Isabella: The Warrior Queen
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To sway public opinion, Isabella issued a public statement explaining why she had married Ferdinand. To establish their credibility and underscore their seriousness of purpose, they held their first formal meeting of a council of state on October 22, just a few days after the wedding.
Isabella reached out to people she thought might help restore peace in the family. King Enrique had given the rights to the town of Arévalo, Isabella’s mother’s property, to the Count of Plasencia, an act that had irritated Isabella enormously. Nevertheless, Isabella wrote the countess a friendly letter discussing the situation and emphasizing her loyalty to the king; she asked her to intervene with Enrique on her behalf. “Dear countess,” she wrote, “by now you will have seen a copy of the letter I sent to the king my brother giving him the reasons why I left the town of Madrigal and went to the noble city of Valladolid.”5 She told her she was begging Enrique to approve the marriage, which she said she had chosen “in the service of God, and his, and for the serenity of the realm, proffering my will and strong heart with which to serve him and follow him.” She ended with what she called “an affectionate request,” that the countess forward the message to Enrique.
This effort bore no fruit; again Enrique did not respond. His silence became ominous. The young couple now realized they had made lasting enemies of King Enrique and Queen Juana and their ruthless ally Juan Pacheco. They became increasingly worried about their personal security and asked Ferdinand’s father to send troops to protect them. But King Juan, cash-strapped and beleaguered by the civil war in Aragon, had no forces to spare. Instead he urged them to seek advice from Ferdinand’s Castilian grandfather and from the archbishop of Toledo, Alfonso Carrillo, who remained their most steadfast friend.6
Almost immediately Isabella’s political support began to evaporate. Even Valladolid, the city that had hosted her nuptials with Ferdinand, abandoned her cause and allied itself again with the king. Enrique cut off Isabella’s sources of income, forcing the couple to live hand to mouth. Soon Isabella and Ferdinand possessed only Medina del Campo, which was held for them by the ever-present Gonzalo Chacón, and Ávila, held by Chacón’s son, Juan.7 They retreated to the nearby town of Duenas, about twenty miles from Valladolid, looking for safe harbor for their new marriage, in an area controlled by Archbishop Carrillo.
King Enrique’s animosity toward Isabella and Ferdinand became common knowledge in Castile, and soon many Spaniards began avoiding them. “Few grandees wanted it to be known that they supported the young sovereigns,” an Aragonese ambassador wrote to King Juan.8
Ferdinand made matters worse by clashing with the couple’s single most important ally, Archbishop Carrillo, who by this time was essentially supporting them. King Juan had given his son specific instructions to listen to Carrillo and follow his advice, but Ferdinand found the archbishop bossy and overbearing. Carrillo in turn thought Ferdinand willful and obstinate. Ferdinand told Carrillo “that he would not be put in leading-strings like so many of the sovereigns of Castile.”9 Carrillo soon complained to King Juan, in a steady stream of letters and messages, that the teenagers were ignoring his advice.
The dissension put Isabella in an awkward position. Ferdinand was her husband and she owed him her loyalty, but Carrillo had been a steadfast friend who had stayed by her side when others had abandoned her. King Juan also thought Ferdinand was being foolhardy and wrote him repeatedly telling him to do as Carrillo told them.
Then a new problem cast a further shadow on the young couple. The dispensation for their marriage that Ferdinand had provided turned out to have been hastily forged and was now exposed as fraudulent. Archbishop Carrillo and King Juan’s envoy, Mosén Pierres de Peralta, had arranged the ecclesiastical document.10 The two men had been eager to expedite the match and so had tried to pass off a dispensation granted at another time for another wedding as the necessary authorization. The failure to get the proper document from the pope meant that the marriage was now characterized as incestuous. Ferdinand put much pressure on his father to try to get a proper dispensation and make things right.
These developments were unsettling for Isabella. It was essential to obtain the proper dispensation so that her soon-to-be-born infant’s birth would be legitimate. But obtaining the document might be difficult if the pope was reluctant to risk angering King Enrique by providing it. This proved to be the case. Pope Paul II threw his support to Enrique and declined to provide the necessary papers.
Long months passed while they waited. Pope Paul II, who was fifty-three years old, refused to relent, and it eventually became apparent that only the arrival of a new pope might resolve the problem. This delay was a scarring experience for Isabella. Ever afterward she would go to great lengths to ensure that proper approvals from the Vatican regarding marriages of relatives were secured well ahead of time, so that questions could be laid to rest before they even arose. Such dispensations from the pope would be needed frequently because the royal families of Europe commonly intermarried. Isabella’s later preoccupation with papal dispensations would have long-lasting and cataclysmic consequences.
But for now the uncertainty was simply adding to the stress of the first-time mother. Isabella, not legally married in the eyes of church or state, was waiting with bated breath for the birth of her child. The arrival of a boy would secure her position because it would make her the mother of the undisputed heir to Aragon, and a male child would be able to assert his primacy over two other candidates for the throne of Castile—Isabella and Princess Juana.
