Isabella of Castile
Page 49
More importantly, Castile’s Cortes then swore allegiance to Juana as princess of Asturias (and heiress) and to Philip only as consort. Tension began to rise. An offended Philip expelled some of his most pro-Spanish followers and, when a gang of Castilians attacked three of his men, Isabella chose to pardon them. Illness, as ever, plagued both hosts and visitors. Philip and Juana abandoned Toledo in the middle of the night after Isabella, many in her court and some visitors fell ill. Two of their senior servants stayed and died.14 Then Philip’s pro-French chief adviser, the archbishop of Besançon, also died amid rumours that he had been poisoned.
As the Burgundian party moved on to Aragon, some of their pages celebrated St Luke’s Day by ransacking a local mosque. Isabella travelled as far as Madrid before she was struck down by tertiary fevers. There were rumours that she was faking her illness in an attempt to force Philip and a now heavily pregnant Juana to stay in Spain. In fact she was increasingly ill and unable, for example, to receive an envoy from her other son-in-law, the Portuguese king Manuel. She would stay in Madrid, or in nearby Alcalá de Henares, for almost a year. Philip then huffed angrily in Madrid, itching to leave. ‘The queen wanted to avoid him leaving, arguing that the princess’s pregnancy was very advanced, and that she would not make it to his country before the birth,’ reported Lalaing. ‘The archduke said he had important affairs to attend to … as far as the princess’s pregnancy was concerned, he was happy to go, and would willingly leave her with her [mother].’ Isabella thought, mistakenly, that her daughter might be able to stop him leaving. ‘Strengthen her so that she very vigorously impedes his departure,’ she and Ferdinand ordered Villena, Juana’s host in Toledo.15
Isabella tried to reason with Philip. Not only was he now planning to travel back through France, seen as enemy territory, but the journey would endanger his wife and the child she was carrying. ‘The queen insists that he forget it … adding that Juana, his wife, who is close to giving birth would miscarry from sadness or even die – given her ardent love for her husband – if he abandoned her,’ reported Anghiera. Isabella was increasingly desperate. She wanted Philip on their side and was either unaware, or refused to see, that Juana’s marriage was not like her own. Philip had made it clear from the very start that this was no match of equals. Not only was he a man, but he was the ruler of lands with different interests and priorities to those of Spain. Above all he had a powerful and threatening neighbour in France. If he feared that Isabella meant to use her daughter to turn Flanders and his other lands into a weapon against France then he was right. As Philip rode off from Madrid on 19 December, poor Juana found herself squeezed in the middle, unable to satisfy either a demanding mother or an uncaring husband. The archduke left strict instructions about access to Juana’s household in order to prevent Isabella taking control of it. Anghiera claimed that Philip was his wife’s ‘only preoccupation, delight, and devotion’. Juana obviously planned to give birth and, as soon as she could, follow her husband. But Isabella had other plans for her twenty-three-year-old heiress.16
With Philip gone, Isabella spent lavishly on members of Juana’s household – including 1.7 million maravedís in cloth and silk gifts in a single day. She was, essentially, trying to buy the support of people who worked for, and owed their allegiance to, Juana’s husband. She also began to enlarge and fill her daughter’s household with her own appointees, thereby entering into direct competition with Philip. Isabella then did all she could to prevent, or stall, Juana’s return to her husband in Flanders,17 hoping that this might temper his tendency to support France. A new grandson, Fernando, was born in the bishop’s palace at Alcalá de Henares in March 1503, but Isabella still refused to bow to the calls from both Philip and Juana for her daughter to leave Spain.
Isabella had long shown herself to have a powerful, intense and sometimes unbending personality. Her daughters each inherited much of that. Juana was increasingly powerless, both in her Flanders home and in Castile, but she could also be tough and rebellious. A bitter battle now raged between mother and daughter, as their obstinate natures clashed. Love, anger and illness became the prime ingredients of an explosive confrontation.
