Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  It is unclear how much Queen Isabella knew about what was happening, and what she could have done about it even if she did. She received only a partial picture from the ambassadors, and nobody seemed able to identify the strange dynamics that had enveloped Juana, although everyone agreed that something seemed badly amiss. The Spanish ambassadors prodded Juana to write to her mother but did not receive much of an answer as to why she did not do so more regularly. Under persistent questioning, she admitted that she missed her mother so deeply that it would hurt too much to try to write. She told a visiting cleric that she “could not think of her mother, and how far she was separated from her forever, without shedding tears.”27

  For a variety of reasons, then, Queen Isabella wanted Juana to come home. She and King Ferdinand urged the young couple to come to Spain as quickly as possible, with their children, to secure their inheritance. Because of continuing tensions with France, the Spanish sovereigns told the young couple to travel by ship. By this point, Spain had been embroiled in a dispute with France for years over its invasion of Italy, and Ferdinand was still deeply aggrieved over continuing French possession of the border cities of Roussillon and Perpignan. If the French were to seize the heirs to the throne of Castile and Aragon, Spain would lose any leverage it had, and Juana could potentially be at physical risk.

  But Philip insisted on traveling by land through France, nevertheless, where he agreed to give obeisance to King Louis XII in exchange for control of three towns on the frontier between their two countries. Juana refused to defer to the French, ostentatiously dressing in the Spanish style and performing a Spanish dance at a ball, angering their French hosts and embarrassing her husband, who seemed to have reached the point where he could hardly bear her presence.

  That was the situation when the young couple arrived in Spain in 1502. To meet them at the border and escort them home to the court, Isabella sent her trusted friend Gutierre de Cárdenas, the man who had held the sword aloft when she had taken the throne in Segovia thirty years earlier. De Cárdenas had been a source of strength and a dependable ally to the queen from her teenage years, and she turned to him again for his counsel in handling the new family dynamics.

  Isabella had not been able to stage-manage the initial entry of Juana and Philip into Toledo, but otherwise many other things went according to plan. They had come to the ancient Visigothic city because the Cortes was meeting there, and Isabella arranged for Juana to be sworn as heir apparent to her mother while Philip was given the lesser standing of prince consort. Then the couple went to Zaragoza, where the Cortes of Aragon swore the same oath to Juana, which was the first time they had ever named a woman successor to the realm. Philip was not happy when he realized that he had slipped down a notch in the succession. He did not want to be the king consort. Women had succeeded to the throne in Burgundy before, so he was not unfamiliar with the concept of women in positions of power, but he did not want it to happen to him. He was, in fact, furious.

  The king and queen did their best to smooth the tensions. They attempted to get to know Philip better, to influence him, but he clearly cared more for entertainments than instruction. His boorish behavior, so different from his youthful charm, made these events uncomfortable for everyone. At a tournament in Burgos, he thought it was funny to throw leftover sweets into the crowd and watch poor people scramble for the scraps; he liked to masquerade in Turkish clothing and pretend to be a Moor. Isabella and Ferdinand nevertheless organized parties, banquets, and tournaments to keep Philip busy and amused. Pleasing Philip became even more important after the announcement that Juana was pregnant once more. Isabella and Ferdinand wanted Philip and Juana to stay in Castile for good.

  But Philip was increasingly eager to leave. His close companion, Archbishop Busleyden, who had traveled to Spain with him, had suddenly died after a short illness, and Philip’s aversion to life in Castile became a sort of panic. He seemed to think the archbishop had been poisoned and that the same thing could happen to him. He was in a frenzy to get out of Castile as soon as possible. He announced he was leaving immediately.

  Isabella and Ferdinand begged him to stay. It was Christmas. They were at war with France again, over Naples and also over Roussillon. Juana’s pregnancy was advanced, and it would be dangerous for her to embark on a long journey.

