by Lynn Cullen
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
The Spains
Chapter 1. - 15 April anno Domini 1493
Chapter 2. - 17 April anno Domini 1493
Chapter 3. - 29 May anno Domini 1493
Chapter 4. - 1 April anno Domini 1494
Chapter 5. - 2 April anno Domini 1494
The Habsburg Netherlands
Chapter 6. - 18 October anno Domini 1496
Chapter 7. - 20 October anno Domini 1496
Chapter 8. - 31 October anno Domini 1496
Chapter 9. - 14 November anno Domini 1496
Chapter 10. - 15 November anno Domini 1496
Chapter 11. - 3 April anno Domini 1497
Chapter 12. - 20 October anno Domini 1497
Chapter 13. - 27 October anno Domini 1497
Chapter 14. - 11 December anno Domini 1497
Chapter 15. - 13 Mach anno Domini 1498
Chapter 16. - 15 November anno Domini 1498
Chapter 17. - 26 December anno Domini 1498
Chapter 18. - 24 August anno Domini 1500
Chapter 19. - 7 November anno Domini 1501
Chapter 20. - 22 November anno Domini 1502
Chapter 21. - 23 January anno Domini 1502
The Spains
Chapter 22. - 26 January anno Domini 1502
Chapter 23. - 19 February anno Domini 1502
Chapter 24. - 7 May anno Domini 1502
Chapter 25. - 8 May anno Domini 1502
Chapter 26. - 23 May anno Domini 1502
Chapter 27. - 18 June anno Domini 1502
Chapter 28. - 14 July anno Domini 1502
Chapter 29. - 24 August anno Domini 1502
Chapter 30. - 24 March anno Domini 1503
Chapter 31. - 9 July anno Domini 1503
Chapter 32. - 26 August anno Domini 1503
Chapter 33. - 27 August anno Domini 1503
The Habsburg Netherlands
Chapter 34. - 16 May anno Domini 1504
Chapter 35. - 17 May anno Domini 1504
Chapter 36. - 18 May anno Domini 1504
Chapter 37. - 19 May anno Domini 1504
Chapter 38. - 13 November anno Domini 1504
Chapter 39. - 6 January anno Domini 1505
England
Chapter 40. - 12 February anno Domini 1506
The Spains
Chapter 41. - 10 July anno Domini 1506
Chapter 42. - 11 July anno Domini 1506
Chapter 43. - 25 September anno Domini 1506
Chapter 44. - 18 August anno Domini 1507
Chapter 45. - March 2 anno Domini 1509
2 May anno Domini 1543
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
ALSO BY LYNN CULLEN
ALSO BY LYNN CULLEN
The Creation of Eve
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
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Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2011 by Lynn Cullen
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cullen, Lynn.
Reign of madness / Lynn Cullen.
p. cm.
ISBN : 978-1-101-52935-5
1. Juana, la Loca, Queen of Castile, 1479–1555—Fiction. 2. Philip I, King of Castile, 1478–1506—Fiction. 3. Queens—Spain—Castile—Fiction. 4. Castile (Spain)—Kings and rulers—Fiction. 5. Spain—History—Ferdinand and Isabella, 1479–1516—Fiction. 6. Spain—History—Charles I, 1516–1556—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3553.U2955R
813’.54—dc22
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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For my daughters, Lauren, Megan, and Alison
The Family of PHILIPPE the HANDSOME
The Family of JUANA of CASTILE
Prologue
Possibly Juana of Castile
2 May anno Domini 1543
TORDESILLAS, SPAIN
A birdcage might be gilded, but it is still a cage. And so it is A said of the palace at Tordesillas. For all its lovely balconies overlooking the churning waters of the Duero, its sun-warmed tile roofs, its royal pennants of scarlet and gold snapping merrily in the breeze, the townsfolk know the true purpose of the building. This is why farmers cross themselves as they pass before it with their wagonloads of wheat. Why the sisters of the convent of Santa Clara keep their eyes averted when in its vicinity. Why boys throw stones at its empty windows before they are rushed off by their scolding tutors. People are afraid of the place, as if the wrong that has been inflicted on its inhabitant might be catching.
Now its stone walls ring with the sound of trumpets, followed by the determined tap of fine kid shoes against tile. A page shouts, “His Majesty Don Felipe!” although everyone in the palace and in the windswept Castilian town over which it towers knows the identity of the slight young man leading the group of nobles dressed in velvet doublets and fur-trimmed robes. The young man—a youth, truly, new to the blond beard sprouting from his prominent chin—forges deeper into the palace. He strides past empty chambers that smell of the river, then through the arcade, which is shuttered though it is a mild day in early May, and past a chapel with a single votive flickering wanly in the dark. He comes at last to a door and waits, twitching his jaw, a surprisingly heavy feature in his otherwise graceful face. A German guard, steel armor clinking, works the lock then throws open the bolt.
“His Majesty Don Felipe, Prince of Spain, Naples, Milan, Sicily, the Netherlands, and the Indies!” cries the page.
