BOOK II JOAN THE MAD (continued 2)

During the battle she with the Infanta had left the palace, carrying her jewels with them, and had ordered the corpse of Philip to be taken from the church and carried with them out of the town. Before it could be done, in the confusion, the royal troops entered, and they found the Queen and her daughter crouched in the doorway of the palace trembling with fright. The great nobles who came to the capture of Tordesillas were full of lip service to Joan, and she, flattered apparently by their deference, professed delight at their coming; but from the moment the rebel junta fled before the Constable’s troops at Tordesillas without her signature, Joan was a closely watched prisoner. Denia and his wife, with their harsh methods, came back, to the loudly expressed disgust, not only of Joan, but of some of the greatest of the Castilian nobles, who saw how his presence irritated her;^[134] but Charles would permit no change in his mother’s keeper, for he knew he could depend upon Denia to keep her close.

In April 1521, the Comuneros were finally crushed at the battle of Villalar, and the yoke of imperialism forged unwittingly by Ferdinand the Catholic, and open-eyed by Charles the Emperor, was fixed upon the neck of Spain until it strangled her. Thenceforward 199Joan was but a shadow in the world, to which she no longer appertained.

The person most to be pitied, until marriage rescued her in 1524, was the poor young Infanta Katharine. The Denias came back vowing vengeance against every one who they thought had been polite to the rebels, and the Infanta, as well as the Queen, had to feel their petty tyranny. The girl wrote indignantly to her brother of the wretched straits to which she was reduced by them, and also of the persecution of her mother by them. Amongst other complaints, the following may be quoted. ‘For the love of God, pray order that if the Queen wishes to walk in the gallery looking on to the river, or in the matted corridor, or to leave her chamber for pastime, they shall not prevent her from doing so. And pray do not allow the servants and daughters of the marchioness, or others, to go to my closet through the Queen’s rooms, but only the persons who serve; because, in order that the Queen may not see them, the marchioness orders the women to shut the Queen up in her chamber, and will not allow her to go into the passages or hall, but keep her in the chamber where there is no light but candles; for there is nowhere else for her to go, and she will not leave the chamber until she is dragged out: or, if she would, the women are there to prevent her.’ This is the Infanta’s own version; but the Denias’ story is that the young princess is not allowed by her mother to see any one but a common servant, and has not the fit company of ladies. To make matters worse for the girl the Denias accused her of favouring the rebels, which she indignantly denied, and made peace successfully with her brother. Her departure from Tordesillas for her 200marriage afflicted Joan greatly, and for the rest of the Queen’s life there was no one to stand between the emperor and her gaolers.

During the long years of Joan’s seclusion, the principal feature of her aberration was its anti-religious tendency. It is true that she often demanded the summoning of the nobles, and continued her eccentricity in eating and sleeping, but the strange antipathy she showed, and often violently expressed, to the services of her church, was a scandal worse than any in a country where thousands of people were being burnt for a tenth part of what the Queen allowed herself to say and do. The whole of the emperor’s system was based upon the enforcement of universal religious orthodoxy by Spain: and it was a bitter affliction for him to know that his mother, and rightful Queen, was madly opposed, at intervals, to the ceremonies imposed upon the rest of Spaniards. Denia in his letters to the Emperor, on several occasions, drops dark hints that torture should be applied—as it evidently had been applied to Joan years before by Mosen Ferrer. Speaking of her obstinacy soon after the rebel defeat, and advising that she should be transferred to the fortress of Arevalo, which he thought safer and more loyal to Charles, he says: ‘Your Majesty may be sure that this will not be done with the Queen’s goodwill, for it is not to be expected that a person who refuses to do anything beneficial, either for her body or her soul, but does quite the contrary, will agree to this. And, in good truth, if your Majesty would use pressure^[135] 201upon her in many things, you would serve God and benefit her Highness, for people in her condition really need it. Your grandmother, Queen Isabel, served her Highness, her daughter, in this way, but your Majesty will do as you think best.’

Denia, whilst recommending the employment of force for the removal of the Queen, did not wish to appear personally as the instrument, but recommended that the President of the Council of Castile should be sent with the Emperor’s order for her to submit, and if she resisted, to have her seized and put into a litter by force in the night time, and carried off. The removal of the Queen, often urged by Denia for years, on the ground of the accessibility of Tordesillas to disaffected people, does not seem ever to have taken place.^[136] Denia’s desire to lodge Joan in a strong isolated fortress is also explained by him on the ground of the scandal caused by the Queen’s religious attitude. In the letter just quoted, where he recommends torture, he relates that on Christmas night, whilst early matins were being sung in the presence of the Infanta, the Queen came in search of her daughter, and screamed out in anger for them to clear the altar of everything upon it; and she had to be forcibly taken back to her rooms. He relates also that: ‘She often goes into the gallery overlooking the river, and calls to any one she sees to summon the troops to kill each other. Your majesty may judge from all this what is best to do, and what we have to put up with.’

These hints at personal punishment of the Queen are repeated again and again over a series of years by Denia, though, so far as can be gathered from the 202Emperor’s replies, he gave no instructions for it to be done. In 1525 Denia writes: ‘Nothing would do so much good as some pressure (i.e., punishment or torture), although it is a very serious thing for a subject to think of applying such to his Sovereign. Perhaps it will be best to try what effect a good priest would have upon Her Highness ... a Dominican would be best, as she does not like Franciscans.’ On another occasion soon afterwards, when Charles had decided to have his mother secretly carried by night to the impregnable castle of Toro, not far from Tordesillas, Denia remarks that he had taken measures that no persons should be in the streets to witness her arrival, ‘for, in good truth, I myself am ashamed of what I hear and see.’

