portuguese, and these foreigners were always at war with the Spanish women.
The Queen's ladies numbered over fifty, all spinsters, and they only remained at the palace until the King had found advantageous alliances for them.
There were also ten duennas of honour, all widows and ladies of high rank, and at their head the Camarera Mayor, who had to be a lady of quality, and was, at that time, the Dowager Condesa de Urena, Doña Maria de la Cueva, a matron of great judgment and experience and the mother of the first Duque de Osuna.