They were, indeed, extravagant and impracticable to the last degree. The

title of Admiral had only been given in Spain to nobles of the highest

rank and greatest possessions. The office, usually hereditary, carried

with it seignorial rights over the coasts and ports that were

practically sovereign, as in the case of the Enriquezs in Castile and of

Medina Sidonia in Andalucia. And yet Colon, a plebeian Italian sailor,

dropped as if from the clouds, made as his first demand, that he should

be recognised as ‘Admiral of all the islands and continents that may be

discovered or gained by his means, for himself during his life, and for

his heirs and successors for ever, with all the prerogatives and

pre-eminences appertaining to such office, as they are enjoyed by Don

Alonso Enriquez, your Admiral of Castile.’ The Admiral of Castile was

Ferdinand’s uncle, and the second person in realm after the blood royal;

and, although the office was hereditary in his house, the sovereigns of

Castile had never surrendered the power of withdrawing the title if they

pleased, whereas the Italian mariner demanded that for ever he and his

should be practically independent of the sovereigns. The second

condition was, that Colon was to be Governor and Viceroy of all islands

and continents discovered, with the right of nominating three persons

for each sub-governorship or office from which the sovereigns were bound

to choose one. This latter condition was also an infraction of the right

of the kings to choose their own officers freely. The discoverer claimed

for himself and his heirs for ever one clear tenth of all merchandise,

gold, gems, pearls, and commodities of every sort, bought, bartered,

found, gained, or possessed, in the territories discovered. It was just,

of course, that Colon should be splendidly rewarded if success crowned

his efforts, but the imagination reels at the idea of the stupendous

wealth that would have been his by virtue of such a claim as this. But

this was not all. Colon claimed the right, if he pleased, of taking

one-eighth share in every expedition and trading venture leaving Spain

for the Indies, and, to crown all, if any dispute arose with regard to

the discoverer’s rights and profits, under the capitulation, he and his

nominees were to be the sole judges of the case.

Most of these demands could not be legally granted under the laws of

Castile, and it is no wonder that when Colon refused to modify them, he

was curtly dismissed by Ferdinand, and told to go about his business and

propose his plans elsewhere. There is no reason to doubt, in spite of

romantic legends unsupported by evidence, that Isabel acquiesced in this

action of her husband. She was, it is true, strongly in favour of the

proposed undertaking; but she was a greater stickler than Ferdinand for

her regal prerogatives, and it is unlikely that she would have lightly

surrendered them thus any more than he. In any case, Colon, in high

dudgeon, left Santa Fe with the intention of offering his plans to

France. First visiting in Cordova the lady with whom he had lived, he

proceeded on his way to La Rabida, where his son Diego was still living,

thence to embark for France. In the monastery there he again met the

guardian, Fray Juan Perez, the Queen’s confessor, to whom he told his

tale of disappointment; and the physician, Hernandez, was summoned to

the conference.

Colon, with his earnestness and eloquence, impressed them more than ever

with the glowing prospects of wealth unlimited for Spain, and glory

undying for the Christian Queen, who should bring pagan Asia into the

fold of the Church; and, unknown to the explorer, Juan Perez sent post

haste by a trusty messenger a letter to the Queen urging her not to let

Colon go elsewhere with his plans. It is well-nigh two hundred miles,

and a bad road, from Palos to Granada, and Isabel was in the midst of

taking possession of the conquered city; but yet she found time to send

back an answer within a fortnight to Perez, who, by one pretext or

another, had detained Colon in the monastery, bidding her late confessor

himself to come and see her without delay, that she might discuss with

him the subject of his solicitude. Perez lost no time; for at midnight

the same day, without a word to Colon, he rode out of La Rabida towards

Granada.

What arguments he used to Isabel we do not know, probably he told her

that Colon was inclined now to modify his pretensions. In any case, the

good friar hurried back to the monastery with the cheering news that the

Queen had promised to provide three caravels for the expedition, and

summoned Colon to court again, sending him, in a day or two, two

thousand maravedis to buy himself some new clothes, and make him fit to

appear before her. It is extremely unlikely—indeed impossible—that

Isabel should have taken this step without Ferdinand’s consent. She was

the stronger vessel, and may have won him over to her way of thinking,

aided probably by the representations of Juan Perez, that Colon’s terms

would be modified.

The explorer arrived at Granada shortly after the triumphal entry of the

conquerors, and saw Isabel (and presumably her husband) on several

occasions at their quarters at Santa Fe. To Ferdinand’s annoyance he

found that Colon still insisted upon the same impracticable conditions

as before. Talavera, the new Archbishop of Granada, full of zeal for the

Christianisation of his new diocese, frowned at all suggestions that

might divert attention to another direction; and finally, the King and

Queen decided to dismiss Colon for good as impossible to deal with.

Rather than bate a jot of his vast claims, for, as he solemnly asserted

afterwards, he needed not the wealth for himself, but to restore the

Holy Land to Christendom, he wended his way heartbroken towards his home

at Cordova; his red hair now blanched entire to snow. The glory for

Spain of discovering a new world for civilisation was trembling in the

balance. The great dreamer, hopeless, had turned his back upon the court

after seven years of fruitless waiting, and Ferdinand, this time, had no

intention of recalling him.

Then the keen business prescience of the Jew Secretary of Supplies, Luis

de Sant’angel, pained that such bright hopes should be carried to other

lands, took what, for a man of his modest rank, was a very bold step. He

was a countryman of Ferdinand, and in his confidence, but it was to

Isabel he went, and with many expressions of humility and apology for

his daring,[59] urged her not to miss such a chance as that offered by

the Genoese. Sant’angel appears to have been under the impression that

the main reason for Colon’s dismissal was the difficulty of the

Castilian treasury providing the money he asked for, as he offered to

lend the million maravedís necessary. It is quite likely, indeed, that

he did not know the details of the explorer’s demands as to reward.

Isabel appears to have thanked Sant’angel for his offer and opinion,

with which she said she agreed; but asked him to defer the matter until

she was more at leisure.

This was something gained; but the principal difficulty was to persuade

Ferdinand. Another Aragonese it was who undertook it; that inseparable

companion of the King, the Chamberlain, Juan Cabero. What arguments he

employed we know not, but he was as astute as Ferdinand himself, and

probably we shall not be far from the truth when we presume that he and

his master agreed that, since the Queen was so bent upon the affair, it

would be folly to haggle further over terms, which, after all, if they

were found inconvenient, could be repudiated by the sovereigns, and it

is probable that Isabel may have been influenced by the same view. So, a

few hours only after Colon had shaken the dust of Santa Fe from his

feet, a swift horseman overtook him at the bridge of Los Pinos, and

brought him back to court.

Again he stood firm in his immoderate pretensions, and the chaffering

with him was resumed, for it must have been evident to Ferdinand that

the terms could never be fulfilled. It must not be forgotten that Colon

had come with a mere theory. The plan was not to discover a new

continent: there was no idea then of a vast virgin America, but only of

a shorter way to Japan and the realms of the great Khan. Such a project,

great as the profit that might result, would naturally loom less in the

sight of contemporary Spaniards than the Christianisation of Granada,

and it is unjust to blame Ferdinand for holding out against terms which

were even a derogation of his own and his wife’s sovereignty. Isabel,

far more idealist than her husband, was ready to accede to Colon’s

demands, and her advocacy carried the day. Possibly, to judge from what

followed, even she assented, with the mental reservation that she, as

sovereign, could, if she pleased, cancel the concessions she granted to

Colon if she found them oppressive.

The terms demanded, however, were not the only difficulty in the way.

There was the question of ready money; and the war had exhausted the

treasury. It is an ungracious thing to demolish a pretty traditional

story, but that of Isabel’s jewels, sacrificed to pay for Colon’s first

voyage, will not bear scrutiny.[60] As a matter of fact, her jewels were

already pawned for the costs of the war, and although Las Casas,

Bernaldez, and Colon’s son Fernando, say that the Queen offered to

Sant’angel to pawn her jewellery for the purpose, and it is probable

enough that in the heat of her enthusiasm she may have made such a

suggestion figuratively, it is now quite certain that the money for the

expedition was advanced by Luis de Sant’angel, although not as was, and

is, usually supposed, from his own resources, but from money secretly

given to him for the purpose from the Aragonese treasury, of which he

was a high officer.[61]

The agreement with Colon was signed finally in Santa Fe on the 17th

April 1492, and at the end of the month the great dreamer departed, this

time with a light heart and rising hopes, to Palos and La Rabida to fit

out his caravels, and sail on the 3rd August 1492 for his fateful

voyage. With him went Isabel’s prayers and hopes; and during his

tiresome and obstructed preparations at Palos, she aided him to the

utmost by grants and precepts,[62] as well as by appointing his

legitimate son, Diego, page to her heir, Prince Juan, in order that the

lad might have a safe home during his father’s absence. Although

Isabel’s action in the discovery may be less heroic and independent of

her husband, than her enthusiastic biographers are fond of representing,

it is certain that but for her Ferdinand would not have patronised the

expedition. Looking at the whole circumstances, and his character, it is

difficult to blame him, except at last for agreeing to terms that he

knew were impossible of fulfilment, and which he probably never meant to

fulfil. But Isabel’s idealism in this case was wiser than Ferdinand’s

practical prudence, so far as the immediate result was concerned, and to

Isabel the Catholic must be given the glory of having aided Columbus,

rather than to her husband, who was persuaded against his will.

Granada was conquered for Isabel, and it was now Ferdinand’s turn to

have his way. For years Aragonese interests had had to wait, though, as

Ferdinand well knew, the unifying process, which he needed for his ends,

was being perfected the while. Under the stern rule of Torquemada the

Inquisition had struck its tentacles into the nation’s heart, and, crazy

with the pride of superiority over infidels, the orthodox Spaniard was

rapidly developing the confidence in his divine selection to scourge the

enemies of God, which made the nation temporarily great. Isabel was the

inspiring soul of this feeling. A foreigner, visiting her court soon

after Granada fell, wrote, as most contemporaries did of her, in

enthusiastic praise of what we should now consider cruel bigotry.

‘Nothing is spoken of here,’ he says, ‘but making war on the enemies of

the faith, and sweeping away all obstructions to the Holy Catholic

Church. Not with worldly, but with heavenly aim, is all they undertake,

and all they do seems inspired direct from heaven, as these sovereigns

most surely are.’[63]

This eulogium refers to the plan then under discussion for ridding

Isabel’s realms of the taint of Judaism. We are told that to the Queen’s

initiative this terrible and disastrous measure was due. ‘The Jews were

so powerful in the management of the royal revenues that they formed

almost another royal caste. This gave great scandal to the Catholic

Queen, and the decree was signed that all those who would not in three

months embrace the faith, were to leave her kingdoms of Castile and

Leon.’[64] Ferdinand was quite willing, in this case, to give the

saintly Queen and her clergy a free hand, because, to carry out his

world-wide combination to humble France, he would need money—very much

money—and the wholesale confiscation of Jewish property that accompanied

the edict of expulsion was his only ready way of getting it. On the 30th

March 1492, less than three weeks before the signature of the agreement

with Colon, the dread edict against the Jews went forth. Religious

rancour had been inflamed to fever heat against these people, who were

amongst the most enlightened and useful citizens of the State, and whose

services to science, when the rest of Europe was sunk in darkness, make

civilisation eternally their debtor. They were said to carry on in

secret foul rites of human sacrifice, to defile the Christianity that

most of them professed, and Isabel’s zeal, prompted by the churchmen,

was already climbing to the point afterwards reached by her

great-grandson, Philip II., when he swore that, come what might, he

would never be a king of heretic subjects.

By the 30th July 1492 not a professed Jew was to be left alive in

Isabel’s dominions. With cruel irony, in which Ferdinand’s cynical greed

is evident, the banished people were permitted to sell their property,

yet forbidden to carry the money abroad with them. At least a quarter of

a million of Spaniards of all ranks and ages, men, women, and children,

ill or well, were driven forth, stripped of everything, to seek shelter

in foreign lands. The decree was carried out with relentless ferocity,

and the poor wretches, straggling through Spain to some place of safety,

were an easy prey to plunder and maltreat. It was a saturnalia of

robbery. The shipmasters extorted almost the last ducat to carry the

fugitives to Africa or elsewhere, and then, in numberless cases, cast

their passengers overboard as soon as they were at sea. It was said

that, in order to conceal their wealth, the Jews swallowed their

precious gems, and hundreds were ripped up on the chance of discovering

their riches. There was no attempt or pretence of mercy. The banishment

was intended, not alone to remove Judaism as a creed from Spain—that

might have been done without the horrible cruelty that ensued—but as a

doom of death for all professing Jews; for Torquemada had, five years

before, obtained a Bull from the Pope condemning to major

excommunication the authorities of all Christian lands who failed to

arrest and send back every fugitive Jew from Spain.[65] Isabel appears

to have had no misgiving. Her spiritual guides, to whom she was so

humble, praised her to the skies for her saintly zeal: her subjects,

inflated with religious arrogance, joined the chorus raised by servile

scribes and chroniclers, that the discovery of the new lands by Colon

was heaven’s reward to Isabel for ejecting the Hebrew spawn from her

sacred realm; and if her woman’s heart felt a pang at the suffering and

misery she decreed, it was promptly assuaged by the assurance of the

austere churchmen, who ruled the conscience of the Queen.

Leaving Talavera as archbishop, and Count de Tendilla as governor of

conquered Granada, Isabel and her husband, with their children and a

splendid court, travelled in the early summer of 1492 to their other

dominions where their presence was needed. Ferdinand, indeed, was

yearning to get back to his own people, who were growing restive at his

long absence, and for the coming war with France, it was necessary for

him to win the love of his Catalan subjects, who, at first, still

remembering his murdered half-brother, the Prince of Viana, had borne

him little affection. He had treated them, however, with great

diplomacy, respecting their sturdy independence, and had asked little

from them, and by this time, in the autumn of 1492, when he and Isabel,

with their promising son, Juan, by their side, rode from Aragon through

the city of Barcelona to the palace of the Bishop of Urgel, where they

were to live, the Catalans were wild with enthusiasm for the sovereigns

with whose names all Christendom was ringing.

