Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire

by Leslie Carroll

  The exhausted Joanna was carried back to her chamber, flying into a hysterical rage. According to Isabella, Joanna “spoke to me with such severity and disrespect, so removed from how a daughter should speak to her mother that had I not seen the disposition in which she found herself, I would not have tolerated her words.”

  The queen assured Joanna that she had no intention de la decasar de su marido—“to separate you from your husband,” promising her daughter that she could return to Flanders on March 1, 1504. But crossing her formidable mother proved to have been a mistake. In retaliation, Isabella requested Philip to give the leading Burgundians “full authority to hold” Joanna and “restrain her in the things that her passion can make her do,” adding that they should deter her daughter from “anything that could endanger or dishonor her person” during the voyage.

  Within a month of Joanna’s arrival in Flanders that April, she suspected Philip of committing adultery with one of the noblewomen attached to the court. Joanna flew into a rage and exacted her revenge by ordering the woman’s gorgeous blond hair to be cut off. Philip then raised his hand to his wife. Did he hit her in the face—or merely threaten to do so? The chroniclers aren’t clear. Joanna fled to her room, remaining there for days, where she purportedly began mixing love potions from recipes provided by her Moorish serving maids. When Philip discovered her little laboratory, he dismissed the maids and confined Joanna to her chamber. She retaliated by going on a hunger strike. A few days later the royal couple patched up their differences, but soon the cycle of abuse began anew.

  On her deathbed, wily Queen Isabella checkmated her ambitious son-in-law, leaving a clause in her will that if Joanna were to “be unable or unwilling to govern,” then Ferdinand would do so until Joanna’s son Charles was old enough to rule. But Philip wasn’t about to blithely accept his father-in-law’s supremacy. If his wife was the queen, then he was going to claim the rights of succession, and the throne, on her behalf.

  However, the Cortes was the legislative body charged with approving the monarch. And after hearing the testimony of Martín de Moxica, one of the principals of Joanna’s household, regarding her allegedly unstable behavior—the “accidents, passions, and impediments that overcame the queen and had her outside her free will”—which therefore made her an unfit sovereign, the Cortes unanimously confirmed Ferdinand as guardian and governor of Castile. This created tension in the kingdom because the grandees, or aristocracy, preferred to support Joanna and Philip, who was a friend to the nobility.

  Between 1504 and 1506, Philip and his allies enforced Joanna’s silence. Wherever the couple dwelled, they kept her confined to her chamber, guarded by a dozen archers. When Philip and an elderly gentleman of honor visited her one day, she came after them with an iron bar. Philip ducked just in time, but the old man ended up clocked on the head. Then she brained her doorkeeper, “swearing she’d have them all killed.”

  Even taking into account her violent behavior, it still seems that Joanna wasn’t necessarily “mad.” What she was, was enraged.

  Philip had Joanna’s correspondence confiscated, laying the foundation for the legend of her outsized passion for him. A letter written by Pietro Mártire d’Anghiera, a humanist attached to the Castilian court, attests that Joanna was “lost in love” for her spouse. “Neither ambition for such kingdoms nor the love of her parents and other childhood companions would move her. Only attachment to the man whom they say that she loves with such ardor would draw her here.”

  It’s wildly romantic. But when one looks at everything Joanna endured and her behavior as time went on, one has to assume it’s simply not true.

  On September 15, 1505, Joanna gave birth to Philip’s fifth child, their daughter Mary. After all the mistreatment Joanna had endured at Philip’s hands and all the cruel measures he had devised to ruin her in every way, did she still want him sexually? Or by that time was the exercise of conjugal rights a dynastic duty? Was Joanna “mad for love”?

  In 1506, in Spain, Joanna and Philip were sworn in as the monarchs of Castile. It wasn’t long before the clues to her true state of mind began to emerge. After the past two years of marital and political discord (not to mention incarceration), Joanna acknowledged that her differences with Philip were irreconcilable. Far from being senselessly devoted to him, she recognized that the only way to thwart his political agenda and preserve her kingdom as her parents intended it to be ruled was to enter into an alliance with her father.

