“The French rule everything,” wrote Fuensalida, the Spanish Ambassador at the Archduke’s Court despairingly. “They alone surround him and entice him from feast to feast, from mistress to mistress.” [Illustration: TILTING ARMOUR OF PHILIP THE FAIR FROM “SPANISH ARMS AND ARMOUR” REPRODUCED BY COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR, MR. A. F. CALVERT ] Fuensalida suggested that Philip and his wife should be induced to visit Castile as soon as possible, before the evil habits into which the Archduke had fallen took permanent hold of him; and Ferdinand and Isabel warmly seconded this idea. Their son-in-law’s behaviour had been scandalous; but their daughter’s conduct caused them if anything more uneasiness. At times full of loving memories of her old home, so that she confessed “she could not think of her mother and how far she was separated from her for ever without shedding tears,” Joanna, on other occasions, was taciturn or even defiant when approached by special emissaries from Spain. Their questions she met by silence, their allusions to her parents or to the religious enthusiasm that had stirred her youth, by indifference. It seemed that jealousy and wounded pride could in a moment slip like a dark curtain across her mind and blot out all save a brooding fury at her wrongs. The mental balance, once a flaw has shaken its equilibrium, is of all scales the most difficult to adjust; and Isabel’s hopes that a personal supervision of her daughter would effect a cure were doomed to disappointment. Philip and Joanna came to Spain in 1502; but their presence was an unwilling acknowledgment that custom required their recognition as Prince and Princess of Castile by the national Cortes. That business concluded, the Archduke was fully determined to return to his own land, if possible as he had come by way of France, for the reception he had been accorded in Paris made him eager to renew its delights. It was his ambition that his son, Charles, heir not only of his Austrian archduchy and county of Flanders but of all the wide dominions of Spain, should marry Claude, the infant daughter of Louis XII., a scheme of alliance by which he himself would be enabled to pose as the arbiter of European politics, adjudicating between the two great rival nations with whom he had formed connections. Ferdinand might be pardoned if he regarded the Archduke somewhat dubiously in the proposed rôle; and indeed quarrels over the terms of the Partition Treaty and the subsequent war in Naples were soon to wreck the would-be arbitrator’s hopes. Yet, even before this failure was assured, mutual suspicion had thrown a restraint over the intercourse of father-in-law and son-in-law, and had even poisoned the relations between Isabel and her daughter.