At Tortoles he was met by the queen, his daughter, accompanied by Archbishop Ximenes. The interview between them had more of pain than pleasure in it. The king was greatly shocked by Juana’s appearance; for her wild and haggard features, emaciated figure, and the mean, squalid attire in which she was dressed, made it difficult to recognise any trace of the daughter from whom he had been so long separated. She discovered more sensibility on seeing him than she had shown since her husband’s death, and henceforth resigned herself to her father’s will with little opposition. She was soon after induced by him to change her unsuitable residence for more commodious quarters at Tordesillas. Her husband’s remains were laid in the monastery of Santa Clara, adjoining the palace, from whose windows she could behold his sepulchre. From this period, although she survived forty-seven years, she never quitted the walls of her habitation; and although her name appeared jointly with that of her son, Charles V, in all public acts, she never afterwards could be induced to sign a paper, or take part in any transactions of a public nature. She lingered out a half century of dreary existence, as completely dead to the world as the remains which slept in the monastery of Santa Clara beside her.[b]
WAS QUEEN JUANA INSANE?
[1507-1554 A.D.]
The pendulum of historical criticism to which we have had such frequent occasion to refer has swung back to the original tradition in another instance. Juana was generally accounted mad by her contemporaries though she had admittedly intervals of lucid thought. In the latter half of the nineteenth century papers were turned up which emphasised her aspects of sanity and the theory was raised that she was the victim of slander and cruelty.
It was claimed that her only abnormality was her freedom from the bigotry that bloodied the reign of her father and mother; and that it was her stay in Flanders that liberalised her creed. This theory fascinated the iconoclasts who always hunt the evil side of a glorious period, and her mother and father were openly accused of a hideous disregard of the first instincts of humanity, of blackening her fame and robbing her of her royal heritage. The motive of this unnatural crime imputed to Ferdinand and Isabella was given as a mixture of religious intolerance and of selfishness, though it might as well have been said that they called her insane to keep her from undergoing the torture and fire of the Inquisition which ransacked the kingdom for the most minute heterodoxy. Burke[k] especially is unsparing in his denunciations of a cruelty which could not be exceeded if true. He claims that Ferdinand’s letters show that he knew Juana to be sane, but simply “unmanageable as she had ever been.”
But in this instance as in so many others, the histories of a few years ago are put out of date and the histories of long ago brought again into timeliness. The story of Juana’s rise and fall in history is as follows:[a]
For a long time writers who spoke of Juana the Mad stuck to tradition without going back to the original documents. It was only in 1858 that important documents were discovered in the archives at Simancas. Most of them confirmed tradition, but some of them left doubts in the mind of a German scholar, Bergenroth,[u] who collected and published them with an interesting dissertation in the “state papers.” Interpreting these documents, which were incomplete and often ambiguous, in a way contrary to general opinion, he tried to prove that Juana was not insane, but that she was rather the victim of the ambition and fanaticism of her father and of her son.
We are to-day better informed, having contemporary texts, some from Simancas, others from the archives of the historical academy at Madrid, others from private collections. An eminent Spanish writer, Rodriguez Villa,[v] has collected, and commented upon them in a work which one may safely affirm says the last word on this subject and completely contradicts Bergenroth’s opinions. The new historian on the one hand introduces elements hitherto unknown into the question, on the other explains differently those which were known. His circumstantial account, well supported by facts, upholds tradition for the most part and exculpates Ferdinand the Catholic as well as Charles V of the accusation brought against them. In the meantime Gachard[w] had shown like tendencies in a monograph on the subject, and De la Fuente[x] in a substantial pamphlet had peremptorily denied the heretical opinions attributed to the queen of Castile.
[1479-1503 A.D.]
The facts are doubly interesting, first because of their romance and peculiar nature, secondly because of their intimate relations with political events which, at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century, changed the internal form and diplomatic policy of the Spanish monarchy.