As to the real causes of her mental state, they cannot of course be determined with actual certainty, being hidden in the depths of the human organism. Villa[v] considers that Juana became “mad through love,” exasperated first by the infidelities of her husband.
Juana’s early life had passed in peaceful obscurity. She received a careful and kind training. Did she at that time show any distressing symptoms? Nothing precisely indicates such a thing. If, to judge from certain anxieties afterwards manifested by Isabella, it would seem possible that such symptoms might have appeared, one may suppose that they were considered at that time as passing incidents and of no importance. It is difficult to portray her physically or mentally at the time of her marriage. There is a portrait of her made a few years later when cares had already begun to mark her face.
It is a picture in the somewhat stiff style of the first Flemish school. The features are fairly regular, a forehead high and a little prominent, long eyes with no brilliancy, nose and mouth without character. There are no striking defects, nor is there beauty of line or of colour. A sad physiognomy, the eyes reveal only a kind of intellectual lassitude, a vague and dolorous obstinacy. Force and vitality seem to have been pressed inward and the soul appears drowned in a morbid dream; the whole face, half archaic, remains a puzzle. The features are without doubt those of Juana, but immobile and cold. The portrait shows only a melancholy woman, without charm, sickly, and lacking in thought.[y]
Isabella and Ferdinand wanted their son-in-law, Philip, to become acquainted with the country over which he would some time rule. But the measure of family misfortune which balanced the weighty political success of the Catholic kings was not yet full. The first months of the stay of Juana and Philip in Spain brought indeed only rejoicing and splendour. In Toledo the Castilian cortes proclaimed allegiance, in Barcelona the Aragonese. But the archduke Philip soon tired of Spanish life, he longed to get back to Flanders. Juana could not follow him on account of the state of her health. In vain she pleaded, in vain her parents urged the flighty gentleman not to leave her so pitilessly.
[1503-1506 A.D.]
Juana had already shown the beginnings of melancholia, accompanied by outbreaks of jealousy over her inconstant husband to whom she offered few attractions. What would happen if he separated himself from her might have been foreseen; but nothing could keep him. Then a deep melancholy settled upon the poor soul. “She does not raise her eyes from the ground,” writes Peter Martyr[l] in the first days of 1503. “Wealth, power, dominion, even her parents are of no account to her. With clouded brow she thinks only of her husband, he only is her care and passion.”
In the spring of 1504 it became necessary to let her have her way and go to the Netherlands. Here Philip’s heartlessness deepened the cloud of darkness which obscured the brain of the poor unfortunate, which had never been very strong. This sad news gave the last blow to Queen Isabella, who had long been failing; on November 26th, 1504, this woman who had created Spanish power died.
Juana was now queen of Castile. The cortes took the oath of allegiance to her and her husband, but at the same time in accordance with Isabella’s will, since Juana was not able to govern, recognised her father Ferdinand as regent. Juana declared herself perfectly willing to have her father govern for her. But Philip was deeply offended, placed his poor wife under strict surveillance, and made up his mind to get the rule over Castile into his own hands, pretending that he, as Juana’s husband, had better right to it than her father. In April, 1506, he appeared with her in Spain. But on September 25th, 1506, the last hour sounded for the young king, and his widow sank into the depth of insanity.[aa]
Had Juana’s insanity been accidental it would not have affected her descendants. Heredity here is incontestable. Most of the symptoms we have seen in the queen appeared in different degrees and in different forms in her posterity. Was it not she, was it not her shade which lived again in the old Charles V, who was tormented with peculiar attacks during his reign, and then condemned himself to a cloister out of a morose caprice, disgusted with everything, not from philosophy but from the continuity of his lugubrious dreams?
Do we not find her again in the fierce Philip II, like her seeking solitude and darkness in the depths of the Escurial where he combined his sinister policy with a sickly obstinacy? Is it not again Juana’s diseased mind which comes to life in the young Don Carlos, like her a prey to a derangement sometimes furious, sometimes melancholy? He also was confined and kept from sight; but was more fortunate than his grandmother, having been more promptly delivered by death. Consider also the cerebral anæmia which manifested itself in Philip III and Philip IV, both of them weak physically and mentally, in fever and melancholy; and in the pale spectre of Charles II, in the exhaustion of his vitality and intermittent hallucinations. These are not coincidences, they are the results of the transmission, historically attested, of an organic vice, which is reproduced from generation to generation by analogous phenomena.