Ferdinand nearly fell a victim to the attack of a lunatic assassin in

December, as he was leaving his hall of justice at Barcelona, and during

his imminent danger Isabel’s affection and care for him gained for her

also the love of the jealous Catalans.[66] Throughout the winter in

Barcelona Ferdinand was busy weaving his web of intrigue around France

and Europe, to which reference will presently be made, and in March 1493

there came flying to the court the tremendous news that Colon had run

into the Tagus for shelter after discovering the lands for which he had

gone in search. No particulars of the voyage were given; but not many

days passed before Luis de Sant’angel, the Aragonese Treasurer Gabriel

Sanchez, and the monarchs themselves, received by the hands of a

messenger sent by the explorer from Palos, letters giving full details

of the voyage.[67] No doubt as to the importance of the discovery was

any longer entertained, and when the Admiral of the Indies himself

entered Barcelona in the middle of April, after a triumphal progress

across Spain, honours almost royal were paid to him. He was received at

the city gates by the nobles of the court and city, and led through the

crowded streets to the palace to confront the sovereigns, at whose feet

he was, though he and they knew it not, laying a new world. With him he

brought mild bronze-skinned natives decked with barbaric gold ornaments,

birds of rare plumage, and many strange beasts; gold in dust and nuggets

had he also, to show that the land he had found was worth the claiming.

Ferdinand and Isabel, with their son, received him in state in the great

hall of the bishop’s palace; and, rising as he approached them, bade him

to be seated, an unprecedented honour, due to the fact that they

recognised his high rank as Admiral of the Indies. With fervid eloquence

he told his tale. How rich and beautiful was the land he had found; how

mild and submissive the new subjects of the Queen, and how ready to

receive the faith of their mistress. Isabel was deeply moved at the

recital, and when the Admiral ceased speaking the whole assembly knelt

and gave thanks to God for so signal a favour to the crown of Castile.

Thenceforward during his stay in Barcelona, Colon was treated like a

prince; and when he left in May to prepare his second expedition to the

new found land, he took with him powers almost sovereign to turn to

account and bring to Christianity the new vassals of Queen Isabel.

It is time to say something of Isabel’s family and her domestic life. As

we have seen, she had been during the nineteen years since her accession

constantly absorbed in state and warlike affairs; and the effects of her

efforts to reform her country had already been prodigious, but her

public duties did not blind her to the interests of her own household

and kindred; and no personage of her time did more to bring the new-born

culture into her home than she. She had given birth during the strenuous

years we have reviewed to five children. Isabel, born in October 1470;

John, the only son, in 1478; Joan in 1479, Maria in 1482, and Katharine

at the end of 1485: and these young princesses and prince had enjoyed

the constant supervision of their mother. Her own education had been

narrow under her Dominican tutors, and that of Ferdinand was notoriously

defective. But Isabel was determined that her children should not suffer

in a similar respect, and the most learned tutors that Italy and Spain

could provide were enlisted to teach, not the royal children alone, but

the coming generation of nobles, their companions, the wider culture of

the classics and the world that churchmen had so much neglected. And not

book learning alone was instilled into these young people by the Queen.

She made her younger ladies join her in the work of the needle and the

distaff, and set the fashion for great dames to devote their leisure, as

she did, to the embroidering of gorgeous altar cloths and church

vestments, whilst the noble youths, no longer allowed, as their

ancestors had been, to become politically dangerous, were encouraged to

make themselves accomplished in the arts of disciplined warfare and

literary culture.

Isabel, like all her descendants upon the throne, set a high standard of

regal dignity, and in all her public appearances assumed a demeanour of

impassive serenity and gorgeousness which became traditional at a later

period; but she could be playful and jocose in her family circle, as her

nicknames for her children prove. Her eldest girl, Isabel, who married

the King of Portugal, bore a great resemblance to the Portuguese mother

of Isabel herself, and the latter always called her child ‘mother,’

whilst her son Juan to her was always the ‘angel,’ from his beautiful

fair face. She could joke, too, on occasion, though the specimens of her

wit cited by Father Florez are a little outspoken for the present day;

and her contemporary chroniclers tell many instances of her keen caustic

wit. Her tireless and often indiscreet zeal for the spread of the faith

has been mentioned several times in these pages; but submissive as she

was to the clergy, she was keenly alive even to their defects, and the

laxity of the regular orders, which had grown to be a scandal, was

reformed by her with ruthless severity. Her principal instrument,

perhaps the initiator, of this work was the most remarkable

ecclesiastical statesman of his time, and one of the greatest Spaniards

who ever lived, Alfonso Jimenez de Cisneros.

A humble Franciscan friar of over fifty, living as an anchorite in a

grot belonging to the monastery of Castañar, near Toledo, after a

laborious life as a secular priest and vicar-general of a diocese, would

seem the last man in the world to become the arbiter of a nation’s

destinies; and yet this was the strange fate of Jimenez. When Talavera

was created Bishop of Granada, Isabel needed a new principal confessor;

and, as usual in such matters, consulted the Cardinal Primate of Spain,

Mendoza, who years before had been Bishop of Sigüenza, and had made

Father Jimenez his chaplain and vicar-general, because his rival

archbishop, that stout old rebel Carrillo, had persecuted the lowly

priest. Mendoza knew that his former vicar-general had retired from the

world, and was living in self-inflicted suffering and mortification; and

he was wont to say that such a man was born to rule, and not to hide

himself as an anchorite in a cloister. When, after the surrender of

Granada, a new royal confessor was required, Jimenez, greatly to his

dismay, real or assumed, was at the instance of the Cardinal summoned to

see the Queen. Austere and poorly clad, he stood before the sovereign

whom he was afterwards to rule, and fervently begged her to save him

from the threatened honour. In vain he urged his unfitness for the life

of a court, his want of cultivation and the arts of the world; his

humility was to Isabel a further recommendation, and she would take no

denial.

Thenceforward the pale emaciated figure, in a frayed and soiled

Franciscan frock, stalked like a spectre amidst the splendours that

surrounded the Queen; feared for his stern rectitude and his iron

strength of will. His mind was full, even then, of great plans to reform

the order of Saint Francis, corrupted as he had seen it was in the

cloisters; and when the office of Provincial of the Order became vacant

soon afterwards the new Confessor accepted it eagerly. Through all

Castile, to every monastery of the Order, Jimenez rode on a poor mule

with one attendant and no luggage; living mostly upon herbs and roots by

the way. When, at last, Isabel recalled him peremptorily to her side, he

painted to her so black a picture of the shameful licence and luxury of

the friars, that the Queen, horrified at such impiety, vowed to sustain

her Confessor in the work of reform. It was a hard fought battle; for

the Priors were rich and powerful, and in many cases were strongly

supported from Rome. All sorts of influences were brought to bear.

Ferdinand was besought to mitigate the reforming zeal of Isabel and

Jimenez, and did his best to do so. The Prior of the Holy Ghost in

Segovia boldly took Isabel to task personally, and told her that her

Confessor was unfit for his post. When Isabel asked the insolent friar

whether he knew what he was talking about he replied, ‘Yes, and I know

that I am speaking to Queen Isabel, who is dust and ashes as I am.’ But

all was unavailing, the broom wielded by Jimenez and the Queen swept

through every monastery and convent in the land; the Queen herself

taking the nunneries in hand, and with gentle firmness examining for

herself the circumstances in every case before compelling a rigid

adherence to the conventual vows. When Mendoza died in January 1495, the

greatest ecclesiastical benefice in the world after the papacy, the

Archbishopric of Toledo, became vacant. Ferdinand wanted it for his

illegitimate son, Alfonso of Aragon, aged twenty-four, who had been

Archbishop of Saragossa since he was six. But Toledo was in the Queen’s

gift, and to her husband’s indignation she insisted upon appointing

Jimenez. The Pope, Alexander VI., who had just conferred the title of

‘Catholic’ upon the Spanish sovereigns, was by birth a Valencian subject

of Ferdinand; and there was a race of the rival Spanish claimants to win

the support of Rome. But Castile had right as well as might on his side

this time, and, again to his expressed displeasure, Jimenez became

primate of Spain, and the greatest man in the land after the King who

distrusted him.[68]

From their births Ferdinand had destined his children to be instruments

in his great scheme for humbling France for the benefit of Aragon; and

Isabel, in this respect, appears usually to have let him have his way.

It was a complicated and tortuous way, which, in a history of the Queen,

cannot be fully described. Suffice it to say that when Ferdinand found

himself by the fall of Granada free to take his own affairs seriously in

hand, he had for years been intriguing for political marriage for his

children. First he had endeavoured to capture the young King of France,

Charles VIII., on his accession in 1483, by a marriage with Isabel, the

eldest daughter of Spain. Charles VIII. was already betrothed to

Margaret of Burgundy, but Anne of Brittany, with her French dominion,

was preferred to either, and then (1488) Ferdinand, finding himself

forestalled, betrothed his youngest daughter, Katharine, to Arthur,

Prince of Wales, to win the support of Henry Tudor in a war against

France,[69] to prevent the absorption of Brittany. All parties were

dishonest; but Ferdinand outwitted allies and rivals alike. Henry VII.

of England was cajoled into invading France; whilst Ferdinand, instead

of making war on his side as arranged, quietly extorted from the fears

of Charles VIII. an offensive and defensive alliance against the world,

with the retrocession to Aragon of the counties of Roussillon and

Cerdagne; and England was left in the lurch.

There is no doubt that the object of the King of France in signing such

a treaty was to buy the implied acquiescence of Ferdinand in making good

his shadowy claims to the kingdom of Naples, then ruled by the unpopular

kinsman of Ferdinand himself. As was proved soon afterwards, nothing was

further from Ferdinand’s thoughts than thus to aid the ambition of the

shallow, vain King of France in the precise direction where he wished to

check it. But in appearance the great festivities held in Barcelona on

the signature of the treaty in January 1493, heralded a cordial

settlement of the long-standing enmity between the two rivals. Isabel

took her share in the rejoicings; and rigid bigots appear to have

written to her late Confessor, Archbishop Talavera, an exaggerated

account of her participation in the gaiety. Isabel, in answer to the

letter of reprimand he sent her, defended herself with spirit and

dignity, after a preface expressing humble submission. ‘You say that

some danced who ought not to have danced; but if that is intended to

convey that I danced, I can only say that it is not true; I have little

custom of dancing, and I had no thought of such a thing.... The new

masks you complain of were worn neither by me nor by my ladies; and not

one dress was put on that had not been worn ever since we came to

Aragon. The only dress I wore had, indeed, been seen by the Frenchmen

before, and was my silk one with three bands of gold, made as plainly as

possible. This was all my part of the festivity. Of the grand array and

showy garments you speak of, I saw nothing and knew nothing until I read

your letter. The visitors who came may have worn such fine things when

they appeared; but I know of no others. As for the French people supping

with the ladies at table, that is a thing they are accustomed to do.

They do not get the custom from us; but when their great guests dine

with sovereigns, the others in their train dine at tables in the hall

with the ladies and gentlemen; and there are no separate tables for

ladies. The Burgundians, the English and the Portuguese, also follow

this custom; and we on similar occasions to this. So there is no more

evil in it, nor bad repute, than in asking guests to your own table. I

say this, that you may see that there was no innovation in what we did;

nor did we think we were doing anything wrong in it.... But if it be

found wrong after the inquiry I will make, it will be better to

discontinue it in future. The dresses of the gentlemen were truly very

costly, and I did not commend them, and, indeed, moderated them as much

as I could, and advised them not to have such garments made. As for the

Bull feasts, I feel, with you, though perhaps not quite so strongly. But

after I had consented to them, I had the fullest determination never to

attend them again in my life, nor to be where they were held. I do not

say that I can of myself abolish them; for that does not appertain to me

alone, nor do I defend them, for I have never found pleasure in

them.[70] When you know the truth of what really took place, you may

determine whether it be evil, in which case it had better be

discontinued. For my part all excess is distasteful to me, and I am

wearied with all festivity, as I have written you in a long letter,

which I have not sent, nor will I do so, until I know whether, by God’s

grace, you are coming to meet us in Castile.’[71]

This letter gives a good idea of Isabel’s submission to her spiritual

advisers, as well as of her own good sense and moderation, which

prevented her from giving blind obedience to them. Another instance of

this is seen by Isabel’s attitude towards the chapter of Toledo

Cathedral after the death of her friend Cardinal Mendoza (January 1495),

the third King of Spain, as he had been called. The Queen travelled from

Madrid to Guadalajara to be with him at his death, and tended him to the

last, promising, personally, to act as his executor, and to see that all

his testamentary wishes were fulfilled. Amongst these was the desire of

the prelate to be buried in a certain spot in the chancel of the

cathedral. To this the chapter had readily assented in the life of the

archbishop, but when he had died they refused to allow the structural

alterations necessary, and the matter was carried to the tribunals,

which decided in favour of the executors. The chapter still stood firm

in their refusal, and then the Queen, as chief executrix, took the

matter in her own hands, and herself superintended the necessary

demolition of the wall of the chapel at night, to the surprise and

dismay of the chapter, who no longer dared to interfere.[72]

On leaving Aragon after the signature of the hollow Treaty of Barcelona

(1493), Isabel and her husband took up their residence in the Alcazar of

Madrid, where, with short intervals, they remained in residence for the

next six years. During this period, spent, as will be told by Ferdinand,

in almost constant struggle for his own objects in Italy and elsewhere,

Isabel was tireless in her efforts for domestic reform. The purification

of the monasteries and convents went on continually under the zealous

incentive of the new Archbishop of Toledo, Jimenez: the roads and

water-sources throughout Castile were improved; the municipal

authorities, corrupt as they had become by the introduction of the

purchase of offices, and the effects of noble intrigue, were brought

under royal inspection and control; and this, though it improved the

government of the towns, further sapped their independence and

legislative power. The Universities and high schools, which had shared

in the universal decadence, were overhauled, and a higher standard of

graduation enforced: the coinage, which had become hopelessly debased,

in consequence of the vast number of noble and municipal mints in

existence, was unified and rehabilitated: sumptuary pragmatics, mistaken

as they appear to us now, but well-intentioned at the time, endeavoured

to restrain extravagance and idle vanity: measures for promoting

agriculture, the great cloth industry of Segovia and oversea commerce,

and a score of other similar enactments during these years, from 1494 to

the end of the century, show how catholic and patriotic was Isabel’s

activity at the time that Ferdinand was busy with his own Aragonese

plans. The annals of Madrid at this period give a curious account of

Isabel’s prowess in another direction. The neighbourhood of the capital

was infested with bears, and one particular animal, of special size and

ferocity, had committed much damage. By order of the Queen a special

battue was organised, and the bear was killed by a javelin in the hands

of Isabel herself, upon the spot where now stands the hermitage of St.

