anifest current of public
sentiment, agreed to accept Isabella as his successor and as the lawful
heir to the throne of Castile. With this question settled in this
satisfactory way, the matter of Isabella's marriage again became an
affair of national importance. There were suitors in plenty, Richard,
Duke of Gloucester, brother of Edward IV. of England, and the Duke of
Guienne, brother of Louis XI. and heir to the French throne, being among
the number; but the young Isabella, influenced as much by policy as by
any personal feeling in the matter, had decided that she would wed
Fernando, son of John II. of Aragon and his second wife, the dashing
Dona Juana Henriquez, and nothing would change her from this fixed
purpose. In a former day it had been a woman, Queen Berenguela, who had
labored long and successfully for the union of Castile and Leon; and now
another woman, this time a girl still in her teens, was laboring for a
still greater Spanish unity, which will consolidate the interests of the
two kingdoms of Aragon and Castile and give to all Spain the peace which
was now such a necessity to the future well-being of the country. There
were numerous obstacles thrown in the way of this marriage, which was
not pleasing to all of the Castilian factions. The Archbishop of Seville
tried to kidnap Isabella to prevent it, and would have done so but for
the activity of another prelate, the Archbishop of Toledo, who rescued
the unfortunate maiden and carried her off to sure friends in
Valladolid, where she awaited Fernando's coming.

Burke gives an admirable description of Isabella at this time, in the
following lines: "That royal and noble lady was then in the full bloom
of her maiden beauty. She had just completed her eighteenth year. In
stature somewhat superior to the majority of her countrywomen, and
inferior to none in personal grace and charm, her golden hair and her
bright blue eyes told perhaps of her Lancastrian ancestry. Her beauty
was remarkable in a land where beauty has never been rare; her dignity
was conspicuous in a country where dignity is the heritage not of a
class but of a nation. Of her courage, no less than of her discretion,
she had already given abundant proofs. Bold and resolute, modest and
reserved, she had all the simplicity of a great lady born for a great
position. She became in after life something of an autocrat and overmuch
of a bigot. But it could not be laid to the charge of a persecuted
princes