Queens of old Spain

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Introduction

In a previous volume I have remarked upon the extremely small political significance of most of the Queen Consorts of England, although socially the country has become what it is mainly through feminine influence. In Spain the exact reverse has happened, and in no Christian country has the power of woman been less formative of the life and character of the nation, whilst, largely owing to personal and circumstantial accident, the share of ladies in deciding the political destinies of the country from the throne has been more conspicuous than in other European monarchies. The oriental traditions dominant in Spain for centuries tended to make wives the humble satellites rather than the equal companions of their husbands ; and the inflated gallantry, before marriage at least, that sprang from the chivalrous obsession grafted upon mixed feudal and Islamic ideals, affected to exclude woman from the harder facts of existence, and from the practical problems that occupied the minds of men. But whilst these traditions limited the power of Spanish women generally, they were insufficient to counteract the extraordinary political influence of a series of remarkable feminine personalities who, mainly owing to feebleness and ineptitude of consorts, or to long minorities of sons, have on occasion during the viii INTRODUCTION

course of four centuries practically wielded the sceptres of Spain. It is true that queens regnant in England as well as in Spain have usually, and quite naturally, been powerful political factors, but in most instances they necessarily differed but little, either in aims or methods, from male sovereigns. The difference between the queens of the two countries is most remarkable in the case of queens consort, who in Spain have, either as wives or widowed regents, influenced government to an extent quite unparalleled in England. Apart from the accident of forceful personal character, or other influential qualities possessed by some of these ladies, the reason for their importance must be sought in the fact that most of them represented great dynastic interests or national alliances, and were supported by powerful parties in Spain or abroad. In order that their lives should be properly understood, it will be necessary to keep in view contemporary events in other parts of Europe which more or less concerned them ; and to relate the history of all the Queens of Spain upon such a plan would exceed the capacity of a single volume and the patience of the ordinary reader. It is proposed, therefore, to select for treatment only the lives of some of the Queens of Spain who, for their greatness, their political significance, their attractions, or their misfortunes, stand forth most prominently in the romantic history of their country. The temptation is great to dwell upon certain of the earlier Queens of the small kingdoms which constituted Spain before the union of the crowns : to tell the heroic story of the great Berengaria, the mother of St. Ferdinand, and

INTRODUCTION ix

those of Queen Maria de Molina and Blanche of Bourbon ; to recount the matrimonial vagaries of Peter the Cruel, and dwell upon Catharine of Lancaster, whose marriage with the heir of Castile closed the war of succession to the Castilian crowns waged by her father John of Gaunt. She, especially, stands forth with almost photographic precision in the pages of the genius who penned the chronicles of her time. Gigantic in size she seemed to the more diminutive Spaniard : florid, fat, and fair ; a vast eater and drinker, whose valiant prowess at the festal board astounded the abstemious people amongst whom she lived ; strong and masculine, but idle, and careless of the feminine arts by which woman's attraction is increased ; ruled by her favourites, but withal a good woman and a good Queen, who governed Spain honestly for ten years, during the minority of her weak son, John ii. of Castile.

But, interesting as some of these earlier personages are, they cannot rightly be called Queens of Spain ; and the first of all Spanish Queens, the great Isabel of Castile and Aragon, may fittingly begin the volume, which will contain the stories of other ladies perhaps more lovable, more feminine, more sympathetic, but none so splendidly steadfast, so noble of aim, or so strong as she. Her function in the world, aided by her husband, was to crush the rieving nobles, and bring unity to Spain by religious exaltation. The end endowed her country with transient greatness and febrile force, whilst the methods by which it was attained doomed the nation she loved so well to a long agony of decay, and ultimate exhaustion. The pro-

