Queens of old Spain

by Martin A. S. Hume

The first instructions sent by the new King Charles, whose age was barely sixteen, to the Regent Jimenez concerned Joan. Her custody was so important, he said, that he agreed, in view of the dissensions amongst Spaniards, that a Fleming should guard her. Until one was appointed he directed that ‘whilst she was to be very well treated, she was to be so closely guarded that if any body should attempt to thwart my good intentions they may not be able to do it. It is more my duty than that of any one to care for the honour, contentment, and solace of the Queen; and if any one else attempts to interfere it will be with an evil object.’[^[129]] Nevertheless many did attempt to interfere by whispering doubts to Joan of her Flemish eldest son, in the interests of his young brother Ferdinand, whom his mother and all Spaniards loved best; and when in September 1517 one of the monteros approached her and said: ‘Madam, our sovereign lord King Charles, your highness’ son, has arrived in Spain,’ Joan burst forth in a great rage. ‘I alone am Queen: my son Charles is but the prince,’ and she always resisted calling him King thenceforward.

Charles and his sister Leonora came to Tordesillas to see their mother in December. Charles’s tutor and counsellor, Chièvres, first saw Joan to break to her the news of the presence of her children; and when, immediately afterwards, they entered the room and knelt before their mother, she was overcome with joy to see those whom she had left as little children twelve years before, now in the best period of adolescence. When Charles and his sister had retired, Chièvres lost no time in saying that in order to relieve the Queen, and accustom Charles to rule, it would be well to entrust the government of Spain to him. Joan made no great objection to this; but it is clear that her intention was, that he should administer the government for her and not rule on his own account as he subsequently did; and when, a few months afterwards, Charles met the Cortes at Valladolid they would only confirm his power as joint sovereign, jealous as they were of Flemings, on condition that he swore that if ever Joan recovered her faculties he would resign the government to her.[^[130]] Thenceforward Joan, though her name appeared for years on decrees and proclamations, was politically dead.

During his stay at Tordesillas, Charles was distressed to see the sad fate of his young sister, Katharine, now aged eleven. Joan was fiercely attached to her, and would hardly let her out of her sight. The child’s rooms were behind those of the Queen, and could only be reached with Joan’s knowledge; little Katharine’s sole amusement being to look through a window which had been specially cut for her, and watch the people going to the opposite church, and the children playing in the side lane that led to the river, who were encouraged by money to play there for her amusement. She never left the palace, and was dressed in mean rags, such as the Queen herself wore, and Charles, knowing that the Queen would never let the child go willingly, somewhat cruelly planned to have her kidnapped. He caused a way into her apartment to be broken through a tapestry-covered wall from an adjoining gallery; and the girl and her female attendants were carried away at dead of night to a large force of horsemen and ladies awaiting her on the opposite side of the bridge across the Douro; and thence spirited away to Valladolid, where, dressed in fitting splendour, she was lodged in her sister Leonora’s palace. When, in the morning, Joan discovered her loss, she was inconsolable. She would neither eat, drink, nor sleep, she said, until her child was restored to her, and after two days had passed, and she still stood firm, the King had to be asked what was to be done. He was loath to give up the education of his sister; for princesses were valuable dynastic and international assets; but there was no other way but to send her back. Charles accompanied her to Tordesillas, and made terms with Joan; the girl must have proper companions and attendants, she must dress suitably to her rank, and she must be allowed some little relaxation and liberty outside the palace. To this Joan consented, and Katharine lived with her until her marriage with the King of Portugal six years later.

In March 1518, Charles appointed to the custody of the Queen, the Marquis of Denia, who held her until his death, and was succeeded by his son. Soon after his appointment, he wrote a letter to the King which lifts the veil considerably on Joan’s condition. She tried, he says, persistently and with artful words, remarkable for one in her condition, to persuade him to take her out of her prison, and to summon the nobles of Castile, as she was discontented at the way she was being kept out of the government, and wished to complain. He details the excuses with which he put her requests aside, and evidently looks upon her blandishments as wiles to escape; but assures Charles, as he did for many years afterwards, that ‘nothing should be done against his interests,’ whatever that may have meant. But even in this letter we see signs of Joan’s undoubted madness. A day or two before she had thrown some pitchers at two of her women, and hurt them; and when Denia went with a grave face to her and said, ‘How is this, my lady? This is a strange way to treat your servants; your mother treated hers better;’ Joan rose hurriedly, and the very act of her rising sent her servants scurrying off in a fright. ‘I am not so violent as to do you any injury,’ she said; and so began again, and for the next five hours, to try by wheedling to get him to take her out, ‘for she could not bear these women.’