Isidore, the patron of Madrid.[73]

Ferdinand’s marvellous political perspicacity, and the far-reaching

combinations he had formed, now began to produce some of the

international results for which he had worked. The Treaty of Barcelona

had bound Ferdinand to friendship with France, and abstention from

marrying his children in England, Germany or Naples, and implied the

leaving to Charles VIII. of a free hand in Italy: but no sooner had

Ferdinand received his reward by the retrocession of Roussillon and

Cerdagne to him, than he broke all his obligations under the treaty.

Charles VIII. had marched through Italy, to the intense anger of the

native princes, and took possession of Naples, and then Ferdinand, in

coalition with the Valencian Pope, Alexander VI., formed the combination

of Venice, and Spanish troops under the great Castilian, Gonzalo de

Cordova, expelled the French from Naples, and set up the deposed

Aragonese-Neapolitan king, until it should please, as it soon did,

Ferdinand to seize the realm for himself.

This war was an awakening to all Europe that a new fighting nation had

entered into the arena. Already the proud spirit of superiority by

divine selection was being felt by Spaniards as a result of the

religious persecution of the minority, and the devotional exaltation

inspired by the example of the Queen: and under so great a commander as

Gonzalo de Cordova Spanish troops for the first time now showed the

qualities which, for a century at least, made them invincible.[74]

Whilst this result attended the policy of Isabel and her husband in

religious affairs, their action in another direction simultaneously,

whilst for the moment seeming to give to Ferdinand the hegemony of

Europe, really wrought the ruin of Spain by bringing her into the vortex

of central European politics, and burdening her with the championship of

an impossible cause under impossible conditions.

CHAPTER III

Amidst infinite chicanery and baseness on both sides the marriage treaty

of Isabel’s youngest daughter, Katharine, with Arthur, Prince of Wales,

had been alternately confirmed and relaxed, as suited Ferdinand’s

interests. But he took care that it could be at any time revived when

need should demand it. This made Ferdinand always able to deal a

diverting blow upon France in the Channel. But Ferdinand’s main stroke

of policy was the double marriage of his children, Juan, Prince of

Asturias, with the Archduchess Margaret, daughter of Maximilian,

sovereign of the Holy Roman Empire; and of Joan, Isabel’s second

daughter, with Philip, Maximilian’s son, and, by right of his mother,

sovereign of the dominions of the Dukes of Burgundy with Holland and

Flanders; whilst Isabel’s eldest daughter, already the widow of the

Portuguese prince, Alfonso, was betrothed to his cousin, King Emmanuel.

Imagination is dazzled at the prospect opened out by these marriages.

The children of Philip and Joan would hold the fine harbours of

Flanders, and would hem in France by the possession of Artois, Burgundy,

Luxembourg, and the Franche Comté; whilst their possession of the

imperial crown and the German dominions of the house of Habsburg would

identify their interests with those of Ferdinand in checking the French

advance towards Italy. On the other side of the Channel the

grandchildren of Ferdinand and Isabel would rule England, and hold the

narrow sea; whilst the friendship between England and Scotland, prompted

by Ferdinand, and the marriage of Margaret Tudor with James IV.,

deprived France of her ancient northern ally. The King of Aragon might

then, with the assurance of success, extend his grasp from Sicily to the

East, and become the master of the world. The plan was a splendid one;

and for a time it went merry as the marriage bells that heralded it.

With his family seated on the Portuguese throne, Ferdinand had,

moreover, no attack to fear on that side from French intrigue, such as

had often been attempted; and for a brief period it seemed as if all

heaven had smiled upon the astute King of Aragon.

Isabel had always been an exemplary mother to her children, who, on

their side, were deeply devoted to her. She had rarely allowed them to

be separated from her, even during her campaigns; and had herself cared

for their education in letters, music, and the arts under the most

accomplished masters in Europe.[75] When they had to be sacrificed one

by one for the political ends of their father, Isabel’s love as a mother

almost overcame her sense of duty as a queen, and in the autumn of 1496

she travelled through Spain with a heavy heart to take leave of her

seventeen-year old daughter, Joan, for whom a great fleet of 120 sail

was waiting in the port of Laredo, near Santander. The King was away in

Catalonia preparing his war with France; the times were disturbed, and a

strong navy with 15,000 armed men were needed to escort the young bride

to Flanders, the home of her husband, Philip of Burgundy, heir of the

empire, and to bring back to Spain the betrothed of Prince Juan,

Philip’s sister, Margaret, who, in her infancy, had been allied to the

faithless Charles VIII. of France. For two nights after the embarkation

Isabel slept on the ship with her daughter, loath to part with her, as

it seemed, for ever; and when, at last, the fleet sailed, on the 22nd

August 1496, the mother, in the deepest grief, turned her back upon the

sea, and rode sadly to Burgos to await tidings of her daughter.

Storms and disasters innumerable assailed the fleet. Driven by tempest

into Portland, one of the largest of the ships came into collision and

foundered; and though the young Archduchess received every courtesy and

attention from the English gentry, she was not even yet at the end of

her troubles; for on the Flemish coast another great ship was wrecked,

with most of her household, trousseau, and jewels. Eventually the whole

fleet arrived at Ramua, sorely disabled, and needing a long delay for

refitting before it could return to Spain with the bride of Isabel’s

heir.[76] Whilst Joan was being married, with all the pomp traditional

in the house of Burgundy, to her handsome, good-for-nothing husband,

Philip, at Lille, Queen Isabel, at Burgos, in the deepest distress, was

mourning for the loss of her own distraught mother, as well as for her

daughter.[77] Every post from Flanders brought the Queen evil news. The

fleet that had carried Joan over, and was refitting to bring Margaret to

Spain, was mostly unseaworthy: Philip neglected and ill-treated his

wife’s countrymen to the extent of allowing 9000 of the men on the fleet

at Antwerp to die from cold and privation, without trying to help them;

already his young wife was complaining of his conduct. Her Spanish

household were unpaid; and even the income settled upon her by Philip

was withheld, on the pretext that Ferdinand had not fulfilled his part

of the bargain, which was, of course, true.

At length, after what seemed interminable delay, the Archduchess

Margaret arrived at Santander early in March 1497. Ferdinand, with a

great train of nobles, received his future daughter-in-law as she

stepped upon Spanish soil, and a few days later Queen Isabel welcomed

her in the palace of Burgos, where, with greater rejoicing than had ever

been seen in Castile, the heir of Ferdinand and Isabel was married to

gentle Margaret, one of the finest characters of her time. Seven months

afterwards the Prince of Asturias, at the age of twenty-one, was borne

to his grave, and his wife gave birth to a dead child.[78] The blow was

one from which Isabel never recovered. Juan was her only son, her

‘angel,’ from the time of his birth; and the dearest wish of her heart

had been the unification of Spain under him and his descendants. The

next heiress was Isabel, her eldest daughter, just (August 1497) married

to King Emmanuel of Portugal, and the jealous Aragonese and Catalans

would hardly brook a woman sovereign; and, above all, one ruling from

Portugal, when Ferdinand should die.[79] Hastily Cortes of Castile was

summoned at Toledo, and swore allegiance to the new heiress and her

Portuguese husband as princes of Asturias in April 1498, but she, too,

died in childbed in August, when the heirship devolved upon her infant

son, Miguel, who, if he had lived, would have united not only Spain, but

all the Iberian Peninsula under one rule. But it was not to be, and the

babe followed his mother to the grave in a few months.

Troubles fell thick and fast upon Isabel and her husband. Death within

three years had made cruel sport of all their plans; and the support of

England, long held in the balance by Ferdinand, to be bought when it was

worth the price demanded, had now to be obtained almost at any cost. The

price had increased considerably; for Henry Tudor was as keen a hand at

a bargain as Ferdinand of Aragon, and closely watched events. With the

usual grasping dishonesty on both sides, the treaty for the marriage of

Isabel’s youngest daughter, Katharine, to the heir of England was again

signed and sealed, and the young couple were married by proxy in May

1499. But Katharine was young. Her mother could hardly bring herself to

part with her last-born, and send her for ever to a far country amongst

strangers; and she fought hard for two years longer to delay her

daughter’s going, with all manner of conditions and claims as to her

future life. At length Henry of England put his foot down, and said he

would wait no longer; and, worse still, he hinted that he would marry

Arthur elsewhere, and throw his influence on the side of Philip of

Burgundy, Ferdinand’s son-in-law, in the struggle that was already

looming on the horizon. Isabel and her daughter both knew that the

latter was being sent to serve her father’s political interests against

her own sister and brother-in-law; but, from her birth, Katharine had

been brought up in her mother’s atmosphere of uncompromising duty,

surrounded by the ecstatic devotion which demanded serene personal

sacrifice for higher ends; and, on the 21st May 1501, the Princess of

Aragon bade a last farewell to her mother in the elfin palace of the

Alhambra, to see her no more in her life of martyrdom.[80]

Isabel’s health was already breaking down with labour and trouble.

Disappointment faced her from every side, and as tribulations fell,

bringing her end nearer, and ever nearer, the stern religious zeal that

inflamed her grew more eager to do its work in her day. She had never

been a weakling, as we have seen. From her youth the persecution of

infidels had been as grateful to her sense of duty, as the crushing of

her worldly opponents had been satisfying to her love of undisputed

dominion. In all Castile, no man but her confessor, and he at his peril,

had dared to say her nay; but at this juncture, when health was failing

and her strength on the wane, there came to her tidings from across the

sea that turned her heart to stone. Joan, her daughter, had always been

somewhat wayward and rebellious at the gloomy, devout tone that pervaded

her mother’s life, and Isabel had coerced her, on some occasions by

forcible means, to take her part in the religious observances that

occupied so large a share of attention at the Spanish court.[81]

Joan was young and bright: the life in her palace at Brussels was free

from the gloom that hung over crusading Castile. Philip, her husband,

cared for little but pleasure, and, though he was but a faithless

husband, she was desperately in love with him. The new culture,

moreover, which had even found its way, with Peter Martyr, into Isabel’s

court, had, in rich, prosperous Flanders, brought with it the freedom of

thought and judgment that naturally came from the wider horizon of

knowledge that men gained by it, and doubtless the change from the rigid

and uncomfortable sanctimony of her native land to the gay and debonair

society of Flanders had seemed to Joan like coming out of the darkness

into the daylight. The Spanish priests who surrounded her sounded a note

of warning to Isabel only a few months after Joan had arrived in

Flanders. She was said to be lax in her religious duties: her old

confessor, who continued to write to her fervent exhortations to

preserve the faith as it was held in Spain, could get no reply to any of

his letters, and he learnt that the gay Parisian priests, who flocked in

the festive court, were leading Joan astray.

Isabel sent a confidential priest, Friar Matienzo, to Flanders to

examine and report on all these, and the like accusations. He saw Joan

in August 1498, and found her, as he says, more handsome and buxom than

ever, though far advanced in pregnancy; but when he began to press her

about religion, though she had plenty of reasons ready for what she did,

she was as obstinate as her mother could be in holding her own way. She

refused to confess at the bidding of the friar, to accept any confessor

appointed by her mother, or to dismiss the French priests who were with

her, and the friar sent the dire news to Isabel that her daughter had a

hard heart and no true piety.[82]

This was bad enough, but on the death of the Queen of Portugal, Isabel’s

eldest daughter and heiress, leaving her infant son as heir to the

united crowns, Philip assumed for himself and his wife, Joan, the title

of Prince and Princess of Castile. This was a warning for Ferdinand.[83]

Already Philip and his father, the Emperor Maximilian, had shown that

they had no idea of being the tools of Ferdinand’s foreign policy, but

if Philip of Burgundy successfully asserted Joan’s right to succeed her

mother as Queen of Castile, then all Ferdinand’s edifice of hope fell

like a house of cards, for most of Spain would be governed by a

foreigner, with other ends and methods, and poor, isolated Aragon, by

itself, must sink into insignificance.

When the infant Portuguese heir, Miguel, died, early in 1499, the issue

between Ferdinand and his son-in-law was joined. Isabel was visibly

failing, and it was seen would die before her husband, in which case

Joan would be Queen of Castile, in right of her mother. Philip, her

husband, with the riches of Flanders and Burgundy, and the prestige of

the empire behind him, would come, perhaps in alliance with the French,

and reduce greedy, ambitious Ferdinand to the petty crown of Aragon.

Thenceforward it was war to the knife between father and son-in-law, who

hated each other bitterly; and Isabel’s distrust of her daughter Joan

grew deeper as religious zeal and ambition for a united Spain joined in

adding fuel to the fire. With true statesmanship Isabel, under the great

influence of Jimenez, clung more desperately than ever to the idea of a

Spain absolutely united. Ferdinand’s object in working for the

consolidation of the realms had always been to forward the traditional

objects of Aragon in humbling France, but those of Isabel and Jimenez

were different. To them the spread of Christianity in the dark places of

the earth, for the greater glory of Castile, was the end to be gained by

a united Spain, and for that end it was necessary that the people should

be unified in orthodoxy as well as in sovereignty. The cruel and

disastrous expulsion of the Jews[84] served this object in Isabel’s

mind, though to Ferdinand its principal advantage was the filling of his

war chest. The squandering of Castilian blood and treasure in Naples and

Sicily was to Isabel and Jimenez a means of strengthening the Spaniards

in their future Christianisation of north Africa, whilst to Ferdinand it

meant the future domination of Italy, the Adriatic, and gaining the

trade of the Levant for Barcelona.

