Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

QUEENS OF OLD SPAIN

MARY TUDOR, QUEEN OF ENGLAND AND SPAIN.
After a Painting by Sir Antonio More.

Queens
of
Old Spain

BY

MARTIN HUME

EDITOR OF THE CALENDARS OF SPANISH STATE PAPERS LECTURER IN SPANISH HISTORY AND LITERATURE PEMBROKE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

ILLUSTRATED

LONDON

GRANT RICHARDS LTD.

PUBLISHERS

Published October 1906

Re-issued July 1911

TO THE SEVERE BUT HONEST PUBLIC

The books left by a man whose every thought was about books, are even more himself than were his actions during life. In fact, at times, I think it is the case with all who write; for, after all, what a man writes is really far more important than anything he does.

Most of us in wandering through a churchyard where we come upon a friend’s name, on a tombstone, feel a spirit of revolt. It is no good to tell us death is as natural as life. We all know that, and still feel that in some strange way we have been defrauded by the death of a dear friend. Nothing is more unjust than is a natural cause.

Even the Greeks, with all their joyousness, must have felt this when they invented Nemesis.

We Caledonians, who took our faith from Hippo (nane o’ yer Peters, gie me Paul), perhaps stand up against the stabs of Fate better than those nurtured in the most damnable doctrine of freewill. Once allow it, and life becomes a drunken whirligig on which sit grave and reverend citizens playing on penny whistles, all attired in black.

If though the name upon the tombstone strikes a chill to the heart, half of regret and half of fear—for what, when all is said and done, is your memento mori but blue funk?—when we pick up a dead friend’s book upon a stall, published at twelve-and-sixpence and ticketed a penny, we must reflect—that is, the most of us—that to that favour we shall come, and all the pages, that cost us so much thought in the writing, to be tied together with a piece of string and sold with the base trash of Smith and Jones and Brown, fellows who had no style, nor knew the difference betwixt invention and imagination, humour or wit, and did not know a colophon from an illuminated capital, and sold all in a lot.

Therefore I am glad that this edition of one of Hume’s best works is coming out, and I who saw him laid to rest in the dry, marly earth of that drear East End cemetery only a year ago—or was it ten, for when a man is dead time ceases for him and for ourselves in thinking of him—am writing these few lines to do my best to keep his memory green.

His ‘Queens of Spain’ was one of the books that he liked best.

Some say an author always likes his weakest book, but, even if he does, what does it matter? A mother not infrequently adores the least desirable of all her sons, but the world judges him; and she who bore him has to submit to all its judgments of her well-beloved, just as the author has to bow the head to what it says about his books.

Hume was a man who valued what the public said about his work. I used to fancy him, as a good gladiator, some Roman citizen who for his debts, or some cause or another, was forced to live by push of sword, and took it up in the same spirit in which my friend took up the pen, and set about to write.

Such a man, I fancy, fighting of course like Tybalt, by the book of arithmetic, would feel a pride in dying well. Just as he fell, despatched by some rude Dacian who in his life had never come within the walls of any fencing school, he would wrap his mantle round him decently, and murmur: ‘Civis Romanus sum,’ as he lay dying in the dust.

These kind of men are never vanquished. Even if they die, their death serves as an example to the world, and makes boys miserable at school who have to put it into Greek hexameters.

Hume was of these good gladiators and passed laborious days. How many reams of paper he must have filled; how many miles of writing he must have traced in his hard-working life, only himself could have been sure of, and perhaps not he, for who shall say if a silkworm measures the length of silk that comes from the cocoon.

When in a music hall I see a man do something easily which seems impossible, I always think upon the hours he must have passed—missing, remissing, perspiring, cursing, and at last see him successful, and then no matter how respectable my neighbours in the stalls appear, or tight my gloves are, clap with a will. Noise, after all, is the reward, perhaps the sole reward, that we accord success.

A modest modicum was all Hume had to show for a self-denying life spent—that is to say, for the last twenty years of it—in burrowing in archives and writing ceaselessly upon the facts he found.

Most certainly he lived the simple life. Up early in the morning, he used to begin writing just as a mill horse turns round in a mill. Three or four thousand lines by tea-time, and then perhaps he would review a book. Then twice a week (no more) he used to walk down to the club, dine simply, and sit reading till it was time to walk back home, to sleep and rise again to work.

With almost lightning speed he wrote, so that, when once he had his facts, nothing remained but the material labour of the pen.

‘Martin fa presto’ I used to call him, and certainly, considering how much he wrote, the level he maintained was high; not perhaps in the vein of Hallam or of Robertson, but then in history there are many bypaths, and along them he strayed. Sometimes a ramble in a country lane is better than a tramp upon the Great North Road.

I like to fancy that in the Record Office, at Simancas, Brussels, and in the Archives of the Indies (that great red pile, in Seville), there are some old librarians who remember him, and talk about his work. I hear them say, at Seville or Simancas, ‘There was an Englishman who used to come here, one who spoke Christian. He used to sit and write, and knew the documents better than we ourselves’ (which was not difficult). ‘I tell you that that Englishman was like a devil at his work.’

If they exist, and Hume could hear of them, I am certain he would smile in his grave way and say: ‘Ah, yes; old Don Saturino Lopez, or Don Eustaquio Perez,’ as the case might be, ‘I well remember him. He never knew where to find anything; he came from Coria, I think.’

R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM.

INTRODUCTION

In a previous volume I have remarked upon the extremely small political significance of most of the Queens Consort of England, although socially the country has become what it is mainly through feminine influence. In Spain the exact reverse has happened, and in no Christian country has the power of women been less formative of the life and character of the nation, whilst, largely owing to personal and circumstantial accident, the share of ladies in deciding the political destinies of the country from the throne has been more conspicuous than in other European monarchies. The oriental traditions dominant in Spain for centuries tended to make wives the humble satellites rather than the equal companions of their husbands; and the inflated gallantry, before marriage at least, that sprang from the chivalrous obsession grafted upon mixed feudal and Islamic ideals, affected to exclude woman from the harder facts of existence, and from the practical problems that occupied the minds of men. But whilst these traditions limited the power of Spanish women generally, they were insufficient to counteract the extraordinary political influence of a series of remarkable feminine personalities who, mainly owing to feebleness and ineptitude of consorts, or to long minorities of sons, have on occasion during the course of four centuries practically wielded the sceptres of Spain. It is true that queens regnant in England as well as in Spain have usually, and quite naturally, been powerful political factors, but in most instances they necessarily differed but little, either in aims or methods, from male sovereigns. The difference between the queens of the two countries is most remarkable in the case of queens consort, who in Spain have, either as wives or widowed regents, influenced government to an extent quite unparalleled in England. Apart from the accident of forceful personal character, or other influential qualities possessed by some of these ladies, the reason for their importance must be sought in the fact that most of them represented great dynastic interests or national alliances, and were supported by powerful parties in Spain or abroad. In order that their lives should be properly understood, it will be necessary to keep in view contemporary events in other parts of Europe which more or less concerned them; and to relate the history of all the Queens of Spain upon such a plan would exceed the capacity of a single volume and the patience of the ordinary reader. It is proposed, therefore, to select for treatment only the lives of some of the Queens of Spain who, for their greatness, their political significance, their attractions, or their misfortunes, stand forth most prominently in the romantic history of their country. The temptation is great to dwell upon certain of the earlier Queens of the small kingdoms which constituted Spain before the union of the crowns: to tell the heroic story of the great Berengaria, the mother of St. Ferdinand, and those of Queen Maria de Molina and Blanche of Bourbon; to recount the matrimonial vagaries of Peter the Cruel, and dwell upon Catharine of Lancaster, whose marriage with the heir of Castile closed the war of succession to the Castilian crowns waged by her father John of Gaunt. She, especially, stands forth with almost photographic precision in the pages of the genius who penned the chronicles of her time. Gigantic in size she seemed to the more diminutive Spaniard: florid, fat, and fair; a vast eater and drinker, whose valiant prowess at the festal board astounded the abstemious people amongst whom she lived; strong and masculine, but idle, and careless of the feminine arts by which woman’s attraction is increased; ruled by her favourites, but withal a good woman and a good Queen, who governed Spain honestly for ten years, during the minority of her weak son, John II. of Castile.

But, interesting as some of these earlier personages are, they cannot rightly be called Queens of Spain; and the first of all Spanish Queens, the great Isabel of Castile and Aragon, may fittingly begin the volume, which will contain the stories of other ladies perhaps more loveable, more feminine, more sympathetic, but none so splendidly steadfast, so noble of aim, or so strong as she. Her function in the world, aided by her husband, was to crush the rieving nobles, and bring unity to Spain by religious exaltation. The end endowed her country with transient greatness and febrile force, whilst the methods by which it was attained doomed the nation she loved so well to a long agony of decay, and ultimate exhaustion. The problems facing Spanish rulers thenceforward were no longer centred upon the development of the country as a prosperous Christian land, or even upon the maintenance of the Mediterranean as a Christian sea. The policy of the ‘Catholic Kings’ plunged Spain into the vortex of mid-European politics at the critical period of the world’s history, when new lines of demarcation were being scored by religious schism across the ancient boundaries: when deep, unbridgable crevasses were being split between peoples hitherto bound together by common interests and traditional friendship. At this crucial time, when the centre of all earthly authority was boldly challenged, Spain was pledged by Isabel and Ferdinand to a course which thenceforward made her the champion of an impossible religious unity, and squandered for centuries the blood and treasure of her people in the fruitless struggle to fix enduring fetters upon the thoughts and souls of men. Myriads of martyrs shed their blood to cement the solid Spain that might serve as an instrument for such gigantic ends; and the ecstatic Queen, though gentle and pitiful at heart, yet had no pity for the victims, as her clear eyes pierced the reek of sacrifice, and saw beyond it the shining glory of her goal. To her and to her descendant kings the end they aimed at justified all things done in its attainment, and the touch of mystic madness that in the great Queen was allied to exalted genius, grew in those of her blood who followed her to the besotted obsession that blinded them to the nature and extent of the forces against them, and led them down at last to babbling idiocy, and their country to impotent decay. The pale figure of Joan the distraught flits across our page, and forces to our consideration once more the awful problem of whether she was the victim of a hellish conspiracy on the part of those who should have loved her best, or a woman afflicted by the hand of God; whether her lifelong martyrdom was the punishment of heresy or the need of her infirmity. Pathetic Mary Tudor, Queen Consort of Spain, demands notice because her marriage with Philip II. marked the vital need of Spain, at any cost, to hold by the traditional alliance with England amidst the shifting sands of religious revolt which were to overwhelm and transform Europe; whilst, later, the desperate attempt of Philip to form a new group of powers which should enable Spain to dispense with unorthodox England, is personified in the sweet and noble figure of his third wife, Isabel of Valois, upon whose life-story, poignant enough in its bare reality, romancers have embroidered so many strange adornments. The Austrian princesses, who in turn became consorts of the Catholic Kings, all represent the unhappy persistence of the rulers of Spain in clinging to the splendid but unrealisable dream bequeathed by their great ancestor the Emperor to his suffering realm; that of perpetuating Spanish hegemony over Europe by means of compulsory uniformity of creed, dictated from Rome and enforced from Madrid. And in the intervals of discouragement and disillusionment at the impotence of Habsburg Emperors to secure such uniformity even within the bounds of the empire itself, and the patent impossibility for Spain alone to cope with the giant task, we see the turning of kings and ministers in temporary despair towards the secular enemy of the house of Austria, and Spain in search of French brides who might bring Catholic support to the Catholic champion. When, at last, exhausted Spain could deceive herself no longer, and was fain to acknowledge that she had been beaten in her attempt to hold the rising tide and deny to men the God-given right of unfettered thought, the matrimonial alliances of her Kings, whilst ceasing to be instruments for the realisation of the vision of her prime, still obeyed the traditionary policies which drew Spain alternately to the side of France or Austria. But the end of such efforts now was not to serve Spanish objects, wise or otherwise, but to snatch advantage for the rival birds of prey who were hovering over the body of a great nation in the throes of dissolution, ravening for a share of her substance when the hour of death should strike. Sordid and pathetic as the story of these intrigues may be in their political aspect, the personal share in them of the Queens Consort themselves, their methods, their triumphs and their failures, are often fraught with intense interest to the student of manners. The life of the unscrupulous Mariana of Austria, who in the interests of her house held Spain so long in the name of her imbecile son, and in her turn was outwitted by Don Juan and the French interest, presents us with a picture of the times so intimate, thanks to the plentiful material left behind by a self-conscious age, as to introduce us into the innermost secrets of the intrigues to an extent that contemporaries would have thought impossible. And again the sad, but very human, story of the young half-English Princess, bright and light-hearted, torn from brilliant Paris to serve French interests, as the wife of Mariana’s half-witted son Charles II., only to beat herself to death against the bars of her gloomy golden cage and break her heart to old Mariana’s undisguised joy, throws a flood of lurid light upon Spanish society in its decadence, and proves the baseness to which human ambition will stoop. More repugnant is the career of poor Marie Louise’s German successor as the Consort of the miserable Charles the Bewitched in his last years, and the tale of the extraordinary series of plots woven by the rival parties around the lingering deathbed of the King, whom they worried and frightened into his grave, a senile dotard at forty. Only briefly dealt with here are the Queens of the Bourbon renascence, stout little Marie Louise of Savoy, and the forceful termagant Isabel Farnese, who, chosen to serve as a humble instrument of others, at once seized whip and reins herself, and drove Spain as she listed during a long life of struggle for the aggrandisement of her sons, in which Europe was kept at strife for years by the ambition of one woman.

These and other Queens Consort will pass before us in the following pages, some of them good, a few bad, and most of them unhappy. There is no desire to dwell especially upon the sad and gloomy features of their history, or to represent them all as victims; but it must not be forgotten, in condonation of the shortcomings of some of them, that they were sent from their own homes, kin, and country, often mere children, to a distant foreign court, where the traditional etiquette was appallingly austere and repellent; sacrificed in loveless marriage to men whom they had never seen; treated as emotionless pawns in the game of politics played by crafty brains. No wonder, then, that girlish spirits should be crushed, that young hearts should break in despair, or, as an alternative, should cast to the winds all considerations of honour, duty, and dignity, and seek enjoyment before extinction came. Some of them passed through the fiery ordeal triumphant, and stand forth clear and shining. Great Isabel herself, another more colourless Isabel, the Emperor’s wife, a third, Isabel of the Peace, most beloved of Spanish Queens, and Anne her successor, as solemn Philip’s wife. Of these no word of reproach may justly be said, nor of Margaret, the Austrian consort of Philip III., nor of the spirited Isabel of Bourbon, daughter of the gay and gallant Béarnais, and sister of Henriette Marie of England. These and others bore their burden bravely to the last; and of the few who cast theirs down, and strayed amongst the poisoned flowers by the way, it may be truly urged that the trespasses of others against them were greater than their own transgressions. Such of their stories as are here told briefly are set forth with an honest desire to attain accuracy in historical fact and impartiality in deduction therefrom. There has been no desire to make either angels or devils of the personages described. They were, like the rest of their kind, human beings, with mixed and varying motives, swayed by personal and political influences which must be taken into account in any attempt to appraise their characters or understand their actions. Several of the lives are here told in English for the first time by the light of modern research, and in cases where statements are at variance with usually accepted English teaching, references are given in footnotes to the contemporary source from which the statements are derived. The opening of the archives of several European countries, and the extensive reproduction in print of interesting historical texts in Spain of late years, provide much of the new material used in the present work; and the labours of recent English, French, and Spanish historians have naturally been placed under contribution for such fresh facts as they have adduced. Where this is the case, acknowledgment is made in the form of footnotes.

MARTIN HUME.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

The above Illustrations are reproduced from Photographs by J. Lacoste, Madrid.

BOOK I
ISABEL THE CATHOLIC

CHAPTER I

Proudly reared upon a lofty cliff above the trickling Manzanares, there stood the granite palace that had gradually grown around the ancient Moorish fortress of Madrid. Like an eagle from its aerie, its tiny windows blinked across the tawny plain at the far-off glittering snow peaks of Guadarrama, standing forth clear and sharp against a cobalt sky. The Alcazar had been the scene of many strange happenings in the past; and for a hundred years chivalric splendour had run riot in its broad patios, with their arcades of slender columns, and in its tapestried halls, whose carved ceilings blazed with gold and colour. Frivolous, pleasure-loving, Juan II. of Castile, grandson of John of Gaunt, had through a long reign outdone in vain ostentation the epic poems and romances of chivalry that filled his brain, and he himself, with his attendant Nubian lion slouching by his side, had stalked through the Alcazar upon the cliff, a figure more picturesque than that of Amadis or Arthur. His lavish, easy-going son, Henry IV., had followed in his footsteps, and had made his palace of Madrid a home of dissolute magnificence and humiliating debauchery, unexampled even in that age of general decadence.

But rarely had scenes at once so pregnant of evil, and yet so ostensibly joyous, been enacted in the palace of Madrid as on the 17th March 1462. Greed, hate and jealousy, raged beneath silken gowns and ermine mantles; nay, beneath the gorgeous vestments of the great churchmen who stood grouped before the altar in the palace chapel, though smiling faces and words of pleasure were seen and heard on every side. For to the King, after eight years of fruitless marriage, an heiress had been born, and the court and people of Castile and Leon were bidden to make merry and welcome their future Queen. Bull fights, tournaments, and cane contests, the songs of minstrels and plenteous banquets, had for days beguiled a populace palled with gaudy shows; and now the sacred ceremonies of the Church were to sanctify the babe whose advent had moved so many hearts to shocked surprise. The King, a shaggy, red-haired giant with slack, lazy limbs and feeble face, towered in his golden crown and velvet mantle over his nine-year-old half-brother Alfonso by his side. The child, under a canopy, was borne in state up to the font by Count Alba de Liste, and the stalwart, black-browed primate of Spain, Alfonso Carrillo, Archbishop of Toledo, who, with three attendant bishops, performed the ceremony, blessed the baby girl unctuously beneath the King’s lymphatic gaze, though he had already resolved to ruin her. By the side of the font stood the sponsors: a girl of eleven and a sturdy noble in splendid attire, with his wife. All around, the courtiers, their mouths wreathed in doubtful smiles which their lifted brows belied, glanced alternately at the little group of sponsors, and at the noblest figure of all the courtly throng: a young man glittering with gems who stood behind the King. Tall, almost, as Henry himself, with flashing dark eyes and jet black hair, a fair skin and gallant mien, this youth formed with the King, and the group at the font, the elements of a great drama, which ended in the renascence of Spain. For the young man was Beltran de la Cueva, the new Count of Ledesma, who, all the court was whispering, was really the father of the new-born Princess, and the sponsors, besides the Frenchman Armignac, were the gorged and spoiled favourite of the King, the all-powerful Juan Pacheco, Marquis of Villena, and his wife, and the King’s half-sister, Princess Isabel of Castile. The girl had seen nothing of court life, for up to this time, from her orphaned babyhood, she had lived with her widowed mother and younger brother in neglected retirement at the lone castle of Arevalo, immersed in books and the gentle arts that modest maids were taught; but she went through her part of the ceremony composedly, and with simple dignity. She was already tall for her age, with a fair, round face, large, light blue eyes, and the reddish hair of her Plantagenet ancestors; and if she, in her innocence, guessed at some of the tumultuous passions that were silently raging around her, she made no sign, and bore herself calmly, as befitted the daughter of a long line of kings.[^[1]]

Seven weeks afterwards, on the 9th May, in the great hall of the palace, the nobles, prelates, and deputies of the chartered towns met to swear allegiance to the new heiress of Castile. One by one, as they advanced to kneel and kiss the tiny hand of the unconscious infant, they frowned and whispered beneath their breath words of scorn and indignation which they dared not utter openly, for all around, and thronging the corridors and courtyards, there stood with ready lances the Morisco bodyguard of the King, eager to punish disobedience. And so, though the insulting nickname of the new Infanta Juana, the Beltraneja, after the name of her assumed father, passed from mouth to mouth quietly, public protest there was none.[^[2]]

Already before the birth of the hapless Beltraneja, the scandal of Henry’s life, his contemptible weakness and the acknowledged sexual impotence which had caused his divorce from his first wife, had made his court a battle ground for rival ambitions. Like the previous Kings of his house, which was raised to the throne by a fratricidal revolution, and himself a rebel during his father’s lifetime, Henry IV. had lavished crown gifts upon noble partisans to such an extent as to have reduced his patrimony to nought. Justice was openly bought and sold, permanent grants upon public revenues were bartered for small ready payments, law and order were non-existent outside the strong walls of the fortified cities, and the whole country was a prey to plundering nobles, who, either separately or in “leagues,” tyrannised and robbed as they listed.[^[3]] Feudalism had never been strong in the realms of Castile, because the frontier nobles, who for centuries pushed back gradually the Moorish power, always had to depend upon conciliating the towns they occupied, in order that the new regime might be more welcome than the one displaced. The germ of institutions in Spain had ever been the municipality, not the village grouped around the castle or the abbey as in England, and the soldier noble in Spain, unlike the English or German baron, had to win the support of townsmen, not to dispose of agricultural serfs. But when the Moors in Spain had been reduced to impotence, and a series of weak kings had been raised to the throne as the puppets of nobles; then when feudalism was dying elsewhere, it attempted to raise its head in Spain, capturing the government of towns on the one hand and beggaring and dominating the King on the other. By the time of which we are now speaking, the process was well nigh complete; and the only safeguard against the absolute tyranny of the nobles, was their mutual greed and jealousy.

For years Juan Pacheco, Marquis of Villena, had ruled the King with a rod of iron. The grants and gifts he had extorted for himself and his friends made him more powerful than any other force in the land. But there were those who sulked apart from him, nobles, some of them, of higher lineage and greater hereditary territories than his; and when the handsome foot page, Beltran de la Cueva, captured the good graces of the King and his gay young Portuguese wife, Queen Juana, the enemies of Villena saw in the rising star an instrument by which he might be humbled. After the Beltraneja’s birth and christening, honours almost royal were piled upon Beltran de la Cueva; and Villena and his uncle, Alfonso Carrillo, Archbishop of Toledo, grew ever more indignant and discontented. Only a fortnight after the Cortes had sworn allegiance to the new Princess, Villena drew up a secret protest against the act, alleging the illegitimacy of the child,[^[4]] and soon open opposition to King and favourite was declared.

There is no space here to relate in detail the complicated series of intrigues and humiliations that followed. The King on one occasion was forced to hide in his own palace from the assaulting soldiery of Villena. To buy the goodwill of the jealous favourite towards his little daughter he went so far as to agree to a marriage between the Beltraneja and Villena’s son;[^[5]] and more humiliating still, in December 1464, he consented to the inquiry of a commission of churchmen nominated by Villena and his friends, to inquire into the legitimacy of his reputed daughter. The inquiry elicited much piquant but entirely contradictory evidence as to the virility of the King, who, it was admitted on all hands, delighted in the society of ladies, and aroused the violent jealousy of the Queen; but, although with our present lights there seems to have been no valid reason for disinheriting the princess, the commission was sufficiently in doubt to recommend the King to make the best terms he could with the rebels. The King’s sister, Princess Isabel, who at the time lived at Court, was also used as an instrument by Henry to pacify the league against him. She had been betrothed when quite a child at Arevalo to Prince Charles of Viana, eldest son of the King of Aragon, and in right of his mother himself King of Navarre; a splendid match which, failing issue from Henry and from her younger brother Alfonso, might have led to the union of all Spain in one realm. But Charles of Viana had already in 1461 fallen a victim to the hate and jealousy of his stepmother, Juana Enriquez, daughter of a great Castilian noble, Don Fadrique, the Admiral of the realm, and Isabel became to her brother a valuable diplomatic asset. Before the storm of war burst Henry attempted to wed his sister to Alfonso V. of Portugal, his wife’s brother, and so to prevent her claims to the Castilian crown being urged to the detriment of the Beltraneja; but the match had no attraction for the clever cautious girl of thirteen; for the suitor was middle-aged and ugly, and already her own genius or crafty councillors had suggested to her the husband who would best serve her own interests. So she gravely reminded her brother that she, a Castilian princess, could not legally be bestowed in marriage without the formal ratification of the Cortes.

In September 1564 Beltran de la Cueva received the great rank of Master of Santiago, which endowed him not only with vast revenues, but the disposal of an armed force second to none in the kingdom, and this new folly of the King was the signal for revolt. A party of nobles immediately seized Valladolid against the King, and though the townspeople promptly expelled them and proclaimed the loyalty of the city, the issue between the factions was now joined. On the following day, 16th September, an attempt that nearly succeeded was made to capture and kidnap the King himself near Segovia. He was a poor, feeble-minded creature, hating strife and danger, and, though some of his stronger councillors protested against such weakness, he consented to meet the revolted nobles, and redress their grievances. In October Villena, the Archbishop of Toledo, Count Benavente, the Admiral Don Fadrique, and the rest of the rebels, met Henry between Cabezon and Cigales, and in three interviews, during their stay of five weeks, dictated to the wretched King their demands.[^[6]] The King was to dismiss his Moorish guard and become a better Christian: he was to ask for no more money without the consent of the nobles, to deprive Cueva of the Mastership of Santiago, recognise his own impotence and the bastardy of his daughter, and acknowledge as his heir his half-brother Alfonso, whom he was to deliver to the guardianship of Villena. On the 30th November the nobles and the King took the oath to hold the boy Alfonso as the heir of Spain; and then Henry, a mere cypher thenceforward, sadly wended his way to Segovia, where the commission to inquire into the shameful question of his virility was still sitting,[^[7]] and Villena and his uncle, the warlike Archbishop, were thus practically the rulers of Spain. But though Henry consented to everything he characteristically tried to avoid the spirit of the agreement. Beltran de la Cueva was deprived of the Mastership of Santiago, but he was made Duke of Alburquerque in exchange for the loss, and the poor little disinherited Beltraneja was treated with greater consideration than before.

When civil war was seen to be inevitable in the spring of 1465, Henry carried his wife and child with his sister Isabel to Salamanca, whilst the Archbishop of Toledo, in the name of the revolted nobles, seized the walled city of Avila, where within a few days he was joined by Villena and his friends, bringing with them the Infante Alfonso, who, in pursuance of the agreement made with the King at Cigales, had received the oath of allegiance as heir to the crown. From the King it was clear that the nobles could hope for no more, for he had summoned the nation to arms to oppose them; but from a child King of their own making, rich grants could still be wrung, and for the first time since the dying days of the Gothic monarchy, the sacredness of the anointed Sovereign of Castile was mocked and derided. In April 1565, at Plascencia, the nobles swore secretly to hold Alfonso as King; and on the 5th June 1364, on a mound within sight of the walls of Avila, the public scene was enacted that shocked Spain like a sacrilege. Upon a staging there was seated a lay figure in mourning robes, with a royal crown upon its head; a sword of state before it, and in the hand a sceptre. A great multitude of people with bated breath awaited the living actors in the scene; and soon there issued from the city gate a brilliant cavalcade of nobles and bishops, headed by Villena escorting the little prince Alfonso. Arriving before the scaffolding, and in mockery saluting the figure, most of the nobles mounted the platform, whilst Villena, the Master of Alcantara, and Count Medillin, with a bodyguard, conveyed the Infante to a coign of vantage some distance away. Then in a loud voice was read upon the platform the impeachment of the King, which was summed up under four heads. For the first, it ran, Henry of Castile is unworthy to enjoy the regal dignity; and as the tremendous words were read the Archbishop of Toledo stepped forth and tore the royal crown from the brows of the lifeless doll: for the second, he is unfit to administer justice in the realm, and the Count of Plascencia removed the sword of state from its place: for the third, no rule or government should be entrusted to him, and Count of Benavente took from the figure’s powerless grasp the sceptre which it held: for the fourth, he should be deprived of the throne and the honour due to kings, whereupon Don Diego Lopez de Zuñiga cast the dummy down and trampled it under foot, amidst the jeers and curses of the crowd. When this was done, and the platform cleared, young Alfonso was raised aloft in the arms of men that all might see, and a great shout went up of “Castilla, Castilla, for the King Don Alfonso,” and then, seated on the throne, the boy gave his hand to kiss to those who came to pay their new sovereign fealty. Like wildfire across the steppes and mountains of Castile sped the awful news, and Henry in Salamanca was soon surrounded by hosts of subjects whose reverence for a sacrosanct King had been wounded by what they regarded as impious blasphemy.

Both factions flew to arms, and for months civil war raged, the walled cities being alternately besieged and captured by both parties. Isabel herself remained with the King, usually at Segovia or Madrid; though with our knowledge of her character and tastes, she can have had little sympathy with the tone of her brother’s court. At one time during the lingering struggle in 1466, Henry endeavoured to win Villena and his family from the side of rebellion by betrothing Isabel to Don Pedro Giron, Master of Calatrava, Villena’s brother. The suitor was an uncouth boor, and that an Infanta of Castile should be sacrificed in marriage with an upstart such as he was too much for Isabel’s pride and great ambition. Nothing in the world, she said, should bring her to such a humiliation; though the King, careless of her protests, petitioned the Pope to dispense Don Pedro from his pledge of celibacy as Master of a monkish military order. Isabel’s faithful friend, Doña Beatriz Bobadilla, wife of Andres Cabrera, High Steward of the King, and Commander of the fortress of Segovia, was as determined as her mistress that the marriage should not take place, and swore herself to murder Don Pedro, if necessary, to prevent it. A better way was found than by Dona Beatriz’s dagger, for when the papal dispensation arrived, and the prospective bridegroom set out in triumph to claim his bride, poison cut short his career as soon as he left his home. Whether Isabel herself was an accomplice of the act will never be known. She probably would not have hesitated to sanction it in the circumstances, according to the ethics of the time; for she never flinched, as her brother did, at inflicting suffering for what she considered necessary ends.

On the 20th August 1467, the main bodies of both factions met on the historic battlefield of Olmedo, the warlike Archbishop of Toledo, clad in armour covered by a surcoat embroidered with the holy symbols, led into battle the boy pretender Alfonso; whilst the royal favourite, Beltran de la Cueva, now Duke of Alburquerque, on the King’s side, matched the valour of the Churchman.[^[8]] Both sides suffered severely, but the pusillanimity of the King caused the fight to be regarded as a defeat for him, and the capture of his royal fortress of Segovia soon afterwards proved his impotence in arms so clearly, that a sort of modus vivendi was arranged, by which for nearly a year each King issued decrees and ostensibly ruled the territories held by his partisans.[^[9]]

At length, in July 1468, the promising young pretender Alfonso died suddenly and mysteriously in his fifteenth year, at Cardeñosa, near Avila; perhaps of plague, as was said at the time, but more probably of poison;[^[10]] and the whole position was at once revolutionised. Isabel had been in the Alcazar of Segovia with her friends the commander and his wife when the city was surrendered to the rebels, and from that time, late in 1567, she had followed the fortunes of Alfonso, with whom she was at his death. She at once retired broken-hearted to the convent of Santa Clara in Avila, but not, we may be certain, unmindful of the great change wrought in her prospects by her brother’s premature death. She was nearly seventeen years of age, learned and precocious far beyond her years; the events that had passed around her for the last six years had matured her naturally strong judgment, and there is no doubt from what followed that she had already decided upon her course of action. She was without such affectionate guidance as girls of her age usually enjoy; for her unhappy widowed mother, to whom she was always tender and kind, had already fallen a victim to the hereditary curse of the house of Portugal, to which she belonged, and lived thenceforward in lethargic insanity in her castle of Arevalo. Isabel’s brother the King was her enemy, and she had no other near relative: the churchmen and nobles who had risen against Henry, and were now around her, were, it must have been evident to her, greedy rogues bent really upon undermining the royal power for their own benefit; and deeply devout as Isabel was, she was quite unblinded by the illusion that the Archbishop and bishops who led the revolt were moved to their action by any considerations of morality or religion. On the other hand, the rebellious nobles and ecclesiastics could not persist in their revolt without a royal figure head. Young Alfonso, a mere child, had been an easy tool, and doubtless the leaders thought that this silent, self-possessed damsel would be quite as facile to manage.

They did not have to wait many days for proof to the contrary. The Archbishop of Toledo was the mouthpiece of his associates. Within the venerable walls of the royal convent at Avila he set before Isabel a vivid picture of the evils of her elder brother’s rule, his shameful laxity of life, his lavish squandering of the nation’s wealth upon unworthy objects, and the admitted illegitimacy of the daughter he wished to make his heiress; and the Archbishop ended by offering to Isabel, in the name of the nobles, the crowns of Castile. The wearer of these crowns, wrested painfully through centuries of struggle from intruding infidels, had always been held sacred. The religious exaltation born of the reconquest had invested the Christian sovereigns in the eyes of their subjects with divine sanction and special saintly patronage. To attack them was not disloyalty alone, but sacrilege; and the deposition of Henry at Avila had, as we have seen, thrilled Spain with horror. It was no part of Isabel’s plan to do anything that might weaken the reverence that surrounded the throne to which she knew now she might succeed. So her answer to the prelate was firm as well as wise. With many sage reflections taken from the didactic books that had always been her study, she declared that she would never accept a crown that was not hers by right. She desired to end the miserable war, she said, and to be reconciled to her brother and sovereign. If the nobles desired to serve her they would not try to make her Queen before her time, but persuade the King to acknowledge her as his heir, since they assured her that the Princess Juana was the fruit of adultery.

At first the nobles were dismayed at an answer that some thought would mean ruin to them. But the Archbishop, Carrillo, knew the weakness of Henry, and whispered to Villena as they descended the convent stairs, that the Infanta’s resolve to claim the heirship would mean safety and victory for them. Little did he or the rest of the nobles know the great spirit and iron will of the girl with whom they had to deal. No time was lost in approaching the King. He was ready to agree to anything for a quiet life, and Alburquerque, and even the great Cardinal Mendoza, agreed with him that an accord was advisable; though it might be broken afterwards when the nobles were disarmed. Before the end of August all was settled, and the cities of Castile had sent their deputies to take the oath of allegiance to Isabel as heiress to the crown. A formal meeting was arranged to take place between Henry and his sister at a place called the Venta de los Toros de Guisando, a hostelry famous for some prehistoric stone figures of undetermined beasts in the neighbourhood. All was amiable on the surface. Henry embraced his sister and promised her his future affection, settling upon her the principality of Asturias and Oviedo, and the cities of Avila, Huete, Medina, and many others, with all revenues and jurisdictions as from the beginning of the revolt (September 1464).[^[11]] But by the agreement Isabel was bound not to marry without the King’s consent, and it is evident that to this condition Henry and his friends looked for rendering their concessions voidable.

The intrigues of the two parties of Castile were therefore now centred upon the marriage of the Princess. Suitors were not lacking. If we are to believe Hall, Edward IV. of England, before his marriage with Elizabeth Grey, was approached by the Spaniards, and it is certain that his brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was at one time a wooer. Either of them would have suited Henry of Castile, because it would have removed Isabel from Spain. A Portuguese would have also been acceptable to the same party, because Portugal was naturally on the side of the Beltraneja and her Portuguese mother. But Isabel had other views, and the only suitors that were entertained seriously were the Duke of Guienne, the brother of Louis XI., and the young Ferdinand of Aragon, the son and heir of John II. and nephew of the doughty old Admiral of Castile, who had stood by the side of the nobles in their revolt. There was never any doubt as to which of the suitors Isabel favoured. The Frenchman was reported to her as a poor, puny creature with weak legs and watery eyes, whilst Ferdinand, a youth of her own age, was praised to the skies for his manliness, his good looks, and his abilities, by those whose judgment she trusted. It is impossible to say whether Isabel as yet fully understood what such a marriage might mean to Spain; but it is certain that the wicked old John II. of Aragon was quite aware of its advantages for his own realm.