  But Philip insisted, saying that he had promised his subjects he would return to Flanders within one year. It was a humiliating turn of events for Princess Juana to be abandoned by her husband at Christmastime. She still loved him, at least on some level, but his lack of interest in her made it impossible for her to exert any power in the relationship. She wept and sobbed, begging him to stay. He rebuffed her, which became common knowledge in the Castilian court. Peter Martyr was stunned by his intransigence: “Nor is Philip softened by these things, he is more adamant than adamant, he prepares his departure,” he wrote to a friend.28

  Philip set out for Flanders at Christmas. When he crossed the border into France, however, he found plenty of new amusements—the French were masters at finding enjoyable pastimes—and he established himself there for some months, making it clear that his reasons for departing Castile had been merely subterfuge. Juana’s parents, who were at war with France over Naples, were appalled by his disloyalty and weakness of character. He was completely dominated by the French, and putting himself in their power created a risk both to himself and to Spanish interests. “So great is the influence of his counselors whom they think to have been corrupted by French bribes that he does not seem to be in his own power,” Peter Martyr wrote.29

  Philip’s continuing presence in France exacerbated Juana’s sense of abandonment and left her obsessed with jealous suspicion about his sexual activities while they were separated. Her fears were not unfounded. “He was highly susceptible to his counselors, who made him drunk with a licentious life, taking him from banquet to banquet, from woman to woman, until he was owned body and soul by the French, who had made him their satellite,” wrote Gutierre Gómez de Fuensalida, the Spanish ambassador to Flanders.30

  Mortified and hurt, Juana turned her anger on her mother, who had insisted that Juana remain in Spain. Ferdinand had returned to the battlefield to fight the French in Perpignan, and so Isabella was the parent who remained present as a target. She bore the brunt of Juana’s quiet fury. The princess “lives with clouded brow, meditating day and night and never utters a word without being urged and if she [does] it is a troublesome one,” Peter Martyr wrote.31

  In March, still simmering with barely suppressed rage, Juana gave birth at Alcalá de Henares to her fourth child, who was her second son. He was named Ferdinand, after his grandfather. It was another easy delivery. Juana had scarcely recovered when she began insisting that she wanted to rejoin her husband, in a frenzy of jealousy to recapture his love and attention. She was willing to leave the baby behind with her parents to get started as quickly as possible. Isabella looked for every means to delay her, because going to Flanders would require her to journey overland in France, a kingdom with which they were now fully at war, or by sea, with all the risks the family by now realized that such voyages entailed.

  Isabella persuaded Juana that they should go to their family home, the palace in Segovia, since it was on the route to Burgos and therefore on the way to Flanders. Once there she sent Juana on again, a bit farther along the road, to Medina del Campo, under the care of Juan de Fonseca. It was a sign of Isabella’s sense of the delicacy of the job that she recruited Juan de Fonseca, the official who was already busy overseeing expeditions to the New World, but whom she must have viewed as entirely trustworthy.

  When Juana got to the castle at La Mota, in Medina del Campo, she received a letter from Philip asking her to rejoin him, and she became vociferously insistent that she depart immediately. She ordered her household staff to begin packing for the trip. This put Juan de Fonseca in a terrible spot, because if he blocked her, he would incur her wrath, and if he didn’t, he would be disobeying the qu
een. Fonseca ordered the doors to the fortress closed to prevent Juana from leaving. She raged at him, threatening him with death when she became queen. And indeed, Isabella’s declining health meant that Juana would soon have the means and power to punish those who had displeased her.

  Fonseca sent out frantic messages to Isabella telling her what was happening, and then he set to work trying to persuade Juana to wait until her mother arrived to discuss the matter further. Juana, in a fury, tried to rush out of the citadel as though she would run to Flanders herself. Fonseca held his ground and would not allow the gates to be opened. Juana, screaming abuse and crying, refused to go back inside and spent the night outside on the fortress walls in the chilly winter air, her erratic and hysterical behavior drawing the attention of the entire town.