Isabella went into labor on October 1, and the long and difficult childbirth lasted through the night: “the caballeros and Ferdinand spent many anxious hours worrying about Isabella’s dangerous condition.”11 The baby was born in the late morning on October 2, 1470. Isabella’s life may indeed have been at risk: At that time, childbirth was generally dangerous, and many women died as a result of complications, infection, or blood loss.
Five witnesses attended the birth to ensure that the child presented to the world was indeed borne by the mother. No one wanted rumors of switched babies to complicate the succession picture even more. Isabella was probably attended by a midwife, not by a doctor, according to fifteenth-century custom. She asked to have a silken veil placed over her face during labor so the witnesses would not see the pain etched there. The child, when she arrived, proved to be a girl. Archbishop Carrillo christened her Isabel, the same name as her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother.
Princess Isabella shared the disappointing discovery with the kingdom that afternoon. “Our Lord has given us a princess,” she announced in a letter.12 It was terrible news, particularly in Aragon, where females could not inherit the throne. King Juan received the news with “open dismay,” for it threatened to unravel his carefully set plans for his descendants to rule over Castile.13
But the news was heartening for King Enrique. A girl child was less of a threat to little Juana than a male would have been. As soon as he learned of the birth, he moved to strip Isabella of her remaining possessions and titles. He took her beloved town of Medina del Campo in his own name. And in what can only have been an act of spite, he announced that Juana, now age nine, would marry a French nobleman, Charles, Duke of Berry, the one with the spindly legs who had previously negotiated to marry Isabella. Charles was no longer heir to the French throne, because his older brother’s wife had given birth to a son, but Juana’s marriage to a French lord would likely result in French pretensions to the throne of Castile. Soon the French made those intentions clear: They insisted that little Juana, to be worthy to wed a man third in line for the French throne, be named heir to the Castilian throne. Enrique agreed. With that thoughtless act, King Enrique demonstrated the full extent of his rage against his half sister. He was willing to cede his kingdom to its archrival, France, rather than see it go to Isabella and Ferdinand.
On October 26, 1470, in a public ceremony in the Valley of Lozoya, near the Aragonese border, Enrique made the formal declaration
that he was disinheriting Isabella and that Castilians should “neither consider the princess the legitimate heir nor obey her as such.”14 It was no idle gesture. Enrique underscored his intention of dispossessing Isabella and Ferdinand by issuing a proclamation that as soon as Juana and the French duke married, the Duke of Berry would be named Prince of Asturias and primary inheritor of the Castilian throne.15
It was a very bad month for the young couple. Isabella was still recovering from childbirth. Ferdinand had suffered a bad fall while on horseback and developed a frighteningly high fever, in an age without antibiotics. In this already-bad situation, the new French alliance was an alarming development. King Juan worried that the young couple and their baby daughter were at personal risk and told his councilors that he believed they faced “great danger.”16 He was already at war with the French himself over the towns he had ceded to them during the Aragonese civil war, and he believed that French soldiers might seize Ferdinand with King Enrique’s encouragement, thereby removing them as contenders for the succession. He was not wrong. On December 8, King Enrique secretly wrote to Charles, Duke of Berry, Isabella’s former suitor, urging him to send his “most powerful soldiers” to capture Isabella and Ferdinand.17
Suspecting the truth and realizing that Enrique’s spies were watching their movements, Isabella and Ferdinand moved from place to place, seeking refuge. They moved to an estate owned by the Enríquez family, relatives of Ferdinand’s mother, and then into Carrillo’s home. Living with the archbishop was tense, as he and Ferdinand continued to feud with each other.
The next three years—from the end of 1470 to late 1473—were frequently dismal for Isabella. King Juan II of Aragon was still enmeshed in war against the French and called for Ferdinand to join him in the campaign. It was a foolish war, caused by his father’s mismanagement of his own realm, but the stakes were not imaginary. King Juan, now in his eighties, needed Ferdinand’s youthful energy and intensity to defeat the French. Ferdinand left for Aragon in February 1472.18 For most of the next two years, he was gone; Isabella and her little daughter, left behind in Castile, were impoverished and nearly friendless.
To make matters worse, Ferdinand, once he arrived back home in Aragon, was not alone. He took up company with other women. Very early in their relationship, Isabella had had to learn to live with Ferdinand’s nearly constant sexual infidelity. He had come into the marriage with two illegitimate children, after all, and in the beginning Isabella accepted easily and generously what had happened before their union.
But episodes of unfaithfulness, some of long and humiliating duration, started very soon after the wedding. When Ferdinand left for the battlefield, he was accompanied by his mistress Aldonza Roig de Ibarra, later made Viscountess of Ebol, a pretty young Catalan woman from the town of Cervera. Aldonza dressed up in men’s clothes while on military campaigns with Ferdinand, but she wasn’t fooling anyone about her gender. Together they had already produced two offspring, Alonso and Juana, both of whom Ferdinand recognized as his children.
