Hiding her fears, she replied to Henry’s manifesto by a counter-protest, in which she recalled her own moderation in refusing the crown on her brother Alfonso’s death, and vindicated her marriage as performed on the advice of the wiser and larger section of the leading nobility. Henry, she declared had broken his oath, not only in acknowledging Joanna, who was known to be illegitimate, as his daughter and heiress; but long before, when he had failed to divorce and send away the Queen as he had promised, and when he had tried to force his sister to marry the King of Portugal against her will. In the meanwhile, in spite of the flourish of trumpets with which the betrothal had taken place, the French marriage hung fire. Gossip maintained that the Duke of Guienne’s interest in Joanna had been merely the result of pique at Isabel’s refusal; while Louis XI. had used it as a temporary expedient against his enemy, the King of Aragon. At any rate the French Prince was openly courting the heiress, Mary of Burgundy, when death cut short his hopes in May, 1472. Various bridegrooms were now suggested for the Infanta Joanna; amongst them her own uncle the King of Portugal. Henry IV. was at this time at Segovia, whose Alcayde, Andres de Cabrera, husband of Isabel’s lady-in-waiting, Beatriz de Bobadilla, had always been one of his faithful adherents. In the Alcazar was stored a considerable sum of money; and the Master of Santiago now advised the King to demand its surrender and also that of the fortress, hoping to get them into his own hands, as he had done with the Alcazar at Madrid. Cabrera, suspecting rightly a plot for his own ruin, stoutly refused; and his enemy, after stirring up in the town a rebellion which the Alcayde promptly quelled, left the city in disgust. Henry, who loved Segovia, remained behind, unable to make up his mind to any decisive action. The favourite’s departure was the opportunity for which those inclined to Isabel’s interests had long been waiting; and Beatriz de Bobadilla urged her husband to effect a reconciliation between the King and his sister. This plan met with the approval of no less important a person than Pedro Gonsalez de Mendoza, Bishop of Siguenza, whose material position had been lately increased, not only by the Archbishopric of Seville, but also by receiving a long-coveted Cardinal’s hat. At the time of the Aragonese marriage the Mendozas had been amongst Isabel’s most formidable opponents, but their enforced surrender of the Infanta Joanna to the Master of Santiago after the French betrothal, had quite altered their views; and the Cardinal of Spain, as Pedro Gonsalez was usually called, now worked to secure Isabel’s accession, as the best means of ruining his rival.