More pleasing, in a country where generals were wont to sell their services to the highest bidder and yield to bribery with little hesitation, was Gonsalvo’s persistent loyalty to his sovereign. Ferdinand was not an easy master to satisfy, for neither his thoughts nor actions were ordinarily generous, and his cold distrustful nature was slow to respond to either enthusiasm or anxiety. During the war of Granada, the task of dispatching an adequate supply of soldiers and ammunition to the seat of war had fallen, as we have seen, to Isabel; but with increasing ill-health and worry such affairs had slipped from her fingers, and preparations for the Neapolitan campaigns were left to other hands.
In vain Gonsalvo begged for reinforcements and the necessary money to pay those companies already under his command. Ferdinand had a shrewd conviction that his general was capable, when in straits, of making two men perform the work of four, and doled out his assistance with niggardly craft. Nor did the brilliant achievements of his young Commander-in-chief, in the teeth of difficulties he himself had often aggravated arouse his gratitude or admiration.
“He who is the cause of another’s greatness,” says Machiavelli, “is himself undone”; and Ferdinand looked with suspicion on a subject so successful and popular that his possible disloyalty might prove a source of danger to the Crown. His own reputation as the champion cheat of Europe was perhaps unassailable; but it carried with it this penalty: he lived in mortal terror that he would one day be cheated.
In extenuation of his parsimony, the contrast between his wide ambitions and small treasury must be remembered. Ferdinand, like Elizabeth of England, was forced to imitate the careful housekeeper in making a little go a long way; and habitual economy is a virtue that often borders on vice. Not yet were the gold and silver of South America and Mexico pouring in a rich flood into the royal coffers; while every day fresh schemes of government, fresh wars and discoveries abroad, and the weaving of fresh strands of alliance demanded monetary support, as well as the King’s minute and unswerving attention.
Were Spain to pause for a moment in the race, letting Portugal outstrip her in the Western seas, or France suborn her brilliant generals and entice away her allies, she must inevitably fall behind into the second rank of nations. Thus Ferdinand, straining ever after a prize, whose very magnitude was to prove his country’s ultimate ruin, spun his web of diplomacy in and out amongst the Powers of Europe, never neglecting any opportunity that would draw him nearer his goal.
In the case of Portugal, fate seemed to have willed by the death, first of Prince Alfonso and then of the young Queen Isabel, that no Aragonese Infanta should draw closer the union of the two nations; but in 1500 the spell of tragedy was broken by the marriage of Maria, the sovereign’s third daughter, with the widower King Emmanuel.
One child alone remained with Ferdinand and Isabel, Catherine their youngest; and in the following year she also fulfilled her destiny and carried her father’s olive-branch to a northern home. Born in December, 1485, she had been betrothed almost from her infancy to Arthur, Prince of Wales, Henry VII.’s eldest son; and Roger Machado, on his visit to the Spanish Court, did not in his amazement at jewels and fine clothes neglect to mention his future Queen, and how beautiful he had thought her, held up in her mother’s arms to watch a tilting-match.
So firmly settled was the alliance, grounded on mutual hatred of England and Aragon for France, that already at the early age of three the little Infanta was styled “Princess of Wales”; but the intervening years before the union could be realized did not on this account pass her over in silence. The correspondence of the time is filled with frequent disputes between the Catholic sovereigns and Henry VII. as to the exact financial value of their respective offspring; and the discussion ranged from Catherine’s marriage portion and the size of her household to the comeliness of the ladies-in-waiting, who would accompany her;—the latter a point on which the English King laid great stress.
At length, however, all was satisfactorily settled; and Henry, having welcomed the bride, could write to her parents that
although they could not see the gentle face of their beloved daughter, they might be sure that she had found a second father, who would ever watch over her happiness, and never permit her to want anything he could procure her.