  Queen Isabella’s health was poor, but she was a fiercely protective mother, and she immediately took to the road to take care of her daughter, the way she had rushed to rescue her eldest daughter Isabel when she had been at risk in Segovia as a child, trapped in the castle in an uprising during the war with the Portuguese. The confrontation between Isabella and Juana was painful for both women. Obsessive love in an abusive relationship is a sorry sight, but when it occurred within the royal family, it became an embarrassing public spectacle.

  At last Juana calmed down and went on her way. Isabella, exhausted and drained, could go no further herself and settled into her home in Medina del Campo, a familiar place from her own childhood. The contretemps had left her weakened. Queen Isabella was “very distressed and fatigued by the Señora princesa,” one of her secretaries wrote.32

  Isabella’s dreams for Castile, meanwhile, seemed to be crushed—Juana’s behavior had made it clear that she lacked the even temper and composure that were essential to establishing herself securely as queen. And she was anchored to a frivolous and venal man who was more interested in his own pleasure than in Spain’s interests.

  There was more drama when Juana got home to Flanders. Philip had entered an intense love affair with a lady of the court. In a jealous rage, Juana threw herself at her rival and ordered the woman’s long blond hair shorn from her head. Philip was furious. “He spoke very cruelly to her, giving her much injury, and they say he put his hands on her,” wrote the chronicler Alonso de Santa Cruz. “And as the Princess Doña Juana was a delicate young woman, and raised that way, under the guidance of her mother, she felt very intensely the mistreatment that her husband gave her, and she fell ill on her bed.”33

  To silence Juana, Philip ordered her sealed inside her bedchamber. She pounded on the floor and ceiling of her room and demanded to speak with her husband. He ignored her, and so she began starving herself. Reports from the ambassadors left Isabella even sadder, and she urged her envoys to find ways to foster “love and agreement” between the warring spouses.34

  Isabella’s doctors worried that the emotional turmoil over Juana might precipitate a downward health spiral for the queen and, indeed, her condition steadily worsened from that time, with her fevers becoming almost continual. “The Queen brooded about it, greatly angered by the Prince Don Philip,” Santa Cruz wrote, “and it weighed upon her that she had arranged such a marriage.”35

  But Isabella had another family problem to solve as well: another young family member had been struck down in the prime of life. Catherine’s husband, Arthur, Prince of Wales, fell dead from a plague on April 2, 1502. Catherine had contracted the ailment at the same time, but she had survived. Once more a royal court was plunged into deepest mourning. And again the question arose of what to do with a widowed princess.

  Queen Isabella offered two suggestions to the English king: either send Catherine back home to Spain, or marry her to Arthur’s younger brother Henry. That latter option was under consideration in both courts, if only the financial arrangements could be handled smoothly. Of course, that immediately presented problems because of the financial wrangling that had occurred over the dowry when Catherine and Arthur had married, and a portion of that money had not yet been paid.

  Grieving for his son and clutching his strongbox, King Henry VII demanded payment of the rest of the dowry. He made life difficult for the young princess by refusing to give her money for her living expenses and those of her attendants. It was bad enough that Catherine was a widow. Now she became a needy one as well, pressed to, in effect, beg for charity from home and from King Henry. Her only consolation was the kindness of her mother-in-law, Elizabeth of York.

  And then that source of support was extinguished as well. Elizabeth of York died in childbirth, about ten months after Prince Arthur died. Henry VII shed some tears over the loss of his sweet and long-suffering wife, then began looking around for a new bride. He spied Catherine’s fresh young face and body. Perhaps he had been as eager to get a look at her when she arrived for his own interests as for his son’s. He wrote to Castile suggesting that Catherine marry him instead.

  This idea appalled Queen Isabella, who denounced it in no uncertain terms. “It would be a very terrible thing—one never before seen, and the mere mention of which offends the ears,” she told her ambassador in England.36 The younger Henry was the only possible choice in England, she insisted. It was Prince Henry or home for Catherine.

