The rebels had no time to communicate with Joan as to their aims before they appeared outside the walls of the town on the 29th August. As soon as Joan learnt of their coming she ordered the townspeople to welcome them; and so, amidst salute of cannon and enthusiastic cheers, Padilla, the rebel leader, and his host were escorted into the town, and passed before the Queen, who stood in a balcony of the palace. After resting and changing their garments, Padilla and other chiefs sought audience of the Queen. Joan received him smilingly. ‘Who are you?’ she asked, as he knelt before her. ‘I am Juan Padilla, my lady,’ he replied, ‘son of the captain-general of Castile, a servant of Queen Isabel, as I am a servant of your Highness.’ And then the insurgent chief told the astonished Queen all that had happened since old King Ferdinand died: how the evil foreign advisers of young Charles had brought all Spain into revolt, and that Padilla and the commons of Castile were ready to die in the service of their own Queen Joan. She expressed her wonderment at all this. She had been kept a prisoner, she said, for nearly sixteen years, and Denia, her gaoler, had hidden everything from her. If she had been sure of her father’s death she would have gone forth and have prevented some of this trouble in her realm. Then, addressing Padilla, she said: ‘Go now; I order you to exercise the authority of captain-general of the realm. Look to all things carefully, until I order otherwise.’
Joan thus made herself the ostensible head of the revolution; and on many subsequent occasions conferred with the leaders in arms at Tordesillas, fully approving of their proceedings and aims. She tried to exonerate Charles on account of his youth and inexperience of Spain, but clearly indicated her intention to govern for herself in future. Most important of all, she authorised the leaders to summon the Cortes to meet at Tordesillas. The weak, foreign Cardinal Regent could only ascribe Joan’s attitude to her madness; though, as he wrote to Charles, the people regard it as a proof of her sanity. Denia was now almost a prisoner, but the revolutionary leaders could never persuade Joan to sign his formal dismissal, though they, on their own authority, turned both the marquis and his wife unceremoniously out of the town when Tordesillas became the centre of the rebel government in September, and the Cortes held its sittings there.[[131]]
Joan met her Parliament in the hall of the palace, and listened patiently to the lengthy harangues of the deputies. In her reply, which seems to have been extempore, she spoke at great length of her father, whose death had been concealed from her. During his life she was at ease, because she knew no one would dare to do harm. But she now saw how the country and herself had been abused and deceived, to the injury of the people whom she loved so much. She wished she were in some place where she could direct affairs better; but as her father had placed her there, either because of the woman who took her mother’s place, or for some other reason, she could do no more than she had done. She wondered that the Spaniards had not avenged themselves before upon the foreigners who had come with her son. She thought at first that these foreigners had meant well to her boys; whom they had, she was told, taken back to Flanders; but she saw differently now, and she hoped no one here had any evil meaning towards her sons. Even if she were not the Queen she ought to have been better treated, for, at least, she was the daughter of great sovereigns; and she was in favour of the Comuneros, because she saw they were anxious to remedy the abuses of which she complained. All this seemed quite sane, but at the end of the speech there is a pathetic ring of self-distrust that tells the sad tale. ‘To the extent of my power I will see to affairs, either here or elsewhere. But if, whilst I am here, I cannot do much it will be because I am obliged to spend some time in calming my heart and strengthening my spirit, on the death of the King, my husband. But as long as I am in disposition for it, I will attend to affairs.’[[132]]
The democratic excesses of the revolutionary Committee, together with the diplomacy of Charles, were gradually enlisting the great nobles on the side of the government. Although Joan’s attendants generally were in her favour, and continued to assert her sanity now they had got rid of the Denias, her confessor, Juan de Avila, was always secretly faithful to the Regent; and whispered warnings constantly in the Queen’s ear. It was evident after a short time also to the revolutionary junta that Joan was not sane; as they wrote from Tordesillas to the city of Valladolid saying that they had summoned all the best physicians in Spain to her; and, apparently finding human aid powerless, they had ordered processions and prayers for her restoration to health. The Regent, indeed, writing to Charles in October, says that the Queen cannot last long if she does not escape from the power of the rebel government; as she was much worse after Denia went. She no longer sleeps in a bed, he says, nor eats regularly, but keeps her food all around her cold until it goes bad. At another time, after she had eaten nothing for three days, she was given the accumulated food of the whole period at once. The government party asserted that all the poor woman’s crazy caprices were acceded to, and even threats resorted to by the junta, in order to get her to sign the decrees necessary to legitimise their action; but she continued obstinate in her refusal to put her hand to anything.[[133]]
The junta began to grow desperate; for the forces against them were growing daily, whilst they made no progress, depending, as they did, for legality upon obtaining the signature of a lunatic. They tried to bribe the poor woman to sign by promising to take her away from Tordesillas; but that was fruitless: on another occasion, in the middle of the night, a hue and cry was raised that the Constable of Castile with a great force of government troops was outside, and the Queen was told that the ‘tyrants’ had come to seize her. ‘Tell the Constable,’ she replied, ‘not to do anything until the daylight comes; and then I will see about it.’ Things thus went from bad to worse for the rebellion. This was the one chance of Joan’s life, and she missed it. For months she trifled and smiled upon the rebel junta, but would sign nothing; and early in December the government troops were strong enough to make a dash for Tordesillas, which they took by assault after four hours of desperate fighting; the rebel junta flying in a panic from the place. Joan welcomed the victors with a smiling face. She had been expecting and wishing they would come, she said; and had ordered that the nobles should be admitted before the fight began.