‘The disposition of the lady princess is such that it should greatly pain not only those so affected and who love her so, but even strangers, because she sleeps poorly, eats little, and sometimes nothing. She is very sad and quite thin,’ Isabella’s doctors reported, after tending to Juana on 20 June 1503. ‘Her sickness advances substantially. The cure is usually undertaken by love and entreaty or by fear. Yet she does not accept pleas or persuasion or anything else, and feels such anger and at times such sorrow from any slight force applied, that to attempt it is a great pity, and no one wants or dares to.’18 The doctors warned that the battles with Juana were also taking a toll on Isabella’s own health. ‘The weight of all this often falls on the Queen,’ the three doctors, called Soto, Julián and de la Reyna, wrote to Ferdinand in Barcelona. ‘The life that the Queen is living with the princess is putting her health in great danger, as every day there is some incident.’ The three doctors also asked Ferdinand to burn the letter, perhaps fearing that Juana would take revenge on them if she found it after inheriting the throne.
The two women travelled together towards Segovia in the summer of 1503 on what was presumed to be the beginning of Juana’s journey home after eight months without her husband. Isabella had been wary of Philip’s attempt to negotiate on the Spanish monarchs’ behalf a peace treaty with France in Italy, even though she and Ferdinand had given him powers to do so. Via a cyphered letter to her ambassador in London, she now warned Henry VII not to trust Philip. ‘Tell him [Henry VII] on our behalf that if he is called on to do anything concerning any deal that the archduke [Philip] may have struck on our behalf with the king of France, he ignore it unless it is accompanied by our signature,’ she wrote. Philip fell ill in France (which can only have increased Juana’s anxiety), then returned home to Flanders. ‘The princess begged the queen her mother to give her permission to return to her husband,’ reported the chronicler Padilla, but the sickly Isabella continued to stall her. Her daughter then pushed on alone to Medina del Campo, taking up residence in the city’s La Mota fortress and sending secret instructions to a ship’s captain to await her in Bilbao. Her plan was stymied when Isabella ordered that the mules carrying her goods be detained and gave the bishop of Córdoba, Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, who was with Juana, orders to stop her.19
Isabella herself narrates the unseemly events that followed in a letter to Fuensalida. ‘I ordered the bishop of Córdoba, who was with her, that if that [leaving] was what she wanted to do, he should under no circumstances allow it to happen and, in my name, should prevent her from doing something that everybody would view as bad and that would be so shameful for her and disobedient towards us,’ she wrote. ‘The said bishop ordered, on my behalf, that her pack animals were not led off. And when the Princess found out, she wanted to leave the fortress and go alone on foot through the mud to where the pack animals were. Then the bishop, to prevent her doing something so damaging to her authority and reputation in such a public place and within sight of the many locals and foreigners who were attending the fair, ordered that the fortress gates be closed.’ Fonseca was confronted by a furious Juana at the outer gates. ‘However hard he begged and pleaded, he could not get the princess to turn back,’ reported Padilla. With further progress blocked, Juana remained obstinately in the open on the fortress’s ramparts, between the inner and outer gates (Isabella and Ferdinand had built an outer wall to help protect it from cannonfire). She sent Fonseca off with her words still ringing in his ears and continued to rail against those blocking her way. She stayed on the outer rampart on one of the coldest nights of that winter, demanding all afternoon and until two o’clock the following morning that the gate be opened. A hatless Juana refused to return to her quarters. ‘Instead, after everyone there had pleaded with her, she went into some kitchens that are beside the outer rampart and
was there for four or five days.’20
Isabella tried to reason with her from a distance as messengers braved the icy weather, galloping backwards and forwards along the exposed sixty-mile route separating Segovia from Medina del Campo. ‘Despite the letters I sent her, this did not change. Because of this I came here as fast as I could manage, doing longer stages than were good for my health,’ Isabella wrote after being carried on a litter through the rain and cold to her rebellious daughter. It must have been a difficult, uncomfortable journey, however warmly wrapped she was in blankets and furs, with the litter jolting up and down as the mules or horses plodded along wet, wind-blown tracks. The royal party had to rest overnight twice along the way, as Isabella could move no faster than twenty-five miles in a day. When Isabella finally crossed the broad moat that surrounded the imposing La Mota fortress, Juana was still camped out in the rough outer kitchens. She doggedly refused to return to the warm, comfortable brick and stone palace that lay just a few yards away behind thick walls. ‘She spoke to me with such awful words of disobedience, and so beyond what a daughter should say to a mother, that if I had not seen the state she was in I would not have put up with it for a moment,’ said Isabella.21
Juana had convinced herself that her parents were trying to provoke a permanent break-up with her husband, and Isabella sought to reassure her, asking her ‘very lovingly to return to her quarters and promising that once her father the king of Aragon came back, she would send her to her husband’. Mother and daughter then spent an awkward four months together, as Juana waited impatiently for an opportunity to leave, apparently consumed by the belief that all were plotting against her, while Isabella sought both to calm her and to cope with her own declining health.
