Seven weeks afterwards, on the 9th May, in the great hall of the palace, the nobles, prelates, and deputies of the chartered towns met to swear allegiance to the new heiress of Castile. One by one, as they advanced to kneel and kiss the tiny hand of the unconscious infant, they frowned and whispered beneath their breath words of scorn and indignation which they dared not utter openly, for all around, and thronging the corridors and courtyards, there stood with ready lances the Morisco bodyguard of the King, eager to punish disobedience. And so, though the insulting nickname of the new Infanta Juana, the Beltraneja, after the name of her assumed father, passed from mouth to mouth quietly, public protest there was none.[[2]]
Already before the birth of the hapless Beltraneja, the scandal of Henry’s life, his contemptible weakness and the acknowledged sexual impotence which had caused his divorce from his first wife, had made his court a battle ground for rival ambitions. Like the previous Kings of his house, which was raised to the throne by a fratricidal revolution, and himself a rebel during his father’s lifetime, Henry IV. had lavished crown gifts upon noble partisans to such an extent as to have reduced his patrimony to nought. Justice was openly bought and sold, permanent grants upon public revenues were bartered for small ready payments, law and order were non-existent outside the strong walls of the fortified cities, and the whole country was a prey to plundering nobles, who, either separately or in “leagues,” tyrannised and robbed as they listed.[[3]] Feudalism had never been strong in the realms of Castile, because the frontier nobles, who for centuries pushed back gradually the Moorish power, always had to depend upon conciliating the towns they occupied, in order that the new regime might be more welcome than the one displaced. The germ of institutions in Spain had ever been the municipality, not the village grouped around the castle or the abbey as in England, and the soldier noble in Spain, unlike the English or German baron, had to win the support of townsmen, not to dispose of agricultural serfs. But when the Moors in Spain had been reduced to impotence, and a series of weak kings had been raised to the throne as the puppets of nobles; then when feudalism was dying elsewhere, it attempted to raise its head in Spain, capturing the government of towns on the one hand and beggaring and dominating the King on the other. By the time of which we are now speaking, the process was well nigh complete; and the only safeguard against the absolute tyranny of the nobles, was their mutual greed and jealousy.
For years Juan Pacheco, Marquis of Villena, had ruled the King with a rod of iron. The grants and gifts he had extorted for himself and his friends made him more powerful than any other force in the land. But there were those who sulked apart from him, nobles, some of them, of higher lineage and greater hereditary territories than his; and when the handsome foot page, Beltran de la Cueva, captured the good graces of the King and his gay young Portuguese wife, Queen Juana, the enemies of Villena saw in the rising star an instrument by which he might be humbled. After the Beltraneja’s birth and christening, honours almost royal were piled upon Beltran de la Cueva; and Villena and his uncle, Alfonso Carrillo, Archbishop of Toledo, grew ever more indignant and discontented. Only a fortnight after the Cortes had sworn allegiance to the new Princess, Villena drew up a secret protest against the act, alleging the illegitimacy of the child,[[4]] and soon open opposition to King and favourite was declared.
There is no space here to relate in detail the complicated series of intrigues and humiliations that followed. The King on one occasion was forced to hide in his own palace from the assaulting soldiery of Villena. To buy the goodwill of the jealous favourite towards his little daughter he went so far as to agree to a marriage between the Beltraneja and Villena’s son;[[5]] and more humiliating still, in December 1464, he consented to the inquiry of a commission of churchmen nominated by Villena and his friends, to inquire into the legitimacy of his reputed daughter. The inquiry elicited much piquant but entirely contradictory evidence as to the virility of the King, who, it was admitted on all hands, delighted in the society of ladies, and aroused the violent jealousy of the Queen; but, although with our present lights there seems to have been no valid reason for disinheriting the princess, the commission was sufficiently in doubt to recommend the King to make the best terms he could with the rebels. The King’s sister, Princess Isabel, who at the time lived at Court, was also used as an instrument by Henry to pacify the league against him. She had been betrothed when quite a child at Arevalo to Prince Charles of Viana, eldest son of the King of Aragon, and in right of his mother himself King of Navarre; a splendid match which, failing issue from Henry and from her younger brother Alfonso, might have led to the union of all Spain in one realm. But Charles of Viana had already in 1461 fallen a victim to the hate and jealousy of his stepmother, Juana Enriquez, daughter of a great Castilian noble, Don Fadrique, the Admiral of the realm, and Isabel became to her brother a valuable diplomatic asset. Before the storm of war burst Henry attempted to wed his sister to Alfonso V. of Portugal, his wife’s brother, and so to prevent her claims to the Castilian crown being urged to the detriment of the Beltraneja; but the match had no attraction for the clever cautious girl of thirteen; for the suitor was middle-aged and ugly, and already her own genius or crafty councillors had suggested to her the husband who would best serve her own interests. So she gravely reminded her brother that she, a Castilian princess, could not legally be bestowed in marriage without the formal ratification of the Cortes.
