At a somewhat similar reception of a French embassy, tales of the Queen’s magnificence evidently spread through Spain; and Fra Fernando de Talavera, Archbishop of Granada, though no longer her official Father-Confessor, felt bound to write and remonstrate. Isabel was, however, able to offer a good defence, declaring that neither the dresses of herself nor her ladies had been new,—indeed her own “made of silk and with three bands of gold as plainly as possible,” she had worn before in Aragon in the presence of these same Frenchmen. If some of the men’s garments were costly, it had not been by her orders, rather she had done her uttermost to discountenance it. She might have mentioned also how, in the critical stages of the Moorish war, she had pledged the crown jewels to merchants of Barcelona, thus showing that for all her appreciation of the luxuries of dress, they did not rank for a second in her thoughts with more important considerations. Her magnificence like her severity was calculated and the same might be said of her liberality. She had seen money wasted on ne’er-do-wells and was fully determined that no man, merely because he was powerful or plausible, should prey on her revenues; while for the regular type of Court-flatterer hunting for sinecures her contempt amounted to aversion. Galindez Carvajal tells us in his chronicle that she and Ferdinand kept a book in which they wrote down the names of those at Court whom they thought most capable and worthy of reward, consulting it whenever an office fell vacant, and that they did not hesitate to prefer prudent men of the middle-class to the highly-born incompetent. Their actual gifts, though scarcely lavish, were sufficient to cause satisfaction, and Lucio Marineo declares that “when between the King and Queen there was discussion as to the fitting reward of any particular service, she on her part always gave more than the sum on which the two had determined.” Ferdinand was not unlike his contemporary, Henry VII. of England, according to Ayala, the Spanish Ambassador’s description of that monarch: “If gold once enters his strong boxes it never comes out again. He pays in depreciated coin.” Against this criticism may be set Machiavelli’s praise: “If the present King of Spain had desired to be thought liberal, he would not have been able to contrive, nor would he have succeeded in so many undertakings.”