Yet a fresh disagreement arose when the Cardinal, according to the compact, demanded payment of the advances made by the see; and when Ferdinand at last was compelled to acquiesce, it was in the most ungracious and unbecoming manner. Ferdinand died January 23, 1516. On his death-bed he appointed Ximenes Regent of Castile during the minority of Charles V., with expressions indicative of no personal regard, but bearing strong testimony to his unbending justice, disinterestedness, and zeal for the public welfare. The Cardinal’s conduct in this exalted station was consistent with the tenor of his past life; he was a just ruler, but his authority was feared and respected rather than loved. If he had one passion unmortified, it was ambition: he ruled with a single eye to his young sovereign’s interests; but he evaded that sovereign’s attempts to circumscribe his powers with as much success as he bore down the opposition of those turbulent nobles, who hoped, in the weakness of a minority, to find a fit opportunity for prosecuting their own aggrandizement, and committing with impunity acts of illegal violence. For when Charles V. sent some of his confidential Flemish ministers to be associates in the commission of regency, the Cardinal received them with respect, and granted them the external distinctions of office; for the rest they were mere puppets in his hands. Of his internal policy, the chief scope was to elevate the regal power, and to depress that of the nobles, even by throwing a greater weight into the hands of the unprivileged classes: the same policy as had been pursued by the wisest princes of the age, Ferdinand and Isabella, Henry VII. of England, and Louis XI. of France. The crown had been reduced to great poverty by lavish grants, extorted, in disturbed times, by the necessity of conciliating powerful noblemen, rather than granted by free-will, or out of real gratitude for services; and it was one of Ximenes’ first objects to remedy this evil, even by means which showed none of that regard to vested interests, which belongs to times in which the course of law is regular and supreme, and consequently the rights of property are rigidly respected. Such pensions as had been granted in Ferdinand’s reign he cut off at once, on the plea that the grantor could only have bestowed them for his own life. The crown lands alienated during the same period were resumed: even the Cardinal’s boldness did not venture to carry the inquiry farther back, from the apprehension of driving the whole body of the nobility into revolt.