The Last Queen (55 page)

Aragón.

Regardless of his promises, Charles favored his Flemish and Austrian courtiers

over their Castilian counterparts, and the heavy taxations he imposed on the Spanish

people to finance his wars abroad eventual y drove the people to rebellion. The most

tragic of their attempts to throw off the Habsburg yoke was the Comuneros Revolt of

1520. The Comuneros initially sought to restore their captive queen to her throne;

alas, their poor organization and training, coupled with Charles V‟s immense

manpower, put a swift end to them. More than three-hundred Spaniards were

executed for treason. Some, nevertheless, reached Tordesillas, and for a brief spell a

bewildered Juana was released. She had no idea her father had died or that her son

now held her throne. By the time she managed to absorb the monumental changes

that had occurred since she‟d been locked away, it was too late.

She never left the precincts of Tordesillas again.

Following the subjugation of the Comuneros, Charles came to Spain and visited

his mother. What Juana said privately to her son after more than twenty years of

separations remains unrecorded, but he must have known her refusal to surrender her

rights as queen had given him Spain. Nevertheless, by Castilian law he would not be

fully recognized as king until her death, and he did not release her.

Prematurely aged by his obligations, Charles V abdicated in 1555. He retired to a

monastery in Avila, Spain, where he spent his final years in seclusion, obsessed with

clocks. He died in 1558. He bequeathed Spain, the Netherlands, Naples, and Spain‟s

New World territories to his son, Phillip II. Raised in Spain, Philip became the

country‟s first official king: he ruled over a united realm and elevated it to

preeminence and power. His influence would last into the seventeenth century; under

him, Spain entered the apex of her Golden Age, mirroring the thriving of the arts

under Elizabeth I of England. Philip‟s era was one of undoubted savage religious

persecution, of slavery and the destruction of Native populations throughout the

Americas; it also gave birth to Cervantes‟s
Don Quixote
, the first essentially modern novel, the paintings of EL Greco and Velazquez, and the dramatic writings of Lope

de Vega.

Charles‟s Habsburg domains went to his brother, Juana‟s younger son, the infante

Fernando, who inherited the title of Holy Roman Emperor. He became a strong ruler

in his own right, signing a peace treaty with the Ottoman Empire and supporting the

Counter-Reformation. He died in 1564 and was buried in Vienna.

Beatriz de Talvera wed, bore children, and died in Spain. The admiral succumbed

to a stomach ailment shortly after Juana‟s imprisonment. The handmaiden Soraya‟s

fate is unknown.

Juana‟s eldest daughter, Eleanor, wed the King of Naples; after his death she

became the unhappy second wife of François I of France. Isabella wed the king of

Denmark, with whom she was apparently content.

Juana‟s youngest sister, Catalina, became queen of England and the first of Henry

VIII‟s six wives. Her namesake, Juana‟s youngest daughter, remained with her mother

in Tordesillas for sixteen years. In 1525, at her brother Charles‟s command, Catalina

was stolen away while Juana slept and sent to marry King Juan III of Portugal. After

giving birth to nine children, she died in 1578, twenty-two years after the death of her

mother, whom she never saw again.

The loss of Catalina, Juana‟s sole remaining consolation, plunged the imprisoned

queen into utter despair. According to the accounts of her current custodian, which I

read firsthand, it was at this moment that she began to show the erratic, clinical signs

of the manic depression that many scholars believe tainted the Trastámara blood.

In 1555, after forty-six years in captivity, Juana of Castile died at the age of

seventy-six. Francesco de Borja, founder of the Jesuit Order, attended her in her final

days. By this time, she had passed into myth, the unstable queen who went mad with

grief, impotent symbol of Spain‟s suffering― Juana la Loca.

She was entombed with her husband, Philip the Fair. Today, the lovers who

became mortal enemies rest in the cathedral in Granada, opposite the sepulcher of

Isabel and Fernando.