Queens of old Spain

Proudly reared upon a lofty cliff above the trickling Manzanares, there stood the granite palace that had gradually grown around the ancient Moorish fortress of Madrid. Like an eagle from its aerie, its tiny windows blinked across the tawny plain at the far-off glittering snow peaks of Guadarrama, standing forth clear and sharp against a cobalt sky. The Alcazar had been the scene of many strange happenings in the past; and for a hundred years chivalric splendour had run riot in its broad patios, with their arcades of slender columns, and in its tapestried halls, whose carved ceilings blazed with gold and colour. Frivolous, pleasure-loving, Juan II. of Castile, grandson of John of Gaunt, had through a long reign outdone in vain ostentation the epic poems and romances of chivalry that filled his brain, and he himself, with his attendant Nubian lion slouching by his side, had stalked through the Alcazar upon the cliff, a figure more picturesque than that of Amadis or Arthur. His lavish, easy-going son, Henry IV., had followed in his footsteps, and had made his palace of Madrid a home of dissolute magnificence and humiliating debauchery, unexampled even in that age of general decadence. But rarely had scenes at once so pregnant of evil, and yet so ostensibly joyous, been enacted in the palace of Madrid as on the 17th March 1462. Greed, hate and jealousy, raged beneath silken gowns and ermine mantles; nay, beneath the gorgeous vestments of the great churchmen who stood grouped before the altar in the palace chapel, though smiling faces and words of pleasure were seen and heard on every side. For to the King, after eight years of fruitless marriage, an heiress had been born, and the court and people of Castile and Leon were bidden to make merry and welcome their future Queen. Bull fights, tournaments, and cane contests, the songs of minstrels and plenteous banquets, had for days beguiled a populace palled with gaudy shows; and now the sacred ceremonies of the Church were to sanctify the babe whose advent had moved so many hearts to shocked surprise. The King, a shaggy, red-haired giant with slack, lazy limbs and feeble face, towered in his golden crown and velvet mantle over his nine-year-old half-brother Alfonso by his side. The child, under a canopy, was borne in state up to the font by Count Alba de Liste, and the stalwart, black-browed primate of Spain, Alfonso Carrillo, Archbishop of Toledo, who, with three attendant bishops, performed the ceremony, blessed the baby girl unctuously beneath the King's lymphatic gaze, though he had already resolved to ruin her. By the side of the font stood the sponsors: a girl of eleven and a sturdy noble in splendid attire, with his wife. All around, the courtiers, their mouths wreathed in doubtful smiles which their lifted brows belied, glanced alternately at the little group of sponsors, and at the noblest figure of all the courtly throng: a young man glittering with gems who stood behind the King. Tall, almost, as Henry himself, with flashing dark eyes and jet black hair, a fair skin and gallant mien, this youth formed with the King, and the group at the font, the elements of a great drama, which ended in the renascence of Spain. For the young man was Beltran de la Cueva, the new Count of Ledesma, who, all the court was whispering, was really the father of the new-born Princess, and the sponsors, besides the Frenchman Armignac, were the gorged and spoiled favourite of the King, the all-powerful Juan Pacheco, Marquis of Villena, and his wife, and the King's half-sister, Princess Isabel of Castile.