The Queen’s activity and strength of body and mind must have been marvellous. We hear of her travelling vast distances, almost incessantly in the saddle, visiting remote parts of her husband’s and her own dominions for State business, to settle disputed points, to inspect fortifications, to animate ecclesiastical or municipal bodies, and to suppress threatened disorder. No difficulty seemed to dismay her, no opposition to deflect her from the exalted purpose she had in view. For it must not be supposed that this strenuous activity was sporadic and without a central object which inspired it all. In this supreme object the key to Isabel’s life must be sought. Isabel’s mother was mad: after the death of her husband she had sunk into the gloomy devotional lunacy which afflicted in after years so many of her descendants; and in the impressionable years of Isabel’s youth, passed in the isolated castle of Arevalo, the whole atmosphere of her life had been one of mystic religious exaltation. The Christian Spaniard of Castile had through seven centuries gradually regained for Christ his lost kingdom by a constant crusade against the infidel. The secular struggle had made him a convinced believer in his divine mission to re-establish the reign of the cross on earth. To this end saints had led him into battle in shining armour, blazing crosses in the sky had heralded victory to God’s own militia, and holy relics, miraculously revealed, had served as talismans which ensured success. Mysticism and the yearning for martyrdom was in the air in Isabel’s youth, and she, a saintly neurotic, who happened also to be a genius and a queen, shared to the full the Castilian national obsession. The man who fostered the growth of this feeling in the young princess at Arevalo might have been useful in spurring a sluggish mind to devotion; but to further inflame the zeal of a girl of Isabel’s innate tendency was unnecessary, and of this alone was he capable. He was a fiery, uncompromising, Dominican monk, called Tomas de Torquemada. The Dominicans, centuries before, had been entrusted by the Pope with the special duty to maintain the purity of the faith, and as its guardians, spiritual pride and arrogance had always been the characteristic of the order. Torquemada, as Isabel’s confessor and spiritual tutor, had abundant opportunities of influencing her, and never ceased to keep before her the sacred duty imposed upon rulers of extirpating heresy, root and branch, at any cost. Her own brother Henry had been surrounded by the hated infidel, the enemy of Christ and Spain. Failure as a king, ruin as a man, and a miserable death, had been his portion. And so the lesson was ceaselessly dinned into Isabel’s ear, that no ruler could be happy or successful who did not smite heretics, infidels and doubters, hip and thigh, for the glory of God. The Moor, she was told, still defiled in Granada the sacred soil of Spain, suffered by an unworthy