[The following is in regards to a figure from Spanish history who is commonly known as Joanna the Mad. We’ve written about her before, here.]
The years had dealt more hardly with Joanna in Flanders than with Catherine in England. It is hard to lose a husband through death, even if one has not learned to love him; it is infinitely harder to lose the husband one loves, and to know him completely and forever lost while he sits at one’s table and shares one’s bed. From her first arrival in Flanders Joanna was desperately in love with her husband, and that blond, smiling, dull-witted athlete was first flattered, and then bored, then annoyed and perhaps a little frightened by this intense, possessive passion. Philip’s idea of life was to spend his days in hunting and drinking with his male companions and his nights in the bed of some complacent and unexigent female, lady of quality or kitchen wench, who would take him as lightly as he took her, and not disturb too much his emotions or his slumbers.
Joanna’s stormy jealousy, her unending demands, chilled and embarrassed him. She was jealous of every minute spent away from her, not only of his women, but of his drinking companions, his counselors, his very hunting dogs. When she upbraided him with his infidelity he was callously brutal; when she sank into stony despair he took it for mere skulking and left her severely alone; when, at last, she flew at one of his mistresses with scissors, he declared that she was out of her wits and ought to be locked up, and have the devils beaten out of her.
Had Joanna not been Queen of Castile in her own right, and had Philip not been anxious to take advantage of her love to win her kingdom for himself and his greedy flatterers, perhaps he would have locked her up and treated her frankly as a madwoman. And perhaps she was already beginning to be mad. She had always been high-strung, ill-balanced, excessively responsive to affection or ill-treatment. Now under the strain of her grievances, real and fancied, her personality was beginning to break up: brief, hysterical outbursts of weeping or anger alternating with long periods of silent melancholy.
But the disintegration was by no means complete. While some observers at the Burgundian court found her behavior inexplicable, others were impressed by her grave, graceful bearing, her queenly manner, her courage and dignity and wit. At Windsor, she was shaken by her recent terrible experience at sea, a trial in which she had borne herself bravely enough, and hurt by Philip’s neglect and by the completeness with which she had been shouldered out of the celebrations for the royalty she conferred, and the discussions of the fate of her kingdom.
But though Catherine found her sadly changed she did not find her mad. And Henry VII was curiously stirred. He had asked for her presence; he regretted having so little of it. He thought her – as many people thought her – beautiful. He was sincerely sorry for her.
Source:
Mattingly, Garrett. “Part I: A Spanish Princess (1485-1509); Chapter Three, Section v” Catherine of Aragon. New York: Quality Paperback , 1990. 83-4. Print.
Further Reading:
Joanna of Castile / Juana la Loca (Joanna the Mad)
Catalina de Aragón (Catherine of Aragon)
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