When Isabel and her husband went to Granada, after a long absence, in

1499, with the all-powerful Jimenez in his dirty, coarse, Franciscan

gown, the difference of view of the husband and wife was again seen. The

Moors of Granada had lived, since their capitulation, contented and

prosperous in the enjoyment of toleration for their customs and faith

under the sympathetic rule of the Christian governor, the Count of

Tendilla, and the ardent, but always diplomatic, religious propaganda of

Archbishop Talavera. If these two men had been allowed to continue their

gentle system for a generation, there is no doubt that in time Granada

would have become Christian without bloodshed, even if it had retained

its Arabic speech. But Jimenez and the Queen could not wait, and

determined upon methods more rapid than those of Talavera. In the seven

years that had passed since Granada surrendered to Isabel, the crown of

Spain had become much more powerful. The prestige and wealth of the

sovereigns had been increased; the discovery of America had considerably

added to the importance of Castile, whilst the expulsion of the French

from Naples had magnified Aragon. The Jews had been expelled from Spain,

and, above all, the Inquisition, under the ruthless Torquemada, had

raised the arrogance both of people and priests on the strength of the

stainless orthodoxy of Spain.

Jimenez doubtless felt that the circumstances demanded, or at least

excused, stronger measures towards the Moslems in Granada. He soon

persuaded or stultified Talavera, and set about converting the Moors

wholesale. Bribery, persuasion, flattery, were the first instruments

employed, then threats and severity. Thousands of Moors were thus

brought to baptism, with what sincerity may be supposed. Jimenez, a book

lover himself, and afterwards the munificent inspirer of the polyglot

Bible in his splendid new University of Alcalá, committed the vandalism

of burning the priceless Arabic manuscripts that had been collected by

generations of scholars in Granada. Five thousand magnificently

illuminated copies of the Koran were cast into the flames, whilst many

thousands of ancient Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic texts were sacrificed to

the blind bigotry and haste of Jimenez and Isabel, who, even in

learning, drew the line at Christian writings. From sacrificing books to

sacrificing men was but a step for Jimenez. Isabel and her husband had

sworn to allow full toleration to the Moors, but what were oaths of

monarchs as against the presumed interests of the faith? Soon the

dungeon, the rack, and the thumbscrew came to fortify Jimenez’s

propaganda, and, though the Moslems bowed their heads before

irresistible force, they cursed beneath their breath the day they had

trusted to the oath of Christian sovereigns.

The absence of Ferdinand and Isabel in Seville early in 1500, gave to

Jimenez full freedom; and soon the strained cord snapped, and the

outraged Moors rebelled. Like a spark upon tinder an excess of insolence

on the part of one of Jimenez’s myrmidons set all Granada in a blaze;

and the Primate was besieged in his palace, in imminent danger of death.

He acted with stern courage even then, and refused to escape until Count

de Tendilla with the soldiery dispersed the populace, and drove them

into their own quarter, the Albaicin. There they were impregnable, and

Tendilla, who was popular, with Talavera, even more beloved, took their

lives in their hands, and unarmed and bareheaded entered the Albaicin to

reassure the Moors. ‘We do not rise,’ cried the latter, ‘against their

highnesses, but only to defend their own signatures,’[85] and the

beloved Archbishop and Governor, who left his own wife and children in

the Albaicin as hostages of peace, soothed the Moors into quietude

almost as soon as the storm had burst.

The news flew rapidly to Seville, though Jimenez’s version was not the

first to arrive, and when he heard it, Ferdinand turned in anger to

Isabel. ‘See here, madam,’ he said, handing her the paper, ‘our

victories, earned with so much Spanish blood, are thus ruined in a

moment by the rashness and obstinacy of your Archbishop.’[86] Isabel

herself wrote in grave sorrow to Jimenez, deploring that he had given

her no proper explanation of what had happened; and after sending his

faithful vicar, Ruiz, to placate the monarchs somewhat, the Archbishop

himself appeared before the Queen and her husband. He was a man of

tremendous power. Over Isabel his religious influence was great, and he

proved now that he knew how to get at the weak side of Ferdinand. The

Moors, he urged, had been converted by thousands; and so far, his work

had been successful. But rebellion on the part of subjects could never

be condoned, no matter what the cause, and he appealed to both

sovereigns only to pardon Granada for its revolt on condition that every

Moor should become a Christian or leave Spain. It was a shameful

violation of a sacred pledge given only seven years before, but the

rising of the Albaicin was the salve which Jimenez applied to the

wounded honour of his Queen and King.

To Granada he returned triumphant, with the fell decree in the pocket of

his shabby grey gown. More converts flocked in than ever when the

alternative was presented to them. But up in the wild Alpujarras, the

Moslem villagers and farmers looked with hatred and dismay at the lax

townsmen abandoning Allah and his only prophet at the bidding of a

ragged, sour-faced priest who broke his monarch’s word. Like an

avalanche the mountaineers swept down from their fastnesses upon Malaga,

beating back the Christian force from Granada which came to rescue the

city. But Ferdinand from Seville and the greatest soldier in Europe,

Gonzalo de Cordova, hastened with an army to crush the desperate handful

who had defied an empire; and every Moor in arms, with many women and

children, were pitilessly massacred. The repression was carried out with

a savage ferocity and heartlessness only equalled by the despairing

bravery of the insurgents; but at last, by the end of 1500, the few who

were still left unconverted were brought to their knees: all except the

fierce mountaineers of Ronda, a separate African tribe, notable even

to-day for their lawlessness and indomitable independence. From their

savage fortress over the gorge they repelled one Christian force after

another, until Ferdinand himself, with vengeance in his heart against

all rebels, came with an army strong enough to crush them. A ruinous

ransom and instant conversion were dictated to them, and confiscation

and death, or deportation to Africa, for those who hesitated.

Then came the turn of Granada itself. Jimenez and the new

Inquisitor-General, Deza, the friend of Colon, demanded of Isabel and

Ferdinand the establishment of the Inquisition in the city. This was

considered too flagrant a violation of all promises; but what was

refused in the letter was granted in the spirit; and the Inquisition of

Cordova was given power to extend its operations over Granada. What

followed will always remain a blot upon the name of Isabel, who with

Jimenez was principally responsible. In July 1501, she with her husband

issued a decree forbidding the Moslem faith throughout the kingdom of

Granada, on pain of death and confiscation; and in February 1502, the

wicked edict went forth, that the entire Moslem population, men, women,

and all children of over twelve years, should quit the realm within two

months, whilst they were forbidden to go to a Mahommedan country.

Whither were the poor wretches to go but to Africa, opposite their own

shores? and some found their way there. This was a pretext a few months

afterwards for prohibiting any one to emigrate from Spain at all; and

such Moors as still remained in Spain had only the alternatives of

compulsory conversion or death.[87] By the end of 1502 not a single

professed Moslem was left in Spain; and Isabel, with saintly joy in her

heart, could thank God that she had done her duty, and that in her own

day the miracle had come to pass: the Jews expelled, the Moors

‘converted,’ the Inquisition scourging religious doubt with thongs of

flame; all men in very fear bowing their heads to one symbol and

muttering one creed. This was indeed a victory to be proud of, and it

made Spain what it was and what it is.

To Isabel, in broken health and sad bereavement, it was the one ray of

glory that gilded all her sorrow. Not the least of her troubles were

those arising from her new domain across the sea. The impossible terms

insisted upon by the discoverer had, as we have seen, been accepted with

the greatest unwillingness by Ferdinand, and probably with no intention

of fulfilling them; and when Colon began to prepare his second

expedition on a great scale, and thousands of adventurers craved to

accompany him, the King realised the danger that threatened his own

plans in Europe if such an exodus continued; and, at the same time, the

tremendous power that this foreign sailor, now Admiral of the Indies and

perpetual Spanish Viceroy, with riches untold, would hold in his hands.

So the process of undermining him began. The Council of the Indies was

formed to control all matters connected with the new domain, and the

priests that ruled it obstructed and thwarted the Admiral at every turn.

Isabel was mainly concerned in winning her new subjects to Christianity;

and four friars went this time in the fleet to baptise. All of them but

his friend Marchena were disloyal to the chief, and so were the crowd of

Aragonese who accompanied the expedition. Of the fifteen hundred

adventurers who at last were selected, the great majority were greedy,

reckless men whom the end of the Moorish war had left idle.

At first the news from Colon on his second voyage were bright and

hopeful. New lands, richer than ever, were discovered, and the prospects

of coming wealth from this source, whilst delighting the King, only made

the downfall of the Admiral more inevitable. But soon the merciless

violence of the colonists provoked reprisals, and every ship that

returned to Spain brought to Isabel bitter complaints of Colon’s

rapacity and tyranny; whilst he, on his side, denounced the want of

discipline, of industry, and of justice, on the part of those who were

rapidly turning a heaven into a hell. At length the complaints, both of

friars and laymen, against the high-handed Admiral of the Indies, became

so violent that the sovereigns summoned him to Spain to give some

explanation of the position. Colon saw the Queen at Burgos in 1496, and

found her, at least, full of sympathy for him in his difficulties, and

still firmly convinced that his golden hopes would be fulfilled. But the

reaction had set in against the extravagant expectations aroused by his

second expedition. The idlers, many of them, had come back disappointed,

fever-stricken and empty-handed, and had much evil to say of the

despotic Italian who had lorded over land granted by the Viceregent of

Christ at Rome to the Spanish sovereigns; and though Isabel herself,

full of zeal for winning all Asia, as she thought, for the faith, did

her best, the treasury was empty after the wars of Granada and Italy,

and the heavy expense of the royal marriages then in progress.

Amidst infinite obstruction from the Council of the Indies, and with

little but frowning looks from Ferdinand, Colon’s third expedition was

painfully and slowly fitted out. Few adventurers were anxious to go now;

and condemned criminals had to be enlisted for the service; but, withal,

at length in May 1498, the Admiral sailed on his third voyage to his new

land. When he arrived at his centre, the isle of Hispanola (Haiti), he

found that a successful revolt of the lawless ruffians he had left

behind had overturned all semblance of order and discipline. The mines

were unworked, the fields untilled, the natives atrociously tortured,

and violence everywhere paramount. Isabel’s verbal instructions to the

Admiral when she took leave of him had been precise. Her first object,

she said, was to convert the Indians to Christianity, and to carry to

them from Spain, not slavery and oppression, but the gentle, Christian,

virtues. This doubtless to some extent was the desire of Colon himself,

with his mystic devotional soul, though wholesale slavery of natives was

part of his system, and he set about his work of the reconciliation of

the Indians, whose horrible sufferings had driven them to armed

opposition or flight. The undisciplined Spaniards had the whip hand, and

the Admiral could only with much diplomacy, and perhaps unwise

concessions to them, at length bring some semblance of peace and order

to the colony. But mild as his methods were on the occasion, they were

bitterly resented by arrogant Spaniards, indignant that a foreigner

should wield sovereign powers over them in their own Queen’s territory.

Complaints and accusations more bitter than ever came to the King and

Queen by every ship. The men who returned to Spain assured Ferdinand

that Colon was sacrificing every interest to his own insatiable greed;

and Isabel, favourably disposed as she was to the discoverer generally,

at length lost patience when she found that he was shipping cargoes of

Indians to Spain to be sold for slaves. To enslave infidels was not

usually held to be wrong, and Colon considered it a legitimate source of

profit: but Isabel’s new subjects, mild and gentle as they were, had

been looked upon by her as actual or potential Christians, and her

indignation was great when she saw that Colon was treating them

indifferently as chattels of his own.[88] At length it was decided to

send an envoy to Hispanola, with full powers to inquire into affairs and

to take possession of all property and dispose of all persons in the new

territories. The man chosen thus to exercise unrestrained power was

Francisco de Bobadilla, probably a relative of the Queen’s great friend,

Beatriz de Bobadilla, Marchioness of Moya; but in any case an intolerant

tyrant, who considered it his business, as, by Ferdinand, it was

probably intended to be, to degrade the Admiral in any case. With

unexampled insolence and harshness, he loaded the great explorer with

manacles almost as soon as he arrived in Hispanola; and then, whilst

Colon lay in prison, the whole of the charges against him were raked

together, and, without any attempt to sift them judicially, were

embodied in an act of accusation, and sent to Spain by the same caravel

as that which carried in chains the exalted visionary, whose dream had

enriched Castile with a new world.

The shameful home-coming of Colon in December 1500, struck the

imagination and shocked the conscience of the people; and Isabel herself

was one of the first to express her indignation. She and Ferdinand were

at Granada at the time, and sent to the illustrious prisoner a dignified

letter of regret, ordering him at once to be released, supplied with

funds, and to present himself before them. The Queen received him in her

palace of the Alhambra, and as he stood before his sovereign, with his

bared white head bowed in grief and shame for the insult that had eaten

into his very soul,[89] Isabel lost her usual calm serenity and wept,

whereupon the Admiral himself broke down, and he cast himself at the

foot of the throne that he had so nobly endowed. The title of Admiral

was restored to him: though in his stead as Viceroy was sent out Nicolas

de Ovando, with thirty-two vessels and a great company of gentlemen. But

disaster overtook the fleet; and, though Ovando arrived, most of the

ships and men were lost, and thenceforward Isabel’s zeal for maritime

adventure grew cooler.

The cost and drain of men for the enterprise had been very great. The

fame of the discovery had rung through the world, and had exalted Isabel

and Castile as they had never been exalted before, but up to this period

the returns in money had been insignificant, whilst the unsettling

influence of the adventure upon the nation at large had been very

injurious. Ferdinand, for reasons already explained, always regarded it

coldly; and the loss of Ovando’s fleet seemed to prove him right. When,

therefore, Colon begged for the Queen’s aid to sail with a fourth

expedition early in 1502, she was unwilling to help; though she was

sufficiently his friend still to prevent others from hindering him; and

he sailed for the last time in March 1502, to see his patroness no more;

for when he came back, two years and nine months later, broken with

injustice, and with death in his heart, Isabel the Catholic was dead.