The house of Aragon, with its domains of Sicily and Naples, and its secular ambition towards the east, had found itself everywhere opposed by the growing power of France. The Mediterranean, the seat of empire for centuries, had no finer havens than those under the sceptre of Aragon, but the Catalans were harsh and independent with their kings, and sparing of their money for royal purposes. A poor king of Aragon could not hope, with his own unaided resources, to beat France on the Gulf of Lyons, and bear the red and yellow banner of Barcelona to the infidel Levant. But with the resources in men and money of greater Castile at his bidding, all was possible; and John II., who had not scrupled to murder his first-born son for the benefit of his second, and oust his own children from their mother’s realm of Navarre, was ready to go to any lengths to bring about the union which might realise the dream of Aragon.

From Isabel’s point of view, too, the match was a good one, apart from personal inclination. There is no doubt whatever that she was, even thus early, determined when her time came to crush the tyrannous nobles who had reduced Castile to anarchy and the sovereign to a contemptible lay figure. With her great talent she understood that to do this she must dispose of force apart from that afforded by any league of nobles in Castile itself; and she looked towards Aragon to lend her such additional strength. This fact, however, was not lost upon the greedy nobles, especially Villena. The turbulent leader of conspiracy already looked askance at the quiet determined girl who thus early imposed her will upon her followers, and throwing his power again on the side of the king he had once solemnly deposed, he seized the mastership of Santiago as his reward. In a panic at the fear of the Aragonese match, the king and Villena once more agreed to marry Isabel with the king of Portugal, Villena and Cardinal Mendoza being heavily bribed by the Portuguese for their aid.[^[12]] Isabel was at her town of Ocaña at the time, and her position was extremely difficult and perilous when the Portuguese envoys came to her with Villena to offer her their king’s hand. As Isabel had several weeks before secretly bound herself to marry Ferdinand of Aragon, her reply was a diplomatic refusal to the Portuguese advances; and Villena, enraged, was disposed to capture her on the spot and carry her a prisoner to Court. Inconvenient princes and princesses were easily removed in those days, and Isabel’s danger was great. But she had the faculty of compelling love and admiration; she was as brave as a lion and as cunning as a serpent, and the people of Ocaña made it quite evident to Villena that they would allow no violence to be offered to her. But clearly something must be done to prevent Isabel from becoming too strong; and as a last resort after her refusal to entertain the Portuguese match it was determined to capture her by force of arms. She was then at Madrigal, and Villena’s nephew, the Bishop of Burgos, bribed her servants to desert her in her hour of need: the King sent orders to the townsmen that no resistance was to be offered to his officers; and Cardinal Mendoza with a strong force marched towards Madrigal to arrest Isabel. But another archbishop, more warlike than he, Carrillo of Toledo, was before him. With the Admiral Don Fadrique and a band of horsemen, he swooped down from Leon and bore Isabel to safety amongst those who would have died for her, and entered into the great city of Valladolid after sunset on the 31st August 1469. No time was to be lost. Envoys were sent in disguise hurrying up to Saragossa, to hasten the coming of the bridegroom. The service was a dangerous one; for if Ferdinand had fallen into the hands of the Court party a short shrift would have been his. But the stake was great, and Juan II. of Aragon and his son, young as the latter was, did not stick at trifles. One difficulty, indeed, was overcome characteristically. Isabel was known to be rigidity itself in matters of propriety; and, as she and Ferdinand were second cousins, a papal bull was necessary for the marriage. The Pope, Paul II., was on the side of the Castilian Court, and no bull could be got from him; but Juan II. of Aragon and the Archbishop of Toledo carefully had one forged to satisfy Isabel’s scruples.[^[13]]

Whilst one imposing cavalcade of Aragonese bearing rich presents took the high road into Castile and occupied the attention of the King’s officers, a modest party of five merchants threaded the mountain paths by Soria, after leaving the Aragonese territory at Tarazona on the 7th October. The first day after entering Castile they rode well-nigh sixty miles; and late at night the little cavalcade approached the walled town of Osma, where Pedro Manrique and an armed escort were to meet them. The night was black, and their summons at the gates of the town was misunderstood: a cry went up that this was a body of the king’s men to surprise the place; and from the ramparts a shower of missiles flew upon the strangers below. One murderous stone whizzed within a few inches of the head of a fair-haired lad of handsome visage and manly bearing, who, as a servant, accompanied those who wore the garb of merchants. It was Ferdinand himself who thus narrowly escaped death, and a hurried explanation, a shouted password, the flashing of torches followed, and then the creaking drawbridge fell, the great gates clanged open, and the danger was over.[^[14]] The next day, with larger forces, Ferdinand reached Dueñas, in Leon, near Valladolid; and four days later, now in raiment that befitted a royal bridegroom, for his father had made him king of Sicily, he rode when most men slept to Valladolid. It was nearly midnight when he arrived, and the gates of the city were closed for the night, but a postern in the walls gave access to the house in which Isabel was lodged; and there the Archbishop of Toledo led him by hand into the presence of his bride, to whom he was solemnly betrothed by the Archbishop’s chaplain. It was all done so secretly that no inkling of it reached the slumbering town; and within two hours the youth was in the saddle again and reached Dueñas long before dawn.[^[15]]

On the 18th October 1469, four days later, all was ready for the public marriage, and Ferdinand entered the city this time in state, with Castilian and Aragonese men-at-arms and knights around him. Isabel was staying at the best house in Valladolid, that of her partisan, Juan Vivero, and the great hall was richly decked for the occasion of this, one of the fateful marriages of history, though none could have known that it was such at the time. The celebrant was the warlike Archbishop who had been so powerful a factor in bringing it about; and the next day, after mass, the married pair dined in public amidst the rejoicing of the faithful people of Valladolid. There was little pomp and circumstance in the wedding, for the times were critical, the realm disturbed, and money scarce; but imagination is stirred by the recollection of the great consequences that ensued upon it, and those who saw the event, even with their necessarily limited vision of its effects, must have realised that any splendour lavished upon it could not have enhanced its importance.

The news of the dreaded marriage filled the King and his court with dismay. Villena, in close league with Alburquerque and the Mendozas, now espoused the cause of the Beltraneja,[^[16]] who was declared the legitimate heiress to the Crown, and betrothed to Isabel’s former suitor, the Duke of Guienne, in the presence of the assembled nobles, at the monastery of Loyola, near Segovia. It mattered not, apparently, that the very men who now swore fealty to Juana, the hapless Beltraneja, had previously denounced her as a bastard: they wanted a puppet, not a mistress, as Isabel was likely to be, and they were quite ready to perjure themselves in their own interests. Isabel was formally deprived of all her grants and privileges, even of the lordship of her town of Dueñas, near Valladolid;[^[17]] where she and Ferdinand had kept their little court, and where their first child had just been born (October 1470), a daughter, to whom they gave the name of Isabel.

Ferdinand could not remain long in idleness, and was soon summoned by his father to aid him in a war with France, being absent from his wife for over a year, winning fresh experience and credit both as soldier and negotiator. In the meanwhile, things were going badly again for the Beltraneja. Her French betrothed died in May 1472; and some of the nobles, jealous of the greed of Villena, were once more wavering, and making secret approaches to Isabel. She had bold and zealous friends in the Chamberlain Cabrera, who held the strong castle of Segovia, and his wife, Beatriz de Bobadilla.[^[18]] In the last weeks of 1473, Doña Beatriz and her husband urged Henry to forgive and receive his sister. She was, they told him, being persecuted by the Marquis of Villena, and had meant no harm in her marriage with the man she loved. Henry was doubtful, but Cardinal Mendoza and Count Benavente had changed sides again, and now quietly used their influence in Isabel’s favour. A grudging promise was given by the King, but it was enough for Doña Beatriz; and, disguised as a farmer’s wife, she set forth from Segovia on a market pad; and alone over the snowy roads, hurried to carry the good news to the Princess in the town of Aranda, which had just been surrendered to her by the townsfolk. A few days afterwards, on further advice from Doña Beatriz, Isabel, escorted by the Archbishop of Toledo and his men-at-arms, travelled through the night, and before the first streak of dawn on the 28th December 1473, they were admitted into the Alcazar of Segovia, where no force but treachery could harm her.

Villena’s son, who, fearing betrayal, had refused to enter the city when he had come with the King weeks before, and had remained in the neighbourhood at the famous Geronomite monastery of El Parral, founded by his father, fled at the news. His father, with Alburquerque and the Constable of Castile, Count of Haro, at once met at Cuellar, and sent an insolent order to Henry to expel his sister from Segovia. It came too late, however. The King, by this time, had met Isabel, who had received him at the gate of the Alcazar, and professed her love and duty to him. In a speech full of womanly wisdom,[^[19]] she said she had come to pray him to put aside anger towards her, for she meant no evil; and all she asked was that he should fulfil his oath taken at Toros de Guisando, and acknowledge her as heiress of Castile. ‘For by the laws of God and man, the succession belonged to her.’ Weak Henry swayed from one side to the other like a reed in the wind, as either party had his ear; and at last Isabel took the bold course of sending secretly for Ferdinand, who had just returned from Aragon. The risk was great, but Isabel knew, at least, that she could depend upon the Commander of the Alcazar of Segovia, and Ferdinand secretly entered the fortress on the 4th January 1474. It was a difficult matter for Doña Beatriz to persuade the King to receive his young brother-in-law; but she succeeded at last, and when Henry had consented, he did the thing handsomely, and they all rode together through the city in state, with great show of affection and rejoicing. On Twelfth Day, Doña Beatriz and her husband gave a great banquet to the royal party[^[20]] at the Bishop’s palace, between the Alcazar and the Cathedral. Whilst the minstrels were playing in the hall after dinner, the King suddenly fell ill. Violent vomiting and purging seemed to point to poison, and the alarm was great. Prayers and processions continued night and day, and the unfortunate man seemed to recover; but, though he lived for nearly a year longer, he never was well again, the irritation of the stomach continuing incessantly until he sank from weakness.

In the interim both factions interminably worried him to settle the succession. Sometimes he would lean to Isabel’s friends, sometimes to Villena and Alburquerque, but Isabel herself, wise and cautious, knew where safety alone for her could be found, and took care not to stir outside the Alcazar of Segovia, in the firm keeping of Cabrera, who himself was in the firm keeping of his wife, Doña Beatriz. Once in the summer it was found that the King had treacherously agreed that Villena’s forces should surreptitiously enter the town and occupy the towers of the cathedral, whence they might throw explosives into the Alcazar and capture Isabel on the ground that she was poisoning the King; but the plan was frustrated, and Henry, either in fear or ashamed of his part of the transaction, left Segovia to place himself in the hands of Villena at Cuellar. Greedy to the last, Villena carried the sick King to Estremadura to obtain the surrender of some towns there that he coveted; but to Henry’s expressed grief, and the relief of the country, the insatiable favourite died unexpectedly of a malignant gathering in the throat on the way, and the King returned to Madrid, himself a dying man. His worthless life flickered out before dawn on the 12th December 1474, and his last plans were for the rehabilitation of the Beltraneja. He is said to have left a will bequeathing her the succession; but Cardinal Mendoza, Count Benavente, and his other executors, never produced such a document, which, moreover, would have been repudiated now by the nation at large, passionately loyal, as it already mainly was, to Isabel.[^[21]]

There was hardly a private or public shortcoming of which Henry in his lifetime had not been accused. From the Sovereign Pontiff to frank, but humble subjects, remonstrances against his notoriously bad conduct had been offered to the wretched King; and at his death the accumulated evils, bred by a line of frivolous monarchs, had reached their climax. There was no justice, order or security for life or property, and the strong oppressed the weak without reproach or hindrance, the only semblance of law being maintained by the larger walled cities in their territories by means of their armed burgess brotherhood. But in the disturbances that had succeeded the birth of the Beltraneja the cities themselves were divided, and in many cases the factions within their own walls made them scenes of bloodshed and insecurity. Faith and religion, that had hitherto been the mainstay of the throne of Castile, had been trampled under foot and oppressed by a monarch whose constant companions and closest servitors had been of the hated brood of Mahomet. Nobles who, for themselves and their adherents, had wrung from the Kings nearly all they had to give, and threatened even to overwhelm the cities, were free from taxation, except the almost obsolete feudal aid in spears which the Sovereign had nominally a right to summon at need. Such men as Villena, or Alvaro de Luna in the previous reign, with more armed followers than the King and greater available wealth, were the real sovereigns of Castile in turbulent alternation, and the final disintegration of the realm into petty principalities appeared to be the natural and imminent outcome of the state of affairs that existed when Henry IV. breathed his last.

All Castile and Leon, with their daughter kingdoms, were looking and praying for a saviour who could bring peace and security; and at first sight it would seem as if a turbulent State that had never been ruled by a woman could hardly expect that either of the young princesses who claimed the crown could bring in its dire need the qualities desired for its salvation. Isabel’s popularity, especially in Valladolid, Avila and Segovia, was great; and at the moment of the King’s death her friends were the stronger and more prompt, for Villena had just died, the Beltraneja was but a child of twelve, and the Queen-Mother, discredited and scorned, was lingering out her last days in a convent in Madrid.[^[22]] The towns, for the most part, awaited events in awe, fearing to take the wrong side, and a breathless pause followed the death of the King. Isabel was at Segovia, and under her influence and that of Cabrera, the city was the first to throw off the mask and raised the pennons for Isabel and Ferdinand, to whom, in her presence, it swore allegiance and proclaimed sovereigns of Castile. Valladolid followed on the 29th December; whilst Madrid, whose fortress was in the hands of Villena’s son, declared for the Beltraneja. The nobles shuffled again; moved by personal interest or rivalry, the Archbishop of Toledo, abandoning Isabel out of jealousy of Cardinal Mendoza; whilst Alburquerque, the supposed father of the Beltraneja, joined her opponent, and civil war, aided by foreign invasion from Portugal, was organised to dispute with Isabel and her husband their right to the crown.

By rare good fortune the young couple, who were thus forced to fight for their splendid inheritance, were the greatest governing geniuses of their age. It is time to say something of their gifts and characters. They were both, at the time of their accession, twenty-three years of age, and, as we have seen, their experience of life had already been great and disillusioning. Isabel’s was incomparably the higher mind of the two. The combined dignity and sweetness of her demeanour captivated all those who approached her, whilst her almost ostentatious religious humility and devotion won the powerful commendation of the churchmen who had suffered so heavily during the reign of Henry. There is no reason to doubt her sincerity or her real good intentions any more than those of her great-grandson, Philip II., a very similar, though far inferior, character. Like him, she never flinched from inflicting what we now call cruelty in the pursuance of her aims, though she had no love for cruelty for its own sake. She was determined that Spain should be united, and that rigid orthodoxy should be the cementing bond; that the sacred sovereign of Castile should be supreme over the bodies and souls of men, for her crown in her eyes was the symbol of divine selection and inspiration, and nothing done in the service of God by His vice-regent could be wrong, great as the suffering that it might entail. She was certainly what our lax generation calls a bigot; but bigotry in her time and country was a shining virtue, and is still her greatest claim to the regard of many of her countrymen. She was unmerciful in her severity in suppressing disorder and revolt; but we have seen the state at which affairs had arrived in Castile when she acceded to the crown, and it is quite evident that nothing but a rod of iron governed by a heart of ice was adequate to cope with the situation. Terrible as was Isabel’s justice, it entailed in the end much less suffering than a continuance of the murderous anarchy she suppressed.[^[23]] Her strength and activity of body matched her prodigious force of mind, and she constantly struck awe in her potential opponents by her marvellous celerity of movement over desolate tracts of country almost without roads, riding often throughout the night distances that appear at the present day to be almost incredible.

Ferdinand was as despotic and as ambitious as she, but his methods were absolutely different. He wanted the strength of Castile to push Aragonese interests in Italy and the Mediterranean; and, like Isabel, he saw that religious unity was necessary if he was to be provided with a solid national weapon for his hand. But for Isabel’s exalted mystic views of religion he cared nothing. He was, indeed, severely practical in all things; never keeping an oath longer than it suited him to do so, loving the crooked way if his end could be gained by it, and he positively gloried in the tergiversation by which throughout his life he got the better of every one with whom he dealt, until death made sport of all his plans and got the better of him. His school of politics was purely Italian; and he cynically acted upon the knowledge, as Henry VII. of England also did, that the suppression of feudalism doomed the sovereign to impotence unless he could hoard large sums of ready money wrung from subjects. In future he saw that kings would be feared, not for the doubtful feudatories they might summon, but in proportion to the men and arms they could promptly pay for in cash; and he went one better than the two Henry Tudors in getting the treasure he saw was needed. They squeezed rills of money from religious orthodoxy, and divided their subjects for a century; he drew floods of gold by exterminating a heterodox minority, and united Spain for the ends he had in view. Ferdinand and Isabel might therefore challenge the admiration of subjects for their greatness and high aims, and command loyalty by their success as rulers; but they cannot be regarded as loveable human beings.

Between two such strong characters as these it was not to be expected that all would be harmonious at first, and the married life of Isabel began inauspiciously enough in one respect. There is no doubt that both Ferdinand and his father intended that the former should be King regnant of Castile, and not merely King consort. Ferdinand indeed, through his grandfather of the same name, was the male heir to the Castilian crowns; and as the Salic law prevailed in Aragon, they assumed that it might be enforced in Castile. This, however, was very far from Isabel’s view; reinforced as she was by the decision of the Castilian churchmen and jurists, and she stood firm. For a time Ferdinand sulked and threatened to leave her to fight out her battle by herself; but better counsels prevailed, and an agreement was made by which they were to reign jointly, but that Isabel alone should appoint all commanders, officers and administrators, in Castile, and retain control of all fiscal matters in her realms.

On the 2nd January 1475, Ferdinand joined his wife in Segovia, where a Cortes had been summoned to take the oath of allegiance to them. Through the thronged and cheering street he rode to the Alcazar; Beltran de la Cueva, Duke of Alburquerque, by his side, and nobles, bishops and burgesses, flocked to do homage to the new sovereigns. Two months later the faithful city of Valladolid greeted the royal couple with effusive joy; and a round of festivities drew the lieges and gave time for adherents to come in. Both parties were mustering forces for the great struggle; and it needed stout hearts on the part of Isabel and her husband to face the future. The Archbishop of Toledo was now on the side of the Beltraneja; and so was Madrid and some of the great nobles of Andalucia; and, worst of all, Alfonso of Portugal had been betrothed to his niece the Beltraneja; and was even now gathering his army to invade Castile and seize the crown. On the 3rd April the new sovereigns held high festival at Valladolid. Isabel, in crimson brocade and with a golden crown upon her veiled abundant russet hair, mounted a white hackney with saddle cloth, housings and mane covered with gold and silver flowers. She was followed by fourteen noble dames dressed in parti-coloured tabards, half green brocade and half claret velvet, and head dresses to imitate crowns; and, as they rode to take the place of honour in the tilt yard, men said that no woman was ever seen so beautiful and majestic as the Queen of Spain.[^[24]] Knights and nobles flocked to the lists, and King Ferdinand rode into the yard mounted upon his warhorse to break a lance, the acknowledged finest horseman in Spain. But as he entered the populace stared to see the strange crest he bore upon his helm, and the stranger motto emblazoned upon his shield. What could it mean? asked, not without fear, some of those who professed to be his friends. The crest took the form of a blacksmith’s anvil, and the motto ran;—

Como yunque sufro y callo,

Por el tiempo en que me hallo.

I do bear, like anvil dumb,

Blows, until the time shall come.[^[25]]

which we are told was meant as a warning to those at his side that he knew they were beguiling him with such pageantry whilst they were paltering with his enemies.

It was a gay though ominous feast; but Isabel could not afford much time for such trifling, and on the second day she mounted her palfrey and rode out to Tordesillas, forty miles away, to inspect the fortifications, and then to make an attempt to win back to her cause the Archbishop of Toledo. With prodigious activity the young Sovereigns separately travelled from fortress to fortress, animating followers, and providing for defence; and Isabel was in the imperial city of Toledo late in May 1475, when the news came to her that the King of Portugal had entered Spain with a large army, had formally married the Beltraneja at Palencia, and proclaimed himself King of Castile.[^[26]] Without wasting a moment Isabel started on horseback for her faithful fief of Avila, ninety miles away. She was less than two days on the road, and, though she had a miscarriage on the way at Cabezon she dared not tarry until safe within the walls of the city, which she entered on the 28th May.

For some months thereafter the fate of Spain hung in the balance. Ferdinand strained every nerve, but the forces against him were stronger than his, and the Archbishop of Toledo with his wealth and following had reinforced the Portuguese. The invading army lay across the Douro at Toro, a frontier fortress of Leon of fabulous strength, and Ferdinand from Valladolid attempted to push them back and was beaten. All Leon, and the plain of Castile as far as Avila, looked at the mercy of the invaders. But the Portuguese was slow of action, and at this critical juncture the splendid courage of Isabel saved the situation.[^[27]] Summoning Cortes at her city of Medina, the centre of the cloth industry and the greatest mart for bills of exchange in Europe, she appealed to their patriotism, their loyalty, and their love. Her eloquent plea was irresistible. Money was voted without stint, merchants and bankers unlocked their coffers, churches sold their plate, and monasteries disinterred their hoards. Aragonese troops marched in, Castilian levies came to the call of their Queen, and by the end of 1475 Ferdinand was at the head of an army strong enough to face the invaders. Isabel took her full share of the military operations. On the 8th January 1476, she rode out of Valladolid through terrible weather, in the coldest part of Spain, to join Ferdinand’s half-brother, Alfonso, before Burgos. For ten days the Queen travelled through the deep snowdrifts before she reached the camp, to find that the city had already surrendered; and on the evening of her arrival, in the gathering dusk, she entered the city of the Cid, to be received by kneeling, silk-clad aldermen with heads bowed for past transgressions, to be graciously pardoned by the Queen. The pardon was hearty and prompt; for these, and such as these, Isabel meant to make her instruments for bringing Spain to heel.

In the meanwhile Ferdinand had marched to meet the invading army of 3000 horse and 10,000 foot which lay across the Douro at Toro. First he set siege to Zamora, between the invading army and its base, and the King of Portugal ineffectually attempted to blockade him. Failing in this, the invaders on the 17th February raised their camp and marched towards Toro again. They stole away silently, but Ferdinand followed them as rapidly as possible, and caught up with them twelve miles from Toro, late in the afternoon, on the banks of the Douro. The charge of the Aragonese upon the disorganised army on the march was irresistible, and a complete rout of the invaders ensued, no less than 300 of the fugitives being drowned in the river in sheer panic. King Alfonso of Portugal fled, leaving his royal standard behind him, and before nightfall all was over, and the last hope of the Beltraneja had faded for ever.

A month afterwards Zamora, the almost impregnable fortress, surrendered to Ferdinand; and then the King marched to subdue other towns, whilst Isabel laid siege to Toro. The Queen scorned to avail herself of the privilege of her sex, and suffered all the hardships and dangers of a soldier’s life. Early and late she was on horseback superintending the operations, and ordered and witnessed more than one unsuccessful assault upon the town. At length, after a siege of many months, Toro itself fell, the last great fortress to hold out, and Isabel rode into the starving city in triumph. Then indeed was she Queen of Castile, with none to question her right.

The waverers hastened to join the victorious side, the nobles who had helped the Beltraneja, even the Archbishop of Toledo, came penitently, one by one, to make such terms as their mistress would accord; whilst the Beltraneja herself, unmarried again by an obedient Pope, retired to a Portuguese convent, and the King of Portugal afterwards laid aside his royal crown and assumed the tonsure and coarse gown of a Franciscan friar. Never was victory more complete; and when three years later, early in 1479, the old King of Aragon, Ferdinand’s father, went to his account, Isabel and Ferdinand, for ever known as ‘the Catholic kings,’ by grace of the Pope, reigned over Spain jointly from the Pyrenees to the Pillars of Hercules, one poor tributary Moorish realm, Granada, alone remaining to sully with infidelity the reunited domains of the Cross.

But the elements of aristocratic anarchy still existed, especially in Galicia and Andalucia, where certain noble families assumed the position of almost independent sovereigns, and at any time might again imperil the very existence of the State. With the great ambitions of Ferdinand and the exalted fervour of Isabel to spread Christianity, it must have been clear to both sovereigns that they must make themselves absolutely supreme in their own country before they could attempt to carry out their views abroad. The realms of Aragon offered no great difficulty, since good order prevailed, although the strict parliamentary constitutions sorely limited the regal power, and gave to the estates the command of the purse. In Castile, however, the nobles, eternally at feud with each other, were quite out of hand, and Isabel’s first measures were directed towards shearing them of their power for mischief. All the previous kings of her line—that of Trastamara—had been simply puppets in the hands of the nobility; she was determined, as a preliminary of greater things, to be sole mistress in her realm. Her task was a tremendous one, and needed supreme diplomacy in dividing opponents, as well as firmness in suppressing them. Isabel was a host in herself; and to her, much more than to her husband, must be given the honour of converting utter anarchy into order and security in a prodigiously short time.

The only semblance of settled life and respect for law in Castile was to be found in the walled towns. The municipal government had always been the unit of civilisation in Spain, and the nobility being untaxed, the Castilian Cortes consisted entirely of the representatives of the burgesses. With true statesmanship Isabel therefore turned to this element to reinforce the crown as against lawless nobles. The proposal to revive in a new form the old institution of the ‘Sacred Brotherhood’ of towns was made to her at the meeting of the Cortes at Madrigal in April 1476, and was at once accepted. A meeting of deputies was called at Dueñas in July, and within a few months the urban alliance was complete. An armed force of 2000 horsemen and many foot-soldiers was formed and paid by an urban house tax.[^[28]] They were more than a mere constabulary, although they ranged the country far and wide, and compelled men to keep the peace, for the organisation provided a judicial criminal system that effectually completed the task of punishment. Magistrates were appointed in every village of thirty families for summary jurisdiction, and constables of the Brotherhood were in every hamlet, whilst a supreme council composed of deputies from every province in Castile judged without appeal the causes referred to it by local magistrates. The punishments for the slightest transgression were terrible in their severity, and struck the turbulent classes with dismay. In 1480 a league of nobles and prelates met at Cabeña, under the Duke of Infantado, to protest against the Queen’s new force of burgesses. In answer to their remonstrance she showed her strength by haughtily telling them to look to themselves and obey the law, and at once established the Brotherhood on a firmer footing than before, to be a veritable terror to evildoers, gentle as well as simple.

Isabel was no mild saint, as she is so often represented. She was far too great a woman and Queen to be that; and though for the first two or three years of her reign diplomacy was her principal weapon, no sooner had she divided her opponents and firmly established the Holy Brotherhood, than the iron flail fell upon those who had offended. In Galicia the nobles had practically appropriated to themselves the royal revenues, and the Queen’s writ had no power. That might suit weak Henry, but Isabel was made of sterner stuff than her brother had been, and in 1481 she sent two doughty officers to summon the representatives of the Galician towns to Santiago, and to demand of them money and men to bring the nobles to their senses. The burgesses despaired, and said that nothing less than an act of God would cure the many evils from which they suffered. The act of God they yearned for came, but Isabel was the instrument. Forty-seven fortresses, which were so many brigand strongholds, were levelled to the ground in the province; and some of the highest heads were struck from noble shoulders. The stake and the gibbet were kept busy, the dungeons and torture chambers full; and those of evil life in sheer terror mended their ways, or fled to places were justice was less strict.

But it is in the suppression of the anarchy at Seville that Isabel’s personal action is most clearly seen. For years the city had been a prey to the sanguinary rivalry between two great families who lorded it over the greater part of Andalucia, the Guzmans and the Ponces de Leon; and at the time of Isabel’s accession the feud had assumed the form of predatory civil war, from which no citizen was safe. The cities of the south were less settled in Christian organisation than those of the north, and their municipal governments not so easy to combine; and Isabel, in 1477, determined by her personal presence in Seville to enforce the hard lessons she had taught the rest of her realms. The armed escort that accompanied her was sufficient, added to the awe already awakened by her name, to cow the turbulent spirits of Seville. Reviving the ancient practice of the Castilian kings, Isabel, alone or with her husband by her side, sat every Friday in the great hall of the Moorish Alcazar at Seville, to deal out justice without appeal to all comers. Woe betided the offender who was haled before her. The barbaric splendour, which Isabel knew how to use with effect, surrounding her, gave to this famous royal tribunal a prestige that captured the imagination of the semi-oriental population of Seville, whilst the terrible severity of its judgments and the lightning rapidity of its executions reduced the population to trembling obedience whilst Isabel stayed in the city. No less than four thousand malefactors fled—mostly across the frontier—to escape from the Queen’s wrath, whilst all those who in the past had transgressed, either by plundering or maltreating others, and could be caught, were made to feel to the full what suffering was. So great was Isabel’s severity that at last the Bishop of Cadiz, accompanied by the clergy and notables of Andalucia, and backed by hosts of weeping women, came and humbly prayed the Queen to have mercy in her justice. Isabel had no objection. She did not scourge and slay because she loved to do it, but to compel obedience. Once that was obtained she was content to stay her hand; and before she left the city, a general amnesty was given for past offences except for serious crimes. But she left behind her an organised police and criminal tribunals, active and vigilant enough to trample at once upon any attempt at reviving the former state of things.

A more difficult task for Isabel was that of reforming the moral tone of her court and society at large. The Alcazar of Henry IV. had been a sink of iniquity, and the lawlessness throughout the country had made the practice of virtue almost impossible; whilst the clergy, and especially the regular ecclesiastics, were shamefully corrupt. Isabel herself was not only severely discreet in her conduct, but determined that no countenance should be given to those who were lax in any of the proprieties of life; and it was soon understood by ecclesiastics and courtiers that the only certain passport to advancement in Castile was strict decorum. It is probable that much of the sudden reform thus effected was merely hypocrisy; but it lasted long enough to become a fixed tradition, and permanently raised the standard of public and private life in Spain.

In all directions Isabel carried forward her work of reform. The great nobles found to their dismay, when the Queen was strong enough to do it, that she, fortified by the Cortes of Toledo, had cancelled all the unmerited grants so lavishly squandered by previous kings upon them. Some of those who had been most active in the late troubles, such as the Dukes of Alburquerque and Alba and the Admiral of Castile, Ferdinand’s maternal uncle, were stripped almost to the skin. Isabel’s revenue on her accession had only amounted to 40,000 ducats, barely sufficient for necessary sustenance; but in a very few years (1482) it had multiplied by more than twelvefold, and thirty millions of maravedis a year had been added to the royal income from resumed national grants. To all remonstrances from those who suffered, Isabel was firm and dignified, though conciliatory in manner. Her voice was sweet and her bearing womanly; she always ascribed her measures, however oppressive they might seem, to her love for the country and her determination to make it great. Upon this ground she was unassailable; and enlisted upon her side even those who felt the pinch by appealing to their national pride.

There was no one measure that added more to Isabel’s material power than her policy towards the religious orders of knighthood. These three great orders, Calatrava, Santiago, and Alcantara, had grown out of the long crusade against the Moors; devout celibate soldiers receiving in community vast grants of territory which they wrested from the infidel. By the time of Isabel they had grown to be a scandal, for the grandmasters disposed of revenues and forces as large as those of the crown, and were practically independent of it. Isabel’s treatment of them was diplomatic and wise as usual. As each mastership fell vacant she granted it to her husband; and thus the three most dangerous rivals to the royal authority were made thenceforward appanages of the crown, to which the territories were afterwards appropriated.[^[29]]

The Queen’s activity and strength of body and mind must have been marvellous. We hear of her travelling vast distances, almost incessantly in the saddle, visiting remote parts of her husband’s and her own dominions for State business, to settle disputed points, to inspect fortifications, to animate ecclesiastical or municipal bodies, and to suppress threatened disorder. No difficulty seemed to dismay her, no opposition to deflect her from the exalted purpose she had in view. For it must not be supposed that this strenuous activity was sporadic and without a central object which inspired it all. In this supreme object the key to Isabel’s life must be sought. Isabel’s mother was mad: after the death of her husband she had sunk into the gloomy devotional lunacy which afflicted in after years so many of her descendants; and in the impressionable years of Isabel’s youth, passed in the isolated castle of Arevalo, the whole atmosphere of her life had been one of mystic religious exaltation.

The Christian Spaniard of Castile had through seven centuries gradually regained for Christ his lost kingdom by a constant crusade against the infidel. The secular struggle had made him a convinced believer in his divine mission to re-establish the reign of the cross on earth. To this end saints had led him into battle in shining armour, blazing crosses in the sky had heralded victory to God’s own militia, and holy relics, miraculously revealed, had served as talismans which ensured success. Mysticism and the yearning for martyrdom was in the air in Isabel’s youth, and she, a saintly neurotic, who happened also to be a genius and a queen, shared to the full the Castilian national obsession. The man who fostered the growth of this feeling in the young princess at Arevalo might have been useful in spurring a sluggish mind to devotion; but to further inflame the zeal of a girl of Isabel’s innate tendency was unnecessary, and of this alone was he capable. He was a fiery, uncompromising, Dominican monk, called Tomas de Torquemada. The Dominicans, centuries before, had been entrusted by the Pope with the special duty to maintain the purity of the faith, and as its guardians, spiritual pride and arrogance had always been the characteristic of the order. Torquemada, as Isabel’s confessor and spiritual tutor, had abundant opportunities of influencing her, and never ceased to keep before her the sacred duty imposed upon rulers of extirpating heresy, root and branch, at any cost. Her own brother Henry had been surrounded by the hated infidel, the enemy of Christ and Spain. Failure as a king, ruin as a man, and a miserable death, had been his portion. And so the lesson was ceaselessly dinned into Isabel’s ear, that no ruler could be happy or successful who did not smite heretics, infidels and doubters, hip and thigh, for the glory of God. The Moor, she was told, still defiled in Granada the sacred soil of Spain, suffered by an unworthy Christian king to linger for the sake of the paltry tribute paid.

To establish the rule of Christ on earth, which she was taught was her sacred duty, Isabel knew that a strong weapon was needed. Only a united and centralised Spain could give her that, and Spain must be unified first of all. Her marriage with Ferdinand was a great step in advance; her suppression of the nobles and the masterships of the orders another, the submission of the country to her will and law a third, the increase of her revenues a fourth; but a greater than all was the reawakening in the breasts of all Spaniards the mystic exaltation and spiritual pride that gave strength to their arms against the Moor in the heroic days of old. The character of the Spanish people, and the state of the public mind at the time, made it easy to stir up the religious rancour of the majority against a minority already despised and distrusted. Throughout Spain there were numerous families of the conquered race nominally Christians, but yet living apart in separate quarters, and unmixed in blood with their neighbours. They were, as a rule, industrious and well-to-do handicraftsmen and agriculturists, whose artistic traditions and skill gave them the monopoly in many profitable and thriving avocations. The Christian Spaniard had not, as a rule, developed similar qualities, and were naturally jealous of the so-called new Christians who lived with them, but were not of them.

There was, however, at first but little open enmity between these two races of Spaniards, though distrust and dislike existed. It was otherwise in the case of the Jews. They, during the centuries of Moorish rule, had grown rich and numerous, and had in subsequent periods almost monopolised banking and financial business throughout Spain, marrying in many cases into the highest Christian families. As farmers of taxes and royal treasurers they had become extremely unpopular, especially in Aragon; and although, for the most part, professed Christians, they were eyed with extreme jealousy by the people at large, and on many occasions had been the victims of attack and massacre in various places.[^[30]] Nevertheless, so far as can be seen, the first steps towards religious persecution by Isabel and her husband do not appear to have been prompted, although they may have been strengthened, by this feeling. There had for centuries existed in Aragon and Sicily an Inquisition for the investigation of cases of heresy. It was a purely papal institution, and its operations were very mild, though extremely unpopular. In Castile, the papal Inquisition had never been favoured by rulers, who were always jealous of the interference of Rome, and at the time of Isabel’s accession it had practically ceased to exist.

