Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  Even discounting for the customary fawning by courtiers, Edward drew accolades that were seemingly genuine. “He was a goodly personage, and very princely to behold . . . of visage lovely, of body mighty, strong and clean made,” wrote Sir Thomas More. “Remarkable beyond all others,” said a German traveler, Gabriel Tetzel, in 1466. Even his critics acknowledged his physical beauty. “I don’t remember having seen a more handsome prince,” wrote the French courtier Philippe de Commynes.2

  Marriage to Edward would of course have been an intriguing, even dazzling, prospect for Isabella, who loved hunting and stories of courtly love. It would give her a splendid husband, make her the envy of other women, and install her as queen of a kingdom with which she had long ancestral links. Isabella believed that Spain and England had a natural dynastic affinity. Her great-grandmother was Catherine of Lancaster, the daughter of the famous English nobleman John of Gaunt, son of King Edward III, whose marriage to Constance of Castile had made him a contender for the throne of Castile. Edward IV was also descended from John of Gaunt, making him a distant cousin of Isabella’s. If the alliance proceeded, an old family tie would be reconnected.

  The marriage presented some strategic opportunities for England as well. Edward’s descent from King Pedro, through Pedro’s daughter, already made Edward a potential claimant to the Castilian throne, and this claim would be strengthened if he were to marry Isabella. English poets were already writing doggerel extolling Edward as not just king of England and deserving of France but also the future inheritor of Spain: “Re Angliae et Franciae, I say, It is thine own, why sayest thou nay? And so is Spain, that fair country.”3

  Once the match was proposed, Isabella waited at home for the decision. Given the difficulties in communication at the time, messages from one court to another sometimes took months because courtiers needed to physically travel from one place to another. Finally she somehow learned, to her great disappointment, that another woman had been selected, in a most unusual way.

  Unbeknown to the king’s councilors, who were negotiating Edward’s marriage prospects in both France and Spain, King Edward had already impulsively married a comely widow, Elizabeth Woodville. She was one of the few women who had successfully resisted his blandishments, and in a fever, he chose marriage to obtain lawfully what he could not obtain by courtship. They wed in a furtive ceremony on April 30, 1464, at the home of friends of her family, with only a handful of people in attendance.4 Edward must have regretted the elopement almost instantly because he sought to conceal the match for the next six months. Even his friends were not informed.

  The circumstances were even more awkward for his officials who were abroad discussing terms of potential marriages with foreign princesses. The French king, Louis XI, wasn’t officially informed of the secret marriage until October 10, 1464, after six months of deliberations and negotiations over a possible marriage of Edward to Louis’s sister-in-law Bona. The Earl of Warwick, an important ally of Edward working on his behalf in France, was humiliated and chagrined to realize he had been left uninformed while “pressing actively” for the French alliance.5 An English chronicler described his reaction: “And when the Erle of Warwyke come home and herde hereof, thenne was he gretely displesyd.”6

  The course of European history could have been shifted in many ways if Isabella had managed to marry, win over, and provide assistance in governing to the high-spirited but short-sighted and pleasure-loving king of England. Both countries might have evolved in better directions. Edward’s marriage turned out to be disastrously bad for him, as the woman he wed was “grasping and ambitious for her family’s interests, quick to take offense and reluctant to forgive.”7 She was also a member of the Lancaster clan, enemies to the Yorks, and to please his wife, Edward was forced to find posts at court for her two children from her first marriage, five brothers, and seven unmarried sisters. Like King Enrique, Edward ended up surrounding himself with people who did not have his best interests at heart. The king’s irritated emissary to France and former ally, the Earl of Warwick, turned against him. Edward’s dynastic aspirations collapsed even though he had ten children with Elizabeth, and after his death, his two oldest boys, aged ten and thirteen, were spirited away and rumored to have been killed in the Tower of London by persons unknown.

  In faraway Castile, Isabella, still a young teenager, brooded over her rejection, much later telling ambassadors that she had been passed over for a mere “widow of England,” making it clear she had harbored resentment at her rejection for the next twenty years. Like Elizabeth Woodville, she was not a woman to suffer a slight lightly or forgive easily.8 In addition to Isabella’s good qualities, a certain hardness of character was developing in her. It made her able to survive the difficulties of her childhood and adolescence, but it also made her rigid and unforgiving.

