Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  In the meantime, Palencia himself was chosen to travel to Aragon to collect the pearl and ruby necklace that had been pledged to her as an advance on the wedding dowry payment. Ferdinand travelled south to Valencia in person to recover the bulky necklace in mid-July and hand it to Palencia. He also made a chivalrous offer that must have warmed Isabella’s heart and which certainly fitted her idea of proper knightly behaviour. ‘He called me to see him on his own,’ said Palencia, ‘and asked whether I thought he should head as soon as possible for Madrigal, taking two companions and myself as a guide, in order to console the anxious lady with his presence, and to run the same risks that she was running.’ The chronicler must have been conscious of the necklace’s weight, both physical and emblematic, as he rode back into Castile. The thick knot of gold strings weighed more than three marcos (twenty-five ounces) and was hung with seven fat rubies and eight oval-shaped, greyish pearls. An enormous ruby dangled from its centre, decorated with a beautiful pear-shaped pearl.19 The jewels were proof, if she needed it, of Ferdinand’s commitment.

  Isabella must have lived in a state of acute anxiety. Her husband-to-be was more than 300 miles away in his father’s kingdoms. If they were to marry, he would somehow have to infiltrate himself into a Castile that was mostly hostile. She was also in personal danger, asking her handful of Grandee allies to send troops to Madrigal, and the atmosphere in her small court began to sour. Not everyone wanted to join her rebellion and some of her damas, or ladies-in-waiting, fearing the worst, slipped away. They included some of her most intimate friends. ‘They knew how you had already ordered that I be captured and deprived of my freedom, as was also clear in certain letters that came into my hands, including one to the town council of Madrigal ordering that they arrest me,’ Isabella wrote to Enrique later. Eventually she decided it was safer to leave the town, setting off on a journey that would see her settle in Valladolid.20 She wanted a safe place where Ferdinand could reach her.

  7

  Marrying Ferdinand

  Zaragoza, 5 October 1469

  The dark-haired, full-lipped young man who finally set out from Zaragoza dressed as a lowly groom was a convincing actor. Riding with five others, Ferdinand stayed in role for two days and two nights, serving meals and looking after the horses. The seventeen-year-old prince had waited impatiently for a sign from Isabella that he should set out. This had finally arrived in the form of Palencia and Gutierre de Cárdenas, who had ridden via back routes and through the dark of the night so as to avoid Enrique’s spies. Along the way they had realised that the first sixty-five miles of Ferdinand’s journey into Castile would be through extremely hostile territory. Once in Zaragoza, Isabella’s envoys acted as if they had no business with Ferdinand, with Cárdenas hiding in their lodgings while Palencia set out for a secret meeting with the young prince in a monk’s cell at the magnificent San Francisco monastery, whose chapel boasted a 245-foot nave. Ferdinand, they decided, should loudly proclaim that he was setting out to see his father in Catalonia and then, disguised as a servant, would join a supposed Aragonese embassy heading into Castile. Palencia and Cárdenas, meanwhile, left Zaragoza in a pretend huff, loudly complaining that Ferdinand had told them he had urgent business in Catalonia.1

  After two days the riders made it to Burgo de Osma, where the Duke of Treviño – now married to Enrique’s former mistress doña Guiomar – awaited them with an escort of lancers. Ferdinand insisted they push straight on, setting out again at 3 a.m. By 9 October 1469 the energetic young prince was at Dueñas where, among others, his aunt Teresa Enríquez greeted him. It was a reminder that Ferdinand was, via his mother, half-Castilian. Cárdenas and Palencia pressed on to Valladolid, just eighteen miles away, knowing that Isabella would be anxiously awaiting news. They seem to have bickered along the way, about which of them deserved the glory for their successful mission.2

  Ferdinand and his seventy-one-year-old father, still battling rebellions in the north of Catalonia, were now taking risks far bigger than those taken by Isabella. ‘The king [Juan] has no other son or support in his old age in this world other than the king of Sicily [Ferdinand] and on him hangs the health, wellbeing and succession of all these kingdoms,’ Juan’s secretary Felip Climent wrote.3 ‘The mere fact that the king says with his own mouth that he [his son] should risk travelling with just three or four men to Valladolid, especially considering the vague promises of safety that he has … should make the king of Sicily [Ferdinand] believe that his toughness and strength defy description.’

  Enrique had no reason to be surprised by Ferdinand’s arrival. A month earlier, on 8 September 1469, Isabella had written to him from Valladolid announcing that she was set to marry. She now claimed that she, Enrique and the nobles had agreed to study four potential candidates for husband to determine which would be best for the kingdom. Isabella named the four, in order, as Ferdinand, Afonso V of Portugal, the French Duke of Berry and the future Richard III of England. She chided her half-brother for trying to bully her into a Portuguese marriage, claiming that an agreement had been negotiated behind her back. Isabella blamed ‘certain people’, meaning Pacheco, for duping King Afonso into thinking that she was willing to marry him and claimed that the will of other nobles and procuradores had been ignored, while others had been cowed into approval of the match by threats. Her right to decide on her own future, with ‘just and due freedom’, agreed at Guisando, had also been ignored.4