X INTRODUCTION

blems facing Spanish rulers thenceforward were no longer centred upon the development of the country as a prosperous Christian land, or even upon the maintenance of the Mediterranean as a Christian sea. The policy of the ' Catholic Kings ' plunged Spain into the vortex of mid- European politics at the critical period of the world's history, when new lines of demarcation were being scored by religious schism across the ancient boundaries : when deep, unbridgable crevasses were being split between peoples hitherto bound together by common interests and traditional friendship. At this crucial time, when the centre of all earthly authority was boldly challenged, Spain was pledged by Isabel and Ferdinand to a course which thenceforward made her the champion of an impossible religious unity, and squandered for centuries the blood and treasure of her people in the fruitless struggle to fix enduring fetters upon the thoughts and souls of men. Myriads of martyrs shed their blood to cement the solid Spain that might serve as an instrument for such gigantic ends ; and the ecstatic Queen, though gentle and pitiful at heart, yet had no pity for the victims, as her clear eyes pierced the reek of sacrifice, and saw beyond it the shining glory of her goal. To her and to her descendant kings the end they aimed at justified all things done in its attainment, and the touch of mystic madness that in the great Queen was allied to exalted genius, grew in those of her blood who followed her to the besotted obsession that blinded them to the nature and extent of the forces against them, and led them down at last to babbling idiocy, and their

INTRODUCTION xi

country to impotent decay. The pale figure of Joan the distraught flits across our page, and forces to our consideration once more the awful problem of whether she was the victim of a hellish conspiracy on the part of those who should have loved her best, or a woman afflicted by the hand of God ; whether her lifelong martyrdom was the punishment of heresy or the need of her infirmity. Pathetic Mary Tudor, Queen Consort of Spain, demands notice because her marriage with Philip II. marked the vital need of Spain, at any cost, to hold by the traditional alliance with England amidst the shifting sands of religious revolt which were to overwhelm and transform Europe ; whilst, later, the desperate attempt of Philip to form a new group of powers which should enable Spain to dispense with unorthodox England, is personified in the sweet and noble figure of his third wife, Isabel of Valois, upon whose life-story, poignant enough in its bare reality, romancers have embroidered so many strange adornments. The Austrian princesses, who in turn became consorts of the Catholic Kings, all represent the unhappy persistence of the rulers of Spain in clinging to the splendid but unrealisable dream bequeathed by their great ancestor the Emperor to his suffering realm ; that of perpetuating Spanish hegemony over Europe by means of compulsory uniformity of creed, dictated from Rome and enforced from Madrid. And in the intervals of discouragement and disillusionment at the impotence of Habsburg Emperors to secure such uniformity even within the bounds of the empire itself, and the patent impossibility for Spain alone to cope with the giant task.

xii INTRODUCTION

we see the turning of kings and ministers in temporarydespair towards the secular enemy of the house of Austria, and Spain in search of French brides who might bring Catholic support to the Catholic champion. When, at last, exhausted Spain could deceive herself no longer, and was fain to acknowledge that she had been beaten in her attempt to hold the rising tide and deny to men the God-given right of unfettered thought, the matrimonial alliances of her Kings, whilst ceasing to be instruments for the realisation of the vision of her prime, still obeyed the traditionary policies which drew Spain alternately to the side of France or Austria. But the end of such efforts now was not to serve Spanish objects, wise or otherwise, but to snatch advantage for the rival birds of prey who were hovering over the body of a great nation in the throes of dissolution, ravening for a share of her substance when the hour of death should strike. ' Sordid and pathetic as the story of these intrigues may be in their political aspect, the personal share in them of the Queens Consort themselves, their methods, their triumphs and their failures, are often fraught with intense interest to the student of manners. The life of the unscrupulous Mariana of Austria, who in the interests of her house held Spain so long in the name of her imbecile son, and in her turn was outwitted by Don Juan and the French interest, presents us with a picture of the times so intimate, thanks to the plentiful material left behind by a self-conscious age, as to introduce us into the innermost secrets of the intrigues to an extent that contemporaries would have thought impossible. And

INTRODUCTION xiii

again the sad, but very human, story of the young half-English Princess, bright and hght-hearted, torn from brilliant Paris to serve French interests, as the wife of Mariana's half-witted son Charles ii., only to beat herself to death against the bars of her gloomy golden cage and break her heart to old Mariana's undisguised joy, throws a flood of lurid light upon Spanish society in its decadence, and proves the baseness to which human ambition will stoop. More repugnant is the career of poor Marie Louise's German successor as the Consort of the miserable Charles the Bewitched in his last years, and the tale of the extraordinary series of plots woven by the rival parties around the lingering deathbed of the King, whom they worried and frightened into his grave, a senile dotard at forty. Only briefly dealt with here are the Queens of the Bourbon renascence, stout little Marie Louise of Savoy, and the forceful termagant Isabel Farnese, who, chosen to serve as a humble instrument of others, at once seized whip and reins herself, and drove Spain as she listed during a long life of struggle for the aggrandisement of her sons, in which Europe was kept at strife for years by the ambition of one woman.

