Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  Given the tenor of the times, Enrique’s methods of war-making also made him a laughingstock. Much of the practice of war in those days entailed one side doing economic damage to the other—setting fire to their crops and killing their livestock—opening the prospect that the weaker side would pay bribes to make the marauding soldiers go away. Part of the pleasure of the enterprise was permitting people to undertake activities that would never be tolerated in peaceful times. Young men in particular relished the chance to display their machismo through daring acts of vandalism that took them into contact with the enemy. But Enrique commanded that they were not to burn down olive groves, because they took too long to grow and bear fruit. He lectured his troops on the preciousness of both human and natural life, leaving his soldiers “incredulous.”31

  During those years, Enrique’s younger half siblings Isabella and Alfonso remained in Arévalo with their mother, grandmother, and family friends. Alfonso had a special role as heir to the throne, but the close-knit group continued to live apart, in their own little world, hearing only distant reports from the front. The same core group of adults—grandmother Isabel, the Bobadilla family, and Gonzalo Chacón and his wife—shielded and sheltered them and gave them a sense of security and stability.

  As Isabella left behind her early childhood years, she became interested in hearing stories about other girls and their lives, as girls her age often are. Fascinating news came from France when Isabella was about five. Europe was engaged in an intense reevaluation of the role of Joan of Arc, the French teenager who had organized her countrymen around a religious banner to eject a foreign invader. Joan, born in a small village, believed she had been told by visions of saints to rally the French people against the English, in defense of the heir to the French throne, the Dauphin Charles. Joan had shamed her countrymen into seeing war not as an economic enterprise or as a demonstration of valor but as a spiritual quest. Joan was caught by the English and burned at the stake for the heresy, in 1431, two decades before Isabella was born.32 The specific charge was that at war and in prison, Joan had worn men’s clothes, something that is prohibited in the book of Deuteronomy. The French government convened a second trial in 1456 that reevaluated all the evidence, cleared Joan’s name, and paved the way for her eventual elevation to sainthood. Joan’s experience and sacrifice was a story that many men and women of a spiritual bent found mesmerizing in these last days of the medieval era. People everywhere debated what role God had played in helping Joan achieve her signal victories.

  This conversation had particular resonance at the palace in Arévalo. Some of the people who were educating Isabella had been much taken with Joan and her military successes. Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo, one of the clerics associated with the Castilian court, had been living in France during Joan’s meteoric career and was a fervent admirer of hers. Gonzalo Chacón, head of their household staff and the husband of Isabella’s governess, shared his recollections of how Isabella’s father had welcomed Joan’s envoys with great respect. He carried about with him a letter purportedly from Joan herself and displayed it like a holy relic. He is believed to have been the author who wrote about a character like Joan in an anonymous chronicle, saying that God alone had inspired her.33 Some versions of that chronicle, the book known as La Poncella de Francia, were explicitly dedicated to Princess Isabella. In this version of the tale, the young woman called La Poncella did not die but rode off happily into the sunset.34

  Some of the people around Isabella may have been presenting Joan of Arc’s life as an ideal that Isabella could emulate, as a “heaven-sent” woman who could “save the realm” from an outside invader.35 Joan’s life was being reconceived, reengineered, as an acceptable role a woman could play in warfare. The goal of those circulating these stories may have been to influence Isabella and bring her to see herself as a second Joan of Arc. In any case, whether the idea was impressed upon her or she came up with it herself, it found fertile ground in Isabella’s imagination, because she already had a tendency to view herself as something of a martyr for a cause and she had the kind of romantic temperament that appreciated people who made great sacrifices in pursuit of a common good. Moreover, she had a deep and fervent belief in miracles and signs from God. Soon she would seek out people to work with her who viewed the world in the same way.

  In this phase of her life, however, Isabella’s primary importance was still as a political pawn in the royal marriage market. In 1457, when she was six years old, Enrique negotiated a double marriage for Isabella and Alfonso. Isabella was to marry Ferdinand, the younger son of King Juan II, their Aragonese cousin, and Alfonso would marry Juana, King Juan’s youngest daughter.36 This was a solid but second-choice marriage proposition for Isabella because the boy, Ferdinand, was not the heir to a throne. He had an older brother, Carlos, who was heir to the thrones of Aragon and Navarre, two kingdoms that abutted Castile. And a marriage to Juana was good enough for Alfonso because Enrique assumed he would at some point have an heir of his own, who would someday be the king and would marry a woman of highest rank. For Isabella, marriage to Ferdinand seemed a pleasant prospect. He was about her age and was reported to be athletic, personable, and quick-witted. He was also her second cousin. The close interactions and fierce rivalries within the family would have guaranteed that reports about the boy frequently reached her ears. She came to believe Ferdinand was her intended mate and Aragon her likely destination.