  She, meanwhile, claimed to have conducted her own consultations with the nobles. ‘They praised and approved of a marriage with the Prince of Aragon, King of Sicily, giving very obvious reasons as to why,’ she told Enrique. Ferdinand’s obvious virtues, including his age and Trastámara blood, were being deliberately besmirched by those with ‘sinister intent’ who surrounded the king. Even more shocking had been the attempt to foist the French Duke of Berry on her. The French, she said, would treat Castile like a mere province and use it in its wars with Aragon.5

  Isabella’s defiant anger shines through her letter to Enrique. She is, nevertheless, acutely aware of the trouble she is about to cause and of the dangers to herself and the young man who was coming into a foreign land to marry her against the monarch’s wishes. Ferdinand, she said, would come in peace and as a faithful servant to Enrique. She reminded him that they all shared great-grandparents and that their own grandfather, Castile’s King Enrique III, had expressly asked in his will that the Castilian and Aragonese lines should intermarry to keep the family close. Those who claimed that Ferdinand would cause trouble were misleading him. ‘You can be sure that, from now on, I will comply with my promises,’ she added. ‘And you can be secure in the obedience that the said prince of Aragon should owe, and understands that he owes, to your highness, if you are prepared to receive him as an obedient son.’6 She wanted, in other words, both to rebel and to be forgiven. Pacheco and Enrique may not have planned to stick to the Guisando agreement, but they had not blatantly torn it up like this.

  Isabella wrote to Enrique again on 12 October, telling him that Ferdinand was already in Castile and assuring him that her husband-to-be came in peace. This time she pleaded for his blessing. ‘I beg that you may approve of his coming and approve of the [good] intentions underpinning my plans,’ she said. Enrique did not bother to reply. It was, in any case, too late for him to object. Two days later Isabella met her future husband for the first time. The only image she had ever seen of Ferdinand was a roughly engraved medallion showing a young, bearded face and little more. Gutierre de Cárdenas had to point out which of the group of riders that entered Valladolid was Isabella’s future husband. An apocryphal story has Isabella excitedly shouting, ‘That is he! That is he!’,7 and she must have been overjoyed that Ferdinand had made it to her successfully, especially as he had been ready to run such risks to get to her. The only surviving portrait from around this time, or copied from an original, shows him sporting a wispy, young man’s beard of fine dark hairs that only sparsely cover his chin and cheeks, while thick b
lack straight hair hangs lankly over his ears – as it does in other portraits – and down to the base of his neck. Brown eyes below a straight fringe of black hair add to the overall swarthiness.

  The tension provoked by the appearance of a son of the infamous infantes of Aragon was immediately patent, even among Isabella’s followers. Some of the Castilian nobles insisted that Ferdinand kiss his wife’s hand to prove his obeisance and show that, in this match, he was the lucky one. Isabella herself was inclined to agree, but the archbishop of Toledo was scandalised. Ferdinand already held the title of king (of Sicily) and so would elevate her to the rank of queen. More importantly, he was a man. ‘He put a stop to this shameful and insulting adulation by pointing out the insolence that some people were trying to instil in the wife, who had to obey her husband and hand over to the male the symbols of power,’ wrote Palencia, who agreed with his friend the archbishop on this. But the extraordinary agreement signed at Cervera was read out, leaving little doubt about Ferdinand’s subordinate role. Palencia claimed that the young couple, aged eighteen and seventeen, were so smitten with each other that only the presence of the archbishop during their two-hour meeting prevented them from misbehaving. More importantly, they also signed a joint document with the archbishop, recognising their dependence on his support by stating that he was now their chief counsellor. ‘Without you, archbishop, we will not do or order anything, but instead will govern and do things by mutual agreement between the three of us as if we were one body and soul,’ they said.8 The archbishop took them literally. He was, at least in his own mind, their privado – the true power behind the throne.

  The religious part of the wedding was celebrated three days later in the presence of the archbishop of Toledo, who somehow managed to represent the interests of God, Castile, Aragon and himself all at the same time. It was a modest affair, made more so by the urgency with which it was conducted. The Cervera agreement was read out once more, hammering home the superior status of Isabella, and of Castile, in the marriage. The bride and bridegroom were second cousins. As such, they needed a papal dispensation to marry. But Pope Paul II was on Enrique’s side. Only four months earlier he had provided written permission for Isabella to marry another distant cousin, Afonso V of Portugal. The problem was solved with the public reading of an entirely false dispensation, allegedly given by an earlier pope, Pius II. The papal nuncio Venier let it all happen, his pockets weighed down with Aragonese gold and his mouth firmly shut. He was the only man with the authority to override Toledo – or to expose the enormous lie that had just been uttered. Perhaps he, like Juan the Great, believed that the pope would come up with a dispensation once the marriage had already been celebrated. More likely, however, he was thinking of the 1,000 ounces of gold he was to receive yearly from Ferdinand’s kingdom of Sicily and the additional promise of an even richer bishopric than his current one in León.9

  Isabella was complicit in the cheating. ‘As for what you say in your letter about me marrying without a dispensation, there is no need for a long reply as you are not the judge in this matter,’ she wrote in a circular letter addressed to Enrique eighteen months later. ‘My conscience is fully clean, as can be shown by the authentic bulls and documents, whenever and wherever necessary.’10 She was bluffing. She had never seen any ‘authentic’ documents. They did not exist. Her later reputation for both piety and scrupulous legality, busily promoted by her propagandists, does not hold up at this stage of her life. Neither does that of Ferdinand. Politics and power clearly came first. In that, she was displaying considerable prowess.

