In a previous volume I have remarked upon the extremely small political significance of most of the Queens Consort of England, although socially the country has become what it is mainly through feminine influence. In Spain the exact reverse has happened, and in no Christian country has the power of women been less formative of the life and character of the nation, whilst, largely owing to personal and circumstantial accident, the share of ladies in deciding the political destinies of the country from the throne has been more conspicuous than in other European monarchies. The oriental traditions dominant in Spain for centuries tended to make wives the humble satellites rather than the equal companions of their husbands; and the inflated gallantry, before marriage at least, that sprang from the chivalrous obsession grafted upon mixed feudal and Islamic ideals, affected to exclude woman from the harder facts of existence, and from the practical problems that occupied the minds of men. But whilst these traditions limited the power of Spanish women generally, they were insufficient to counteract the extraordinary political influence of a series of remarkable feminine personalities who, mainly owing to feebleness and ineptitude of consorts, or to long minorities of sons, have on occasion during the course of four centuries practically wielded the sceptres of Spain. It is true that queens regnant in England as well as in Spain have usually, and quite naturally, been powerful political factors, but in most instances they necessarily differed but little, either in aims or methods, from male sovereigns. The difference between the queens of the two countries is most remarkable in the case of queens consort, who in Spain have, either as wives or widowed regents, influenced government to an extent quite unparalleled in England. Apart from the accident of forceful personal character, or other influential qualities possessed by some of these ladies, the reason for their importance must be sought in the fact that most of them represented great dynastic interests or national alliances, and were supported by powerful parties in Spain or abroad. In order that their lives should be properly understood, it will be necessary to keep in view contemporary events in other parts of Europe which more or less concerned them; and to relate the history of all the Queens of Spain upon such a plan would exceed the capacity of a single volume and the patience of the ordinary reader. It is proposed, therefore, to select for treatment only the lives of some of the Queens of Spain who, for their greatness, their political significance, their attractions, or their misfortunes, stand forth most prominently in the romantic history of their country. The temptation is great to dwell upon certain of the earlier Queens of the small kingdoms which constituted Spain before the union of the crowns: to tell the heroic story of the great Berengaria, the mother of St. Ferdinand, and those of Queen Maria de Molina and Blanche of Bourbon; to recount the matrimonial vagaries of Peter the Cruel, and dwell upon Catharine of Lancaster, whose marriage with the heir of Castile closed the war of succession to the Castilian crowns waged by her father John of Gaunt. She, especially, stands forth with almost photographic precision in the pages of the genius who penned the chronicles of her time. Gigantic in size she seemed to the more diminutive Spaniard: florid, fat, and fair; a vast eater and drinker, whose valiant prowess at the festal board astounded the abstemious people amongst whom she lived; strong and masculine, but idle, and careless of the feminine arts by which woman’s attraction is increased; ruled by her favourites, but withal a good woman and a good Queen, who governed Spain honestly for ten years, during the minority of her weak son, John II. of Castile.

But, interesting as some of these earlier personages are, they cannot rightly be called Queens of Spain; and the first of all Spanish Queens, the great Isabel of Castile and Aragon, may fittingly begin the volume, which will contain the stories of other ladies perhaps more loveable, more feminine, more sympathetic, but none so splendidly steadfast, so noble of aim, or so strong as she. Her function in the world, aided by her husband, was to crush the rieving nobles, and bring unity to Spain by religious exaltation. The end endowed her country with transient greatness and febrile force, whilst the methods by which it was attained doomed the nation she loved so well to a long agony of decay, and ultimate exhaustion. The problems facing Spanish rulers thenceforward were no longer centred upon the development of the country as a prosperous Christian land, or even upon the maintenance of the Mediterranean as a Christian sea. The policy of the ‘Catholic Kings’ plunged Spain into the vortex of mid-European politics at the critical period of the world’s history, when new lines of demarcation were being scored by religious schism across the ancient boundaries: when deep, unbridgable crevasses were being split between peoples hitherto bound together by common interests and traditional friendship. At this crucial time, when the centre of all earthly authority was boldly challenged, Spain was pledged by Isabel and Ferdinand to a course which thenceforward made her the champion of an impossible religious unity, and squandered for centuries the blood and treasure of her people in the fruitless struggle to fix enduring fetters upon the thoughts and souls of men. Myriads of martyrs shed their blood to cement the solid Spain that might serve as an instrument for such gigantic ends; and the ecstatic Queen, though gentle and pitiful at heart, yet had no pity for the victims, as her clear eyes pierced the reek of sacrifice, and saw beyond it the shining glory of her goal. To her and to her descendant kings the end they aimed at justified all things done in its attainment, and the touch of mystic madness that in the great Queen was allied to exalted genius, grew in those of her blood who followed her to the besotted obsession that blinded them to the nature and extent of the forces against them, and led them down at last to babbling idiocy, and their country to impotent decay. The pale figure of Joan the distraught flits across our page, and forces to our consideration once more the awful problem of whether she was the victim of a hellish conspiracy on the part of those who should have loved her best, or a woman afflicted by the hand of God; whether her lifelong martyrdom was the punishment of heresy or the need of her infirmity. Pathetic Mary Tudor, Queen Consort of Spain, demands notice because her marriage with Philip II. marked the vital need of Spain, at any cost, to hold by the traditional alliance with