"Perhaps," says Helps, speaking of Isabella, "there is hardly any great personage whose name and authority are found in connection with so much that is strikingly evil, all of it done, or rather assented to, upon the highest and purest motives." To palliate on such grounds is to believe in the irresponsibility of motives, which should transcend times and occasions.
She is not, however, without loyal adulators of her own time and race.
We read in Oviedo of her splendid soul. Peter Martyr found commendations of ordinary humanity not enough for her. Those nearest her person spoke as admiringly. It is the fortune, however, of a historical student, who lies beyond the influence of personal favor, to read in archives her most secret professions, and to gauge the innermost wishes of a soul which was carefully posed before her contemporaries. It is mirrored to-day in a thousand revealing lenses that were not to be seen by her contemporaries. Irving and Prescott simply fall into the adulation of her servitors, and make her confessors responsible for her acquiescence in the expulsion of the Jews and in the horrors of the Inquisition.
The king, perhaps, was good enough for a king as such personages went in the fifteenth century; but his smiles and remorseless coldness were mixed as few could mix them, even in those days. If the Pope regarded him from Italy, that Holy Father called him pious. The modern student finds him a bigot. His subjects thought him great and glorious, but they did not see his dispatches, nor know his sometimes baleful domination in his cabinet. The French would not trust him. The English watched his ambition. The Moors knew him as their conqueror. The Jews fled before his evil eye. The miserable saw him in his inquisitors. All this pleased the Pope, and the papal will made him in preferred phrase His Most Catholic Majesty,--a phrase that rings in diplomatic formalities to-day.
Every purpose upon which he had set his heart was apt to blind him to aught else, and at times very conveniently so. We may allow that it is precisely this single mind which makes a conspicuous name in history; but conspicuousness and justness do not always march with a locked step.