In reply to this, Charles warned Denia that his conversations with the Queen must never be overheard by anybody, and that all his letters about her must be strictly secret. Thus every few days news of his mother reached the young King, sometimes reporting improvement, sometimes the reverse; but always harping upon her desire to get out, her dislike of her woman attendants, and her extreme irregularity in getting up and eating, which she often did only at intervals of two days. At this time, too, began to develop her great repugnance to attend mass. The women seem to have been a great source of trouble to every one. They were, it appears, always gadding about the town, telling people of what passed in the palace, and what the Queen said, especially about religion, and her desire to go out, and to summon the grandees. What was worse, they defied Denia to dismiss them, until the King gave him full authority over them, and brought them to reason. In the autumn of the same year, 1518, there was a visitation of plague in the country, though Tordesillas had not suffered much, owing to the scrupulous care taken to isolate the place. The removal of the Queen, however, had to be considered. ‘If it be necessary,’ wrote the Marquis, ‘we shall want saddle mules with black velvet housings for the Queen and the Infanta.... It will also be necessary to take the body of the King, your father, and if this has to be done, we must put into proper order the car in which it was brought here, as it is now dismantled. Charles was against any removal if it could possibly be avoided, but if quite unavoidable, the Queen might be taken to the monastery of St. Paul at Moralejo, near Arevalo. If she refused to go, she must be taken by force; but with as much respect as possible, and with every precaution against her endeavouring to stay in the open on the way. If she wanted the corpse of Philip to go with her, a dummy coffin might be made up and carried, whilst the real one with the body remained behind at Tordesillas.

The plague passed away, and the move was not made; and so things passed with Joan as before. Squalid and unhappy, she resisted as obstinately as ever the pressure put upon her to attend mass, though more than once she was violently desirous of going over in Holy Week, or other anniversaries, to the convent church of St Clara, and on several occasions had her clothes washed in preparation for the great event; which Denia himself was inclined to allow, under strict guard, as people in the town were tattling about her being kept a prisoner. Great efforts were made by Juan de Avila, the chaplain, to bring Joan to a better frame of mind about religion; and in June 1519 he writes a curious letter to the King, beseeching him to do his duty by his mother; ‘especially for the salvation of her soul.’ Perhaps in answer to this Charles ordered Denia to insist that the Queen should hear mass. She had wished it to be said at the end of a corridor, instead of in a special room adjoining her own, as Denia desired, and, at last, rather than she should not hear it at all, she was allowed to have her way; and an altar and chapel were screened off by black velvet hangings at the end of the corridor. She went through the service with great devotion until the evangelium and the pax were brought to her, when she refused them, but motioned that they should be administered to her daughter.

This attendance at mass continued for some time, to the immense jubilation of Denia and the priests; but as the day approached when Charles was to leave Spain for Germany to claim the imperial crown, in consequence of Maximilian’s death (January 1519), the effervescence and discontent in Castile at the prospect of an absentee King drawing money from Spain for foreign purposes, penetrated in some mysterious way the prison-palace of Joan the Mad. For hours the Queen railed at Denia for not having summoned the Grandees, as she had requested him to do so often. She was being disgracefully treated, she said; everything belonged to her, and yet she was being denied what she required. She excitedly summoned the treasurer, and demanded money of him, which he was not allowed to give her. So vehement did she become, that at last Denia forbade any one to speak to her at all. She would go to Valladolid, she said; and at another time she would dress to go over to the convent church, though she was not allowed to go. She ordered Denia to write to her son, asking that she should be better treated; and that the grandees should come to her to consult about the realm. Denia, at his wit’s end to pacify her, on one occasion, for, as he says, ‘she uses words fit to make the very stones rise,’ had the inspiration to mention her father, as if he were still alive, and at the head of affairs; and for a time all the disagreeable answers given to her were said to be by order of King Ferdinand, for whose wisdom she had a great respect. But this lie gave her a new idea. If her father were alive, he could help her; and she ordered Denia to write and tell him that she could no longer stand the life she led. She was badly treated, and as a prisoner, her son, Ferdinand, had been taken away from her, and she feared they were going to rob her of her daughter Katharine; but, if they did, she would kill herself. Denia fell more and more into her black books, as the discontent at Charles’s departure grew in the country, and echoes reached the Queen’s prison of the public indignation at her seclusion, and wild rumours of intentions to rescue her. On one occasion (July 1520) she ordered Denia to open a doorway from her apartments into the corridor where mass was said. He was suspicious and refused, whereupon she fell into a violent rage with him, and heaped upon him outrageous words without measure. No wonder the poor man deplores that everybody believes he keeps her prisoner (as indeed he did, though he says not), and he advocates her entire seclusion, although the best way to undeceive the people, he says, would be to let them see her, and recognise her sad condition.

