Unhappy king! There he lies, a corpse! He never moved, and is borne off from the field on a trestle hastily formed of gilded lances laid across, covered with the flag of Castile, a melancholy spectacle, his soldiers following with many a moistened eye, to be buried in the cathedral, beneath gorgeous gold panels in the _coro_. * * * * * The race of Trastamare, destined soon to end, brings short and troubled reigns, in which the superstitious may read an ever-present curse in the fratricide of Don Pedro. The last words of Don Enrique el Caballero were a warning to his son Juan not to follow his footsteps, “but to cherish the followers of Don Pedro, who were faithful in adversity"--a curious glimpse into the idiosyncrasy of his mind at the moment when the crown for which he had sacrificed his honour as a knight and his fealty as a brother is fading from him as he approaches the misty confines of another world. “Verily his sin will find him out,” says the Bible, and so it was with Henry of Trastamare. Juan I., his son, dies a miserable death at thirty-four (A.D. 1390) on a mimic battle-field. He had none of the bloodthirsty instincts of his family. He fought with English and Portuguese because it was the duty of kings of that day to fight, but with no ferocity of temperament or greed of conquest. He had inherited the softer qualities of the winning Caballero whom all men loved, before the unnatural cruelty of his brother, and the sting of repeated reverses drove him to the commission of a crime which will ever cling to his name. Juan is succeeded by his young son Enrique, known as _El Enfermo_, under a Council of Regency, presided over by the Archbishop of Toledo and the Marqués de Villena. No wonder the child of eleven is sick and tired of life under the oppressive surroundings in which he lives. The Marqués de Villena, a grandee with the privilege of wearing his hat in the royal presence, and irritable and sarcastic when he dares, turns the royal boy’s blood cold when he rivets upon him his keen black eyes. Under the guise of devotion to his person he exercises over him every species of petty tyranny, and when, driven beyond his patience, the gentle Don Enrique pouts his lip and knits his young brow, he calls in the archbishop to help him, who, in his turn, exhorts the unhappy young king to conform in all things to the will of “the Regents” placed over him under God. Else--here the stately prelate pauses with a significant glance upwards, not to the sky, for these scenes generally take place within the palace, but all the same invoking the Divine wrath upon the disobedient child, who, well understanding what the archbishop means, is seized with such an access of unknown and mysterious terror as leaves him a helpless victim in their hands.