With regard to Joanna, whom Villena and his followers styled “Princess of Castile,” they insisted that she should be suitably married; and on this demand all negotiations ultimately broke down. Ferdinand and Isabel were willing to grant the Marquis the Mastership, in spite of the clamours of seven other candidates; they agreed to the idea of Joanna’s marriage; but their stipulation that, while this subject was under consideration, she should be handed over to some trustworthy person, virtually put an end to all hopes of reconciliation. Joanna was the Marquis’s trump card, and he had no intention of playing her until he was certain of his trick, far less of passing her into the hands of anyone, whom her rivals would consider trustworthy. Dazzled by the schemes he had planned, he believed it would be an easy matter to secure Isabel’s ruin, and in this view he was strengthened by the secret correspondence he had been carrying on with his great-uncle, the Archbishop of Toledo. The latter’s conduct is on the surface inexplicable; for, having maintained Isabel’s cause with unswerving loyalty throughout the negotiations for her marriage, when she was in danger of imprisonment and he of incurring, on her account, not only papal censure but the loss of his archbishopric, he had yet at the end of Henry IV.’s reign reconciled himself to that monarch and his favourite the young Marquis of Villena, to the weakening of his old allegiance. His tardy appearance at Segovia, and the sulky manner he had adopted towards Ferdinand and the Queen, were alike in keeping with a change of policy that in a man of his ambitions seemed as shortsighted as it was unaccountable. The explanation lies in Carrillo’s lack of self-control that made his ambition the plaything of his besetting vice. Like Juan Pacheco, he loved wealth, the more that he was in secret an alchemist and squandered the revenues of his see in a vain endeavour to make gold; but even the glitter of precious metals lost its charm beside his lust for power and influence. He must be first. This was the motive that had driven him to desert Henry IV., to break with his nephew in the revolt of the League, and now, finally, when the cause for which he had laboured was on the eve of success, to renounce his allegiance to Isabel, because of his jealousy of her new adviser the Cardinal of Spain. In vain the Queen, who knew his character, tried to dissipate his suspicions. Carrillo’s temperament set his imagination afire at the least glimmer of insult or neglect; his manner grew morose and overbearing, his desire for gifts and rewards every day more rapacious. At length, when Ferdinand ventured to oppose his demands, the Archbishop openly expressed his anger and, leaving the Court, withdrew to his town of Alcalá de Henares, where he began to plot secretly with Joanna’s supporters.