streets and squares, spread their long fronts to the great parade-ground known as the Campo Grande, or rose amongst the gardens which fringed the Pisuerga.

The princess-regent Juana was the second daughter of the emperor, and widow of Juan, prince of Brazil, heir-apparent of the Portuguese crown. Her married life had been no less brief than bright; the prince, who loved her tenderly, dying in less than thirteen months after their union. Juan was the only son, not only of his parents, but of the decaying house of Avis; and therefore, on his pregnant widow of nineteen, were centered all the hopes of the Portuguese nation. In spite, however, of the prayers which rose in every church, and the processions which glittered through every town between the Minho and cape St. Vincent, alarming portents preceded the royal birth. A woman, clad in black, was seen to stand by the bed of Juana, snapping her fingers, and blowing into the air, as if in prediction of the futility of the national hope; and Moorish figures, with torches in their hands, rushed at night by the palace windows, in full view of the princess and her ladies, riding on the wintry blast, and uttering doleful cries as they descended into the sea. But in the night of the fifteenth of January, 1554, a shout of joy rung through the broad square between the palace and the Tagus, when it was announced to the expectant crowd that the prince was born whose romantic fate has made the name of Sebastian so famous in song and story. From the pangs of travail the young mother, who had been kept ignorant of her husband's death, passed to the sorrows of widowhood; she wept for the father of her child as Rachel for her children, and would not be comforted; and but for the king, who forbade the cutting off of her fine auburn hair, she would have retired with her grief to a nun

nery. Having repaid to the house of Avis the debt incurred by the house of Austria at the birth of Don Carlos, she was soon recalled to Spain, to govern that country, as regent, first for her father, the emperor, and now for her brother, Philip the Second.

This high post she filled with firmness and moderation, displaying no want of sagacity, except in her policy towards the enthusiasts for religious reform, whom she treated with the foolish severity practised by many of the mildest and wisest rulers of the time. Her policy was ever directed by that strong family feeling which the princes of the nineteenth century have learned to call by the more decorous name of public spirit. Of personal ambition she appears to have been entirely free. For many months before her brother returned to Spain, she was constantly urging him to come back and ease her of the burden of power. To her father her deference was ever most readily and affectionately paid. Devotion was the ruling passion of her widowed life; her recreation during her regency was to retire, for prayer and scourging, to the convent which the Franciscans called their Scala Cæli, amongst the gloomy rocks and tall pines of Abrojo. She encouraged her ladies to become nuns, but dissuaded them from becoming wives; and she would never give audience to foreign ambassadors without being covered from head to foot with a veil, drawing it aside for a moment only when some envoy, more curious than his fellows, desired permission to identify her pale and melancholy face.

While at Valladolid, the emperor and his suite were lodged in the house of Don Gomez Perez de las Marinas. Another residence was assigned to the queens, who arrived on the twenty-second of October, the day after

1 M. de Meneses: Chronica de D. Sebastiao, fol. Lisboa: 1730, pp. 27-30.

their brother. The grandees, the dignitaries of the church and the law, the council of state in their robes of ceremony, and the college doctors in their scarlet hoods, met them in grand procession, and conducted them into the city in triumph. They were charmed with their reception; Quixada and his people had made no mistake about the tapestries; and queen Mary, at the banquet in the evening, remarked that every day she found new cause to rejoice that she had come to Spain. The banquet was followed by a ball, at which the emperor also was present. The admiral of Castille, the duke of Sesa, heir of the great captain, the count of Benevente, and the marquess of Astorga were amongst the chief nobles who came to do homage to their ancient lord, whose hand was also kissed by the members of the council of Castille. It was probably at this ball that Charles caused the wives of all his personal attendants to be assembled around him, and bade each in particular farewell. Perico de Sant Erbas, a famous jester of the court, passing by at the moment, the emperor good humouredly saluted him by lifting his hat. This buffoon had formerly been wont to make the emperor laugh by calling his son Philip Señor de Todo, lord of All,' and now that he was so, this opportunity of reviving the old joke was too good to be lost by the bitter fool. 'What! do you uncover to me?' said the jester; 'does it mean that you are no longer an emperor ?' 'No, Pedro,' replied the object of the jest; but it means that I have nothing to give you beyond this courtesy."

On the twenty-seventh of October, Don Constantino de Braganza arrived from Lisbon to congratulate the em

'Bradford's Correspondence of Charles V. Relatione di Navagiero, P. 439. 2 J. A. de Vera: Vida del Emp. Carlos V. 4to. Bruxelles: 1656. p. 246.

peror, in the name of his cousin, John the Third, and his sister Catherine, king and queen of Portugal, on his safe return to Spain. Charles received him with that perfect graciousness with which he knew well how to meet the advances of a rival who had just cause for dissatisfaction. For the courts of Lisbon and Valladolid, though friendly in appearance, were really upon terms far from cordial. Not only had Philip the Second broken his faith to an infanta of Portugal, but his father had aided him in foiling the designs of a Portuguese infant upon the crown matrimonial of England. For that splendid prize the gallant Don Luis of Portugal had been one of the earliest candidates. Knowing that the prince of Spain was already betrothed to his halfsister, and being himself a brother-in-law, as well as a brother in arms, of his sire, he at once confided his plan to the emperor, and asked for his aid in its execution. Charles received his confidence graciously, and affected to favour his pretensions, until Philip had made his election sure. Don Luis was lately dead, leaving a bastard son, who, as prior of Crato, afterwards became famous for a time as Philip's most formidable rival for the crown of Portugal. But the affronts which the house of Avis had received in the persons of Don Luis and the infanta, were still too recent to be forgotten, and may have been partly the cause why the princess Juana so soon forsook her baby-son, and the kingdom which was his heritage. The national enmities which burned on the opposite shores of the Guadiana were not extinct in royal bosoms at Lisbon and Valladolid; France was careful to fan the useful flame; and it was suspected that the moidores of Brazil were not unknown to the troops which soon began to plant the lilied banner on fortress after fortress along the ever-fluctuating frontier of French and Austrian Flanders.

During his stay at Valladolid, the emperor every day held long conferences on public affairs with the princessregent and the secretary Vazquez. He could not approach the machine of government which he had so long directed without examining with lively interest its condition and its movements. He was anxious now to

give its present guides the benefit of his parting advice, -advice which, as the event proved, he continued to transmit from Yuste by every post, and which was ended only with his powers of hearing and dictating despatches. But that he now intended to abstain from further interference with business of state is plain, from a letter which he wrote to Philip the Second on the thirtieth of October.

This letter relates chiefly to certain overtures which had been made to the emperor by Anthony de Bourbon, whom he called duke of Vendome, but who was known in France by the title of king of Navarre. Since Ferdinand the Catholic had driven John the Third across the Pyrenees, the dominions of the house of D'Albret hardly extended beyond the horizon of its fair castle of Pau. The chains in which Castille held Navarre were stronger than those through which Don Sancho clove his way at Navas de Tolosa, and which his exiled descendants still emblazoned in gold on their blood-red shield. Yet the late king Henry, husband of the story-loving pearl of Margarets, had willed himself a provisional tomb, until fortune should permit him to be laid in the cathedral of Pamplona. His son-in-law, the chief of the Bourbons, was, however, neither very solicitous nor very hopeful of disturbing Henry's repose at Lescar. To the courage, courtesy, and good humour which seldom desert a Bourbon in high or low estate, the first king of the name added, in full measure, that laxity of principle and instability of purpose which seem to