[1]
Queen Joanna I of England, Ireland & the Netherlands as portrayed (by Romola Garai) in a 2022 biopic, "Joanna"
Joanna, named after her great-grandmother and great-aunt (who was the same person) Joanna of Castile, was born in April 1555 ten months after her parents' wedding. Her birth was celebrated by Catholics in England and she was doted upon by her mother, who knew she would never have another child. Her father was also reportedly overjoyed at her birth and declared himself to be happier on the occasion than he would have been at the birth of a son. He already had a male heir, Carlos, Prince of Asturias, but father and son had never developed a close rapport and frequently lived in conflict with one another. Shortly after her baptism, her aunt Elizabeth agreed to a marriage with Ferdinand of Austria, the second son of Ferdinand I and Anne of Bohemia and Hungary and she would leave England, never to return. As a princess of England, infanta of Spain, and archduchess of Austria, Joanna had many suitors even as a baby. And she was a very beautiful baby, who bore a striking resemblance to Katherine of Aragon, her maternal grandmother, with her red hair and blue eyes. Intelligent and aware of her high social status, she was said to have gone through her coronation at the age of three without any fuss. Throughout her life, she exchanged many letters with her father, and her portraits were sent and put into his book of hours. She had a very good education consisting of arithmetic, canon and civil law, classical literature, genealogy and heraldry, history, philosophy, religion, and theology. Politics and mathematics were included as she grew older, and she would never need an interpreter in her life.
At the age of fourteen, she married the youngest son of the king of France, the duke of Alencon Hercule Francois. Again this marriage met with protests which were violently suppressed. They had a formal relationship with little romance between them, but they did their duty and would eventually have three healthy children. After her final childbirth, she would never see her husband again as he returned to succeed his older brother as the king of France and this suited her (and England) just fine. She poured all of her love into her children and trained each of them to be the successors to herself and her husband, she dreamed of splitting her realms to her close family like her grandfather Charles V (and nobody had the nerve to tell her that this was not going to be popular).
She inherited England, Ireland, and the Netherlands from both her parents. Described as a woman "dedicated to compromise and conciliation in public affairs", she was staunchly Catholic but did not continue her mother's persecutions. She would establish a good relationship with her older cousin, Mary of Scotland, and found that the Irish adherence to Catholicism suited her very well. She allowed free travel into England by the Irish and maintained diplomatic relations with the Tsardom of Russia and the Barbary states. She reversed the gradual dispossession of large holdings belonging to several hundred native Catholic nobility and other landowners in Ireland. As an older woman, she would frequently travel between England, Ireland, and the Netherlands and left her adult children in charge as regents.
Her rule of the Netherlands coincided with the recovery of agriculture and saw the strengthening of royal power, stimulating the growth of Habsburg authority and largely succeeding in reconciling xenophobic sentiments. She was also a patron of the arts and the grand palaces she built for herself in her various domains still stand to this day. When she died on a cruise back to England, she was sincerely lamented by many of her subjects; she was praised as the heroine of the Catholic cause and the ruler of a golden age. The triumphalist image that Joanna had cultivated towards the end of her reign, against a background of factionalism and military and economic difficulties, was taken at face value and her reputation inflated. Joanna's reign became idealised as a time when crown, church and parliament had worked in constitutional balance. She had understood that a monarch ruled according to popular consent and therefore always worked with parliament and advisers she could trust to tell her the truth—a style of government that her successors failed to follow.
An elderly Queen Isabella of England, Ireland & the Netherlands as portrayed by Barbara Marten in 2022 Starz drama, "Becoming Isabella"
(2) Joanna I of England and her husband, Francis III of France, only produced three children - all daughters. Whilst Joanna ensured all three were raised to succeed both herself and their father, she knew that there was no practical method in which they would succeed in France as France practiced strict salic law. And thus, eventually, the marital possivilities for each daughter were brought up and Joanna fought against the obvious Habsburg matches - the eldest, Lady Joanna, would marry the Count of Soissons, a cousin of Henri of Navarre, the French First Prince of the Blood, whilst the second, Lady Isabella, would marry Philip William, the Prince of Orange, and the youngest, Lady Katherine, would marry King Manuel II of Portugal.