These and other Queens Consort will pass before us in the following pages, some of them good, a few bad, and most of them unhappy. There is no desire to dwell especially upon the sad and gloomy features of their history, or to represent them all as victims ; but it must not be forgotten, in condonation of the shortcomings of some of them, that they were sent from their own homes, kin, and country, often mere children.

Book V

2. Mariana of Neuburg . . . 487

I LLUSTRATIONS

MARY TUDOR, QUEEN OF ENGLAND AND

SPAIN. After a Painting by Antonio MoR . Frontispiece

ISABEL THE CATHOLIC AT THE SURRENDER

OF GRANADA. After a Painting by Pradilla to face pa^e bl\,

JOAN THE MAD AND THE BODY OF HER

HUSBAND. After a Painting by Pradilla . „ ,. 176

ISABEL OF VALOIS. After a Painting by Pantoja

ISABEL OF BOURBON. After a Painting by

MARIANA OF AUSTRIA. After a Painting by

ISABEL FARNESE. After a Painting by Van Loo . „ „ 536

The above Illustrations are reproduced from Photographs by /. Lacosie, Madrid.

Chapter I

Proudly reared upon a lofty cliff above the trickling Manzanares, there stood the granite palace that had gradually grown around the ancient Moorish fortress of Madrid. Like an eagle from its aerie, its tiny windows blinked across the tawny plain at the far off" glittering snow peaks of Guadarrama, standing forth clear and sharp against a cobalt sky. The Alcazar had been the scene of many strange happenings in the past ; and for a hundred years chivalric splendour had run riot in its broad patios, with their arcades of slender columns, and in its tapestried halls, whose carved ceilings blazed with gold and colour. Frivolous, pleasure-loving, Juan ii. of Castile, grandson of John of Gaunt, had through a long reign outdone in vain ostentation the epic poems and romances of chivalry that filled his brain, and he himself, with his attendant Nubian lion slouching by his side, had stalked through the Alcazar upon the cliff, a figure more picturesque than that of Amadis or Arthur. His lavish, easy-going son, Henry iv., had followed in his footsteps, and had made his palace of Madrid a home of dissolute magnificence and humiliating debauchery, unexampled even in that age of general decadence.

But rarely had scenes at once so pregnant of evil, and yet so ostensibly joyous, been enacted in the palace of Madrid as on the 17th March 1462. Greed, hate and jealousy, raged beneath silken gowns and ermine

CHAPTER I

Proudly reared upon a lofty cliff above the trickling Manzanares, there stood the granite palace that had gradually grown around the ancient Moorish fortress of Madrid. Like an eagle from its aerie, its tiny windows blinked across the tawny plain at the far off glittering snow peaks of Guadarrama, standing forth clear and sharp against a cobalt sky. The Alcazar had been the scene of many strange happenings in the past ; and for a hundred years chivalric splendour had run riot in its broad patios, with their arcades of slender columns, and in its tapestried halls, whose carved ceilings blazed with gold and colour. Frivolous, pleasure-loving, Juan ii. of Castile, grandson of John of Gaunt, had through a long reign outdone in vain ostentation the epic poems and romances of chivalry that filled his brain, and he himself, with his attendant Nubian lion slouching by his side, had stalked through the Alcazar upon the cliff, a figure more picturesque than that of Amadis or Arthur. His lavish, easy-going son, Henry iv., had followed in his footsteps, and had made his palace of Madrid a home of dissolute magnificence and humiliating debauchery, unexampled even in that age of general decadence.