Even greater sorrows than those of America came to Isabel in her last

years, troubles that stabbed her to the very heart, and from which one

of the great tragedies of history grew. From Flanders came tidings of

grave import for the future of the edifice so laboriously reared by

Ferdinand and Isabel. The heiress of Spain, the Archduchess Joan, with

her cynical, evil-minded husband, Philip the Handsome, were daily

drifting further away from the influence of Joan’s parents. Dark

whispers of religious backsliding on the part of the Court of Brussels

were rife in the grim circle of friars and devotees that accompanied

Isabel. It was said that Joan and her husband openly slighted the rigid

observance of religious form considered essential in Spain, and that the

freedom of thought and speech common in Flanders was more to the taste

of Joan than the terror-stricken devotion of her Inquisition-ridden

native land. Isabel had dedicated her strenuous life and vast ability to

the unification of the faith in Spain. She had connived at cruelty

unfathomable, and had exterminated whole races of her subjects with that

sole object. Throughout her realms and those of her husband no heresy

dared now raise its head, or even whisper doubt; and the thought that

free-thinking, mocking Burgundian Philip, with his submissive wife, so

alienated from her own people that she refused to send a message of

loving greeting to her mother, should come and work their will upon the

sacred soil of Castile, must have been torture to Isabel. To Ferdinand

it must have been as bad; for it touched him, too, in his tenderest

part. His life dream had been to realise the ambitions of Aragon. For

that he had plotted, lied, and cheated; for that he had plundered his

subjects, kept his realms at war, bartered his children and usurped his

cousin’s throne. But it would be all useless if Castile slipped through

his fingers when his wife died, and his deadly enemy, his son-in-law,

became king of Castile in right of his wife Joan.

The difficulty became more acute when Joan gave birth to her son at

Ghent in February 1500, because, according to the law of succession, the

child christened Charles, a name unheard of in Spain before, would

inherit, not Castile and Leon alone, but Aragon as well, with Flanders,

Burgundy, Artois, Luxembourg, the Aragonese kingdoms in Italy, and,

worst of all, Austria and the empire. Where would the interests of

Aragon, nay, even of Spain, be amongst such world-wide dominions; and

how could such a potentate devote himself either to aggrandising Aragon,

or to carrying the Cross into the dark places of Moorish Africa? What

added to the bitterness in Ferdinand’s case was, that Philip was even

now intriguing actively with the Kings of France, Portugal, and England

against Aragon; and was, with vain pretexts, evading the pressing

invitations of his wife’s parents to bring her to Spain, to receive with

him the oath of allegiance as heirs of the realms.

It was necessary somehow to conciliate Philip and Joan before they went

too far; for Philip’s plan, to marry the infant Prince Charles to a

French princess, struck at the very root of Ferdinand’s policy. Envoy

after envoy was sent to Flanders to expedite the coming of Philip and

Joan, if possible, with the infant Charles; but the Archduke had no

intention of becoming the tool of his astute father-in-law, and was

determined to be quite secure before he placed himself in his power. He

was anxious enough to obtain recognition as heir of Castile jointly with

his wife, but desired to leave Spain immediately afterwards, which did

not suit Ferdinand, who wished to have time to influence him towards his

policy, and alienate him from his Flemish and French favourites.[90]

Joan herself flatly refused to come without her husband; of whom, with

ample reason, she was violently jealous; and neither would allow the

infant Charles to come without them. At length, after Joan had been

delivered of her third child, a daughter named Isabel, the prayers and

promises of Queen Isabel and her husband prevailed, and the Archduke and

Archduchess consented to come to Spain. But it was under conditions that

turned the heart of Ferdinand more than ever against his son-in-law.

They would travel to Spain through France, and ratify in Paris the

betrothal of their one-year old son Charles, heir of Spain, Flanders,

and the empire, with Claude of France, child of Louis XII. Philip went

out of his way during the sumptuous reception in Paris to show his

submission to the King of France; and even did homage to him as Count of

Flanders; but Joan, mindful for once, at least, that she belonged to the

house of Aragon, and was heiress of Spain, refused all tokens implying

her subservience.

On the 7th May 1502, Joan and her husband entered the imperial city of

Toledo with all the ceremony that Castile could supply. At the door of

the great hall in the Alcazar, Isabel stood to receive her heirs. Both

knelt before her and tried to kiss her hand, but the Queen raised them,

and embracing her daughter, carried her off to her private chamber. Soon

afterwards the Archduchess and her husband took the oath as heirs of

Castile in the vast Gothic Cathedral; and the splendid festivities to

celebrate the event were hardly begun before another trouble came in the

announcement of the death of Arthur, Prince of Wales, husband of

Isabel’s youngest daughter, Katharine. The event immediately changed the

aspect of the game. The next heir of England was a boy of eleven, who

might be married to a French princess, and thus cause one other blow to

Ferdinand’s carefully arranged schemes. This made it more necessary than

ever that Joan and Philip should be brought into entire obedience to

Spanish views. War broke out between France and Spain at once, and

strenuous efforts were made by Ferdinand to expel from Spain the

councillors of Philip, who were known to be in the French interest.[91]

The Archduchess and her husband were then taken to Aragon, to receive

the homage of the Cortes there as heirs of Ferdinand, and then Philip,

in spite of all remonstrance, hurried back again to his own country.

Isabel gravely took her son-in-law to task when he announced his

intention to return to Flanders by land through France whilst Spain was

at war. It was, she said, his duty to recollect, moreover, that he was,

in right of his wife, heir to one of the greatest thrones in the world,

and should stay at least long enough in the country to know the people

and their language and customs. To her entreaties the Archduchess, now

far advanced in pregnancy, and unable to travel, added her prayers and

tears. But all in vain; Philip, against the respectful protest even of

the Cortes, would go, and insisted upon travelling through France, the

enemy of Spain.[92] So, almost in flight, Philip of Burgundy crossed the

frontiers of his father-in-law, leaving his wife Joan and their unborn

child in Castile, in December 1502.

Never in their lives had Ferdinand and Isabel suffered such a rebuff as

this. That the man, who on their death would succeed them, was a

free-living German Fleming, who cared nothing for Spain, to promote

whose glory they had lived and laboured so hard, was bitter enough for

them. But that he should be so lost to all duty and respect towards them

and to their country as to leave them thus, to rejoice with the enemy in

arms against them, convinced them that under him and his wife Spain and

the faith had nothing to expect but neglect and sacrifice for other

interests. Isabel’s frequent conversations with her daughter Joan,

during the months she had been in Spain, had more than confirmed the

worst fears she had formed from the reports sent to her from Flanders.

Joan, though of course a Catholic, obstinately refused to conform to the

rigid ritual of Castile; and, both in acts and words, showed a strange

disregard of, and, indeed, captious resistance to, her mother’s wishes.

She was inconstant and fickle; sometimes determined, notwithstanding her

condition, to go and rejoin her husband, sometimes docile and amiable.

It had become evident to Isabel and her husband not many weeks after

Joan and Philip’s arrival, that these were no fit successors to continue

the policy that was to make Spain the mistress of the world and the

arbiter of the faith; and to the Cortes of Toledo, which took the oath

of allegiance to Philip and his wife, it was secretly intimated that the

Queen wished that, ‘if, when the Queen died, Juana was absent from the

realms, or, after having come to them, should be obliged to leave them

again, or that, although present, she might not choose, or _might not be

able to reign and govern_,’[93] Ferdinand should rule Castile in her

name. This was a serious departure both from strict legality and from

usage, and has been considered by recent commentators to indicate that,

even thus early, Isabel wished to exclude her daughter from the throne,

either for heresy or madness, or with that pretext. That Joan was

hysterical, obstinate, and unstable, is evident from all contemporary

testimony, and that she defied her mother in her own realm is clear from

what followed; but it seems unnecessary to seek to draw from these facts

the deduction that Isabel at this juncture meant to disinherit her

daughter _in any case_. Philip’s flagrant flouting of what Isabel and

her husband considered the best interests of Spain, and his laxity in

religion, as understood in Castile, furnished ample reason for the

desire on the part of Isabel, when she felt her health failing, to

ensure, so far as she could do it, that the policy inaugurated by her

and her husband should be continued by him after her death, instead of

allowing Spain to be handed over by an absentee prince to a Flemish

viceroy. The suggestion that Joan _might not be able_ to govern, even if

she was in Spain, was not unnatural, considering that her conduct, as

reported to Isabel from Flanders, had certainly been strangely

inconsistent, whilst her behaviour since she had arrived in Spain had

not mended matters.[94]

Joan gave birth in March 1503 at Alcalá de Henares to a son, who, in

after years, became the Emperor Ferdinand; and immediately after the

christening in Toledo Cathedral the Archduchess declared that she would

stay in Spain no longer, but would join her husband in Flanders. Isabel

humoured her as best she could, persuading her to accompany her from

Alcalá to Segovia, on the pretext that it would be more easy to arrange

there the sea voyage from Laredo. The Princess was held in

semi-restraint under various excuses for a time, but at last she

extracted from her mother a promise that she would let her go by sea

(but not through France, with which they were still at war), when the

weather should be fair, for it was still almost winter.

From Segovia the Queen took her daughter to Medina del Campo, as she

said, to be nearer the sea; but there the worry of the situation threw

Isabel into some sort of apoplectic fit, and for a time her life was

despaired of. Ferdinand was with his successful army on the French

frontier; and the physicians, in their reports to him of his wife’s

illness, attribute the attacks she suffered entirely to the life that

Joan was leading her. ‘The disposition of the Princess is such, that not

only must it cause distress to those who love and value her so dearly,

but even to a perfect stranger. She sleeps badly, eats little, and

sometimes not at all, and she is very sad and thin. Sometimes she will

not speak, and in this, and in some of her actions, which are as if she

were distraught, her infirmity is much advanced. She will only take

remedies either by entreaty and persuasion, or out of fear, for any

attempt at force produces such a crisis that no one likes or dares to

provoke it.’[95] This trouble, the doctor adds, together with the usual

constant worries of government, is breaking the Queen down entirely, and

something must be done. The Secretary, Conchillos, writing at the same

time, gives the same testimony. ‘The Queen,’ he says, ‘is better, but in

great tribulation and fatigue with this Princess, God pardon her.’[96]

Isabel soon had to travel to Segovia, after praying her daughter not to

leave Medina until her father returned. But she took care to give secret

instructions to the Bishop of Cordova, who had charge of Joan, ‘to

detain her, if she tried to get away, as gently and kindly as possible.’

Nothing, however, short of force would suffice to prevent Joan from

joining her husband, who, on his side from Flanders, constantly urged

her coming, and protested against delay.[97] At last Joan became so

clamorous that a message was sent to her from her mother, saying that

the King and herself were coming to see her at Medina, and ordering her

not to attempt to leave until they arrived. Joan seems to have taken

fright at this, and, horses being denied her, she attempted to escape

alone and on foot from the great castle of La Mota, where she was

lodged. Finding when she arrived at the outer moat that the gates were

shut against her by the Bishop of Cordova, she fell into a frenzy and

refused to move from the barrier where she was stayed. All that day and

night, in the bitter cold of late autumn, the princess remained

immovable in the open, deaf to all remonstrance and entreaty, refusing

even to allow a screen of cloth to be hung for her shelter. Isabel was

gravely ill at Segovia, forty miles away, but she instantly sent Joan’s

uncle, Enriquez, to pacify the princess and persuade her at least to go

to her rooms again. But neither he nor the powerful Jimenez, Cardinal

Primate of Spain, could move her, and at last Isabel, sick as she was,

had to travel to Medina, and prevailed upon her daughter again to enter

the castle, where she remained on the assurance of the Queen that she

should go and rejoin her husband in Flanders when the King arrived.

In the meanwhile peace was made with France, and Isabel and her husband

tried their hardest to persuade Philip to send the infant Charles to

Spain to replace his mother. Promise after promise was given that

Charles should go to his grandparents; but Philip had no intention of

entrusting his heir to Ferdinand’s tender mercies, and all the promises

were broken. Isabel’s death was seen to be approaching, and already a

strong Castilian party, jealous of Aragon and of the old King, was

looking towards Isabel’s heiress in Flanders and drifting away from

Ferdinand. The detention of Joan against her will at Medina was regarded

sourly by Castilians generally, and at length the scandal had to be

ended. In March 1504, the princess therefore was allowed to leave her

place of detention at Medina, and after two months further delay in

Laredo, took ship for Flanders, to see her mother no more.

No sooner was she safe in her husband’s territory than the plot that had

long been hatching against her father came to a head. In September 1504

Philip, his father Maximilian, Louis XII., and a little later the Pope,

joined in a series of leagues, from which Ferdinand was pointedly

excluded. It was intended as a notice to Ferdinand, that when his wife

died he would no longer be King of Spain, but only King of Aragon,

unable to hold what he had grasped; and, though the wily King fell ill

and was like to die at the news, he was not beaten yet, and in time to

come was more than a match for all his enemies. But Isabel was sick unto

death. A united orthodox Spain had been her life’s ideal. With labour

untiring she and her husband had attained it, and now she saw the

imminent ruin of her work through the undutifulness of her daughter’s

foreign husband. It was no fault of Isabel’s, for she had been

single-minded in her aims; but Ferdinand had been brought to this pass

by his own overreaching cleverness. In yoking stronger powers than

himself to his car he had enlisted forces that he could not control, and

which were now pulling a different way from that in which he wanted to

go. Those that he depended upon to be his prime instruments had been

removed by death, whilst those who he had hoped to make subsidiary

factors in his favour were now principals and against him.

The accumulating troubles at length, in the autumn of 1504, threw Isabel

into a tertian fever, which was aggravated by the fact that Ferdinand,

being also ill in bed, could not visit his wife. Isabel’s anxiety for

her husband was pitiable to witness; and though her physicians assured

her that he was in no danger, his absence from her bedside increased the

fever and threw her into delirium. Symptoms of dropsy, and probably

diabetes, since constant insatiable thirst and swelling of the limbs are

mentioned as symptoms, ensued, and for three months the Queen lay

gradually growing worse and worse. Rogations for her recovery were

offered up in every church in Castile, but by her own wish, after a

time, this was discontinued, and the heroic Queen, strong to the last,

faced death undismayed, confident that she had done her best, yet humble

and contrite. When the extreme unction was to be administered she

exhibited a curious instance of her severe modesty, almost prudery, by

refusing to allow even her foot to be uncovered to receive the sacred

oil, which was applied to the silken stocking that covered the limb

instead of to the flesh.

