Juana Coello (c. 1548 in

Madrid Madrid ( ; ) is the capital and List of largest cities in Spain, most populous municipality of Spain. It has almost 3.5 million inhabitants and a Madrid metropolitan area, metropolitan area population of approximately 7 million. It i ...

– ?) was the wife of Antonio Pérez, Secretary of State of

Philip II of Spain Philip II (21 May 152713 September 1598), sometimes known in Spain as Philip the Prudent (), was King of Spain from 1556, King of Portugal from 1580, and King of Naples and List of Sicilian monarchs, Sicily from 1554 until his death in 1598. He ...

, famous for having helped her husband escape from prison. Coello received a good education and married in 1567. Her husband was revealed to be a womanizer; some authors claim that he had sex with the Princess of Eboli, the king's favorite, who put him in jail. Juana visited her husband in prison and gave him her clothes, thus facilitating his escape. She remained behind, locked in the dungeon her husband had occupied. In 1585 he went to

Portugal Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic, is a country on the Iberian Peninsula in Southwestern Europe. Featuring Cabo da Roca, the westernmost point in continental Europe, Portugal borders Spain to its north and east, with which it share ...

to see the king. When Juana moved from Aldea Gallega to

Lisbon Lisbon ( ; ) is the capital and largest city of Portugal, with an estimated population of 567,131, as of 2023, within its administrative limits and 3,028,000 within the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, metropolis, as of 2025. Lisbon is mainlan ...

, she was seized and imprisoned again in the public jail of Madrid, together with her seven children. All were later transferred to a fortress, where she remained until April 1599, when Philip II was dead. Her children remained behind bars. Little is known of the rest of her life. Some authors state that she went to

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to join her husband and died in poverty at 1602. Others say that in 1613 she sought the rehabilitation of their children, to which the

Inquisition The Inquisition was a Catholic Inquisitorial system#History, judicial procedure where the Ecclesiastical court, ecclesiastical judges could initiate, investigate and try cases in their jurisdiction. Popularly it became the name for various med ...

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agreed two years later.

References

Enciclopedia universal ilustrada europeo-americana __NOTOC__ The ''Enciclopedia universal ilustrada europeo-americana'' (also called ''Enciclopedia Espasa'', or ''Enciclopedia Espasa-Calpe'', after its publisher, founded by José Espasa Anguera) is a Spanish encyclopedia. It comprises 72 volume ...

, book 13. {{DEFAULTSORT:Coello, Juana 16th-century Spanish people 1540s births 17th-century deaths