On November 26th[[11]] the end so long expected came; and, having received the Sacraments and commended her soul to God, the Queen, clad in a Franciscan robe, passed peacefully away.
[11]. Peter Martyr says November 22d.
My hand [says Peter Martyr] falls powerless by my side for very sorrow. The world has lost its noblest ornament ... for she was the mirror of every virtue, the shield of the innocent, and an avenging sword to the wicked.
It has pleased Our Lord [wrote Ferdinand to the chief citizens of Madrid] to take to Himself the Most Serene Queen Doña Isabel, my very dear and well-beloved wife; and although her loss is for me the greatest heaviness that this world held in store ... yet, seeing that her death was as holy and catholic as her life, we may believe that Our Lord has received her into His glory, that is a greater and more lasting kingdom than any here on earth.
The day after her death, the coffin with its funeral cortège left Medina del Campo for Granada, amid a hurricane of wind and rain such as the land had rarely witnessed. Peter Martyr, who was one of the escort, declared that the Heavens opened, pouring down torrents that drove the horsemen to shelter in the ditches by the wayside, while the mules sank exhausted and terrified in the road. Never for a moment was there a gleam of either sun or star, until on December 25th, as the funeral procession entered Granada, the clouds lifted for the first time.
There in the city of her triumph, in the Franciscan monastery of the Alhambra, the very heart of the kingdom she had won for Christianity, Isabel of Castile was laid to rest.
CHAPTER XIII
CASTILIAN LITERATURE
“Isabel’s death,” says Butler Clarke, “marks the beginning of a period of anarchy.”
The peace that she had done so much to promote and that her presence had insured was threatened by the incapacity of her successor, and by the restless rivalry of the Archduke Philip and his father-in-law. Prescott describes Isabel as “Ferdinand’s good genius,” and her loss was to make obvious to the Castilians his less attractive side,—the suspicion, and want of faith and generosity, that during their joint rule her more kingly qualities had tended to disguise. The old feeling against him as a foreigner, which his personal valour in the Moorish war had partly obliterated, now reappeared and was intensified by disgust at his prompt remarriage. Ferdinand was not in the least sentimental, and thus failed to take into account the large part played by sentiment in national history. The fact that he regretted Isabel’s death would have struck him as a foolish reason for missing any advantage that unfortunate occurrence might afford, and he re-entered the matrimonial market with great promptitude.
He was now fifty-three and the bride selected by him a girl of eighteen, Germaine de Foix, a daughter of the Count of Narbonne, who with her brother Gaston represented the younger branch of the House of Navarre. Such a union was naturally attractive to Aragonese ambitions, ever watchful to establish dynastic links with that northern kingdom, though at the moment as it happened the Navarrese connection was of merely secondary importance. Germaine de Foix was a niece of Louis XII., and by his marriage with her (October, 1505) Ferdinand succeeded in breaking the dangerous combination of France and Flanders that might otherwise have proved his ruin.