When the sovereigns were holding Court at Seville in 1477, a Sicilian Dominican came to beg for the confirmation of an old privilege, giving to the Order in Sicily one-third of the property of all the heretics condemned there by the Inquisition. This Ferdinand and Isabel consented to, and the Dominican, whose name was Dei Barberi, suggested to Ferdinand that as religious observance had grown so lax under the late King Henry, it might be advisable to introduce a similar tribunal into Castile. Ferdinand’s ambitions were great. He wanted to win for Barcelona the mastership of the Mediterranean and the reversion of the Christian Empire of the East, and, as a preliminary, to clear Spain itself of the taint of dominant Islam at Granada. He understood that times had changed, and that the nerve of war was no longer feudal aids, but the concentration in the hands of the King of the ready money of his subjects. The people who had most of the ready money in Spain were the very people whose orthodoxy was open to attack, and he welcomed a proposal that might make him rich beyond dreams.

Isabel was not greedy for money as her husband was: she was too much of a religious mystic for that; but to spread the kingdom of Christ on earth, to crush His enemies and raise His cross supreme in the eyes of men, seemed to promise her the only glory for which she yearned. By her side was her confessor Torquemada, the Dominican Ojeda, and the Papal Nuncio, all pressing upon her that to strike at heresy in her realms was her duty. So Isabel took the step they counselled, and begged the Pope for a bull establishing the Inquisition in Castile. The bull was granted in September 1478, but no active steps were taken for nearly two years.

In 1480, Isabel and her husband were again in Seville, and the Dominicans were ceaseless in their exhortations to them to suppress the growing scandal of obstinate Judaism. The complaints of the clergy against the Jews were such as they knew would be supported by the populace. Amongst other things, they said that the Jews bought up and ate all the meat in the market for their Sabbath, and there was none left for Christians on Sunday;[^[31]] that they were hoarding coin to such an extent that there was a lack of currency; that they donned rich finery and ornaments only fit for their betters, and so on.[^[32]]

The various modern apologists of Isabel have striven to minimise her share in the establishment of the dread tribunal that sprang out of these and similar complaints. There seems to me no reason for doing so: she herself probably considered it a most praiseworthy act, and her only hesitation in the matter was caused by her dislike of strengthening the papal power over the church of Castile.[^[33]] There could have been no repugnance in her mind to punishing, however severely, those whom she looked upon as God’s enemies, and consequently unworthy of the privileges of humanity. Ferdinand added his persuasion to the clamours of the churchmen; and from Medina del Campo, Isabel, in September 1480, commissioned two Dominicans to act as Inquisitors, and to establish their tribunal at Seville.

The Jews of Seville took alarm at once, and large numbers of them fled from the city to the shelter of some of the neighbouring great nobles, who looked with dislike at this new development of priestly power. A decree of the sovereign’s at once forbade all loyal subjects to withhold suspected heretics from their accusers, and those fugitive Jews who could escape sought the safety of Moorish Granada. In the first days of 1481, the Inquisition got to work, striking at the highest first, and before the end of the year 2000 poor wretches were burnt in Andalusia alone.[^[34]] All Spain protested against it. Deputations from the chief towns came and demanded the abolition of a foreign tribunal over Spaniards. The Aragonese, rough and independent as usual, resorted to violence, and hunted the Inquisitors, whilst in Old Castile the tribunal could only sit, in many places, surrounded by the Queen’s soldiers. But Isabel’s heart was aflame with zeal, and Ferdinand, with gaping coffers, was rejoicing at the showers of Jewish gold that flowed to him; and all remonstrance was in vain. The Pope himself soon took fright at the severity exercised, and threatened to withdraw the bull, but Ferdinand silenced him with a hint that he would make the Inquisition an independent tribunal altogether, as later it practically became, and thenceforward the horrible business went on unchecked until Spain was seared from end to end, and independent judgment was stifled for centuries in blood and sacrificial smoke.

The heartless bigot Torquemada, Isabel’s confessor, was appointed Inquisitor-General in 1483, and he, the most insolent, because the humblest, man in Spain, became the greatest power in the land, master of Isabel’s conscience and feeder of Ferdinand’s purse. Isabel’s Spanish biographers continue to assert that she was tireless in her endeavours to soften the rigour of her own tribunal, and to intercede for her ‘dear Castilians.’ There is not a scrap of real evidence known to prove that she did so, and certainly her contemporaries did not believe it.[^[35]] Her administration, however, had already been extremely successful. Peace and order reigned, the pride of Spaniards, which she so sedulously fostered, had been worked up to a high pitch, the Queen herself was personally popular, in consequence of her dignity, her activity, and her patriotism; and the urban populations, who had so greatly aided her, and were now so powerful, dreaded to cause disturbance that might have thrown the country again into the clutches of the nobles. Terrible, therefore, as was the action of the Holy Office, acquiesced in by the Queen, there were many reasons why no combined opposition to it in Castile was offered, although for the first years of its existence it was bitterly hated.

To the Queen during these first few years of ceaseless activity, no other child had been born but the Infanta Isabel, the first fruit of her marriage in 1470. The constant long journeys on horseback, the hardships and risk entailed by her work, thus for eight years prevented the birth of a male heir. But during Isabel’s stay at Seville, on the 30th June 1478, the prayed for Prince of Asturias, Juan, was born. Ferdinand was away in the north at the time, but all the pomp and splendour, which Isabel knew so well how to use, heralded the birth of the Prince. On the 15th July the Queen was sufficiently well to ride in state to the cathedral from the Moorish Alcazar where she lived, and to present her first-born son to the Church. Through the narrow, tortuous lanes of the sunny city, packed with people, Isabel rode on a bay charger; her crimson brocade robe, all stiff with gold embroidery, trailing almost to the ground, over the petticoat covered with rich pearls. Her saddle, we are told, was of gold, and the housings black velvet, with bullion lace and fringe. Ferdinand’s base brother Alfonso, and his kinswoman the Duchess of Vistahermosa, followed close behind, and the Queen’s bridle was held by the Constable of Castile and Count Benavente. The merry music of fife, tabor, and clarion preceded the royal party; and behind there came on foot the nobles and grandees, and the authorities of the city. The baby Prince was borne in the arms of his nurse, seated upon a mule draped with velvet, and embroidered with the scutcheons of Castile, Leon, and Aragon, and led by the Admiral of Castile. At the high altar of the famous Mudejar Cathedral, Isabel solemnly devoted her child to the service of God, and then, with splendid largess to all and sundry, she returned to the palace.[^[36]]

Isabel was unremitting always in the performance of her religious duties, and wherever she stayed, endowments for purposes of the Church commemorated her visit. Her humility and submission to priests and nuns is cited with extravagant praise by her many ecclesiastical eulogists, and they tell the story of how, when Father Talavera first succeeded Torquemada as her confessor, he bade her kneel at his feet like an ordinary penitent. When she reminded him that monarchs always sat by the side of the confessor, as she had always done before, he rebuked her by saying that his seat was the seat of God, before whom all kneeled without distinction; and the Queen thenceforward kept upon her knees before the priest, whom she honoured thenceforward for what in our days we should consider unpardonable arrogance.

There was little of repose for Isabel, even after the birth of her child. To Seville came the news a few months afterwards that the old soldier Archbishop of Toledo and the Pachecos had once more persuaded Alfonso of Portugal to strike a blow for his niece and wife the Beltraneja. Raising what troops she could, Isabel rode through Estremadura at the head of her force, determined to end for good claims that she thought had already been disposed of. Ferdinand was in Aragon, where, his father having just died, his presence could not be dispensed with; but Isabel was undismayed. In vain her councillors begged her to refrain from undertaking the campaign in person. The country was devastated by famine and war, they said; pestilence prevailed in the towns, and the raids of the Portuguese and rebels would expose her to great danger. ‘I did not come hither,’ Isabel replied, ‘to shirk danger and trouble, nor do I intend to give my enemies the satisfaction, nor my subjects the chagrin, to see me do so, until we end the war we are engaged upon or make the peace we seek.’[^[37]] Isabel, in command of the Castilians, finally crushed the Portuguese at the battle of Albuera; and then, after reducing to submission the rebel noble fortresses, she negotiated a peace with Portugal and France at Alcantara, by which both powers were compelled to recognise her as Queen of Spain. Suppressing revolt, deciding disputes, and punishing transgressions on her way, Isabel then rode to Toledo, where Ferdinand joined her, and there her third child, Joan, was born, in November 1479.

CHAPTER II

Castile and Aragon, now being indissolubly united, and internal peace secured, it was time for the sovereigns to prepare for the execution of the great designs that had respectively moved them to effect what they had done. These designs were to some extent divergent from each other. Ferdinand’s main object was to cripple his rival, France, in the direction of Italy, and assume for Aragon the hegemony of the Mediterranean and of the sister Peninsula, of which Sicily already belonged to him and Naples to a member of his house. Castile, on the other hand, had for centuries cultivated usually harmonious relations with France, the frontiers not being conterminous except at one point, the mouth of the Bidasoa; and the ambitions of Castile were traditionally towards the absorption of Portugal, the domination of the coast of North Africa, and the spread of the Christian power generally to the detriment of Islam, its secular enemy. Its own Moorish populations were as yet but imperfectly assimilated, and the existence of the realm of Granada in the Peninsula kept hopes alive in the breasts of the Castilian Moors. The presence of many thousands of potential enemies in the midst of Christian Spain, and the wealth and number of the Jews, who, in a struggle, would probably side with the Moors, undoubtedly influenced greatly in causing the severity of the Inquisition against them and their subsequent expulsion. The first step, therefore, to be taken towards the objects either of Aragon and Castile, was to reduce to impotence any Moorish power in Spain itself that might cause anxiety to the Christian rulers whilst they were busy upon plans abroad, though this step was mainly important to Castile rather than to Aragon.

This was the state of affairs in the beginning of 1481. The Castilians were subdued and prepared to do the bidding of their Queen, but the Catalans and Aragonese, rough and independent, had to be conciliated before they could be depended upon to give their aid to an object apparently for the advantage of Castile. Isabel had summoned a Cortes of her realms to the imperial city of Toledo late in 1480, to take the oath of allegiance to her infant son Juan as heir to the throne: and thence, with a splendid train, she rode to visit for the first time her husband’s kingdoms, to receive their homage as joint sovereign. Ferdinand met his wife at Calatayud in April 1481, and there, before the assembled Cortes of Aragon, the oath of allegiance to the sovereigns and their heir was taken. The Aragonese were rough-tongued and jealous, and even more so the Catalans, dreading the centralising policy of Isabel and their assimilation by Castile; and throughout Ferdinand’s dominions Isabel was forced to hear demands and criticisms to which the more amenable Cortes of Castile had not accustomed her. It was gall and wormwood to her proud spirit that subjects should haggle with monarchs, and in Barcelona she turned to her husband, when the Cortes had refused one of his requests, and said: ‘This realm is not ours, we shall have to come and conquer it.’ But Ferdinand knew his subjects better than she, and gradually made them understand that in all he did he had their interests in view. He was forced, indeed, by circumstances and his wife to allow precedence to Castilian aims, the better to compass those of Aragon.

The turbulent Valencians were being won to benevolence by the presence of their King and the smiles of his wife in the last days of 1481, when the news reached the sovereigns that the pretext they needed for their next great step had been furnished by the Moors of Granada. From the fairy palace of the Alhambra for the previous two hundred and fifty years, the Kings of Granada had ruled a territory in the South of Andalucia, running from fifteen miles north of Gibraltar along the Mediterranean coast two hundred and twenty miles to the borders of Murcia, and including the fine ports of Malaga, Velez, and Almeria. The industry of the people and the commerce of their important seaboard, facing the African land of their kinsmen, made the population prosperous and their standard of living high; but a series of petty despots, successively reaching the throne by usurpation and murder, had enabled the Kings of Castile, by fomenting the consequent discord, to reduce Granada to the position of a tributary. When Isabel succeeded, and the treaties between Castile and Granada had to be renewed in 1476, Ferdinand had demanded the prompt annual payment of the tribute in gold. Muley Abul Hassan had paid no tribute to Isabel’s brother, and intended to pay none to her. ‘Tell the Queen and King of Castile,’ he replied, ‘that steel and not gold is what we coin in Granada.’ From the day they received the message Isabel and Ferdinand knew that they could not wield a solid Spain to their ends until the Cross was reared over the Mosque of Granada. When, therefore, all the rest of Spain was pacified, and the sovereigns were at Valencia at Christmas 1481, the pretext for action came, not unwelcome, at least for Isabel. The Moors of Granada had swept down by night and captured the Christian frontier fortress of Zahara.[^[38]] Isabel and her husband had never ceased since their accession to prepare for the inevitable war. The civil conflict they had passed through had proved the superiority for their purpose of paid troops of their own over feudal levies, and already the organisation of a national army existed. The Royal Council appointed by Isabel had brought from France, Italy, and Germany the best skilled engineers and constructors of the recently introduced iron artillery; great quantities of gunpowder had been imported from Sicily, and improved lances, swords, and crossbows had been invented and manufactured in Italy and Spain.

The troops that had been expelled from Zahara, and those that at first revenged the insult by the capture and sack of the important Moorish fortress of Alhama, between Malaga and Granada, were the vassals of the princely Andalucian nobles, the Duke of Medina Sidonia and the Marquis of Cadiz; but the sovereigns, hurrying from Valencia to the Castilian town of Medina del Campo, set about organising the coming war with national forces. The efficiency and foresight shown were extraordinary, and, up to that time, unexampled. Nothing seems to have been forgotten or left to chance; flying hospitals, field ambulances, and army chaplains, testify to Isabel’s personal influence. Whatever may have been the case with Ferdinand, his wife approached the struggle as to a sacred crusade. Torquemada, though not yet Inquisitor-General, was busy with the Holy Office, and had just been replaced as Isabel’s confessor by the saintly Father Talavera, whose influence over the Queen was greater still; and whose zeal for the conquest of Granada for the cross was a consuming passion, only comparable in its strength with his proud humility.[^[39]]

The kingdom of Granada was girt around with mountain fortresses of immense strength upon the spurs and peaks of the Sierra Nevada; and in the midst stood the lovely city, as it stands to-day, with its twin fortresses upon their sister cliffs, the Alhambra and the Albaycin, each capable of housing an army. The task of reducing the mountain realm was a great one, for the outlying fortresses had to be subdued separately before the almost impregnable capital could be attacked, whilst the long line of coast had to be watched and blockaded to prevent, if possible, succour being sent from Africa by kinsmen across the sea. In the first days of March 1482, the news of the capture of Alhama by the Andalucian nobles, and the awful slaughter of the women and children, as well as the men, who so heroically defended it, reached Isabel at Medina; and the splendid exploit and vast booty won uplifted all Castilian hearts. It is said by many historians, but is not true, that Isabel herself set out barefooted on a pilgrimage to Compostella, to thank Santiago for the victory. But though she had no time for this, she bade the Church throughout Castile sing praises for the boon vouchsafed to the Christian cause. But then came tidings less bright. The Moorish King, with all his force of 80,000 men, was besieging the Marquis of Cadiz in Alhama: the water supply had been cut off, food was scarce, and the Christians surrounded. Within a week of the news Ferdinand was on the march with his army, and the Duke of Medina Sidonia, with his 40,000 armed retainers, was rapidly approaching Alhama to succour his ancient foe the Marquis of Cadiz. The slaughter of Moors in the constant unsuccessful assaults upon Alhama had been immense; the King, Muley Abul Hassan, had bitter domestic enemies, and daring not to face the approaching Christians, he raised the siege and returned to Granada. The rich booty taken in the town by the original captors aroused the cupidity of the relieving force, and dissensions between the Christians arose over the division of the spoil. Medina Sidonia and his army marched away, and again Muley Abul Hassan beleaguered Alhama, with artillery this time, and a powerful army. Once more deeds of unheard of gallantry and hardihood were done by the Moorish chivalry; but, as before, unavailingly. By the end of March Ferdinand’s great host, with 40,000 beasts of burden carrying supplies and munitions, approached, and again Muley Abul Hassan retreated to his disaffected capital. It was a blow from which the Moorish power in Spain never recovered, and thenceforward Granada fought hopelessly with her back to the wall.

Into the fertile vega of Granada swept Ferdinand’s host in the midsummer of 1482, carrying devastation and ruin in its van. From the heights of Granada the Moors, with impotent hate and rage, saw their blazing villages, their raided flocks and herds, their murdered countrymen, and desolated fields; and yet within the fair city treason and civil discord numbed all hearts, and paralysed the warrior’s arms. For Muley Abul Hassan was fighting foes within his own harem more deadly than the Christians who raided beneath his walls; and a palace revolution led by his wife and his undutiful son, Abu Abdalla (Boabdil), was already plotting his downfall. To secure his position in the vega of Granada, it was necessary for Ferdinand to capture the frowning fortress that crowned the height of Loja, and commanded the pass into Castile. It had long been a thorn in the Christian flesh, and now Ferdinand, with all the chivalry of Spain, were pledged to capture it at any cost. Though brave and cool, Ferdinand was no great tactician, and was easily outwitted by the wily Moors, who led his forces into ambush and utterly routed the Christian host. Panic and flight ensued, with the loss of baggage, standards, and arms; and Ferdinand himself escaped only by the efforts of a small devoted band of Castilian knights. The ruin was complete, and when Ferdinand joined his heroic wife at the ancient Moorish Alcazar of Cordova, even her faith and steadfastness for a time wavered.

But not for long. Talavera, Torquemada, and Mendoza, the Cardinal of Spain, with fiery zeal for the extirpation of heresy, were at her side. Not for territory alone, but to fix God’s realm on earth freely, must sacrifice be made and final victory won: and, though Ferdinand with longing eyes towards his own aims, yearned to use his arms against France for the recapture of his own provinces of Rosellon and Cerdagne, and tried to persuade his wife that though ‘her war might be a holy one, his against the French would be a just one,’ Isabel had her way, and with unflinching zeal set about organising to snatch conquest from defeat.[^[40]] Muley Abul Hassan, expelled from his city of Granada, but holding his own in Malaga and the south, had been succeeded in his capital by the weak, rebellious Boabdil. The old King and his brother, El Zagal, were still fighting doughtily, and even successfully raiding the Christian land near Gibraltar; and Boabdil, jealous of their activity, determined to sally from Granada and strike a blow for his cause, at the instigation of his masculine mother. At the head of 9000 Moors, all glittering and confident, the Prince sallied out of Granada in April 1483, and, collecting the veteran guard of Loja on the way, marched towards Cordova. The Moors were undisciplined, loaded with loot, and led by a fool, when they approached the Christian Cordovese city of Lucena, and their ostentatious march into Christian land had been heralded. Their attack upon the city was repulsed with great valour, and whilst they were meditating a renewed assault, a relieving force of Christians approached. The Moors retired, but were overtaken and utterly routed. Boabdil the King, garbed in crimson velvet mantle heavy with gold, and armed in rich damascened steel, was singled out from amongst the mob of fugitives, captured by a Castilian man-at-arms, and borne in triumph by the Christian chief, the Count of Cabra, to the strong castle of Porcuna, there to await the sovereign’s decision as to his fate. Isabel and her husband were far away at the time; for, after the birth of her fourth child, Maria, in the previous summer of 1482, she and Ferdinand had travelled north to Madrid to meet the Castilian Cortes, and ask for supplies for carrying on the war. Thence, on a more questionable errand, they had moved further north. The little mountain realm of Navarre on the Pyrenees, a buffer state between Castile and France, belonged to the descendants of Ferdinand’s father by his first wife. The desire of the Aragonese King to unite Navarre to Ferdinand’s kingdoms, had removed by murder one Navarrese sovereign after another, until now, in 1482, the beautiful young half French Francis Phœbus was King. He was one more obstacle to be removed; for after him a sister would come to the throne, and she might be easily dealt with: so poison ended the budding life of Francis Phœbus—by Ferdinand’s orders, it was credibly said at the time;[^[41]] and Ferdinand and his wife hurried up to Vitoria, bent, if possible, upon adding one more crown to the brows of the Queen of Castile.[^[42]] It was a cynically clever move of Ferdinand’s, for it would bring Castile in touch with France, and thus play into the hands of the Aragonese, but the threatening attitude of Louis XI. convinced Ferdinand that he must wait for a more fitting opportunity, which he did for thirty years, when Isabel had long been dead. When the news came to Tarazona, where the Cortes of Aragon were in session, that Boabdil was captured, Ferdinand hurried south to Cordova to reap the fruits of victory, leaving Isabel in Castile.

In the great hall of the Alcazar of Cordova, Ferdinand sat in council in August 1483, surrounded by the soldiers who in his absence had overrun the vega, and two Moorish embassies claimed audience. One came from the old King, Muley Abul Hassan, in Malaga, begging with heavy bribes the surrender of his rebellious son Boabdil. This embassy Ferdinand refused to receive; but the other from the Queen Zoraya, Boabdil’s mother, with offers of ransom, submission, and obedience, was admitted. Ferdinand was the craftiest man of his age, and saw that the imprisonment of Boabdil gave unity to the Granadan Moors, whilst his presence amongst them would again be the signal for fratricidal conflict. But the King of Aragon drove a hard bargain, as he always did, and the foolish, vain Boabdil only bought his liberty at a heavy price. He was to do homage to the Christian kings, to pay a heavy ransom and yearly tribute, and give passage to the Christian armies to conquer his father in Malaga. Boabdil meekly subscribed to any terms, and then paying homage on bended knee to his master, he wended his way to Moorish land, a mark for the scorn of all men, ‘Boabdil the Little’ for the rest of time.

Anarchy thenceforward reigned through the kingdom of Granada, as Ferdinand had foreseen. I shall pluck the pomegranate, seed by seed, chuckled the Christian king. And so he did; for, although a two years’ truce had been settled with Boabdil, the civil war gave to the Christian borderers constant opportunities of overrunning the land, on the pretext of aiding or avenging one of the combatants and attacking the old King. Ferdinand would fain have attacked the new King of France, Charles VIII., but Isabel was firm; and though Ferdinand was thereafter obliged to stay a time in his own dominions to placate the discontented Catalans, Isabel was tireless in her insistence upon the Christian crusade that she had undertaken, though, for appearance sake, she consented to both wars being carried on at the same time, which she knew was impracticable.[^[43]] The spirit of the woman was indomitable. Travelling south towards the seat of war in 1484 with the new Archbishop of Toledo, Cardinal Mendoza, she herself took command of the campaign against the Moor.

It was, verily, her own war. In counsel with veteran soldiers she surprised them with her boldness and knowledge; and her harangues to the soldiery, and care for their welfare, caused her to be idolised by men who had never yet regarded a woman as being capable of such a stout heart as hers. She managed even to spur Ferdinand into leaving Aragon, and once more taking the field against the old King of Granada, and, one by one, the Moorish fortresses fell, and the Christian host encamped almost before the walls of Granada: the Queen herself, though approaching childbirth (in 1485), travelling from place to place in the conquered country, encouraging, supervising, and directing. The following year, 1486, Isabel and her husband again travelled to Cordova from Castile, and now with a greater force than ever before. For news of this saintly warrior Queen, who was fighting for the cross, had spread now through Christendom, and not Iberian knights alone, but the chivalry of France and Italy, Portugal and England, were flocking to share the glory of the struggle.

At the conquest of Loja in May 1486, Lord Rivers, Conde de Escalas, as the Spaniards called him, aided greatly with his men in capturing the place, and earned the praise of Isabel.[^[44]] As each church was dedicated to the true worship in the conquered towns, Isabel herself contributed the sacred vessels and vestments necessary for Christian worship; relics of the saints, and blessed banners sent by her, went always with the Castilian hosts; and soon the spiritual pride, which had been the secret of all Spain’s strength in the past, became again the overwhelming obsession, which, whilst it strengthened the arms, hardened the hearts of all those who owned the sway of Isabel.

In December 1485, Isabel’s last child, Katharine, was born at Alcalá de Henares, and through most of the stirring campaigns of 1486 the Queen accompanied the army in their sieges of Moorish towns, and thence rode with her husband right across Spain to far Santiago, crushing rebellion (that of Count Lemos), holding courts of justice, punishing offences and rewarding services on the way. The next spring again saw her in the field against the important maritime city of Velez-Malaga, which was captured in April; and in the autumn the great port of Malaga fell after an heroic defence. But heroism of infidels aroused no clemency in the breast of the Christian Queen. By her husband’s side, with cross borne before them, and a crowd of shaven ecclesiastics around them, they rode in triumph through the deserted city to the mosque, now purified into a Christian cathedral. Christian captives in chains were dragged from pestilent dungeons that the manacles might be struck from their palsied limbs in the victors’ presence, and when the Christians had given thanks to the Lord of Hosts, the whole starving population of Malaga were assembled in the great courtyard of the fortress, and every soul was condemned to slavery for life: some to be sent to Africa in exchange for Christian captives; some to be sold to provide funds for the war, some for presents for the Pope and other potentates and great nobles, whilst all the valuables in the wealthy city were grabbed by greedy Ferdinand, by one of his usually clever and heartless devices.[^[45]]

ISABEL THE CATHOLIC AT THE SURRENDER OF GRANADA.
After a Painting by Pradilla.

The want of magnanimity and common humanity to these poor people, who had only defended their homes against the invader, is usually ascribed entirely to Ferdinand; but there is nothing whatever to show that Isabel thought otherwise than he, except that she objected to a suggestion that they should all be put to the sword. She was a child of her age, an age that did not recognise the right of others than orthodox Christians to be regarded as human beings; and in Isabel all instinctive womanly feeling was dominated by her conviction of the greatness of her duty as she understood it, and the sacred mission of her sovereignty. The fall of Malaga rendered inevitable that of the city of Granada, only held, as it was, under the nominal rule of the miserable Boabdil, supported by the Christian troops under Gonzalo de Cordova. Every week his little realm grew smaller, and every hour the streets of Granada rang with Moslem curses of his name. Outside the walls rapine and war, inside treachery and murder, scourged Granada; and whilst the pomegranate was rotting to its fall, in the intervals of fresh conquests Isabel and her husband progressed through Aragon and Valencia, everywhere carrying terror to evildoers and strengthening the arm of the Inquisition. The next year, 1488, the same process was continued, and in 1489 the large cities of Baza, Almeria and Guadix were conquered from Boabdil’s rebel uncle. Baza was the strongest fortress in the kingdom, and offered a resistance so obstinate that the Christians, despairing of taking it, sent to Isabel at Jaen, asking her permission to raise the siege. She commanded them to redouble their efforts. Fresh men, money and munitions were sent to them. The Dukes of Alba and Najera, and the Admiral of Castile, were bidden to lead their men to aid Ferdinand before Baza. New field hospitals were supplied, and all the Mancha and Andalucia were swept for food and transport, no less than 14,000 mules, for the relief of the besiegers. Floods broke down the bridges and made the roads impassable, but still Isabel did not lose heart. A body of 6000 men were raised to repair the ways. The cost exhausted the Queen’s treasury, but she laid hands on the church plate and the treasures of the convents, pledged her own crown with the Jews to overcome the obstacle, and raised a hundred million maravedis for her purpose. Her ladies followed her example and poured their gold and jewels into her coffers, and yet Baza still held out, and winter was close at hand. Ferdinand was for abandoning the siege, but the stout-hearted Queen herself set out from Jaen in November, and rode undaunted through the bitter weather, night and day, to join her troops at Baza. Her presence struck the Moors with dismay, and filled the Christian hearts with confidence, for both knew that there she would stay, at any cost, until the place surrendered, as it did, to her, on the 4th December 1489,[^[46]] whereupon Almeria and Guadix gave up the struggle, and the Queen and her husband returned to winter at Seville, knowing now that Granada itself was theirs for the plucking when the season should arrive.

All through the year 1490 the preparations for the crowning feat went on throughout Castile. Patriotism, in the sense of a common pride of territory, did not exist in Spain; but already in the nine years that the Inquisition had been at work, and Isabel’s fiery zeal against the Moors had continued, the spiritual arrogance, always latent, had knit orthodox Spaniards together as they had never been bound before. To the majority, the persecution of a despised and hated minority was confirmation of their own mystic selection. Isabel was the personification of the feeling, and to her, as to her people now, the oppression of the unbeliever was an act that singled her out as the chosen of God to vindicate His faith. So Torquemada and the Inquisition, with the approval of the Queen, harried the wretched Jews, who professed Christianity, more cruelly every day.[^[47]] If a ‘New Christian’ broke bread with a Jew it was the former who was punished. If he dared to wear clean linen on Saturday, or used a Hebrew name, the Dominican spies, who dogged his footsteps, accused him, and the flames consumed his carcass whilst Ferdinand emptied his coffers. The revenue of the Jewish confiscations had provided much of the treasure needed for the constant war of the last eight years; but Ferdinand wanted more, and ever more, money before Granada could be made into a Christian city. Isabel would conquer Granada, and at any cost gain the undying glory of recovering for Christ the last spot in Spain held by the infidel. Injustice, cruelty, robbery, and the torture of innocent people were nothing, less than nothing, to the end she aimed at; and when the flames were found all too slow for feeding Ferdinand’s greed, Isabel easily consented to a blow being struck at the unbaptised Jews, in a body, whenever it was necessary to collect a specially large sum of money for her war.

In April 1491, the siege of the lovely city, set in its vast garden plain, was begun. The Moors inside were gallant and chivalrous, determined to sell their city dearly, however their spiritless King might deport himself; but their dashing cavalry sallies where almost futile against an army so carefully organised and disciplined as that of Isabel. The head quarters of the Christian Queen were about two leagues from Granada, and when Isabel joined her army the siege opened in grim earnest. The many contemporary chroniclers of the campaign have left us astonishing descriptions of the dazzling splendour which surrounded the Queen. She, who in the privacy of her palace was sober in her attire, and devoted to housewifely duties, could, when she thought desirable, as she did before Granada, present an appearance of sumptuous splendour almost unexampled. Her encampment, with its silken tents magnificently furnished, its floating banners and soaring crosses, were such as had never been since the time of the Crusades. On a white Arab charger, with floating mane and velvet trappings to the ground, the Queen, herself dressed in damascened armour and regal crimson, was everywhere animating, consoling, and directing. Cardinals and bishops, princes, nobles and ladies, thronged around her; and every morning as the sun tipped with gold the snow peaks of the Sierra, all in that mighty host, from the Queen down to the poorest follower, bowed before the gorgeous altar in the midst of the camp, whilst the Cardinal of Spain (Mendoza) performed the sacred mystery of the mass.

One night in the summer (14th July) the Queen had retired to her tent and was sleeping, when, two hours after midnight, a lamp by her bedside caught the hangings, stirred by the breeze, and in a minute the great pavilion was ablaze. Isabel in her night garb had barely time to escape, and witnessed the conflagration spread from tent to tent till much of the encampment was reduced to ruin. At the cries and bugle calls of the distressed Christians, the Moors afar off on the walls beheld with joy the discomfiture of their enemies; and if another leader than Boabdil had been in command, it would have gone ill with Isabel and her men. But there was no defeat for a woman with such a spirit as hers. The suggestions that the siege should be raised until the next year, she rejected in scorn. Once again her virile spirit had its way. More money was raised, mostly squeezed out of the miserable Jews; the army was quartered in neighbouring villages, and within eighty days a city of masonry and brick replaced the canvas encampment, and here, in the city of Santa Fe,[^[48]] Isabel solemnly swore to stay, winter and summer, until the city of Granada should surrender to her.

Granada was entirely cut off from the world. The coast towns were no longer in Moorish hands, and no succour from Africa could come to the unhappy Boabdil. The desperate warriors of the crescent were for sallying en masse and dying or conquering, once for all; but Boabdil was weak and incapable; and less than a month after the completion of Isabel’s new city of Santa Fe, he made secret advances to his enemy at his gates for a capitulation. The Queen entrusted the greatest of her captains, Gonzalo de Cordova, who understood Arabic, with the task of negotiation; but soon the news was whispered inside the city, and twenty thousand furious Moorish warriors rushed up the steep hill to the Alhambra, to demand a denial from the King. Seated in the glittering hall of the ambassadors, Boabdil received the spokesmen of his indignant people, and pointed out to them with the eloquence of despair the hopelessness of the situation; and the wisdom of making terms whilst they might. Stupefied and grief-stricken the populace acknowledged the truth, bitter as it was, and with bowed heads and coursing tears left the beautiful palace that was so soon to pass from them.

The negotiations were protracted, for Granada was divided and might still have held out, and the Moors begged hard for at least some vestige of independence as a State. But at last, on the 28th November 1491, the conditions were agreed to. The Granadan Moors were to enjoy full liberty for their faith, language, laws and customs; their possessions and property were to be untouched, and those who did not desire to owe allegiance to Christian sovereigns were to be aided to emigrate to Africa. The tribute to be paid was the same as that rendered to the Moorish King, and the city was to be free from other taxation for three years; whilst Boabdil was to have a tiny tributary kingdom (Purchena) of his own in the savage fastnesses of the Alpujarra mountains, looking down upon the splendid heritage that had been his. The terms were generous to a beaten foe, and their gentleness is usually ascribed to Isabel. Since, however, they were afterwards all violated with her full consent, it matters little whether the Queen or her husband drafted them. But mild as the conditions of surrender were, many of the heartbroken Moors of the city were still for fighting to the death in defence of the land of their fathers and their faith; and Boabdil, in deadly fear for his life, begged the visitors to hasten the taking possession of the city. On the last day but one of the year 1491, the Christian men-at-arms entered the Alhambra; and on the 2nd January 1492, a splendid cavalcade went forth from the besieging city of Santa Fe to crown the work of Isabel the Catholic. Surrounded by all the nobles and chivalry of Castile and Aragon, the Queen, upon a splendid white charger, rode by her husband’s side, followed by the flower of the victorious army. Upon a hill hard by the walls of the city, Isabel paused and gazed upon the towers and minarets, and upon the two fortresses that crowned the sister heights, for which her heart had yearned. This must have seemed to her the most glorious moment of her life: for the last stronghold of Islam was within her grasp; and well she must have known that, capitulations notwithstanding, but a few short years would pass before the worship of the false prophet would disappear from the land where it had prevailed so long.

At a signal the gates of the city opened, and a mournful procession came towards the royal group upon the rise. Mounted upon a black barb came Boabdil the Little, dusky of skin, with sad, weeping eyes downcast. His floating haik of snowy white half veiled a tunic of the sacred green, covered with barbaric golden ornaments. As he approached the group upon the mound, the conquered King made as if to dismount, and kneel to kiss the feet of the Queen and her husband. But Ferdinand, with diplomatic chivalry, forbade the last humiliation, and took the massive keys of the fortress, whilst Boabdil, bending low in his saddle, kissed the sleeve of the King as he passed the keys to the Queen, who handed them to her son, and then to the Count of Tendilla, the new governor of the city. Four days later, Granada was swept and garnished, purified with holy water, ready for the entry of the Christian Sovereigns.[^[49]] The steep, narrow lane leading to the Alhambra from the Gate of Triumph was lined by Christian troops, and only a few dark-skinned Moors scowled from dusky jalousies high in the walls, as the gallant chivalry of Castile, Leon, and Aragon, flashed and jingled after the King and Queen. As they approached the Alhambra, upon the tower of Comares there broke the banner of the Spanish Kings fluttering in the breeze, and at the same moment, upon the summit of the tower above the flag, there rose a great gilded cross, the symbol of the faith triumphant.

Then, at the gates, the heralds cried aloud, ‘Granada! Granada! for the Kings Isabel and Ferdinand;’ and Isabel, dismounting from her charger, as the cross above glittered in the sun, knelt upon the ground in all her splendour, and thanked her God for the victory. The choristers intoned Christian praise in the purified mosque, whilst the Moors, who hoped to live in favour of the victors, led by the renegade Muza, added the strange music of their race to the thousand instruments and voices that acclaimed the new Queen of Granada. Amidst the rejoicing and illuminations that kept the city awake that night, Boabdil the beaten was forgotten. When he had delivered the keys of the Alhambra, he had refused to be treated by his followers any longer with royal honours, and had retired weeping to the citadel, soon to steal forth with a few followers and his masculine mother to the temporary shelter of his little principality.[^[50]] When the sad cavalcade came to the hill called Padul, ‘The last sigh of the Moor,’ thenceforward tears coursed down the bronze cheeks of the King as he gazed upon the lost kingdom he was to see no more. ‘Weep! weep!’ cried his mother, ‘weep! like a woman for the city you knew not how to defend like a man.’