To the last she was determined that, if she could prevent it, Joan and

her husband should not rule in Castile as absentee sovereigns whilst

Ferdinand lived. Her will, which was signed in October, is a notable

document, showing some of Isabel’s strongest characteristics. She would

be buried very simply, and without the usual royal mourning, in the city

of her greatest glory, the peerless Granada; ‘but if the King, my lord,’

desires to be buried elsewhere, then her body was to be laid by the side

of his. Her debts were to be paid, and many alms distributed and

religious benefactions founded, and all her jewels were to be given to

Ferdinand, ‘that they may serve as witness of the love I have ever borne

him, and remind him that I await him in a better world, and so that with

this memory he may the more holily and justly live.’ What does not seem

so saintly a provision was, that all the royal grants she had given,

except those to her favourite Beatriz de Bobadilla, were cancelled on

her death. With a firm hand she signed this will later in October 1504,

providing in it also that her daughter Joan should succeed her on the

throne of Castile:[98] but before she died, almost indeed in the last

act of her life, her fears for Spain conquered her love for her

daughter. In a codicil signed on the 23rd November, three days before

her death, she left to Ferdinand the governorship of Castile in the name

of her daughter Joan; and enjoined him solemnly to cause the Indians of

America to be brought to the faith gently and kindly, and their

oppression to be redressed.

With trembling hands and streaming eyes she handed the codicil to

Jimenez, solemnly entrusting him with the fulfilment of all her wishes,

a trust which he obeyed far better than did her husband, and then Isabel

the Catholic had done with the world. Thenceforward she was serene;

eyewitnesses say as beautiful as in youth. ‘Do not weep,’ she said to

her attendants, ‘for the loss of my body; rather pray for the gain of my

soul.’

And so at the hour of noon, on the 26th November 1504, the greatest of

Spanish queens gently breathed her last, a dignified, devout, great lady

to the end. Days afterwards, when Ferdinand was busy plotting how he

could oust his daughter from her heritage, the body of Isabel was

carried across bleak Castile, with soaring crucifixes and swinging

censers, by a great company of churchmen to far away Granada, there to

lay for all time to come, under the shadow of the red palace that she

had won for the cross. As the velvet hearse with the body of the Queen

of Castile, dressed in death as a Franciscan nun, wound its way over the

land she had made great, the wildest tempest in the memory of man roared

her requiem. Earthquake, flood and hurricane, scoured the way by which

the corpse was borne: skies of ink by night and day for all that three

weeks’ pilgrimage lowered over the affrighted folk that accompanied the

bier, convinced that heaven itself was muttering mourning for the mighty

dead. But it is related that when at last Granada was reached, and the

Christian mosque received the corpse of its conqueror, the glorious sun

burst out at its brightest for the first time, and all the vega smiled

under a stainless sky.

Isabel the Catholic was a great queen and a good woman, because her aims

were high. She was not tender, or gentle, or what we should now call

womanly. If she had been, she would not have made Castile one of the

greatest powers in Europe in her reign of thirty years. She was not

scrupulous, or she would not have been so easily persuaded to displace

her niece the Beltraneja. She was not tender-hearted, or she would not

have looked unmoved upon the massacre or expulsion, in circumstances of

atrocious inhumanity, of Jews and Moors, to whom she broke her solemn

oath upon a weak pretext. She was none of these pleasant things; nor was

she the sweet, saintly housewife she is usually represented. If she had

been, she would not have been Isabel the Catholic—one of the strongest

personalities, and probably the greatest woman ruler the world ever saw:

a woman whose virtue slander itself never dared to attack; whose saintly

devotion to her faith blinded her eyes to human things, and whose

anxiety to please the God of mercy made her merciless to those she

thought His enemies.

BOOK II

JOAN THE MAD

On the same day (26th November 1504) that Isabel died, Ferdinand, with

sorrow-stricken face, and tears coursing down his cheeks, sallied from

the palace of Medina del Campo, and upon a platform hastily raised in

the great square of the town, proclaimed his daughter Joan Queen of

Castile, with the usual ceremony of hoisting pennons and the crying of

heralds: ‘Castile, Castile, for our sovereign lady Queen Joan.’ Then the

clause of the dead Queen’s will was read, giving to Ferdinand power to

act as King of Castile whenever Joan was absent from Spain, or was

unable or unwilling to govern, and enjoining upon Joan and her husband

obedience and submission to Ferdinand. Castile was in a ferment; for all

men knew that the death of the Queen opened infinite possibilities of

change. The Castilian nobles, so long humbled by Isabel, dared again to

hope that better times for them might come in the contending interests

around the throne; and there were not a few, especially Aragonese, that

counselled Ferdinand to claim the throne of Castile for himself[99] by

right of descent, instead of governing in his daughter’s name.

But Ferdinand’s way was always a tortuous one, and the letters from him

the same night that carried to Flanders the news of his wife’s death

were addressed to Joan and Philip, by the grace of God Sovereigns of

Castile, Leon, Granada, Princes of Aragon, etc., etc.’; whilst every

city in the realms was informed that henceforward the title of King of

Castile would be borne no more by Ferdinand, but only that of

Administrator for Joan.[100] The step was profoundly diplomatic, for all

Europe and half Spain was distrustful of Ferdinand, and the open

usurpation of Castile would have been forcibly resisted. And yet, as we

shall see, he intended to rule Castile; and in the end had his way.

Philip and Joan, in reply to their loving father, declined to commit

themselves as to Ferdinand’s proceedings, and announced their coming to

take possession of their realm of Castile. They were equally cool to

Ferdinand’s envoy, Fonseca, Bishop of Cordova, whom Joan had no reason

to love. In the meanwhile, Cortes was convoked at Toro (January 1505) in

the name of Joan; and there Ferdinand played his first card, by

claiming, under the clause in Isabel’s will, the right to govern Castile

until Joan should be present and demonstrate her fitness to rule.[101]

The nobles of Castile, already jealous of Aragon, were determined to

resist this, though the Cortes agreed; and Juan Manuel, the most notable

diplomatist in Castile, descended from the royal house, and Ferdinand’s

deadly enemy, was sent to Philip, over whom his influence was complete,

as the envoy of the Castilian nobles; thenceforward from Flanders to

animate and direct the diplomatic campaign against Ferdinand.

The situation thus became daily more strained. Ferdinand’s confidential

agents endeavoured to sow discord between Joan and her husband, not a

difficult matter; and on one occasion the Queen, in a fit of jealousy,

was persuaded by the Aragonese Secretary Conchillos to sign a letter

approving of her father’s acts. The messenger to whom it was entrusted

betrayed it to Philip, and Conchillos was cast into a dungeon; all

Spaniards were warned away from Court, and Joan completely isolated,

even from her chaplain. Thinking that in the palace of Brussels Joan was

too easy of access, Philip arranged that she should be secretly removed.

Whilst the Burgomaster and Councillors were discussing at dead of night

in the palace the details of the secret flitting, poor Joan herself

learnt what was in the wind; and being denied an interview with the

Spanish bishop who attended her, she peremptorily summoned the Prince of

Chimay. He dared not enter her chamber alone; but accompanied by another

courtier he obeyed the Queen’s summons. They found her in a violent

passion, and with difficulty escaped personal attack; with a result

that, though the Queen was not immediately removed, she was

thenceforward kept strictly guarded in her chambers, a prisoner.[102]

When news came of the decision of the Cortes of Toro that Joan was unfit

to rule, Philip prevailed upon his wife to sign a remarkable letter[103]

for publication in Castile. ‘Since they want in Castile to make out that

I am not in my right mind, it is only meet that I should come to my

senses again, somewhat; though I ought not to wonder that they raise

false testimony against me, since they did so against our Lord. But,

since the thing has been done so maliciously, and at such a time, I bid

you (M. de Vere) speak to my father the king on my behalf, for those who

say this of me are acting not only against me but against him; and

people say that he is glad of it, so as to have the government of

Castile, though I do not believe it, as the King is so great and

catholic a sovereign and I his dutiful daughter. I know well that the

King my Lord (_i.e._ Philip) wrote thither complaining of me in some

respect; but such a thing should not go beyond father and children!

especially as, if I did fly into passions and failed to keep up my

proper dignity, it is well known that the only cause of my doing so was

jealousy. I am not alone in feeling this passion; for my mother, great

and excellent person as she was, was also jealous; but she got over it

in time, and so, please God, shall I. Tell everybody there (_i.e._ in

Castile) ... that, even if I was in the state that my enemies would wish

me to be, I would not deprive the King, my husband, of the government of

the realms, and of all the world if it were mine to give.’...—Brussels,

3rd May 1505.

We can see here, and in the several reports sent, that Joan had little

or no control over herself. In the conflict, daily growing more bitter,

between her husband and her father, she swayed from one side to another

according to the influences brought to bear upon her. Her gusts of

jealous rage and frenzied violence gave to both sides the excuse of

calling her mad when it suited them to do so, or to declare that such

temporary fits were compatible with general sanity when they wanted her

sane. Joan’s affection for her husband was fierce, and monopolous, and

his influence over her was great, especially when he appealed to her

pride and her rights as Queen of Castile, but her sense of filial duty

was also high; and whenever she understood that a measure was intended

to be against her father, she indignantly refused to countenance it.

Ferdinand knew that the King of France had been enlisted by Philip and

Maximilian against him; and that an army was being mustered in Flanders;

whilst a project was on foot for Philip to come to Castile without Joan.

This he was determined to prevent; and warned his son-in-law that he

would not be allowed to act as King without his wife. To this warning

Philip retorted by ordering his father-in-law to leave Castile, and

return to his own realm of Aragon.

In this contest poor hysterical Joan was but a cypher, with her gusts of

jealous passion and her lack of fixed resolution. When she had arrived

in Flanders after her detention in Spain, she had discovered that her

husband, whose coolness she noted from the first, was carrying on a

liaison with a lady of the court. We are told that she sought out the

lady in a raving fury and seriously injured her; as well as causing all

her beautiful hair, of which she was proud, to be cut off close to the

scalp. This led to a violent scene between Philip and Joan, in which not

only hard words but hard blows were exchanged; and Joan took to her bed,

seriously ill both in body and mind. These scenes continued at

intervals, either with or without good reason, but with the natural

result that Philip in his relations with his father-in-law acted almost

independently of his wife; who, as Ferdinand afterwards said, was really

a good dutiful daughter, proud of Spain and her people.

Ferdinand had at his side at this juncture the great Cardinal Jimenez.

The stern Franciscan had been no friend of the King, who had opposed his

appointment as primate; but he was a patriotic Spaniard, and could not

fail to see that if Flemish Philip was paramount in Spain, the work of

Isabel for the faith would be in peril. Ferdinand, he knew, was an able

and experienced ruler, who would not greatly change the existing system;

and he threw all his powerful influence on the side of an arrangement

that might leave Ferdinand real power in Castile, without entirely

alienating Philip. Above all, Jimenez was determined to prevent the

ambitious Castilian nobles from again dominating the government; which

they hoped to do if an inexperienced foreigner like Philip took the

reins. It was, indeed, quite as much a struggle between Ferdinand and

Jimenez and the Castilian nobles, as between Ferdinand and his

son-in-law. But Jimenez’s patriotic efforts met with little success, so

far as Philip was concerned; and, in the meantime, Ferdinand, whilst

ostensibly solacing himself in hunting, was quietly planning a

characteristic stroke at his enemy.

He was fifty-five years of age and still robust, and he bethought

himself that he might yet win the game by a second marriage. It was

almost sacrilege to contemplate such a thing in the circumstances; but

to Ferdinand of Aragon any crooked way was straight that led him to his

goal. So he sent his natural son, Hugo de Cardona, to propose secretly

to the King of Portugal that the forgotten Beltraneja should leave her

convent and become Queen of Aragon, joining her claims to Castile to

those of Ferdinand and ousting Joan and Philip.[104] It was a wicked

cynical idea, for it made Isabel a usurper; but neither the King of

Portugal nor his cousin, the Beltraneja, would have anything to say to

it; so Ferdinand turned towards a solution, which, if not quite so

iniquitous morally, was even more inimical to the interest of Spain as a

nation. This was nothing less than to outbid Philip for the friendship

of the King of France, upon which he mainly depended to frustrate his

father-in-law’s plans. Ferdinand had broken all his former covenants

with Louis XII. The French had been turned out of Naples, and the great

Gonzalo de Cordova was there as Ferdinand’s viceroy. He was a Castilian;

and already Ferdinand’s spies had reported that the Castilian nobles, in

union with Philip and France, were tampering with Cordova’s loyalty and

endeavouring to establish the claim of Castile, instead of Aragon, to

Naples. Ferdinand, with what sincerity may be supposed, rapidly patched

up an alliance with Louis XII., by which the widowed King of Aragon was

to marry the niece of the King of France, Germaine de Foix, a spoiled

and petted young beauty of twenty-one. Any heirs of the marriage were to

inherit Aragon, Sicily, and Naples; but in the case of no children being

left, Naples was to be divided between France and Aragon; great

concessions were made at once to the French in Naples, and a million

gold crowns were to be paid by Ferdinand to France as indemnity for the

late war.

This, it will be seen, quite isolated Philip, threatened again to

separate Aragon and Castile, and at one blow to undo the work both of

Isabel and her husband. But as Ferdinand never kept more of a treaty

than suited him at the moment, it may be fairly assumed that he signed

this only to bridge his present difficulty and with such mental

reservation as was usual with him. When the news reached Brussels

Maximilian himself was there with his son, and they at once tried their

best to deal a counterstroke. When certain papers were presented to Joan

for signature denouncing to the Castilian people Ferdinand’s treaty and

second marriage, she stood firm in her refusal to sign. Philip exerted

the utmost pressure upon his wife; but at last, worn out by his and

Maximilian’s importunity, the unhappy lady burst into ungovernable rage,

flinging the papers from her and crying that she would never do anything

against her father. The isolation and close guard over the Queen was

indeed working its natural effect upon her highly wrought nervous

system; and Ferdinand’s ambassadors, who had come to announce his

marriage with his French bride, and to offer terms of friendship to his

son-in-law, were scandalised at the treatment of their Queen. When,

after much difficulty, they were allowed to see her at the palace of

Brussels it was only on condition that they should have no conversation

with her.