But rarely had scenes at once so pregnant of evil, and yet so ostensibly joyous, been enacted in the palace of Madrid as on the 17th March 1462. Greed, hate and jealousy, raged beneath silken gowns and ermine mantles ; nay, beneath the gorgeous vestments of the great churchmen who stood grouped before the altar in the palace chapel, though smiling faces and words of pleasure were seen and heard on every side. For to the King, after eight years of fruidess marriage, an heiress had been born, and the court and people of Castile and Leon were bidden to make merry and welcome their future Queen. Bull fights, tournaments, and cane contests, the songs of minstrels and plenteous banquets, had for days beguiled a populace palled with gaudy shows ; and now the sacred ceremonies of the Church were to sanctify the babe whose advent had moved so many hearts to shocked surprise. The King, a shaggy, red-haired giant with slack, lazy limbs and feeble face, towered in his golden crown and velvet mantle over his nine-year-old half-brother Alfonso by his side. The child, under a canopy, was borne in state up to the font by Count Alba de Liste, and the stalwart, black-browed primate of Spain, Alfonso Carrillo, Archbishop of Toledo, who, with three attendant bishops, performed the ceremony, blessed the baby girl unctuously beneath the King's lymphatic gaze, though he had already resolved to ruin her. By the side of the font stood the sponsors : a girl of eleven and a sturdy noble in splendid attire, with his wife.

All around, the courtiers, their mouths wreathed in doubtful smiles which their lifted brows belied, glanced alternately at the little group of sponsors, and at the noblest figure of all the courtly throng : a young man glittering with gems who stood behind the King. Tall, almost, as Henry himself, with flashing dark eyes and jet black hair, a fair skin and gallant mien, this youth formed with the King, and the group at the font, the elements of a great drama, which ended in the renascence of Spain. For the young man was Beltran de la Cueva, the new Count of Ledesma, who, all the court was whispering, was really the father of the new-born Princess, and the sponsors, besides the Frenchman Armignac, were the gorged and spoiled favourite of the King, the all-powerful Juan Pacheco, Marquis of Villena, and his wife, and the King's half-sister, Princess Isabel of Castile. The girl had seen nothing of court life, for up to this time, from her orphaned babyhood, she had lived with her widowed mother and younger brother in neglected retirement at the lone castle of Arevalo, immersed in books and the gentle arts that modest maids were taught ; but she went through her part of the ceremony composedly, and with simple dignity. She was already tall for her age, with a fair, round face, large, light blue eyes, and the reddish hair of her Plantagenet ancestors ; and if she, in her innocence, guessed at some of the tumultuous passions that were silently raging around her, she made no sign, and bore herself calmly, as befitted the daughter of a long line of kings. ^

Seven weeks afterwards, on the 9th May, in the great hall of the palace, the nobles, prelates, and deputies of the chartered towns met to swear allegiance to the new heiress of Castile. One by one, as they advanced to kneel and kiss the tiny hand of the unconscious infant, they frowned and whispered beneath their breath words of scorn and indignation which they dared not utter openly, for all around, and thronging the corridors and courtyards, there stood with ready lances the Morisco bodyguard of the King, eager to punish disobedience. And so, though the insulting

' The ceremony is described by Enriquez de Castillo in the contemporary ' Cronica de Enrique iv.'

nickname of the new Infanta Juana, the Beliraneja, after the name of her assumed father, passed from mouth to mouth quietly, public protest there was none. I

Already before the birth of the hapless Beltraneja, the scandal of Henry's life, his contemptible weakness and the acknowledged sexual impotence which had caused his divorce from his first wife, had made his court a battle ground for rival ambitions. Like the previous Kings of his house, which was raised to the throne by a fratricidal revolution, and himself a rebel during his father's lifetime, Henry iv. had lavished crown gifts upon noble partisans to such an extent as to have reduced his patrimony to nought. Justice was openly bought and sold, permanent grants upon public revenues were bartered for small ready payments, law and order were non-existent outside the strong walls of the fortified cities, and the whole country was a prey to plundering nobles, who, either separately or in " leagues," tyrannised and robbed as they listed. 2 Feudalism had never been strong in the realms of Castile, because the frontier nobles, who for centuries pushed back gradually the Moorish power, always had to depend upon conciliating the towns they occupied, in order that the new regime might be more welcome than the one displaced. The germ of institutions in Spain had ever been the municipality, not the village grouped around the castle or the abbey as in England, and the soldier noble in Spain, unlike the English or German baron, had to win the support of townsmen, not to dispose of agricultural

' Hernando de Pulgar, ' Cronica de los Reyes Catolicos.' ^ Letter of Diego de Valera to Henry iv. MS. quoted by Amador de las Rios. Historia de Madrid. See also the famous poems of the time, Coplas de Mingo Revulgo, and Coplas del Provincial, where vivid pictures are given of the prevailing anarchy.

serfs. But when the Moors in Spain had been reduced to impotence, and a series of weak kings had been raised to the throne as the puppets of nobles ; then when feudalism was dying elsewhere, it attempted to raise its head in Spain, capturing the government of towns on the one hand and beggaring and dominating the King on the other. By the time of which we are now speaking, the process was well nigh complete ; and the only safeguard against the absolute tyranny of the nobles, was their mutual greed and jealousy.