England amidst the shifting sands of religious revolt which were to overwhelm and transform Europe; whilst, later, the desperate attempt of Philip to form a new group of powers which should enable Spain to dispense with unorthodox England, is personified in the sweet and noble figure of his third wife, Isabel of Valois, upon whose life-story, poignant enough in its bare reality, romancers have embroidered so many strange adornments. The Austrian princesses, who in turn became consorts of the Catholic Kings, all represent the unhappy persistence of the rulers of Spain in clinging to the splendid but unrealisable dream bequeathed by their great ancestor the Emperor to his suffering realm; that of perpetuating Spanish hegemony over Europe by means of compulsory uniformity of creed, dictated from Rome and enforced from Madrid. And in the intervals of discouragement and disillusionment at the impotence of Habsburg Emperors to secure such uniformity even within the bounds of the empire itself, and the patent impossibility for Spain alone to cope with the giant task, we see the turning of kings and ministers in temporary despair towards the secular enemy of the house of Austria, and Spain in search of French brides who might bring Catholic support to the Catholic champion. When, at last, exhausted Spain could deceive herself no longer, and was fain to acknowledge that she had been beaten in her attempt to hold the rising tide and deny to men the God-given right of unfettered thought, the matrimonial alliances of her Kings, whilst ceasing to be instruments for the realisation of the vision of her prime, still obeyed the traditionary policies which drew Spain alternately to the side of France or Austria. But the end of such efforts now was not to serve Spanish objects, wise or otherwise, but to snatch advantage for the rival birds of prey who were hovering over the body of a great nation in the throes of dissolution, ravening for a share of her substance when the hour of death should strike. Sordid and pathetic as the story of these intrigues may be in their political aspect, the personal share in them of the Queens Consort themselves, their methods, their triumphs and their failures, are often fraught with intense interest to the student of manners. The life of the unscrupulous Mariana of Austria, who in the interests of her house held Spain so long in the name of her imbecile son, and in her turn was outwitted by Don Juan and the French interest, presents us with a picture of the times so intimate, thanks to the plentiful material left behind by a self-conscious age, as to introduce us into the innermost secrets of the intrigues to an extent that contemporaries would have thought impossible. And again the sad, but very human, story of the young half-English Princess, bright and light-hearted, torn from brilliant Paris to serve French interests, as the wife of Mariana’s half-witted son Charles II., only to beat herself to death against the bars of her gloomy golden cage and break her heart to old Mariana’s undisguised joy, throws a flood of lurid light upon Spanish society in its decadence, and proves the baseness to which human ambition will stoop. More repugnant is the career of poor Marie Louise’s German successor as the Consort of the miserable Charles the Bewitched in his last years, and the tale of the extraordinary series of plots woven by the rival parties around the lingering deathbed of the King, whom they worried and frightened into his grave, a senile dotard at forty. Only briefly dealt with here are the Queens of the Bourbon renascence, stout little Marie Louise of Savoy, and the forceful termagant Isabel Farnese, who, chosen to serve as a humble instrument of others, at once seized whip and reins herself, and drove Spain as she listed during a long life of struggle for the aggrandisement of her sons, in which Europe was kept at strife for years by the ambition of one woman.

These and other Queens Consort will pass before us in the following pages, some of them good, a few bad, and most of them unhappy. There is no desire to dwell especially upon the sad and gloomy features of their history, or to represent them all as victims; but it must not be forgotten, in condonation of the shortcomings of some of them, that they were sent from their own homes, kin, and country, often mere children, to a distant foreign court, where the traditional etiquette was appallingly austere and repellent; sacrificed in loveless marriage to men whom they had never seen; treated as emotionless pawns in the game of politics played by crafty brains. No wonder, then, that girlish spirits should be crushed, that young hearts should break in despair, or, as an alternative, should cast to the winds all considerations of honour, duty, and dignity, and seek enjoyment before extinction came. Some of them passed through the fiery ordeal triumphant, and stand forth clear and shining. Great Isabel herself, another more colourless Isabel, the Emperor’s wife, a third, Isabel of the Peace, most beloved of Spanish Queens, and Anne her successor, as solemn Philip’s wife. Of these no word of reproach may justly be said, nor of Margaret, the Austrian consort of Philip III., nor of the spirited Isabel of Bourbon, daughter of the gay and gallant BÉarnais, and sister of Henriette Marie of England. These and others bore their burden bravely to the last; and of the few who cast theirs down, and strayed amongst the poisoned flowers by the way, it may be truly urged that the trespasses of others against them were greater than their own transgressions. Such of their stories as are here told briefly are set forth with an honest desire to attain accuracy in historical fact and impartiality in deduction therefrom. There has been no desire to make either angels or devils of the personages described. They were, like the rest of their kind, human beings, with mixed and varying motives, swayed by personal and political influences which must be taken into account in any attempt to appraise their characters or understand their actions. Several of the lives are here told in English for the first time by the light of modern research, and in cases where statements are at variance with usually accepted English teaching, references are given in footnotes to the contemporary source from which the statements are derived. The opening of the archives of several European countries, and the extensive reproduction in print of interesting historical texts in Spain of late years, provide much of the new material used in the present work; and the labours of recent English, French, and Spanish historians have naturally been placed under contribution for such fresh facts as they have adduced. Where this is the case, acknowledgment is made in the form of footnotes.