Roger Machado, had he lived to-day, would surely have made his fortune as journalist of some fashion-weekly; but even his facile pen finds it difficult to express adequately the splendour of the Queen’s jewellery,—her necklace of gold and jewelled roses,—the ribbon at her breast adorned with diamonds, rubies, and pearls,—the pouch of her white leather girdle set “with a large balass ruby the size of a tennis-ball between five rich diamonds and other stones the size of a bean.”
“Truly, as I believe,” he comments, “and also as I heard it said at the time, I estimate the dress she then wore at the value of 200,000 crowns of gold”; while on another occasion he declares her dress so rich that “there is no man who can well imagine what could be the value of it.”
At a somewhat similar reception of a French embassy, tales of the Queen’s magnificence evidently spread through Spain; and Fra Fernando de Talavera, Archbishop of Granada, though no longer her official Father-Confessor, felt bound to write and remonstrate. Isabel was, however, able to offer a good defence, declaring that neither the dresses of herself nor her ladies had been new,—indeed her own “made of silk and with three bands of gold as plainly as possible,” she had worn before in Aragon in the presence of these same Frenchmen. If some of the men’s garments were costly, it had not been by her orders, rather she had done her uttermost to discountenance it.
She might have mentioned also how, in the critical stages of the Moorish war, she had pledged the crown jewels to merchants of Barcelona, thus showing that for all her appreciation of the luxuries of dress, they did not rank for a second in her thoughts with more important considerations.
Her magnificence like her severity was calculated and the same might be said of her liberality. She had seen money wasted on ne’er-do-wells and was fully determined that no man, merely because he was powerful or plausible, should prey on her revenues; while for the regular type of Court-flatterer hunting for sinecures her contempt amounted to aversion. Galindez Carvajal tells us in his chronicle that she and Ferdinand kept a book in which they wrote down the names of those at Court whom they thought most capable and worthy of reward, consulting it whenever an office fell vacant, and that they did not hesitate to prefer prudent men of the middle-class to the highly-born incompetent. Their actual gifts, though scarcely lavish, were sufficient to cause satisfaction, and Lucio Marineo declares that “when between the King and Queen there was discussion as to the fitting reward of any particular service, she on her part always gave more than the sum on which the two had determined.”
Ferdinand was not unlike his contemporary, Henry VII. of England, according to Ayala, the Spanish Ambassador’s description of that monarch: “If gold once enters his strong boxes it never comes out again. He pays in depreciated coin.”
Against this criticism may be set Machiavelli’s praise: “If the present King of Spain had desired to be thought liberal, he would not have been able to contrive, nor would he have succeeded in so many undertakings.”
It is pleasant to turn from calculated policy to uncalculated enthusiasm; and this may be truly said of Isabel’s love of her faith. Both she and the King were strict in the outward observances of catholicism, and every morning would find Ferdinand at Mass before he broke his fast, while we are told that on Maundy Thursday his servants would seek out twelve of the poorest of his subjects and that he would serve them at supper and wash their feet. Isabel herself would recite the hours every day like a priest; and, for all the whirl of ceremonies and duties in which she found herself involved, she would make time for special devotions so that it seemed to those about her that her life was “contemplative rather than active.”
Her marked individuality, and the respect she inspired in Ferdinand, had completely changed the character of the Court from the old licentious days of Henry IV.; priests of the type of Ximenes and Fra Fernando de Talavera thronged her ante-chambers; and courtiers, when they saw her coming, would walk with eyes cast down in the hope of establishing a reputation for sanctity.
Their hypocrisy can have brought them little. The Queen might be a saint in her private life; but those who think saints necessarily fools stand convicted of folly themselves. She was too shrewd a judge of character to desire to change her Court into a convent, and her letters to Fra Fernando de Talavera, while breathing affection and admiration yet venture occasionally to question the suitability to herself and her surroundings of his standard of asceticism.