Throughout Christendom rang the fame of the great Queen, whose steadfastness had won so noble a victory; and even in far-off England praise of her, and thanks to the Redeemer whose cause she had championed, were sung throughout the land. For the conquest of Granada marked an epoch, and sealed with permanence and finality the Christianisation of Europe, the struggle for which had begun eight centuries before, from the mountains of Asturias. The imagination of the world was touched by the sight of a warrior-crusading Queen, more splendid in her surroundings than any woman since Cleopatra, who yet was so modest, meek, and saintly in the relations of daily life, so exemplary a mother, so faithful a wife,[^[51]] so wise a ruler; and the cautious, unemotional Ferdinand, whose ability as a statesman was even greater than that of his wife, was overshadowed by her radiant figure, because she fought for an exalted abstract idea, whilst his eyes were for ever turned towards the aggrandisement of himself and Aragon. She could be cruel, and deaf to pleas for mercy, because in her eyes the ends she aimed at transcended human suffering; he could be mean and false, because his soul was baser and his objects all mundane.

In the Christian camp before Granada there had wandered a man who was not a warrior, but a patient suitor, waiting upon the leisure of the Sovereigns to hear his petition. He was a man of lofty stature, with light blue eyes that gazed afar away, fair, florid face and ruddy hair, already touched with snow by forty years of toil and hardship. He had long been a standing joke with some of the shallow courtiers and churchmen that surrounded the Queen, for he was a dreamer of great dreams that few men could understand, and, worst offence of all, he was a foreigner, a Genoese some said. He had followed the Court for eight long years in pursuit of his object, the scoff of many and the friend of few; but the war, and the strenuous lives that Isabel and Ferdinand lived, had again and again caused them to postpone a final answer to the prayer of the Italian sailor, who had, to suit Spanish lips, turned his name from Cristoforo Colombo to Cristobal Colon.

At the end of 1484,[^[52]] the man, full of his exalted visions, had sailed from Lisbon, disgusted at the perfidy of the Portuguese, who had feigned to entertain his proposals only to try to cheat him of the realisation of them. His intention was first to sail to Huelva in Spain, where he had relatives, and to leave with them his child Diego, who accompanied him, whilst he himself would proceed to France, and lay his plans before the new King, Charles VIII. Instead of reaching Huelva, his pinnace was driven for some reason to anchor in the little port of Palos, on the other side of the delta, and thence the mariner and his boy wended their way to the neighbouring Franciscan Monastery of St. Maria de la Rabida, to seek shelter and food, at least for the child. Colon, as we shall call him here, was an exalted religious mystic, full of a great devotional scheme, and himself, in after years, wore a habit of St. Francis. It was natural, therefore, that he should be well received by the brothers in that lonely retreat overlooking the delta of the Rio Tinto; for he was, in addition to his devotion, a man of wide knowledge of the world as well as of science and books, and in the monastery there was an enlightened ecclesiastic who had known courts and cities, one Friar Juan Perez, who had once been a confessor of Queen Isabel. With him and the physician of the monastery, Garcia Hernandez, Colon discussed cosmogony, and interested them in his theories, and the aims that led him on his voyage. The mariner needed but little material aid, two or three small ships, which could easily have been provided for him by private enterprise. But his plans were far reaching, and well he knew that to be able to carry them out, the lands he dreamed of discovering could only produce for him the means to attain the result he hungered for, if a powerful sovereign would hold and use them when he had found them.[^[53]]

There was a great magnate within a few days’ journey of the monastery, who himself was almost a sovereign, and not only had ships in plenty of his own, but could, if he pleased, obtain for any plan he accepted the patronage of powerful sovereigns. This was the head of the Guzmans, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, the Andalucian noble who controlled the port of Seville and the coasts of the south. It must have seemed worth while to Colon to address himself to this neighbouring noble before setting out on his long voyage to France; for he journeyed from La Rabida towards Seville, leaving his child, Diego, to be educated and cared for by the friars of the monastery. He found the Duke of Medina Sidonia irresponsive to his approaches, and was again thinking of taking ship to France, when he was brought into contact, by what means is not known, with another great noble almost as powerful as the head of the Guzmans, the Duke of Medina Celi, who, from his palaces at Rota and Puerto de Santa Maria, on the Bay of Cadiz, disposed of nearly as many sail as Medina Sidonia.

The magnate listened, often and attentively, to the eloquent talk of the sailor seer whom he lodged in his house: how, far away across the western ocean, beyond the islands that the Portuguese had found, lay Asia, the home of gems and spices rare, now only reached painfully across the forbidden lands of the infidel and by the Levant Sea, or perchance, though that was not sure, around the mighty African continent; that wealth untold lay there in pagan hands, awaiting those who, with cross and sword, should capture it, and win immortal souls for Christ, and so eternal glory. He, Colon, was the man destined by God to open up the new world foretold to Saint John in the tremendous dream of the Apocalypse, for some vast object of which he yet refrained to speak. Books, Seneca, Ptolemy, and the Arab geographers, the Fathers of the Church, legends half forgotten, the conclusions of science, the course of the stars, and the concentrated experience of generations of sailor men, were all used by the Genoese to convince the Duke. The prospect was an attractive one, and Medina Celi promised to fit out the expedition.

In the building yards of Port Santa Maria the keels of three caravels were laid down to be built under Colon’s superintendence. They were to cost three or four thousand ducats, and be fitted, provisioned and manned, for a year at the Duke’s expense; and Colon must have thought that now his dream was soon to come true, and that his doubt and toil would end. But for the inner purpose he had in view beyond the discovery of the easy way to Asia, he needed a patron even more powerful than Medina Celi; and it may have been the discoverer who took means to let the Queen of Castile know the preparations that were being made, or, as Medina Celi himself wrote afterwards, the information may have been sent to Court by the Duke, fearing to undertake so great an expedition without his sovereign’s licence.[^[54]] In either case, when Isabel was informed of it in the winter of 1485, she and her husband were in the north of Spain, and instructed the Duke to send Colon to court, that they might hear from his own mouth what his plans were.

The mariner arrived at Cordova on the 20th January 1486, with letters of introduction from the Duke to the Queen and his friends at court. The sovereigns were detained by business in Madrid and Toledo for three months after Colon came to Cordova; but his letters procured for him some friends amongst the courtiers there, with whom he discussed the theories he had formed, especially with the Aragonese Secretary of Supplies, the Jewish Luis de Sant’angel, who, throughout, was his enlightened and helpful friend. Most of the idle hangers-on of the court at Cordova, clerical and lay, made merry sport of the rapt dreamer who lingered in their midst awaiting the coming of the sovereigns. His foreign garb and accent, his strange predictions, absurd on the face of them—for how could one arrive at a given place by sailing directly away from it?—all convinced the shallow pates that this carder of wool turned sailor was mad.

When Isabel and Ferdinand at last arrived at Cordova, on the 28th April 1486, the season was already further advanced than usual to make preparations for the summer campaign: and there was little leisure for the sovereigns to listen to the vague theories of the sailor. But early in May Colon was received kindly by Isabel and her husband, and told his tale. Their minds were full of the approaching campaign, and of the trouble between Aragon and the new King of France about the two counties on the frontier unjustly withheld from Ferdinand; and after seeing Colon for the first time Isabel instructed the secretary, Alfonso de Quintanilla to write to the Duke of Medina Celi that she did not consider the business very sure; but that if anything came of it the Duke should have a share of the profits.

In the meanwhile Ferdinand and his wife were too busy to examine closely themselves into the pros and cons of Colon’s scheme, and followed the traditional course in such circumstances, that of referring the matter to a commission of experts and learned men to sift and report. The president of the commission was that mild-mannered but arrogant-minded confessor of the Queen, Father Talavera; the man of one idea whom the conquest of Granada for the cross blinded to all other objects in life. With him for the most part were men like himself, saturated with the tradition of the church, that looked upon all innovation as impiety, and all they did not understand as an invention of the evil one. So, when Colon sat with them and expounded his theories to what he knew were unsympathetic ears, he kept back his most convincing proofs and arguments; for his treatment in Portugal had taught him caution.[^[55]] There were two, at least, of the members of the commission who fought hard for Colon’s view, Dr. Maldonado and the young friar Antonio de Marchena, but they were outvoted; and when the report was presented it said that Colon’s project was impossible, and that after so many thousands of years he could not discover unknown lands, and so surpass an almost infinite number of clever men who were experienced in navigation.[^[56]]

Hardly had Talavera and his colleagues assured the sovereigns that the whole plan was impossible and vain, unfit for royal personages to patronise,[^[57]] than Ferdinand again took the field (20th May), and once more Cristobal Colon was faced by failure. But he was a man not easily beaten. During his stay at Cordova he had made many friends, and gained many protectors at Court. First was his close acquaintance, Luis de Sant’angel, by whose intervention he was so promptly received by the sovereigns after their arrival at Cordova; but others there were of much higher rank: the great Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo, Mendoza, the tutor of the Prince Don Juan, Friar Diego Deza, Friar Juan Perez, who had first received Colon at La Rabida, and was now at court, Alonso de Quintanilla, the Queen’s secretary, Juan Cabero, the intimate Aragonese friend and chamberlain of the King; and one who probably did more in his favour quietly than any one else, that inseparable companion of Isabel, Beatriz de Bobadilla, now Marchioness of Moya.

But it was weary waiting. As we have seen, the energies of the sovereigns were absorbed in the war. Ferdinand, moreover, was desperately anxious to finish it successfully, and get to Aragonese problems that interested him more directly; the intended war with France and that world-wide combination he was already planning, by which not the strength of Spain alone but that of all Christendom should be at his bidding, to humble his rival and exalt Aragon in Italy, the Mediterranean and the East. It was too much to expect that Ferdinand would welcome very warmly any project for frittering away in another direction the strength of the nation he was hungering to use for his own ends. Isabel, on the other hand, would naturally be inclined to listen more sympathetically to such a project as that of Colon. Here was half a world to be won to Christianity under her flag, here was wealth illimitable to coerce the other half, and, above all, here was the fair-faced mystic with his lymphatic blue eyes, like her own, showing her how the riches that would fall to his share were all destined for a crusade even greater than that of Granada, the winning of the Holy Sepulchre from the infidel, and the fixing for ever of the sovereign banner of Castile upon the country hallowed by the footsteps of our Lord. To Isabel, therefore, more than to Ferdinand, must it be attributed, that when the campaign of 1486 was ended the Italian mariner was not dismissed, notwithstanding the unfavourable report of Talavera’s commission.

The sovereigns were obliged to start out to far Galicia, as has been related on page [64]; but before they went they replied to Colon that, ‘though they were prevented at present from entering into new enterprises, owing to their being engaged in so many wars and conquests, especially that of Granada, they hoped in time that a better opportunity would occur to examine his proposals and discuss his offers.’[^[58]] This answer, at all events, prevented Colon’s supporters in Spain from despairing; and whilst the monarchs were in Galicia in the winter of 1486, the Dominican Deza, the Prince’s tutor, who was also a professor at Salamanca, conceived the idea that an independent inquiry by the pundits of the university might arrive at a different conclusion from that of Talavera’s commission, and undo the harm the latter had effected. Though there is no evidence of the fact, it is certain that Deza, who was a Castilian and a member of the Queen’s household, would not have taken such a step as he did without Isabel’s consent. In any case, Colon travelled to Salamanca; and there, as the guest of Deza in the Dominican monastery of Saint Stephen, he held constant conference with the learned men for whom the famous University was a centre.

Isabel and her husband themselves arrived at Salamanca in the last days of the year 1486, and heard from Deza and other friends that, in the opinion of most of them, the plans of Colon were perfectly sound. The effect was seen at once: the mariner accompanied the Court to Cordova in high hopes, no longer an unattached projector of doubtful schemes, but a member of the royal household. Before once more taking the field in the spring of 1487, the Queen officially informed Colon that ‘when circumstances permitted she and the King would carefully consider his proposal’; and in the meantime a sum of 3000 maravedis was given to him for his sustenance, a grant that was repeated, and sometimes exceeded, every few months afterwards. In August 1487, Colon was summoned by the sovereigns to the siege of Malaga, probably to give advice as to some maritime operations; but thenceforward he usually resided in Cordova, awaiting with impatience the convenience of the Queen and King.

During the heartbreaking delay he entered again into negotiation with the Kings of Portugal, France, and England, but without result; and it was only when the city of Granada was near its fall, and the end of the long war in sight, that Colon, following the sovereigns in Santa Fe, saw his hopes revive. Now, for the first time, he was invited to lay before them the terms he asked for if success crowned his project. Isabel had been already gained to Colon’s view by the transparent conviction of the man and his saintly zeal. His friends at Court were now many and powerful, and Ferdinand himself had not failed to see that the promised accession of wealth to be derived from the discovery would strengthen his hands. Perhaps he, like Isabel, had been dazzled with Colon’s life dream of the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre; for that would, if it were effected, tend to realise the highest ambitions of Aragon. But Ferdinand, as a prudent man of business, never allowed sentiment, however exalted, to override practical considerations. When, therefore, the terms demanded by Colon were at length submitted to him and the Queen, he unhesitatingly rejected them as absolutely out of the question. Much obloquy has been heaped upon Ferdinand for his lack of generosity in doing so; but a perusal of the conditions, with a consideration of the circumstances and ideas of the times, will convince any impartial person that Ferdinand’s first rejection of them was more to his credit than his subsequent acceptance with the obvious intention of violating them.

They were, indeed, extravagant and impracticable to the last degree. The title of Admiral had only been given in Spain to nobles of the highest rank and greatest possessions. The office, usually hereditary, carried with it seignorial rights over the coasts and ports that were practically sovereign, as in the case of the Enriquezs in Castile and of Medina Sidonia in Andalucia. And yet Colon, a plebeian Italian sailor, dropped as if from the clouds, made as his first demand, that he should be recognised as ‘Admiral of all the islands and continents that may be discovered or gained by his means, for himself during his life, and for his heirs and successors for ever, with all the prerogatives and pre-eminences appertaining to such office, as they are enjoyed by Don Alonso Enriquez, your Admiral of Castile.’ The Admiral of Castile was Ferdinand’s uncle, and the second person in realm after the blood royal; and, although the office was hereditary in his house, the sovereigns of Castile had never surrendered the power of withdrawing the title if they pleased, whereas the Italian mariner demanded that for ever he and his should be practically independent of the sovereigns. The second condition was, that Colon was to be Governor and Viceroy of all islands and continents discovered, with the right of nominating three persons for each sub-governorship or office from which the sovereigns were bound to choose one. This latter condition was also an infraction of the right of the kings to choose their own officers freely. The discoverer claimed for himself and his heirs for ever one clear tenth of all merchandise, gold, gems, pearls, and commodities of every sort, bought, bartered, found, gained, or possessed, in the territories discovered. It was just, of course, that Colon should be splendidly rewarded if success crowned his efforts, but the imagination reels at the idea of the stupendous wealth that would have been his by virtue of such a claim as this. But this was not all. Colon claimed the right, if he pleased, of taking one-eighth share in every expedition and trading venture leaving Spain for the Indies, and, to crown all, if any dispute arose with regard to the discoverer’s rights and profits, under the capitulation, he and his nominees were to be the sole judges of the case.

Most of these demands could not be legally granted under the laws of Castile, and it is no wonder that when Colon refused to modify them, he was curtly dismissed by Ferdinand, and told to go about his business and propose his plans elsewhere. There is no reason to doubt, in spite of romantic legends unsupported by evidence, that Isabel acquiesced in this action of her husband. She was, it is true, strongly in favour of the proposed undertaking; but she was a greater stickler than Ferdinand for her regal prerogatives, and it is unlikely that she would have lightly surrendered them thus any more than he. In any case, Colon, in high dudgeon, left Santa Fe with the intention of offering his plans to France. First visiting in Cordova the lady with whom he had lived, he proceeded on his way to La Rabida, where his son Diego was still living, thence to embark for France. In the monastery there he again met the guardian, Fray Juan Perez, the Queen’s confessor, to whom he told his tale of disappointment; and the physician, Hernandez, was summoned to the conference.

Colon, with his earnestness and eloquence, impressed them more than ever with the glowing prospects of wealth unlimited for Spain, and glory undying for the Christian Queen, who should bring pagan Asia into the fold of the Church; and, unknown to the explorer, Juan Perez sent post haste by a trusty messenger a letter to the Queen urging her not to let Colon go elsewhere with his plans. It is well-nigh two hundred miles, and a bad road, from Palos to Granada, and Isabel was in the midst of taking possession of the conquered city; but yet she found time to send back an answer within a fortnight to Perez, who, by one pretext or another, had detained Colon in the monastery, bidding her late confessor himself to come and see her without delay, that she might discuss with him the subject of his solicitude. Perez lost no time; for at midnight the same day, without a word to Colon, he rode out of La Rabida towards Granada.

What arguments he used to Isabel we do not know, probably he told her that Colon was inclined now to modify his pretensions. In any case, the good friar hurried back to the monastery with the cheering news that the Queen had promised to provide three caravels for the expedition, and summoned Colon to court again, sending him, in a day or two, two thousand maravedis to buy himself some new clothes, and make him fit to appear before her. It is extremely unlikely—indeed impossible—that Isabel should have taken this step without Ferdinand’s consent. She was the stronger vessel, and may have won him over to her way of thinking, aided probably by the representations of Juan Perez, that Colon’s terms would be modified.

The explorer arrived at Granada shortly after the triumphal entry of the conquerors, and saw Isabel (and presumably her husband) on several occasions at their quarters at Santa Fe. To Ferdinand’s annoyance he found that Colon still insisted upon the same impracticable conditions as before. Talavera, the new Archbishop of Granada, full of zeal for the Christianisation of his new diocese, frowned at all suggestions that might divert attention to another direction; and finally, the King and Queen decided to dismiss Colon for good as impossible to deal with. Rather than bate a jot of his vast claims, for, as he solemnly asserted afterwards, he needed not the wealth for himself, but to restore the Holy Land to Christendom, he wended his way heartbroken towards his home at Cordova; his red hair now blanched entire to snow. The glory for Spain of discovering a new world for civilisation was trembling in the balance. The great dreamer, hopeless, had turned his back upon the court after seven years of fruitless waiting, and Ferdinand, this time, had no intention of recalling him.

Then the keen business prescience of the Jew Secretary of Supplies, Luis de Sant’angel, pained that such bright hopes should be carried to other lands, took what, for a man of his modest rank, was a very bold step. He was a countryman of Ferdinand, and in his confidence, but it was to Isabel he went, and with many expressions of humility and apology for his daring,[^[59]] urged her not to miss such a chance as that offered by the Genoese. Sant’angel appears to have been under the impression that the main reason for Colon’s dismissal was the difficulty of the Castilian treasury providing the money he asked for, as he offered to lend the million maravedís necessary. It is quite likely, indeed, that he did not know the details of the explorer’s demands as to reward. Isabel appears to have thanked Sant’angel for his offer and opinion, with which she said she agreed; but asked him to defer the matter until she was more at leisure.

This was something gained; but the principal difficulty was to persuade Ferdinand. Another Aragonese it was who undertook it; that inseparable companion of the King, the Chamberlain, Juan Cabero. What arguments he employed we know not, but he was as astute as Ferdinand himself, and probably we shall not be far from the truth when we presume that he and his master agreed that, since the Queen was so bent upon the affair, it would be folly to haggle further over terms, which, after all, if they were found inconvenient, could be repudiated by the sovereigns, and it is probable that Isabel may have been influenced by the same view. So, a few hours only after Colon had shaken the dust of Santa Fe from his feet, a swift horseman overtook him at the bridge of Los Pinos, and brought him back to court.

Again he stood firm in his immoderate pretensions, and the chaffering with him was resumed, for it must have been evident to Ferdinand that the terms could never be fulfilled. It must not be forgotten that Colon had come with a mere theory. The plan was not to discover a new continent: there was no idea then of a vast virgin America, but only of a shorter way to Japan and the realms of the great Khan. Such a project, great as the profit that might result, would naturally loom less in the sight of contemporary Spaniards than the Christianisation of Granada, and it is unjust to blame Ferdinand for holding out against terms which were even a derogation of his own and his wife’s sovereignty. Isabel, far more idealist than her husband, was ready to accede to Colon’s demands, and her advocacy carried the day. Possibly, to judge from what followed, even she assented, with the mental reservation that she, as sovereign, could, if she pleased, cancel the concessions she granted to Colon if she found them oppressive.

The terms demanded, however, were not the only difficulty in the way. There was the question of ready money; and the war had exhausted the treasury. It is an ungracious thing to demolish a pretty traditional story, but that of Isabel’s jewels, sacrificed to pay for Colon’s first voyage, will not bear scrutiny.[^[60]] As a matter of fact, her jewels were already pawned for the costs of the war, and although Las Casas, Bernaldez, and Colon’s son Fernando, say that the Queen offered to Sant’angel to pawn her jewellery for the purpose, and it is probable enough that in the heat of her enthusiasm she may have made such a suggestion figuratively, it is now quite certain that the money for the expedition was advanced by Luis de Sant’angel, although not as was, and is, usually supposed, from his own resources, but from money secretly given to him for the purpose from the Aragonese treasury, of which he was a high officer.[^[61]]

The agreement with Colon was signed finally in Santa Fe on the 17th April 1492, and at the end of the month the great dreamer departed, this time with a light heart and rising hopes, to Palos and La Rabida to fit out his caravels, and sail on the 3rd August 1492 for his fateful voyage. With him went Isabel’s prayers and hopes; and during his tiresome and obstructed preparations at Palos, she aided him to the utmost by grants and precepts,[^[62]] as well as by appointing his legitimate son, Diego, page to her heir, Prince Juan, in order that the lad might have a safe home during his father’s absence. Although Isabel’s action in the discovery may be less heroic and independent of her husband, than her enthusiastic biographers are fond of representing, it is certain that but for her Ferdinand would not have patronised the expedition. Looking at the whole circumstances, and his character, it is difficult to blame him, except at last for agreeing to terms that he knew were impossible of fulfilment, and which he probably never meant to fulfil. But Isabel’s idealism in this case was wiser than Ferdinand’s practical prudence, so far as the immediate result was concerned, and to Isabel the Catholic must be given the glory of having aided Columbus, rather than to her husband, who was persuaded against his will.

Granada was conquered for Isabel, and it was now Ferdinand’s turn to have his way. For years Aragonese interests had had to wait, though, as Ferdinand well knew, the unifying process, which he needed for his ends, was being perfected the while. Under the stern rule of Torquemada the Inquisition had struck its tentacles into the nation’s heart, and, crazy with the pride of superiority over infidels, the orthodox Spaniard was rapidly developing the confidence in his divine selection to scourge the enemies of God, which made the nation temporarily great. Isabel was the inspiring soul of this feeling. A foreigner, visiting her court soon after Granada fell, wrote, as most contemporaries did of her, in enthusiastic praise of what we should now consider cruel bigotry. ‘Nothing is spoken of here,’ he says, ‘but making war on the enemies of the faith, and sweeping away all obstructions to the Holy Catholic Church. Not with worldly, but with heavenly aim, is all they undertake, and all they do seems inspired direct from heaven, as these sovereigns most surely are.’[^[63]]

This eulogium refers to the plan then under discussion for ridding Isabel’s realms of the taint of Judaism. We are told that to the Queen’s initiative this terrible and disastrous measure was due. ‘The Jews were so powerful in the management of the royal revenues that they formed almost another royal caste. This gave great scandal to the Catholic Queen, and the decree was signed that all those who would not in three months embrace the faith, were to leave her kingdoms of Castile and Leon.’[^[64]] Ferdinand was quite willing, in this case, to give the saintly Queen and her clergy a free hand, because, to carry out his world-wide combination to humble France, he would need money—very much money—and the wholesale confiscation of Jewish property that accompanied the edict of expulsion was his only ready way of getting it. On the 30th March 1492, less than three weeks before the signature of the agreement with Colon, the dread edict against the Jews went forth. Religious rancour had been inflamed to fever heat against these people, who were amongst the most enlightened and useful citizens of the State, and whose services to science, when the rest of Europe was sunk in darkness, make civilisation eternally their debtor. They were said to carry on in secret foul rites of human sacrifice, to defile the Christianity that most of them professed, and Isabel’s zeal, prompted by the churchmen, was already climbing to the point afterwards reached by her great-grandson, Philip II., when he swore that, come what might, he would never be a king of heretic subjects.

By the 30th July 1492 not a professed Jew was to be left alive in Isabel’s dominions. With cruel irony, in which Ferdinand’s cynical greed is evident, the banished people were permitted to sell their property, yet forbidden to carry the money abroad with them. At least a quarter of a million of Spaniards of all ranks and ages, men, women, and children, ill or well, were driven forth, stripped of everything, to seek shelter in foreign lands. The decree was carried out with relentless ferocity, and the poor wretches, straggling through Spain to some place of safety, were an easy prey to plunder and maltreat. It was a saturnalia of robbery. The shipmasters extorted almost the last ducat to carry the fugitives to Africa or elsewhere, and then, in numberless cases, cast their passengers overboard as soon as they were at sea. It was said that, in order to conceal their wealth, the Jews swallowed their precious gems, and hundreds were ripped up on the chance of discovering their riches. There was no attempt or pretence of mercy. The banishment was intended, not alone to remove Judaism as a creed from Spain—that might have been done without the horrible cruelty that ensued—but as a doom of death for all professing Jews; for Torquemada had, five years before, obtained a Bull from the Pope condemning to major excommunication the authorities of all Christian lands who failed to arrest and send back every fugitive Jew from Spain.[^[65]] Isabel appears to have had no misgiving. Her spiritual guides, to whom she was so humble, praised her to the skies for her saintly zeal: her subjects, inflated with religious arrogance, joined the chorus raised by servile scribes and chroniclers, that the discovery of the new lands by Colon was heaven’s reward to Isabel for ejecting the Hebrew spawn from her sacred realm; and if her woman’s heart felt a pang at the suffering and misery she decreed, it was promptly assuaged by the assurance of the austere churchmen, who ruled the conscience of the Queen.

Leaving Talavera as archbishop, and Count de Tendilla as governor of conquered Granada, Isabel and her husband, with their children and a splendid court, travelled in the early summer of 1492 to their other dominions where their presence was needed. Ferdinand, indeed, was yearning to get back to his own people, who were growing restive at his long absence, and for the coming war with France, it was necessary for him to win the love of his Catalan subjects, who, at first, still remembering his murdered half-brother, the Prince of Viana, had borne him little affection. He had treated them, however, with great diplomacy, respecting their sturdy independence, and had asked little from them, and by this time, in the autumn of 1492, when he and Isabel, with their promising son, Juan, by their side, rode from Aragon through the city of Barcelona to the palace of the Bishop of Urgel, where they were to live, the Catalans were wild with enthusiasm for the sovereigns with whose names all Christendom was ringing.

Ferdinand nearly fell a victim to the attack of a lunatic assassin in December, as he was leaving his hall of justice at Barcelona, and during his imminent danger Isabel’s affection and care for him gained for her also the love of the jealous Catalans.[^[66]] Throughout the winter in Barcelona Ferdinand was busy weaving his web of intrigue around France and Europe, to which reference will presently be made, and in March 1493 there came flying to the court the tremendous news that Colon had run into the Tagus for shelter after discovering the lands for which he had gone in search. No particulars of the voyage were given; but not many days passed before Luis de Sant’angel, the Aragonese Treasurer Gabriel Sanchez, and the monarchs themselves, received by the hands of a messenger sent by the explorer from Palos, letters giving full details of the voyage.[^[67]] No doubt as to the importance of the discovery was any longer entertained, and when the Admiral of the Indies himself entered Barcelona in the middle of April, after a triumphal progress across Spain, honours almost royal were paid to him. He was received at the city gates by the nobles of the court and city, and led through the crowded streets to the palace to confront the sovereigns, at whose feet he was, though he and they knew it not, laying a new world. With him he brought mild bronze-skinned natives decked with barbaric gold ornaments, birds of rare plumage, and many strange beasts; gold in dust and nuggets had he also, to show that the land he had found was worth the claiming.

Ferdinand and Isabel, with their son, received him in state in the great hall of the bishop’s palace; and, rising as he approached them, bade him to be seated, an unprecedented honour, due to the fact that they recognised his high rank as Admiral of the Indies. With fervid eloquence he told his tale. How rich and beautiful was the land he had found; how mild and submissive the new subjects of the Queen, and how ready to receive the faith of their mistress. Isabel was deeply moved at the recital, and when the Admiral ceased speaking the whole assembly knelt and gave thanks to God for so signal a favour to the crown of Castile. Thenceforward during his stay in Barcelona, Colon was treated like a prince; and when he left in May to prepare his second expedition to the new found land, he took with him powers almost sovereign to turn to account and bring to Christianity the new vassals of Queen Isabel.

It is time to say something of Isabel’s family and her domestic life. As we have seen, she had been during the nineteen years since her accession constantly absorbed in state and warlike affairs; and the effects of her efforts to reform her country had already been prodigious, but her public duties did not blind her to the interests of her own household and kindred; and no personage of her time did more to bring the new-born culture into her home than she. She had given birth during the strenuous years we have reviewed to five children. Isabel, born in October 1470; John, the only son, in 1478; Joan in 1479, Maria in 1482, and Katharine at the end of 1485: and these young princesses and prince had enjoyed the constant supervision of their mother. Her own education had been narrow under her Dominican tutors, and that of Ferdinand was notoriously defective. But Isabel was determined that her children should not suffer in a similar respect, and the most learned tutors that Italy and Spain could provide were enlisted to teach, not the royal children alone, but the coming generation of nobles, their companions, the wider culture of the classics and the world that churchmen had so much neglected. And not book learning alone was instilled into these young people by the Queen. She made her younger ladies join her in the work of the needle and the distaff, and set the fashion for great dames to devote their leisure, as she did, to the embroidering of gorgeous altar cloths and church vestments, whilst the noble youths, no longer allowed, as their ancestors had been, to become politically dangerous, were encouraged to make themselves accomplished in the arts of disciplined warfare and literary culture.

Isabel, like all her descendants upon the throne, set a high standard of regal dignity, and in all her public appearances assumed a demeanour of impassive serenity and gorgeousness which became traditional at a later period; but she could be playful and jocose in her family circle, as her nicknames for her children prove. Her eldest girl, Isabel, who married the King of Portugal, bore a great resemblance to the Portuguese mother of Isabel herself, and the latter always called her child ‘mother,’ whilst her son Juan to her was always the ‘angel,’ from his beautiful fair face. She could joke, too, on occasion, though the specimens of her wit cited by Father Florez are a little outspoken for the present day; and her contemporary chroniclers tell many instances of her keen caustic wit. Her tireless and often indiscreet zeal for the spread of the faith has been mentioned several times in these pages; but submissive as she was to the clergy, she was keenly alive even to their defects, and the laxity of the regular orders, which had grown to be a scandal, was reformed by her with ruthless severity. Her principal instrument, perhaps the initiator, of this work was the most remarkable ecclesiastical statesman of his time, and one of the greatest Spaniards who ever lived, Alfonso Jimenez de Cisneros.

A humble Franciscan friar of over fifty, living as an anchorite in a grot belonging to the monastery of Castañar, near Toledo, after a laborious life as a secular priest and vicar-general of a diocese, would seem the last man in the world to become the arbiter of a nation’s destinies; and yet this was the strange fate of Jimenez. When Talavera was created Bishop of Granada, Isabel needed a new principal confessor; and, as usual in such matters, consulted the Cardinal Primate of Spain, Mendoza, who years before had been Bishop of Sigüenza, and had made Father Jimenez his chaplain and vicar-general, because his rival archbishop, that stout old rebel Carrillo, had persecuted the lowly priest. Mendoza knew that his former vicar-general had retired from the world, and was living in self-inflicted suffering and mortification; and he was wont to say that such a man was born to rule, and not to hide himself as an anchorite in a cloister. When, after the surrender of Granada, a new royal confessor was required, Jimenez, greatly to his dismay, real or assumed, was at the instance of the Cardinal summoned to see the Queen. Austere and poorly clad, he stood before the sovereign whom he was afterwards to rule, and fervently begged her to save him from the threatened honour. In vain he urged his unfitness for the life of a court, his want of cultivation and the arts of the world; his humility was to Isabel a further recommendation, and she would take no denial.

Thenceforward the pale emaciated figure, in a frayed and soiled Franciscan frock, stalked like a spectre amidst the splendours that surrounded the Queen; feared for his stern rectitude and his iron strength of will. His mind was full, even then, of great plans to reform the order of Saint Francis, corrupted as he had seen it was in the cloisters; and when the office of Provincial of the Order became vacant soon afterwards the new Confessor accepted it eagerly. Through all Castile, to every monastery of the Order, Jimenez rode on a poor mule with one attendant and no luggage; living mostly upon herbs and roots by the way. When, at last, Isabel recalled him peremptorily to her side, he painted to her so black a picture of the shameful licence and luxury of the friars, that the Queen, horrified at such impiety, vowed to sustain her Confessor in the work of reform. It was a hard fought battle; for the Priors were rich and powerful, and in many cases were strongly supported from Rome. All sorts of influences were brought to bear. Ferdinand was besought to mitigate the reforming zeal of Isabel and Jimenez, and did his best to do so. The Prior of the Holy Ghost in Segovia boldly took Isabel to task personally, and told her that her Confessor was unfit for his post. When Isabel asked the insolent friar whether he knew what he was talking about he replied, ‘Yes, and I know that I am speaking to Queen Isabel, who is dust and ashes as I am.’ But all was unavailing, the broom wielded by Jimenez and the Queen swept through every monastery and convent in the land; the Queen herself taking the nunneries in hand, and with gentle firmness examining for herself the circumstances in every case before compelling a rigid adherence to the conventual vows. When Mendoza died in January 1495, the greatest ecclesiastical benefice in the world after the papacy, the Archbishopric of Toledo, became vacant. Ferdinand wanted it for his illegitimate son, Alfonso of Aragon, aged twenty-four, who had been Archbishop of Saragossa since he was six. But Toledo was in the Queen’s gift, and to her husband’s indignation she insisted upon appointing Jimenez. The Pope, Alexander VI., who had just conferred the title of ‘Catholic’ upon the Spanish sovereigns, was by birth a Valencian subject of Ferdinand; and there was a race of the rival Spanish claimants to win the support of Rome. But Castile had right as well as might on his side this time, and, again to his expressed displeasure, Jimenez became primate of Spain, and the greatest man in the land after the King who distrusted him.[^[68]]

From their births Ferdinand had destined his children to be instruments in his great scheme for humbling France for the benefit of Aragon; and Isabel, in this respect, appears usually to have let him have his way. It was a complicated and tortuous way, which, in a history of the Queen, cannot be fully described. Suffice it to say that when Ferdinand found himself by the fall of Granada free to take his own affairs seriously in hand, he had for years been intriguing for political marriage for his children. First he had endeavoured to capture the young King of France, Charles VIII., on his accession in 1483, by a marriage with Isabel, the eldest daughter of Spain. Charles VIII. was already betrothed to Margaret of Burgundy, but Anne of Brittany, with her French dominion, was preferred to either, and then (1488) Ferdinand, finding himself forestalled, betrothed his youngest daughter, Katharine, to Arthur, Prince of Wales, to win the support of Henry Tudor in a war against France,[^[69]] to prevent the absorption of Brittany. All parties were dishonest; but Ferdinand outwitted allies and rivals alike. Henry VII. of England was cajoled into invading France; whilst Ferdinand, instead of making war on his side as arranged, quietly extorted from the fears of Charles VIII. an offensive and defensive alliance against the world, with the retrocession to Aragon of the counties of Roussillon and Cerdagne; and England was left in the lurch.

