In Paris Ruy Gomez’s son, the Duke of Pastrana, paid similar court to the dark-haired girl of nine who was betrothed to young Philip, heir of Spain, two years younger. Three years more had to pass, notwithstanding the impatience of the French, before the backward little Infanta Anna, in October 1615, was conveyed with a pomp and extravagance that ill matched the penury of her father’s realm, to the frontier of France, there to be exchanged for Isabel of Bourbon, her brother’s bride.[200] On the 9th November 1615 all the chivalry of France and Spain were once more assembled on either bank of the little stream of Bidasoa that separated the two countries. Wasteful luxury and vain magnificence had been squandered wantonly by the Spanish nobles, determined, as usual, to put the French to shame. At Behovia, the point where the ceremony was to take place, sumptuous banqueting-halls had been erected upon rafts moored on each side of the stream, whilst in mid-current another raft supported a splendid pavilion covered with velvet and cloth of gold, and carpeted with priceless silken carpets from the East. Here the Duke of Guise delivered Isabel of France to the Duke of Uceda, in exchange for Anna of Austria, thenceforward Queen of France. The romantic and turbulent career of the latter is related elsewhere: here we have to follow the fortunes of the beautiful dark-haired girl of twelve who, like Isabel of the Peace fifty-four years before, turned her back upon her native land to cement the Catholic alliance between France and Spain.[201] The circumstances were widely different, for the battle of religious liberty in Europe was practically won, though the blind faith and vanity of Philip III. refused, even now, to recognise the fact, or his own poverty-stricken impotence. The Medici Queen-Regent of France, moreover, was a very different person from her kinswoman Catharine. She was not playing her own game so much as that of the cunning Italians who directed her, and it was soon evident, under Richelieu, that Frenchmen were no longer to be made the playthings of foreign ambitions. Isabel, child as she was, had a stout heart and a high spirit, as befitted her father’s daughter. She was willing enough to be a queen upon the most pretentious throne in Europe; but she was not made for martyrdom, and, as we shall see, her marriage was even less influential in securing lasting peace and co-operation between France and Spain than that of the previous Isabel had been.