As Katherine performed her usual round of royal duties, Juana received visitors. On a bitterly cold November day in 1517, a small retinue arrived at Tordesillas. Charles, accompanied by his elder sister, Eleanor, had come to see their mother. The last time they had all met was when Juana and Philip had left the Netherlands to take up the throne of Castile upon Isabella’s death. Then, Eleanor had been a little girl of almost eight, her brother two years younger. Now Charles was a king in his own right, and Eleanor about to become a queen. She was to replace Juana’s sister, Maria, as queen of Portugal. Manuel II, having already married two sisters, was quite happy to marry his niece.
Brother and sister had left the Burgundian Netherlands, the land of their birth, early in November, but the seas were stormy and their fleet of forty ships was soon battered and bruised by the howling gales and tossing waves. Somehow, after a horrendous journey of ten days, they had arrived on Spanish soil and traveled in easy stages to Tordesillas for their first glimpse of the mother they could barely remember and their sister, Catalina, whom they had never seen. Soon they would also meet their other sibling, Prince Ferdinand, although Charles, recognizing a potential rival, was swift to endow his younger brother with some of his Habsburg estates, intending eventually to dispatch him to Germany.
Juana’s remaining two children, Maria and Isabella, had already begun new lives when Charles and Eleanor dismounted at Tordesillas. When she was eight, Maria had been sent off to join her grandfather, Maximilian, in the Habsburg lands of the Holy Roman Empire, eventually becoming Queen of Hungary; Isabella was married to King Christian II of Denmark, a union destined to bring the young bride nothing but misery.
Still, Juana did at least have Charles and Eleanor. Yet both connived to keep her ignorant of what was going on in the world outside the walls of Tordesillas. Charles, she was told, had come to Spain entirely for her sake: he intended to “see that satisfaction be given to her” regarding any complaints she might have about her treatment. Thus, Charles’s first meeting with her was based upon a lie, one in which he willingly connived, for he did not tell her that he was really there to claim her crowns for himself because Ferdinand was dead. For that was indeed why Charles had come. Just as she and Philip had needed the acclamations of the various Cortes upon their accession, so did he. And it was politic that it did at least look as if his mother had given him her blessing and that she was happy for him to take up the cares of state with which she could not be burdened. It was also politic for Charles to give the appearance of being devoted to his mother’s welfare, a feat he managed to perfection. Katherine, in England, never thought to question her nephew’s concern for her sister; she had no inkling that she should.
Quite how Charles and Eleanor expected their mother to behave as they went into her room on that November day is unrecorded. If they expected to view a deranged woman, that did not happen. She did not always dress as a queen; she ate erratically and was often reluctant to hear Mass (a trait that worried her devout son just as much, if not more than, her physical state); but she was far from “the wretched brain-sick Queen” mournfully described by one of Charles’s most thorough but sympathetic biographers. We will never know what she said to her son, but since she did not know that her own father had died more than a year before, she could hardly surrender authority to Charles when she believed that Ferdinand was exercising it on her behalf.
That did not stop Charles claiming it, although he found the Cortes more reluctant to acknowledge his rule than he had anticipated, especially since some grandees were suspicious of Juana’s true mental condition. Some, too, disliked the concept of a foreign monarch who knew nothing about Spain and its customs, whose native language was not Spanish, and whose advisers were rapacious Burgundians. Indeed, many would have preferred Charles’s brother, who had spent his entire life in Spain; sending Prince Ferdinand out of the country was a wise move on Charles’s part. Nevertheless, over the coming months, despite simmering if underlying discontent, Charles gained the authorizations he required. He could now turn his attention to his mother. He began by pensioning off Cisneros’s choice of “governor” (i.e. jailer), Hernan, Duke of Estrada, replacing him with the Marquis of Denia and his wife, Francisca, both former servants of Ferdinand and Isabella, and both firm supporters of Charles’s cause. As a consequence, Juana’s everyday life was about to get worse, her restrictions tighter and isolation greater.