For years Juan Pacheco, Marquis of Villena, had ruled the King with a rod of iron. The grants and gifts he had extorted for himself and his friends made him more powerful than any other force in the land. But there were those who sulked apart from him, nobles, some of them, of higher lineage and greater hereditary territories than his ; and when the handsome foot page, Beltran de la Cueva, captured the good graces of the King and his gay young Portuguese wife. Queen Juana, the enemies of Villena saw in the rising star an instrument by which he might be humbled. After the Beltraneja's birth and christening, honours almost royal were piled upon Beltran de la Cueva ; and Villena and his uncle, Alfonso Carrillo, Archbishop of Toledo, grew ever more indignant and discontented. Only a fortnight after the Cortes had sworn allegiance to the new Princess, Villena drew up a secret protest against the act, alleging the illegitimacy of the child,' and soon open opposition to King and favourite was declared.

There is no space here to relate in detail the

1 The protest is in the archives of Villena's descendant, the present Duke of Frias, to whom I am indebted for an abstract of it.

complicated series of intrigues and humiliations that followed. The King on one occasion was forced to hide in his own palace from the assaulting soldiery of Villena. To buy the goodwill of the jealous favourite towards his little daughter he went so far as to agree to a marriage between the Beltraneja and Villena's son;' and more humiliating still, in December 1464, he consented to the inquiry of a commission of churchmen nominated by Villena and his friends, to inquire into the legitimacy of his reputed daughter. The inquiry elicited much piquant but entirely contradictory evidence as to the virility of the King, who, it was admitted on all hands, delighted in the society of ladies, and aroused the violent jealousy of the Queen ; but, although with our present lights there seems to have been no valid reason for disinheriting the princess, the commission was sufficiently in doubt to recommend the King to make the best terms he could with the rebels. The King's sister. Princess Isabel, who at the time lived at Court, was also used as an instrument by Henry to pacify the league against him. She had been betrothed when quite a child at Arevalo to Prince Charles of Viana, eldest son of the King of Aragon, and in right of his mother himself King of Navarre ; a splendid match which, failing issue from Henry and from her younger brother Alfonso, might have led to the union of all Spain in one realm. But Charles of Viana had already in 1 46 1 fallen a victim to the hate and jealousy of his stepmother, Juana Enriquez, daughter of a great Castilian noble, Don Fadrique, the Admiral of the

The origin . treaty, which of course came to nothing, is in the Frias Archives, and s signed by Louis xi. as one of the contracting parties. It is dated gtir May 1463. I have not seen the fact stated elsewhere.

realm, and Isabel became to her brother a valuable diplomatic asset. Before the storm of war burst Henry attempted to wed his sister to Alfonso v. of Portugal, his wife's brother, and so to prevent her claims to the Castilian crown being urged to the detriment of the Beltraneja ; but the match had no attraction for the clever cautious girl of thirteen ; for the suitor was middle-aged and ugly, and already her own genius or crafty councillors had suggested to her the husband who would best serve her own interests. So she gravely reminded her brother that she, a Castilian princess, could not legally be bestowed in marriage without the formal ratification of the Cortes.

In September 1564 Beltran de la Cueva received the great rank of Master of Santiago, which endowed him not only with vast revenues, but the disposal of an armed force second to none in the kingdom, and this new folly of the King was the signal for revolt. A party of nobles immediately seized Valladolid against the King, and though the townspeople promptly expelled them and proclaimed the loyalty of the city, the issue between the factions was now joined. On the following day, i6th September, an attempt that nearly succeeded was made to capture and kidnap the King himself near Segovia. He was a poor, feeble-minded creature, hating strife and danger, and, though some of his stronger councillors protested against such weakness, he consented to meet the revolted nobles, and redress their grievances. In October Villena, the Archbishop of Toledo, Count Benavente, the Admiral Don Fadrique, and the rest of the rebels, met Henry between Cabezon and Cigales, and in three interviews, during their stay of five weeks.