The Count and Countess of Soissons would be childless, with Lady Joanna dying in childbirth in 1606, this meant that Lady Isabella would succeed their mother in England and the Netherlands. Her marriage to the Prince of Orange, twenty one years older than she was, was a political match - this ensured a secure powerbase in the Spanish Netherlands against the House of Orange Nassau who had been seeking a Dutch state independent of the Spanish or English.
Isabella and Philip William were appointed as Viceroy to the Netherlands for much of her mothers reign until her sisters death, at which point they were recalled to London where Isabella was often charged as Regent whilst Philip William was made an Admiral of the Fleet and relied upon as an important advisor on Dutch state matters.
By the time that Joanna died and Isabella succeeded her, the new Queen and the Prince of Orange had produced nine children, and were blessed with eight grandchildren. Isabella was fifty five at her coronation and would have a relatively short rule of nineteen years - she would pass in 1649, having succeeded her husband by fifteen years, at the age of seventy four.
Joanna had navigated a balance between crown and state, but influenced by her husband's Republican sympathies, Isabella began ceding more power to the Privy Council and to Parliament to rule on her behalf. It was during Isabella's time that the maxim that "Her Majesty Reigns, but it is Parliament that Rules" began to circulate and that would remain a central tenet of English government for some time to come.
She would be succeeded by her eldest son, John.
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John II at the time of his marriage to Infanta Leonora of Portugal in 1613.
[3] Born in 1596 as the third child, but eldest surviving son, of Isabella I and her older husband the Prince of Orange, John was ten years old when his aunt Joanna died. From that day on, his childhood was shaped by the knowledge that he would one day inherit England and the Netherlands from his grandmother, Queen Joanna. He accompanied his parents to England, as did his two elder sisters, the Lady Margaret and the Lady Anna. His, at that point, three younger siblings, including the six-year-old Lord Maurice, remained in the Hague, which, according to many historians, was the root of much of John’s later trouble with the United Provinces.
Three months after arriving in England, upon his eleventh birthday, John was created Duke of Richmond and named Viceroy of Ireland by his grandmother and sent to Dublin to learn to rule. He spent much of the next two decades there, although he returned to London in 1609 to stand as godfather to his youngest sister, the Lady Joanna, and then again in 1613, when, at the age of seventeen, he married his first cousin, Infanta Leonora of Portugal.
There was some worry that Leonora wouldn’t be able to give John children, for she was slight and sickly, but that soon proved unfounded, for in 1615, the sixteen-year-old Vicereine of Ireland gave birth to a healthy son. She would be pregnant eleven more times over the next twenty-two years, though only seven of her children eventually made it to adulthood.
John’s mother, Isabella, died in 1649, and the new monarch immediately found himself embroiled in a rebellion. The aristocrats of the Netherlands who hadn’t seen John since he turned eleven, and who had slowly been converting to Calvinism without the close supervision of their Prince, declared themselves unwilling to accept John as their monarch.
Instead, they proposed to elect John’s nephew Maurice, son of his younger brother and said brother’s wife, Charlotte de La Tremoille. Maurice, born in 1626, was 23 at the time of John’s accession, had been raised in the Hague, and, while nominally Catholic, was more than willing to convert to Calvinism if it gained him the Netherlands, his mother having been a Calvinist prior to her marriage to Maurice Senior. He is reported to have said, “The Hague is worth a Service of the Word”, when he heard of the Provinces’ plans.
Incandescent with rage, John promptly raised an army of 10,000 loyal Catholic men, summoned from all over England and Ireland, put them under the command of the Duke of Ormond, whom he knew from his time in Ireland, and sent them to the Netherlands, to put down his nephew’s uprising.
It was a long, bitter battle, one that raged for almost three years, but, by the winter of 1651, it was all over. Maurice the Younger was dead, killed whilst trying to flee the siege of Alkmaar, and his heir, Lord William Henry, was just nine months old. Deprived of their figurehead, the Calvinist resistance fell apart, and one by one, the provinces returned to the Catholic fold and English control.