Katherine, about to confront troubles of her own, had no conception of those plaguing her sister. There was still no correspondence between the two. Even had Katherine sent letters, Juana’s “guardians” are unlikely to have allowed her to receive them, unless heavily censored. Keeping her in seclusion, in total ignorance of major events, made her easier to control. As Denia confirmed in one of his letters to Charles, that was why she had not been told of Ferdinand’s death:
I have told the Queen our lady that the King my lord, her father, is alive, because whenever anything that is done displeases her Highness, I say that the King orders and commands it so; for the love she bears him makes it easier to her to endure it than it would be if she knew that he is dead.
As Denia let slip, he knew that she had much “to endure.”
Yet Juana’s respect for her father was not so deep-rooted, nor her spirit so quelled, that she never questioned what she had done to justify her imprisonment. She wanted to return to the world, even perhaps to play a part in government. Again, Denia left Charles in no doubt about what his mother was feeling:
She ordered me to write to the King, her lord [Ferdinand] telling him that she can no longer bear the life she leads, that it is so long a time that he has kept her locked up and a prisoner, and that being his daughter, he ought to treat her in a better manner; that she wished to live where she could know what was going on, and see the nobles of the kingdom.
As always, her pleas were ignored.
In fact, the regime instituted by Charles’s choice of jailer was worse than that she had suffered under Ferrer. When he had been in charge, Juana had been allowed to visit the convent occasionally. Such outings stopped almost entirely once Denia took the helm, though Juana frequently demanded them. “She desires much to go out,” usually to the nearby convent on holy days such as the “day of All Saints,” he informed his master. Once she “ordered that her dresses be cleaned” so that they were ready for her; once she “dressed and put her hood over her head” so that she could leave the castle. And, as determined as she always had been to get her own way, she continued to pester him. In every case, Denia found reasons to thwart her. “It was not convenient,” he said, or there was disease around. “I intend to prevent her by all means from going out,” he told Charles, but if that proved “impossible” it would be done “in such a way that, with the help of God, no inconvenience will be the consequence.”
Denia and Charles knew only too well what such “inconvenience” meant: if she was seen in public, the elaborate fiction that she was completely and utterly insane would unravel. Her conversations with Denia, all of which he meticulously reported to her son, showed just how sane she actually was. She asked about her family, she asked about her servants’ wages, she asked for money, she asked to see leading nobles, she asked how her kingdoms fared. Almost ten years’ incarceration were beginning to take their toll—she was afraid that Prince Ferdinand might be given “something to kill him,” for example—but she was not the constantly unbalanced creature that carefully phrased propaganda promulgated.
Secrecy was to be the order of the day. In one of his first letters to Denia, Charles stressed just that. The marquis was not “to speak or write anything concerning her Highness to any other person except to me,” Charles emphasized, and such letters should be sent only “by trusty messengers.” Moreover, whenever Denia spoke to Juana, he should ensure that no one heard what was going on. “The affairs of her Highness being of such kind as you know, you must not consent that any of the women or any other person be present when she speaks to you about them,” Charles instructed. Quickly Denia affirmed that Charles could “rest assured” that “precaution is and will be observed … by not permitting anyone to be present when her Highness speaks to me, as well as by keeping the secret, as it stands to reason.” In fact, he said that “for writing certain things,” he would “like to have a cipher.” Denia is silent on whether the “secret” was that Juana was so unbalanced that she was an embarrassment to herself and others, or that she was in fact quite sane. It is left to us to make up our minds.
Denia understood completely that what went on at Tordesillas was to be kept confidential, even from Juana’s other children. When Prince Ferdinand left the country, Denia thought he should send a note of farewell, a “message of courtesy,” the essence of which he was quick to convey to Charles:
I wrote to him that the Queen our lady was better treated than she had been before, thinking it advantageous to your Highness that the better treatment of her highness should be known in these kingdoms, and everywhere else, and that it was due to your Highness. Besides this I wrote to the senor Infante on the occasion of his departure what a good vassal and servant of your Highness ought to write, but if he had remained a hundred years in these kingdoms I should not have written or told him a word of what is going on here.
