He became regent of Navarre and a member of the Council of Castille, and tutor of Prince Philip, who was later Philip II. He died at the age of forty in 1534, the year after the birth of the poet. It was a current tradition of the sixteenth century that the mother of Alonso de Ercilla was descended from the kings of Navarre. If this tradition represented a fact, there might be claimed for Don Alonso an aristocratic as well as an intellectual heritage. The seigniory of Bobadilla, which had belonged to his mother, was reunited to the crown, and the seignior became attached to the court of Charles V, where her young son was educated, subjected, doubtless, to the same system of instruction as that under which Prince Philip had grown up. It is probable that Alonso de Ercilla knew the Latin of Virgil and Lucian, but that his knowledge of Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto was derived through translations. He entered the service of Philip in 1548, and accompanied that prince to Flanders on the occasion of Philip’s taking possession of the duchy of Brabant. The route of this journey was through Saragossa, Barcelona, Genoa, and Luxembourg, and the return was by the same way. A little later he went to Bohemia with his mother, who was in the suite of the Infanta María and her husband, the Archduke Maximilian. The young Ercilla undertook a third journey in 1554, accompanying Philip when that prince went to wed Mary Tudor, the Queen of England. [Sidenote: Alderete and Mendoza] While in England Ercilla learned that the Araucanians were in revolt, and that Hernández Girón was leading a rebellion against the legitimate government in Peru. The state into which affairs in Peru had fallen during the rebellion rendered the post of viceroy especially unattractive. Two persons to whom the king had offered it declined the honour. It was, however, accepted by Andrés Hurtado de Mendoza, Marqués de Cañete. Alderete, who had been in America, was in England with Philip’s escort. From him Ercilla got information that awakened his adventurous spirit, and he left Europe for America with the fleet that carried Alderete and Viceroy Mendoza. He arrived in Peru on July 6, 1556. Here he joined the expedition sent by the viceroy against the insurgent Araucanians. This expedition was commanded by the viceroy’s son, García Hurtado de Mendoza, a youth of twenty-one, who had been appointed governor of Chile. On his arrival in Chile García de Mendoza arrested both Aguirre and Villagra and sent them to Lima. Thus freed from the embarrassing presence of the two rival claimants, he entered upon his campaign against the Araucanians, and on this campaign Ercilla acquired his first experience in warfare with the Indians. To describe the events of the war and his part in it was the primary purpose in writing _La Araucana_. [Sidenote: Ercilla in Chile]