  In July the Cortes of 1506 refused to grant Philip a legal mandate for Joanna’s imprisonment after she told them that she supported her father’s right to rule Castile, agreed to dress in the Castilian manner, and refused to employ female attendants, “knowing the nature of her husband.” Presumably the legislative body found her testimony sensible. Philip didn’t much like the decision of the Castilian Cortes, so he went venue shopping and insisted that the decision be rendered from Valladolid. There on July 12, the Cortes declared both Philip and Joanna to be the true and legitimate rulers “of these said kingdoms and lands.”

  No better case can be made that Joanna’s overweening passion for her spouse was merely mythological than the document Philip’s supporters subsequently presented to Joanna for her signature, which stated that if she were mad, she authorized no one else but her husband to rule her kingdom on her behalf because of the great love she bore him.

  Joanna crossed out that sentence.

  So Philip’s advocates stetted it and presented it to her again.

  And Joanna deleted it.

  Evidently Joanna, who was in frequent conflict with Philip by that point, objected strenuously to the word “love.” But finally, after five rounds of the same two edits, Joanna’s signature appeared on the document, ostensibly endorsing Philip’s takeover.

  However, the signature was probably forged; it does not match her acknowledged signature on forty-four other documents. It was also known at the time that Joanna supported her father’s—and not Philip’s—claim to the stewardship of the Spanish crown. One of her primary aims as queen was to restore the patrimonial lands and revenues to the crown that her husband had illegally distributed among the Spanish nobility in order to purchase their loyalty. So for obvious reasons, the grandees were not keen to enforce her orders. Consequently, measures were frequently dispatched without her signature or her approval.

  Ferdinand suspected forgery and threatened to publish a list of grievances against Philip if he didn’t start treating Joanna with more dignity. By this point the couple was back in Brussels and Joanna was once again being kept in isolation by her husband, who informed her father that she preferred not to receive visitors. It was a tactic that might have played well long-distance, but not in person. Philip must have acknowledged that it might be a tad inappropriate to imprison his wife in their own home, especially when company came to call, because on August 24, 1506, not too long after their return to Burgundy, he permitted Joanna to emerge from her enforced incarceration in order to welcome her father-in-law, Emperor Maximilian. During the emperor’s visit, Joanna was highly social, attending jousts and other celebratory events, where the Venetian ambassador Vicentio Quirini noted that she was “molto bella” with the manner of “a wise and prudent lady.” It would seem that Joanna only showed symptoms of “madness” when she was in captivity.

  Or when Philip betrayed her.

  But it had also been a mistake to have allied with her father after Queen Isabella’s death, because Ferdinand proved just as capable of deceiving her.

  Without consulting Joanna, Philip and Ferdinand negotiated an arrangement for the government of Castile. Their ultimate goal was to have her declared incompetent to rule.

  Philip obtained the legal authority to govern in her stead, but his victory was short-lived. During their visit to Burgos that September Philip hosted a lavish banquet for one of his local supporters. After drinking a considerable amount of cool water he came down with a fever and chills. A few days later, he could bar
ely speak, was sweating profusely, and was incapable of swallowing. One chronicler, referring to Philip’s fondness for gaming and women, wrote, “through bad government, he passed from this life to the next.” Joanna remained by his bedside, nursing him day and night, but the twenty-eight-year-old “Philip the Handsome” died of typhus fever on September 25. He had wished to be buried in the royal chapel in Granada; Joanna, pregnant with their sixth child, was determined to fulfill his final desire to inter him alongside the Spanish monarchs.

  So, on December 20, Joanna traveled to the Convent at Miraflores, where her husband’s body had been temporarily interred. She ordered his coffin opened and had some noblemen identify the putrefying remains. Satisfied that she had the right corpse, Joanna began the journey to Granada with Philip’s coffin. A cortege of soldiers and priests accompanied the royal entourage. They traveled only by night. During the day, the lengthy procession stopped only at monasteries (Joanna refused to take refuge in convents), and though he had been dead for three months, she would not allow any women, whether lay or in orders, near her husband. She was described as being “lost, without any sense,” although her secretary, Juan Lopez, insisted that Joanna was “more sane than her mother,” a telling declaration, considering that Isabella of Spain had been one of the most pragmatic, capable, and respected women in Europe.

