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.