But, interesting as some of these earlier personages are, they cannot rightly be called Queens of Spain; and the first of all Spanish Queens, the great Isabel of Castile and Aragon, may fittingly begin the volume, which will contain the stories of other ladies perhaps more loveable, more feminine, more sympathetic, but none so splendidly steadfast, so noble of aim, or so strong as she. Her function in the world, aided by her husband, was to crush the rieving nobles, and bring unity to Spain by religious exaltation. The end endowed her country with transient greatness and febrile force, whilst the methods by which it was attained doomed the nation she loved so well to a long agony of decay, and ultimate exhaustion. The problems facing Spanish rulers thenceforward were no longer centred upon the development of the country as a prosperous Christian land, or even upon the maintenance of the Mediterranean as a Christian sea. The policy of the ‘Catholic Kings’ plunged Spain into the vortex of mid-European politics at the critical period of the world’s history, when new lines of demarcation were being scored by religious schism across the ancient boundaries: when deep, unbridgable crevasses were being split between peoples hitherto bound together by common interests and traditional friendship. At this crucial time, when the centre of all earthly authority was boldly challenged, Spain was pledged by Isabel and Ferdinand to a course which thenceforward made her the champion of an impossible religious unity, and squandered for centuries the blood and treasure of her people in the fruitless struggle to fix enduring fetters upon the thoughts and souls of men. Myriads of martyrs shed their blood to cement the solid Spain that might serve as an instrument for such gigantic ends; and the ecstatic Queen, though gentle and pitiful at heart, yet had no pity for the victims, as her clear eyes pierced the reek of sacrifice, and saw beyond it the shining glory of her goal. To her and to her descendant kings the end they aimed at justified all things done in its attainment, and the touch of mystic madness that in the great Queen was allied to exalted genius, grew in those of her blood who followed her to the besotted obsession that blinded them to the nature and extent of the forces against them, and led them down at last to babbling idiocy, and their country to impotent decay. The pale figure of Joan the distraught flits across our page, and forces to our consideration once more the awful problem of whether she was the victim of a hellish conspiracy on the part of those who should have loved her best, or a woman afflicted by the hand of God; whether her lifelong martyrdom was the punishment of heresy or the need of her infirmity. Pathetic Mary Tudor, Queen Consort of Spain, demands notice because her marriage with Philip II. marked the vital need of Spain, at any cost, to hold by the traditional alliance with England amidst the shifting sands of religious revolt which were to overwhelm and transform Europe; whilst, later, the desperate attempt of Philip to form a new group of powers which should enable Spain to dispense with unorthodox England, is personified in the sweet and noble figure of his third wife, Isabel of Valois, upon whose life-story, poignant enough in its bare reality, romancers have embroidered so many strange adornments. The Austrian princesses, who in turn became consorts of the Catholic Kings, all represent the unhappy persistence of the rulers of Spain in clinging to the splendid but unrealisable dream bequeathed by their great ancestor the Emperor to his suffering realm; that of perpetuating Spanish hegemony over Europe by means of compulsory uniformity of creed, dictated from Rome and enforced from Madrid. And in the intervals of discouragement and disillusionment at the impotence of Habsburg Emperors to secure such uniformity even within the bounds of the empire itself, and the patent impossibility for Spain alone to cope with the giant task, we see the turning of kings and ministers in temporary despair towards the secular enemy of the house of Austria, and Spain in search of French brides who might bring Catholic support to the Catholic champion. When, at last, exhausted Spain could deceive herself no longer, and was fain to acknowledge that she had been beaten in her attempt to hold the rising tide and deny to men the God-given right of unfettered thought, the matrimonial alliances of her Kings, whilst ceasing to be instruments for the realisation of the vision of her prime, still obeyed the traditionary policies which drew Spain alternately to the side of France or Austria.