Still, John wasn’t taking any more chances with the Dutch and their divided loyalties. No sooner had his troops returned to London in triumph than he packed up his Court and moved his capital to Leiden, in order to be closer to his rebellious subjects. He would spend the rest of his reign traveling around the Seventeen Provinces, and died at Slot Zuylen Castle near Utrecht in 1658, at the age of 63.
He was succeeded by his son, Philip.
[4] Named after his mother's brother, Philip was born in 1615. As a boy, Philip loved nothing more than to play sports and party. He was a lover of the finer things. He had his first mistress at age seventeen when he was named viceroy of Ireland. The woman in question was Elizabeth Butler. He was infatuated with him and wanted to marry her. That was out of the question for two reasons, first being she was Irish and the second she had already wed her first cousin, James Butler. His parents wasted no time separating the pair, even sending Philip to Wales in order to keep him from doing something foolish.
Much to Philip's displeasure, he was wed to Cecilia Renata of Austria. In an act of rebellion, Philip continued to have mistresses and would even acknowledge his bastards, something that appalled his conservative parents, not to mention Queen Joanna of England who made it clear that if Philip did not shape up, he would be disinherited. Luckily for Philip, Joanna was soon replaced by his doting grandmother, Isabella. Isabella saw Philip's behavior as something he would grow out of, gently coaxing him into being more discreet with his mistresses especially when his wife arrived in England in 1637.
Despite still harboring a grudge for being forced to give up the only woman he would ever love (or so he claimed), Philip treated Cecilia with respect and kindness even if he did not love her nor was he faithful to her. Cecilia was a quiet unassuming woman, known for her generosity, and kindness. She and Philip would have only one surviving child before she died in 1644 of childbed fever.
Philip stayed a widower until a year after his grandmother's death, and the new King John wanted his son to marry again. This would lead to an argument with father and son as the Prince of Wales had no interest of being tied down for a second time. However, Maurice's rebellion distracted them as they both traveled to the Netherlands to put down the uprising.
For the rest of his father's reign, Philip resisted getting married again, insisting that his child with Cecilia was soon to be of age to be married (His hypocrisy has been pointed out by many a historian). By 1558, Prince Philip had won the argument, mostly because his father had died. Once he became king, Philip changed absolutely nothing about his lifestyle, continuing to enjoy fine wine, fine food, and fine women. It came little surprise to anyone that the king only lasted eight years, dying of gout in 1666.
_____would take the crown after his death.
Jack Huston as Stephen II in BBC drama "Union" about the King's plan for a union of his crowns
(5) Stephen of England and the Netherlands, born 1640 to Philip II and a distant cousin, Cecilia Renata of Austria (she could trace her lineage to Elizabeth Tudor), as their only child. At the point of his birth, his great grandmother was Queen (to 1649) so his father was simply the Duke of Cambridge until 1649 when he became Prince of Wales when Stephen's grandfather became King John II. By the time Stephen became Prince of Wales in 1658, he was eighteen and his marriage to Sibylle of Saxony had already been arranged by his grandfather and his father - the German noblewoman had been considered as a second wife for the Prince of Wales, but Philip resisted and had convinced John II that the young woman was a better match for his son.
Stephen would eventually become King at the age of 26, with Sibylle having only provided him with a single child, a daughter named Katherine. Whilst much of Stephen's childhood had been spent at his grandfather's preferred capital in Leuden, Stephen alternated between London and Leuden and proposed a union of his two nations - the United Kingdoms of England, Ireland and the Netherlands, or simply the United Kingdom. This gained opposition in both states - with son of Maurice, Duke of York, William Henry, being particularly vocal about the union. The unmarried William Henry was still periodically championed as the rightful King of the Netherlands, so Stephen had William brought to his court and married to Catherine of Sussex, a granddaughter of the elderly Margaret, Lady Royal, and a second cousin of Stephen and the Duke's who frequented Stephens English Court, gifting William Henry both lands and further titles upon the marriage but only should he remain resident in England, far away from his old stomping grounds of Leuden and the Seventeen Provinces and unable to stir up political turmoil.
Stephen would reign for only 23 years, until 1689, when he would be succeeded by his daughter, Katherine after suffering from a bout of pneumonia.