During the battle she with the Infanta had left the palace, carrying her jewels with them, and had ordered the corpse of Philip to be taken from the church and carried with them out of the town. Before it could be done, in the confusion, the royal troops entered, and they found the Queen and her daughter crouched in the doorway of the palace trembling with fright. The great nobles who came to the capture of Tordesillas were full of lip service to Joan, and she, flattered apparently by their deference, professed delight at their coming; but from the moment the rebel junta fled before the Constable’s troops at Tordesillas without her signature, Joan was a closely watched prisoner. Denia and his wife, with their harsh methods, came back, to the loudly expressed disgust, not only of Joan, but of some of the greatest of the Castilian nobles, who saw how his presence irritated her;[[134]] but Charles would permit no change in his mother’s keeper, for he knew he could depend upon Denia to keep her close.
In April 1521, the Comuneros were finally crushed at the battle of Villalar, and the yoke of imperialism forged unwittingly by Ferdinand the Catholic, and open-eyed by Charles the Emperor, was fixed upon the neck of Spain until it strangled her. Thenceforward Joan was but a shadow in the world, to which she no longer appertained.
The person most to be pitied, until marriage rescued her in 1524, was the poor young Infanta Katharine. The Denias came back vowing vengeance against every one who they thought had been polite to the rebels, and the Infanta, as well as the Queen, had to feel their petty tyranny. The girl wrote indignantly to her brother of the wretched straits to which she was reduced by them, and also of the persecution of her mother by them. Amongst other complaints, the following may be quoted. ‘For the love of God, pray order that if the Queen wishes to walk in the gallery looking on to the river, or in the matted corridor, or to leave her chamber for pastime, they shall not prevent her from doing so. And pray do not allow the servants and daughters of the marchioness, or others, to go to my closet through the Queen’s rooms, but only the persons who serve; because, in order that the Queen may not see them, the marchioness orders the women to shut the Queen up in her chamber, and will not allow her to go into the passages or hall, but keep her in the chamber where there is no light but candles; for there is nowhere else for her to go, and she will not leave the chamber until she is dragged out: or, if she would, the women are there to prevent her.’ This is the Infanta’s own version; but the Denias’ story is that the young princess is not allowed by her mother to see any one but a common servant, and has not the fit company of ladies. To make matters worse for the girl the Denias accused her of favouring the rebels, which she indignantly denied, and made peace successfully with her brother. Her departure from Tordesillas for her marriage afflicted Joan greatly, and for the rest of the Queen’s life there was no one to stand between the emperor and her gaolers.
During the long years of Joan’s seclusion, the principal feature of her aberration was its anti-religious tendency. It is true that she often demanded the summoning of the nobles, and continued her eccentricity in eating and sleeping, but the strange antipathy she showed, and often violently expressed, to the services of her church, was a scandal worse than any in a country where thousands of people were being burnt for a tenth part of what the Queen allowed herself to say and do. The whole of the emperor’s system was based upon the enforcement of universal religious orthodoxy by Spain: and it was a bitter affliction for him to know that his mother, and rightful Queen, was madly opposed, at intervals, to the ceremonies imposed upon the rest of Spaniards. Denia in his letters to the Emperor, on several occasions, drops dark hints that torture should be applied—as it evidently had been applied to Joan years before by Mosen Ferrer. Speaking of her obstinacy soon after the rebel defeat, and advising that she should be transferred to the fortress of Arevalo, which he thought safer and more loyal to Charles, he says: ‘Your Majesty may be sure that this will not be done with the Queen’s goodwill, for it is not to be expected that a person who refuses to do anything beneficial, either for her body or her soul, but does quite the contrary, will agree to this. And, in good truth, if your Majesty would use pressure[[135]] upon her in many things, you would serve God and benefit her Highness, for people in her condition really need it. Your grandmother, Queen Isabel, served her Highness, her daughter, in this way, but your Majesty will do as you think best.’
Denia, whilst recommending the employment of force for the removal of the Queen, did not wish to appear personally as the instrument, but recommended that the President of the Council of Castile should be sent with the Emperor’s order for her to submit, and if she resisted, to have her seized and put into a litter by force in the night time, and carried off. The removal of the Queen, often urged by Denia for years, on the ground of the accessibility of Tordesillas to disaffected people, does not seem ever to have taken place.[[136]] Denia’s desire to lodge Joan in a strong isolated fortress is also explained by him on the ground of the scandal caused by the Queen’s religious attitude. In the letter just quoted, where he recommends torture, he relates that on Christmas night, whilst early matins were being sung in the presence of the Infanta, the Queen came in search of her daughter, and screamed out in anger for them to clear the altar of everything upon it; and she had to be forcibly taken back to her rooms. He relates also that: ‘She often goes into the gallery overlooking the river, and calls to any one she sees to summon the troops to kill each other. Your majesty may judge from all this what is best to do, and what we have to put up with.’