There is no doubt that the object of the King of France in signing such a treaty was to buy the implied acquiescence of Ferdinand in making good his shadowy claims to the kingdom of Naples, then ruled by the unpopular kinsman of Ferdinand himself. As was proved soon afterwards, nothing was further from Ferdinand’s thoughts than thus to aid the ambition of the shallow, vain King of France in the precise direction where he wished to check it. But in appearance the great festivities held in Barcelona on the signature of the treaty in January 1493, heralded a cordial settlement of the long-standing enmity between the two rivals. Isabel took her share in the rejoicings; and rigid bigots appear to have written to her late Confessor, Archbishop Talavera, an exaggerated account of her participation in the gaiety. Isabel, in answer to the letter of reprimand he sent her, defended herself with spirit and dignity, after a preface expressing humble submission. ‘You say that some danced who ought not to have danced; but if that is intended to convey that I danced, I can only say that it is not true; I have little custom of dancing, and I had no thought of such a thing.... The new masks you complain of were worn neither by me nor by my ladies; and not one dress was put on that had not been worn ever since we came to Aragon. The only dress I wore had, indeed, been seen by the Frenchmen before, and was my silk one with three bands of gold, made as plainly as possible. This was all my part of the festivity. Of the grand array and showy garments you speak of, I saw nothing and knew nothing until I read your letter. The visitors who came may have worn such fine things when they appeared; but I know of no others. As for the French people supping with the ladies at table, that is a thing they are accustomed to do. They do not get the custom from us; but when their great guests dine with sovereigns, the others in their train dine at tables in the hall with the ladies and gentlemen; and there are no separate tables for ladies. The Burgundians, the English and the Portuguese, also follow this custom; and we on similar occasions to this. So there is no more evil in it, nor bad repute, than in asking guests to your own table. I say this, that you may see that there was no innovation in what we did; nor did we think we were doing anything wrong in it.... But if it be found wrong after the inquiry I will make, it will be better to discontinue it in future. The dresses of the gentlemen were truly very costly, and I did not commend them, and, indeed, moderated them as much as I could, and advised them not to have such garments made. As for the Bull feasts, I feel, with you, though perhaps not quite so strongly. But after I had consented to them, I had the fullest determination never to attend them again in my life, nor to be where they were held. I do not say that I can of myself abolish them; for that does not appertain to me alone, nor do I defend them, for I have never found pleasure in them.[^[70]] When you know the truth of what really took place, you may determine whether it be evil, in which case it had better be discontinued. For my part all excess is distasteful to me, and I am wearied with all festivity, as I have written you in a long letter, which I have not sent, nor will I do so, until I know whether, by God’s grace, you are coming to meet us in Castile.’[^[71]]

This letter gives a good idea of Isabel’s submission to her spiritual advisers, as well as of her own good sense and moderation, which prevented her from giving blind obedience to them. Another instance of this is seen by Isabel’s attitude towards the chapter of Toledo Cathedral after the death of her friend Cardinal Mendoza (January 1495), the third King of Spain, as he had been called. The Queen travelled from Madrid to Guadalajara to be with him at his death, and tended him to the last, promising, personally, to act as his executor, and to see that all his testamentary wishes were fulfilled. Amongst these was the desire of the prelate to be buried in a certain spot in the chancel of the cathedral. To this the chapter had readily assented in the life of the archbishop, but when he had died they refused to allow the structural alterations necessary, and the matter was carried to the tribunals, which decided in favour of the executors. The chapter still stood firm in their refusal, and then the Queen, as chief executrix, took the matter in her own hands, and herself superintended the necessary demolition of the wall of the chapel at night, to the surprise and dismay of the chapter, who no longer dared to interfere.[^[72]]

On leaving Aragon after the signature of the hollow Treaty of Barcelona (1493), Isabel and her husband took up their residence in the Alcazar of Madrid, where, with short intervals, they remained in residence for the next six years. During this period, spent, as will be told by Ferdinand, in almost constant struggle for his own objects in Italy and elsewhere, Isabel was tireless in her efforts for domestic reform. The purification of the monasteries and convents went on continually under the zealous incentive of the new Archbishop of Toledo, Jimenez: the roads and water-sources throughout Castile were improved; the municipal authorities, corrupt as they had become by the introduction of the purchase of offices, and the effects of noble intrigue, were brought under royal inspection and control; and this, though it improved the government of the towns, further sapped their independence and legislative power. The Universities and high schools, which had shared in the universal decadence, were overhauled, and a higher standard of graduation enforced: the coinage, which had become hopelessly debased, in consequence of the vast number of noble and municipal mints in existence, was unified and rehabilitated: sumptuary pragmatics, mistaken as they appear to us now, but well-intentioned at the time, endeavoured to restrain extravagance and idle vanity: measures for promoting agriculture, the great cloth industry of Segovia and oversea commerce, and a score of other similar enactments during these years, from 1494 to the end of the century, show how catholic and patriotic was Isabel’s activity at the time that Ferdinand was busy with his own Aragonese plans. The annals of Madrid at this period give a curious account of Isabel’s prowess in another direction. The neighbourhood of the capital was infested with bears, and one particular animal, of special size and ferocity, had committed much damage. By order of the Queen a special battue was organised, and the bear was killed by a javelin in the hands of Isabel herself, upon the spot where now stands the hermitage of St. Isidore, the patron of Madrid.[^[73]]

Ferdinand’s marvellous political perspicacity, and the far-reaching combinations he had formed, now began to produce some of the international results for which he had worked. The Treaty of Barcelona had bound Ferdinand to friendship with France, and abstention from marrying his children in England, Germany or Naples, and implied the leaving to Charles VIII. of a free hand in Italy: but no sooner had Ferdinand received his reward by the retrocession of Roussillon and Cerdagne to him, than he broke all his obligations under the treaty. Charles VIII. had marched through Italy, to the intense anger of the native princes, and took possession of Naples, and then Ferdinand, in coalition with the Valencian Pope, Alexander VI., formed the combination of Venice, and Spanish troops under the great Castilian, Gonzalo de Cordova, expelled the French from Naples, and set up the deposed Aragonese-Neapolitan king, until it should please, as it soon did, Ferdinand to seize the realm for himself.

This war was an awakening to all Europe that a new fighting nation had entered into the arena. Already the proud spirit of superiority by divine selection was being felt by Spaniards as a result of the religious persecution of the minority, and the devotional exaltation inspired by the example of the Queen: and under so great a commander as Gonzalo de Cordova Spanish troops for the first time now showed the qualities which, for a century at least, made them invincible.[^[74]] Whilst this result attended the policy of Isabel and her husband in religious affairs, their action in another direction simultaneously, whilst for the moment seeming to give to Ferdinand the hegemony of Europe, really wrought the ruin of Spain by bringing her into the vortex of central European politics, and burdening her with the championship of an impossible cause under impossible conditions.

CHAPTER III

Amidst infinite chicanery and baseness on both sides the marriage treaty of Isabel’s youngest daughter, Katharine, with Arthur, Prince of Wales, had been alternately confirmed and relaxed, as suited Ferdinand’s interests. But he took care that it could be at any time revived when need should demand it. This made Ferdinand always able to deal a diverting blow upon France in the Channel. But Ferdinand’s main stroke of policy was the double marriage of his children, Juan, Prince of Asturias, with the Archduchess Margaret, daughter of Maximilian, sovereign of the Holy Roman Empire; and of Joan, Isabel’s second daughter, with Philip, Maximilian’s son, and, by right of his mother, sovereign of the dominions of the Dukes of Burgundy with Holland and Flanders; whilst Isabel’s eldest daughter, already the widow of the Portuguese prince, Alfonso, was betrothed to his cousin, King Emmanuel. Imagination is dazzled at the prospect opened out by these marriages. The children of Philip and Joan would hold the fine harbours of Flanders, and would hem in France by the possession of Artois, Burgundy, Luxembourg, and the Franche Comté; whilst their possession of the imperial crown and the German dominions of the house of Habsburg would identify their interests with those of Ferdinand in checking the French advance towards Italy. On the other side of the Channel the grandchildren of Ferdinand and Isabel would rule England, and hold the narrow sea; whilst the friendship between England and Scotland, prompted by Ferdinand, and the marriage of Margaret Tudor with James IV., deprived France of her ancient northern ally. The King of Aragon might then, with the assurance of success, extend his grasp from Sicily to the East, and become the master of the world. The plan was a splendid one; and for a time it went merry as the marriage bells that heralded it. With his family seated on the Portuguese throne, Ferdinand had, moreover, no attack to fear on that side from French intrigue, such as had often been attempted; and for a brief period it seemed as if all heaven had smiled upon the astute King of Aragon.

Isabel had always been an exemplary mother to her children, who, on their side, were deeply devoted to her. She had rarely allowed them to be separated from her, even during her campaigns; and had herself cared for their education in letters, music, and the arts under the most accomplished masters in Europe.[^[75]] When they had to be sacrificed one by one for the political ends of their father, Isabel’s love as a mother almost overcame her sense of duty as a queen, and in the autumn of 1496 she travelled through Spain with a heavy heart to take leave of her seventeen-year old daughter, Joan, for whom a great fleet of 120 sail was waiting in the port of Laredo, near Santander. The King was away in Catalonia preparing his war with France; the times were disturbed, and a strong navy with 15,000 armed men were needed to escort the young bride to Flanders, the home of her husband, Philip of Burgundy, heir of the empire, and to bring back to Spain the betrothed of Prince Juan, Philip’s sister, Margaret, who, in her infancy, had been allied to the faithless Charles VIII. of France. For two nights after the embarkation Isabel slept on the ship with her daughter, loath to part with her, as it seemed, for ever; and when, at last, the fleet sailed, on the 22nd August 1496, the mother, in the deepest grief, turned her back upon the sea, and rode sadly to Burgos to await tidings of her daughter.

Storms and disasters innumerable assailed the fleet. Driven by tempest into Portland, one of the largest of the ships came into collision and foundered; and though the young Archduchess received every courtesy and attention from the English gentry, she was not even yet at the end of her troubles; for on the Flemish coast another great ship was wrecked, with most of her household, trousseau, and jewels. Eventually the whole fleet arrived at Ramua, sorely disabled, and needing a long delay for refitting before it could return to Spain with the bride of Isabel’s heir.[^[76]] Whilst Joan was being married, with all the pomp traditional in the house of Burgundy, to her handsome, good-for-nothing husband, Philip, at Lille, Queen Isabel, at Burgos, in the deepest distress, was mourning for the loss of her own distraught mother, as well as for her daughter.[^[77]] Every post from Flanders brought the Queen evil news. The fleet that had carried Joan over, and was refitting to bring Margaret to Spain, was mostly unseaworthy: Philip neglected and ill-treated his wife’s countrymen to the extent of allowing 9000 of the men on the fleet at Antwerp to die from cold and privation, without trying to help them; already his young wife was complaining of his conduct. Her Spanish household were unpaid; and even the income settled upon her by Philip was withheld, on the pretext that Ferdinand had not fulfilled his part of the bargain, which was, of course, true.

At length, after what seemed interminable delay, the Archduchess Margaret arrived at Santander early in March 1497. Ferdinand, with a great train of nobles, received his future daughter-in-law as she stepped upon Spanish soil, and a few days later Queen Isabel welcomed her in the palace of Burgos, where, with greater rejoicing than had ever been seen in Castile, the heir of Ferdinand and Isabel was married to gentle Margaret, one of the finest characters of her time. Seven months afterwards the Prince of Asturias, at the age of twenty-one, was borne to his grave, and his wife gave birth to a dead child.[^[78]] The blow was one from which Isabel never recovered. Juan was her only son, her ‘angel,’ from the time of his birth; and the dearest wish of her heart had been the unification of Spain under him and his descendants. The next heiress was Isabel, her eldest daughter, just (August 1497) married to King Emmanuel of Portugal, and the jealous Aragonese and Catalans would hardly brook a woman sovereign; and, above all, one ruling from Portugal, when Ferdinand should die.[^[79]] Hastily Cortes of Castile was summoned at Toledo, and swore allegiance to the new heiress and her Portuguese husband as princes of Asturias in April 1498, but she, too, died in childbed in August, when the heirship devolved upon her infant son, Miguel, who, if he had lived, would have united not only Spain, but all the Iberian Peninsula under one rule. But it was not to be, and the babe followed his mother to the grave in a few months.

Troubles fell thick and fast upon Isabel and her husband. Death within three years had made cruel sport of all their plans; and the support of England, long held in the balance by Ferdinand, to be bought when it was worth the price demanded, had now to be obtained almost at any cost. The price had increased considerably; for Henry Tudor was as keen a hand at a bargain as Ferdinand of Aragon, and closely watched events. With the usual grasping dishonesty on both sides, the treaty for the marriage of Isabel’s youngest daughter, Katharine, to the heir of England was again signed and sealed, and the young couple were married by proxy in May 1499. But Katharine was young. Her mother could hardly bring herself to part with her last-born, and send her for ever to a far country amongst strangers; and she fought hard for two years longer to delay her daughter’s going, with all manner of conditions and claims as to her future life. At length Henry of England put his foot down, and said he would wait no longer; and, worse still, he hinted that he would marry Arthur elsewhere, and throw his influence on the side of Philip of Burgundy, Ferdinand’s son-in-law, in the struggle that was already looming on the horizon. Isabel and her daughter both knew that the latter was being sent to serve her father’s political interests against her own sister and brother-in-law; but, from her birth, Katharine had been brought up in her mother’s atmosphere of uncompromising duty, surrounded by the ecstatic devotion which demanded serene personal sacrifice for higher ends; and, on the 21st May 1501, the Princess of Aragon bade a last farewell to her mother in the elfin palace of the Alhambra, to see her no more in her life of martyrdom.[^[80]]

Isabel’s health was already breaking down with labour and trouble. Disappointment faced her from every side, and as tribulations fell, bringing her end nearer, and ever nearer, the stern religious zeal that inflamed her grew more eager to do its work in her day. She had never been a weakling, as we have seen. From her youth the persecution of infidels had been as grateful to her sense of duty, as the crushing of her worldly opponents had been satisfying to her love of undisputed dominion. In all Castile, no man but her confessor, and he at his peril, had dared to say her nay; but at this juncture, when health was failing and her strength on the wane, there came to her tidings from across the sea that turned her heart to stone. Joan, her daughter, had always been somewhat wayward and rebellious at the gloomy, devout tone that pervaded her mother’s life, and Isabel had coerced her, on some occasions by forcible means, to take her part in the religious observances that occupied so large a share of attention at the Spanish court.[^[81]]

Joan was young and bright: the life in her palace at Brussels was free from the gloom that hung over crusading Castile. Philip, her husband, cared for little but pleasure, and, though he was but a faithless husband, she was desperately in love with him. The new culture, moreover, which had even found its way, with Peter Martyr, into Isabel’s court, had, in rich, prosperous Flanders, brought with it the freedom of thought and judgment that naturally came from the wider horizon of knowledge that men gained by it, and doubtless the change from the rigid and uncomfortable sanctimony of her native land to the gay and debonair society of Flanders had seemed to Joan like coming out of the darkness into the daylight. The Spanish priests who surrounded her sounded a note of warning to Isabel only a few months after Joan had arrived in Flanders. She was said to be lax in her religious duties: her old confessor, who continued to write to her fervent exhortations to preserve the faith as it was held in Spain, could get no reply to any of his letters, and he learnt that the gay Parisian priests, who flocked in the festive court, were leading Joan astray.

Isabel sent a confidential priest, Friar Matienzo, to Flanders to examine and report on all these, and the like accusations. He saw Joan in August 1498, and found her, as he says, more handsome and buxom than ever, though far advanced in pregnancy; but when he began to press her about religion, though she had plenty of reasons ready for what she did, she was as obstinate as her mother could be in holding her own way. She refused to confess at the bidding of the friar, to accept any confessor appointed by her mother, or to dismiss the French priests who were with her, and the friar sent the dire news to Isabel that her daughter had a hard heart and no true piety.[^[82]]

This was bad enough, but on the death of the Queen of Portugal, Isabel’s eldest daughter and heiress, leaving her infant son as heir to the united crowns, Philip assumed for himself and his wife, Joan, the title of Prince and Princess of Castile. This was a warning for Ferdinand.[^[83]] Already Philip and his father, the Emperor Maximilian, had shown that they had no idea of being the tools of Ferdinand’s foreign policy, but if Philip of Burgundy successfully asserted Joan’s right to succeed her mother as Queen of Castile, then all Ferdinand’s edifice of hope fell like a house of cards, for most of Spain would be governed by a foreigner, with other ends and methods, and poor, isolated Aragon, by itself, must sink into insignificance.

When the infant Portuguese heir, Miguel, died, early in 1499, the issue between Ferdinand and his son-in-law was joined. Isabel was visibly failing, and it was seen would die before her husband, in which case Joan would be Queen of Castile, in right of her mother. Philip, her husband, with the riches of Flanders and Burgundy, and the prestige of the empire behind him, would come, perhaps in alliance with the French, and reduce greedy, ambitious Ferdinand to the petty crown of Aragon. Thenceforward it was war to the knife between father and son-in-law, who hated each other bitterly; and Isabel’s distrust of her daughter Joan grew deeper as religious zeal and ambition for a united Spain joined in adding fuel to the fire. With true statesmanship Isabel, under the great influence of Jimenez, clung more desperately than ever to the idea of a Spain absolutely united. Ferdinand’s object in working for the consolidation of the realms had always been to forward the traditional objects of Aragon in humbling France, but those of Isabel and Jimenez were different. To them the spread of Christianity in the dark places of the earth, for the greater glory of Castile, was the end to be gained by a united Spain, and for that end it was necessary that the people should be unified in orthodoxy as well as in sovereignty. The cruel and disastrous expulsion of the Jews[^[84]] served this object in Isabel’s mind, though to Ferdinand its principal advantage was the filling of his war chest. The squandering of Castilian blood and treasure in Naples and Sicily was to Isabel and Jimenez a means of strengthening the Spaniards in their future Christianisation of north Africa, whilst to Ferdinand it meant the future domination of Italy, the Adriatic, and gaining the trade of the Levant for Barcelona.

When Isabel and her husband went to Granada, after a long absence, in 1499, with the all-powerful Jimenez in his dirty, coarse, Franciscan gown, the difference of view of the husband and wife was again seen. The Moors of Granada had lived, since their capitulation, contented and prosperous in the enjoyment of toleration for their customs and faith under the sympathetic rule of the Christian governor, the Count of Tendilla, and the ardent, but always diplomatic, religious propaganda of Archbishop Talavera. If these two men had been allowed to continue their gentle system for a generation, there is no doubt that in time Granada would have become Christian without bloodshed, even if it had retained its Arabic speech. But Jimenez and the Queen could not wait, and determined upon methods more rapid than those of Talavera. In the seven years that had passed since Granada surrendered to Isabel, the crown of Spain had become much more powerful. The prestige and wealth of the sovereigns had been increased; the discovery of America had considerably added to the importance of Castile, whilst the expulsion of the French from Naples had magnified Aragon. The Jews had been expelled from Spain, and, above all, the Inquisition, under the ruthless Torquemada, had raised the arrogance both of people and priests on the strength of the stainless orthodoxy of Spain.

Jimenez doubtless felt that the circumstances demanded, or at least excused, stronger measures towards the Moslems in Granada. He soon persuaded or stultified Talavera, and set about converting the Moors wholesale. Bribery, persuasion, flattery, were the first instruments employed, then threats and severity. Thousands of Moors were thus brought to baptism, with what sincerity may be supposed. Jimenez, a book lover himself, and afterwards the munificent inspirer of the polyglot Bible in his splendid new University of Alcalá, committed the vandalism of burning the priceless Arabic manuscripts that had been collected by generations of scholars in Granada. Five thousand magnificently illuminated copies of the Koran were cast into the flames, whilst many thousands of ancient Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic texts were sacrificed to the blind bigotry and haste of Jimenez and Isabel, who, even in learning, drew the line at Christian writings. From sacrificing books to sacrificing men was but a step for Jimenez. Isabel and her husband had sworn to allow full toleration to the Moors, but what were oaths of monarchs as against the presumed interests of the faith? Soon the dungeon, the rack, and the thumbscrew came to fortify Jimenez’s propaganda, and, though the Moslems bowed their heads before irresistible force, they cursed beneath their breath the day they had trusted to the oath of Christian sovereigns.

The absence of Ferdinand and Isabel in Seville early in 1500, gave to Jimenez full freedom; and soon the strained cord snapped, and the outraged Moors rebelled. Like a spark upon tinder an excess of insolence on the part of one of Jimenez’s myrmidons set all Granada in a blaze; and the Primate was besieged in his palace, in imminent danger of death. He acted with stern courage even then, and refused to escape until Count de Tendilla with the soldiery dispersed the populace, and drove them into their own quarter, the Albaicin. There they were impregnable, and Tendilla, who was popular, with Talavera, even more beloved, took their lives in their hands, and unarmed and bareheaded entered the Albaicin to reassure the Moors. ‘We do not rise,’ cried the latter, ‘against their highnesses, but only to defend their own signatures,’[^[85]] and the beloved Archbishop and Governor, who left his own wife and children in the Albaicin as hostages of peace, soothed the Moors into quietude almost as soon as the storm had burst.

The news flew rapidly to Seville, though Jimenez’s version was not the first to arrive, and when he heard it, Ferdinand turned in anger to Isabel. ‘See here, madam,’ he said, handing her the paper, ‘our victories, earned with so much Spanish blood, are thus ruined in a moment by the rashness and obstinacy of your Archbishop.’[^[86]] Isabel herself wrote in grave sorrow to Jimenez, deploring that he had given her no proper explanation of what had happened; and after sending his faithful vicar, Ruiz, to placate the monarchs somewhat, the Archbishop himself appeared before the Queen and her husband. He was a man of tremendous power. Over Isabel his religious influence was great, and he proved now that he knew how to get at the weak side of Ferdinand. The Moors, he urged, had been converted by thousands; and so far, his work had been successful. But rebellion on the part of subjects could never be condoned, no matter what the cause, and he appealed to both sovereigns only to pardon Granada for its revolt on condition that every Moor should become a Christian or leave Spain. It was a shameful violation of a sacred pledge given only seven years before, but the rising of the Albaicin was the salve which Jimenez applied to the wounded honour of his Queen and King.

To Granada he returned triumphant, with the fell decree in the pocket of his shabby grey gown. More converts flocked in than ever when the alternative was presented to them. But up in the wild Alpujarras, the Moslem villagers and farmers looked with hatred and dismay at the lax townsmen abandoning Allah and his only prophet at the bidding of a ragged, sour-faced priest who broke his monarch’s word. Like an avalanche the mountaineers swept down from their fastnesses upon Malaga, beating back the Christian force from Granada which came to rescue the city. But Ferdinand from Seville and the greatest soldier in Europe, Gonzalo de Cordova, hastened with an army to crush the desperate handful who had defied an empire; and every Moor in arms, with many women and children, were pitilessly massacred. The repression was carried out with a savage ferocity and heartlessness only equalled by the despairing bravery of the insurgents; but at last, by the end of 1500, the few who were still left unconverted were brought to their knees: all except the fierce mountaineers of Ronda, a separate African tribe, notable even to-day for their lawlessness and indomitable independence. From their savage fortress over the gorge they repelled one Christian force after another, until Ferdinand himself, with vengeance in his heart against all rebels, came with an army strong enough to crush them. A ruinous ransom and instant conversion were dictated to them, and confiscation and death, or deportation to Africa, for those who hesitated.

Then came the turn of Granada itself. Jimenez and the new Inquisitor-General, Deza, the friend of Colon, demanded of Isabel and Ferdinand the establishment of the Inquisition in the city. This was considered too flagrant a violation of all promises; but what was refused in the letter was granted in the spirit; and the Inquisition of Cordova was given power to extend its operations over Granada. What followed will always remain a blot upon the name of Isabel, who with Jimenez was principally responsible. In July 1501, she with her husband issued a decree forbidding the Moslem faith throughout the kingdom of Granada, on pain of death and confiscation; and in February 1502, the wicked edict went forth, that the entire Moslem population, men, women, and all children of over twelve years, should quit the realm within two months, whilst they were forbidden to go to a Mahommedan country. Whither were the poor wretches to go but to Africa, opposite their own shores? and some found their way there. This was a pretext a few months afterwards for prohibiting any one to emigrate from Spain at all; and such Moors as still remained in Spain had only the alternatives of compulsory conversion or death.[^[87]] By the end of 1502 not a single professed Moslem was left in Spain; and Isabel, with saintly joy in her heart, could thank God that she had done her duty, and that in her own day the miracle had come to pass: the Jews expelled, the Moors ‘converted,’ the Inquisition scourging religious doubt with thongs of flame; all men in very fear bowing their heads to one symbol and muttering one creed. This was indeed a victory to be proud of, and it made Spain what it was and what it is.

To Isabel, in broken health and sad bereavement, it was the one ray of glory that gilded all her sorrow. Not the least of her troubles were those arising from her new domain across the sea. The impossible terms insisted upon by the discoverer had, as we have seen, been accepted with the greatest unwillingness by Ferdinand, and probably with no intention of fulfilling them; and when Colon began to prepare his second expedition on a great scale, and thousands of adventurers craved to accompany him, the King realised the danger that threatened his own plans in Europe if such an exodus continued; and, at the same time, the tremendous power that this foreign sailor, now Admiral of the Indies and perpetual Spanish Viceroy, with riches untold, would hold in his hands. So the process of undermining him began. The Council of the Indies was formed to control all matters connected with the new domain, and the priests that ruled it obstructed and thwarted the Admiral at every turn. Isabel was mainly concerned in winning her new subjects to Christianity; and four friars went this time in the fleet to baptise. All of them but his friend Marchena were disloyal to the chief, and so were the crowd of Aragonese who accompanied the expedition. Of the fifteen hundred adventurers who at last were selected, the great majority were greedy, reckless men whom the end of the Moorish war had left idle.

At first the news from Colon on his second voyage were bright and hopeful. New lands, richer than ever, were discovered, and the prospects of coming wealth from this source, whilst delighting the King, only made the downfall of the Admiral more inevitable. But soon the merciless violence of the colonists provoked reprisals, and every ship that returned to Spain brought to Isabel bitter complaints of Colon’s rapacity and tyranny; whilst he, on his side, denounced the want of discipline, of industry, and of justice, on the part of those who were rapidly turning a heaven into a hell. At length the complaints, both of friars and laymen, against the high-handed Admiral of the Indies, became so violent that the sovereigns summoned him to Spain to give some explanation of the position. Colon saw the Queen at Burgos in 1496, and found her, at least, full of sympathy for him in his difficulties, and still firmly convinced that his golden hopes would be fulfilled. But the reaction had set in against the extravagant expectations aroused by his second expedition. The idlers, many of them, had come back disappointed, fever-stricken and empty-handed, and had much evil to say of the despotic Italian who had lorded over land granted by the Viceregent of Christ at Rome to the Spanish sovereigns; and though Isabel herself, full of zeal for winning all Asia, as she thought, for the faith, did her best, the treasury was empty after the wars of Granada and Italy, and the heavy expense of the royal marriages then in progress.

Amidst infinite obstruction from the Council of the Indies, and with little but frowning looks from Ferdinand, Colon’s third expedition was painfully and slowly fitted out. Few adventurers were anxious to go now; and condemned criminals had to be enlisted for the service; but, withal, at length in May 1498, the Admiral sailed on his third voyage to his new land. When he arrived at his centre, the isle of Hispanola (Haiti), he found that a successful revolt of the lawless ruffians he had left behind had overturned all semblance of order and discipline. The mines were unworked, the fields untilled, the natives atrociously tortured, and violence everywhere paramount. Isabel’s verbal instructions to the Admiral when she took leave of him had been precise. Her first object, she said, was to convert the Indians to Christianity, and to carry to them from Spain, not slavery and oppression, but the gentle, Christian, virtues. This doubtless to some extent was the desire of Colon himself, with his mystic devotional soul, though wholesale slavery of natives was part of his system, and he set about his work of the reconciliation of the Indians, whose horrible sufferings had driven them to armed opposition or flight. The undisciplined Spaniards had the whip hand, and the Admiral could only with much diplomacy, and perhaps unwise concessions to them, at length bring some semblance of peace and order to the colony. But mild as his methods were on the occasion, they were bitterly resented by arrogant Spaniards, indignant that a foreigner should wield sovereign powers over them in their own Queen’s territory.

Complaints and accusations more bitter than ever came to the King and Queen by every ship. The men who returned to Spain assured Ferdinand that Colon was sacrificing every interest to his own insatiable greed; and Isabel, favourably disposed as she was to the discoverer generally, at length lost patience when she found that he was shipping cargoes of Indians to Spain to be sold for slaves. To enslave infidels was not usually held to be wrong, and Colon considered it a legitimate source of profit: but Isabel’s new subjects, mild and gentle as they were, had been looked upon by her as actual or potential Christians, and her indignation was great when she saw that Colon was treating them indifferently as chattels of his own.[^[88]] At length it was decided to send an envoy to Hispanola, with full powers to inquire into affairs and to take possession of all property and dispose of all persons in the new territories. The man chosen thus to exercise unrestrained power was Francisco de Bobadilla, probably a relative of the Queen’s great friend, Beatriz de Bobadilla, Marchioness of Moya; but in any case an intolerant tyrant, who considered it his business, as, by Ferdinand, it was probably intended to be, to degrade the Admiral in any case. With unexampled insolence and harshness, he loaded the great explorer with manacles almost as soon as he arrived in Hispanola; and then, whilst Colon lay in prison, the whole of the charges against him were raked together, and, without any attempt to sift them judicially, were embodied in an act of accusation, and sent to Spain by the same caravel as that which carried in chains the exalted visionary, whose dream had enriched Castile with a new world.

The shameful home-coming of Colon in December 1500, struck the imagination and shocked the conscience of the people; and Isabel herself was one of the first to express her indignation. She and Ferdinand were at Granada at the time, and sent to the illustrious prisoner a dignified letter of regret, ordering him at once to be released, supplied with funds, and to present himself before them. The Queen received him in her palace of the Alhambra, and as he stood before his sovereign, with his bared white head bowed in grief and shame for the insult that had eaten into his very soul,[^[89]] Isabel lost her usual calm serenity and wept, whereupon the Admiral himself broke down, and he cast himself at the foot of the throne that he had so nobly endowed. The title of Admiral was restored to him: though in his stead as Viceroy was sent out Nicolas de Ovando, with thirty-two vessels and a great company of gentlemen. But disaster overtook the fleet; and, though Ovando arrived, most of the ships and men were lost, and thenceforward Isabel’s zeal for maritime adventure grew cooler.

The cost and drain of men for the enterprise had been very great. The fame of the discovery had rung through the world, and had exalted Isabel and Castile as they had never been exalted before, but up to this period the returns in money had been insignificant, whilst the unsettling influence of the adventure upon the nation at large had been very injurious. Ferdinand, for reasons already explained, always regarded it coldly; and the loss of Ovando’s fleet seemed to prove him right. When, therefore, Colon begged for the Queen’s aid to sail with a fourth expedition early in 1502, she was unwilling to help; though she was sufficiently his friend still to prevent others from hindering him; and he sailed for the last time in March 1502, to see his patroness no more; for when he came back, two years and nine months later, broken with injustice, and with death in his heart, Isabel the Catholic was dead.

Even greater sorrows than those of America came to Isabel in her last years, troubles that stabbed her to the very heart, and from which one of the great tragedies of history grew. From Flanders came tidings of grave import for the future of the edifice so laboriously reared by Ferdinand and Isabel. The heiress of Spain, the Archduchess Joan, with her cynical, evil-minded husband, Philip the Handsome, were daily drifting further away from the influence of Joan’s parents. Dark whispers of religious backsliding on the part of the Court of Brussels were rife in the grim circle of friars and devotees that accompanied Isabel. It was said that Joan and her husband openly slighted the rigid observance of religious form considered essential in Spain, and that the freedom of thought and speech common in Flanders was more to the taste of Joan than the terror-stricken devotion of her Inquisition-ridden native land. Isabel had dedicated her strenuous life and vast ability to the unification of the faith in Spain. She had connived at cruelty unfathomable, and had exterminated whole races of her subjects with that sole object. Throughout her realms and those of her husband no heresy dared now raise its head, or even whisper doubt; and the thought that free-thinking, mocking Burgundian Philip, with his submissive wife, so alienated from her own people that she refused to send a message of loving greeting to her mother, should come and work their will upon the sacred soil of Castile, must have been torture to Isabel. To Ferdinand it must have been as bad; for it touched him, too, in his tenderest part. His life dream had been to realise the ambitions of Aragon. For that he had plotted, lied, and cheated; for that he had plundered his subjects, kept his realms at war, bartered his children and usurped his cousin’s throne. But it would be all useless if Castile slipped through his fingers when his wife died, and his deadly enemy, his son-in-law, became king of Castile in right of his wife Joan.

The difficulty became more acute when Joan gave birth to her son at Ghent in February 1500, because, according to the law of succession, the child christened Charles, a name unheard of in Spain before, would inherit, not Castile and Leon alone, but Aragon as well, with Flanders, Burgundy, Artois, Luxembourg, the Aragonese kingdoms in Italy, and, worst of all, Austria and the empire. Where would the interests of Aragon, nay, even of Spain, be amongst such world-wide dominions; and how could such a potentate devote himself either to aggrandising Aragon, or to carrying the Cross into the dark places of Moorish Africa? What added to the bitterness in Ferdinand’s case was, that Philip was even now intriguing actively with the Kings of France, Portugal, and England against Aragon; and was, with vain pretexts, evading the pressing invitations of his wife’s parents to bring her to Spain, to receive with him the oath of allegiance as heirs of the realms.

It was necessary somehow to conciliate Philip and Joan before they went too far; for Philip’s plan, to marry the infant Prince Charles to a French princess, struck at the very root of Ferdinand’s policy. Envoy after envoy was sent to Flanders to expedite the coming of Philip and Joan, if possible, with the infant Charles; but the Archduke had no intention of becoming the tool of his astute father-in-law, and was determined to be quite secure before he placed himself in his power. He was anxious enough to obtain recognition as heir of Castile jointly with his wife, but desired to leave Spain immediately afterwards, which did not suit Ferdinand, who wished to have time to influence him towards his policy, and alienate him from his Flemish and French favourites.[^[90]] Joan herself flatly refused to come without her husband; of whom, with ample reason, she was violently jealous; and neither would allow the infant Charles to come without them. At length, after Joan had been delivered of her third child, a daughter named Isabel, the prayers and promises of Queen Isabel and her husband prevailed, and the Archduke and Archduchess consented to come to Spain. But it was under conditions that turned the heart of Ferdinand more than ever against his son-in-law. They would travel to Spain through France, and ratify in Paris the betrothal of their one-year old son Charles, heir of Spain, Flanders, and the empire, with Claude of France, child of Louis XII. Philip went out of his way during the sumptuous reception in Paris to show his submission to the King of France; and even did homage to him as Count of Flanders; but Joan, mindful for once, at least, that she belonged to the house of Aragon, and was heiress of Spain, refused all tokens implying her subservience.

On the 7th May 1502, Joan and her husband entered the imperial city of Toledo with all the ceremony that Castile could supply. At the door of the great hall in the Alcazar, Isabel stood to receive her heirs. Both knelt before her and tried to kiss her hand, but the Queen raised them, and embracing her daughter, carried her off to her private chamber. Soon afterwards the Archduchess and her husband took the oath as heirs of Castile in the vast Gothic Cathedral; and the splendid festivities to celebrate the event were hardly begun before another trouble came in the announcement of the death of Arthur, Prince of Wales, husband of Isabel’s youngest daughter, Katharine. The event immediately changed the aspect of the game. The next heir of England was a boy of eleven, who might be married to a French princess, and thus cause one other blow to Ferdinand’s carefully arranged schemes. This made it more necessary than ever that Joan and Philip should be brought into entire obedience to Spanish views. War broke out between France and Spain at once, and strenuous efforts were made by Ferdinand to expel from Spain the councillors of Philip, who were known to be in the French interest.[^[91]] The Archduchess and her husband were then taken to Aragon, to receive the homage of the Cortes there as heirs of Ferdinand, and then Philip, in spite of all remonstrance, hurried back again to his own country. Isabel gravely took her son-in-law to task when he announced his intention to return to Flanders by land through France whilst Spain was at war. It was, she said, his duty to recollect, moreover, that he was, in right of his wife, heir to one of the greatest thrones in the world, and should stay at least long enough in the country to know the people and their language and customs. To her entreaties the Archduchess, now far advanced in pregnancy, and unable to travel, added her prayers and tears. But all in vain; Philip, against the respectful protest even of the Cortes, would go, and insisted upon travelling through France, the enemy of Spain.[^[92]] So, almost in flight, Philip of Burgundy crossed the frontiers of his father-in-law, leaving his wife Joan and their unborn child in Castile, in December 1502.