  In January 1507, during her pilgrimage to Granada with Philip’s corpse, Joanna went into labor. Shunning help from midwives, she delivered her daughter Catalina alone. Philip’s coffin was placed for safekeeping before the altar in a nearby church. It remained there for four months until Joanna resumed her journey. When a storm forced the cortege to take refuge in a village, Joanna insisted on resting there for another few months before continuing on to Granada. Each time they stopped, Joanna purportedly had the coffin opened for a body check. But it was not love that motivated each of these “reveals.” It was politics.

  Perpetuating the myth that Joanna was mad for love, an anonymous Bulgarian chronicler wrote that she visited her husband’s corpse every day and kissed its feet—a lurid narrative that assumed legendary proportions. The general belief was that Joanna’s passion for her husband had made her so nuts that she couldn’t function—which of course meant that she couldn’t govern.

  Joanna was crazy, all right—crazy like a fox. To paraphrase Hamlet, she knew a hawk from a handsaw. She refused to contradict the colorful rumors about her behavior because it was politically advantageous for her to let them spread. After Philip’s death Joanna had two goals: to avoid a second marriage—which would have prejudiced her children by Philip—and to secure their children’s inheritance. Only by sticking close to Philip’s coffin could Joanna secure the succession for their oldest son, Charles, once Ferdinand died. From December 1506 to August 1507, Joanna made four nocturnal torchlight pilgrimages with Philip’s coffin. She had it opened at each stop for the express purpose of showing his body to their subjects. It was all a giant display of sham devotion to reinforce the fact that young Charles was a direct descendant of Ferdinand, not just through Joanna, but through Philip as well.

  In any case, the party was over when Ferdinand returned from a trip to Naples in August 1507. Warned that the Spanish nobles might withdraw their support from him, after Joanna deposited Philip’s coffin in the Royal Monastery of Saint Clare he confined her to the adjacent palace at Tordesillas, a small town in central Castile.

  Resisting her father’s authority, Joanna refused to bathe or change her clothes and insisted on eating off the floor. Whatever her reasons, if she had any, the result was the widespread report that she was incapable of governing her own person, much less the kingdom. As the months wore on, Joanna became an ascetic, following the model of Saint Clare, “who never had a bed or a mattress or anything soft” and who “always went almost naked and barefoot.” As this was conduct unbecoming a monarch, the Spanish nobles became suspicious of Ferdinand’s motives. After all, he had once imprisoned her at La Mota.

  Among those who dared to question the legitimacy of Joanna’s insanity was the widowed Henry VII of England, who was mulling over the idea of asking Joanna to marry him. When the Spanish ambassador, Fuensalida, advised Henry that the young woman was probably in no mental condition to wed anyone, the English king replied, “Tell me, ambassador, is the Queen such as they say she is? If what they say is true, God defend that I should marry her for three kingdoms such as hers, but there are those who say it is your King who keeps her shut up and spreads this rumor about her. Indeed, I have reports from Spain that she listens and replies rationally and seems quite normal. When I saw her two years ago, her husband and some of his council were giving it out that she was mad, but at that time she seemed very well to me, and she spoke with a good manner and countenance, without losing a point of her authority. And although her husband and those who came with him depicted her as crazy, I did not see her as other than sane then, and I think her sane now.” To this passionate and reasoned defense of Joanna’s lucidity, Fuensalida could only stammer that the fifty-one-year-old Henry was too old to toy with thoughts of remarrying.

  A veil of secrecy shrouded the events behind the thick stone walls of Tordesillas, and no one was permitted access to the twenty-seven-year-old queen. Joanna’s older children remained in Flanders with Philip’s sister, Margaret of Austria. Little Catalina, Joanna’s last connection with her husband, was her sole source of comfort, confined with her mother and two female servants.

