It is difficult to find in history a monarch whose reign had not some effort for good, since perfection in vice is as impossible as perfection in virtue. But surely no other king ever deserved less sympathy than Pedro for his failure to check the noblemen in their greed. Surely the feudal lords rarely used their power with better excuse than in protecting for a time the unhappy girl-wife Blanche de Bourbon whom Pedro sought to murder, and finally put to death. And the revolt of Trastamara can only be blamed by those to whom legitimacy of descent is a sacred claim on loyalty, even though the legitimate monarch wield his dagger right and left and have his kinsmen beaten to death with clubs till the floor of his own palace was ankle-deep in blood, as the chronicler asserts of Pedro. It is unjust to deny the monarch the one distinction he earned by consistency and perseverance in the cause of evil. “Cruel” was his epithet in his own day; let “cruel” be his epitaph in ours.[a] FOOTNOTES [30] [Usually, but improperly termed, “the Wise” and also “the Astronomer.”[b]] [31] [The reader may remember that the Templar Jacques de Molay, when burned alive, similarly summoned Philip the Fair of France and the pope to meet him before the Judgment Seat, and that they died soon after.] [32] A sort of men-at-arms, whose usual weapon was a short club, or mace. [33] [It is said that she stood to her ankles in the blood of the slaughtered noblemen.] [34] While Pedro was at Najera, for the purpose of protecting his frontiers against these irruptions, a priest of San Domingo de la Calzada is said to have waited on him, and foretold, that, unless he kept on his guard, he would be assassinated by his brother Henry. “Who has advised you to tell me this?” asked the king. “No one,” replied the priest, “except San Domingo.” Pedro regarded this as some “weak invention of the enemy,” and caused the priest to be burned alive. This anecdote, true or false, is extracted from the chronicle of the contemporary López de Ayala.[h] [35] The fate of this lady, which has so frequently occupied the tragic muse of the peninsula, must be looked for in the history of Portugal. [36] [He did not escape without being the victim of an attempt at poisoning which ruined his health. He returned, as Burke[d] says, “with the loss of his soldiers, of his money, and of his health, befooled and cheated in one of the worst causes in which English blood and English treasure had been squandered on the continent of Europe.” Burke, who also calls Pedro “one of the greatest blackguards that ever sat upon a throne,” notes that to the last it was two Englishmen who defended him.] [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER IV. ARAGON TO THE UNION WITH CASTILE [Sidenote: [1162-1475 A.D.]]