On account of his wealth he still hoped to save his life, and cunningly offered, in return for a pardon, the enormous sum of 40,000 ducats to go towards the expenses of a war against the Infidel. This was a project that Isabel was known to have much at heart; and, since its main hindrance had been the poverty of the royal exchequer not a few of her counsellors urged her to let such a pious gift atone for the crime.
“The Queen,” we are told, “preferred justice to money”; and Alvar Yañez was beheaded. Even then she might, on some specious pretext, have seized the guilty man’s possessions; but instead she commanded that the inheritance should go to his sons, so that all might recognize her object in maintaining the sentence had not been to enrich herself but to punish evil.
Other instances of her rigorous justice there are many, but none more characteristic than her famous “Audiences” in Seville. Thither she had gone in the spring of 1477 to supervise the pacification of Southern Spain; while Ferdinand in the north kept watch over the Portuguese army and the chronic disturbances on the Pyrenean border.
The Duke of Medina-Sidonia, riding out from the city to meet her with the four-and-twenty gaily clad nobles of his suite and a throng of royal officials and clergy, tended her with complacent homage the keys of the different gates. Was he not lord of the city? “Duke of Seville” he was popularly called, since he had succeeded in driving his rival, the Marquis of Cadiz, beyond the walls. The Marquis, it is true, had retaliated by seizing the strong fortress of Xerez; but the Duke now meant to recover this through the Queen’s influence and favour. By good fortune his rival had married a sister of that arch-rebel the Marquis of Villena, and chastisement of the brother-in-law could therefore, he hoped, be looked on as a piece of disinterested patriotism.
It was in this spirit the Duke had chosen to regard the faction fights that had decimated the population of Seville and forced many of its leading citizens into exile. Not so those, whose fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers had died fighting in sheer self-defence, their backs against the very houses now hung with tapestries and brocades! Not so those, whose wives and daughters had been the prey of dissolute mercenaries! Not so those, who had been dispossessed of their lands, or whose shops had been raided and sacked!
It was the cry of such as these that made Isabel hold public audience every Friday, that the injured might bring her their complaints. Raised high on a dais in the large hall of the Alcazar, with the prelates and knights below her on the one side, and the Doctors of her Council on the other, she listened, weighed evidence, and gave judgment, referring the more doubtful cases for enquiry by special “Alcaldes,” with the injunction that there should be no delay. As a result hundreds of criminals were executed, and lands and goods were restored to their rightful owners; while in some instances so strong was the fear aroused that voluntary restitution was made, in the hope of avoiding a trial.
It is characteristic of Isabel that the ever-increasing revelation of crime failed to shake her purpose. It was her will, as “the fountain of justice,” to see justice prevail; and through all the long hours of accusation and defence, through case after case, she and her fellow-judges listened with a grave impartiality that won for her tribunal a respect bordering on the horror accorded to the superhuman. If there was to be nothing but strict justice, who in Seville should be saved?
At length the Bishop of the city and its leading citizens ventured to remonstrate. The number of murders and robberies committed had been so great, they declared, that scarcely a family could call itself guiltless; and they petitioned that an amnesty might be granted, lest the people in despair were driven to fresh crime.
A ruler of more obstinate fibre would have contended with pitiless logic that justice being equivalent to right could never prove excessive. Isabel had too much inherent common-sense to make this mistake; and, realizing that the advice was good, she consented to the publication of a general pardon for the city and its environs, that should cover all crimes and offences with one exception, the unpardonable sin of heresy.
Seville at large heaved a sigh of relief; but the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, at this stage of the proceedings, was not so pleased. He had been steadily poisoning Isabel’s mind against his rival since her advent to the city, accusing him of giving secret support to some fortresses in the neighbourhood that still upheld the claims of “La Beltraneja.” Nothing but force, he protested, would succeed against such a traitor; but in the midst of his denunciations the Marquis of Cadiz appeared in Seville, accompanied only by a few attendants. Riding to the Alcazar, he petitioned for a private audience with the Queen, and there pleaded his cause with a brevity and directness that appealed to his listener more than the most subtle arguments. Plain speaking was almost a virtue to Isabel’s mind.