Denia became obsessed with the need for stealth, especially because Juana “speaks words to move stones.” Those words should be for his implacable ears alone. Therefore he was quick to keep her from meeting the nobles whom she often said she wished to consult, always pretending that pestilence or distance had prevented their coming. Juana’s women too were a perennial problem to him because they went out into the town and gossiped “of things which ought not to be known, because in all that passes here, secrecy indeed is necessary.” He was particularly worried because one of them was married to an official of the Council of State, who could then hear things that “ought to be a secret from all, and much more so from the Members of the Council.” Even if the women did not indulge in tittle-tattle, and he thought most of them did, they brought news back from the town to Juana, thus depriving her “of her rest and tranquility.” The danger that such news might include the fact of Ferdinand’s death did not bear thinking of. Charles’s quick response was to dismiss those women thought untrustworthy.
But even with the women dismissed, there were other anxieties for Denia to contend with. A major concern was always illness. As outsiders, doctors could be dangerous. When Juana complained of toothache, Denia’s response was that everyone was unwell because the weather was so bad; when Juana felt so awful after suffering “strong fevers and shiverings” for ten days that she begged for a doctor, Denia refused. The fever subsided, he said. And when Catalina became so ill that he had no option but to seek medical help, Denia sent for Dr. Soto, an elderly physician who had accompanied Juana from Burgundy. Denia thought Dr. Soto would stay silent in the hope that a small pension he had once received would be reinstated. It was not.
Even if Juana and Catalina seemed healthy, Denia was forever troubled by the spread of plague and disease in the countryside around them. Fearing contagion, he told Charles that he had “taken measures of great precaution, walling up all the gates of the town, with the exception of two” at which he posted guards. This served only to so upset the townsfolk who were unable to go about their normal business that Denia entreated Charles to send them a personal note of thanks for their cooperation. What really kept Denia awake at night was what he should do if the outside sickness became so bad that Juana had to be moved. How he would keep her away from prying eyes occupied his thoughts to the point that he was constantly writing to Charles about it.
While Charles pondered other possible destinations, Juana’s existence continued its monotonous pace. She “lives in her room, goes to bed and gets up, and dines every second day” wrote Denia. Food rarely tempted her, although her jailer happily reported when she “improved in eating.” Her religious observances, or apparent lack of them, were a persistent thorn in Denia’s flesh. Charles wanted her to hear Mass often. She demurred, unless it was said in a corridor rather than in the room of Denia’s choice. Such issues, petty in themselves, were crucial to Juana’s self-esteem; religion was the one area that she understood really mattered to those in charge of her, the one area in which she could still defy them. She contrived to get her way: a small chapel was “constructed out of drapery” in the corridor just where she wanted it. With the hangings in place, she finally consented to hear Mass with Catalina. Receiving the sacrament, she “chanted Paternosters and Ave Marias so loud that they could be heard,” wrote an exultant Denia. Charles could rest easy that his mother’s soul was being safeguarded even if her overall welfare was not. Such was his sense of priorities.
Catalina’s welfare did trouble Charles, though. Lovingly brought up with most of his siblings by his aunt Margaret, he believed that he cared deeply about family, and about his sisters in particular. The records bulge with affectionate letters he wrote to them. Catalina’s plight, growing up in the same bleak castle in which their mother declared herself to be “locked up and a prisoner,” pained him. He immediately set about providing his eleven-year-old sister with all she might need as a royal princess, requesting Denia’s wife to send him a list of “what appears to be necessary.” Once he received it, he said, he would “provide for it at once.” Yet in a note he sent to Catalina, in which he called her his “very dear and beloved sister” and signed himself “your good brother,” he also told her to “follow the council [sic] and advice of the Marquis of Denia and of the Marchioness his wife” because “persons who are so prudent and so much desire to serve” him could not “err in any respect.”
Perhaps to give Catalina more experiences, and to prepare her for a royal marriage, Charles ordered that she should be removed from Tordesillas six months or so after he first saw her. But Catalina was all that Juana had—even some of the queen’s possessions were being spirited away to provide items for Eleanor’s trousseau—and her reaction was so pitiful that Catalina was quickly restored to her mother’s side. From then on, Juana tried not to let her daughter out of her sight, constantly “calling for her” if she disappeared even for a minute. She was afraid, she told Denia, that “the King my lord will take her from me as he has taken the Infante [Prince Ferdinand].” Should that happen, she said, she would throw herself out the window or kill herself “with a knife.” The fact that it was her son, not her father, who had removed Catalina never occurred to her. Fortunately, Charles heeded her warnings and allowed his sister to stay with their mother for a while yet.
