BURKE’S ESTIMATE OF ISABELLA; HUME’S ESTIMATE
Burke thinks that Isabella has suffered from too much praise of virtues she did not possess and too much neglect of her truer gifts. He places the blame for this largely on the fact that she and her husband were succeeded by foreign rulers, Habsburgs and Bourbons. He ridicules the tendency to blame Torquemada and others for the blots of cruelty on her reign, and blames them on the orthodoxy of the time. He makes of her a creature far different from the gentle Isabella of Prescott’s idea, and exclaims eloquently:[a]
The real Isabella is one of the most remarkable characters in history. Not only was she the most masterful, and, from her own point of view, by far the most successful ruler that ever sat upon the throne of Spain, or of any of the kingdoms of the peninsula; she stands in the front rank of the great sovereigns of Europe, and challenges comparison with the greatest women who have ever held sway in the world.
In one particular she stands alone among the great ruling women, the conquerors and empresses of history. She is the only royal lady, save, perhaps, Maria Theresa of Hungary, who maintained through life the incongruous relations of a masterful sovereign and a devoted wife, and shared not only her bed but her throne with her husband whom she respected—a fellow-sovereign whom she neither feared nor disregarded. To command the obedience of a proud and warlike people is given to few of the great men of history. To do the bidding of another with vigour and with discretion is a task that has been but rarely accomplished by a heaven-born minister. But to conceive and carry out great designs, with one hand in the grasp of even the most loyal of companions, is a triumphant combination of energy with discretion, of the finest tact with the most indomitable resolution that stamps Isabella of Spain as a being more vigorous than the greatest men, more discreet than the greatest women of history. Semiramis, Zenobia, Boadicea, Elizabeth of England, Catherine of Russia—not one of them was embarrassed by a partner on the throne. The partner of Isabella was not only a husband but a king, jealous, restless, and untrustworthy. It is in this respect, and in the immense scope of her political action, that the great queen of Castile is comparable with the bold empress-king of Hungary, rather than with any other of the great queens and royal ladies of history.
Isabella revolutionised the institutions of her country, religious, political, military, financial; she consolidated her dominions, humiliated her nobles, cajoled her commons, defied the pope, reformed the clergy; she burned some ten thousand of her subjects, she deported a million more, and of the remnant she made a great nation; she brooked no man’s opposition, in a reign of thirty years, and she died in the arms of the king, her husband! It is open to any man to call her a saint and a heroine. It is open to any man to call her a bigot and a tyrant. But no man at least may deny that she was a great queen.[f]
The contradiction between such an opinion and the opinion of Prescott is not after all a contradiction in facts but in point of view. Both regard different phases or facets of one great busy soul striding through a great life on a line which, whether it led through tenderness or mercilessness, was as nearly straight as any line ever trod by a human monarch. It is the mockery of history, however, that while great souls bear great fruits, those fruits are not always of lasting quality, and time may turn them to poison.
The epitaph that Martin Hume would place above the beautiful memory of Isabella is sad enough, yet only too just:[a]
“That her objects were high and noble may be conceded, and that she succeeded in consolidating Spain as no other monarch had done, is true. But at what a cost! She had, in conjunction with Ferdinand, encouraged forces of bigotry and religious hate which flooded her realm with blood and tears, and threw it back in the race of nations for centuries. Her patronage of Columbus is more than blotted out by her patronage of Torquemada; her exalted piety is drowned in the recollection of her treatment of the Jews and the Moriscos. She was a fair embodiment of the prevailing feeling of her countrymen: that to them all things are permitted; they can do no wrong, because they are working for and with the cause of God. We shall see the bitter fruit this feeling bore later. By the irony, or perhaps the eternal justice of fate, all the chicanery of Ferdinand, all the wisdom, the labours, and the fervour of Isabella brought disaster, ruin, and death to Spain. A thousand times happier would it have been for Castile to have remained isolated in its corner of Europe, untroubled with the complications of vast European connections, rather than to have been dragged by Aragon into a position of responsibility and world-wide ambition for which neither its native resources nor the extent nor character of its population befitted it. Its transient grandeur, dearly paid for by long and painful decline, brought to the Spanish people, even while it lasted, neither peace, happiness, nor enduring prosperity; and the king and queen who made Spain great were the worst enemies she ever had.”[t]
FOOTNOTES
[50] Gonzalo de Oviedo[b] lavishes many encomiums on Cabrera, for his “generous qualities, his singular prudence in government, and his solicitude for his vassals, whom he inspired with the deepest attachment.” The best panegyric on his character is the unshaken confidence which his royal mistress reposed in him to the day of her death.