OTHER ROYAL MURDERS
[1358-1361 A.D.]
The king and the prince of Aragon departed for Biscay; but, on reaching Aguilar, they found that Don Tello had been apprised of his intended doom, and had fled. Pedro followed him to Bermeo, where he learned that the fugitive had just embarked for Bayonne. In his blind fury he embarked in the first vessel he found in the harbour, and ordered a pursuit; but the sea began to rise so high that he soon abandoned it, and returned to the port. The infante Juan now requested the fulfilment of the royal promise; but he who had made it had now changed his mind. With his usual duplicity, however, he amused his cousin, saying that he could do nothing without the states of the province; that he would speedily convoke them, and procure the recognition of the new feudatory. He did convoke them; but it was to persuade them to confer their sovereignty on himself alone.
The disappointed claimant now left Pedro in disgust; but was speedily recalled to Bilbao, where the king repaired, by the promise that his ambition should be gratified. The infante hastened to that town, and proceeded to the house occupied by the court. As he approached the royal apartments, some of the tyrant’s creatures, as if in jest, deprived him of his poniard—the only weapon which he had about him, and, at the same moment he was struck on the head by a mace; another blow brought him lifeless to the ground. His corpse was thrown from the window of the apartment occupied by the king into the street; but was afterwards conveyed to Burgos, and cast into the river.
To revenge the murder of these victims, the two brothers, Henry and Tello, who had returned to Aragon, made frequent irruptions into Castile. In a battle fought in 1359, they triumphed over Henestrosa, whom they left dead on the field; and, in subsequent invasions, they obtained no small portion of plunder.[34] But none of these things moved the king, who persevered in his course of barbarities as if his throne rested on a rock of adamant. It is impossible to specify all his individual acts of murder; such only can be represented here as are either more than usually characteristic of him, or as exercised some influence on following events: in revenge for the aid afforded to his revolted subjects by the infante of Aragon, he put to death Leonora, the dowager queen of that country, who had long resided in Castile, and who was also his own aunt. But his famous, or rather infamous compact with the Portuguese king, Pedro, is most indicative of the man. Knowing how much that sovereign longed to extirpate all who had been concerned in the murder of Iñes de Castro,[35] and of whom a few had sought refuge in Castile; and no less eager on his own part to take vengeance on three or four of his own obnoxious subjects, who had implored the protection of the Portuguese, he proposed to surrender the Portuguese in exchange for the Castilian refugees. The kindred soul of the Lusitanian felt a savage joy at the proposal; in 1360, the men were exchanged and put to death.
That he cared as little for the king of France as for the pope—both were distant enemies—Spain had a melancholy proof, in 1361, in the tragical death of that unhappy queen, Blanche de Bourbon. His orders for her removal by poison were first given to the governor of Xeres, to whom the custody of her person had for some time been intrusted; but that governor, whose name (Iñigo Ortiz de Zuñiga) ought to be revered by posterity, refused to become the executioner of his queen. It is somewhat surprising that his life was not the penalty of his disobedience—a doom which he doubtless expected. A less scrupulous agent for this bloody business was found in one of the king’s ballasteros, Juan Perez de Robledo, who hastened to the fortress, superseded the noble Iñigo Ortiz in the command, and perpetrated the deed—whether by poison or by steel is unknown. The same violence befell Isabella de Lara, widow of the infante Don Juan, whom the tyrant had murdered at Bilbao.
[1361-1366 A.D.]
The death of Blanche was followed by the natural one of the king’s mistress, Maria de Padilla. Whether through the example of the Portuguese sovereign, who had shortly before proclaimed his secret marriage with Iñes de Castro, or whether because the Castilian had in like manner actually married Maria, certain it is, that, in 1362—immediately after the murder of the king of Granada by his own hand—Pedro convoked the cortes at Seville, and declared that Maria de Padilla had been his lawful wife, and that for this reason alone he had refused to live with Blanche de Bourbon: he therefore required that his son Alfonso should be declared his legitimate successor. Three of the king’s creatures were brought forward, who swore on the holy Gospels that they had been present at the nuptials; and the cortes, though far from convinced of the fact, affected to receive it as such, declared Maria the queen and Alfonso the heir of the kingdom; and, after him, the daughters of their monarch by that favourite. If such a marriage were really contracted, Blanche was deceived as well as Juana de Castro; but, from want of sufficient evidence, history can place the French princess only in the rank of Castilian queens. The man who had imposed on the credulity of Doña Juana, who had broken his faith whenever it suited his views, whose character was as much distinguished for duplicity as for violence—must produce some better voucher than his word, or his oath, or those of his creatures, before he will obtain credit with posterity.