Charles sailed from Corunna on 20th May 1520. During the time he had been in Spain he, or rather his rude, greedy gang of Flemings, had driven Castilians to desperation. Jimenez, who had held the country for him in his absence in the face of the nobles and young Ferdinand, had been contemptuously dismissed—and probably poisoned on Charles’ arrival: young Ferdinand had been packed off to Flanders: Flemings had crowded all the great posts, to the exclusion of Spaniards: Joan was not presented before the Cortes as Queen jointly with her son, as she should have been; and now, to crown all, the Constitution of Castile had been violated by the insolent young foreigner who was to rule, not Spain alone, but half the world. He had held a Castilian Cortes outside the limits of Castile itself, and had coerced the deputies to vote him large sums of money to be spent away from Spain. The nobles were already seething with discontent, and now the people in the towns, who paid all the taxes, rose and hanged some of the deputies who had voted away their money for an absent king.

Then, like a well-laid train, all Castile blazed into revolt. It was a great social, industrial and political struggle, which ended in the financial impotence of the Cortes of Castile, and the decadence of the Castilian nobility. The complicated details of the revolt cannot here be told, but only those points in which Joan was personally concerned. The governing committee of the revolutionary Comuneros met at Avila at the end of July 1520, headed by the gentry, and, to some extent, secretly encouraged by the great nobles. The Flemish Regent, Cardinal Adrian, was paralysed with dismay at the extent of the rising, and did nothing; whilst to the cry of ‘Long live the King and Queen: down with evil ministers,’ every Spanish heart responded. The manifesto published by the committee announced that the revolutionaries had risen in the interests of the imprisoned Queen Joan; and early in August a committee of the council of Castile, the supreme executive body of the Regent’s government, with its president, Bishop Rojas, presented themselves before Joan in her palace of Tordesillas, to beg her to sign decrees against those who were in arms. Joan was to all appearance calm, and replied to the demand for her signature, ‘It is now fifteen years that I have been kept from the government and badly treated; and this marquis here’ (pointing to Denia), ‘is he who has lied to me most.’ Denia, confused, replied: ‘It is true, my lady, that I have lied to you, but I have done so to overcome certain prejudices of yours. I may tell you now, that your father is dead, and I buried him.’ The Queen shed tears at this, and turning to Rojas, murmured between her sobs, ‘Bishop, believe me, all that I see and hear is like a dream.’ Rojas pressed his point. ‘My lady, I can assure you that your signature to these papers will work a greater miracle than Saint Francis; for, after God, in your hands now rests the salvation of these realms.’ ‘Rest now,’ replied the Queen, ‘and come back another day.’

On the morrow the committee of the council saw the Queen again, and as there was no seat but hers in the room, the president mentioned that it was not meet that they should be kept standing. ‘Bring a seat for the council,’ directed the Queen; but, as the attendants were bringing in chairs, she said, ‘No, no, not chairs, but a bench; that was the rule in my mother’s time: but the bishop may have a chair.’ After another long conference the Queen directed the committee to return to Valladolid and discuss again, in full council the papers to which they requested her signature; and thus, unsatisfied, the members left her, only to find themselves prisoners at Valladolid, which was now in the hands of the rebels, who were rapidly marching upon Tordesillas at the urgent request of the townspeople of the latter place, to save Queen Joan from being carried away by the government party.