Some years later, when Catalina did leave her in order to marry her Portuguese cousin and become a queen herself, Juana would become almost broken by her grief at the girl’s loss. She stayed for twenty-four hours in the corridor from which she had had her last glimpse of her daughter before shutting herself away and taking to her bed for two days, prostrate with despair.
From the moment of his accession, Charles had been in a dilemma over what to do with Juana. She was an enigma, her behavior so often puzzling and contradictory. Whenever she wanted to get her own way at Tordesillas, she would try anything. She would orchestrate scene after scene; she had temper tantrums; she would not eat regularly; she attacked two of her female attendants with a broom. Yet she would then spend hours in coherent and sensible conversation with Denia and his wife, and Catalina never begged Charles to save her from an irrational mother.
However, if he accepted that Juana was not insane but, with rest and a change of scene, might be able to play some part in ruling her kingdoms, no matter how limited, his own position would be undermined. His father had ruled in partnership with Isabella, but that was not Charles’s style. He had a deep inner conviction of his own destiny, and monarchy was in his opinion a male preserve. “Think what troubles might not ensue if your sisters and their husbands came to inherit what was yours,” he was later to write to his own son, counseling the young man to take very good care of himself in order to keep such “troubles” away.
It is true that Charles relied upon his aunt Margaret to act as regent for him in the Netherlands again, and he would use his son and other female members of his family similarly, but his regents had no inherent right to their position; they worked under his direction and could be removed at the stroke of a pen should he so wish. His mother’s case was entirely different because she was a sovereign in her own right. If he released her, there was no saying what she might do; genies do not willingly jump back into bottles. She could even attempt to take over the sole government of her realms herself, and because Charles was highly unpopular with many Castilian grandees, they might support her.
We cannot know whether Charles really did think Juana was totally unbalanced, whether he chose to convince himself that she was, or whether he knew that she was quite sane. All of those are possible, but there is no denying that his mother’s supposedly deranged mental state was remarkably convenient for him. We do know that, when he was in a position to change her life, he did not do so. He did not deliberately have her badly handled; indeed, he was assiduous in requesting Denia to treat her well; but he did continue her imprisonment.
Maximilian’s death in January 1519 made Juana’s confinement still more essential, because Charles was clearly the prime candidate to take over from his grandfather as Holy Roman Emperor. Success would mean Charles’s leaving Spain, at least for a while; he did not want existing tensions increasing in his absence. Although the office of emperor was not hereditary, for its holder had to be chosen by seven electors, Charles’s Habsburg blood, his ownership of land within the conglomerate of states that comprised the empire, and the astronomical sums he was prepared to advance in bribes gave him a key advantage over other potential contestants. He knew it; so did Francis I and Henry. And if Charles gained the empire in addition to his existing territories, France was encircled and England outshone. In such circumstances, the only course open to Francis and Henry was to put themselves forward for election too. But although Francis lobbied hard and efficiently, “straining every nerve, by art or cunning” as Wolsey so aptly put it, and promising to double Charles’s bribes to those electors who would support him, while Henry also offered promises of cash to anyone who would switch to his side, it was Charles who triumphed. Already the possessor of Spain, the Low Countries, parts of the New World and Italy, and now the Holy Roman Empire, Juana’s son was the man of the moment.
Juana was told of his election, but she was not told of Maximilian’s death. Instead, she was fed the usual pack of lies. The emperor had abdicated, she was informed, so that Charles could take over. Denia even suggested that she write to Maximilian to thank him for “the favour” he had shown her son. Such a letter, written to a decaying corpse, could have been used to prove her insanity to the world, but Juana perspicaciously ignored his advice. She suggested that Denia should write it instead, since “she had never written to him [Maximilan] since the death of the King her lord [Philip].”
