Isabella revolutionised the institutions of her country, religious, political, military, financial; she consolidated her dominions, humiliated her nobles, cajoled her commons, defied the pope, reformed the clergy; she burned some ten thousand of her subjects, she deported a million more, and of the remnant she made a great nation; she brooked no man’s opposition, in a reign of thirty years, and she died in the arms of the king, her husband! It is open to any man to call her a saint and a heroine. It is open to any man to call her a bigot and a tyrant. But no man at least may deny that she was a great queen.[f] The contradiction between such an opinion and the opinion of Prescott is not after all a contradiction in facts but in point of view. Both regard different phases or facets of one great busy soul striding through a great life on a line which, whether it led through tenderness or mercilessness, was as nearly straight as any line ever trod by a human monarch. It is the mockery of history, however, that while great souls bear great fruits, those fruits are not always of lasting quality, and time may turn them to poison. The epitaph that Martin Hume would place above the beautiful memory of Isabella is sad enough, yet only too just:[a] “That her objects were high and noble may be conceded, and that she succeeded in consolidating Spain as no other monarch had done, is true. But at what a cost! She had, in conjunction with Ferdinand, encouraged forces of bigotry and religious hate which flooded her realm with blood and tears, and threw it back in the race of nations for centuries. Her patronage of Columbus is more than blotted out by her patronage of Torquemada; her exalted piety is drowned in the recollection of her treatment of the Jews and the Moriscos. She was a fair embodiment of the prevailing feeling of her countrymen: that to them all things are permitted; they can do no wrong, because they are working for and with the cause of God. We shall see the bitter fruit this feeling bore later. By the irony, or perhaps the eternal justice of fate, all the chicanery of Ferdinand, all the wisdom, the labours, and the fervour of Isabella brought disaster, ruin, and death to Spain. A thousand times happier would it have been for Castile to have remained isolated in its corner of Europe, untroubled with the complications of vast European connections, rather than to have been dragged by Aragon into a position of responsibility and world-wide ambition for which neither its native resources nor the extent nor character of its population befitted it. Its transient grandeur, dearly paid for by long and painful decline, brought to the Spanish people, even while it lasted, neither peace, happiness, nor enduring prosperity; and the king and queen who made Spain great were the worst enemies she ever had.”[t] FOOTNOTES