A woman whose bloom has long since faded looks up from the book she holds to the light of the only window of the chamber. She is dressed in the plain coarse gray of the Poor Clares. A wooden rosary hangs from her
waist. Only the delicate Flemish linen of the coif beneath her thick veil—too fine for a simple Poor Clare—hints that she might not be a sister of that humble religious order.
The young man hesitates for a moment, working his considerable jaw, then strides before her and falls to his knees. “My Lady Grandmother, I wish to kiss your hands.”
She hides her hands, one still clutching the small leather-bound book, in the folds of her rough skirt. “No.”
The youth sits back on his heels as if snapped at by a dog he had judged friendly. The nobles behind him cease their jostling for position and exchange glances.
The lines etched around the woman’s mouth speak of sorrow, aging her beyond her sixty-three years, but now, when she smiles with affection, it is possible to imagine how beautiful she once was. Indeed, in spite of her graying skin and brows, and having borne six children, all of them kings, queens, or emperors, in her mind she is still a young maiden. “Stand up, Felipe.”
He hesitates.
She holds out her arms. “Come.”
After they embrace, he says, “I have come to ask permission to marry.”
Her smile fades. “My ‘permission’?” She sighs. “Who?”
He pauses. Behind him, a cardinal coughs into his scarlet sleeve.
“My cousin, Maria Manuela of Portugal.”
“Catalina’s child? My own daughter Catalina’s child? Catalina has not written me about it. No one has. But you would think at least Catalina …” She stops, then takes a breath. “When is the wedding?”
“As soon as you allow it.”
She exhales. “When, Felipe.”
He lowers his eyes. “November.”
“Thank you.” Seeing his guilty look, she asks quietly, “Is she beautiful?”
His fool, a gangling fellow with eyes set impossibly close together and a head furred with melon-colored hair, jogs forward and knocks the prince with his elbow. “Is she beautiful? ¡Que bonita! Who would not want to eat her peaches?”
“Manuelito,” Felipe says, “you’ve not seen her.”
The fool slides forth a petulant bottom lip. “I have seen her picture.”
Felipe glances at the walls, bare save for a painting of the Virgin Mary that is black with age. He reddens. He has not thought to bring a portrait.
The woman smiles gently. “You will find yourself more foolish than a fool if she does not seem beautiful to you once you have seen her.”
Felipe’s short laugh is one of sheepish gratitude. “Surely I will admire my cousin,” he says lightly. “She has my same blood.”
“Yes,” says the woman. “She has my blood, too. Though that might not be the best recommendation.”
Felipe reddens again. The woman sighs. She did not mean to embarrass him. This is what comes from being alone too much, she thinks to herself. I no longer know how to behave.
“She should count herself lucky to be of your line,” Felipe says.
The boy has her delicate skin and its propensity to give away emotions, the woman thinks. He is a poor liar, just like her. Interesting, how lineage will tell, no matter how much you wish that it would not. Looking at this boy, she can see her husband’s heavy jaw and swollen lips, though on Philippe they were considered quite attractive, if you measured by the number of ladies who fell across his bed. There are women who, after gaining the affection of such a handsome man, must possess him completely or go mad. Philippe never seemed to worry about this.
He should have.
The Spains
Possibly Isabel of Castile
1.
15 April anno Domini 1493
I had gone to get Estrella. She was in my chamber on the second floor of the palace in Barcelona, chewing a slipper, no doubt. She was losing her puppy teeth, and I, the proud bearer of nearly fourteen entire years, believed with the confident certainty of a physician at Salamanca that her gums did pain her. I thought that my company would aid her. I would keep her in my sleeve, where she could burrow to her heart’s delight. She would not piss if the ceremony did not take too terribly long. Surely a reception for a sailor, even one who claimed to have found a shortcut to the Indies, would not last longer than a Mass. She had made it through many a Mass when I thought that even I should burst.
My chance to escape came when Mother was deep in one of her discussions with her confessor, Fray Hernando de Talavera. The two of them were roasting themselves before the fireplace, which in the Saló del Tinell was large enough to house a peasant family and their beasts. My mother was the Queen of Castile, León, Aragón, Granada, Naples, Sicily, Toledo, Valencia, Galicia, Mallorca, Seville, Sardinia, Corsica, Murcia, Jaén, the Algarve, Algeciras, and, let us not forget, Gibraltar, with its apes, one of whom tried to bite me when I gave it an orange. But Heaven was not yet one of the places she ruled, and so she listened to Fray Hernando with a reverence she afforded few men. Certainly not Papa.
Fray Hernando was leaning over her, his head tilted to hear her over the din around them, an affectionate smile upon his handsome smooth-skinned face, when my brother, Juan, and his household clattered into the hall. Most of Juan’s pimpled gallants had insisted on wearing their armor and, typical boys of fifteen years or so, were enjoying the pain they were inflicting on everyone’s ears with their clanking. All they earned from Mother was a twinge of a frown, but my little sisters María and Catalina gazed at them worshipfully, as if they might be knights from one of the tales of chivalry that María so loved to read. My elder sister, Isabel, however, was not amused. Widowed and worldly at twenty-two, she was Queen in her own mind, even though, as a woman, she was behind Juan in the succession.