  While Enrique awaited word from England, at some point suspecting that the match with Edward would evaporate, he began to consider instead marrying Isabella to King Afonso V of Portugal, a war hero whose support would bolster Castile’s defenses. Such a match would be equally effective in getting Isabella out of the kingdom and out of the path of little Juana’s claims, and it would also improve relations with Portugal. And Portugal already had an heir apparent, Afonso’s son João. In this scenario, João’s children would rule Portugal; Juana’s children would rule Castile. Isabella’s children would be safely out of any line of succession.

  In April 1463 Enrique took Isabella, just turning thirteen, and Queen Juana to El Puente de Arzobispo, in central-western Castile, closer to the Portuguese border, to meet King Afonso. The thirty-one-year-old Portuguese king—paunchy, middle-aged, and pompous—was “much taken” with his young cousin. Isabella, for her part, under pressure from the queen and her own mother, who was Portuguese, and undoubtedly playing for time while she awaited word on the English alliance, tactfully or innocently led the Portuguese king to believe he was her choice as well.9 This was an error on her part.

  King Enrique’s popularity in Castile was plummeting, however, and the proposed Portuguese marriage was not well received. Two men in particular took it as an affront. Alfonso Carrillo, the rich and powerful archbishop of Toledo, had grown weary of Enrique’s vacillating leadership. He was also a partisan of the envious Aragonese cousins and had long hoped to steer public policy in Castile toward Aragon rather than toward Portugal. Juan Pacheco, meanwhile, was angry and out of sorts because he was being supplanted in the king’s affections by other men. Carrillo and Pacheco began to foment a rebellion against Enrique. As a first step, they wanted to get control of young Prince Alfonso and Princess Isabella and insisted they be given custody of the children, ostensibly to ensure their continued security. They warned that people of “damnable intent” had planned to kill Alfonso and marry off Isabella, to give “succession in these realms to [one] to whom by right it does not belong,” by which they meant the child Juana.10

  They announced their split from the king in an open letter to the kingdom that was widely circulated. The document, called the Representation of Burgos, oozed contempt and derision and made a series of demands. Enrique was ordered to get rid of his Moorish bodyguard, whom they accused of sexually assaulting both men and women; to discard his new favorite, Beltrán de la Cueva; and to drop the charade about Juana’s legitimacy. “It is quite manifest that she is not the daughter of your highness,” the statement read.11

  Enrique, always eager to mollify his critics, deferred to Pacheco and Carrillo and agreed to their demands, even to the extent of repudiating his daughter’s claim to the throne and giving it to his young half brother Alfonso: “Know ye, that to avoid any kind of scandal . . . I declare that the legitimate succession of this kingdom belongs to my brother the Infante don Alfonso and to no other person whatsoever.” Beltrán was sent away. At a ceremony in Cabezón, the nobility took oaths in support of Alfonso as the successor, and the mastership of Santiago was transferred to him. Young Alfonso was handed over to the custody of Ju
an Pacheco, the Marquess of Villena, who had played such a pivotal role in Enrique’s own youth.12

  This was an unfortunate period in Alfonso’s life, for there were reports that he was badly treated, and perhaps sexually molested, while he was in Pacheco’s care. The chronicler Palencia said that Pacheco attempted a pedophilic seduction of the boy, in hopes of making him more malleable, something that was widely believed to have been done to Enrique in his youth. In fact, by this time, similar allegations had been raised regarding three generations of Trastámara men—their father Juan, Enrique, and now Alfonso.

  This is a distinct possibility. There is a long tradition of sex being used to manipulate politicians and other powerful people. In this case, an unusual set of facts seems to suggest a possibility of adolescent sexual abuse. Sexual predators generally seek out their victims when they are young, often almost under the noses of their parents or guardians, woo them in a pattern known as “grooming,” and after having sexual relations with them, assert dominance over them in other ways. Certainly patterns characteristic of molestation were visible among the men in Isabella’s family. In all three cases, the parents were absent or preoccupied by serious problems, leaving a void in the child’s life. Sexual predators thrive in those conditions.

