It is not easy to reconcile this monstrous tissue of incongruity and dissimulation with any motives of necessity or expediency. Why should he, so soon after preparing to raise the kingdom in his daughter’s cause, thus publicly avow her imbecility, and deposit the whole authority in the hands of Philip? Was it to bring odium on the head of the latter, by encouraging him to a measure which he knew must disgust the Castilians? But Ferdinand by this very act shared the responsibility with him. Was it in the expectation that uncontrolled and undivided power, in the hands of one so rash and improvident, would the more speedily work his ruin? As to his clandestine protest, its design was obviously to afford a plausible pretext at some future time for reasserting his claims to the government, on the ground that his concessions had been the result of force. But, then, why neutralise the operation of this by the declaration, spontaneously made in his manifesto to the people, that his abdication was not only a free but most deliberate and premeditated act? He was led to this last avowal, probably, by the desire of covering over the mortification of his defeat; a thin varnish, which could impose on nobody. The whole of the proceedings are of so ambiguous a character as to suggest the inevitable inference that they flowed from habits of dissimulation too strong to be controlled even when there was no occasion for its exercise. We occasionally meet with examples of a similar fondness for superfluous manœuvring in the humbler concerns of life. THE REIGN OF PHILIP I (1506 A.D.) King Ferdinand had no sooner concluded the arrangement with Philip, and withdrawn into his hereditary dominions, than the archduke and his wife proceeded towards Valladolid, to receive the homage of the estates convened in that city. Juana, oppressed with an habitual melancholy, and clad in the sable habiliments better suited to a season of mourning than rejoicing, refused the splendid ceremonial and festivities with which the city was prepared to welcome her. Her dissipated husband, who had long since ceased to treat her not merely with affection, but even decency, would fain have persuaded the cortes to authorise the confinement of his wife, as disordered in intellect, and to devolve on him the whole charge of the government. But the commons could not brook such an indignity to their own “natural sovereign”; and the usual oaths of allegiance were tendered to Juana as queen and lady proprietor of the kingdom, and to Philip as her husband, and finally to their eldest son, Prince Charles, as heir-apparent and lawful successor on the demise of his mother.