In September 1564 Beltran de la Cueva received the great rank of Master of Santiago, which endowed him not only with vast revenues, but the disposal of an armed force second to none in the kingdom, and this new folly of the King was the signal for revolt. A party of nobles immediately seized Valladolid against the King, and though the townspeople promptly expelled them and proclaimed the loyalty of the city, the issue between the factions was now joined. On the following day, 16th September, an attempt that nearly succeeded was made to capture and kidnap the King himself near Segovia. He was a poor, feeble-minded creature, hating strife and danger, and, though some of his stronger councillors protested against such weakness, he consented to meet the revolted nobles, and redress their grievances. In October Villena, the Archbishop of Toledo, Count Benavente, the Admiral Don Fadrique, and the rest of the rebels, met Henry between Cabezon and Cigales, and in three interviews, during their stay of five weeks, dictated to the wretched King their demands.[[6]] The King was to dismiss his Moorish guard and become a better Christian: he was to ask for no more money without the consent of the nobles, to deprive Cueva of the Mastership of Santiago, recognise his own impotence and the bastardy of his daughter, and acknowledge as his heir his half-brother Alfonso, whom he was to deliver to the guardianship of Villena. On the 30th November the nobles and the King took the oath to hold the boy Alfonso as the heir of Spain; and then Henry, a mere cypher thenceforward, sadly wended his way to Segovia, where the commission to inquire into the shameful question of his virility was still sitting,[[7]] and Villena and his uncle, the warlike Archbishop, were thus practically the rulers of Spain. But though Henry consented to everything he characteristically tried to avoid the spirit of the agreement. Beltran de la Cueva was deprived of the Mastership of Santiago, but he was made Duke of Alburquerque in exchange for the loss, and the poor little disinherited Beltraneja was treated with greater consideration than before.
When civil war was seen to be inevitable in the spring of 1465, Henry carried his wife and child with his sister Isabel to Salamanca, whilst the Archbishop of Toledo, in the name of the revolted nobles, seized the walled city of Avila, where within a few days he was joined by Villena and his friends, bringing with them the Infante Alfonso, who, in pursuance of the agreement made with the King at Cigales, had received the oath of allegiance as heir to the crown. From the King it was clear that the nobles could hope for no more, for he had summoned the nation to arms to oppose them; but from a child King of their own making, rich grants could still be wrung, and for the first time since the dying days of the Gothic monarchy, the sacredness of the anointed Sovereign of Castile was mocked and derided. In April 1565, at Plascencia, the nobles swore secretly to hold Alfonso as King; and on the 5th June 1364, on a mound within sight of the walls of Avila, the public scene was enacted that shocked Spain like a sacrilege. Upon a staging there was seated a lay figure in mourning robes, with a royal crown upon its head; a sword of state before it, and in the hand a sceptre. A great multitude of people with bated breath awaited the living actors in the scene; and soon there issued from the city gate a brilliant cavalcade of nobles and bishops, headed by Villena escorting the little prince Alfonso. Arriving before the scaffolding, and in mockery saluting the figure, most of the nobles mounted the platform, whilst Villena, the Master of Alcantara, and Count Medillin, with a bodyguard, conveyed the Infante to a coign of vantage some distance away. Then in a loud voice was read upon the platform the impeachment of the King, which was summed up under four heads. For the first, it ran, Henry of Castile is unworthy to enjoy the regal dignity; and as the tremendous words were read the Archbishop of Toledo stepped forth and tore the royal crown from the brows of the lifeless doll: for the second, he is unfit to administer justice in the realm, and the Count of Plascencia removed the sword of state from its place: for the third, no rule or government should be entrusted to him, and Count of Benavente took from the figure’s powerless grasp the sceptre which it held: for the fourth, he should be deprived of the throne and the honour due to kings, whereupon Don Diego Lopez de Zuñiga cast the dummy down and trampled it under foot, amidst the jeers and curses of the crowd. When this was done, and the platform cleared, young Alfonso was raised aloft in the arms of men that all might see, and a great shout went up of “Castilla, Castilla, for the King Don Alfonso,” and then, seated on the throne, the boy gave his hand to kiss to those who came to pay their new sovereign fealty. Like wildfire across the steppes and mountains of Castile sped the awful news, and Henry in Salamanca was soon surrounded by hosts of subjects whose reverence for a sacrosanct King had been wounded by what they regarded as impious blasphemy.