Soon another woman came into his field of vision, and he passed time with her in the winter of 1472–73, also near the battlefields of Perpignan, on the French-Catalan border. She was Joana Nicolau, daughter of a low-level official. Together they produced a child who was also named Juana. A few years later, when he was visiting Bilbao, he spied a young woman called Toda de Larrea, and a torrid encounter produced yet another child, a girl who was named María. The baby’s mother was proud of her royal liaison and flaunted the child’s existence. Lacking an official title, the child was popularly styled La Excelenta. And there were others. “Although he loved the Queen his wife greatly, he gave himself to other women,” the court chronicler Pulgar said with a sigh.19
Ferdinand’s infidelities made Isabella jealous and hurt her deeply even though she presented a stoic face to the world. The two of them came to blows about it on one occasion in Segovia, in a room in the Alcázar. Courtiers heard shouts and blows, then the plaintive sound of muffled sobs.
Isabella’s desolation was visible to those who cared to look. The Castilian poet and nobleman Gómez Manrique, for example, wrote a piece of poetry about Isabella that referred to her “sad, beautiful” face, adding that the “lady herself is as lonely as the empty city where no one dwells.”20
In April 1473 Ferdinand made preparations to set off to Perpignan once again, once more to fight the French. Isabella was unhappy about it. It had now been more than three years since her daughter Isabella was born, and she worried she wouldn’t become pregnant again. She was also very vulnerable, living alone in Castile with King Enrique’s heart turned against her. She crafted a letter to her father-in-law that subtly conveyed her irritation: “I felt such great anxiety on hearing the news of the invasion of the French into your kingdom, that if matters here had permitted, I would not have been able to endure not to go with the prince my lord to rescue Your Majesty, because certainly it would have been less onerous for me to travel with him than to remain behind.”21
In fact, by the time Ferdinand arrived, the battle was already won. Nevertheless, he stayed there for the next seven months, helping his father rebuild his defenses and undoubtedly renewing old friendships. He didn’t return until December 1473.
In November of that year, Isabella wrote to Ferdinand begging him to return. She told him that King Enrique, who was ailing, might die at any moment, or become incapacitated, and she needed her husband’s support. Ferdinand turned her down, stressing the urgent crush of business, but he was evidently using his absences to pressure Isabella into persuading King Enrique to make him his heir and to administer the oath of succession to him instead of Isabella. Ferdinand’s letter, one of only a few surviving pieces of correspondence between the husband and wife, is a masterpiece of artful duplicity, threat, and menace, masked as romantic yearning:
I do not know why Our Lord has given me so much good with so little pleasure in it, since in three years I have not been with you seven months. Now I must tell you that I have to go to induce these people to do their duty. But all this cannot happen before Christmas, and if in this time you can arrange it so that the King calls me for the oath, within the hour I could be on my way [to you], but otherwise I would have no excuse for my lord the King. Although I do my best, this unfortunate predicament puts me in such a mood that I do not know whether I am coming or going. I beg you to work at this, or at least to write to the Archbishop and Cardinal. I do not mean to imply that this is your task, or that I do not think that for me there is no higher duty than fulfilling your wishes.… I beg, my lady, that you would pardon me the annoyance and trouble I do not know how to describe, with all the delay in my coming. Awaiting your answer, I ask to be now and to the end, your slave.22
In fact, despite Ferdinand’s honeyed words, his mind was often elsewhere. In letters to his father during these years, Ferdinand frequently discussed his illegitimate children, particularly Alonso, but he seldom mentioned little Isabel, his child with his wife. In the summer of 1474 he publicly acknowledged the boy as his son and began looking for a regular source of income for him. Despite the distress she felt, Isabella was eager to make sure that Ferdinand’s children received proper educations. “He is a son of my august husband, and consequently must be educated in conformance with his noble birth,” she once said in talking about Alonso.23
Ferdinand’s misplaced fertility was another sore point in the marriage. Isabella needed to produce more heirs to the throne to solidify her position, but Ferdinand’s extended absences made that impossible. She had conceived a child in the first days of the marriage; now long years passed without another successful pregnancy. Little Isabel was growing up as an only child. As the years ticked by, it became apparent that while Ferdinand loved Isabella, he also resented her and was choosing to stay away more than was absolutely necessary. Perhaps he thought that he could make himself heir to the Castilian throne if Isabella were to fail to produce a male child. He would certainly have had a strong
claim based on his own ancestry. He may have been hedging his bets, preparing for various outcomes and giving himself as much maneuvering room as possible.
Another man at court, however, stood in a notable contrast to Isabella’s faithless husband. This was her longtime friend Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, still in his early twenties. He had been part of her younger brother Alfonso’s entourage, and he had been with Isabella when Alfonso died. He was deeply fond of Isabella and completely loyal to her from those teenage years. Soon after Alfonso died and Enrique resumed power, Gonzalo had traveled back with his tutor to the town where Isabella was living, taking up residence nearby. When he was asked why he had come, he replied, “Not for any self-interest, but in the hopes of being able to serve Her Highness, the Princess, in some way.”24
Gonzalo joined Isabella’s court and in the next few years frequently traveled as one of her escorts, always maintaining a discreet distance from her. In the months when Isabella was preparing to marry Ferdinand, Gonzalo had traveled with her guard from Enrique’s court in Ocaña to Madrigal, and later, when Enrique’s troops were riding to take her prisoner, he accompanied her from Madrigal to Valladolid.25 He had been present at Isabella’s marriage to Ferdinand, serving as her page.