At length, after what seemed interminable delay, the Archduchess Margaret arrived at Santander early in March 1497. Ferdinand, with a great train of nobles, received his future daughter-in-law as she stepped upon Spanish soil, and a few days later Queen Isabel welcomed her in the palace of Burgos, where, with greater rejoicing than had ever been seen in Castile, the heir of Ferdinand and Isabel was married to gentle Margaret, one of the finest characters of her time. Seven months afterwards the Prince of Asturias, at the age of twenty-one, was borne to his grave, and his wife gave birth to a dead child.[78] The blow was one from which Isabel never recovered. Juan was her only son, her ‘angel,’ from the time of his birth; and the dearest wish of her heart had been the unification of Spain under him and his descendants. The next heiress was Isabel, her eldest daughter, just (August 1497) married to King Emmanuel of Portugal, and the jealous Aragonese and Catalans would hardly brook a woman sovereign; and, above all, one ruling from Portugal, when Ferdinand should die.[79] Hastily Cortes of Castile was summoned at Toledo, and swore allegiance to the new heiress and her Portuguese husband as princes of Asturias in April 1498, but she, too, died in childbed in August, when the heirship devolved upon her infant son, Miguel, who, if he had lived, would have united not only Spain, but all the Iberian Peninsula under one rule. But it was not to be, and the babe followed his mother to the grave in a few months.