Shortly afterwards, in September 1505, Joan was delivered of a daughter

(Maria, afterwards Queen of Hungary and Governess of the Netherlands),

and Philip then decided that the time had come to carry her to Castile

and claim the throne. First issuing a manifesto to the Castilian nobles

and towns, ordering them not to obey Ferdinand in anything, he made

overtures to the King of France to allow him to pass overland to Spain.

This was flatly refused. The French princess, Germaine, was now

Ferdinand’s wife, and all the help that Louis XII. could give would be

against Philip and Joan. It was therefore decided to make the voyage by

sea, and a large fleet of sixty ships, with a retinue of three thousand

persons, was mustered in one of the ports of Zeeland. In the meanwhile

ceaseless intrigue went on both in Spain and abroad. France having

abandoned him, Philip turned to England. Juan Manuel’s sister, Elvira,

was the principal lady-in-waiting upon Katharine, Princess of Wales, and

through her and Katharine secret negotiations were opened for a marriage

between Henry VII. and Philip’s sister, the Archduchess Margaret, the

widow of Juan, Prince of Asturias and of the Duke of Savoy, with an

alliance between England and Philip—though Katharine probably did not

understand at first how purely this was a move against her father. So,

although Henry VII. still professed to be on Ferdinand’s side in the

quarrel, he was quite ready for a secret alliance with Philip and Joan

against him and the King of France.

The King and Queen of Castile left Brussels early in November to join

the waiting fleet, but from the slowness of their movements and the

ostentatious publicity given to them, it is clear that their first

object was to prepare Castile in their favour. Philip, for a time,

scouted all idea of arrangement with Ferdinand. He knew that the

Castilian nobles were on his side, and that his wife’s legal right was

unimpeachable. The wily old King of Aragon saw that his best policy was

to temporise, and to do that he must seem strong. His first move was to

declare to the Castilians that Joan was sane, but was kept a prisoner by

her husband, and he proposed to send a fleet to rescue her and bring her

and her son Charles to Castile. Philip’s Flemish subjects were

discontented at his proposed long absence, and also threatened trouble.

Then Ferdinand hinted that he would mobilise all his force to resist

Philip’s landing.

This series of manœuvres delayed the departure of Philip and his wife

month after month; until Ferdinand, by consummate diplomacy, managed to

patch up an agreement with Philip’s ambassadors at Salamanca at the end

of November; which, though on the face of it fair enough, was really an

iniquitous plot for the exclusion of Joan in any circumstances. Philip

and Joan were to be acknowledged by Castile as sovereigns, and their son

Charles as heir; but, at the same time, Ferdinand was to be accepted as

perpetual governor in his daughter’s absence: and in the case of Queen

Joan being unwilling or unable to undertake the government, the two

Kings, Ferdinand and Philip, were to issue all decrees and grants in

their joint names. The revenues of Castile and of the Grand Masterships

were to be equally divided between Philip and Ferdinand.

When once this wicked but insincere agreement was ratified there was no

further need for delay, and Philip’s fleet sailed for Spain on the 8th

January 1506 to engage in the famous battle of wits with his

father-in-law, which only one could win. All went well until the Cornish

coast was passed, and then a dead calm fell, followed by a furious

south-westerly gale which scattered the ships and left that in which

Philip and Joan were without any escort. To add to the trouble a fire

broke out upon this vessel, and a fallen spar gave the ship such a list

as to leave her almost waterlogged. Despair seized the crew, and all

gave themselves up for lost. Philip played anything but an heroic part.

His attendants dressed him in an inflated leather garment, upon the back

of which was painted in staring great letters, ‘The King, Don Philip,’

and thus arrayed, he knelt before a blessed image in prayer, alternating

with groans, expecting every moment would be his last. Joan does not

appear to have lost her head. She is represented by one contemporary

authority[105] as being seated on the ground between her husband’s

knees, saying that if they went down she would cling so closely to him

that they should never be separated in death, as they had not been in

life. The Spanish witnesses are loud in her praise in this danger. ‘The

Queen,’ they say, ‘showed no signs of fear, and asked them to bring her

a box with something to eat. As some of the gentlemen were collecting

votive gifts to the Virgin of Guadalupe, they passed the bag to the

Queen, who, taking out her purse containing about a hundred doubloons,

hunted amongst them until she found the only half-doubloon there,

showing thus how cool she was in the danger. A king never was drowned

yet, so she was not afraid, she said.’[106]

At length, mainly by the courage and address of one sailor, the ship was

righted, the fire extinguished, and the vessel brought into the port of

Weymouth on the 17th January 1506. Henry VII. of England had been

courted and conciliated by Philip for some time past, but it was a

dangerous temptation to put in the wily Tudor’s way to enable him to

make his own terms for an alliance. Above all, he wanted to get into his

power the rebel Earl of Suffolk, who was in refuge in Flanders, and this

seemed his opportunity. Philip had had enough of the sea for a while. We

are assured by one who was there that he was ‘fatigate and unquyeted in

mynde and bodie,’ and he yearned to tread firm land again. His

councillors urged him to take no risk, but Philip and Joan landed at

Melcombe Regis to await a fair wind for sailing again. From far and near

the west country gentry flocked down with their armed bands, ready for

war or peace, but when they found that the royal visitors were friendly

their hospitality knew no bounds. Sir John Trenchard would take no

denial. The King and Queen must rest in his manor-house hard by until

the weather mended; and, in the meanwhile, swift horses carried the news

to King Henry in London.

As may be supposed, when he heard the news, ‘he was replenyshed with

exceeding gladnes ... for that he trusted it should turn out to his

profit and commodity,’ which it certainly did. But Philip grew more and

more uneasy at the pressing nature of the Dorsetshire welcome. The armed

bands grew greater, and though the weather improved, Trenchard would not

listen to his guests going on board until the King of England had a

chance of sending greeting to his good brother and ally. At length

Philip and Joan realised that they were in a trap, and had to make the

best of it, which they did with a good grace, for they were welcomed by

Henry with effusive professions of pleasure. Philip was conveyed with a

vast cavalcade of gentlemen across England to Windsor, where he was met

by Henry and his son, the betrothed of Katharine, Joan’s sister. Then

the King of Castile was led to London and to Richmond with every

demonstration of honour. But, withal, it was quite clear that Henry

would not let his visitors go until they had subscribed to his terms,

whatever they might be. And so the pact was solemnly sworn upon a

fragment of the true cross in Saint George’s Chapel, Windsor, by Philip

and Henry, by which Suffolk was to be surrendered to his doom, Philip’s

sister Margaret, with her fat dowry, was to be married to the widowed

old Henry, and England was bound to the King of Castile against

Ferdinand of Aragon.

Joan was deliberately kept in the background during her stay in England.

She had followed her husband slowly from Melcombe, and arrived at

Windsor ten days later, the day after Philip, with great ceremony, had

been invested with the Order of the Garter and had signed the treaty. On

her arrival at Windsor on the 10th February she saw her sister

Katharine, though not alone, and Katharine left the next day to go to

Richmond. Three days later, on the 14th February, Joan set out from

Windsor again towards Falmouth, whilst Philip joined Henry at Richmond;

and soon after the King of Castile was allowed to travel into the west

and once more take ship for his wife’s kingdom. The cynical exclusion of

Joan from all participation in the treaty with England,[107] and the

fact that she was only allowed to see her sister once, and in the

presence of witnesses in the interests of Philip, seems to prove that

she was purposely kept in the dark as to the real meaning of the treaty,

which was directed almost as much against herself as against her father,

because, with England on his side, Philip could always paralyse France

from interfering with him in Spain; and it is clear that, whether Joan

was really incapacitated at the time or not, both Ferdinand and Philip

had already determined to make out that she was.

Like a pair of wary wrestlers the two opponents still played at arms’

length. Ferdinand, after celebrating his second marriage—as he had

celebrated his first, nearly forty years before—at Valladolid, awaited

at Burgos, so as to be near on arrival of his daughter and her husband

at one of the Biscay ports, as was expected. But nothing was further

from Philip’s thoughts than to land at any place near where Ferdinand

was waiting. His idea was to go to Andalucia, so as to be able to march

through Spain before meeting the old King, and to gather friends and

partisans on the way. Contrary winds, however, drove the fleet into

Corunna, on the extreme north-west of the Peninsula, on the 26th April;

and Ferdinand, when he got the news, for a moment lost his smooth

self-control, and was for flying at his undutiful son-in-law sword in

hand. But the outbreak was not of long duration, for the circumstances

were serious, and needed all the great astuteness of which Ferdinand was

capable. He was determined to rule Castile whilst he lived for the

benefit of his great Aragonese aims.

He had, indeed, some cause for complaint against fortune; for, with the

exception of the kingdom of Naples, he had not yet gathered the harvest

that he had reckoned upon as the result of the union of the realms. His

son-in-law, now that, by the death of other heirs, Joan had become Queen

of Castile, was an enemy instead of an ally, and his defection had

rendered necessary the pact between Ferdinand and France, which had

stultified much of the advantage previously gained by the Castilian

connection. At any cost Castile must be held, or all would be lost. If

Joan herself took charge of the government, as was her right, then

goodbye to the hope of Ferdinand employing for his own purposes the

resources of Castile; for around her would be jealous nobles hating

Aragon; whereas, with Philip as King, it was certain that his

imprudence, his ignorance of Spain, and the Castilian distrust of

foreigners, would soon provoke a crisis that might give Ferdinand his

chance. Both opponents, therefore, were equally determined to keep Joan

away from active sovereignty, whatever her mental state; and as Philip

and his wife rode through Corunna, smiling and debonair, gaining friends

everywhere, but surrounded with armed foreigners, German guards,

archers, and the like, strange to Spaniards, as if in an enemy’s

country, the plot thickened between the two antagonists.

Everywhere Philip took the lead, and Joan was treated as a consort.[108]

In the verses of welcome it was Don Philip’s name that came first; and

Joan showed her discontent at the position in which she was placed by

refusing to confirm the privileges of the cities through which they

passed until she had seen her father, though Philip promised readily to

do so. No sooner did Philip find himself supported by the northern

nobles, than he announced that he would not be bound by the treaty of

Salamanca, and generally gave Ferdinand to understand that he, Philip,

alone, intended to be master. Ferdinand travelled forward to meet his

son-in-law, making desperate attempts at conciliation and to win Juan

Manuel to his side, but without success: whilst Philip tarried on the

way and exhausted every means of delay in order to gain strength before

the final struggle. To Philip’s insulting messages Ferdinand returned

diplomatic answers; in the face of Philip’s scornful rejection of

advances, Ferdinand was amiable, conciliatory, almost humble; he who,

with the great Isabel, had been master of Spain for well nigh forty

years. But he must have chuckled under his bated breath and whispering

humbleness, for he knew that he was going to win, and he knew how he was

going to do it.

Slowly Ferdinand travelled towards the north-west, sending daily

embassies to Philip soliciting a friendly interview, and at every stage,

as he came nearer, his son-in-law grew in arrogance. When Ferdinand left

Astorga in the middle of May, Juan Manuel sent a message to him that if

he wished to see the King of Castile, he must understand three things:

first, that no business would be discussed; second, that Philip must

have stronger forces than he; and third, that he must not expect that he

would be allowed to obtain any advantage by, or through, his daughter,

Queen Joan, as they knew where that would lead them to. Therefore,

continued Manuel, King Ferdinand had better not come to Santiago at all.

In the meanwhile the inevitable discord was brewing in the Court of Joan

and Philip at Corunna. The proud Castilian nobles, greedy and touchy,

who had flocked to Philip’s side, found that Flemings and Germans always

stood between them and the throne, and intercepted the favours for which

they hungered. The Teutons, who thought they were coming to Spain to

lord over all, found a jealous nobility and a nation convinced of its

own heaven-sent superiority, ready to resist to the death any

encroachment of foreigners, whom they regarded with hate and scorn.

The Castilians deplored most the isolation of Joan, and endeavoured by a

hundred plans to persuade her to second her husband’s action towards her

father. Philip ceased now even to consult her, since she had refused to

oppose Ferdinand; and in the pageantry of the entrance into Santiago and

the triumphal march through Galicia, with a conquering army rather than

a royal escort, Joan, in deepest black garments and sombre face, passed

like a shadow of death. As the Kings gradually approached each other,

Ferdinand, in soft words, begged Philip to let him know what alterations

he desired to make in the agreement of Salamanca. After much fencing,

Philip replied that if his father-in-law would send Cardinal Jimenez

with full powers, he would try to arrange terms. The great point, he

wrote, was that of Queen Joan; and the King of Aragon knew full well

that upon this point the issue between him and Philip would be joined.

Ferdinand had little love or trust in the great Castilian Cardinal,

Jimenez, though the latter was faithful to him, not for his own sake,

but for the good of Spain; but the Cardinal went to Philip with full

powers, and bearing a private letter, saying that, as Joan was

incapacitated from undertaking the government, Ferdinand besought Philip

to join and make common cause with him, in order to prevent her, either

of her own accord or by persuasion of the nobles, from seizing the

reins. This was the line upon which Philip was pleased to negotiate, and

Cardinal Jimenez found a ready listener. Ferdinand, however, was ready

with the other alternative solution if this failed. If Philip would not

join with him to exclude Joan, he would join Joan to exclude Philip, and

all preparations were quietly made to muster his adherents at Toro, make

a dash for Benavente, the place where Philip was to stay, rescue Joan,

and govern, with her or in her name, to the exclusion of

foreigners.[109] But it was unnecessary. Jimenez’s persuasion and

Ferdinand’s supple importunity conquered; and, though with infinite

distrust and jealousy on all sides, the Kings still slowly approached

each other, stage by stage, whilst the negotiations went on.

The Teutons and Castilians were at open loggerheads now; Queen Joan,

reported Jimenez, was more closely guarded and concealed than ever, and

Philip less popular in consequence. But, at length, the two rival Kings,

on the 20th June 1506, found themselves in neighbouring villages; and on

that day at a farmhouse half-way between Puebla and Asturianos they met.