  A 1509 accord officially deprived Joanna of the right to exercise any royal authority. She became ruler of Castile in name only. Until his death on January 23, 1516, Ferdinand autocratically ruled Spain. Not long after that, on March 14, Joanna’s sixteen-year-old son, Charles, still in Brussels, assumed the titles of King of Castile y Leon, and Aragon.

  Accompanied by his sister Leanor, Charles arrived in Spain in 1517, with the intention of ruling Aragon and Castile. However, this was technically impossible while his mother still lived. So he continued to keep Joanna imprisoned, preventing her from being seen in public, writing to her governor, the Marquis of Denia, “It seems to me that the best and most suitable thing for you to do is to make sure that no person speaks with Her Majesty, for no good could come of it.” Her meals of bread and cheese were usually left outside her door because she refused to eat in the presence of anyone.

  Charles even prevented his mother from evacuating the castle during an outbreak of the plague. To maintain her isolation during the pestilence, Joanna was told that the disease had ravaged and depopulated the outlying lands. In order to make the lie more convincing, Charles instructed the marquis to stage mock funeral processions around the palace several times a day.

  What better device to drive a person crazy than solitary confinement, a starvation diet, and a systematic attempt to alter her reality?

  For forty-seven years—from 1509 to 1555—Joanna of Castile, Queen of Spain, was locked away in a chamber with no natural light. Her jailers, guards hired by her own son and governed by the Marquis of Denia, were allowed to make use of “the strap” either to beat or bind her if they deemed it necessary. But if she were really mad—and dangerously so—to begin with, Charles and his minions would probably not have left his youngest sister in Joanna’s care. Although Joanna was undeniably moody, prone to melancholy, and was capable of extreme fits of temper, her behavior does not appear synonymous with an incapacitating madness that deprived her of all reason.

  On April 12, 1555, death took the seventy-five-year-old Joanna out of her misery. By that point, she was paralyzed from the waist down and her legs were covered with gangrenous ulcers. Technically, she had been Queen of Castile for more than fifty years. All of her six children had lived to adulthood—a Renaissance rarity—and each one had become a monarch. Charles of course became King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor; his younger brother, Ferdinand, succeeded him as Holy Roman Emperor. The daughters of Philip and Joanna—Leanor, Isabel, Mary, and Catalina—became the queens of France, Denmark
, Bohemia, and Portugal, respectively.

  Joanna was interred beside the palace of Tordesillas at Saint Clare’s, where her husband’s corpse had rested for forty-eight years.

  By a 1574 order of their grandson, Philip II of Spain, Philip’s and Joanna’s coffins were moved to the Royal Chapel at Granada, where they still rest beside the tombs of Ferdinand and Isabella. Poor Joanna was betrayed and/or abandoned by everyone who mattered in her life, beginning and ending with her family members; and if she wasn’t “mad” to begin with, their cruelty would have been enough to destabilize her. Yet it’s hard to imagine that she would ever want to lie anywhere else for all eternity except alongside them. “Loca,” or merely livid, she was still a Queen of Spain.

  ARTHUR, PRINCE OF WALES 1486-1502

  and

  KATHERINE OF ARAGON

  1485-1536

  married 1501-1502

  “Willoughby, bring me a cup of ale, for I have been this night in the midst of Spain.”

  —Arthur, Prince of Wales to his steward on the morning of November 15, 1501

  “... as intact and uncorrupt as when [she] emerged from [her] mother’s womb.”

  —Katherine of Aragon’s assertion regarding the non-consummation of her marriage to Arthur

  AFTER TWO YEARS OF NEGOTIATIONS, BY THE TREATY of Medina del Campo ratified by Henry VII of England on September 23, 1490, his four-year-old son, Arthur, the Prince of Wales and heir to England’s throne, was contracted in marriage to Catalina, or Katherine, the youngest daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. Half of Katherine’s dowry was to be paid upon her arrival in England and the balance upon her marriage—which left the Catholic Monarchs a lengthy gap of time before they would have to finance the second installment, as Katherine—thereafter styled as the Princess of Wales—was all of five years old.