A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens (8 page)

Hopelessly in love and living in fear, Joanna was her husband’s virtual prisoner. She was also becoming a bit unbalanced. Her maternal grandmother had died insane and Joanna, always dark and moody, was now exhibiting similar symptoms. Her plunge into madness was marked by one particularly disturbing episode in 1503. She and Philip had come to Spain so that Joanna could be sworn in as heir to her mother’s kingdom of Castile. Philip, however, decided he hated his wife’s homeland and promptly announced he was returning to his kingdom in the Low Countries (modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands).

Pregnant with their fourth child, Joanna was in no condition to travel. So while her beloved took off, she was stuck in Spain and miserable about it. Increasingly morose and withdrawn, she wept constantly and refused to eat. Even the birth of a healthy son failed to drag Joanna out of her neurotic malaise.

Then one night she simply lost it.

Barefoot, half-dressed, and raving, Joanna ran out of the castle where she was lodged, wailing in agony. Though the November night was freezing, she refused warm clothing and ignored desperate pleas to come back inside. Dressed only in her flimsy nightgown, she stayed out in the cold for thirty-six hours, clinging to the castle gates and hurling obscene insults at anyone who dared approach her. Though she was eventually coaxed back inside, the damage was done. As word of her behavior spread, “Juana la Loca” was on everyone’s lips.

The strain was beginning to take its toll on her mother, Queen Isabella. Although this formidable monarch oversaw the Spanish Inquisition and cosponsored Columbus’s voyages to the New World, her difficult daughter left her cowed. “She spoke to me very rudely,” the queen wrote her ambassador in Flanders, “with such contempt and lack of respect that if I had not been aware of her mental condition, I would not have tolerated it in any way.” Joanna was literally making her mother sick. “We believe that the Queen’s life is endangered by her contact with Madame Princess,” Isabella’s doctors wrote King Ferdinand. “We pray that the fire that consumes [Joanna] disappears. Her life and condition has long affected the life and health of our Queen and Ladyship.”

Meanwhile, back in Flanders, Philip, enjoying the extended respite from his clinging wife, was not pleased by the news of her impending return. His dread was soon confirmed when Joanna came home and went on a rampage with a pair of scissors. She attacked a young woman she suspected of sleeping with Philip, cutting off the poor woman’s blond hair and slashing at her face. Fed up with his unstable spouse, Philip had her locked up in the apartments of his Brussels palace where it was rumored he took to slapping her around. He called her “the terror.” She called him “the fairest of all husbands.”

Not long after, in 1504, Queen Isabella died and Joanna and Philip were proclaimed the new rulers of Castile. Philip, however, died suddenly at age twenty-eight. Some suspected he was the victim of a poisoning plot by King Ferdinand of Aragon, who never was too fond of his son-in-law and certainly didn’t want to share any power with him. Now Joanna really flipped. Plunged into deep despair, she refused to leave her dead husband’s side. Jealous as ever of other women, she forbade any female to approach the corpse. Periodically, she would order Philip’s casket opened so that she might embrace his decaying remains.

Resolving to move the body for final burial, the grieving new queen commanded that the funeral train travel only at night because, she said, “a widow who has lost the sun of her own soul should never expose herself to the light of day.” One night the procession came to rest at a convent, but Joanna didn’t want any women near her man—even if they were nuns. She ordered the coffin taken from the monastery and out to the open fields, where she slept beside it all night.

A monk once told the grieving queen that her beloved husband would come back to life in fourteen years. Eager to believe him, Joanna waited patiently, but when the allotted time came and went with Philip still moldering in his casket, her mental condition deteriorated further. The demented behavior eventually became too much, and Joanna was confined in a Spanish castle until her death in 1555. Her legacy of madness, however, lived on, infiltrating her Habsburg descendants for generations to come.
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Living with Henry VIII was no picnic for the six women unfortunate enough to become his wives. And severed heads weren’t necessarily the worst of it. Getting dumped after nearly twenty years of marriage was bad enough for Henry’s first wife, Katherine of Aragon, but having the husband who once lovingly declared himself “Sir Loyal Heart” turn into a vicious cad devastated her.