  But for Catherine to marry Henry, they would need yet another dispensation from Pope Alexander VI, this time for Henry to marry his brother Arthur’s widow. But was she really his widow? There was that awkward question of whether the marriage had actually been consummated. Some people said it had, some said it hadn’t.

  King Ferdinand was drafted to make the request to the pope, who was by now a lifetime ally of his king, although their relationship had had some ups and downs. These long-distance deliberations over papal dispensations were time-consuming and complicated and sometimes expensive to procure, so Isabella began leaning on everyone she could to make sure that copies of the official document arrived in the Spanish and English courts as soon as possible.

  In 1504 the long-awaited dispensation finally arrived. Isabella breathed a sigh of relief. She knew she was dying, and she was satisfied that she had secured a safe, and possibly even happy, future for Catherine as the wife and queen of the future King Henry VIII.

  For with this dispensation in place, and the marriage blessed by the pope, what could possibly go wrong?

  TWENTY-TWO

  A CHURCH WITHOUT A SHEPHERD

  In the last two years of her life, Queen Isabella focused her energies on the things that mattered the most to her: her religious faith, her children’s well-being, and the security of Spain.

  The war with France was dragging on, year after weary year. It had been almost ten years since the French had begun their ill-fated assault on the Italian peninsula. Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba had left Spain to fight in Greece and Italy in 1499, and now, in 1503, he was engaged in the mop-up operations in Naples. He and his men fought ferociously and tirelessly in the service of the Spanish sovereigns, braving extremes of harsh weather, exhaustion, and even starvation. And the queen had been his most consistent supporter as the war wore on. She wrote to him in her own hand in May 1503, urging him to seek complete victory in Naples. “All the eyes of Christians and infidels are watching what you do,” she told him, imploring him to move forward quickly to accomplish as much as possible.1

  But despite the queen’s loyalty to Gonzalo, a whispering campaign was under way against him in Spain, instigated and encouraged by Ferdinand, who criticized him from afar for perceived missteps or mistakes. Those who found fault with Gonzalo, talking about the cost of the campaign or its duration, found favor with the king. “There was much murmuring by all, the nobles and even the king himself saying that el Gran Capitán’s run of good fortune had run out,” writes the biographer Mary Purcell. “… Queen Isabella was the only one who took his part, saying that they should not judge him until they saw how the war went.”2

  But Gonzalo’s bravery was acknowledged by all who witnessed him in battle. “The Spanish fought
like devils,” wrote one French chronicler, “and the Great Captain ran up and down in the first line of the attack, calling his men-at-arms by their own names and giving them heart.”3 Then, in December 1503, he won the overwhelming victory against the French at Garignola, through a traditional surprise assault. He attacked the French army during wild, cold, and rainy winter weather, when they had left key defensive positions undermanned. The Spanish had built a concealed bridge that allowed their troops to suddenly spring up inside the French cantonments, and in so doing, they “completely destroyed the French army of Italy,” writes the military historian Charles Oman.4

  The Spanish victory was absolute. “Of the French who were led to war,” Peter Martyr wrote, “few have escaped who did not perish by the sword or famine, ill health, of the people, scarcely anyone.”5 Back in Castile, Queen Isabella couldn’t help but preen with pride over what her longtime friend had managed to achieve. “I was certain he would succeed,” she told her courtiers. “What the Great Captain cannot accomplish no other man in our dominions can, and those who go about backbiting him are doing so out of sheer envy.”6

  Then the Great Captain added insult to injury, from the French perspective, by behaving magnanimously in victory. He rounded up the remnants of the French troops, who had been abandoned in Italy by their leaders, and gave them free transportation back home. That was another bitter pill for the French king Louis XII, so he decided to seek revenge by claiming back Roussillon and Perpignan, the provinces that the French had been feuding over with Ferdinand and his father for five decades. King Ferdinand rushed north with troops to try to run them off. He had been left on the sidelines in Castile during the war over Naples, with the Great Captain getting all the glory, and this was his opportunity to shine.