BERGENROTH'S SUPPLEMENTARY STATE PAPERS.* THIS volume of the late Mr.
Bergenroth's collections will be found more readable than most of the Rolls publications from its com- prising State papers which have mostly a direct bearing on two selected historical questions, and which, moreover, appear to have been a long time withheld from him by the Spanish Government, with a view to screening from scandalous imputations the reputation of the Emperor Charles V. and some of his most distinguished rela- tives. For this delay our editor has revenged himself by putting the worstpossible construction on his documents in relation both to the life of Katharine of Aragon during her widowhood, and to the treat- ment which her sister, Queen Juana (or Johanna) received from her parents and afterwards her husband and son, on the ground of her alleged imbecility. Mr. Fronde, in a recent article in Fraser's Magazine, has censured the new views on both these points, as ill- sustained by evidence, though it is only on the former of them that he has yet entered into a methodical discussion. It appears that Katharine had an imprudent confidence in her confessor, Brother Diego Fernandez, whom the Ambassador in England, Fuensalida, represented to her father in March, 1509, as a young, licentious, assuming man, and in the habit of controlling her con- duct to an unwarrantable degree, by making a sin of any step of hers which happened to displease him, as, in one instance, of her joining a common family party. He further complained that for this man's frivolous expenditure she sold plate which she ought to have kept until the question of her dowry had been settled, and this while she was herself in great want of money. Mr. Bergenioth would restrain us from putting any charitable construction on her care for the comforts of her confessor, by quoting a passage where the ambassador makes the latter say to him, "En esta casa ay malas lenguas, y me an infamado y no con lo mas baxo de la casa, syno con lo mas alto." By this our editor understands, "In this house there are evil tongues, and they have cast slanderous imputa- tions upon me with respect not to the lowest in the house, but to the highest," and he alleges that the highest person in the house was evidently the Princess Katharine. Mr. Froude, however, has fairly pointed out that the friar may have spoken of himself as slandered, not with respect to, but to (i.e., in speaking with) the highest person in the house, for the Spanish infamar. . . . conlomas alto will apparently bear this construction as well as any other. Mr. Bergenroth says that Katharine's case is not improved by the circumstance that about six years later, Diego, while still her confessor, was judicially convicted of fornication, and ordered to be given up to Ferdinand. Mr. Fronde here shows that the trial was an irregular and, very probably, an unfair one. We mast refer to Fraser's Magazine for other parti- eulars of the controversy, and especially for the negative evidence that Katharine was not upbraided or censured on any after- occasion for her intimacy with Diego Fernandez ; but it is our decided impression that Mr. Bergenroth has been somewhat too eager to give a positive value to the historical materials he ac- quired with so much difficulty. Although Horne Tooke com- plained that he was made the victim, in a law court, of "two pre- positions and a conjunction," we must be cautious of allowing the character of a queen whom we have longed deemed "fair, sober, wise," to be betrayed by one ambiguous particle in the docu- ments lent us to unmask an ancient confessional. We speak from a kind of personal interest, which Mr. Bergenroth is inclined to suppress in behalf of the philosophy of history ; but how pre- carious is the credit of that philosophy, if one or two slippery examples from the lives of eminent individuals are indispensable to support its conclusions? It would never be too difficult to maintain, even without the confessor of Katharine of Aragon, that few, if any, of the men and women who were mixed up with the public affairs of three or four hundred years ago can bear close
* Supplement to Vol. I. and Vol. II, of Letters, Despatches. and State Papers, relating to The Negotiations between Erufland and Spain, preserved in the Archives of Simaneas and elsewhere. I. Queen Katharine, II, Intended Marriage of King Henry VII. with Queen Juana. Edited by G. A. Bergenroth, Rolls Publications. London : Longmans. 1868.
examination without their characters being more or lees lowered in our estimation."
On the more important subject of Queen Juana, it is Mr. Bergenroth's theory that at an early period in her life she was inclined to religious views which dissatisfied her mother, Isabella, whose attempts to observe and control her mode of living after her marriage with the Archduke Philip resulted in a further estrange-
ment between them. The Catholic zeal of Isabella, seconded by Ferdinand's interested policy, led them hereupon to a decision that Juana should never be allowed to reign in Spain. This plan seems to have been ripe in 1501 ; and already, in the following two years, the Cortes, which met in Toledo, &c., were artfully induced to petition Queen Isabella to make provision for the Government of Castile after her death, in case her daughter "might be absent," or " might not like or be able to reign or govern." It had probably been already intimated to the Spanish notables that the Archduchess was suffer- ing from some mental derangement ; and they afterwards promised to obey the provision thus made, at their desire, according to that hypothesis. It is known that while Ferdinand and Philip were yet disputing the government of Castile, the latter accused his father-in-law of spreading a false rumour of Juana's madness. "Moreover," says the instruction for John de Hesdin, "to have more colour for usurping the said government, and animating the grandees and the people against our said lord, the King (Philip), he (Ferdinand) caused to be published and circulated the rumour that the said Queen, his daughter, was
mad, and that he ought to govern for her, and that the said King, her husband, kept her prisoner,—with other infinite lies and extravagances." The rivals, nevertheless, patched up their quarrel ; and Juana's rights were sacrificed by both parties through the medium of a secret treaty.