The union looked auspicious when it began in 1509, just weeks after the nearly eighteen-year-old Henry became king of England. The young monarch was a vigorous and dazzling romantic who rescued Katherine from the life of misery she had been enduring under his cold and forbidding father, Henry VII.

The youngest daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella (and Joanna the Mad’s kid sister), Katherine had come from Spain eight years earlier as the bride of Henry’s sickly older brother, Arthur. That marriage ended almost as soon as it began, however, when fifteen-year-old Arthur died in 1502. The young widow was left in agonizing limbo. She was stuck in a strange land with no apparent future. Her father-in-law Henry VII used the poor girl as a pawn in his disputes with her father King Ferdinand over her dowry and other matters, depriving Katherine of an allowance and leaving her nearly destitute. The situation had grown so desperate that she was prepared to leave England and become a nun.

Then suddenly it was all over. Henry VII died and his gallant son immediately stepped in to marry his former sister-in-law, who was six years his senior. It was a love match from the beginning, with the happy newlyweds soon crowned together at Westminster Abbey. The endless celebrations surrounding the new king and queen seemed to usher in a new era of youth, vitality, and Renaissance splendor.

The years that followed were happy for both of them. Henry had a devoted queen who did everything from sew his shirts to serve ably as regent while he was away fighting in France. Katherine had a husband who respected her virtue, learning, and piety. The marriage was, in the words of the great Dutch scholar Erasmus, a true example of “harmonious wedlock.” Harmonious, that is, until Katherine’s looks faded, her girth expanded, and it became increasingly obvious that she would be barren of the boys Henry craved to carry on the Tudor family line.

After twenty years of marriage, the king’s conveniently malleable conscience suddenly started gnawing at him. Didn’t the Bible clearly state in Leviticus that it was a sin against God for a man to lie with his brother’s widow? (Never mind that another passage in Deuteronomy encouraged the very same thing.) It was simple, he concluded. God never recognized the patently sinful marriage, so it was cursed with only a daughter, Princess Mary, and in fact never even existed.

But there was something else pricking the king besides his conscience. He had fallen desperately in love with Katherine’s enchanting lady-in-waiting, Anne Boleyn. Unfortunately, this dark-eyed lady with the graceful neck and sparkling wit was withholding her favors until she had a guarantee that Henry would make her queen. Educated in the worldly court of the French King Francis I, Anne was nothing if not savvy. She had seen how quickly Henry discarded his handful of mistresses, including her own sister, so she wasn’t about to become just another temporary treat. Henry didn’t want this either. He was seeking a new wife who could provide him with legitimate sons as well as a good roll in the sack.

In a series of passionate love letters to Anne, “the woman in the world that I value most,” Henry pleaded for patience, “assuring you that henceforth my heart will be dedicated to you alone, and wishing greatly that my body was so too.” At the conclusion of another letter, the king’s mounting lust was plain, “wishing myself in my sweetheart’s arms, whose pretty ducks [breasts] I trust shortly to kiss.” Before he could get his ducks in line, however, Henry had to confront an unexpected obstacle. Queen Katherine absolutely refused to step aside. Though she broke down and wept when her adored husband revealed that his suddenly troubled conscience was urging him out of the marriage, she didn’t roll over and die. Behind the tears was a dignified determination that would forever alter the course of English history. “I am the king’s true and lawful wife,” she defiantly proclaimed when it was suggested that she quietly retire to a nunnery.

Katherine of Aragon may have been a submissive wife wishing only to please her man, but she was also a proud princess of Spain who would never willingly hand over her husband to the upstart Boleyn. Nor would the pious queen agree that twenty years of marriage had been a sinful sham in the eyes of the Church, making their daughter Mary a bastard. But there was something else compelling Katherine to stand up and fight. She was still in love with the dashing prince who had fallen in love with her two decades before.