  Then, when Isabella was about ten years old, Enrique announced a new alliance with Ferdinand’s older half brother Carlos—and offered Isabella as wife to him instead. Carlos, eager to solidify ties to Castile, quickly agreed. Now, instead of a fiancé of her own age, Isabella learned she was pledged in marriage to a forty-year-old man. This development would certainly have been disconcerting to the princess, particularly after years of being told she would marry an attractive boy her age. But no trace of her reaction remains. In fact, she would not have been expected to have much of an opinion. It was not an issue in which she had any control. Her brother the king had complete authority over her person, to give in marriage as he saw best. For the next year, Isabella adjusted herself to this new development.

  Around the same time, Isabella’s life suddenly changed in an even more immediate way. In about 1461 or early 1462, when she was ten years old and her brother was eight, King Enrique ordered the two children to join him immediately. Isabella and Alfonso were abruptly yanked from the sheltered home they shared with their mother and were moved to court permanently, under armed guard. Their relocation from a stable rural base to a series of sophisticated metropolitan hubs came at a time of rising international tensions. The marriage negotiations had been part of a shifting political strategy that was reaching a sour conclusion. King Juan II of the neighboring Kingdom of Aragon, the father of Carlos, Ferdinand, and Juana, was stirring up trouble for King Enrique with his Castilian nobles; King Enrique in return was encouraging the Aragonese to rebel against King Juan. Enrique wanted to be sure he had control of the two children, the promised marriage partners and current heirs to the throne, but other issues were also coming into play. Even Castillo, Enrique’s most sympathetic chronicler, acknowledged that some among the court had “sinister motives” for gaining possession of the children.37 As long as Enrique remained childless, they were potential competitors to the throne. And as step-siblings to the king, the two children were vulnerable to his whims.

  The two semi-orphaned children were being sent off to a court that was growing increasingly licentious and undisciplined. There was little apparent plan for caring for the children. Queen Juana was young and callow, a teenager operating in a court with minimal adult supervision. She and her ladies-in-waiting engaged in exuberant flirtations with male courtiers. Their sexual escapades offended older, more conservative, and religious court observers. “Generous damsels” is how they were described by one wit, who was not referring to their purses.38

  Enrique was also a less-than-stellar parental figure. Hi
s court was dominated by his corps of all-male friends—“peasants, jugglers, entertainers, muleteers, sharp-eyed peddlers,” people at whom noble families were likely to look askance in such a class-conscious society, and with whom Enrique liked to socialize in private settings.39 He enjoyed holding forth in the Moorish style, sitting on cushions and rugs instead of upon a throne, often dressed in a turban or hooded cape, an affectation that would have seemed harmless or romantic except for the fact that Castile was at war with Granada. The charming young courtier Beltrán de la Cueva attracted considerable attention as well, particularly after he won the affections of both monarchs. “He could please the king as well as the queen,” scholar Teofilo Ruiz notes tartly.40

  Isabella, aged about ten, began to act as a lady-in-waiting to Juana and observed the goings-on as part of the queen’s entourage, which kept her in constant proximity to Juana, almost around the clock. She became aware at a young age of the sexual escapades that were engulfing the court. She did not get drawn into them, however, maintaining a detachment and unusual seriousness of purpose and piety, behavior that must have made her seem oddly old for her years and certainly out of step with the crowd. During the next few years, she remained part of the queen’s household, living principally in Segovia, in its majestic Alcázar.41 Alfonso’s education was handed over to a well-trained gentleman of the court; Isabella was to be educated by the feckless young queen.

  Isabella later recalled this period of her life as a frightening, isolating, and forlorn time. “When my brother Alfonso and I were children,” she would write, “we were forcibly and intentionally taken from the arms of our mother and raised under the authority of the Queen Doña Juana.… It was a dangerous guardianship for us and . . . had infamous influences.”42 She told her older brother Enrique, in a letter also written in later years, that she sought to keep herself as much in seclusion as possible for self-protection: “I remained in my palace in order to avoid your immorality, taking care for my honor and fearing for my life . . . [persevering] through the grace of God.”43

  She learned to take consolation, as she did throughout her life, in religion. One of Spain’s most respected clerics happened to live in a monastery just down the hill from Segovia’s Alcázar, and his important family connections made him venerated. He was a Dominican friar who dressed in simple monk garb, lived abstemiously, and retreated from time to time into a cave for quiet contemplation. His uncle was a famous cardinal living in Rome, but this nephew had not gone to live with his well-heeled uncle but instead stayed home to play a vital role in the community’s spiritual life. His name was Tomás de Torquemada, and he became, at least from time to time, confessor to both Isabella and Alfonso during these childhood years.

  It was not surprising that Isabella would place her trust in a sober local prelate. Both children needed powerful allies wherever they could find them.

