a loud voice, setting forth the offences of Don Enrique, 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 Alonso Carrillo, advanced and took the crown from the brows of the mimic king. For the second he forfeited the right to administer 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. For the fourth, he deserved to be deprived of the throne and establishment of a king, wherefore Don Diego Lopez de Zuñiga 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 Enrique. And immediately upon this, Don Alonso came up, and being placed on the throne, received the homage and fealty of the banded nobles, 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 shouts of 'viva el rey' from themselves and their fautors, 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 Alonso 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 Alonso, 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 22nd day of April, in the year 1451. Ere she had completed her fourth year, her father died, and the imbecile Don Enrique, on succeeding to the crown, left Isabel and her mother to languish in poverty and obscurity in the seclusion of the royal country house of Arevalo. The Queen mother, Doña Isabel of Portugal, soon lost her reason from the accumulated burden of degradation and 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 Enrique did, indeed, after a while, repent 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 im

placable foe of the Gothic name strengthened himself in the hills of Granada, and defied the chivalry of Castile to the field; but the descendant of Don Pelayo was now a craven knight, a minion ruled prince, the scorn alike of Christian and Moor,—and consumed the treasures of his kingdom in revelry or 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 jesters, and rash bavin wits,
Soon kindled and soon burnt: carded his state;
Mingled his royalty with carping fools;

Had his great name profaned with their scorns.

And worst of all, the profligate Queen of a shameless monarch, the guilty Doña Juana, lived in unchecked adultery with Don Beltran, at once the falsest of friends and most incapable of ministers, and reared up the offspring of their crime, the unfortunate Beltraneja, to be the watchword of treason in Castile for many a weary year of bloodshed and confusion. Fortunately for Isabel, she possessed a native dignity and purity of character, fortified and refined by the seeming mischances of her lot, which, however, had but taught her the 'sweet uses' of adversity; and she passed through the fiery ordeal of a dissolute court unscathed, or rather with her genuine nobility of soul yet more elevated by a

shrinking repulsion for the foul atmosphere she had been compelled to breathe.

When the death of Don Alonso, the victim of poison administered in his food, left the insurgent nobles without a suitable chief, they went to Doña Isabel, with the Archbishop of Toledo at their head, and offered her the sceptre of Castile. She had taken refuge in a convent at Avila, anxious to escape from the horrors of civil war which every where met her eye. If her principles of conduct had been less pure and upright, the spectacle of her country given up to the reciprocal rage of hostile partisans, and of her beloved brother the early victim of unregulated ambition, would have come to confirm her resolutions in such a crisis. But she needed not this; and immoveable in her loyalty to her lord and brother Don Enrique, she unhesitatingly and decidedly refused the proffers of allegiance made her by the grandees in arms against the crown. A procedure so full of high-toned generosity, while it won the regards of Don Enrique, was not without its influence upon his enemies, and greatly facilitated the conclusion of a modified peace at the congress of Los Toros de Guisando, where Don Enrique proclaimed Doña Isabel sole heiress of his kingdom, thus forever sealing the fate of La Beltraneja, whom he declared under oath not to be his child.

The barons, who had so contumeliously performed the ceremony of dethroning the King in effigy at Av21*

VOL. I.

ila, now returned to his confidence, and engaged in a new series of intrigues for the disposal of the hand of Doña Isabel, who, as heiress of Castile and Leon, was sought for in marriage by many of the great Princes of Europe. Don Juan Pacheco obtained the grand mastership of Santiago; and the Archbishop of Toledo was again trusted. Of the various alliances, which offered, that of the house of Aragon, as uniting the two great fragments of Spain, it was the interest of every true patriot to promote; and thus it was viewed by the Archbishop. But Don Juan had reasons of personal interest for opposing this, and managed to gain exclusive control of the movements and purposes of the King. They endeavored to compel the Princess, by threats of imprisonment, to marry the King of Portugal, a widower, far advanced in years, and wholly unsuitable as a husband of the fair and youthful Isabel. This hopeful scheme failing, they fixed on Charles, Duke of Berri and Guienne, brother of Louis XI. of France. Don Fadrique Enriquez, Admiral of Castile, and Don Mosen Pierres de Peralta, Constable of Navarre, were the coadjutors of the Archbishop in furthering the proposals of the young Ferdinand of Aragon, who had a still more powerful partisan than either in the growing tenderness of Doña Isabel.

In fact Isabel, like a discreet and prudent lady as she was, had been playing, under the rose, a game of her own, quite as cunningly as the politic