Stunned by the obstinacy of the woman who had always shown herself to be so amenable, Henry realized that shedding his wife would not be so easy. Furthermore, he was confronted with something he had never encountered before—the unwelcome mutterings of a people unhappy with the prospect of seeing their beloved queen displaced. In what may be one of history’s more disingenuous public speeches, the king attempted a bit of sixteenth-century spin control.

“If it be adjudged that the Queen is my lawful wife,” he pronounced, “nothing will be more pleasant or more acceptable to me, both for the clearness of my conscience, and also for the good qualities and conditions I know her to be in . . . besides her noble parentage she is a woman of most gentleness, humility and buxomness; yea, and of all good qualities pertaining to nobility she is without comparison. . . . So that if I were to marry again, I would choose her above all women. But if it be determined in judgment that our marriage is against God’s law, then shall I sorrow, parting from so good a lady and loving companion.”

Henry had every intention of parting from the good lady, and concluded his speech on a rather sinister note. He shouted to the crowd that if anyone dared criticize him in the future, they would pay dearly. There was “no head so fine,” he warned, that he would “not make it fly.” This was a king who had grown accustomed to getting his way.

An ecclesiastical tribunal was convened to determine the validity of Henry’s marriage to Katherine. One of the pope’s two representatives assigned to hear the case happened to be the king’s own chief minister, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, so Katherine had little chance for a fair hearing. Nevertheless, she did show up to solemnly swear that her brief union with Prince Arthur had never been consummated, and as Henry well knew, she entered the marriage “as a virgin and an immaculate woman.”

Falling to her knees, the queen made a dramatic public plea to her powerful husband that would inspire Shakespeare more than eight decades later. “Sir,” Katherine began in her strong Spanish accent, “I beseech you for all the love that hath been between us, let me have justice and right, take of me some pity and compassion, for I am a poor woman, and a stranger born out of your dominion. I have no friend and much less indifferent counsel. I flee to you, as to the head of justice within this realm.”

After reminding him of their life together, their shared tragedies and joys, Katherine concluded by returning to the heart of the issue. “And when ye had me at first, I take God to my judge, I was a true maid, without touch of man. And whether this be true or no, I put it to your conscience.” With that, the proud queen made her way through the silenced crowd and walked out of the trial so clearly biased against her.

Henry never did overtly deny Katherine’s declaration of virginity when entering the marriage, but he did allow evidence to be heard that no doubt would have mortified the deeply religious woman if she had hung around the courtroom to hear it. In what amounted to little more than teenage locker room testimony, a succession of witnesses claimed that the late Prince Arthur had indeed bedded his young bride. Sir Anthony Willoughby, for one, testified that he was there both when the prince had taken Katherine to bed and when he emerged from the wedding chamber the next morning. “Willoughby,” he recalled Arthur saying, “bring me a cup of ale, for I have been this night in the midst of Spain.”

Salacious testimony aside, the tribunal ended without a verdict. King Henry sincerely believed the case would be concluded quickly and that he soon would be able to marry Anne Boleyn, but it was not to be. Cardinal Wolsey may have been the king’s man, but he wasn’t the only one hearing the case. The other papal legate, Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio, had come directly from Rome and was under strict orders from Pope Clement VII to delay a verdict at all costs.

The pope’s motive was simple. Katherine’s powerful nephew (and Joanna the Mad’s son), the Habsburg Emperor Charles V,
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had recently sacked Rome, and the pope was at his mercy. He could not allow the divorce without incurring Charles’s wrath. Campeggio, exercising the order to delay, decided that the case was too important to be heard in England and referred it to Rome.

Hoping to be divorced and in bed with Anne by now, Henry was furious to find himself instead stuck in an intolerable position while the pope bided his time. The king was living with his wife and would-be wife in the same household, and none of them was happy about it. Katherine took every opportunity to remind her estranged husband that she was a virgin when she came to the marriage and that the union was true and legal. So relentless was the queen in defending her position that finally Henry exploded in anger. “I am content,” he conceded impatiently on the issue of Katherine’s maidenhood, “but you are not my wife for all that.”