At Arcos Joan, with her two children, Ferdinand and Katharine, lived her strange, solitary life for eighteen months, broken only when Ferdinand, going in July 1508 to reduce Andalusia to order, decided to take his favourite little grandson and namesake with him. Joan flew into a fury when she learnt that her child was to be taken from her; and there is no doubt that the disturbance thus caused aggravated her malady for a time, although it is said that she forgot the boy in a few days. A curious idea of her life at Arcos is given in a letter sent on the 9th October 1508 by the Bishop of Malaga, her confessor, to the King. ‘As I wrote before, since your Highness left, the Queen has been quiet, both in word and action; and she has not injured or abused any one. I forgot to say that since then she has not changed her linen, nor dressed her hair, nor washed her face. They tell me also that she always sleeps on the ground, as before.’ There follow some medical details, from which the Bishop draws the conclusion that the Queen would not live long. ‘It is not meet,’ he says, ‘that she should have the management of her own person, as she takes so little care of herself. Her lack of cleanliness in her face, and they say elsewhere, is very great, and she eats with the plates on the floor, and no napkin. She very often misses hearing mass, because she is breakfasting at the hour it is celebrated, and there is no opportunity of her hearing it before noon.’[125] Before leaving to suppress the revolt in Andalucia, Ferdinand took effective measures to prevent Joan from being made a tool of faction. He had tried without success to prevail upon her to remove to the remote town of Tordesillas, on the river Douro, where there was a commodious castle-palace fit for her habitation, and the climate was good; but he posted around Arcos strong forces, commanded by faithful partisans, with orders that if the Queen at last gave way to the persuasion of her attendants, and removed to Tordesillas, the troops were to guard her just as closely and secretly there. But Joan obstinately refused to move; and Ferdinand found her still there when he returned from the South in February 1509. Whilst he had been absent, the great magnate in whose district of Burgos Arcos was situated, the Constable of Castile (Count de Haro) had been coquetting with the Emperor Maximilian to displace Ferdinand by his grandson Charles, now nine years old; and the possession of the person of Joan was of the highest importance. Ferdinand decided, therefore, that, either willingly or unwillingly, Joan should be placed where she would be safe from capture by surprise. When he visited her at Arcos, he found her thin and weak with the cold, unhealthy climate.[126] ‘Her dress was such as on no account could be allowed, or is fit even to write about, and everything else looked similarly, and as if it would be totally impossible for her to go through another winter if she continued to live in the same way.’