But while Juan acted like a clown, at least he was clever enough to realize that not even he was likely ever to be King, not with Mother’s bear-grip on life. Good luck, Señor Death, trying to reel in Queen Isabel of Castile before she was ready. She had fought to win her crowns, battled the Moors to near extinction, and united the Spains, all the while wearing a man’s breastplate as she urged her men on, her wavy strawberry-gold hair blowing in the wind. The woman was too ferocious to die. And though the motto she took with Papa was “Tanto monta, monta tanto, Isabel como Fernando”—Isabel and Fernando, they amount to the same—it was her fierce will and not Papa’s quiet strength that was recognized as the force behind these wonders, as unjust as I thought that was. No, this was not a person who would lie down meekly to be collected by the Reaper. Perhaps this was why my sister Isabel took such pleasure in trying to dictate everyone’s actions. In her heart, she knew it was as close as she would ever come to ruling.
Now my sister was exchanging disapproving glares with her ladies. Their own furrowed brows were tepid imitations of hers—indeed, some of their glances at the boys were passing flirtatious. Bueno. Let everyone chat, flirt, worship, or clank. I could slip from the chamber to get Estrella.
I had not gotten far—only to the chapel of Santa Agata, which Mother had newly redone, like everything else in the Spains—when I thought I heard a woman laugh. I stopped to listen.
Behind me, from the other side of the iron-strapped door I had so carefully closed to the saló, came the muted music of Mother’s lutenists and the muffled din of the grandees, priests, and ladies waiting to receive Colón after his voyage. To the right of the saló, on the steps to the Plaça del Rei—those same steps on which a wretch had tried to take Papa’s life only five months earlier—I could hear the pikemen stationed just outside the palace door, banging their poles and stamping their feet against the chill of the drizzly April morning. Drums pounded in the distance: Colón’s procession. To judge from their sound, he had entered the walls of the city. In less time than it takes to sew on a button, I had to get Estrella in the far reaches of the palace, return, and melt back into the gathering, unnoticed.
But there—I heard it again. A soft titter, behind the heavy carved doors of the chapel, one of which was ajar.
I knew that laugh yet could not quite place it. And in Mother’s chapel?
Who would be in there now? All of us and our households were to be in the Saló del Tinell: Mother’s orders. She believed Colón’s claim that he had found a better way to the Indies—at least to the outlying islands—so the rest of us must be there to receive him, no matter if some, like Papa, whose line in all things I staunchly followed, were not convinced.
I heard the rustle of heavy cloth from inside the chapel.
I glanced around guiltily. Colón’s drums were slowly nearing. My sister would note my absence at any minute and report it to Mother, bringing down both me and my former tutor, now governess, Beatriz Galindo, who was expected to keep control over me. But I had to see who was in there. Had one of Mother’s ladies disobeyed her? Or, Hostias en vinagre, had one of my sister’s? I would not want to be this person when Isabel found out. Even at my tender age I understood that a would-be monarch could be more tyrannical than a crowned one.
Carefully, as not to make the thick iron hinges creak, I put my shoulder to the door and leaned into the chapel.
Honey and orange peel. That’s what I smelled, not the oily scent of the incense from Mass or Mother’s musky perfume. Mother did love a good strong stink of civet. She dabbed a fortune of it on the nape of her neck each day. No, this was honey and orange, for certain. It was familiar to me, but how?
A woman murmured.
I followed the sound with my gaze to the portable prayer booth in which Mother was taken to Mass each day like a relic being carried to its shrine. The rustling came from inside the cloth-of-gold curtains. Whoever was inside was making the curtains sway.
I drew up short: There was a man in the booth. I could hear him breathe. Even a child knows whether it is a man or a woman by the sound of the person’s breath.
I heard the smack of moist flesh. ¡Hostias! Hostias! There were two people in there. I knew what they were doing.
My heart pounding, I took a step back and crunched on something hard. I lifted my heel. A ruby the size of a hazelnut.
I scooped it up and ran out to get Estrella.
When I returned to the saló, the drums of Colón’s procession were rattling the timber floors of the chamber. He was entering the Plaça del Rei outside. Mother and Papa had taken to their thrones at the far end of the room; Papa was whispering in Mother’s ear. She did not seem to see me slip between my little sisters, but Beatriz did. She rounded her eyes at me in outraged disbelief. Beatriz Galindo was only five years older than I, and already famed for her skill in Latin, having attended university in Salerno. She had been a brilliant tutor, but she was a terrible governess and for that I loved her. I feared that Mother would catch on to how lax a prison guard she was and relieve her of her duties. A chill from almost being caught raised the hair on my arms.