In England, Wolsey celebrated a high Mass at St. Paul’s in Charles’s honor as Henry, who had thought he stood a chance of winning as a compromise candidate, made the best he could of his disappointment. Pointedly, the French ambassador did not attend the service, an action that “offended many,” or so the Venetian representative, Giustinian, assures us. Katherine, naturally, was delighted by her family’s increased power and Charles’s new position in European politics. Giustinian reported that “as a Spaniard,” Katherine was “gratified at the success of her nephew.” And that was the rub: Katherine would always be thought of as Spanish. When her father’s perfidy had given her little option, she had chosen her husband over her Spanish heritage, but that had not meant that she had relinquished it forever: if presented with a choice between France and Spain as English allies, she would not have hesitated for an instant. The choice, though, was not hers to make.
And for a brief while, it looked as though there was no choice to make in any case. Before Charles’s coup in securing his new title, Cardinal Wolsey, shamelessly hijacking the pope’s plans for a major European truce so that Christians could fight the Muslims rather than each other, had encouraged Henry to abandon thoughts of conflict (always expensive and usually risky) and consider himself a warrior for peace instead of war. The result had been the Treaty of London of 1518, which provided a form of collective security for those who signed: should any be attacked by anyone else, the others would rush to their aid. Because of Wolsey’s skillful negotiations, the signatories included the key Italian city-states, the pope, and Francis, soon to be joined by Charles himself. Henry basked in admiration, his ego satisfied. As “the chief author of the proceedings,” Wolsey fared just as well. “Nothing pleases him [Wolsey] more,” announced Giustinian shrewdly, “than to be styled the arbitrator of Christendom.”
This rush of universal brotherhood and warmth, moreover, had directly affected Katherine: Princess Mary, although only two years old, was betrothed to the dauphin. At Greenwich on October 5, 1518, Henry had stood before his throne with Katherine beside him. Princess Mary, wearing “cloth of gold, with a cap of black velvet on her head, adorned with many jewels,” stood in front of her mother. Wolsey, naturally, was there, and so was the pope’s representative, Cardinal Campeggio. All listened while the French ambassadors formally asked for Mary’s hand in marriage for the dauphin. Henry and Katherine having given their consent, Wolsey gave the little girl a ring containing a huge diamond that, it was said, he had purchased for her himself. Once one of the ambassadors symbolically “passed it over the second joint” of the child’s wedding ring finger, the betrothal was complete, the ring’s shape, a circle without a break, supposed to represent the eternal nature of love.
To cement this newfound amity between the old enemies, Henry and Francis pledged to meet each other near Calais. It was while Wolsey settled down to the complex and convoluted preparations required for this summit that an additional scheme was hatched: on his way to his new empire, Charles should stop off in England and meet Henry. It was in both their interests. Since Charles and Francis were so evenly matched, Henry’s backing might tip the balance between them should the current mood of universal brotherhood disintegrate into war. Henry would then be in the envious position of being wooed by both sides and could attempt to exact a high price for his support.
Katherine, never likely to be overjoyed at a French match for her only daughter but thrilled at the idea of bringing together her nephew and her husband, played her part in trying to engineer the encounter. After all, friendship with France was one thing, friendship with Spain quite another; it would be a rekindling of everything she had come to England to foster. And for the first time since those few precious hours she had spent with Juana all those years ago, Katherine would be able to see a member of her own family. No wonder that when Henry announced to her that they would meet Charles on their way to the rendezvous with Francis, she was ecstatic. “Raising her eyes to heaven, with clasped hands,” she praised God “for the grace she hoped he would do her that she might see Charles, which was her greatest desire in the world.” And knowing her husband as she did, she thanked him profusely, making a low curtsy to him as she did so.
The timing of the meeting was tight, largely because Francis could not delay too long because of his wife’s pregnancy. The king wanted Queen Claude to be present when he greeted Henry in France, but he also wanted to allow time for her to rest before her delivery. Thus, if Charles did not arrive in England by May 26, there would be no time for talks before Henry would have to start for Calais. Katherine was on tenterhooks as Charles did his utmost to meet the deadline, but he was hindered by bad winds and treacherous weather. Finally, his ship scraped into Dover harbor on the twenty-sixth itself.
Katherine was about to have her wish and meet her sister’s son for the very first time.