How true to the life is the general description of the canon Ortiz, may be seen from a trait of the times recorded by Fernando del Pulgar. It seems that Don Pedro de Mendaña was alcaide of Castronuño during the period under review. Seeing the time well disposed for his natural desires and inclinations, he received in that fortalice many robbers with the booty which they made, and protected them from pursuit, as also desperate men of every kind, absconding debtors, murderers, and other outlaws. And when he found himself accompanied by such followers, induced by impunity from the laws and by large rewards to do his bidding, he seized on the castles of Cubillas and Cantalapiedra, and fortified that of Sieteiglesias, and placed his men in them; from which strongholds they sallied forth to rob in all the regions round about, and brought to him the treasure and goods they collected. He also captured the town of Tordesillas, and augmented his power in such wise, that the great cities of Burgos, Avila, Salamanca, Segovia, Valladolid, and Medina, and all the other towns in that country, gave him a regular tribute of bread, wine, and money, to purchase security. And thenceforward he continued to make other demands from them, of money and cattle, all which was yielded to his satisfaction. And by such oppressions he acquired great riches, so as to maintain constantly in his pay no less than three hundred mounted banditti. All the grandees of the kingdom who had estates in these districts held him in fear, and gave him largesses, that he might not make war against them on their lands. And from the success of this alcaide, many other alcaides in the kingdom took example, and set themselves to pillaging and ransoming the people, and defending the crimes and misdeeds which robbers perpetrated. Some time elapsed in this wise, when Pedro de Mendaña was besieged in his castle of Castronuño, and after an obstinate defence surrendered only upon honorable terms of capitulation; he and his bands escaping all punishment, as if what he had done was in the mere common course of war.
We shall give one other incident equally characteristic, but differing from the foregoing, as it shows how the great nobles and their immediate followers demeaned themselves in the same reign. Don Henrique had abandoned the control of affairs to his queen, and to her paramour Don Beltram de la Cueva, Conde de Ledesma, who was universally believed to have dishonored the royal bed, and to be the father of the Infanta Juana, stigmatized from this circumstance by the sobriquet of la Beltraneja, by which name she is uniformly styled in Spanish history. The power enjoyed by this ancient Godoy excited a confederation of the discontented grandees and prelates, having for its object the deposition of Don Henrique, and the elevation of his brother Don Alonzo to the throne. The chroniclers Diego Enriquez del Castillo and Alonzo de Palencia describe the scene which ensued.
The leagued barons, being assembled at Avila, selected an extensive plain without the city, on which they erected a large scaffold, open on all sides, so that the citizens of Avila and the multitude who came from other towns to witness the ceremonial, might plainly see everything which took place. Here was displayed a royal throne, on which sat a figure representing Don Henrique with the crown on his head, a sword before, and the sceptre in his hand, in the usual manner of arraying the person of kings. Everything being thus arranged, the barons rode out from the city towards the scaffold, accompanied by Don Alonzo. When they had arrived, Don Juan Pacheco, Marquis de Villena, with the master of Alcantara, and the Conde de Medellin, took the prince a little way aside, while the other lords approached and placed themselves behind the effigy, ready to perform the act of dethronement.
Having done this, one of them advanced to the front of the scaffold, and read a paper with a loud voice, setting forth the offences of Don Henrique, which they divided into four principal heads. For the first, they alleged that he deserved to lose his royal dignity, whereupon the Archbishop of Toledo, Don Alonzo Carrillo, advanced, and took the crown from the brows of the mimic king. For the second, he forfeited the right of jurisdiction and justice, wherefore Don Alvaro de Zuñiga, Conde de Plasencia, removed the sword which lay on his lap. For the third, he ought to lose the government of his kingdom, and so Don Rodrigo Pimentel, Conde de Benavente, snatched the sceptre which he held in his hand. Lastly, for the fourth, he deserved to be deprived of the throne and establishment of a king, wherefore Don Diego Lopez de Luñiga, approaching and striking the effigy from the chair in which it was seated, kicked it ignominiously from the scaffold to the ground, accompanying the act with bitter terms of invective and reproach against the person and character of Don Henrique.
Immediately upon this, Don Alonzo came up, and being placed on the throne, received the insignia of royalty, with the homage and fealty of the banded knights, who kissed his hands as king and right lord of the realm, ordering the trumpets to sound a loud note of joy and triumph, amid the shouts of "viva el rey" from themselves and their partisans, and the muttered lamentations of the shocked and terrified multitude, too conscious that all the extremities of civil war must tread close on the heels of such high-handed and outrageous misdemeanors. And so indeed it was to the scandal of all Spain, and to the desolation and misery of the people, until the sudden death of Don Alonzo deprived the disaffected lords of a rallying-point, and abated, but did not extinguish, the fury of embattled factions in wretched Castile.
After the death of Don Alonzo, there remained only Doña Isabel, the young sister of the king, who could dispute with him the possession of the crown. She was daughter of Don Juan by a second marriage, being born at Madrigal, in old Castile, the twenty-second day of April, in the year 1451. Ere she had completed her fourth year, her father died, and Don Henrique, on succeeding to the crown, left Isabel and her mother to languish in poverty and obscurity in the seclusion of their town and lordship of Arevalo. The queen-mother, Doña Isabel of Portugal, soon lost her reason from the accumulated burden of degradation and other sorrows, and her deserted daughter, far from the luxury of palaces, and stripped of all the flattering incidents of royal birth, entered upon that childhood and youth of affliction whose trials were to conduct to so glorious an issue in her after life. Don Henrique did indeed, after a while, repent him of his abandonment of the injured Isabel, and received her into his palace, to enjoy the advantages which belonged to her rank.
But what a scene was there for the pure and ingenuous recluse of the walls of Arevalo! The implacable foe of the Gothic name strengthened himself among the hills of Granada, and defied the chivalry of Castile to the field; but the descendant of Don Pelayo was now a craven knight and a minion ruled prince, the scorn alike of Christian and of Moor; and consumed the treasures of his kingdom in revelry and favoritism, and its blood in civil broils, in the stead of devoting them to the noble task of driving Muley Hassan, from the golden halls and marble courts of the Alhambra, back to the native deserts of his race.
The skipping king, he ambled up and down,
With shallow gestures, and rash bavin wits,
Soon kindled and soon burnt: carded his state;