Ferdinand, in peaceful guise, was attended only by the Duke of Alba and

the gentlemen of his household, not more than two hundred in all, mostly

mounted on mules and unarmed; whilst Philip came in warlike array with

two thousand pikemen and hundreds of German archers in strange garments

and outlandish headgear, whilst the flanks of his great company of

nobles were protected by a host of Flemish troops. When Philip

approached his father-in-law, with steel mail beneath his fine silken

doublet, and surrounded by armed protectors, it was seen that his face

was sour and frowning, whilst Ferdinand, almost alone and quite unarmed,

came smiling and bowing low at every step. When the Castilian nobles

came forward one by one shamefacedly, to kiss the hand of the old

monarch they had betrayed, Ferdinand’s satiric humour had full play, and

many a sly thrust pierced their breasts, for all their hidden armour.

After a few empty polite words between the Kings the conference was at

an end, and each returned the way he came; Ferdinand more than ever

chagrined that he had not been allowed even to see his daughter.

For the next few days the Kings travelled along parallel roads towards

Benavente; Philip continuing to treat his father-in-law as an intruder

in the most insulting fashion. At length their roads converged at a

small village called Villafafila, at the time when the long discussed

agreement had been settled by their respective ministers; and here, in

the village church, the two rivals finally met to sign their treaty of

peace on the 27th June 1506. It was a hellish compact, and it sealed the

fate of unhappy Joan whatever might happen. Ferdinand came, as he said,

with love in his heart and peace in his hands, only anxious for the

happiness of his ‘beloved children,’ and of the realm that was theirs:

and, after warmly embracing Philip, he led him towards the little

village church to sign and swear to the treaty. With them, amongst

others, were Don Juan Manuel and Cardinal Jimenez, and when the treaty

was signed and the church cleared, the great churchman took the arm of

Manuel, and whispered, ‘Don Juan, it is not fitting that we should

listen to the talk of our masters. Do you go out first, and I will serve

as porter.’ And there alone, in the humble house of prayer, the two

Kings made the secret compact which explains the treaty they had just

publicly executed. In appearance Ferdinand gave up everything. He was,

it is true, to have half the revenues from the American discoveries, and

to retain much plunder from the royal Orders and other grants of money,

but he surrendered completely all share and part in the government of

Castile, and allied himself to Philip for offence and defence against

the world.

The secret deed, the outcome of that sinister private talk between two

cruel scoundrels in the village church, allows us to guess, in

conjunction with what followed, the reason for Ferdinand’s meek

renunciation of the government. ‘As the Queen Joan on no account wishes

to have anything to do with any affair of government or other things;

and, even if she did wish it, it would cause the total loss and

destruction of these realms, having regard to her infirmities and

passions, which are not described here for decency’s sake’; and then the

document provides that, ‘if Joan of her own accord, or at the instance

of others, should attempt to interfere in the government or disturb the

arrangement made between the two Kings, they will join forces to prevent

it.’ ‘And so we swear to God our Lord, to the Holy Cross, and the four

saintly evangelists, with our bodily hands placed upon His altar.’ And

the two smiling villains came out hand in hand, both contented; each of

them sure that the best of the evil bargain lay with him, and Ferdinand

made preparations for departure to his own Aragon, and so to his realm

of Naples and Sicily, delighted that his ‘beloved children’ should

peacefully reign over the land of Castile.

It was more than two years and a half since Ferdinand had seen his

daughter Joan. During that time both he and Philip had alternately

declared she was quite sane and otherwise, as suited their plans. Now

both were agreed, not only that she did not _wish_ to govern her

country: but that if ever she _did_ wish, or Castilians wished for her

to do so, then her ‘passions and infirmities,’ so vaguely referred to,

would make her rule disastrous. It ensured Philip being King of Castile

_so long as he lived_, and Ferdinand being master if he survived, and

until the majority of his grandson Charles. There is no reason to deny

that Joan was wayward, morbid, and eccentric; subject to fits of jealous

rage at certain periods or crises, and that subsequently she developed

intermittent lunacy. But at this time, according to all accounts, she

was not mad in a sense that justified her permanent exclusion from the

throne that belonged to her. Philip, heartless, ambitious, and vain,

wished to rule Castile alone, according to Burgundian methods, which

were alien to Spain and to the Queen. Ferdinand knew that, in any case,

such an attempt could not succeed for long; and by permanently excluding

Joan he secured for himself the reversion practically for the rest of

his life. And so Joan was pushed aside and wronged by those whose sacred

duty it was to protect and cherish her, and as Joan the Mad she goes

down to all posterity.

But old Ferdinand had not yet shot his last bolt, for symmetry and

completeness in his villainy was always his strong point. On the very

day that the secret compact was signed, he came again to that humble

altar of Villafafila, accompanied this time only by those faithful

Aragonese friends who would have died for him, Juan Cabrero, who had

befriended Colon, and his secretary, Almazan. Before these he swore and

signed a declaration that Philip had come in great force whilst he had

none, and had by intimidation and fear compelled him to sign a deed so

greatly to the injury of his own daughter. He swore now that he had only

done so to escape his peril, and never meant that Joan should be

deprived of her liberty of action: on the contrary, he intended when he

could to liberate her and restore to her the administration of the realm

that belonged to her: and he solemnly denounced and repudiated the

former oath he had just taken on the same altar. And then, quite happy

in his mind, Ferdinand the Catholic went on his way, having left heavily

bribed all the men who surrounded doomed Philip, including even the

all-powerful favourite Juan Manuel.

Philip lost no time. Before Ferdinand had got beyond Tordesillas, a

courtier reached him from his son-in-law giving him news of Joan’s anger

and passion when she learnt that she was pushed aside and was not to see

her father. What would Ferdinand recommend? asked Philip. But the old

King was not to be caught; he would not be cajoled into giving his

consent to Joan being shut up, but he sent a long sanctimonious

rigmarole enjoining harmony, but meaning nothing. Philip then appealed

to the nobles one by one, asking them to sign a declaration assenting to

Joan’s confinement. The Admiral of Castile, Ferdinand’s cousin, led a

strong opposition to this, and demanded a personal interview with the

Queen to which Philip consented, and the Admiral and Count Benavente

went to the fortress of Murcientes, where Joan and her husband were

staying. At the door of the chamber stood Garcilaso de la Vega, a noble

in Philip’s interest, and Cardinal Jimenez was just inside; whilst in a

window embrasure in the darkened room sat the Queen alone, garbed in

black with a hood which nearly obscured her face. She rose as Admiral

Enriquez approached, and with a low curtsey, asked him if he came from

her father. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘I left him yesterday at Tudela on his

way to Aragon.’ ‘I should so much have liked to see him,’ sighed poor

Joan; ‘God guard him always.’ For many hours that day and the next the

noble spoke to the Queen, saying how important it was to the country

that she should agree well with her husband, and take part in the

government that belonged to her. He reported afterwards that in all

these conferences she never gave a random answer.

The Admiral was too important a person to be slighted, and Philip was

forced to listen to some plain warnings from him. He must not venture to

go to Valladolid without the Queen, or ill would come of it: the people

were jealous already, and if Joan was shut up their fears would be

confirmed. So Joan was borne by her husband’s side to Valladolid in

state, though her face was set in stony sorrow beneath the black cowl

that shrouded it. Near there one other interview took place between the

two kings with much feigned affection, but no result as regards Joan. On

the 10th July 1506, Joan and her husband rode through the city of

Valladolid with all the pomp of Burgundy and Spain. Two banners were to

be carried before the royal pair, but Joan knew she alone was Queen of

Castile, and insisted that one should be destroyed before she would

start. She was mounted upon a white jennet, housed in black velvet to

match her own sable robes, and a black hood almost covered her

face.[110] Shows, feasts and addresses were arranged for their

reception, but they rode straight through the crowded, flower-decked

streets without staying to witness them; and this joyous entry, we are

told by an eyewitness, meant to be so gay, was blighted by an

all-pervading gloom, as of some great calamity to come.

On the following day the Cortes took the oath of allegiance to Joan as

Queen, and to Philip only as consort, and she personally insisted upon

seeing the powers of the deputies. The ceremonies over, Philip came to

business. Great efforts were made to persuade the Cortes to consent to

Joan’s confinement and Philip’s personal rule; and Jimenez did his best

to get the custody of her.[111] But the stout Admiral Enriquez stood in

the way, and insisted that this iniquity should not be, so that Philip

was obliged to put up with the position of administrator for his wife,

since he could not be King in her stead. Flemings, Germans and

Castilians, in the meanwhile, vied with each other in rapacity. Philip

was free enough with the money of others, but even he had to go out

hunting by stealth to escape importunity when he had given away all he

had to give and more. But of all the greedy crew there was none so

rapacious as Juan Manuel, little of body but great of mind, who, like

the Marquis of Villena forty years before, grabbed with both hands

insatiate. Fortresses, towns, pensions, assignments of national revenue,

nothing came amiss to Manuel, and at last his covetous eyes were cast

upon the fortress-palace of Segovia, still in the keeping of that stout

Andrés Cabrera and his wife, Beatriz de Bobadilla, Marchioness of Moya,

the lifelong friend of the great Isabel. Philip gave an order that the

Alcazar of Segovia was to be surrendered to Manuel. Surrender the

Alcazar! after fifty years of keeping! No, forsooth, said big-hearted

Dona Beatriz; only to Queen Joan will we give the fortress that her

great mother entrusted to our keeping.

And so it happened that Philip, with Joan still in black by his side,

rode out of Valladolid in August towards Segovia, to demand the fortress

from its keeper. When the cavalcade reached Cogeces, half way to

Segovia, Joan would go no further. They were taking her to Segovia, she

cried, to imprison her in the Alcazar, and she threw herself from her

horse writhing upon the ground, and refused to stir another step on the

way. The prayers and threats of Philip and his councillors, whom she

hated, were worse than useless, and all that night she rode hither and

thither across country refusing to enter the town. When the morning came

Philip learnt that Cabrera had surrendered the Alcazar of Segovia to

Manuel; and as there was no reason now for going thither, they rode back

to Burgos. As they travelled through Castile, brows grew darker and

hearts more bitter at this fine foreign gallant with his fair face and

his gay garments, who kept the Queen of Castile in durance in her own

realms, and packed his friends and foreign pikemen in all the strong

castles of the land. When Burgos was reached on the 7th September,

Philip deepened the discontent by ordering the immediate departure of

the wife of the Constable of Castile, an Enriquez by birth, and

consequently a cousin of Ferdinand, in order that Joan should have no

relative near her, although they lodged in the Constable’s palace. The

Admiral of Castile and the Duke of Alba were also attacked by Philip,

who demanded their fortresses as pledges of loyalty; and soon all

Castile was in a ferment, clamouring for the return of the old King

Ferdinand, and the liberation of their Queen Joan.

The King, not content with conferring upon his favourite Manuel the

Alcazar of Segovia, now entrusted to his keeping the castle of Burgos,

where it was determined to celebrate the surrender by entertaining

Philip at a banquet. After the feast the King was taken ill of a

malignant fever, it was said, caused by indulgence or over-exercise, and

Philip lay ill for days in raging delirium. Joan, dry-eyed and cool,

never left his side, saying little, but attending assiduously to the

invalid. At one o’clock on the 25th September 1506 Philip I., King of

Castile, breathed his last, in his twenty-eighth year: but yet Joan,

without a tear or a tremor, still stayed by his side, deaf to all

remonstrance and condolence, to all appearance unmoved. She calmly gave

orders that the corpse of her husband should be carried in state to the

great hall of the Constable’s palace upon a splendid catafalque of cloth

of gold, the body clad in ermine-lined robes of rich brocade, the head

covered by a jewelled cap, and a magnificent diamond cross upon the

breast. A throne had been erected at the end of the hall, and upon this

the corpse was arranged, seated as if in life. During the whole of the

night the vigils for the dead were intoned by friars before the throne,

and when the sunlight crept through the windows the body, stripped of

its incongruous finery, was opened and embalmed and placed in a lead

coffin, from which, for the rest of her life, Joan never willingly

parted.[112]

Joan, in stony immobility, dazed and silent, gave no indication that she

understood the tremendous importance of her husband’s death; but

courtiers and nobles, Castilians and Teutons alike, did not share her

insensibility. Dismay fell upon the rapacious crew, fierce denunciations

of poison,[113] scrambling for such plunder as could be grasped,[114]

and dread apprehensions as to what would happen to them all when the

King of Aragon should return. Joan had to be forcibly removed from the

corpse; and for days remained shut up in a darkened room without

speaking, eating, or undressing. When, at length, she learnt that the

coffin had been carried to the Cartuja de Miraflores, near Burgos, she

insisted upon going thither, and ordered an immense number of new

mourning garments fashioned like nun’s weeds. Arriving at the church,

she heard mass, and then caused the coffin to be raised from the vault

and broken open, the cerecloths removed from the head and feet, which

she kissed and fondled until she was persuaded to return to Burgos, on

the promise that the coffin should be kept open for her to visit it when

she pleased; which she did thenceforward every few days whilst it

remained there.

The Flemish chronicler, whom I have quoted several times, gives a

curious description of Joan’s jealous amorous obsession for her husband.

Philip is represented as being libidinous to the last degree, as well as

being the handsomest man of his time; whilst Joan herself is praised for

her beauty, grace, and delicacy. ‘The good Queen fell into such jealousy

that she could never get free from it, until at last it became a bad

habit which reached amorous delirium, and excessive and irrepressible

rage, from which for three years she got no repose or ease of mind; as

if she was a woman possessed or distraught.... She was so much troubled

at the conduct of her husband that she passed her life shut up alone,

avoiding the sight of all persons but those who attended upon and gave

her food. Her only wish was to go after her husband, whom she loved with

such vehemence and frenzy, that she cared not whether her company was

agreeable to him or not. When she returned to Spain, she would not rest

until all the ladies that had come with them were sent home, or she

threatened to make a public scandal. So far did she carry this mania,

that it ended by her having no woman near her but a washerwoman, whom,

at any hour that seized her caprice, she made to wash the clothes in her

presence. In this state, without any women attendants, she kept close to

her husband, serving herself like a poor, miserable woman. Even in the

country she did not leave him, and went by his side, followed sometimes

by ten thousand men, but not one person of her own sex.’[115]