  King Juan, Isabella’s father, had been just six years old when he fell under the spell of eighteen-year-old Álvaro de Luna, who was soon sleeping in the child’s bed. Juan’s father had died, and his mother was trying to administer the nation at a time of terrible civil strife; she was initially appreciative when Álvaro took such a kindly interest in the boy. “The king did not want to be without Don Álvaro de Luna either by night or by day,” wrote a chronicler of the time.13 At some point, however, the queen mother became concerned that the relationship had become so “intimate,” writes historian Teofilo Ruiz. She ordered “Don Álvaro removed from the court, only to bring him back at the pleading and insistence of her son.”14

  Álvaro, for his part, had been the illegitimate son of a nobleman who took no interest in him. He had been separated from his mother and raised in the household of the Catholic pope who was his uncle, surrounded by priests whose religious vows kept them from marriage. Álvaro de Luna was handsome, charming, and amiable; he eventually married and had children. In his twenties, however, though many women were attracted to him, he was never associated publicly with any of them, which he encouraged people to believe was evidence of his unusual gallantry toward the ladies of the court. But it could also have meant that his sexual interests were primarily elsewhere. In Álvaro’s own household, for example, an unusual boy, Juan Pacheco, served as a teenage page, and Pacheco repeated the pattern established by Álvaro de Luna.

  After King Juan grew up, married, and had a son, Enrique, Álvaro de Luna similarly introduced Juan Pacheco, six years older than Enrique, to the young prince and placed him in the prince’s household. Soon Juan Pacheco held Enrique in thrall as Álvaro had done with his father.

  Both Álvaro de Luna and Juan Pacheco had exhibited a remarkable degree of personal power over Juan and Enrique—in both cases, it was so noteworthy that it was likened to witchcraft. This pattern is common among sexual predators and their victims. The sexual involvement is not a romance but an abuse. The molester often takes satisfaction from humiliating the object of his or her attentions, sometimes in a public place, with the goal of demonstrating dominance. The victim often feels some combination of anger and shame, because at times the interactions are sexually pleasurable. Adults who were molested as children frequently have difficulty maintaining relationships and are either easily sexually aroused or become incapable of having sex. Moreover, the victims frequently become very religious out of a sense of guilt, in seeking redemption for what they believe to be their own culpability for what occurred.

  A chronicler of Juan who lived at the court said: “Juan II… lived his life under the influence of Don Álvaro de Luna, up until the time when, under pressure from nobles, the King, crying, ordered him decapitated.”15 Another added: Juan was “weak of character and suggestible to the point of shameful submission” to the tutelage of Don Álvaro de Luna.16 This relationship, of course, had been the insuperable obstacle for Isabella’s mother, who had struggled to get her husband to break from Álvaro’s spell, then watched as her husband descended into black melancholy at Álvaro’s death.

  Similar things were said about Enrique and Juan Pacheco a generation later. A chronicler of Enrique, an eyewitness, reported that “abuses and delights became his habit” under the influence of Juan Pacheco. He became a “passive instrument of Don Juan Pacheco, intentionally placed at his side by Álvaro de Luna . . . Not a single thing was done unless he had ordered it.”17 One contemporary historian went so far as to call Pacheco a “monster of nature.”18 Another, Fernando del Pulgar, said Enrique was introduced at age fourteen to “unseemly pleasures” he was unable to resist because of his sexual inexperience.19

  For both King Juan and King Enrique, the relationships between king and favorite had sparked criticism and ridicule, undermined their authority, and led to open hostilities in their kingdoms. To gain even a small advantage, Juan Pacheco had been willing to shed blood, and in some cases innocent bystanders were killed as a result of his machinations.