lo QUEENS OF OLD SPAIN

dictated to the wretched King their demands, i The King was to dismiss his Moorish guard and become a better Christian : he was to ask for no more money without the consent of the nobles, to deprive Cueva of the Mastership of Santiago, recognise his own impotence and the bastardy of his daughter, and acknowledge as his heir his half-brother Alfonso, whom he was to deliver to the guardianship of Villena. On the 30th November the nobles and the King took the oath to hold the boy Alfonso as the heir of Spain ; and then Henry, a mere cypher thenceforward, sadly wended his way to Segovia, where the commission to inquire into the shameful question of his virility was still sitting,^ and Villena and his uncle, the warlike Archbishop, were thus practically the rulers of Spain. But though Henry consented to everything he characteristically tried to avoid the spirit of the agreement. Beltran de la Cueva was deprived of the Mastership of Santiago, but he was made Duke of Alburquerque in exchange for the loss, and the poor little disinherited Beltraneja was treated with greater consideration than before.

When civil war was seen to be inevitable in the spring of 1465, Henry carried his wife and child with his sister Isabel to Salamanca, whilst the Archbishop

1 The text of the demands, under thirty-nine heads, will be found in the ' Documentos Ineditos,' vol. xiv. p. 369.

'^ The exact sequence and dates of these and the following events have never yet been made clear in any of the numerous histories of the time, not even in Prescott, owing to the fact that Enriquez de Castillo and Pulgar very rarely give dates, whilst Galindez only mentions the years of such happenings as he records. The printing of the contemporary so-called ' Cronicon de Valladolid' (partly written by Isabel's physician, Dr. Toledo) in the ' Documentos Ineditos,' now enables us to set forth the events chronologically, and thus the better to understand their significance.

ISABEL THE CATHOLIC n

of Toledo, in the name of the revolted nobles, seized the walled city of Avila, where within a few days he was joined by Villena and his friends, bringing with them the Infante Alfonso, who, in pursuance of the agreement made with the King at Cigales, had received the oath of allegiance as heir to the crown. From the King it was clear that the nobles could hope for no more, for he had summoned the nation to arms to oppose them ; but from a child King of their own making, rich grants could still be wrung, and for the first time since the dying days of the Gothic monarchy, the sacredness of the anointed Sovereign of Castile was mocked and derided. In April 1565, at Plascencia, the nobles swore secretly to hold Alfonso as King ; and on the 5th June 1564, on a mound within sight of the walls of Avila, the public scene was enacted that shocked Spain like a sacrilege. Upon a staging there was seated a lay figure in mourning robes, with a royal crown upon its head ; a sword of state before it, and in the hand a sceptre. A great multitude of people with bated breath awaited the living actors in the scene ; and soon there issued from the city gate a brilliant cavalcade of nobles and bishops, headed by Villena escorting the little prince Alfonso. Arriving before the scaffolding, and in mockery saluting the figure, most of the nobles mounted the platform, whilst Villena, the Master of Alcantara, and Count Medillin, with a bodyguard, conveyed the Infante to a coign of vantage some distance away. Then in a loud voice was read upon the platform the impeachment of the King, which was summed up under four heads. For the first, it ran, Henry of Castile is unworthy to enjoy the regal dignity ; and as the tremendous words were read the Archbishop of Toledo stepped forth and tore the royal crown from the brows of the lifeless doll : for the second, he is unfit to administer justice in the realm, and the Count of Plascencia removed the sword of state from its place : for the third, no rule or government should be entrusted to him, and Count of Benavente took from the figure's powerless grasp the sceptre which it held : for the fourth, he should be deprived of the throne and the honour due to kings, whereupon Don Diego Lopez de Zufiiga cast the dummy down and trampled it under foot, amidst the jeers and curses of the crowd. When this was done, and the platform cleared, young Alfonso was raised aloft in the arms of men that all might see, and a great shout went up of '' Castilla, Castilla, for the King Don Alfonso" and then, seated on the throne, the boy gave his hand to kiss to those who came to pay their new sovereign fealty. Like wildfire across the steppes and mountains of Castile sped the awful news, and Henry in Salamanca was soon surrounded by hosts of subjects whose reverence for a sacrosanct King had been wounded by what they regarded as impious blasphemy.