Chapter VII: The Regencies of Ferdinand (3)

Thus it is that the seed sown under a good system continues to yield fruit under a bad one. The season of the most brilliant results, however, is not always that of the greatest national prosperity. The splendours of foreign conquest in the boasted reign of Charles V were dearly purchased by the decline of industry at home, and the loss of liberty. The patriot will see little to cheer him in this “golden age” of the national history, whose outward show of glory will seem to his penetrating eye only the hectic brilliancy of decay. He will turn to an earlier period, when the nation, emerging from the sloth and license of a barbarous age, seemed to renew its ancient energies, and to prepare like a giant to run its course; and glancing over the long interval since elapsed, during the first half of which the nation wasted itself on schemes of mad ambition, and in the latter has sunk into a state of paralytic torpor, he will fix his eye on the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella as the most glorious epoch in the annals of his country.[b]

FOOTNOTES

[66] [Burke[k] gives Baudier[a] as authority for claiming that Ferdinand did not care to see his daughter, and says, “it must be admitted that if Ferdinand was a detestable father, Philip was a very sorry husband.”]

[67] [According to Bergenroth,[u] however, “the general opinion was that he had been poisoned,” and he insinuates that Louis Ferrer, Ferdinand’s envoy to Philip, was the person who rendered his master this service. But the suspicion is unsupported by a particle of evidence, and seems to be sufficiently refuted by a description of the symptoms and course of the disease, to be found in a letter addressed to Ferdinand by a Dr. Parra, one of the consulting physicians.]

[68] A foolish Carthusian monk, “_levi sicco folio levior_,” to borrow Martyr’s[l] words, though more knave than fool probably, filled Juana with absurd hopes of her husband’s returning to life, which, he assured her, had happened, as he had read, to a certain prince, after he had been dead fourteen years. As Philip was disembowelled, he was hardly in a condition for such an auspicious event. The queen, however, seems to have been caught with the idea. Martyr loses all patience at the inventions of this “_blactero cucullatus_,” as he calls him, in his abominable Latin, as well as at the mad pranks of the queen, and the ridiculous figure which he and the other grave personages of the court were compelled to make on the occasion. It is impossible to read his jeremiads on the subject without a smile.

[69] [Martin Hume[t] credits Ferdinand with being the founder of the school of diplomacy ordinarily called Italian. He blames him also for commencing the long wars between the Spanish and the French.]

[70] [Oviedo[s] notices a rumour of his having been poisoned by one of his secretaries but vouches for the innocence of the individual accused, whom he personally knew.]

[71] [“Neither to the buildings nor the endowment did queen or king contribute a single maravedi.”[k]]

[72] Alcalá de Henares was called Complutum by the Romans. This name has been variously derived.

[73] [The original manuscripts were, it seems, sold as waste paper to a manufacturer of skyrockets, and were destroyed wantonly though brilliantly.]

[74] [To accomplish this she and the austere Ximenes must needs defy even the pope Alexander VI. The result was as Hume[e] observes: “It is unquestionable that the worst abuses in the church of which the early reformers complained, had been purged from the Spanish church by Isabella, and that, at a time when the rest of the clergy of Europe were grossly licentious, the Spanish priests were generally virtuous and devout.”]

[75] [Martin Hume[e] says: “Spanish gold and silver coin, in a few years, was plentiful in every country but in Spain itself.”]

[76] The sums in the text express the _real de vellom_; to which they have been reduced by Señor Clemencin,[j] from the original amount in maravedis, which varied very materially in value in different years.