  And now there was more news at the court. Queen Juana had at last become pregnant, surprising everyone, and in February 1462 she produced the long-desired heir. Isabella was there at the childbirth, as part of the queen’s entourage. Following specific rules of court ritual, the queen gave birth squatting, with a platoon of observers flanking her. One nobleman supported her body as the queen writhed in pain. On one side stood Juan Pacheco, the king’s favorite, observing the proceedings. On the other side stood Alfonso Carrillo, archbishop of Toledo, with two other dignitaries. It was a difficult labor, after which she gave birth to a daughter, who was named Juana, in the family pattern of naming the child after the parent. Soon afterward the baby was baptized by Carrillo. Princess Isabella served as godmother to the child.44

  Given King Enrique’s previous problems with sexual performance, some whispered at the time about whether the king was truly the baby’s father. The thirteen years of impotence during his first marriage raised questions, but he may have found a medical solution to his infertility. Jerónimo Münzer, a German physician who visited Spain in those years, said he was told that Enrique’s “member was thin and weak at the base but large at the head,” making it difficult for him to sustain an erection, but that the queen had undergone artificial insemination by having a golden tube filled with Enrique’s semen inserted into her vagina.45 Some Jewish physicians who were consulted about the problem, however, believed Enrique to be hopelessly infertile.

  Enrique added some grist to the rumor mill on his own. Within a week of Juana’s birth, Enrique named Beltrán de la Cueva to be the Count of Ledesma, a major new honor for a nobleman of fairly humble birth. This fact became another item of salacious gossip at the court.

  Many festivities were held to celebrate the birth, including a joust. In May, Enrique brought the nobles together in Madrid to swear an oath of support to the newborn princess. In July in Toledo the Cortes, the kingdom’s governing assembly, repeated the pledge.

  The Castilian nobility took the oath of loyalty to the baby girl as the heir apparent. But given his previous testimony about impotence in his divorce proceedings with Blanca, Enrique’s opponents soon raised questions about Juana’s legitimacy and right to the throne. They dubbed the child Juana la Beltraneja—or Juana the daughter of Beltrán, the bisexual courtier. On the very day that Enrique’s close friend Juan Pacheco swore the oath of obedience to the infant princess, he drafted and signed a document disputing the child’s right to the throne. In that statement, Pacheco said he swore the oath out of “fear” of the king but “did not intend . . . to harm nor cause prejudice in the succession of the said kingdom.”46

  Certainly there was some reason for questioning the child’s parentage. Queen Juana’s flirtatious interactions had fueled speculations about her morals. People began recalling a particular incident, one that had been witnessed by foreign diplomats, in which De la Cueva fought a joust in which he ostentatiously bore the letter J, the initial of the woman in whose honor he was competing. Many inferred that his love object was the queen herself.47

  Against this backdrop of sexual intrigue and gossipy chatter, Isabella as a person virtually disappeared into the woodwork. Her name would pop into conversations as an available bargaining chip in potential foreign alliances, and she became a pawn in one political scheme after another, particularly after 1461, when Prince Carlos of Aragon, her intended, suddenly died. Carlos’s death opened up new possibilities for Enrique because of King Juan’s unpopularity at home. A group of Catalans proposed, after Carlos’s death, that Enrique should become the next king of Aragon—an idea that Enrique found agreeable. The dispute threatened to become murderous, as Carlos’s father, King Juan of Aragon, who was still living, did not think it was a good idea at all.

  In his typical double-dealing manner, Juan Pacheco suggested that King Louis XI of France, a man who was living up to his new nickname “The Universal Spider,” be permitted to mediate the succession dispute, giving the French king a valuable commission for which Pacheco would be generously rewarded. At Pacheco’s urging, Enrique foolishly agreed. Then King Louis accepted a generous bribe from Aragon as well and threw his weight to Carlos’s father rather than to Enrique, making Enrique feel both stupid and angry. That added to the strains between Pacheco and Enrique and also put Castile at loggerheads with both Aragon and France.

  Now Enrique needed a new alliance, another kingdom that could give him military support. He reached out to negotiate with England, starting in 1463. Suddenly a marriage offer from that distant land opened up a new world of possibility for the young princess. Ambassadors from England came to Spain to negotiate for her possible marriage to “Europe’s most eligible bachelor,” the dashing and handsome heir to the English throne, Edward IV.48

  Soon, it appeared, Isabella of Castile, the younger sister of the king, would become queen of England.

  THREE

  FRIGHTENING YEARS

  In February 1464, when Isabella was not quite thirteen years old, her brother Enrique accepted the English offer and agreed to give her in marriage to King Edward IV, in a gesture of polit
ical alignment between the two countries.1 This would at once make Isabella a queen.

  It might have been a generous act on Enrique’s part, to help ensure an illustrious future for his half sister. Certainly Isabella and Enrique showed visible signs of affection from time to time. They both loved music, and sometimes he would sing while she would dance. They shared some of the same interests—riding, hunting, deep and thoughtful discussions—and they held the same religious convictions. However, it is just as likely that the marital alliance was Enrique’s attempt to remove Isabella from the direct line of succession in Castile and relocate her to a distant land, particularly at a time when rumors were brewing about Juana’s legitimacy.

  Regardless of Enrique’s motives, however, the proposition of marriage to the English king would have been appealing to most young women. The twenty-two-year-old Edward of York had recently assumed the throne of England. Charming, blond, strong, and six feet four inches tall, he was intelligent, excellent at the courtly games of hunting and jousting, dressed elegantly in furs and rich jewelry, and was fond of chivalric romances. This combination of traits made him irresistible to women, upon whom the lusty young king was eager to lavish his own attentions.