Never in their lives had Ferdinand and Isabel suffered such a rebuff as this. That the man, who on their death would succeed them, was a free-living German Fleming, who cared nothing for Spain, to promote whose glory they had lived and laboured so hard, was bitter enough for them. But that he should be so lost to all duty and respect towards them and to their country as to leave them thus, to rejoice with the enemy in arms against them, convinced them that under him and his wife Spain and the faith had nothing to expect but neglect and sacrifice for other interests. Isabel’s frequent conversations with her daughter Joan, during the months she had been in Spain, had more than confirmed the worst fears she had formed from the reports sent to her from Flanders. Joan, though of course a Catholic, obstinately refused to conform to the rigid ritual of Castile; and, both in acts and words, showed a strange disregard of, and, indeed, captious resistance to, her mother’s wishes. She was inconstant and fickle; sometimes determined, notwithstanding her condition, to go and rejoin her husband, sometimes docile and amiable.

It had become evident to Isabel and her husband not many weeks after Joan and Philip’s arrival, that these were no fit successors to continue the policy that was to make Spain the mistress of the world and the arbiter of the faith; and to the Cortes of Toledo, which took the oath of allegiance to Philip and his wife, it was secretly intimated that the Queen wished that, ‘if, when the Queen died, Juana was absent from the realms, or, after having come to them, should be obliged to leave them again, or that, although present, she might not choose, or might not be able to reign and govern,’[^[93]] Ferdinand should rule Castile in her name. This was a serious departure both from strict legality and from usage, and has been considered by recent commentators to indicate that, even thus early, Isabel wished to exclude her daughter from the throne, either for heresy or madness, or with that pretext. That Joan was hysterical, obstinate, and unstable, is evident from all contemporary testimony, and that she defied her mother in her own realm is clear from what followed; but it seems unnecessary to seek to draw from these facts the deduction that Isabel at this juncture meant to disinherit her daughter in any case. Philip’s flagrant flouting of what Isabel and her husband considered the best interests of Spain, and his laxity in religion, as understood in Castile, furnished ample reason for the desire on the part of Isabel, when she felt her health failing, to ensure, so far as she could do it, that the policy inaugurated by her and her husband should be continued by him after her death, instead of allowing Spain to be handed over by an absentee prince to a Flemish viceroy. The suggestion that Joan might not be able to govern, even if she was in Spain, was not unnatural, considering that her conduct, as reported to Isabel from Flanders, had certainly been strangely inconsistent, whilst her behaviour since she had arrived in Spain had not mended matters.[^[94]]

Joan gave birth in March 1503 at Alcalá de Henares to a son, who, in after years, became the Emperor Ferdinand; and immediately after the christening in Toledo Cathedral the Archduchess declared that she would stay in Spain no longer, but would join her husband in Flanders. Isabel humoured her as best she could, persuading her to accompany her from Alcalá to Segovia, on the pretext that it would be more easy to arrange there the sea voyage from Laredo. The Princess was held in semi-restraint under various excuses for a time, but at last she extracted from her mother a promise that she would let her go by sea (but not through France, with which they were still at war), when the weather should be fair, for it was still almost winter.

From Segovia the Queen took her daughter to Medina del Campo, as she said, to be nearer the sea; but there the worry of the situation threw Isabel into some sort of apoplectic fit, and for a time her life was despaired of. Ferdinand was with his successful army on the French frontier; and the physicians, in their reports to him of his wife’s illness, attribute the attacks she suffered entirely to the life that Joan was leading her. ‘The disposition of the Princess is such, that not only must it cause distress to those who love and value her so dearly, but even to a perfect stranger. She sleeps badly, eats little, and sometimes not at all, and she is very sad and thin. Sometimes she will not speak, and in this, and in some of her actions, which are as if she were distraught, her infirmity is much advanced. She will only take remedies either by entreaty and persuasion, or out of fear, for any attempt at force produces such a crisis that no one likes or dares to provoke it.’[^[95]] This trouble, the doctor adds, together with the usual constant worries of government, is breaking the Queen down entirely, and something must be done. The Secretary, Conchillos, writing at the same time, gives the same testimony. ‘The Queen,’ he says, ‘is better, but in great tribulation and fatigue with this Princess, God pardon her.’[^[96]]

Isabel soon had to travel to Segovia, after praying her daughter not to leave Medina until her father returned. But she took care to give secret instructions to the Bishop of Cordova, who had charge of Joan, ‘to detain her, if she tried to get away, as gently and kindly as possible.’ Nothing, however, short of force would suffice to prevent Joan from joining her husband, who, on his side from Flanders, constantly urged her coming, and protested against delay.[^[97]] At last Joan became so clamorous that a message was sent to her from her mother, saying that the King and herself were coming to see her at Medina, and ordering her not to attempt to leave until they arrived. Joan seems to have taken fright at this, and, horses being denied her, she attempted to escape alone and on foot from the great castle of La Mota, where she was lodged. Finding when she arrived at the outer moat that the gates were shut against her by the Bishop of Cordova, she fell into a frenzy and refused to move from the barrier where she was stayed. All that day and night, in the bitter cold of late autumn, the princess remained immovable in the open, deaf to all remonstrance and entreaty, refusing even to allow a screen of cloth to be hung for her shelter. Isabel was gravely ill at Segovia, forty miles away, but she instantly sent Joan’s uncle, Enriquez, to pacify the princess and persuade her at least to go to her rooms again. But neither he nor the powerful Jimenez, Cardinal Primate of Spain, could move her, and at last Isabel, sick as she was, had to travel to Medina, and prevailed upon her daughter again to enter the castle, where she remained on the assurance of the Queen that she should go and rejoin her husband in Flanders when the King arrived.

In the meanwhile peace was made with France, and Isabel and her husband tried their hardest to persuade Philip to send the infant Charles to Spain to replace his mother. Promise after promise was given that Charles should go to his grandparents; but Philip had no intention of entrusting his heir to Ferdinand’s tender mercies, and all the promises were broken. Isabel’s death was seen to be approaching, and already a strong Castilian party, jealous of Aragon and of the old King, was looking towards Isabel’s heiress in Flanders and drifting away from Ferdinand. The detention of Joan against her will at Medina was regarded sourly by Castilians generally, and at length the scandal had to be ended. In March 1504, the princess therefore was allowed to leave her place of detention at Medina, and after two months further delay in Laredo, took ship for Flanders, to see her mother no more.

No sooner was she safe in her husband’s territory than the plot that had long been hatching against her father came to a head. In September 1504 Philip, his father Maximilian, Louis XII., and a little later the Pope, joined in a series of leagues, from which Ferdinand was pointedly excluded. It was intended as a notice to Ferdinand, that when his wife died he would no longer be King of Spain, but only King of Aragon, unable to hold what he had grasped; and, though the wily King fell ill and was like to die at the news, he was not beaten yet, and in time to come was more than a match for all his enemies. But Isabel was sick unto death. A united orthodox Spain had been her life’s ideal. With labour untiring she and her husband had attained it, and now she saw the imminent ruin of her work through the undutifulness of her daughter’s foreign husband. It was no fault of Isabel’s, for she had been single-minded in her aims; but Ferdinand had been brought to this pass by his own overreaching cleverness. In yoking stronger powers than himself to his car he had enlisted forces that he could not control, and which were now pulling a different way from that in which he wanted to go. Those that he depended upon to be his prime instruments had been removed by death, whilst those who he had hoped to make subsidiary factors in his favour were now principals and against him.

The accumulating troubles at length, in the autumn of 1504, threw Isabel into a tertian fever, which was aggravated by the fact that Ferdinand, being also ill in bed, could not visit his wife. Isabel’s anxiety for her husband was pitiable to witness; and though her physicians assured her that he was in no danger, his absence from her bedside increased the fever and threw her into delirium. Symptoms of dropsy, and probably diabetes, since constant insatiable thirst and swelling of the limbs are mentioned as symptoms, ensued, and for three months the Queen lay gradually growing worse and worse. Rogations for her recovery were offered up in every church in Castile, but by her own wish, after a time, this was discontinued, and the heroic Queen, strong to the last, faced death undismayed, confident that she had done her best, yet humble and contrite. When the extreme unction was to be administered she exhibited a curious instance of her severe modesty, almost prudery, by refusing to allow even her foot to be uncovered to receive the sacred oil, which was applied to the silken stocking that covered the limb instead of to the flesh.

To the last she was determined that, if she could prevent it, Joan and her husband should not rule in Castile as absentee sovereigns whilst Ferdinand lived. Her will, which was signed in October, is a notable document, showing some of Isabel’s strongest characteristics. She would be buried very simply, and without the usual royal mourning, in the city of her greatest glory, the peerless Granada; ‘but if the King, my lord,’ desires to be buried elsewhere, then her body was to be laid by the side of his. Her debts were to be paid, and many alms distributed and religious benefactions founded, and all her jewels were to be given to Ferdinand, ‘that they may serve as witness of the love I have ever borne him, and remind him that I await him in a better world, and so that with this memory he may the more holily and justly live.’ What does not seem so saintly a provision was, that all the royal grants she had given, except those to her favourite Beatriz de Bobadilla, were cancelled on her death. With a firm hand she signed this will later in October 1504, providing in it also that her daughter Joan should succeed her on the throne of Castile:[^[98]] but before she died, almost indeed in the last act of her life, her fears for Spain conquered her love for her daughter. In a codicil signed on the 23rd November, three days before her death, she left to Ferdinand the governorship of Castile in the name of her daughter Joan; and enjoined him solemnly to cause the Indians of America to be brought to the faith gently and kindly, and their oppression to be redressed.

With trembling hands and streaming eyes she handed the codicil to Jimenez, solemnly entrusting him with the fulfilment of all her wishes, a trust which he obeyed far better than did her husband, and then Isabel the Catholic had done with the world. Thenceforward she was serene; eyewitnesses say as beautiful as in youth. ‘Do not weep,’ she said to her attendants, ‘for the loss of my body; rather pray for the gain of my soul.’

And so at the hour of noon, on the 26th November 1504, the greatest of Spanish queens gently breathed her last, a dignified, devout, great lady to the end. Days afterwards, when Ferdinand was busy plotting how he could oust his daughter from her heritage, the body of Isabel was carried across bleak Castile, with soaring crucifixes and swinging censers, by a great company of churchmen to far away Granada, there to lay for all time to come, under the shadow of the red palace that she had won for the cross. As the velvet hearse with the body of the Queen of Castile, dressed in death as a Franciscan nun, wound its way over the land she had made great, the wildest tempest in the memory of man roared her requiem. Earthquake, flood and hurricane, scoured the way by which the corpse was borne: skies of ink by night and day for all that three weeks’ pilgrimage lowered over the affrighted folk that accompanied the bier, convinced that heaven itself was muttering mourning for the mighty dead. But it is related that when at last Granada was reached, and the Christian mosque received the corpse of its conqueror, the glorious sun burst out at its brightest for the first time, and all the vega smiled under a stainless sky.

Isabel the Catholic was a great queen and a good woman, because her aims were high. She was not tender, or gentle, or what we should now call womanly. If she had been, she would not have made Castile one of the greatest powers in Europe in her reign of thirty years. She was not scrupulous, or she would not have been so easily persuaded to displace her niece the Beltraneja. She was not tender-hearted, or she would not have looked unmoved upon the massacre or expulsion, in circumstances of atrocious inhumanity, of Jews and Moors, to whom she broke her solemn oath upon a weak pretext. She was none of these pleasant things; nor was she the sweet, saintly housewife she is usually represented. If she had been, she would not have been Isabel the Catholic—one of the strongest personalities, and probably the greatest woman ruler the world ever saw: a woman whose virtue slander itself never dared to attack; whose saintly devotion to her faith blinded her eyes to human things, and whose anxiety to please the God of mercy made her merciless to those she thought His enemies.

BOOK II
JOAN THE MAD

On the same day (26th November 1504) that Isabel died, Ferdinand, with sorrow-stricken face, and tears coursing down his cheeks, sallied from the palace of Medina del Campo, and upon a platform hastily raised in the great square of the town, proclaimed his daughter Joan Queen of Castile, with the usual ceremony of hoisting pennons and the crying of heralds: ‘Castile, Castile, for our sovereign lady Queen Joan.’ Then the clause of the dead Queen’s will was read, giving to Ferdinand power to act as King of Castile whenever Joan was absent from Spain, or was unable or unwilling to govern, and enjoining upon Joan and her husband obedience and submission to Ferdinand. Castile was in a ferment; for all men knew that the death of the Queen opened infinite possibilities of change. The Castilian nobles, so long humbled by Isabel, dared again to hope that better times for them might come in the contending interests around the throne; and there were not a few, especially Aragonese, that counselled Ferdinand to claim the throne of Castile for himself[^[99]] by right of descent, instead of governing in his daughter’s name.

But Ferdinand’s way was always a tortuous one, and the letters from him the same night that carried to Flanders the news of his wife’s death were addressed to Joan and Philip, by the grace of God Sovereigns of Castile, Leon, Granada, Princes of Aragon, etc., etc.’; whilst every city in the realms was informed that henceforward the title of King of Castile would be borne no more by Ferdinand, but only that of Administrator for Joan.[^[100]] The step was profoundly diplomatic, for all Europe and half Spain was distrustful of Ferdinand, and the open usurpation of Castile would have been forcibly resisted. And yet, as we shall see, he intended to rule Castile; and in the end had his way. Philip and Joan, in reply to their loving father, declined to commit themselves as to Ferdinand’s proceedings, and announced their coming to take possession of their realm of Castile. They were equally cool to Ferdinand’s envoy, Fonseca, Bishop of Cordova, whom Joan had no reason to love. In the meanwhile, Cortes was convoked at Toro (January 1505) in the name of Joan; and there Ferdinand played his first card, by claiming, under the clause in Isabel’s will, the right to govern Castile until Joan should be present and demonstrate her fitness to rule.[^[101]] The nobles of Castile, already jealous of Aragon, were determined to resist this, though the Cortes agreed; and Juan Manuel, the most notable diplomatist in Castile, descended from the royal house, and Ferdinand’s deadly enemy, was sent to Philip, over whom his influence was complete, as the envoy of the Castilian nobles; thenceforward from Flanders to animate and direct the diplomatic campaign against Ferdinand.

The situation thus became daily more strained. Ferdinand’s confidential agents endeavoured to sow discord between Joan and her husband, not a difficult matter; and on one occasion the Queen, in a fit of jealousy, was persuaded by the Aragonese Secretary Conchillos to sign a letter approving of her father’s acts. The messenger to whom it was entrusted betrayed it to Philip, and Conchillos was cast into a dungeon; all Spaniards were warned away from Court, and Joan completely isolated, even from her chaplain. Thinking that in the palace of Brussels Joan was too easy of access, Philip arranged that she should be secretly removed. Whilst the Burgomaster and Councillors were discussing at dead of night in the palace the details of the secret flitting, poor Joan herself learnt what was in the wind; and being denied an interview with the Spanish bishop who attended her, she peremptorily summoned the Prince of Chimay. He dared not enter her chamber alone; but accompanied by another courtier he obeyed the Queen’s summons. They found her in a violent passion, and with difficulty escaped personal attack; with a result that, though the Queen was not immediately removed, she was thenceforward kept strictly guarded in her chambers, a prisoner.[^[102]]

When news came of the decision of the Cortes of Toro that Joan was unfit to rule, Philip prevailed upon his wife to sign a remarkable letter[^[103]] for publication in Castile. ‘Since they want in Castile to make out that I am not in my right mind, it is only meet that I should come to my senses again, somewhat; though I ought not to wonder that they raise false testimony against me, since they did so against our Lord. But, since the thing has been done so maliciously, and at such a time, I bid you (M. de Vere) speak to my father the king on my behalf, for those who say this of me are acting not only against me but against him; and people say that he is glad of it, so as to have the government of Castile, though I do not believe it, as the King is so great and catholic a sovereign and I his dutiful daughter. I know well that the King my Lord (i.e. Philip) wrote thither complaining of me in some respect; but such a thing should not go beyond father and children! especially as, if I did fly into passions and failed to keep up my proper dignity, it is well known that the only cause of my doing so was jealousy. I am not alone in feeling this passion; for my mother, great and excellent person as she was, was also jealous; but she got over it in time, and so, please God, shall I. Tell everybody there (i.e. in Castile) ... that, even if I was in the state that my enemies would wish me to be, I would not deprive the King, my husband, of the government of the realms, and of all the world if it were mine to give.’...—Brussels, 3rd May 1505.

We can see here, and in the several reports sent, that Joan had little or no control over herself. In the conflict, daily growing more bitter, between her husband and her father, she swayed from one side to another according to the influences brought to bear upon her. Her gusts of jealous rage and frenzied violence gave to both sides the excuse of calling her mad when it suited them to do so, or to declare that such temporary fits were compatible with general sanity when they wanted her sane. Joan’s affection for her husband was fierce, and monopolous, and his influence over her was great, especially when he appealed to her pride and her rights as Queen of Castile, but her sense of filial duty was also high; and whenever she understood that a measure was intended to be against her father, she indignantly refused to countenance it. Ferdinand knew that the King of France had been enlisted by Philip and Maximilian against him; and that an army was being mustered in Flanders; whilst a project was on foot for Philip to come to Castile without Joan. This he was determined to prevent; and warned his son-in-law that he would not be allowed to act as King without his wife. To this warning Philip retorted by ordering his father-in-law to leave Castile, and return to his own realm of Aragon.

In this contest poor hysterical Joan was but a cypher, with her gusts of jealous passion and her lack of fixed resolution. When she had arrived in Flanders after her detention in Spain, she had discovered that her husband, whose coolness she noted from the first, was carrying on a liaison with a lady of the court. We are told that she sought out the lady in a raving fury and seriously injured her; as well as causing all her beautiful hair, of which she was proud, to be cut off close to the scalp. This led to a violent scene between Philip and Joan, in which not only hard words but hard blows were exchanged; and Joan took to her bed, seriously ill both in body and mind. These scenes continued at intervals, either with or without good reason, but with the natural result that Philip in his relations with his father-in-law acted almost independently of his wife; who, as Ferdinand afterwards said, was really a good dutiful daughter, proud of Spain and her people.

Ferdinand had at his side at this juncture the great Cardinal Jimenez. The stern Franciscan had been no friend of the King, who had opposed his appointment as primate; but he was a patriotic Spaniard, and could not fail to see that if Flemish Philip was paramount in Spain, the work of Isabel for the faith would be in peril. Ferdinand, he knew, was an able and experienced ruler, who would not greatly change the existing system; and he threw all his powerful influence on the side of an arrangement that might leave Ferdinand real power in Castile, without entirely alienating Philip. Above all, Jimenez was determined to prevent the ambitious Castilian nobles from again dominating the government; which they hoped to do if an inexperienced foreigner like Philip took the reins. It was, indeed, quite as much a struggle between Ferdinand and Jimenez and the Castilian nobles, as between Ferdinand and his son-in-law. But Jimenez’s patriotic efforts met with little success, so far as Philip was concerned; and, in the meantime, Ferdinand, whilst ostensibly solacing himself in hunting, was quietly planning a characteristic stroke at his enemy.

He was fifty-five years of age and still robust, and he bethought himself that he might yet win the game by a second marriage. It was almost sacrilege to contemplate such a thing in the circumstances; but to Ferdinand of Aragon any crooked way was straight that led him to his goal. So he sent his natural son, Hugo de Cardona, to propose secretly to the King of Portugal that the forgotten Beltraneja should leave her convent and become Queen of Aragon, joining her claims to Castile to those of Ferdinand and ousting Joan and Philip.[^[104]] It was a wicked cynical idea, for it made Isabel a usurper; but neither the King of Portugal nor his cousin, the Beltraneja, would have anything to say to it; so Ferdinand turned towards a solution, which, if not quite so iniquitous morally, was even more inimical to the interest of Spain as a nation. This was nothing less than to outbid Philip for the friendship of the King of France, upon which he mainly depended to frustrate his father-in-law’s plans. Ferdinand had broken all his former covenants with Louis XII. The French had been turned out of Naples, and the great Gonzalo de Cordova was there as Ferdinand’s viceroy. He was a Castilian; and already Ferdinand’s spies had reported that the Castilian nobles, in union with Philip and France, were tampering with Cordova’s loyalty and endeavouring to establish the claim of Castile, instead of Aragon, to Naples. Ferdinand, with what sincerity may be supposed, rapidly patched up an alliance with Louis XII., by which the widowed King of Aragon was to marry the niece of the King of France, Germaine de Foix, a spoiled and petted young beauty of twenty-one. Any heirs of the marriage were to inherit Aragon, Sicily, and Naples; but in the case of no children being left, Naples was to be divided between France and Aragon; great concessions were made at once to the French in Naples, and a million gold crowns were to be paid by Ferdinand to France as indemnity for the late war.

This, it will be seen, quite isolated Philip, threatened again to separate Aragon and Castile, and at one blow to undo the work both of Isabel and her husband. But as Ferdinand never kept more of a treaty than suited him at the moment, it may be fairly assumed that he signed this only to bridge his present difficulty and with such mental reservation as was usual with him. When the news reached Brussels Maximilian himself was there with his son, and they at once tried their best to deal a counterstroke. When certain papers were presented to Joan for signature denouncing to the Castilian people Ferdinand’s treaty and second marriage, she stood firm in her refusal to sign. Philip exerted the utmost pressure upon his wife; but at last, worn out by his and Maximilian’s importunity, the unhappy lady burst into ungovernable rage, flinging the papers from her and crying that she would never do anything against her father. The isolation and close guard over the Queen was indeed working its natural effect upon her highly wrought nervous system; and Ferdinand’s ambassadors, who had come to announce his marriage with his French bride, and to offer terms of friendship to his son-in-law, were scandalised at the treatment of their Queen. When, after much difficulty, they were allowed to see her at the palace of Brussels it was only on condition that they should have no conversation with her.

Shortly afterwards, in September 1505, Joan was delivered of a daughter (Maria, afterwards Queen of Hungary and Governess of the Netherlands), and Philip then decided that the time had come to carry her to Castile and claim the throne. First issuing a manifesto to the Castilian nobles and towns, ordering them not to obey Ferdinand in anything, he made overtures to the King of France to allow him to pass overland to Spain. This was flatly refused. The French princess, Germaine, was now Ferdinand’s wife, and all the help that Louis XII. could give would be against Philip and Joan. It was therefore decided to make the voyage by sea, and a large fleet of sixty ships, with a retinue of three thousand persons, was mustered in one of the ports of Zeeland. In the meanwhile ceaseless intrigue went on both in Spain and abroad. France having abandoned him, Philip turned to England. Juan Manuel’s sister, Elvira, was the principal lady-in-waiting upon Katharine, Princess of Wales, and through her and Katharine secret negotiations were opened for a marriage between Henry VII. and Philip’s sister, the Archduchess Margaret, the widow of Juan, Prince of Asturias and of the Duke of Savoy, with an alliance between England and Philip—though Katharine probably did not understand at first how purely this was a move against her father. So, although Henry VII. still professed to be on Ferdinand’s side in the quarrel, he was quite ready for a secret alliance with Philip and Joan against him and the King of France.

The King and Queen of Castile left Brussels early in November to join the waiting fleet, but from the slowness of their movements and the ostentatious publicity given to them, it is clear that their first object was to prepare Castile in their favour. Philip, for a time, scouted all idea of arrangement with Ferdinand. He knew that the Castilian nobles were on his side, and that his wife’s legal right was unimpeachable. The wily old King of Aragon saw that his best policy was to temporise, and to do that he must seem strong. His first move was to declare to the Castilians that Joan was sane, but was kept a prisoner by her husband, and he proposed to send a fleet to rescue her and bring her and her son Charles to Castile. Philip’s Flemish subjects were discontented at his proposed long absence, and also threatened trouble. Then Ferdinand hinted that he would mobilise all his force to resist Philip’s landing.

This series of manœuvres delayed the departure of Philip and his wife month after month; until Ferdinand, by consummate diplomacy, managed to patch up an agreement with Philip’s ambassadors at Salamanca at the end of November; which, though on the face of it fair enough, was really an iniquitous plot for the exclusion of Joan in any circumstances. Philip and Joan were to be acknowledged by Castile as sovereigns, and their son Charles as heir; but, at the same time, Ferdinand was to be accepted as perpetual governor in his daughter’s absence: and in the case of Queen Joan being unwilling or unable to undertake the government, the two Kings, Ferdinand and Philip, were to issue all decrees and grants in their joint names. The revenues of Castile and of the Grand Masterships were to be equally divided between Philip and Ferdinand.

When once this wicked but insincere agreement was ratified there was no further need for delay, and Philip’s fleet sailed for Spain on the 8th January 1506 to engage in the famous battle of wits with his father-in-law, which only one could win. All went well until the Cornish coast was passed, and then a dead calm fell, followed by a furious south-westerly gale which scattered the ships and left that in which Philip and Joan were without any escort. To add to the trouble a fire broke out upon this vessel, and a fallen spar gave the ship such a list as to leave her almost waterlogged. Despair seized the crew, and all gave themselves up for lost. Philip played anything but an heroic part. His attendants dressed him in an inflated leather garment, upon the back of which was painted in staring great letters, ‘The King, Don Philip,’ and thus arrayed, he knelt before a blessed image in prayer, alternating with groans, expecting every moment would be his last. Joan does not appear to have lost her head. She is represented by one contemporary authority[^[105]] as being seated on the ground between her husband’s knees, saying that if they went down she would cling so closely to him that they should never be separated in death, as they had not been in life. The Spanish witnesses are loud in her praise in this danger. ‘The Queen,’ they say, ‘showed no signs of fear, and asked them to bring her a box with something to eat. As some of the gentlemen were collecting votive gifts to the Virgin of Guadalupe, they passed the bag to the Queen, who, taking out her purse containing about a hundred doubloons, hunted amongst them until she found the only half-doubloon there, showing thus how cool she was in the danger. A king never was drowned yet, so she was not afraid, she said.’[^[106]]

At length, mainly by the courage and address of one sailor, the ship was righted, the fire extinguished, and the vessel brought into the port of Weymouth on the 17th January 1506. Henry VII. of England had been courted and conciliated by Philip for some time past, but it was a dangerous temptation to put in the wily Tudor’s way to enable him to make his own terms for an alliance. Above all, he wanted to get into his power the rebel Earl of Suffolk, who was in refuge in Flanders, and this seemed his opportunity. Philip had had enough of the sea for a while. We are assured by one who was there that he was ‘fatigate and unquyeted in mynde and bodie,’ and he yearned to tread firm land again. His councillors urged him to take no risk, but Philip and Joan landed at Melcombe Regis to await a fair wind for sailing again. From far and near the west country gentry flocked down with their armed bands, ready for war or peace, but when they found that the royal visitors were friendly their hospitality knew no bounds. Sir John Trenchard would take no denial. The King and Queen must rest in his manor-house hard by until the weather mended; and, in the meanwhile, swift horses carried the news to King Henry in London.

As may be supposed, when he heard the news, ‘he was replenyshed with exceeding gladnes ... for that he trusted it should turn out to his profit and commodity,’ which it certainly did. But Philip grew more and more uneasy at the pressing nature of the Dorsetshire welcome. The armed bands grew greater, and though the weather improved, Trenchard would not listen to his guests going on board until the King of England had a chance of sending greeting to his good brother and ally. At length Philip and Joan realised that they were in a trap, and had to make the best of it, which they did with a good grace, for they were welcomed by Henry with effusive professions of pleasure. Philip was conveyed with a vast cavalcade of gentlemen across England to Windsor, where he was met by Henry and his son, the betrothed of Katharine, Joan’s sister. Then the King of Castile was led to London and to Richmond with every demonstration of honour. But, withal, it was quite clear that Henry would not let his visitors go until they had subscribed to his terms, whatever they might be. And so the pact was solemnly sworn upon a fragment of the true cross in Saint George’s Chapel, Windsor, by Philip and Henry, by which Suffolk was to be surrendered to his doom, Philip’s sister Margaret, with her fat dowry, was to be married to the widowed old Henry, and England was bound to the King of Castile against Ferdinand of Aragon.

Joan was deliberately kept in the background during her stay in England. She had followed her husband slowly from Melcombe, and arrived at Windsor ten days later, the day after Philip, with great ceremony, had been invested with the Order of the Garter and had signed the treaty. On her arrival at Windsor on the 10th February she saw her sister Katharine, though not alone, and Katharine left the next day to go to Richmond. Three days later, on the 14th February, Joan set out from Windsor again towards Falmouth, whilst Philip joined Henry at Richmond; and soon after the King of Castile was allowed to travel into the west and once more take ship for his wife’s kingdom. The cynical exclusion of Joan from all participation in the treaty with England,[^[107]] and the fact that she was only allowed to see her sister once, and in the presence of witnesses in the interests of Philip, seems to prove that she was purposely kept in the dark as to the real meaning of the treaty, which was directed almost as much against herself as against her father, because, with England on his side, Philip could always paralyse France from interfering with him in Spain; and it is clear that, whether Joan was really incapacitated at the time or not, both Ferdinand and Philip had already determined to make out that she was.

Like a pair of wary wrestlers the two opponents still played at arms’ length. Ferdinand, after celebrating his second marriage—as he had celebrated his first, nearly forty years before—at Valladolid, awaited at Burgos, so as to be near on arrival of his daughter and her husband at one of the Biscay ports, as was expected. But nothing was further from Philip’s thoughts than to land at any place near where Ferdinand was waiting. His idea was to go to Andalucia, so as to be able to march through Spain before meeting the old King, and to gather friends and partisans on the way. Contrary winds, however, drove the fleet into Corunna, on the extreme north-west of the Peninsula, on the 26th April; and Ferdinand, when he got the news, for a moment lost his smooth self-control, and was for flying at his undutiful son-in-law sword in hand. But the outbreak was not of long duration, for the circumstances were serious, and needed all the great astuteness of which Ferdinand was capable. He was determined to rule Castile whilst he lived for the benefit of his great Aragonese aims.

He had, indeed, some cause for complaint against fortune; for, with the exception of the kingdom of Naples, he had not yet gathered the harvest that he had reckoned upon as the result of the union of the realms. His son-in-law, now that, by the death of other heirs, Joan had become Queen of Castile, was an enemy instead of an ally, and his defection had rendered necessary the pact between Ferdinand and France, which had stultified much of the advantage previously gained by the Castilian connection. At any cost Castile must be held, or all would be lost. If Joan herself took charge of the government, as was her right, then goodbye to the hope of Ferdinand employing for his own purposes the resources of Castile; for around her would be jealous nobles hating Aragon; whereas, with Philip as King, it was certain that his imprudence, his ignorance of Spain, and the Castilian distrust of foreigners, would soon provoke a crisis that might give Ferdinand his chance. Both opponents, therefore, were equally determined to keep Joan away from active sovereignty, whatever her mental state; and as Philip and his wife rode through Corunna, smiling and debonair, gaining friends everywhere, but surrounded with armed foreigners, German guards, archers, and the like, strange to Spaniards, as if in an enemy’s country, the plot thickened between the two antagonists.

Everywhere Philip took the lead, and Joan was treated as a consort.[^[108]] In the verses of welcome it was Don Philip’s name that came first; and Joan showed her discontent at the position in which she was placed by refusing to confirm the privileges of the cities through which they passed until she had seen her father, though Philip promised readily to do so. No sooner did Philip find himself supported by the northern nobles, than he announced that he would not be bound by the treaty of Salamanca, and generally gave Ferdinand to understand that he, Philip, alone, intended to be master. Ferdinand travelled forward to meet his son-in-law, making desperate attempts at conciliation and to win Juan Manuel to his side, but without success: whilst Philip tarried on the way and exhausted every means of delay in order to gain strength before the final struggle. To Philip’s insulting messages Ferdinand returned diplomatic answers; in the face of Philip’s scornful rejection of advances, Ferdinand was amiable, conciliatory, almost humble; he who, with the great Isabel, had been master of Spain for well nigh forty years. But he must have chuckled under his bated breath and whispering humbleness, for he knew that he was going to win, and he knew how he was going to do it.

Slowly Ferdinand travelled towards the north-west, sending daily embassies to Philip soliciting a friendly interview, and at every stage, as he came nearer, his son-in-law grew in arrogance. When Ferdinand left Astorga in the middle of May, Juan Manuel sent a message to him that if he wished to see the King of Castile, he must understand three things: first, that no business would be discussed; second, that Philip must have stronger forces than he; and third, that he must not expect that he would be allowed to obtain any advantage by, or through, his daughter, Queen Joan, as they knew where that would lead them to. Therefore, continued Manuel, King Ferdinand had better not come to Santiago at all. In the meanwhile the inevitable discord was brewing in the Court of Joan and Philip at Corunna. The proud Castilian nobles, greedy and touchy, who had flocked to Philip’s side, found that Flemings and Germans always stood between them and the throne, and intercepted the favours for which they hungered. The Teutons, who thought they were coming to Spain to lord over all, found a jealous nobility and a nation convinced of its own heaven-sent superiority, ready to resist to the death any encroachment of foreigners, whom they regarded with hate and scorn.

The Castilians deplored most the isolation of Joan, and endeavoured by a hundred plans to persuade her to second her husband’s action towards her father. Philip ceased now even to consult her, since she had refused to oppose Ferdinand; and in the pageantry of the entrance into Santiago and the triumphal march through Galicia, with a conquering army rather than a royal escort, Joan, in deepest black garments and sombre face, passed like a shadow of death. As the Kings gradually approached each other, Ferdinand, in soft words, begged Philip to let him know what alterations he desired to make in the agreement of Salamanca. After much fencing, Philip replied that if his father-in-law would send Cardinal Jimenez with full powers, he would try to arrange terms. The great point, he wrote, was that of Queen Joan; and the King of Aragon knew full well that upon this point the issue between him and Philip would be joined. Ferdinand had little love or trust in the great Castilian Cardinal, Jimenez, though the latter was faithful to him, not for his own sake, but for the good of Spain; but the Cardinal went to Philip with full powers, and bearing a private letter, saying that, as Joan was incapacitated from undertaking the government, Ferdinand besought Philip to join and make common cause with him, in order to prevent her, either of her own accord or by persuasion of the nobles, from seizing the reins. This was the line upon which Philip was pleased to negotiate, and Cardinal Jimenez found a ready listener. Ferdinand, however, was ready with the other alternative solution if this failed. If Philip would not join with him to exclude Joan, he would join Joan to exclude Philip, and all preparations were quietly made to muster his adherents at Toro, make a dash for Benavente, the place where Philip was to stay, rescue Joan, and govern, with her or in her name, to the exclusion of foreigners.[^[109]] But it was unnecessary. Jimenez’s persuasion and Ferdinand’s supple importunity conquered; and, though with infinite distrust and jealousy on all sides, the Kings still slowly approached each other, stage by stage, whilst the negotiations went on.

