Sudden Death

Flight to Flanders

Catalina Enríquez de Ribera y Cortés and Pedro Téllez Girón had not just a marriage but a powerful business partnership in which each provided the other with what was needed to act on a grudge. He brought new visibility to the gray house of Alcalá with his political savvy and his proximity to the king; she contributed money and the memory of the wiles of her grandfather, who had gone away and won what he believed he deserved.

When Osuna learned that a detail of bailiffs was being sent from Madrid to arrest him for abusing the generosity of the king with his trip to Italy, he set off for Ostend. He left for Flanders by night, accompanied by a single servant. There he joined the royal regiments like any other soldier until he was distinguished by his valor in combat.

The house of Osuna had no precedent for this: fleeing the king by taking up arms to defend the king; fighting bitterly to reclaim a territory in order to win a royal pardon; forcing the monarch and all his judges and bailiffs to pay obeisance. The only thing he carried with him on the jaunt was Cortés’s sword, which Catalina took down from the wall of the garden room and gave to him before he set off on the road like a bandit.

There were likely few husbands in Spain at the end of the sixteenth century who were as unfaithful as Osuna, and it’s interesting to note that each time the young duke was put under house arrest for reasons to do with his capacity for drink and the ubiquity of his member, Catalina had to embrace the sentence and serve it with him.

Many years later, at the fateful hour of the final and most serious of the duke’s confinements — the one that spelled his end because this time he was accused of lèse-majesté and his enemies at court were infinite — Catalina Enríquez de Ribera y Cortés didn’t hesitate to write a spectacular letter to Philip IV in defense of her husband. Addressing the king with the familiar tú, the duchess reminded him that his Holy Roman Emperor great-grandfather, Charles V, had treated her grandfather Hernán Cortés as wretchedly as he was now treating Osuna. She reminded him that Ostend would have fallen and Spain given way to the Low Countries entirely had it not been for her husband’s defense of the city — which was true, to a certain extent. She pointed out that because her man had fought in the mud to defend the king, Spain had been able to sign a treaty rather than concede defeat.

The letter didn’t sway Philip: the duke died under strict house arrest on September 20, 1624.

The night of November 26, 1599, when Osuna had fled to Flanders, his wife had accompanied him to the door of the Palacio de los Adelantados — where both had hid while the king’s bailiffs called for him at his own palaces. Stay alive, she said before giving him a kiss. She touched his chest. Are you wearing the scapular? He felt it under his shirt. Don’t take it off.