It was the awful fate of Juana, endowed at her birth with all the gifts of fortune, to endure for fifty years the most lugubrious and degraded fate imaginable. Other persons may have had more dramatic reverses, but they at least moved in the current of events of their age; they lived and acted in the human mêlée. The daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella passed long years of suffering and neglect in ignorance of contemporary events, sufficiently intelligent to comprehend her mental feebleness but powerless to act against it; buried alive, so to speak, at once feverish and inert, condemned by her own weakness, and bowed down by the weight of fatality, struggling in vain against the clouds of her intellect and the torments of her life.
But we, while recognising that these events had a fateful effect on the brain of the princess, cannot accept this explanation in full. We must not forget that her grandmother on her mother’s side had been confined on account of insanity at the castle of Arevalos; also before marriage she caused disquietude to her family, which was kept secret. Ferdinand and Isabella had certainly noticed strange predispositions in her mind; they did not emphasise them, hoping that time, marriage, and distraction might attenuate them, but it is an incontestable fact that they never showed any surprise when their agents informed them of later events—they spoke of them as natural results of a diseased state they had long suspected.[y]
FERDINAND’S SECOND REGENCY (1507-1516 A.D.)
[1507-1512 A.D.]
Ferdinand’s second administration was signalised by the same splendid effects as the first. In 1509, at the suggestion of Cardinal Ximenes, he proposed an expedition against Oran on the African coast. The cardinal not only defrayed the expenses, but accompanied it. It was completely successful: Oran was stormed, and forced to receive a Christian garrison. The following year, Bugia, a city on the same coast, was reduced; Algiers, Tunis, Tremecen, and other places, consented that their native governors should be the vassals of Ferdinand. Another expedition reduced Tripoli.
In 1511, he himself was preparing to embark with a formidable armament, to pursue his conquests in that country,—conquests, however, which his own experience proved to be fleeting,—when he was pressed by Pope Julius to aid the church against the schismatics under the protection of the king of France and the emperor. As he was even more proud of his title of Catholic king than desirous of glory, he despatched an armed force to aid the chief of the church. Into the interminable affairs of Italy, however,—the critical wars which Ferdinand carried on in that country in defence of his Sicilian and Neapolitan possessions,—we cannot enter in this place; they will be found in the Italian volume. It is sufficient here to observe that the war was for some time in favour of the French (the emperor had withdrawn from them), and that the papal allies were defeated.
But this war led to one memorable result, and one not very glorious to Ferdinand. Wishing to carry hostilities into France, he demanded from Jean d’Albret, king of Navarre, permission to march his troops through that country. The Navarrese refused, but at the same time professed his determination in no way to aid the French monarch, and to remain perfectly neutral. Scarcely, however, had he given this answer, than he entered into an alliance, offensive and defensive, with the French king. Resolving to attain his end by force and to punish the duplicity of the Navarrese, Ferdinand assembled his forces at Vittoria, invaded Navarre, and in a short time obtained possession of the whole kingdom, the royal family taking refuge in France. This new conquest he annexed to his kingdom of Aragon, and successfully defended it against the invasion of the French. From the blood-stained house of Foix the sceptre had forever departed; nor could all the armies of France, during the reigns of the emperor Charles and his son Philip, restore it to the descendants of Jean.
The conquest of Navarre, however necessary to the tranquillity of Spain, can be characterised in no other terms than as an act of unblushing rapacity; yet attempts have been made to justify it, and by writers who would not willingly be considered the advocates of a criminal abuse of power. According to Peter Martyr,[l] the king of Navarre had been excommunicated by the pope as a schismatic,—as one of the league formed by the emperor and France against the papal pretentions to the duchy of Ferrara,—and bulls, absolving the Navarrese from their oath of allegiance, deposing Jean, and conferring the kingdom on the first that took possession of it, were sent to Ferdinand; in other words, the enterprise was sanctioned by the head of the church in gratitude for the aid which, in conjunction with the Venetians, he afforded the successor of St. Peter. As such a title, however, will not be admitted at this day even beyond the Pyrenees, the conquest must be designated as one of the most flagitious transactions of a lawless age.
[1512-1516 A.D.]
Towards the close of his life, Ferdinand still indulged the hope of seeing an heir who should inherit Aragon, Navarre, Naples, and Sicily. This wish arose both from his dislike to the emperor, the grandfather of the archduke Charles, and the whole house of Austria, and from the aversion shown by his hereditary subjects to a union of the crowns. In 1509 his young queen had been delivered of a son, who died in a few days. In 1513 he took a potion which he was persuaded would restore his masculine vigour, but which destroyed his constitution, and produced a lingering illness, that ended in death. In his last will he declared his daughter Juana heiress to all his dominions in Spain and Italy, and after her his grandson Charles. The regency of Castile, until his grandson should arrive in Spain, he confided to Cardinal Ximenes; and that of Aragon, with the states dependent on it, to his natural son, the archbishop of Saragossa.[d]