The Teutons and Castilians were at open loggerheads now; Queen Joan, reported Jimenez, was more closely guarded and concealed than ever, and Philip less popular in consequence. But, at length, the two rival Kings, on the 20th June 1506, found themselves in neighbouring villages; and on that day at a farmhouse half-way between Puebla and Asturianos they met. Ferdinand, in peaceful guise, was attended only by the Duke of Alba and the gentlemen of his household, not more than two hundred in all, mostly mounted on mules and unarmed; whilst Philip came in warlike array with two thousand pikemen and hundreds of German archers in strange garments and outlandish headgear, whilst the flanks of his great company of nobles were protected by a host of Flemish troops. When Philip approached his father-in-law, with steel mail beneath his fine silken doublet, and surrounded by armed protectors, it was seen that his face was sour and frowning, whilst Ferdinand, almost alone and quite unarmed, came smiling and bowing low at every step. When the Castilian nobles came forward one by one shamefacedly, to kiss the hand of the old monarch they had betrayed, Ferdinand’s satiric humour had full play, and many a sly thrust pierced their breasts, for all their hidden armour. After a few empty polite words between the Kings the conference was at an end, and each returned the way he came; Ferdinand more than ever chagrined that he had not been allowed even to see his daughter.

For the next few days the Kings travelled along parallel roads towards Benavente; Philip continuing to treat his father-in-law as an intruder in the most insulting fashion. At length their roads converged at a small village called Villafafila, at the time when the long discussed agreement had been settled by their respective ministers; and here, in the village church, the two rivals finally met to sign their treaty of peace on the 27th June 1506. It was a hellish compact, and it sealed the fate of unhappy Joan whatever might happen. Ferdinand came, as he said, with love in his heart and peace in his hands, only anxious for the happiness of his ‘beloved children,’ and of the realm that was theirs: and, after warmly embracing Philip, he led him towards the little village church to sign and swear to the treaty. With them, amongst others, were Don Juan Manuel and Cardinal Jimenez, and when the treaty was signed and the church cleared, the great churchman took the arm of Manuel, and whispered, ‘Don Juan, it is not fitting that we should listen to the talk of our masters. Do you go out first, and I will serve as porter.’ And there alone, in the humble house of prayer, the two Kings made the secret compact which explains the treaty they had just publicly executed. In appearance Ferdinand gave up everything. He was, it is true, to have half the revenues from the American discoveries, and to retain much plunder from the royal Orders and other grants of money, but he surrendered completely all share and part in the government of Castile, and allied himself to Philip for offence and defence against the world.

The secret deed, the outcome of that sinister private talk between two cruel scoundrels in the village church, allows us to guess, in conjunction with what followed, the reason for Ferdinand’s meek renunciation of the government. ‘As the Queen Joan on no account wishes to have anything to do with any affair of government or other things; and, even if she did wish it, it would cause the total loss and destruction of these realms, having regard to her infirmities and passions, which are not described here for decency’s sake’; and then the document provides that, ‘if Joan of her own accord, or at the instance of others, should attempt to interfere in the government or disturb the arrangement made between the two Kings, they will join forces to prevent it.’ ‘And so we swear to God our Lord, to the Holy Cross, and the four saintly evangelists, with our bodily hands placed upon His altar.’ And the two smiling villains came out hand in hand, both contented; each of them sure that the best of the evil bargain lay with him, and Ferdinand made preparations for departure to his own Aragon, and so to his realm of Naples and Sicily, delighted that his ‘beloved children’ should peacefully reign over the land of Castile.

It was more than two years and a half since Ferdinand had seen his daughter Joan. During that time both he and Philip had alternately declared she was quite sane and otherwise, as suited their plans. Now both were agreed, not only that she did not wish to govern her country: but that if ever she did wish, or Castilians wished for her to do so, then her ‘passions and infirmities,’ so vaguely referred to, would make her rule disastrous. It ensured Philip being King of Castile so long as he lived, and Ferdinand being master if he survived, and until the majority of his grandson Charles. There is no reason to deny that Joan was wayward, morbid, and eccentric; subject to fits of jealous rage at certain periods or crises, and that subsequently she developed intermittent lunacy. But at this time, according to all accounts, she was not mad in a sense that justified her permanent exclusion from the throne that belonged to her. Philip, heartless, ambitious, and vain, wished to rule Castile alone, according to Burgundian methods, which were alien to Spain and to the Queen. Ferdinand knew that, in any case, such an attempt could not succeed for long; and by permanently excluding Joan he secured for himself the reversion practically for the rest of his life. And so Joan was pushed aside and wronged by those whose sacred duty it was to protect and cherish her, and as Joan the Mad she goes down to all posterity.

But old Ferdinand had not yet shot his last bolt, for symmetry and completeness in his villainy was always his strong point. On the very day that the secret compact was signed, he came again to that humble altar of Villafafila, accompanied this time only by those faithful Aragonese friends who would have died for him, Juan Cabrero, who had befriended Colon, and his secretary, Almazan. Before these he swore and signed a declaration that Philip had come in great force whilst he had none, and had by intimidation and fear compelled him to sign a deed so greatly to the injury of his own daughter. He swore now that he had only done so to escape his peril, and never meant that Joan should be deprived of her liberty of action: on the contrary, he intended when he could to liberate her and restore to her the administration of the realm that belonged to her: and he solemnly denounced and repudiated the former oath he had just taken on the same altar. And then, quite happy in his mind, Ferdinand the Catholic went on his way, having left heavily bribed all the men who surrounded doomed Philip, including even the all-powerful favourite Juan Manuel.

Philip lost no time. Before Ferdinand had got beyond Tordesillas, a courtier reached him from his son-in-law giving him news of Joan’s anger and passion when she learnt that she was pushed aside and was not to see her father. What would Ferdinand recommend? asked Philip. But the old King was not to be caught; he would not be cajoled into giving his consent to Joan being shut up, but he sent a long sanctimonious rigmarole enjoining harmony, but meaning nothing. Philip then appealed to the nobles one by one, asking them to sign a declaration assenting to Joan’s confinement. The Admiral of Castile, Ferdinand’s cousin, led a strong opposition to this, and demanded a personal interview with the Queen to which Philip consented, and the Admiral and Count Benavente went to the fortress of Murcientes, where Joan and her husband were staying. At the door of the chamber stood Garcilaso de la Vega, a noble in Philip’s interest, and Cardinal Jimenez was just inside; whilst in a window embrasure in the darkened room sat the Queen alone, garbed in black with a hood which nearly obscured her face. She rose as Admiral Enriquez approached, and with a low curtsey, asked him if he came from her father. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘I left him yesterday at Tudela on his way to Aragon.’ ‘I should so much have liked to see him,’ sighed poor Joan; ‘God guard him always.’ For many hours that day and the next the noble spoke to the Queen, saying how important it was to the country that she should agree well with her husband, and take part in the government that belonged to her. He reported afterwards that in all these conferences she never gave a random answer.

The Admiral was too important a person to be slighted, and Philip was forced to listen to some plain warnings from him. He must not venture to go to Valladolid without the Queen, or ill would come of it: the people were jealous already, and if Joan was shut up their fears would be confirmed. So Joan was borne by her husband’s side to Valladolid in state, though her face was set in stony sorrow beneath the black cowl that shrouded it. Near there one other interview took place between the two kings with much feigned affection, but no result as regards Joan. On the 10th July 1506, Joan and her husband rode through the city of Valladolid with all the pomp of Burgundy and Spain. Two banners were to be carried before the royal pair, but Joan knew she alone was Queen of Castile, and insisted that one should be destroyed before she would start. She was mounted upon a white jennet, housed in black velvet to match her own sable robes, and a black hood almost covered her face.[^[110]] Shows, feasts and addresses were arranged for their reception, but they rode straight through the crowded, flower-decked streets without staying to witness them; and this joyous entry, we are told by an eyewitness, meant to be so gay, was blighted by an all-pervading gloom, as of some great calamity to come.

On the following day the Cortes took the oath of allegiance to Joan as Queen, and to Philip only as consort, and she personally insisted upon seeing the powers of the deputies. The ceremonies over, Philip came to business. Great efforts were made to persuade the Cortes to consent to Joan’s confinement and Philip’s personal rule; and Jimenez did his best to get the custody of her.[^[111]] But the stout Admiral Enriquez stood in the way, and insisted that this iniquity should not be, so that Philip was obliged to put up with the position of administrator for his wife, since he could not be King in her stead. Flemings, Germans and Castilians, in the meanwhile, vied with each other in rapacity. Philip was free enough with the money of others, but even he had to go out hunting by stealth to escape importunity when he had given away all he had to give and more. But of all the greedy crew there was none so rapacious as Juan Manuel, little of body but great of mind, who, like the Marquis of Villena forty years before, grabbed with both hands insatiate. Fortresses, towns, pensions, assignments of national revenue, nothing came amiss to Manuel, and at last his covetous eyes were cast upon the fortress-palace of Segovia, still in the keeping of that stout Andrés Cabrera and his wife, Beatriz de Bobadilla, Marchioness of Moya, the lifelong friend of the great Isabel. Philip gave an order that the Alcazar of Segovia was to be surrendered to Manuel. Surrender the Alcazar! after fifty years of keeping! No, forsooth, said big-hearted Dona Beatriz; only to Queen Joan will we give the fortress that her great mother entrusted to our keeping.

And so it happened that Philip, with Joan still in black by his side, rode out of Valladolid in August towards Segovia, to demand the fortress from its keeper. When the cavalcade reached Cogeces, half way to Segovia, Joan would go no further. They were taking her to Segovia, she cried, to imprison her in the Alcazar, and she threw herself from her horse writhing upon the ground, and refused to stir another step on the way. The prayers and threats of Philip and his councillors, whom she hated, were worse than useless, and all that night she rode hither and thither across country refusing to enter the town. When the morning came Philip learnt that Cabrera had surrendered the Alcazar of Segovia to Manuel; and as there was no reason now for going thither, they rode back to Burgos. As they travelled through Castile, brows grew darker and hearts more bitter at this fine foreign gallant with his fair face and his gay garments, who kept the Queen of Castile in durance in her own realms, and packed his friends and foreign pikemen in all the strong castles of the land. When Burgos was reached on the 7th September, Philip deepened the discontent by ordering the immediate departure of the wife of the Constable of Castile, an Enriquez by birth, and consequently a cousin of Ferdinand, in order that Joan should have no relative near her, although they lodged in the Constable’s palace. The Admiral of Castile and the Duke of Alba were also attacked by Philip, who demanded their fortresses as pledges of loyalty; and soon all Castile was in a ferment, clamouring for the return of the old King Ferdinand, and the liberation of their Queen Joan.

The King, not content with conferring upon his favourite Manuel the Alcazar of Segovia, now entrusted to his keeping the castle of Burgos, where it was determined to celebrate the surrender by entertaining Philip at a banquet. After the feast the King was taken ill of a malignant fever, it was said, caused by indulgence or over-exercise, and Philip lay ill for days in raging delirium. Joan, dry-eyed and cool, never left his side, saying little, but attending assiduously to the invalid. At one o’clock on the 25th September 1506 Philip I., King of Castile, breathed his last, in his twenty-eighth year: but yet Joan, without a tear or a tremor, still stayed by his side, deaf to all remonstrance and condolence, to all appearance unmoved. She calmly gave orders that the corpse of her husband should be carried in state to the great hall of the Constable’s palace upon a splendid catafalque of cloth of gold, the body clad in ermine-lined robes of rich brocade, the head covered by a jewelled cap, and a magnificent diamond cross upon the breast. A throne had been erected at the end of the hall, and upon this the corpse was arranged, seated as if in life. During the whole of the night the vigils for the dead were intoned by friars before the throne, and when the sunlight crept through the windows the body, stripped of its incongruous finery, was opened and embalmed and placed in a lead coffin, from which, for the rest of her life, Joan never willingly parted.[^[112]]

Joan, in stony immobility, dazed and silent, gave no indication that she understood the tremendous importance of her husband’s death; but courtiers and nobles, Castilians and Teutons alike, did not share her insensibility. Dismay fell upon the rapacious crew, fierce denunciations of poison,[^[113]] scrambling for such plunder as could be grasped,[^[114]] and dread apprehensions as to what would happen to them all when the King of Aragon should return. Joan had to be forcibly removed from the corpse; and for days remained shut up in a darkened room without speaking, eating, or undressing. When, at length, she learnt that the coffin had been carried to the Cartuja de Miraflores, near Burgos, she insisted upon going thither, and ordered an immense number of new mourning garments fashioned like nun’s weeds. Arriving at the church, she heard mass, and then caused the coffin to be raised from the vault and broken open, the cerecloths removed from the head and feet, which she kissed and fondled until she was persuaded to return to Burgos, on the promise that the coffin should be kept open for her to visit it when she pleased; which she did thenceforward every few days whilst it remained there.

The Flemish chronicler, whom I have quoted several times, gives a curious description of Joan’s jealous amorous obsession for her husband. Philip is represented as being libidinous to the last degree, as well as being the handsomest man of his time; whilst Joan herself is praised for her beauty, grace, and delicacy. ‘The good Queen fell into such jealousy that she could never get free from it, until at last it became a bad habit which reached amorous delirium, and excessive and irrepressible rage, from which for three years she got no repose or ease of mind; as if she was a woman possessed or distraught.... She was so much troubled at the conduct of her husband that she passed her life shut up alone, avoiding the sight of all persons but those who attended upon and gave her food. Her only wish was to go after her husband, whom she loved with such vehemence and frenzy, that she cared not whether her company was agreeable to him or not. When she returned to Spain, she would not rest until all the ladies that had come with them were sent home, or she threatened to make a public scandal. So far did she carry this mania, that it ended by her having no woman near her but a washerwoman, whom, at any hour that seized her caprice, she made to wash the clothes in her presence. In this state, without any women attendants, she kept close to her husband, serving herself like a poor, miserable woman. Even in the country she did not leave him, and went by his side, followed sometimes by ten thousand men, but not one person of her own sex.’[^[115]]

The frantic jealousy of her husband during life, together with the knowledge that he was determined to confine her as a lunatic, whilst ruling her kingdom at his will, turned into gloomy misanthropy and rebellion at her fate at his death; and her refusal to sign the formal documents presented to her as Queen in the first days of her widowhood, made evident to the few nobles who kept their heads that some sort of government would have to be improvised, pending the return of Ferdinand from Naples. Juan Manuel, fiercely hated by every one, kept in the background; only hoping to save his life and some of his booty; but the stern old man in his coarse grey frock, to whom money and possessions were nothing, though, next to the Pope, he was the richest churchman in Christendom, Cardinal Jimenez, who perhaps was not taken by surprise by the opportune disappearance of Philip, had everything ready, even before the King died, for the establishment of a provisional government; and on the day of the death a meeting of all the nobles and deputies in Burgos confirmed the arrangements he had made. All parties of nobles were represented upon the governing council; but Jimenez himself was president, and soon became autocrat by right of his ability. Order was temporarily guaranteed, and all the members, in a self-denying ordinance, undertook not to try to obtain possession of the Queen or of her younger son, Ferdinand, who was in Simancas Castle,[^[116]] the elder, Charles, being in Flanders. Joan, sunk in lethargy, refused to sign the decrees summoning Cortes; and the latter were irregularly convoked by the government. But when they were assembled, carefully chosen under Jimenez’s influence in favour of Ferdinand, Joan would not receive the members, until, under pressure, she did so only to tell them to go home and not meddle with government any more without her orders. Thus with a provisional government, whose mandate expired with the year 1506, a Queen who refused to rule, and already anarchy and rebellion rife in the South, Castilians could only pray for the prompt return of King Ferdinand, who, but a few short weeks before, had been expelled with every circumstance of insult and ignominy the realm he had ruled so long.

No entreaty could prevail upon Joan to fulfil any of the duties of government. Her father would see to everything, she said, when he returned; all her future work in the world was to pray for the soul of her husband, and guard his dead body. On Sunday, 19th December 1506, after mass at the Cartuja, Joan announced her intention of carrying the body for sepulture in the city of Granada, near the grave of the great Isabel, in accordance with Philip’s last wish.[^[117]] The steppes of Castile in the depth of winter are as bleak and inhospitable as any tract in Europe. For scores of miles over tableland and mountain the snow lay deep, and the bitter blast swept murderously. The Queen cared for nothing but the drear burden that she carried upon the richly bedizened hearse; and with a great train of male servitors, bishops, churchmen, and choristers, she started on her pilgrimage on the 20th December.[^[118]] The nights were to be passed in wayside inns or monasteries, and at each night’s halt the grisly ceremony was gone through of opening the coffin that the Queen might fondle and kiss the dead lips and feet of what had been her husband. At one point on the way, when after nightfall the cortège entered the courtyard of the stopping place, Joan learnt that, instead of being a monastery for men, it was a convent of nuns. Instantly her mad jealousy of women flared up, and she peremptorily ordered the coffin to be carried out of the precincts. Through the crude winter’s night Joan and her attendants kept their vigil in the open field over the precious dust of Philip the Handsome, until daylight enabled them to go again upon their dreary way. Such experiences as this could not be long continued, for Joan was far advanced in pregnancy; and when she arrived at Torquemada, only some thirty miles from her starting-place, the indications of coming labour warned her that she could go no further; and here, on the 14th January 1507, her youngest child, Katharine, was born.

There is no doubt whatever that Joan was throughout carefully watched by the agents of her father and Jimenez; and that, although ostensibly a free agent, any attempt on her part to act independently or enter into a political combination would have promptly checked. Her mental malady was certainly not minimised by her father or his agents; who were as anxious to keep her in confinement now as her husband had been. Nevertheless, when every deduction has been made, it is indisputable that in her morbid condition it might have been disastrous to the country to have allowed her to exercise full political power at this time, even if she had consented to do so; though if Ferdinand had not been, as he was, solely moved by his own interests, the unhappy woman might after his arrival have been associated with him in the government, and have retained, at least, her personal liberty and ostensible sovereignty.

Jimenez, in the meanwhile, kept his hand firmly on the helm of State. The great military orders, of which Ferdinand was perpetual Grand Master, were at his bidding, and enabled him to hold the nobles in check,[^[119]] as well as the Flemish party, which claimed for the Emperor Maximilian the regency of Castile as representing the dead King’s son Charles. The great Cardinal, far stronger than any other man in Spain, thus kept Castile from anarchy until the arrival of Ferdinand in July 1508. His methods were, of course, arbitrary and unconstitutional; for the Queen either would not, or was not allowed to, do anything; but, at least, Jimenez governed in this time of supreme crisis, as he did at a crisis even more acute on the death of Ferdinand eight years later: and when Ferdinand eventually came from Naples everything was prepared for him to govern Castile as he listed for the ends of Aragon.

So far Ferdinand had triumphed both at home and abroad. The death of Philip made it necessary for Henry of England to change his attitude and court the friendship of the King of Spain. Katharine of Aragon, the neglected and shamefully treated widowed Princess of Wales, once more found her English father-in-law all smiles and amiability. To please him further she consented to try to bring about a marriage between Henry VII., recently a widower by the death of Queen Elizabeth of York, and poor Joan, languishing by her dead husband’s side at Torquemada. The proposal was a diabolical one; for Joan’s madness and morbid attachment to her husband’s memory had been everywhere proclaimed from the housetops: but Katharine of Aragon made no scruple at urging such a match, in order to improve her own position in England. Ferdinand gently dallied with the foul proposal. It was a good opportunity for gaining some concession as to the payment of Katharine’s long overdue dowry, without which Henry threatened to break off her match with his son and heir. So Ferdinand wrote in March 1507 from Naples, praying that the proposal to marry Joan should be kept very secret until he arrived in Spain, or Joan ‘might do something to prevent it’; but if she ever married again he promised that it should be to no one but to his good brother of England.

Whatever may have been Ferdinand’s real intention, and it would appear very unlikely that he would have permitted so grasping a potentate as Henry Tudor to gain a footing, as regent or otherwise, in Castile, his agent in England was quite enamoured of this plan for getting Joan out of the way in Spain. ‘No king in the world,’ he wrote on the 15th April 1507, ‘would make so good a husband (as Henry VII.) for the Queen of Castile, whether she be sane or insane. She might recover her reason when wedded to such a husband; but even in that case King Ferdinand would, at all events, be sure to retain the Regency of Castile. On the other hand, if the insanity of the Queen should prove incurable, it would perhaps be not inconvenient that she should live in England. The English do not seem to mind her insanity much; especially as it is asserted that her mental malady will not prevent child-bearing.[^[120]]

Whilst Katharine in England was, as she says, ‘baiting’ Henry VII. for her own benefit with the tempting morsel of the marriage with Joan, and the King of France was offering the hand of a French prince, the Queen of Castile remained in lethargic isolation at Torquemada, though the plague raged through the summer in the over-crowded village. Joan had been told by some roguish friar that Philip would come to life again there, and she obstinately stayed on in the face of danger; saying when she was urged to go to the neighbouring city of Palencia, where there was more accommodation, that it was not meet that a widow should be seen in public, and the only move she would consent to make was to a small place called Hornillos, a few miles from Torquemada, in April.[^[121]] She spoke little, and with the exception of listening to music, of which she was fond, she had no amusement; but it is evident from at least one incident that, however strange her conduct might be, she was not deprived entirely of her reason. Jimenez had obtained from her a decree dismissing all the Councillors appointed by Philip. These favourites of her husband were naturally furious, and demanded audience of the Queen at Hornillos. They were received by her in the church where the corpse of Philip was deposited. ‘Who put you into the Council?’ she asked them. ‘We were appointed by a decree issued and signed by your Highness,’ they replied. An angry exchange of words then took place, and Joan, turning to the Marquis of Villena,[^[122]] who was behind her, told him that it was his smartness that brought such affront as this upon her. Then she declared in a resolute tone that it was her wish that every one should return to the office or position he held before she and her husband landed in Spain; so that when King Ferdinand arrived he should find everything as it used to be in his time. This, of course, was a victory for Ferdinand’s party, but it is clear that Joan knew what she was talking about on this occasion.[^[123]]

At length, in the early autumn of 1507, came the happy news that King Ferdinand had landed at Valencia; and, accompanied by a large force, was entering Castile; being generally welcomed by nobles and people.[^[124]] As soon as Joan learnt that her father had entered her realm, she caused a Te Deum to be sung in the church of Hornillos, and set forth to receive him, carrying always the corpse of her husband, and travelling only by night, as was now her custom. At a small place called Tortoles, about twenty-five miles beyond Valladolid, father and daughter met. The King approached, surrounded and followed by great crowds of nobles and prelates. He was met at the door of the house by Joan, attended by her half-sister and the Marchioness of Denia; and as he doffed his cap she threw back the black hood which she wore as a Flemish widow, and bared the white coif with which her hair was covered. Casting herself upon her knees she sought to kiss her father’s hand; but he also knelt and embraced her tenderly; leading her afterwards by the hand into the house. Every sign of dutiful submission was given by Joan to her father; and after several long private conferences between them, Ferdinand announced that she had delegated to him the government of Castile.

JOAN THE MAD WITH THE UNBURIED BODY OF HER HUSBAND.
After a Painting by Pradilla.

A few days afterwards the whole court moved to another small place, called Santa Maria del Campo, a few miles nearer Burgos, Joan, as usual, travelling by night, accompanied by the coffin; and here, at Santa Maria, the grand anniversary funeral service for Philip was celebrated (25th September 1507), and Jimenez received the Cardinal’s hat, though Joan would not allow that joyous ceremony, as she said, to be held in the church that held her husband’s remains. With infinite trouble Ferdinand at length persuaded his daughter to accompany him to a larger town, where more comfort could be obtained, and in early October they set forth, Ferdinand travelling by day and Joan by night. Suddenly, however, Joan guessed that they were taking her to Burgos, that dreadful city where Philip had died. No consideration would induce her to go another step in that direction; and she took up her residence at Arcos, a few miles away, whilst Ferdinand established himself at Burgos with his young French wife, whom Joan received politely.

At Arcos Joan, with her two children, Ferdinand and Katharine, lived her strange, solitary life for eighteen months, broken only when Ferdinand, going in July 1508 to reduce Andalusia to order, decided to take his favourite little grandson and namesake with him. Joan flew into a fury when she learnt that her child was to be taken from her; and there is no doubt that the disturbance thus caused aggravated her malady for a time, although it is said that she forgot the boy in a few days. A curious idea of her life at Arcos is given in a letter sent on the 9th October 1508 by the Bishop of Malaga, her confessor, to the King. ‘As I wrote before, since your Highness left, the Queen has been quiet, both in word and action; and she has not injured or abused any one. I forgot to say that since then she has not changed her linen, nor dressed her hair, nor washed her face. They tell me also that she always sleeps on the ground, as before.’ There follow some medical details, from which the Bishop draws the conclusion that the Queen would not live long. ‘It is not meet,’ he says, ‘that she should have the management of her own person, as she takes so little care of herself. Her lack of cleanliness in her face, and they say elsewhere, is very great, and she eats with the plates on the floor, and no napkin. She very often misses hearing mass, because she is breakfasting at the hour it is celebrated, and there is no opportunity of her hearing it before noon.’[^[125]]

Before leaving to suppress the revolt in Andalucia, Ferdinand took effective measures to prevent Joan from being made a tool of faction. He had tried without success to prevail upon her to remove to the remote town of Tordesillas, on the river Douro, where there was a commodious castle-palace fit for her habitation, and the climate was good; but he posted around Arcos strong forces, commanded by faithful partisans, with orders that if the Queen at last gave way to the persuasion of her attendants, and removed to Tordesillas, the troops were to guard her just as closely and secretly there. But Joan obstinately refused to move; and Ferdinand found her still there when he returned from the South in February 1509. Whilst he had been absent, the great magnate in whose district of Burgos Arcos was situated, the Constable of Castile (Count de Haro) had been coquetting with the Emperor Maximilian to displace Ferdinand by his grandson Charles, now nine years old; and the possession of the person of Joan was of the highest importance. Ferdinand decided, therefore, that, either willingly or unwillingly, Joan should be placed where she would be safe from capture by surprise. When he visited her at Arcos, he found her thin and weak with the cold, unhealthy climate.[^[126]] ‘Her dress was such as on no account could be allowed, or is fit even to write about, and everything else looked similarly, and as if it would be totally impossible for her to go through another winter if she continued to live in the same way.’

The King stayed with her for some days, without broaching the sore subject of removing her; but on the 14th February 1509, he had her aroused at three o’clock in the morning—since he knew she would not travel in daylight—and told her she must prepare to be gone. She offered no resistance, but only pleaded for one day to prepare, which was granted; and she consented to cast away the filthy rags which she had been wearing, and don proper garments before setting out on the journey to her new home; carrying her little daughter, Katharine, with her; the corpse of Philip on its great hearse drawn by four horses, as usual, leading the way. Although it was evening when she started, great crowds of people had flocked over from Burgos to see their Queen, who had been invisible for so long, and was by many thought to be dead.

As the morning sun on the third day was glinting with horizontal rays the bare brown cornlands that stretch for many miles around Tordesillas on both sides of the turbid Douro, the wan and weary cavalcade rode over the ancient bridge. Between the main street and the river stood a fortress-palace with frowning walls and little windows looking across the road at the convent of Saint Clara, with its florid Gothic church and cloisters. Into the palace rode, by her father’s side, with her face shrouded, Joan, Queen of Castile; and thenceforward, for forty-seven dreary years, the palace was her prison, until, an old, broken woman of seventy-six, but wayward and rebellious to the last, she joined her long-lost husband in the splendid sepulchre in Granada. From the windows of Joan’s early apartment in the palace, she could see the coffin of Philip deposited in the convent cloister, and in the first years of her confinement, she kept her vigil over the corpse in most of her waking hours, as well as on rare occasions, and closely guarded, attending commemoratory services in the convent in honour of the dead, until her undutiful son, the Emperor Charles, either overcoming her resistance, or perhaps finding the dismal caprice outworn, transferred the mouldering remains of Philip the Handsome to its last abiding place; whilst Joan the Mad waited for her release with fierce defiance in her heart, and revilings on her tongue for all that her oppressors held sacred.

It would not be profitable, even if it were possible, to follow closely the monotonous life of Joan during her long years of confinement; but, at certain crises in the political history of her country, her personality assumed temporary importance, and on these occasions a flood of light is thrown upon her, which, to some extent, will enable us to see the reality and extent of her malady, and to judge how far her laxity in religious observance was the cause of her continued incarceration. Mr. Bergenroth, in his introduction to the early volumes of the Calendars of Spanish State Papers, very forcibly urges the view that Joan was not really mad at all, and that she was sacrificed solely to the ambition of her husband, her father and her son, in succession. After carefully considering all the documents adduced by my learned predecessor as Editor of the Calendars, and many in the Spanish Royal Academy of History which were unknown to him, I find myself unable to come to the same conclusion. The separate accounts of her behaviour are so numerous, and many of them so disinterested, as to leave in my mind no reasonable doubt that after Philip’s death, whatever may have been the case before, Joan was not responsible for all her actions. She appears to have been able on many occasions to discuss complicated subjects quite rationally, as is not infrequent with people undoubtedly insane, but her outbursts of rage against religious ceremonies, her neglect of her person, her persistence for days in refusing food, and other aberrations, are not only clearly indicative of lunacy, but were the symptoms repeated exactly in the case of her great-grandson, Don Carlos, who was undoubtedly insane. At the same time it is clear to see that there was no reason for keeping her closely confined and isolated under strong guard, except the dread of Ferdinand, and afterwards of Charles, that leagues of nobles might make use of her to weaken the power of the Castilian crown.[^[127]] That this fear was not groundless has already been shown, and at one point, as will be related presently, the peril was imminent. That Joan did not seize the opportunity when it was offered to her after her bitter complaints of her treatment is, in my view, the best proof that she was not capable of independent rule.

Ferdinand died in January 1516, leaving the whole of his realms to his grandson Charles in Flanders, in view of Joan’s ‘mental incapacity.’ He tried almost with his last breath to divide Spain for the benefit of his younger son, Ferdinand; but was overborne by the remonstrances of his Council. Jimenez was appointed to be Regent until the new King arrived; and when Cardinal Adrian, Charles’s ambassador, claimed the Regency in virtue of a secret authority he produced, Jimenez accepted him as colleague, but made him a cypher. Up to this period Joan had been under the care of Ferdinand’s faithful Aragonese friend, Mosen Ferrer, the man whom rumour accused of having poisoned Philip: whilst her principal lady in waiting was the Dowager Countess of Salinas. The personal guard of the Queen was entrusted to the incorruptible Monteros de Espinosa, and there were some companies of Castilians on duty in, and around, the palace. Mosen Ferrer was hated, especially by the townspeople of Tordesillas and by the Castilian attendants of Joan, because it was asserted that he had treated the Queen cruelly, and had not attempted to cure her. He gave strict orders that Joan should not be told of her father’s death; but such news could not be hidden, for all Castile was astir to know what was coming next.

Many of the nobles were around young Ferdinand, and were claiming Castile for him, in accordance with the old King’s penultimate wish; and not a few were looking towards Queen Joan. When she first heard the news she was disturbed to know that Jimenez was not on the spot when the King died, but was tranquilised to learn that he was on the way, and would promptly assume the government. No sooner was it known in Tordesillas that Ferdinand was dead than the townspeople and the Castilian guards endeavoured to enter the Queen’s apartments and expel Mosen Ferrer: but the latter and the Monteros de Espinosa[^[128]] stood firm, and for weeks the feud continued. The Guards brought an exorcising priest to cast out the devils that afflicted the Queen; but Ferrer would not let them enter the room; though they got into an ante-chamber, where, quite unknown to the Queen, the exorciser performed his futile incantations through a hole in the door. As soon as Jimenez had established himself in the regency, he sent the Bishop of Majorca to set matters right in Tordesillas. Ferrer, intensely indignant at the accusations against him, wrote a letter to the Regent, which, being read between the lines, tells us much. How could he hope to cure the Queen when her own father could not do so? and how could he be so bad a man as they say, if wise King Ferdinand entrusted his daughter to his care? This does not seem very convincing: but when he tries to excuse himself Ferrer makes matters much worse. It was, he says, only to prevent the Queen from starving herself to death that he had put her to the torture (dar cuerda). He complains bitterly that though he is not dismissed he is not allowed to go near the Queen, for fear he should injure her health. Jimenez, probably recognising that Ferrer had thought more of Aragonese interests than of the health of Joan, thereupon let him go, and appointed the Duke of Estrada to be her Keeper.

The first instructions sent by the new King Charles, whose age was barely sixteen, to the Regent Jimenez concerned Joan. Her custody was so important, he said, that he agreed, in view of the dissensions amongst Spaniards, that a Fleming should guard her. Until one was appointed he directed that ‘whilst she was to be very well treated, she was to be so closely guarded that if any body should attempt to thwart my good intentions they may not be able to do it. It is more my duty than that of any one to care for the honour, contentment, and solace of the Queen; and if any one else attempts to interfere it will be with an evil object.’[^[129]] Nevertheless many did attempt to interfere by whispering doubts to Joan of her Flemish eldest son, in the interests of his young brother Ferdinand, whom his mother and all Spaniards loved best; and when in September 1517 one of the monteros approached her and said: ‘Madam, our sovereign lord King Charles, your highness’ son, has arrived in Spain,’ Joan burst forth in a great rage. ‘I alone am Queen: my son Charles is but the prince,’ and she always resisted calling him King thenceforward.

Charles and his sister Leonora came to Tordesillas to see their mother in December. Charles’s tutor and counsellor, Chièvres, first saw Joan to break to her the news of the presence of her children; and when, immediately afterwards, they entered the room and knelt before their mother, she was overcome with joy to see those whom she had left as little children twelve years before, now in the best period of adolescence. When Charles and his sister had retired, Chièvres lost no time in saying that in order to relieve the Queen, and accustom Charles to rule, it would be well to entrust the government of Spain to him. Joan made no great objection to this; but it is clear that her intention was, that he should administer the government for her and not rule on his own account as he subsequently did; and when, a few months afterwards, Charles met the Cortes at Valladolid they would only confirm his power as joint sovereign, jealous as they were of Flemings, on condition that he swore that if ever Joan recovered her faculties he would resign the government to her.[^[130]] Thenceforward Joan, though her name appeared for years on decrees and proclamations, was politically dead.

During his stay at Tordesillas, Charles was distressed to see the sad fate of his young sister, Katharine, now aged eleven. Joan was fiercely attached to her, and would hardly let her out of her sight. The child’s rooms were behind those of the Queen, and could only be reached with Joan’s knowledge; little Katharine’s sole amusement being to look through a window which had been specially cut for her, and watch the people going to the opposite church, and the children playing in the side lane that led to the river, who were encouraged by money to play there for her amusement. She never left the palace, and was dressed in mean rags, such as the Queen herself wore, and Charles, knowing that the Queen would never let the child go willingly, somewhat cruelly planned to have her kidnapped. He caused a way into her apartment to be broken through a tapestry-covered wall from an adjoining gallery; and the girl and her female attendants were carried away at dead of night to a large force of horsemen and ladies awaiting her on the opposite side of the bridge across the Douro; and thence spirited away to Valladolid, where, dressed in fitting splendour, she was lodged in her sister Leonora’s palace. When, in the morning, Joan discovered her loss, she was inconsolable. She would neither eat, drink, nor sleep, she said, until her child was restored to her, and after two days had passed, and she still stood firm, the King had to be asked what was to be done. He was loath to give up the education of his sister; for princesses were valuable dynastic and international assets; but there was no other way but to send her back. Charles accompanied her to Tordesillas, and made terms with Joan; the girl must have proper companions and attendants, she must dress suitably to her rank, and she must be allowed some little relaxation and liberty outside the palace. To this Joan consented, and Katharine lived with her until her marriage with the King of Portugal six years later.

