In the end Joanna’s stubborn obstinacy was conquered, and she returned to the castle; but after such a scene few could doubt that she was at any rate temporarily insane; and the Queen, conscious that her own days were drawing to a close, trembled at the thought of her country’s future, delivered to the moods of such a ruler.

“Cursed fruit of the tree that bore her; ill-fated seed of the land that gave her birth, was this daughter for her mother,” wrote Peter Martyr bitterly; and Isabel’s star, which had risen in such splendour out of the murk of Henry IV.’s misgovernment, was destined to sink amid the shame of Joanna’s folly.

In the spring of 1504 the Archduchess sailed to Flanders; and Queen Isabel, guessing the scandals that would follow her footsteps when her own restraining influence was removed, said good-bye to her with a sick heart. Feeble in body, so that every task seemed an effort, she herself turned more and more from worldly matters to the prayers and meditations that drew her ever closer in touch with the land of her desire towards which she was hastening. Yet neither her kingdom nor people were far from her thoughts.

In 1503, when Ferdinand had gone north to protect the border counties from what was rumoured to be an enormous invading army, her old martial spirit had revived; and she busied herself in Segovia, as in the old days, in collecting troops and despatching them to the seat of war. With the news of Spanish victories her conscience smote her. The flying French! These also were a Christian race, fighting for their own land. Recoiling from the thought of such a slaughter, she wrote to Ferdinand, praying him to stay his hand; and, whether moved by her wish or his own foresight, he contented himself with driving his foes across the border. Soon afterwards Louis XII. agreed to an armistice that freed the Pyrenean provinces from war.

Triumph in the north of Spain was followed by the news of Gonsalvo de Cordova’s victories in Naples; but joy at these successes was counterbalanced by the serious state of the Queen’s health. She and Ferdinand had fallen ill of fever in Medina del Campo in the summer of 1504; and, while his constitution rallied from the attack, anxiety for him and her own weakness aggravated her symptoms, and it was feared that these would end in dropsy.

“We sit sorrowful in the palace all the day long,” wrote Peter Martyr early in the autumn, “tremulously waiting the hour when religion and virtue shall quit the earth with her.”

Isabel herself knew the end was not far off, and bade those about her restrain their tears. When she heard of the processions and pilgrimages made throughout the kingdom in the hope of restoring her to health she asked that her subjects should pray “not for the safety of her life but the salvation of her soul.”

On the 12th of October she signed her will, commanding in it that her body should be taken to Granada, and there buried without ostentation in a humble tomb. The money that would have provided an elaborate funeral was to be spent on dowries for twelve poor girls and the ransom of Christian captives in Africa.

The poverty of the Castilian treasury, in contrast to its heavy expenses, evidently weighed on her mind; and she gave orders that the number of officials in the royal household should be reduced, and gifts of lands and revenues, that had been alienated by the Crown without sufficient cause, revoked. Her jewels she left to Ferdinand, that “seeing them,” she said, “he may be reminded of the singular love I always bore him while living, and that now I am waiting for him in a better world.”

The future government of the kingdom was her special care; and in her will, and its codicil added in November, while acknowledging Joanna as her successor, she begged both her and Philip “to be always obedient subjects to the King, and never disobey his orders.” This injunction was amplified by the command that if Joanna should be absent from Spain, “or although present ... unable to reign and govern,” Ferdinand should act as regent, until his grandson Charles was of an age to undertake this task for himself.

Such were the most important clauses of the document, by which Isabel strove to safeguard her loved Castile from the dangers threatening her. In others, she insisted that Gibraltar, which she had acquired for the Crown should never be alienated from it; that her daughter and son-in-law should not appoint foreigners to any office or post of trust, that the tax of the alcabala,^[10] if found illegal on inquiry, should be abolished; that a new and more accurate code of laws should be compiled; and that steps should be taken to secure the kindly treatment of natives in the New World. It will be seen that Isabel in her last days was still the ruler, holding in her now feeble hands all the threads of national government, but clear in mind to recognize and command the issues.

On November 26th^[11] the end so long expected came; and, having received the Sacraments and commended her soul to God, the Queen, clad in a Franciscan robe, passed peacefully away.

My hand [says Peter Martyr] falls powerless by my side for very sorrow. The world has lost its noblest ornament ... for she was the mirror of every virtue, the shield of the innocent, and an avenging sword to the wicked.

It has pleased Our Lord [wrote Ferdinand to the chief citizens of Madrid] to take to Himself the Most Serene Queen Doña Isabel, my very dear and well-beloved wife; and although her loss is for me the greatest heaviness that this world held in store ... yet, seeing that her death was as holy and catholic as her life, we may believe that Our Lord has received her into His glory, that is a greater and more lasting kingdom than any here on earth.

The day after her death, the coffin with its funeral cortège left Medina del Campo for Granada, amid a hurricane of wind and rain such as the land had rarely witnessed. Peter Martyr, who was one of the escort, declared that the Heavens opened, pouring down torrents that drove the horsemen to shelter in the ditches by the wayside, while the mules sank exhausted and terrified in the road. Never for a moment was there a gleam of either sun or star, until on December 25th, as the funeral procession entered Granada, the clouds lifted for the first time.

There in the city of her triumph, in the Franciscan monastery of the Alhambra, the very heart of the kingdom she had won for Christianity, Isabel of Castile was laid to rest.