Ferdinand had been in Roussillon, lifting a siege at Salses-le-Château near Perpignan that had followed a French invasion in September 1503 and strengthening his borders. To Isabella’s relief, the French had left without presenting battle – she had begged Ferdinand to avoid spilling Christian blood, fasting and praying on the day when she had expected the battle to take place. By now Spain also had the upper hand in the kingdom of Naples, which effectively become the seventh kingdom in the power of the Aragonese monarchy in addition to Aragon, Valencia, Mallorca, Sicily, Sardinia and the principality of Catalonia. As the French counterattacked through Italy, two of the Borgias – the pope and Cesare – fell foul of the malaria that was sweeping through Rome. Cesare survived. His father, who had just appointed six more cardinals from his home region of Valencia, did not. Borgia’s already sickly successor, Pius III, lasted just 26 days. Further Spanish victories and the new pope Julius II’s desire to rid his states of foreign armies helped push all sides towards peace, with Naples now firmly in Spanish hands. It was further confirmation that the balance of power in Europe was tilting towards Spain. The puritanical nature of Isabella and Ferdinand’s regime was felt in Naples immediately. Instructions were issued to track down conversos who had fled the Inquisition, to pursue homosexuals and to make sure Jews were expelled.22
With Ferdinand back and France on its heels, Juana was finally given permission to leave. She travelled to Laredo in March 1504 and was forced to wait another month for the weather to change. She bickered with the Spaniards on her staff, but her choice of the potentially dangerous sea route rather than a land trip through France suggests that, in this at least, she wished to please her mother.
Isabella was, by now, thinking about the future of Castile after her own death. The crown would have to pass into Juana’s hands, though it seemed clear that this meant that Philip would be the effective ruler. But Isabella was still determined to influence events after her death if, as she now began to suspect, this was not far off. She and Ferdinand now proposed that Juana’s eldest son Charles be sent to Spain to be brought up and made king of Naples. The bait for his father Philip was simple. Charles would stay in Spain, being educated to govern the vast kingdoms owned by the crowns of both Castile and Aragon (and, unlike his father, learning to speak Spanish). Philip, meanwhile, could govern the kingdom of Naples in his son’s name and his counsellors would be given valuable estates there.23
Philip’s love for his in-laws, and for Spain, seemed about as great as his feelings for Juana – which were now mutating from disregard to dislike. ‘Neither her highness writes to the prince, nor the prince writes to her,’ the Spanish ambassadors reported. For Isabella, whose relationship to Ferdinand was the bedrock of what she always viewed as a shared success, the news reaching her was heartbreaking. ‘What you have told us about the discontent and lack of love between the prince and the princess weighs heavily on us … try as best as you can to make sure that there is love and reconciliation between them,’ she and Ferdinand wrote to Fuensalida. Their envoys could do little. Juana’s mistrust had extended to all those around her, barring her slaves. Philip now acted against them. ‘Given that the princess wanted no other company apart from her slaves, who were already exhausted by the work they had and also because of the continual bathing and hairwashing which, according to the physicians, were doing her so much harm, the prince decided to take the slaves away,’ the Spanish ambassadors at the court in Brussels reported.24