The imprisonment of Juana seems certainly to have com- menced during the life-time of her husband ; for Cardinal Adrian writes, in 1520, that the infamy of adopting this measure under false pretences was attributed to Ferdinand and Philip (as well as afterwards to Charles V.) Philip died shortly after this time, and perhaps from the effects of poison ; but Juana was not altogether a free agent when she is said to have given signs of frantic attachment to his corpse on the way to and at Tordesillas.
When Cardinal Ximenez assumed the regency of Spain, he received reports respecting the treatment of Queen Juana which led him to institute inquiries, and to suspend Mosen Ferrer, who had been her principal custodian. This man alleged that his pri- soner had sometimes refused to take food, and that he had been obliged to torment her with the cord (much the same thing as the rack). Charles V., when consulted on the change in her house- hold, replied with diplomatic obscurity, and it was only after some time that be gave her a new keeper in the Marquis of Denia. Between Charles and this Marquis two sets of correspondence were carried on ; the one meant for the eye of the Council, the other entirely secret. Denia objected strongly to having gossips among Juana's attendants, for which care Mr. Bergenroth some- what frivolously endeavours to fasten further suspicion on hint The Marquis writes much about the difficulties of getting the Queen to hear mass ; and he makes a statement which our editor ridicules, about having ordered the funeral cart to be repaired, because without it the Queen could not be induced to travel, when it was proposed to change her residence on the ground of an infection. Mr. Bergenroth adds, "The funeral cart had taken so strong a hold of the popular mind that in the description of the night when Tordesillas was carried by the insurgents (which Gomez de Santillan sent Cardinal Adrian), we again meet the Queen and the Court." This letter tells us that "the Queen commanded the cart to be brought, in which to carry away the corpse of King Philip, our lord ; " and it appears a plain, straightforward document. It does not explicitly agree with a contemporary letter as to the circumstance of Juana's having gone out of the palace a short distance, but the discrepancy seems to us of little moment. The conduct of Juana during the rebellion is open to various inferences, and those of our editor are certainly started with much ingenuity. In his view, her ignorance and habitual seclusion, with many other circumstances, exposed her to be deceived, just as imbecility might have done. Her obstinate aversion to signing any papers appears to him the effect of a cunning though mistaken policy. The perusal of the documents will leave an impression that this was at least an easy policy for a half-mad person. It must be noticed, however, that she is shown on some occasions to have spoken in sensible terms of her late husband, and without showing any expectation that he would wake from his trance. During Juana's second imprisonment (which lasted
from the suppression of the revolt until her death), it is observed that a friar who was really zealous for her conversion was hindered and dismissed from her by the Marquis of Denis. Yet it was ostensibly to give her the benefit of religious exercises that Denia requested permission from her son to torture her according to former precedents,—a course which he was perhaps allowed to take without formal sanction. Perhaps the friar would have readily indulged himself in erroneous views of the prisoner's capacity for worldly business, if he had once made an impression on her conscience. The deceits which were practised upon her in regard to contemporary events may have been dictated by very ordinary motives. She seems certainly to have remembered them too slightly to withdraw her confidence from those who had been guilty of them.
On Christmas Day, 1522, we are told that Juana was free to show her disdain of the ceremonies of the Church (or, as we are to understand, the heretical convictions for which she had been so cruelly slandered) by making a disturbance when it was attempted to perform divine service in her chapel, and by vio- lently removing her daughter, the Infanta Catalina. But we must take into amount not only that heresy in a person like her might have been politically treated as madness, but that real mad- ness might have produced the effect of a total insensibility to religious impressions.
To establish his theory of her sanity, Mr. Bergenroth has been driven to an equally novel one respecting the character of Car- dinal Adrian ; he has also im plicitly brought against Cardinal Ximenez and others accusations of dishonesty which are somewhat startling. From a few further particulars, we should pronounce him to have merely established that Juana did not constantly act like a maniac, but by no means that her sanity could have been depended upon or was deliberately believed by any well- informed and intelligent person.
We all think of Katharine of Aragon as an English queen, but her sister's life is not otherwise directly connected with our history than by the fact that she was demanded in marriage by our pru- dent King Henry VII., who even professed, if we may trust the Spanish Ambassador, that it was indifferent for his purposes whe- ther she was mad or not. It is difficult to suppose he had such sources of information during the time of her widowhood as might have led him positively to disbelieve all unfavourable reports of her state of mind, and it is quite conceivable, as our editor observes, that the only consideration with him would have been her dowry, and a proper civil list from the revenues of Castile!
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