Juan Rodríguez de la Cámara

Who was Juan Rodríguez de la Cámara?

Juan Rodríguez de la Cámara, also known as Juan Rodríguez del Padrón, was a Galician writer and poet, considered the last poet of the Galician school.

Born in Padrón, he was born to a hidalgo family. He may have served as a page to Juan II of Castile, and may have attended the Council of Florence in 1434 as secretary to the cardinal Juan de Cervantes, a respected jurist and a friend of Pero Tafur.

He was exiled for reasons not completely known, but may have been connected with an illicit romance at court; Rodríguez's indiscreet revelations to a talkative friend apparently led to a romantic breach of some kind with a noble lady. James Fitzmaurice-Kelly writes that "the conjectures that make Rodríguez the lover of Juan II's wife, Isabel, or of Enrique IV's wife, Juana, are destroyed by chronology. None the less it is certain that the writer was concerned in some mysterious, dangerous love-affair which led to his exile, and some believe, to his profession as a Franciscan monk.” He became a Franciscan at Jerusalem in 1441 and gave up many of his profitable and numerous benefices. He returned to Spain and entered into the Franciscan monastery of San Antonio de Herbón, situated in a village near Padrón. He died at San Antonio de Herbón. A probably apocryphal tale of Rodríguez's life, by an anonymous writer of the 16th century, states that the poet went to France, became the lover of the French queen, and was killed near Calais after trying to escape to England.