Very different was her attitude when a criminal of Trujillo, on being hailed for his misdeeds before the royal judges, protested that he had received the tonsure and therefore he should be tried in the ecclesiastical courts. To this plea, a trick to which men who had no intention of taking orders resorted, that they might escape the rigours of the secular law, the judges paid no heed; whereupon some priests, relations of the accused, took up arms in his favour. “The Faith,” they declared, “was in danger of perdition,” and having roused the mob by inflammatory speeches, they attacked the house of the corregidor and the local prison. The criminal was released; but the triumph of ecclesiastical privilege was short-lived; for, some companies of men-at-arms appearing on the scenes in response to the corregidor’s appeal to the Queen, the principal lay rioters were hung. The clerical offenders, saved by their cloth from a like fate, spent the rest of their days in exile, meditating on the long arm of royal justice. Equally firm was the position maintained by Ferdinand and Isabel in their dealings with the Roman See. From one aspect they were sincerely loyal and devoted to their “Holy Father in Christ,” seeking his sanction for all those actions where orthodoxy demanded papal consent; and informing him, in sure confidence of his blessing, of every success they enjoyed in their struggle with infidels and heretics. The very nature of the war of Granada earned for them a reputation in Europe as special champions of the Faith; and, though the honour was prompted rather by his needs than their deserts, no title could have been more fitting than “Los Reyes Católicos,” “The Catholic Kings,” bestowed on them by Alexander VI. in 1494. Yet, from another point of view, these same “Catholic Kings” were as staunch opponents of papal encroachments as any imperial Frederick II. or Henry VIII. of England. It might be said that their disputes with the Holy Father savoured rather of the spoilt than the rebellious child. Conscious of their merits as perpetual crusaders and chasteners of the unorthodox, they preferred, instead of making war on the general principle of Roman interference in ecclesiastical matters, to demand exemption as their special right,—the right of those who, with their ancestors, had won back the soil of their native land in conflict with a heathen race. Their hand was none the less iron that it was discreetly gloved. When in 1491 an appeal to Rome was admitted by the Court of Chancery at Valladolid, in a case falling by law solely within the royal jurisdiction, Isabel in her indignation did not hesitate to remove all the judges who had consented to this step, appointing others in their place.