"Perhaps," says Helps, speaking of Isabella, "there is hardly any great personage whose name and authority are found in connection with so much that is strikingly evil, all of it done, or rather assented to, upon the highest and purest motives." To palliate on such grounds is to believe in the irresponsibility of motives, which should transcend times and occasions.
She is not, however, without loyal adulators of her own time and race.
We read in Oviedo of her splendid soul. Peter Martyr found commendations of ordinary humanity not enough for her. Those nearest her person spoke as admiringly. It is the fortune, however, of a historical student, who lies beyond the influence of personal favor, to read in archives her most secret professions, and to gauge the innermost wishes of a soul which was carefully posed before her contemporaries. It is mirrored to-day in a thousand revealing lenses that were not to be seen by her contemporaries. Irving and Prescott simply fall into the adulation of her servitors, and make her confessors responsible for her acquiescence in the expulsion of the Jews and in the horrors of the Inquisition.
Ferdinand.
The king, perhaps, was good enough for a king as such personages went in the fifteenth century; but his smiles and remorseless coldness were mixed as few could mix them, even in those days. If the Pope regarded him from Italy, that Holy Father called him pious. The modern student finds him a bigot. His subjects thought him great and glorious, but they did not see his dispatches, nor know his sometimes baleful domination in his cabinet. The French would not trust him. The English watched his ambition. The Moors knew him as their conqueror. The Jews fled before his evil eye. The miserable saw him in his inquisitors. All this pleased the Pope, and the papal will made him in preferred phrase His Most Catholic Majesty,—a phrase that rings in diplomatic formalities to-day.
Every purpose upon which he had set his heart was apt to blind him to aught else, and at times very conveniently so. We may allow that it is precisely this single mind which makes a conspicuous name in history; but conspicuousness and justness do not always march with a locked step.
He had, of course, virtues that shone when the sun shone. He could be equable. He knew how to work steadily, to eat moderately, and to dress simply. He was enterprising in his actions, as the Moors and heretics found out. He did not extort money; he only extorted agonized confessions. He said masses, and prayed equally well for God's benediction on evil as on good things. He made promises, and then got the papal dispensation to break them. He juggled in state policy as his mind changed, and he worked his craft very readily. Machiavelli would have liked this in him, and indeed he was a good scholar of an existing school, which counted the act of outwitting better than the arts of honesty; and perhaps the world is not loftier in the purposes of statecraft to-day. He got people to admire him, but few to love him.
Columbus's views considered by Talavera and others.
At Salamanca.
The result of an audience with the king was that the projects of Columbus were committed to Talavera, to be laid by him before such a body of wise men as the prior could gather in council. Las Casas says that the consideration of the plans was entrusted to "certain persons of the Court," and he enumerates Cardinal Mendoza, Diego de Deza, Alonso de Cardenas, and Juan Cabrero, the royal chamberlain. The meeting was seemingly held in the winter of 1486-87. The Catholic writers accuse Irving, and apparently with right, of an unwarranted assumption of the importance of what he calls the Council at Salamanca, and they find he has no authority for it, except a writer one hundred and twenty years after the event, who mentions the matter but incidentally. This source was Remesal's Historia de Chyapa (Madrid, 1619), an account of one of the Mexican provinces. There seems no reason to suppose that at best it was anything more than some informal conference of Talavera with a few councilors, and in no way associated with the prestige of the university at Salamanca. The registers of the university, which begin back of the assigned date for such Council, have been examined in vain for any reference to it.