This eulogium refers to the plan then under discussion for ridding Isabel’s realms of the taint of Judaism. We are told that to the Queen’s initiative this terrible and disastrous measure was due. ‘The Jews were so powerful in the management of the royal revenues that they formed almost another royal caste. This gave great scandal to the Catholic Queen, and the decree was signed that all those who would not in three months embrace the faith, were to leave her kingdoms of Castile and Leon.’[64] Ferdinand was quite willing, in this case, to give the saintly Queen and her clergy a free hand, because, to carry out his world-wide combination to humble France, he would need money—very much money—and the wholesale confiscation of Jewish property that accompanied the edict of expulsion was his only ready way of getting it. On the 30th March 1492, less than three weeks before the signature of the agreement with Colon, the dread edict against the Jews went forth. Religious rancour had been inflamed to fever heat against these people, who were amongst the most enlightened and useful citizens of the State, and whose services to science, when the rest of Europe was sunk in darkness, make civilisation eternally their debtor. They were said to carry on in secret foul rites of human sacrifice, to defile the Christianity that most of them professed, and Isabel’s zeal, prompted by the churchmen, was already climbing to the point afterwards reached by her great-grandson, Philip II., when he swore that, come what might, he would never be a king of heretic subjects.