And so from year to year the Queen’s religious aberrations consigned her to constantly increased seclusion to avoid scandal. The Emperor and his only son Philip visited the Queen at least on one occasion at Tordesillas, and during the regency of Philip in 1552, whilst Charles was in Germany, the Prince, much more rigidly devout even than his father, and shocked at the continued refusal of his grandmother to attend the services of the Church and fulfil her religious duties, sent to Tordesillas the saintly Jesuit Francis of Borgia, Duke of Gandia, to exert his influence upon the Queen. His success was very small. For weeks Joan refused to conform, until, at last Borgia persuaded her to make what is called a ‘general confession,’ and he thereupon gave her absolution;^[137] 203but directly he left she relapsed into her former indifference again.

When Philip was leaving Spain to marry Mary, Queen of England, in 1554, he sent Father Borgia again to try to bring Joan to her religious duties. She heard the good father patiently, and when he had finished his exhortations, she endeavoured to make terms. Yes, she would hear mass, and confess, and receive absolution, and the rest of it, if the women attendants upon her were sent away, as they always mocked her whilst she was at her devotions. ‘If that be so,’ replied Father Borgia, ‘the Inquisition shall deal with them as heretics;’ and he at once wrote to Philip recommending that they should pretend to hand the women over to the Holy Office, place crosses and images of saints about the Queen’s rooms, say daily mass on the corridor altar, and if the Queen objected, tell her that it was done by the order of the Inquisition. He also proposed to bring some priestly exorcisers to cast out the devils that afflicted the Queen; but this Philip would not allow. The effect of Borgia’s efforts on this occasion was, that when Prince Philip on his way to Corunna to sail for England called at Tordesillas, he found Joan to his delight going through the ordinary religious rites without resistance. But her devotion was clearly only on the surface, and her new confessor Friar Luis de la Cruz, soon reported that he dared not expose himself to the peril of committing a 204grave act of sacrilege by administering the sacraments to the Queen, and resigned his office. It appears, amongst other things, that she always shut her eyes at the elevation of the Host at the mass, and on one occasion she violently told her attendants to throw away the blessed tapers they carried before her, as she said they stank.

Since the summer of 1553, Joan, then an old woman, had suffered from swelling of the lower limbs, which almost crippled her; and in February 1555, after a bath of very hot water, the legs broke out into open wounds. Thenceforward the course of her illness presented an extraordinary resemblance to that which proved mortal in the case of her grandson, Philip II. Dreadful gangrenous sores, which she refused to have dressed or washed, caused her the most awful torment. She paid no heed to the directions of doctors or nurses; and when her grand-daughter, the Infanta Joan, came over from Valladolid with the best medical men procurable, the Queen violently refused to see them or allow them to examine her. Thus, lying in repulsive squalor and filth, the poor creature was told that Father Borgia had come to see her. She angrily refused to listen to him at first, but she was weak, and his persistence seems finally to have conquered. By and bye she admitted that she was sorry for her errors, and deplored the divagations of her spirit. At the request of Borgia she repeated the apostle’s creed and confessed; but just as he was about to administer the viaticum, she expressed some scruple at receiving it. Learned theologians were summoned in haste from Salamanca; and a few days afterwards, on the 11th April 1555, the famous Dr. Soto was closeted with her for hours. His report was that, though she had privately told him 205things that consoled him, the Queen was not fit to receive the Eucharist; though extreme unction might be administered.

That same night the last rites were performed. Leaning over the dying woman with a crucifix, the priest told her that the last hour for her was come, and that it behoved her to ask God for pardon. By signs and gestures of grief and contrition, she expressed what her poor palsied tongue refused to utter; and Father Borgia, believing her beyond speech, asked her to signify whether he should recite the creed for her. To the astonishment of every one she suddenly recovered her power of utterance, and replied, ‘You begin it, and I will repeat it after you.’ When the last amen was said, the saintly Jesuit placed a crucifix to the lips of the dying woman. ‘Christ crucified aid me,’ she had strength yet to say, and then Joan the Mad passed to the land where all are sane. For twenty years her body lay in the Convent of St. Clara, opposite her prison palace; upon the same spot where the coffin of her husband had rested for so many years; and then, in 1574, she was carried at last to the sumptuous tomb at Granada, to join for the rest of time the dust of him that she had loved not wisely but too well.

The foregoing account of the life of this most unfortunate of queens, gathered entirely from the contemporary statements of persons who knew her, tends irresistibly to the conclusion that her early rigid training, followed by her life in Flanders, had implanted in her mind a dislike of the stern bigotry which characterised the religion of Spain under the influence of the Inquisition; and that this dislike grew to hatred when her mind became permanently unsettled. Her strict seclusion and cruel treatment do not appear to have 206been so necessary for her own health, or even primarily for the public welfare, as for the interests of her father and son, whose autocratic power was threatened by any combination of nobles acting in her name, and whose policy largely depended upon the maintenance of strict religious orthodoxy. To leave at liberty and accessible a feeble-minded Queen who desired to govern through the nobles, and hated the religion of the Inquisition, would have been to invite disaster to the very basis upon which the vast edifice of Spanish autocratic power at its grandest was erected. It might have been better for Spain in the long run, but it would have been ruin for Ferdinand and Charles; and to their interests successively Joan the Mad was sacrificed.

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