“I the King ... make known to you that by the grace of Our Lord, this Thursday just past the Queen Doña Isabel, my dear and well-beloved wife, was delivered of a daughter; the which I tell you that you may give thanks to God.”
With this announcement of her birth to the chief men of Segovia was “Isabel of Castile” ushered by her father John II. into public life; but on that April day of 1451 none could have suspected the important part she would play in the history of her country. The future of the throne was already provided for in the person of her elder half-brother, Henry, Prince of Asturias; and nearly three years later the birth of another brother, Alfonso, made that inheritance apparently secure from any inconvenience of a female succession.
HENRY IV.
FROM “BOLETIN DE LA REAL ACADEMIA DE LA HISTORIA,” VOL. LXII.
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY HAUSER AND MENET
Castile was at this time nearing the end of a long and inglorious reign, signalized by the struggles of the King and his selfish favourite against the domination of an equally selfish nobility. The latter triumphed; the favourite was beheaded and John II., broken-hearted at his own weakness in agreeing to the sentence, died in the following year. His life had been one long negation of everything for which true kingship stands,—dignity, honour, and power; but the son who succeeded to his title and troubles was even less fitted for the task.
Feeble and vain, Henry, Prince of Asturias, had been from boyhood the puppet of his father’s rebellious nobles, led by their flattery into attacking the royal authority that it would be one day his duty to maintain.
“In him,” says the chronicler Pulgar, “desire had the mastery over reason”; and, when he ascended the throne, it was with a character and constitution that self-indulgence had utterly undermined. One virtue he possessed, strangely out of keeping with his age, a compassion arising from dislike of bloodshed; but, since he failed to draw any distinction between justice and indiscriminate mercy, this attribute rather endangered than distinguished his rule. A corresponding indifference, also, to his property, and a reluctance to punish those who tampered with it, might have a ring of magnificence, but it could hardly inspire awe of the King’s law.
The problems by which Henry was faced at the beginning of his reign were not acutely dangerous; and their chief difficulty lay in the constant friction between Castile and the neighbouring kingdom of Aragon. Between these two the tie of mutual descent from the House of Trastamara had been drawn ever closer by frequent intermarriage. Henry IV. was not only cousin of Alfonso V. of Aragon, but also his nephew, while he was son-in-law to Alfonso’s ambitious brother, John, King of Navarre. Here was scope for the time-honoured right of family interference, a right strengthened by quarrels as to confiscated property and abused privileges.
ALFONSO V. OF ARAGON
FROM “ICONOGRAFIA ESPAÑOLA” BY VALENTIN CARDERERA Y SOLANO