Forty years more of feminine rule in the next generation brought the unfortunate country to the revolution of 1868, and then the dawning came of a happier day, now brightening to its full. Only half a century ago the old, old struggle between France and Germany to provide a Consort for Spain was engaged anew, and brought England and France upon the very verge of war. But the fall of the Bourbons in France and Italy, and the disappearance of the French monarchy, as a result of the great war between the Frank and Teuton, still, on the ancient pretext of their rival interests in Spain, banished, at least for our time, the dynastic jealousy which had kept Europe at war for centuries.

An Austrian Queen-Regent has since then ruled Spain with consummate wisdom and the noblest self-sacrifice for nearly twenty years; and France has watched with sympathy, and no thought of aggression, the sustained effort of a good woman to hand down intact to her fatherless son the inheritance to which he was born. An English Queen Consort sits by the side of the Spanish King, now, for the first time for centuries, and yet no breath of discord comes from other nations to mar the love match that has ended in a happy marriage.

The world grows wiser at last. The old tradition that dynastic connection could override irresistible national tendencies has lingered long, but is really dying now. Matrimonial alliances between reigning families are symptoms, not causes, and as the personal power of the monarch wanes before the growth of popular government, the influence of the consort becomes more social, and consequently more personally interesting.

The stories told in these pages treat of a state of affairs never likely to recur. They show, amongst other things, with what little prescience the world has been governed. The attempt of Ferdinand the Catholic to make Aragon great by marriage ended in the swamping of Aragon: the attempt of Charles V. and his son to dictate the religion of the world, by means of the strength gained by matrimonial alliances, ended in the exhaustion and ruin of Spain: the attempts of France and Germany to obtain control of Spain by providing consorts for the ruling kings has ended in neither obtaining what it sought, and in Spain being as safe from foreign domination of any sort as any country in Europe. The lesson to be drawn surely is that rulers, grandly as they bulk for their little day in the eyes of men, are themselves but puppets, moved by aggregate spontaneous national forces infinitely more powerful than any individuality can be, and that a monarch’s seeming strength is only effective so long as it interprets truly the accumulated impulse, that, in obedience to some harmonious law as yet uncoded, guides to their destiny the nations of the earth.

FINIS

INDEX

[1]. The ceremony is described by Enriquez de Castillo in the contemporary ‘Cronica de Enrique IV.’