“There was never a war in Spain during his time,” we are told, “in which he did not personally take part, or at least have his troops engaged”; nor did he disdain the amours, that with conspiracies and duelling formed the fashionable life of Henry IV.’s Court. When that impressionable monarch succumbed to the charms of the Portuguese lady-in-waiting, Doña Guiomar, the name of Gonsález de Mendoza, then Bishop of Calahorra, was linked with that of the favourite’s cousin; and the chronicles record that two of his sons in later years intermarried, through their father’s influence, with connections of the royal family. Illegitimacy carried with it little stain amongst a people whose standard of life was as low as their ideals were often high; and the Church, sharing deeply as we have seen in the national life, paid the penalty of this intimacy in a blinding of her own eyes to the distance many of her sons had wandered from their Master’s footsteps. Queen Isabel, whose personal purity was a standing witness to the high code of morality in which she believed, was yet daughter enough of her age to accept Cardinal Mendoza at his popular value. He had been her protector and advisor through many of her difficulties, showing himself subtle and far-seeing in politics, as well as the kindly friend a man of mature years will often prove to young ambitions. Ferdinand and Isabel owed him much, and they paid their debt by a trust and reverence that gained him honour in Spain only second to that accorded to themselves. Peter Martyr, in a letter to the Cardinal, addresses him as, “You, without whom the King and Queen never take the smallest step, whether engaged actively in war or enjoying peace, and without whose advice they arrive at no important conclusion.” It is the language of eulogy, but it touches truth at bottom; and the strength of Isabel’s affection for her chief councillor may be gauged by her deference to his will, on those occasions that it happened to clash with her own. When, in 1485, she would have carried the royal jurisdiction with her to Alcalá de Henares, superseding temporarily with her prerogative all local justice, as elsewhere on her progress, the Cardinal declined to admit her claims within the boundaries of his diocese of Toledo. To all her expostulations he returned an obstinate refusal, till Isabel, seeing that the matter must end either in an open breach or her own surrender, yielded the point. It was a concession she would have made to few of her subjects. [Illustration: THE CARDINAL OF SPAIN, DON PEDRO GONSÁLEZ DE MENDOZA FROM “HISTORIA DE LA VILLA Y CORTE DE MADRID” BY AMADOR DE LOS RIOS ]