The sudden death of King Philip augmented the unrest throughout the country, for the disappearance of this ineffective sovereign left the state without even a nominal head.  Ferdinand, who had reached Porto Fino when the news was brought to him, made no move to return, confident that the Castilians would soon be forced to invite him to resume the government; on the contrary, he tranquilly continued his journey to Naples.  Rivals, he had none, for his grandson, Charles, was still a child, while the unfortunate Juana passed her time in celebrating funeral rites for her dead husband, whose coffin she carried about with her, opening it to contemplate the body, of which she continued to be so jealous that all women were kept rigorously at a distance.  A provisional government, formed to act for her, consisted of Cardinal Ximenes, the Constable of Castile and the Duke of Najera, but inspired little confidence.  Peter Martyr perceived that, besides Ferdinand, there was no one capable of restoring order and governing the state.  He wrote repeatedly to the secretary, Perez Almazen, and to the King himself, urging the latter’s speedy return as the country’s only salvation from anarchy.  Events proved the soundness of his judgment, for the mere news of the King’s landing at Valencia sufficed to restore confidence; he resumed the regency unopposed and continued to govern Castile, in his daughter’s name, until his own death.

Dona Juana ceased her lugubrious peregrinations and took up her residence in the monastery of Santa Clara at Tordesillas, where she consented to the burial of her husband’s body in a spot visible from her windows.  Peter Martyr was one of the few persons who saw the unhappy lady and even gained some influence over her feeble mind.  Mazzuchelli states that, at one period, there were but two bishops and Peter Martyr to whom the Queen consented even to listen.  Now and again the figure of the insane queen appears like a pallid spectre in Martyr’s pages.  Her caprices and vagaries are noted from time to time in the Opus Epistolarum; indeed the story of her sufferings is all there.  The insanity of Dona Juana was not seriously doubted by her contemporaries—­certainly not by Martyr, whose portrait of her character is perhaps the most accurate contemporary one we possess.  He traces her malady from its incipiency, through the successive disquieting manifestations of hysteria, melancholia, and fury, broken by periods of partial and even complete mental lucidity.  Such intervals became rarer and briefer as time went on.[3]

[Note 3:  The efforts of the historian Bergenroth to establish Dona Juana’s sanity and to depict her as the victim of religious persecution because of her suspected orthodoxy have been conclusively refuted by Maurenbrecher, Gachard, and other writers, who have demolished his arguments and censured his methods of research and interpretation.  The last mention of Dona Juana in the Opus Epistolarum