[61] [Dr. Alfonso Diaz de Montalvo. “He first gave to light the principal Spanish codes, and introduced a spirit of criticism into the national jurisprudence.”—Prescott.[g]]
[62] [The alcavala or alcabala was a tax of one-tenth on all sales. Thus bread was thrice taxed, as wheat, then as flour, and finally as bread.]
[63] Even Milton, in his essay on The Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, the most splendid argument, perhaps, the world had then witnessed in behalf of intellectual liberty, would exclude popery from the benefits of toleration, as a religion which the public good required at all events to be extirpated. Such were the crude views of the rights of conscience entertained, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, by one of those gifted minds whose extraordinary elevation enabled it to catch and reflect back the coming light of knowledge, long before it had fallen on the rest of mankind.
[64] [Burke[f] says, “Ferdinand had at least four illegitimate children by different ladies. Juana, who was offered with a double marriage portion, in 1489, to the king of Scots. Juan, archbishop of Saragossa, and two other daughters, both princesses. Raymond de Cardona (the unworthy successor of Gonsalvo de Cordova in Italy) was also commonly supposed to be a son of Ferdinand. But the king’s faults were certainly not those of a voluptuary.” Prescott[g] quotes Marineo[r] on “the queen’s discreet and most amiable conduct in these delicate matters.”]
[65] She gave evidence of this in the commutation of the sentence she obtained for the wretch who stabbed her husband, and whom her ferocious nobles would have put to death without the opportunity of confession and absolution, that “his soul might perish with his body!” (See her letter to Talavera.) She showed this merciful temper, so rare in that rough age, by dispensing altogether with the preliminary barbarities sometimes prescribed by the law in capital executions.
CHAPTER VII. THE REGENCIES OF FERDINAND
[1604-1517 A.D.]