  At this point, however, angry over the long chain of insults and humiliations by Juan Pacheco, King Enrique unexpectedly began to resist his control. That, sadly, was his undoing. Enrique called his new favorite, Don Beltrán, back to court and elevated him further, by making him not just a count but also the Duke of Alburquerque. This was a final straw to many people around Castile. A large faction of the nobles exploded in anger. Burgos, Seville, Córdoba, and even the ancient capital city of Toledo rose against Enrique. The king retreated, barricading himself in Segovia. His most implacable enemy turned out to be the chief Christian prelate, the warlike archbishop of Toledo, Alfonso Carrillo. Enrique wrote to the clergyman, asking for his support. Carrillo responded curtly to the messenger bearing the request: “Go tell your King that I am sick of him and his affairs, and that we shall now see who is the real king of Castile.”20

  On June 5, 1465, in a fateful act of revolution, nobles gathered in the walled city of Ávila to enact an unusual ceremony. They essentially staged a coup against Enrique by dethroning him in effigy. A life-size mannequin representing the king was placed in a chair on a stage. One noble approached and knocked the crown off its head. Another removed the scepter. It was a ritual designed to be a public spectacle, just as the execution of Álvaro de Luna had been a real decapitation but also a symbolic event. The effigy puppet was kicked to the ground. As the final act, the twelve-year-old Prince Alfonso was brought into the plaza, carried on the shoulders of other officials, and the crown was placed on his head. The rebels now had control of a boy pretender to the throne. It became obvious why the courtiers around Enrique had insisted so strenuously on obtaining physical control of the king’s brother.

  King Enrique was horrified, feeling stricken and defenseless against the assault, which seemed not just a parody of Castilian succession tradition but also something close to sacrilege. He was blindsided and desperate for allies because many of the kingdom’s leading noblemen had participated in the events at Ávila. This played precisely into the hands of Juan Pacheco, who promised Enrique he would return Alfonso to him and bring troops to the king’s defense and support, but only if Enrique would permit his brother, Pedro Girón, master of the Calatrava religious order, to marry Princess Isabella. This extraordinary proposition would have placed Pacheco’s family in the direct line of succession and possibly even permit them to rule Castile, if Alfonso were to die and if Juana’s legitimacy continued to be questioned.

  The fact that this proposal became a matter of such high-level deliberations makes it clear that Isabella was being pulled out of the shadows. The symbolic dethroning of King Enrique meant she too had become a contender for supremacy in the nation. From this point on, Isabella’s exi
stence became a topic of interest to court chroniclers, and her comings and goings were noted with some regularity. After the king had deferred once to the nobility on the question of Juana’s legitimacy, that child’s right to succession was forever diminished, and now Enrique’s own right to rule had been challenged.

  King Enrique caved in once more. The weak-willed king, always pitifully eager to find a peaceful resolution to a problem, agreed to Juan Pacheco’s proposition, promising his fifteen-year-old sister to a religious leader who had pledged to remain chaste but was in fact notoriously debauched. Enrique dispatched an emissary to the pope, asking for a dispensation releasing Girón from his purported vow of celibacy.21

  Now it was Isabella’s turn to be horrified. Just a year or two before, she had believed she was being affianced to one of the most admired young kings in Europe; now she was being thrust into the arms of a degenerate man who regularly betrayed his obligation of celibacy, who was far beneath her in lineage, and who was considerably older than she. There was even the embarrassing family memory of the vulgar sexual advance Pedro Girón had once made to Isabella’s mother.

  Pedro Girón set out on horseback for Madrid, where Isabella was staying, eager to make her his bride. This is the first event in Isabella’s life that is fully described in court records. Chroniclers wrote that she turned to God for help and guidance, begging to be spared the marriage and spending almost two days on her knees in prayer.22 Despairing, she asked God to preserve her from the marriage by death if necessary—either hers or that of Pedro Girón.

  The members of her household circle were similarly disgusted and appalled by this new development. According to some stories, Isabella’s loyal friend, Beatriz de Bobadilla, grabbed a knife and vowed to kill Pedro Girón. But fortuitously, at least in the view of Isabella’s supporters and chroniclers, Girón suddenly dropped dead. He had been making haste to marry Isabella when he fell ill from an acute infection of the tonsils that blocked his breathing, and he died on the road. Girón’s abrupt and unexpected death was a huge relief to Isabella and her friends. Later, after many other events occurred, some people even began to say it had been a miracle.