Over the next few days their argument turned louder and nastier, while all around – including Isabella and Ferdinand’s ambassadors – looked on with shock at the meltdown of the marriage. Philip refused to visit her again until the slaves had been exchanged for some trusty elderly retainers, while Juana apparently threatened to execute the messenger who brought her his letter. After several days of arguments via unhappy messengers, Philip confronted her personally. ‘I am not happy that you are accompanied by these slaves. Expel them, because I will not sleep in your chamber while they are still here,’ he told her. Juana at first pretended to have got rid of them, then brought them back, and an enraged Philip ordered that all entrances to her rooms be barred except one. Juana then refused to eat, and when her husband came back from hunting and went to his own rooms, which were below hers, to sleep, she banged on the floor with a stick and harangued him. ‘Talk to me, I want to know if you are there!’ she shouted. A furious, sleep-deprived Philip went to confront her the following morning, finding his wife similarly exhausted and angry. Juana now threatened to starve herself to death unless her children and staff were returned. Philip said he could do that, but demanded to know why she refused to obey his instructions. ‘If you don’t do what I say, then I will leave you and you won’t see me again until you do,’ he threatened. ‘I will let myself die rather than do any of the things that you demand,’ she replied. ‘Then do whatever you want,’ he said before storming off. One report suggested that the argument had ended with Juana ‘like a wild lioness’ and Philip hitting her.25
Isabella’s ambassadors in Brussels saw it as a disaster. ‘The prince has gone to Flanders with the intention of never seeing the princess again unless she does what he asked her to do, which are things that her royal highness ought to do,’ they reported.26 By Isabella’s own standards, her daughter and heiress was failing her. For more than two decades she had imposed royal will on Castile, slowly disciplining and purifying it while turning it into a respected and feared European power. She was now worried about how much of that would survive after her death.
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The Final Judgement
Medina del Campo, July–November 1504
Isabella was no longer able to travel any great distance. In 1504 she and Ferdinand spent Easter and June in the convent a few hours away at Mejorada de Olmedo, but the rest of the time she stayed in Medina del Campo – first at the La Mota fortress and then in a simpler palace with three interior patios beside the large Plaza de San Antolín. Medina had long been one of her favourite places. She once reportedly proclaimed that, were she to have three sons, the first and second would be king and archbishop of Toledo while the third would be an escribano, notarising the deals struck during the international trading fairs that kept the town busy for a hundred days eac
h year. The mouse-infested palace had not been used much since her father was raised there. But even large fortresses could rarely cope with extended occupation by the court before the filth became unbearable and it may have been more hygienic to move from La Mota after spending several months there with both her own people and Juana’s. The smaller palace by the town square was undergoing extensive repairs, but Isabella now passed much of her day in bed and needed very little space of her own. A carpenter was called in to make windows so that fresh air could blow in off the vegetable plots and the small orchard behind the palace, while a special passageway was built as a short cut between her rooms and the chapel.1 The carpenter also had to knock together traps to keep the palace mice away from the royal bed.
There was something safe and snug about these old Castilian towns, which had prospered so thoroughly through her reign. The past two or more decades of stability and steady population growth had finally allowed her kingdom’s economy to expand vigorously. Many towns, indeed, had spilt out beyond their medieval walls and were developing large ‘suburban’ neighbourhoods beyond them. The bustle of people, the thick defensive walls, the growing wealth of trade and even the presence of skilled artisans and learned men – dressed in the cloth of the clergy or the finery of escribanos and financiers – were all enriching and reassuring.