These hints at personal punishment of the Queen are repeated again and again over a series of years by Denia, though, so far as can be gathered from the Emperor’s replies, he gave no instructions for it to be done. In 1525 Denia writes: ‘Nothing would do so much good as some pressure (i.e., punishment or torture), although it is a very serious thing for a subject to think of applying such to his Sovereign. Perhaps it will be best to try what effect a good priest would have upon Her Highness ... a Dominican would be best, as she does not like Franciscans.’ On another occasion soon afterwards, when Charles had decided to have his mother secretly carried by night to the impregnable castle of Toro, not far from Tordesillas, Denia remarks that he had taken measures that no persons should be in the streets to witness her arrival, ‘for, in good truth, I myself am ashamed of what I hear and see.’

And so from year to year the Queen’s religious aberrations consigned her to constantly increased seclusion to avoid scandal. The Emperor and his only son Philip visited the Queen at least on one occasion at Tordesillas, and during the regency of Philip in 1552, whilst Charles was in Germany, the Prince, much more rigidly devout even than his father, and shocked at the continued refusal of his grandmother to attend the services of the Church and fulfil her religious duties, sent to Tordesillas the saintly Jesuit Francis of Borgia, Duke of Gandia, to exert his influence upon the Queen. His success was very small. For weeks Joan refused to conform, until, at last Borgia persuaded her to make what is called a ‘general confession,’ and he thereupon gave her absolution;[[137]] but directly he left she relapsed into her former indifference again.

When Philip was leaving Spain to marry Mary, Queen of England, in 1554, he sent Father Borgia again to try to bring Joan to her religious duties. She heard the good father patiently, and when he had finished his exhortations, she endeavoured to make terms. Yes, she would hear mass, and confess, and receive absolution, and the rest of it, if the women attendants upon her were sent away, as they always mocked her whilst she was at her devotions. ‘If that be so,’ replied Father Borgia, ‘the Inquisition shall deal with them as heretics;’ and he at once wrote to Philip recommending that they should pretend to hand the women over to the Holy Office, place crosses and images of saints about the Queen’s rooms, say daily mass on the corridor altar, and if the Queen objected, tell her that it was done by the order of the Inquisition. He also proposed to bring some priestly exorcisers to cast out the devils that afflicted the Queen; but this Philip would not allow. The effect of Borgia’s efforts on this occasion was, that when Prince Philip on his way to Corunna to sail for England called at Tordesillas, he found Joan to his delight going through the ordinary religious rites without resistance. But her devotion was clearly only on the surface, and her new confessor Friar Luis de la Cruz, soon reported that he dared not expose himself to the peril of committing a grave act of sacrilege by administering the sacraments to the Queen, and resigned his office. It appears, amongst other things, that she always shut her eyes at the elevation of the Host at the mass, and on one occasion she violently told her attendants to throw away the blessed tapers they carried before her, as she said they stank.

Since the summer of 1553, Joan, then an old woman, had suffered from swelling of the lower limbs, which almost crippled her; and in February 1555, after a bath of very hot water, the legs broke out into open wounds. Thenceforward the course of her illness presented an extraordinary resemblance to that which proved mortal in the case of her grandson, Philip II. Dreadful gangrenous sores, which she refused to have dressed or washed, caused her the most awful torment. She paid no heed to the directions of doctors or nurses; and when her grand-daughter, the Infanta Joan, came over from Valladolid with the best medical men procurable, the Queen violently refused to see them or allow them to examine her. Thus, lying in repulsive squalor and filth, the poor creature was told that Father Borgia had come to see her. She angrily refused to listen to him at first, but she was weak, and his persistence seems finally to have conquered. By and bye she admitted that she was sorry for her errors, and deplored the divagations of her spirit. At the request of Borgia she repeated the apostle’s creed and confessed; but just as he was about to administer the viaticum, she expressed some scruple at receiving it. Learned theologians were summoned in haste from Salamanca; and a few days afterwards, on the 11th April 1555, the famous Dr. Soto was closeted with her for hours. His report was that, though she had privately told him things that consoled him, the Queen was not fit to receive the Eucharist; though extreme unction might be administered.

