Joanna was well aware of her husband’s intention of leaving Spain at the first possible moment; but she herself was expecting a child and knew the long journey would be beyond her powers. The thought that Philip would leave her behind, intensified by the fear that he would do so with keener pleasure than regret, assumed in her disordered brain the monstrous proportions of a plot to keep her a prisoner in Castile. In vain she entreated him to stay until she should be well enough to accompany him; the Archduke, his ambition once satisfied by the homage of the Cortes of Toledo and of Saragossa, impatiently counted the days until he could cross the French border, and all the Catholic sovereigns’ efforts to entertain him failed dismally. In December, 1502, he left Madrid; and Joanna, at his going, sank into a mood of sullen despondency from which even the birth of her son, Ferdinand, in March of the following year, could not rouse her. At length she received a letter from Philip suggesting her return to Flanders; but war had broken out between France and Spain, making the journey, if not impossible, at least fraught with danger. Ferdinand was with his army in Roussillon, and Isabel who was ill in Segovia sent imploring messages to her daughter at Medina del Campo, begging her to do nothing rash. Joanna was however obsessed by the notion that she was the victim of a plot, and in her passionate desire to escape from Spain was deaf to warnings and petitions. One evening, lightly clad and followed by her scared attendants, she started on foot from the castle and was only prevented from leaving the city by the Bishop of Burgos, who had been placed by the Queen in charge of her household and who gave orders that the gates should be closed. The Archduchess commanded that they should be opened, and even descended to prayers and entreaties, when she found her authority was of no avail; to all the Bishop’s persuasions that she should return home she replied by an uncompromising refusal. Through the long night, in the darkness and the cold, she maintained her vigil; and when messengers arrived from Segovia the next day, begging her in her mother’s name to resist from her project, she would only consent to move into a poor hovel hard by the gates. On the second evening, Isabel, who had dragged herself from her sick-bed at the tale of her daughter’s mad folly, appeared in Medina del Campo; but Joanna at first greeted her with reproaches and anger, “speaking” wrote the Queen in her account of the interview to Fuensalida, “so disrespectfully and so little as a child should address her mother, that if I had not seen the state of mind she was in, I would not have suffered it for a moment.” [Illustration: JOANNA “THE MAD,” DAUGHTER OF QUEEN ISABEL FROM “HISTORIA DE LA VILLA Y CORTE DE MADRID” BY AMADOR DE LOS RIOS ]