In March 1518, Charles appointed to the custody of the Queen, the Marquis of Denia, who held her until his death, and was succeeded by his son. Soon after his appointment, he wrote a letter to the King which lifts the veil considerably on Joan’s condition. She tried, he says, persistently and with artful words, remarkable for one in her condition, to persuade him to take her out of her prison, and to summon the nobles of Castile, as she was discontented at the way she was being kept out of the government, and wished to complain. He details the excuses with which he put her requests aside, and evidently looks upon her blandishments as wiles to escape; but assures Charles, as he did for many years afterwards, that ‘nothing should be done against his interests,’ whatever that may have meant. But even in this letter we see signs of Joan’s undoubted madness. A day or two before she had thrown some pitchers at two of her women, and hurt them; and when Denia went with a grave face to her and said, ‘How is this, my lady? This is a strange way to treat your servants; your mother treated hers better;’ Joan rose hurriedly, and the very act of her rising sent her servants scurrying off in a fright. ‘I am not so violent as to do you any injury,’ she said; and so began again, and for the next five hours, to try by wheedling to get him to take her out, ‘for she could not bear these women.’

In reply to this, Charles warned Denia that his conversations with the Queen must never be overheard by anybody, and that all his letters about her must be strictly secret. Thus every few days news of his mother reached the young King, sometimes reporting improvement, sometimes the reverse; but always harping upon her desire to get out, her dislike of her woman attendants, and her extreme irregularity in getting up and eating, which she often did only at intervals of two days. At this time, too, began to develop her great repugnance to attend mass. The women seem to have been a great source of trouble to every one. They were, it appears, always gadding about the town, telling people of what passed in the palace, and what the Queen said, especially about religion, and her desire to go out, and to summon the grandees. What was worse, they defied Denia to dismiss them, until the King gave him full authority over them, and brought them to reason. In the autumn of the same year, 1518, there was a visitation of plague in the country, though Tordesillas had not suffered much, owing to the scrupulous care taken to isolate the place. The removal of the Queen, however, had to be considered. ‘If it be necessary,’ wrote the Marquis, ‘we shall want saddle mules with black velvet housings for the Queen and the Infanta.... It will also be necessary to take the body of the King, your father, and if this has to be done, we must put into proper order the car in which it was brought here, as it is now dismantled. Charles was against any removal if it could possibly be avoided, but if quite unavoidable, the Queen might be taken to the monastery of St. Paul at Moralejo, near Arevalo. If she refused to go, she must be taken by force; but with as much respect as possible, and with every precaution against her endeavouring to stay in the open on the way. If she wanted the corpse of Philip to go with her, a dummy coffin might be made up and carried, whilst the real one with the body remained behind at Tordesillas.

The plague passed away, and the move was not made; and so things passed with Joan as before. Squalid and unhappy, she resisted as obstinately as ever the pressure put upon her to attend mass, though more than once she was violently desirous of going over in Holy Week, or other anniversaries, to the convent church of St Clara, and on several occasions had her clothes washed in preparation for the great event; which Denia himself was inclined to allow, under strict guard, as people in the town were tattling about her being kept a prisoner. Great efforts were made by Juan de Avila, the chaplain, to bring Joan to a better frame of mind about religion; and in June 1519 he writes a curious letter to the King, beseeching him to do his duty by his mother; ‘especially for the salvation of her soul.’ Perhaps in answer to this Charles ordered Denia to insist that the Queen should hear mass. She had wished it to be said at the end of a corridor, instead of in a special room adjoining her own, as Denia desired, and, at last, rather than she should not hear it at all, she was allowed to have her way; and an altar and chapel were screened off by black velvet hangings at the end of the corridor. She went through the service with great devotion until the evangelium and the pax were brought to her, when she refused them, but motioned that they should be administered to her daughter.

This attendance at mass continued for some time, to the immense jubilation of Denia and the priests; but as the day approached when Charles was to leave Spain for Germany to claim the imperial crown, in consequence of Maximilian’s death (January 1519), the effervescence and discontent in Castile at the prospect of an absentee King drawing money from Spain for foreign purposes, penetrated in some mysterious way the prison-palace of Joan the Mad. For hours the Queen railed at Denia for not having summoned the Grandees, as she had requested him to do so often. She was being disgracefully treated, she said; everything belonged to her, and yet she was being denied what she required. She excitedly summoned the treasurer, and demanded money of him, which he was not allowed to give her. So vehement did she become, that at last Denia forbade any one to speak to her at all. She would go to Valladolid, she said; and at another time she would dress to go over to the convent church, though she was not allowed to go. She ordered Denia to write to her son, asking that she should be better treated; and that the grandees should come to her to consult about the realm. Denia, at his wit’s end to pacify her, on one occasion, for, as he says, ‘she uses words fit to make the very stones rise,’ had the inspiration to mention her father, as if he were still alive, and at the head of affairs; and for a time all the disagreeable answers given to her were said to be by order of King Ferdinand, for whose wisdom she had a great respect. But this lie gave her a new idea. If her father were alive, he could help her; and she ordered Denia to write and tell him that she could no longer stand the life she led. She was badly treated, and as a prisoner, her son, Ferdinand, had been taken away from her, and she feared they were going to rob her of her daughter Katharine; but, if they did, she would kill herself. Denia fell more and more into her black books, as the discontent at Charles’s departure grew in the country, and echoes reached the Queen’s prison of the public indignation at her seclusion, and wild rumours of intentions to rescue her. On one occasion (July 1520) she ordered Denia to open a doorway from her apartments into the corridor where mass was said. He was suspicious and refused, whereupon she fell into a violent rage with him, and heaped upon him outrageous words without measure. No wonder the poor man deplores that everybody believes he keeps her prisoner (as indeed he did, though he says not), and he advocates her entire seclusion, although the best way to undeceive the people, he says, would be to let them see her, and recognise her sad condition.

Charles sailed from Corunna on 20th May 1520. During the time he had been in Spain he, or rather his rude, greedy gang of Flemings, had driven Castilians to desperation. Jimenez, who had held the country for him in his absence in the face of the nobles and young Ferdinand, had been contemptuously dismissed—and probably poisoned on Charles’ arrival: young Ferdinand had been packed off to Flanders: Flemings had crowded all the great posts, to the exclusion of Spaniards: Joan was not presented before the Cortes as Queen jointly with her son, as she should have been; and now, to crown all, the Constitution of Castile had been violated by the insolent young foreigner who was to rule, not Spain alone, but half the world. He had held a Castilian Cortes outside the limits of Castile itself, and had coerced the deputies to vote him large sums of money to be spent away from Spain. The nobles were already seething with discontent, and now the people in the towns, who paid all the taxes, rose and hanged some of the deputies who had voted away their money for an absent king.

Then, like a well-laid train, all Castile blazed into revolt. It was a great social, industrial and political struggle, which ended in the financial impotence of the Cortes of Castile, and the decadence of the Castilian nobility. The complicated details of the revolt cannot here be told, but only those points in which Joan was personally concerned. The governing committee of the revolutionary Comuneros met at Avila at the end of July 1520, headed by the gentry, and, to some extent, secretly encouraged by the great nobles. The Flemish Regent, Cardinal Adrian, was paralysed with dismay at the extent of the rising, and did nothing; whilst to the cry of ‘Long live the King and Queen: down with evil ministers,’ every Spanish heart responded. The manifesto published by the committee announced that the revolutionaries had risen in the interests of the imprisoned Queen Joan; and early in August a committee of the council of Castile, the supreme executive body of the Regent’s government, with its president, Bishop Rojas, presented themselves before Joan in her palace of Tordesillas, to beg her to sign decrees against those who were in arms. Joan was to all appearance calm, and replied to the demand for her signature, ‘It is now fifteen years that I have been kept from the government and badly treated; and this marquis here’ (pointing to Denia), ‘is he who has lied to me most.’ Denia, confused, replied: ‘It is true, my lady, that I have lied to you, but I have done so to overcome certain prejudices of yours. I may tell you now, that your father is dead, and I buried him.’ The Queen shed tears at this, and turning to Rojas, murmured between her sobs, ‘Bishop, believe me, all that I see and hear is like a dream.’ Rojas pressed his point. ‘My lady, I can assure you that your signature to these papers will work a greater miracle than Saint Francis; for, after God, in your hands now rests the salvation of these realms.’ ‘Rest now,’ replied the Queen, ‘and come back another day.’

On the morrow the committee of the council saw the Queen again, and as there was no seat but hers in the room, the president mentioned that it was not meet that they should be kept standing. ‘Bring a seat for the council,’ directed the Queen; but, as the attendants were bringing in chairs, she said, ‘No, no, not chairs, but a bench; that was the rule in my mother’s time: but the bishop may have a chair.’ After another long conference the Queen directed the committee to return to Valladolid and discuss again, in full council the papers to which they requested her signature; and thus, unsatisfied, the members left her, only to find themselves prisoners at Valladolid, which was now in the hands of the rebels, who were rapidly marching upon Tordesillas at the urgent request of the townspeople of the latter place, to save Queen Joan from being carried away by the government party.

The rebels had no time to communicate with Joan as to their aims before they appeared outside the walls of the town on the 29th August. As soon as Joan learnt of their coming she ordered the townspeople to welcome them; and so, amidst salute of cannon and enthusiastic cheers, Padilla, the rebel leader, and his host were escorted into the town, and passed before the Queen, who stood in a balcony of the palace. After resting and changing their garments, Padilla and other chiefs sought audience of the Queen. Joan received him smilingly. ‘Who are you?’ she asked, as he knelt before her. ‘I am Juan Padilla, my lady,’ he replied, ‘son of the captain-general of Castile, a servant of Queen Isabel, as I am a servant of your Highness.’ And then the insurgent chief told the astonished Queen all that had happened since old King Ferdinand died: how the evil foreign advisers of young Charles had brought all Spain into revolt, and that Padilla and the commons of Castile were ready to die in the service of their own Queen Joan. She expressed her wonderment at all this. She had been kept a prisoner, she said, for nearly sixteen years, and Denia, her gaoler, had hidden everything from her. If she had been sure of her father’s death she would have gone forth and have prevented some of this trouble in her realm. Then, addressing Padilla, she said: ‘Go now; I order you to exercise the authority of captain-general of the realm. Look to all things carefully, until I order otherwise.’

Joan thus made herself the ostensible head of the revolution; and on many subsequent occasions conferred with the leaders in arms at Tordesillas, fully approving of their proceedings and aims. She tried to exonerate Charles on account of his youth and inexperience of Spain, but clearly indicated her intention to govern for herself in future. Most important of all, she authorised the leaders to summon the Cortes to meet at Tordesillas. The weak, foreign Cardinal Regent could only ascribe Joan’s attitude to her madness; though, as he wrote to Charles, the people regard it as a proof of her sanity. Denia was now almost a prisoner, but the revolutionary leaders could never persuade Joan to sign his formal dismissal, though they, on their own authority, turned both the marquis and his wife unceremoniously out of the town when Tordesillas became the centre of the rebel government in September, and the Cortes held its sittings there.[^[131]]

Joan met her Parliament in the hall of the palace, and listened patiently to the lengthy harangues of the deputies. In her reply, which seems to have been extempore, she spoke at great length of her father, whose death had been concealed from her. During his life she was at ease, because she knew no one would dare to do harm. But she now saw how the country and herself had been abused and deceived, to the injury of the people whom she loved so much. She wished she were in some place where she could direct affairs better; but as her father had placed her there, either because of the woman who took her mother’s place, or for some other reason, she could do no more than she had done. She wondered that the Spaniards had not avenged themselves before upon the foreigners who had come with her son. She thought at first that these foreigners had meant well to her boys; whom they had, she was told, taken back to Flanders; but she saw differently now, and she hoped no one here had any evil meaning towards her sons. Even if she were not the Queen she ought to have been better treated, for, at least, she was the daughter of great sovereigns; and she was in favour of the Comuneros, because she saw they were anxious to remedy the abuses of which she complained. All this seemed quite sane, but at the end of the speech there is a pathetic ring of self-distrust that tells the sad tale. ‘To the extent of my power I will see to affairs, either here or elsewhere. But if, whilst I am here, I cannot do much it will be because I am obliged to spend some time in calming my heart and strengthening my spirit, on the death of the King, my husband. But as long as I am in disposition for it, I will attend to affairs.’[^[132]]

The democratic excesses of the revolutionary Committee, together with the diplomacy of Charles, were gradually enlisting the great nobles on the side of the government. Although Joan’s attendants generally were in her favour, and continued to assert her sanity now they had got rid of the Denias, her confessor, Juan de Avila, was always secretly faithful to the Regent; and whispered warnings constantly in the Queen’s ear. It was evident after a short time also to the revolutionary junta that Joan was not sane; as they wrote from Tordesillas to the city of Valladolid saying that they had summoned all the best physicians in Spain to her; and, apparently finding human aid powerless, they had ordered processions and prayers for her restoration to health. The Regent, indeed, writing to Charles in October, says that the Queen cannot last long if she does not escape from the power of the rebel government; as she was much worse after Denia went. She no longer sleeps in a bed, he says, nor eats regularly, but keeps her food all around her cold until it goes bad. At another time, after she had eaten nothing for three days, she was given the accumulated food of the whole period at once. The government party asserted that all the poor woman’s crazy caprices were acceded to, and even threats resorted to by the junta, in order to get her to sign the decrees necessary to legitimise their action; but she continued obstinate in her refusal to put her hand to anything.[^[133]]

The junta began to grow desperate; for the forces against them were growing daily, whilst they made no progress, depending, as they did, for legality upon obtaining the signature of a lunatic. They tried to bribe the poor woman to sign by promising to take her away from Tordesillas; but that was fruitless: on another occasion, in the middle of the night, a hue and cry was raised that the Constable of Castile with a great force of government troops was outside, and the Queen was told that the ‘tyrants’ had come to seize her. ‘Tell the Constable,’ she replied, ‘not to do anything until the daylight comes; and then I will see about it.’ Things thus went from bad to worse for the rebellion. This was the one chance of Joan’s life, and she missed it. For months she trifled and smiled upon the rebel junta, but would sign nothing; and early in December the government troops were strong enough to make a dash for Tordesillas, which they took by assault after four hours of desperate fighting; the rebel junta flying in a panic from the place. Joan welcomed the victors with a smiling face. She had been expecting and wishing they would come, she said; and had ordered that the nobles should be admitted before the fight began.

During the battle she with the Infanta had left the palace, carrying her jewels with them, and had ordered the corpse of Philip to be taken from the church and carried with them out of the town. Before it could be done, in the confusion, the royal troops entered, and they found the Queen and her daughter crouched in the doorway of the palace trembling with fright. The great nobles who came to the capture of Tordesillas were full of lip service to Joan, and she, flattered apparently by their deference, professed delight at their coming; but from the moment the rebel junta fled before the Constable’s troops at Tordesillas without her signature, Joan was a closely watched prisoner. Denia and his wife, with their harsh methods, came back, to the loudly expressed disgust, not only of Joan, but of some of the greatest of the Castilian nobles, who saw how his presence irritated her;[^[134]] but Charles would permit no change in his mother’s keeper, for he knew he could depend upon Denia to keep her close.

In April 1521, the Comuneros were finally crushed at the battle of Villalar, and the yoke of imperialism forged unwittingly by Ferdinand the Catholic, and open-eyed by Charles the Emperor, was fixed upon the neck of Spain until it strangled her. Thenceforward Joan was but a shadow in the world, to which she no longer appertained.

The person most to be pitied, until marriage rescued her in 1524, was the poor young Infanta Katharine. The Denias came back vowing vengeance against every one who they thought had been polite to the rebels, and the Infanta, as well as the Queen, had to feel their petty tyranny. The girl wrote indignantly to her brother of the wretched straits to which she was reduced by them, and also of the persecution of her mother by them. Amongst other complaints, the following may be quoted. ‘For the love of God, pray order that if the Queen wishes to walk in the gallery looking on to the river, or in the matted corridor, or to leave her chamber for pastime, they shall not prevent her from doing so. And pray do not allow the servants and daughters of the marchioness, or others, to go to my closet through the Queen’s rooms, but only the persons who serve; because, in order that the Queen may not see them, the marchioness orders the women to shut the Queen up in her chamber, and will not allow her to go into the passages or hall, but keep her in the chamber where there is no light but candles; for there is nowhere else for her to go, and she will not leave the chamber until she is dragged out: or, if she would, the women are there to prevent her.’ This is the Infanta’s own version; but the Denias’ story is that the young princess is not allowed by her mother to see any one but a common servant, and has not the fit company of ladies. To make matters worse for the girl the Denias accused her of favouring the rebels, which she indignantly denied, and made peace successfully with her brother. Her departure from Tordesillas for her marriage afflicted Joan greatly, and for the rest of the Queen’s life there was no one to stand between the emperor and her gaolers.

During the long years of Joan’s seclusion, the principal feature of her aberration was its anti-religious tendency. It is true that she often demanded the summoning of the nobles, and continued her eccentricity in eating and sleeping, but the strange antipathy she showed, and often violently expressed, to the services of her church, was a scandal worse than any in a country where thousands of people were being burnt for a tenth part of what the Queen allowed herself to say and do. The whole of the emperor’s system was based upon the enforcement of universal religious orthodoxy by Spain: and it was a bitter affliction for him to know that his mother, and rightful Queen, was madly opposed, at intervals, to the ceremonies imposed upon the rest of Spaniards. Denia in his letters to the Emperor, on several occasions, drops dark hints that torture should be applied—as it evidently had been applied to Joan years before by Mosen Ferrer. Speaking of her obstinacy soon after the rebel defeat, and advising that she should be transferred to the fortress of Arevalo, which he thought safer and more loyal to Charles, he says: ‘Your Majesty may be sure that this will not be done with the Queen’s goodwill, for it is not to be expected that a person who refuses to do anything beneficial, either for her body or her soul, but does quite the contrary, will agree to this. And, in good truth, if your Majesty would use pressure[^[135]] upon her in many things, you would serve God and benefit her Highness, for people in her condition really need it. Your grandmother, Queen Isabel, served her Highness, her daughter, in this way, but your Majesty will do as you think best.’

Denia, whilst recommending the employment of force for the removal of the Queen, did not wish to appear personally as the instrument, but recommended that the President of the Council of Castile should be sent with the Emperor’s order for her to submit, and if she resisted, to have her seized and put into a litter by force in the night time, and carried off. The removal of the Queen, often urged by Denia for years, on the ground of the accessibility of Tordesillas to disaffected people, does not seem ever to have taken place.[^[136]] Denia’s desire to lodge Joan in a strong isolated fortress is also explained by him on the ground of the scandal caused by the Queen’s religious attitude. In the letter just quoted, where he recommends torture, he relates that on Christmas night, whilst early matins were being sung in the presence of the Infanta, the Queen came in search of her daughter, and screamed out in anger for them to clear the altar of everything upon it; and she had to be forcibly taken back to her rooms. He relates also that: ‘She often goes into the gallery overlooking the river, and calls to any one she sees to summon the troops to kill each other. Your majesty may judge from all this what is best to do, and what we have to put up with.’

These hints at personal punishment of the Queen are repeated again and again over a series of years by Denia, though, so far as can be gathered from the Emperor’s replies, he gave no instructions for it to be done. In 1525 Denia writes: ‘Nothing would do so much good as some pressure (i.e., punishment or torture), although it is a very serious thing for a subject to think of applying such to his Sovereign. Perhaps it will be best to try what effect a good priest would have upon Her Highness ... a Dominican would be best, as she does not like Franciscans.’ On another occasion soon afterwards, when Charles had decided to have his mother secretly carried by night to the impregnable castle of Toro, not far from Tordesillas, Denia remarks that he had taken measures that no persons should be in the streets to witness her arrival, ‘for, in good truth, I myself am ashamed of what I hear and see.’

And so from year to year the Queen’s religious aberrations consigned her to constantly increased seclusion to avoid scandal. The Emperor and his only son Philip visited the Queen at least on one occasion at Tordesillas, and during the regency of Philip in 1552, whilst Charles was in Germany, the Prince, much more rigidly devout even than his father, and shocked at the continued refusal of his grandmother to attend the services of the Church and fulfil her religious duties, sent to Tordesillas the saintly Jesuit Francis of Borgia, Duke of Gandia, to exert his influence upon the Queen. His success was very small. For weeks Joan refused to conform, until, at last Borgia persuaded her to make what is called a ‘general confession,’ and he thereupon gave her absolution;[^[137]] but directly he left she relapsed into her former indifference again.

When Philip was leaving Spain to marry Mary, Queen of England, in 1554, he sent Father Borgia again to try to bring Joan to her religious duties. She heard the good father patiently, and when he had finished his exhortations, she endeavoured to make terms. Yes, she would hear mass, and confess, and receive absolution, and the rest of it, if the women attendants upon her were sent away, as they always mocked her whilst she was at her devotions. ‘If that be so,’ replied Father Borgia, ‘the Inquisition shall deal with them as heretics;’ and he at once wrote to Philip recommending that they should pretend to hand the women over to the Holy Office, place crosses and images of saints about the Queen’s rooms, say daily mass on the corridor altar, and if the Queen objected, tell her that it was done by the order of the Inquisition. He also proposed to bring some priestly exorcisers to cast out the devils that afflicted the Queen; but this Philip would not allow. The effect of Borgia’s efforts on this occasion was, that when Prince Philip on his way to Corunna to sail for England called at Tordesillas, he found Joan to his delight going through the ordinary religious rites without resistance. But her devotion was clearly only on the surface, and her new confessor Friar Luis de la Cruz, soon reported that he dared not expose himself to the peril of committing a grave act of sacrilege by administering the sacraments to the Queen, and resigned his office. It appears, amongst other things, that she always shut her eyes at the elevation of the Host at the mass, and on one occasion she violently told her attendants to throw away the blessed tapers they carried before her, as she said they stank.

Since the summer of 1553, Joan, then an old woman, had suffered from swelling of the lower limbs, which almost crippled her; and in February 1555, after a bath of very hot water, the legs broke out into open wounds. Thenceforward the course of her illness presented an extraordinary resemblance to that which proved mortal in the case of her grandson, Philip II. Dreadful gangrenous sores, which she refused to have dressed or washed, caused her the most awful torment. She paid no heed to the directions of doctors or nurses; and when her grand-daughter, the Infanta Joan, came over from Valladolid with the best medical men procurable, the Queen violently refused to see them or allow them to examine her. Thus, lying in repulsive squalor and filth, the poor creature was told that Father Borgia had come to see her. She angrily refused to listen to him at first, but she was weak, and his persistence seems finally to have conquered. By and bye she admitted that she was sorry for her errors, and deplored the divagations of her spirit. At the request of Borgia she repeated the apostle’s creed and confessed; but just as he was about to administer the viaticum, she expressed some scruple at receiving it. Learned theologians were summoned in haste from Salamanca; and a few days afterwards, on the 11th April 1555, the famous Dr. Soto was closeted with her for hours. His report was that, though she had privately told him things that consoled him, the Queen was not fit to receive the Eucharist; though extreme unction might be administered.

That same night the last rites were performed. Leaning over the dying woman with a crucifix, the priest told her that the last hour for her was come, and that it behoved her to ask God for pardon. By signs and gestures of grief and contrition, she expressed what her poor palsied tongue refused to utter; and Father Borgia, believing her beyond speech, asked her to signify whether he should recite the creed for her. To the astonishment of every one she suddenly recovered her power of utterance, and replied, ‘You begin it, and I will repeat it after you.’ When the last amen was said, the saintly Jesuit placed a crucifix to the lips of the dying woman. ‘Christ crucified aid me,’ she had strength yet to say, and then Joan the Mad passed to the land where all are sane. For twenty years her body lay in the Convent of St. Clara, opposite her prison palace; upon the same spot where the coffin of her husband had rested for so many years; and then, in 1574, she was carried at last to the sumptuous tomb at Granada, to join for the rest of time the dust of him that she had loved not wisely but too well.

The foregoing account of the life of this most unfortunate of queens, gathered entirely from the contemporary statements of persons who knew her, tends irresistibly to the conclusion that her early rigid training, followed by her life in Flanders, had implanted in her mind a dislike of the stern bigotry which characterised the religion of Spain under the influence of the Inquisition; and that this dislike grew to hatred when her mind became permanently unsettled. Her strict seclusion and cruel treatment do not appear to have been so necessary for her own health, or even primarily for the public welfare, as for the interests of her father and son, whose autocratic power was threatened by any combination of nobles acting in her name, and whose policy largely depended upon the maintenance of strict religious orthodoxy. To leave at liberty and accessible a feeble-minded Queen who desired to govern through the nobles, and hated the religion of the Inquisition, would have been to invite disaster to the very basis upon which the vast edifice of Spanish autocratic power at its grandest was erected. It might have been better for Spain in the long run, but it would have been ruin for Ferdinand and Charles; and to their interests successively Joan the Mad was sacrificed.

BOOK III
I
MARY TUDOR
QUEEN OF ENGLAND AND SPAIN

In the noble gallery at the Prado there hangs the full-length seated portrait of a lady of peculiarly modern aspect, painted by Titian from sketches and descriptions in his extreme old age.[^[138]] Her sad, sweet smile, vague, lymphatic eyes, and high prominent forehead, give to the face a character of far away ideality, such as marked so many of the members of her house: for this is Isabel, the consort of the Emperor, and she, like the greater Isabel’s mother, belonged to the fated royal family of Portugal, whose tainted blood so often carried to its possessors the mysticism that degenerates into madness. Throughout the poor lady’s life of barely thirty-six years, she was overshadowed by the tremendous responsibility of being the mother of the Cæsar’s children. During the long and frequent absences from Spain of Charles V. in his life-struggle against France and heresy on the one side, and the powers of Islam on the other, the Empress Isabel, as Regent, controlled by a council mainly of churchmen, had to squeeze funds for the imperial wars from the commons of Castile, well nigh crushed into financial impotence since the defeat of the parliamentary champions at Villalar.

Like all those who came into immediate contact with Charles in his imperial capacity, his wife was humbly subordinate to the overwhelming magnitude of the policy which he directed, and she had no share in moulding events. For her the glory was sufficient to have borne her husband a son who lived, besides daughters and two boys who died of epilepsy in infancy. The mother of Philip of Spain looked with reverential awe upon her own child, so great and important to mankind was held to be the inheritance to which he was to succeed; and when she flickered out of life in 1539, the boy of twelve was her main contribution and justification to a world which had only known her as Cæsar’s wife, and only remembered her as Philip’s mother.

In the atmosphere of hushed reverence and rigid sacrifice to imperial ends that filled the monastic court of Spain in the absence of the Emperor, Philip was never allowed to forget for an hour the destiny, with all its duties, its responsibilities, and its power, for which he was taught that God had specially selected him as son of his father. As a boy regent in the Emperor’s first great trial of strength with the German Lutherans, his heart had ached at the sufferings of Spain from the cruel drain of blood and treasure for the war in which she had no direct concern; but when he dared, almost passionately, to remonstrate with his father at the ruin which he himself was forced to impose upon the people he loved, he was coldly reminded that it was the cause of God that he and his were fighting, and all earthly considerations must be sacrificed for its triumph. Philip was the son of his forbears, and he learnt his lesson well. Like his grandmother Isabel, he had no love of cruelty for its own sake, but like her he held the mystic belief that he and the Most High were linked in community of cause, and that the greater the suffering the greater the glory. He never spared himself or others when the cause for which he lived, the unification of the faith, demanded sacrifice; but fate was cruel in the era she chose for him. The age when Charles and his son were pledged to force all men to take their faith unquestioned from Rome at the tips of Spanish pikes was that in which the rebellious Monk of Wittemburg had challenged Rome itself, and the world was throbbing with the new revelation, that beyond the trappings that man had hung upon the church, there was a God to whom all were equal, and to whom all might appeal direct.

So, throughout the century of strife, both Charles and his son, rigid as they were, were always obliged to conciliate England, whatever its faith might be; for France, and heresy in their own dominions, were ever the nearest enemies; and for England permanently to have thrown in its lot with either of them would have consigned Spain to impotence. Henry VIII. might defy the Pope, despoil the Church, and insultingly repudiate his blameless Spanish wife, but the Emperor dared not quarrel with him for long together, or provoke him too far. But, withal, it was a hard trial for the champion of orthodoxy to have to speak fair and softly to his heterodox, excommunicated uncle, and welcome alliance with the power that was a standing negation of the cause for which he lived. Still harder was it when Henry was dead; for his personal prestige was great, and his professions of orthodoxy were emphatic, apart from his personal quarrel with the Papacy. But to him there succeeded a child-king ruled by men of small ability, determined to alter the faith of England itself, and make a durable friendship with Spain impossible.

Then almost suddenly the whole aspect of affairs changed. It had been known for some time that the young King of England, Edward VI., was failing, and would probably die without issue; but the uncertain element had been the extent of the Duke of Northumberland’s power and the strength of English Protestantism. Edward VI. died on the 7th July 1553, and the undignified collapse of Northumberland at once decided the Emperor’s plans. The treachery of Maurice of Saxony had brought Charles to the humiliating peace of Passau, and had made for ever impossible the realisation of the great dream of making Philip Emperor as well as King. It was the heaviest blow that Charles had ever suffered; and, if he could have appreciated its significance, he would have seen that it proved the impossibility of the task he had undertaken. He was still at war with the enemy, France, who had supported his Lutheran princes, and he was burning to avenge the crowning disaster of Metz, when the death of the boy King of England opened to his mind’s eye the gates of a shining future. The hollow crown of the Empire might go, with its poor patrimony and its turbulent Lutheran subjects, the fat Portuguese dowry he coveted for his son Philip might be cheerfully sacrificed; but if only rich England could be joined in lasting bonds to Spain, then France would indeed be in the toils, Flanders and Italy safe, the road to unlimited expansion in the East open, and Spain, supreme, might give laws to Latin Christendom, and to heathendom beyond. The prize was worth bidding for, and Charles lost no time.

In the brilliant summer weather of late July in 1553, a faded little woman with a white pinched face, no eyebrows, and russet hair, rode in a blaze of triumph through the green-bordered roads of Suffolk and Essex towards London. Around her thronged a thousand gentlemen in velvet doublets and gold chains, whilst a great force of armed men followed to support if need be the right of Mary Queen of England. It was not much more than a fortnight since her brother had died, but into that time the poignant emotions of a century had been crammed. The traitors who had proclaimed Queen Jane had tumbled over each other to be the first to betray some of their companions, and all to disown the despotic craven who had led them, the wretched Northumberland; Protestant London, even, had greeted with frantic joy the name of the Catholic Queen, whose right it knew, and whose unmerited sufferings it pitied; but at thirty-seven, an old maid, disillusioned and wearied by years of cruel injustice, Mary Tudor came to her heritage resigned rather than elated.

Amongst the crowds of officials and gentlemen who rode out of London to pay homage to the new Queen, were two men, each pledged to outwit the other in his quest. They were of similar age, about fifty, both Frenchmen, though one was born in the Burgundian territory of the Franche Comté, and both were ambassadors; one, Simon Renard, representing the Emperor, and the other, Antoine de Noailles, the King of France, and they went racing towards Chelmsford, each to try to win Queen Mary to the side of his master. Noailles was the more courtly and aristocratic; and his insinuating grace made him a dangerous rival, for it hid a spirit that stopped at no falsity or treachery if it would serve his turn. But in gaining Mary Tudor he was fatally handicapped, though when she received him at New Hall she spoke so fairly that he thought he had succeeded.[^[139]] For Simon Renard represented the power that throughout all the bitter trials of her life Mary had looked to as her only friend. Again and again the imperial ambassadors alone had dared to claim better treatment for her and her outraged mother; and had threatened her father with vengeance if ill befell her; whilst France had always taken the opposite side, and egged King Henry on to work his own will in despite of Spain and the empire. So, though Mary was diplomatic to Noailles she was friendly to Renard, for to him and his master she looked to keep secure her trembling throne.

Already it was seen that the Queen must marry. She had been betrothed times out of number as an instrument of policy, but of her own will she desired no husband; and when Renard, in a long private chat with her at New Hall on the 1st August, broached the subject, she told him that she knew her duty in that respect and would do it, but prayed for the guidance of the Emperor in her choice of a husband. She was no longer young, she said, and hoped that too youthful a husband would not be recommended to her. Renard knew that already English people had chosen as the Queen’s prospective bridegroom young Courtenay, still in the Tower as a prisoner; and that failing him, some had thought of Cardinal Pole; but he knew well, as did the Emperor, that Mary was too proud to marry a subject, and looked to her marriage as a means of strengthening her throne; and soon afterwards even Noailles saw that Courtenay had spoilt his chance by dissoluteness of life, though he continued to make use of him as a tool for conspiracy against Mary and her Spanish friends.

On the 3rd August the new Queen, dressed in violet velvet, and mounted on a milk-white pony, came to her city of London through the gaily decked portal of Aldgate, and so to the Tower, where she released those who had lain there in prison to suit the policy of the men who had ruled Edward VI. Events moved apace. Gardiner from a prison was suddenly raised to the post of chief minister. Bonner, the hated Bishop of London, came from the Marshalsea to his throne in Saint Paul’s; and everywhere, though yet illegal, the mass was already being introduced. The Emperor kept warning Mary to be moderate, and to walk warily; whilst the churchmen, burning with zeal to come upon their own again, were obstinately shutting their eyes to all that had happened since bluff Henry’s death. Renard it was who almost daily saw the Queen with these messages of modern counsel from his master; and the subject of marriage was mentioned more than once. Noailles and Gardiner were pushing as hard as they might the suit of Courtenay; but on the 7th August Mary told Renard that she saw no fit match for her in her own country, and had decided to marry a foreigner.

Then gently and tentatively the ambassador mentioned the Emperor’s only son Philip. She affected to laugh at the idea, for the Prince was only twenty-seven—the same age as Courtenay, by the way—and, as she said on another occasion, most of the bridegrooms they offered her might have been her sons. But Renard saw that his suggestion was not altogether an unwelcome one, and hastened to ask his master for further instructions. ‘Do not overpress her,’ wrote Granvelle, ‘to divert her from any other match; because if she have the whim she will carry it forward if she be like other women.’ But Mary Tudor’s birth and trials had made her not like other women; and she listened to the tale of marriage, not because she hankered for a husband, but because she hungered for a son to present to her people.

Noailles soon got wind of the plan to marry Mary to the Emperor’s son, and wherever French gold or interest could reach the enemies of the new regime they were plied with hints of the terrible results that would come if Spain ruled England by Torquemada’s methods. A gust of panic swept over London at the idea of an Inquisition; for the Queen had come at first with promises of toleration, and already the zeal of the churchmen had darkened the horizon. On the eve of the Queen’s coronation, on the 1st October, a Spanish resident in London, whilst professing to despair of the probability of the match, writes words that show how well aware even private citizens were of the advantage that it would bring to Spain. ‘And if the Lord vouchsafed us to behold this glorious day, what great advantage would befall our Spain, by holding the Frenchmen in check, by the union of these kingdoms with his Majesty. And if it were only to preserve Flanders his Majesty and his son must greatly desire it, ... for when the Lord shall call his Majesty away the Low Countries will be in peril of the Frenchmen attacking them, or of the Germans (i.e., Lutherans) invading them by their help, the succour from Spain being so remote, and the people (i.e., of Flanders) not being well affected towards our nation. It would also be most advantageous to Spain, because if aught should happen to the Prince’s son (i.e., Don Carlos) the son born here would be King of both countries, and, in sooth, this would be advantageous to the English also.’[^[140]]

We may be sure that Mary’s coyly sympathetic attitude was not lost on the Emperor. But Philip was a man of twenty-seven, a widower since his boyhood, with a mistress (Isabel de Osorio) whom he loved; and for many years past he had been his own master, and practically King of Spain, though nominally only Prince Regent. His marriage, moreover, to a Portuguese cousin with a rich dowry was in active final negotiation, and the Emperor could not be sure how the Prince would receive the suggestion of marriage with an unattractive foreign woman more than ten years his senior, and living in a far country. He need have had no distrust. Philip under his system had been brought up from his birth to regard sacrifice to his mission as a supreme duty. He was a statesman and a patriot, and he saw as clearly as his father the increment of strength that the union with England would bring to the cause to which their lives were pledged; and his reply, given, as Sandoval says, ‘like a second Isaac ready to sacrifice himself to his father’s will and for the good of the church,’ was, ‘I have no other will than that of your Majesty, and whatever you desire, that will I do.’