That same night the last rites were performed. Leaning over the dying woman with a crucifix, the priest told her that the last hour for her was come, and that it behoved her to ask God for pardon. By signs and gestures of grief and contrition, she expressed what her poor palsied tongue refused to utter; and Father Borgia, believing her beyond speech, asked her to signify whether he should recite the creed for her. To the astonishment of every one she suddenly recovered her power of utterance, and replied, ‘You begin it, and I will repeat it after you.’ When the last amen was said, the saintly Jesuit placed a crucifix to the lips of the dying woman. ‘Christ crucified aid me,’ she had strength yet to say, and then Joan the Mad passed to the land where all are sane. For twenty years her body lay in the Convent of St. Clara, opposite her prison palace; upon the same spot where the coffin of her husband had rested for so many years; and then, in 1574, she was carried at last to the sumptuous tomb at Granada, to join for the rest of time the dust of him that she had loved not wisely but too well.

The foregoing account of the life of this most unfortunate of queens, gathered entirely from the contemporary statements of persons who knew her, tends irresistibly to the conclusion that her early rigid training, followed by her life in Flanders, had implanted in her mind a dislike of the stern bigotry which characterised the religion of Spain under the influence of the Inquisition; and that this dislike grew to hatred when her mind became permanently unsettled. Her strict seclusion and cruel treatment do not appear to have been so necessary for her own health, or even primarily for the public welfare, as for the interests of her father and son, whose autocratic power was threatened by any combination of nobles acting in her name, and whose policy largely depended upon the maintenance of strict religious orthodoxy. To leave at liberty and accessible a feeble-minded Queen who desired to govern through the nobles, and hated the religion of the Inquisition, would have been to invite disaster to the very basis upon which the vast edifice of Spanish autocratic power at its grandest was erected. It might have been better for Spain in the long run, but it would have been ruin for Ferdinand and Charles; and to their interests successively Joan the Mad was sacrificed.

BOOK III
I
MARY TUDOR
QUEEN OF ENGLAND AND SPAIN

In the noble gallery at the Prado there hangs the full-length seated portrait of a lady of peculiarly modern aspect, painted by Titian from sketches and descriptions in his extreme old age.[[138]] Her sad, sweet smile, vague, lymphatic eyes, and high prominent forehead, give to the face a character of far away ideality, such as marked so many of the members of her house: for this is Isabel, the consort of the Emperor, and she, like the greater Isabel’s mother, belonged to the fated royal family of Portugal, whose tainted blood so often carried to its possessors the mysticism that degenerates into madness. Throughout the poor lady’s life of barely thirty-six years, she was overshadowed by the tremendous responsibility of being the mother of the Cæsar’s children. During the long and frequent absences from Spain of Charles V. in his life-struggle against France and heresy on the one side, and the powers of Islam on the other, the Empress Isabel, as Regent, controlled by a council mainly of churchmen, had to squeeze funds for the imperial wars from the commons of Castile, well nigh crushed into financial impotence since the defeat of the parliamentary champions at Villalar.

Like all those who came into immediate contact with Charles in his imperial capacity, his wife was humbly subordinate to the overwhelming magnitude of the policy which he directed, and she had no share in moulding events. For her the glory was sufficient to have borne her husband a son who lived, besides daughters and two boys who died of epilepsy in infancy. The mother of Philip of Spain looked with reverential awe upon her own child, so great and important to mankind was held to be the inheritance to which he was to succeed; and when she flickered out of life in 1539, the boy of twelve was her main contribution and justification to a world which had only known her as Cæsar’s wife, and only remembered her as Philip’s mother.

In the atmosphere of hushed reverence and rigid sacrifice to imperial ends that filled the monastic court of Spain in the absence of the Emperor, Philip was never allowed to forget for an hour the destiny, with all its duties, its responsibilities, and its power, for which he was taught that God had specially selected him as son of his father. As a boy regent in the Emperor’s first great trial of strength with the German Lutherans, his heart had ached at the sufferings of Spain from the cruel drain of blood and treasure for the war in which she had no direct concern; but when he dared, almost passionately, to remonstrate with his father at the ruin which he himself was forced to impose upon the people he loved, he was coldly reminded that it was the cause of God that he and his were fighting, and all earthly considerations must be sacrificed for its triumph. Philip was the son of his forbears, and he learnt his lesson well. Like his grandmother Isabel, he had no love of cruelty for its own sake, but like her he held the mystic belief that he and the Most High were linked in community of cause, and that the greater the suffering the greater the glory. He never spared himself or others when the cause for which he lived, the unification of the faith, demanded sacrifice; but fate was cruel in the era she chose for him. The age when Charles and his son were pledged to force all men to take their faith unquestioned from Rome at the tips of Spanish pikes was that in which the rebellious Monk of Wittemburg had challenged Rome itself, and the world was throbbing with the new revelation, that beyond the trappings that man had hung upon the church, there was a God to whom all were equal, and to whom all might appeal direct.