  8

  Rebel Princess

  Juan de Vivero’s Palace, Valladolid, 19 October 1469

  The sheets from the wedding bed were displayed, in all their bloodied glory, to the crowd waiting outside Isabella’s bedroom in Juan de Vivero’s palace near the gate of San Pedro in Valladolid. The stained bedlinen had been handed to the select group of officials who had inspected the chamber before the couple went in and then stood at its door. ‘Trumpets, drums and minstrels played as they showed them [the sheets] to all those people who were waiting in the [adjoining] room, which was packed full,’ reported the royal chronicler Diego de Valera. Isabella was determined not to repeat the errors of Enrique, who had changed Castilian royal tradition by banning people from his wedding-night chamber. She wanted people to know both that the marriage had been consummated and that she had come to it as a virgin. The blood on the sheets proved both. There was evident satisfaction that the tradition had been reinstated. ‘Evidence of her virginity and nobility was properly presented before the judges, city councillors and gentlemen as is apt for monarchs,’ Dr Toledo, their physician, noted in his diary. Isabella’s husband was equally keen to let it be known that the marriage would not suffer from the kind of bedroom problems that had blighted Enrique’s reign and reputation. ‘Last night, in the service of God, we consummated the marriage,’ he wrote to the city council of Valencia the following day. When Enrique later spread false rumours claiming that consummation had never happened, Isabella held her head high. ‘This subject is embarrassing and hateful to noble women,’ she sniffed.1 ‘All I can say is that our actions are the evidence that we must present to both God and the world.’

  The marriage celebrations lasted for seven days, with dances, fires and merrymaking in the streets of Valladolid as Enrique’s spies watched closely. There were street processions and public fiestas across Aragon and even in far-off Sicily. In the rest of Castile, however, the celebrations were either muted or non-existent.2 A country that had lived through three years of civil war found itself, after a single year of peace, back on the precipice. One person was ultimately responsible for that. It was the eighteen-year-old heiress to the crown, Isabella, who had torn up the peace agreement. That may have been a wise pre-emptive move, from her point of view, but it left the rest of her country in a state of nervous, fearful expectation.

  Awaking in Juan de Vivero’s palace on 20 October 1469, the morning after consummating her marriage, Isabella may have reflected with satisfaction on just how completely she had imposed her will. The rebel princess was not generally given to regret over her actions. She and no one else had chosen her husband. An agreement had been broken, but men like the archbishop of Toledo were telling her this did not matter. The king had broken it first, she said to herself, by trying to marry her off to princes she did not like and who were bad for the future of Castile. That was stretching the truth to breaking point, but it was the story she would now promote.

  She must also, however, have been aware of some major weaknesses in their position. Cities, with their thick stone walls, fortresses, towers and taxes were crucial for anyone wanting to exercise control over Castile and its countryside. She and her husband had the support of just a handful of significant cities, and holding on to them would be difficult. Valladolid, where they had married, was already subject to an increasingly tense, and potentially violent, confrontation between the local nobles who wanted to control it – with the well-connected Vivero just one of those tussling for power. Important towns like Tordesillas and Olmedo remained in their orbit, but they were under pressure to switch allegiance, and the lands Isabella and her husband controlled directly covered only a small piece of Castile.3 The other sources of power were the nobles and the church, but support from those quarters was sparse. Isabella’s real might came from the archbishop’s vast lands, income and private army and from those of Ferdinand’s Castilian grandfather, the admiral of Castile, Fadrique Enríquez. The dormant power of Aragon, with its long frontier, was available to her in case of emergency, but only if the often overstretched Juan the Great had the resources and the will to do so. The young couple were, in other words, completely dependent on other people.

  Three old men looked on with satisfaction. Juan the Great, Fadrique Enríquez and the archbishop of Toledo were men of weight, experience and tradition. Their unusual longevity was matched by equally remarkable vigour. The archbishop was about t
o turn sixty. The others were a decade or more older. They had been born at the end of the previous century, before Isabella’s father had come to the throne. They were also wealthy and could raise their own armies. In that sense they were classic medieval magnates, entirely comfortable with and confident of their power. The contrast between them and the young princes when it came to experience, power and military might was blatantly in their favour. Without them, the marriage simply would not have happened. As if to drive the point home, Ferdinand wrote to his father explaining that they were worried King Enrique would attack. Archbishop Carrillo had advised them to gather a cavalry force of 1,000 men as protection, but they had no money and needed 40,000 florins urgently. ‘They asked the king for this money … because his son had gone to Castile with no money and the princess also had none,’ reported the great Aragonese historian and chronicler Jerónimo Zurita. ‘But they needed to maintain their court and so needed the 100,000 florins that had been promised.’4