Among the many curious and striking passages in Ayala’s Chronicle, the most interesting are, perhaps, those that relate to the unfortunate Blanche of Bourbon, the young and beautiful wife of Peter the Cruel, who, for the sake of María de Padilla, forsook her two days after his marriage, and, when he had kept her long in prison, at last sacrificed her to his base passion for his mistress; an event which excited, as we learn from Froissart’s Chronicle, a sensation of horror, not only in Spain, but throughout Europe, and became an attractive subject for the popular poetry of the old national ballads, several of which we find were devoted to it.[270] But it may well be doubted whether even the best of the ballads give us so near and moving a picture of her cruel sufferings as Ayala does, when, going on step by step in his passionless manner, he shows us the queen first solemnly wedded in the church at Toledo, and then pining in her prison at Medina Sidonia; the excitement of the nobles, and the indignation of the king’s own mother and family; carrying us all the time with painful exactness through the long series of murders and atrocities by which Pedro at last reaches the final crime which, during eight years, he had hesitated to commit. For there is, in the succession of scenes he thus exhibits to us, a circumstantial minuteness which is above all power of generalization, and brings the guilty monarch’s character more vividly before us than it could be brought by the most fervent spirit of poetry or of eloquence.[271] And it is precisely this cool and patient minuteness of the chronicler, founded on his personal knowledge, that gives its peculiar character to Ayala’s record of the four wild reigns in which he lived; presenting them to us in a style less spirited and vigorous, indeed, than that of some of the older chronicles of the monarchy, but certainly in one more simple, more judicious, and more effective for the true purposes of history.[272] [270] There are about a dozen ballads on the subject of Don Pedro, of which the best, I think, are those beginning, “Doña Blanca esta en Sidonia,” “En un retrete en que apenas,” “No contento el Rey D. Pedro,” and “Doña Maria de Padilla,” the last of which is in the Saragossa Cancionero of 1550, Parte II. f. 46. [271] See the Crónica de Don Pedro, Ann. 1353, Capp. 4, 5, 11, 12, 14, 21; Ann. 1354, Capp. 19, 21; Ann. 1358, Capp. 2 and 3; and Ann. 1361, Cap. 3.