Both factions flew to arms, and for months civil war raged, the walled cities being alternately besieged and captured by both parties. Isabel herself remained with the King, usually at Segovia or Madrid; though with our knowledge of her character and tastes, she can have had little sympathy with the tone of her brother’s court. At one time during the lingering struggle in 1466, Henry endeavoured to win Villena and his family from the side of rebellion by betrothing Isabel to Don Pedro Giron, Master of Calatrava, Villena’s brother. The suitor was an uncouth boor, and that an Infanta of Castile should be sacrificed in marriage with an upstart such as he was too much for Isabel’s pride and great ambition. Nothing in the world, she said, should bring her to such a humiliation; though the King, careless of her protests, petitioned the Pope to dispense Don Pedro from his pledge of celibacy as Master of a monkish military order. Isabel’s faithful friend, Doña Beatriz Bobadilla, wife of Andres Cabrera, High Steward of the King, and Commander of the fortress of Segovia, was as determined as her mistress that the marriage should not take place, and swore herself to murder Don Pedro, if necessary, to prevent it. A better way was found than by Dona Beatriz’s dagger, for when the papal dispensation arrived, and the prospective bridegroom set out in triumph to claim his bride, poison cut short his career as soon as he left his home. Whether Isabel herself was an accomplice of the act will never be known. She probably would not have hesitated to sanction it in the circumstances, according to the ethics of the time; for she never flinched, as her brother did, at inflicting suffering for what she considered necessary ends.
On the 20th August 1467, the main bodies of both factions met on the historic battlefield of Olmedo, the warlike Archbishop of Toledo, clad in armour covered by a surcoat embroidered with the holy symbols, led into battle the boy pretender Alfonso; whilst the royal favourite, Beltran de la Cueva, now Duke of Alburquerque, on the King’s side, matched the valour of the Churchman.[[8]] Both sides suffered severely, but the pusillanimity of the King caused the fight to be regarded as a defeat for him, and the capture of his royal fortress of Segovia soon afterwards proved his impotence in arms so clearly, that a sort of modus vivendi was arranged, by which for nearly a year each King issued decrees and ostensibly ruled the territories held by his partisans.[[9]]
At length, in July 1468, the promising young pretender Alfonso died suddenly and mysteriously in his fifteenth year, at Cardeñosa, near Avila; perhaps of plague, as was said at the time, but more probably of poison;[[10]] and the whole position was at once revolutionised. Isabel had been in the Alcazar of Segovia with her friends the commander and his wife when the city was surrendered to the rebels, and from that time, late in 1567, she had followed the fortunes of Alfonso, with whom she was at his death. She at once retired broken-hearted to the convent of Santa Clara in Avila, but not, we may be certain, unmindful of the great change wrought in her prospects by her brother’s premature death. She was nearly seventeen years of age, learned and precocious far beyond her years; the events that had passed around her for the last six years had matured her naturally strong judgment, and there is no doubt from what followed that she had already decided upon her course of action. She was without such affectionate guidance as girls of her age usually enjoy; for her unhappy widowed mother, to whom she was always tender and kind, had already fallen a victim to the hereditary curse of the house of Portugal, to which she belonged, and lived thenceforward in lethargic insanity in her castle of Arevalo. Isabel’s brother the King was her enemy, and she had no other near relative: the churchmen and nobles who had risen against Henry, and were now around her, were, it must have been evident to her, greedy rogues bent really upon undermining the royal power for their own benefit; and deeply devout as Isabel was, she was quite unblinded by the illusion that the Archbishop and bishops who led the revolt were moved to their action by any considerations of morality or religion. On the other hand, the rebellious nobles and ecclesiastics could not persist in their revolt without a royal figure head. Young Alfonso, a mere child, had been an easy tool, and doubtless the leaders thought that this silent, self-possessed damsel would be quite as facile to manage.
They did not have to wait many days for proof to the contrary. The Archbishop of Toledo was the mouthpiece of his associates. Within the venerable walls of the royal convent at Avila he set before Isabel a vivid picture of the evils of her elder brother’s rule, his shameful laxity of life, his lavish squandering of the nation’s wealth upon unworthy objects, and the admitted illegitimacy of the daughter he wished to make his heiress; and the Archbishop ended by offering to Isabel, in the name of the nobles, the crowns of Castile. The wearer of these crowns, wrested painfully through centuries of struggle from intruding infidels, had always been held sacred. The religious exaltation born of the reconquest had invested the Christian sovereigns in the eyes of their subjects with divine sanction and special saintly patronage. To attack them was not disloyalty alone, but sacrilege; and the deposition of Henry at Avila had, as we have seen, thrilled Spain with horror. It was no part of Isabel’s plan to do anything that might weaken the reverence that surrounded the throne to which she knew now she might succeed. So her answer to the prelate was firm as well as wise. With many sage reflections taken from the didactic books that had always been her study, she declared that she would never accept a crown that was not hers by right. She desired to end the miserable war, she said, and to be reconciled to her brother and sovereign. If the nobles desired to serve her they would not try to make her Queen before her time, but persuade the King to acknowledge her as his heir, since they assured her that the Princess Juana was the fruit of adultery.