given that no raw silk from abroad was to be introduced into the country, and only Spanish-grown silk used. But this was not enough, and some of the silk-making provinces, reduced to desperation, petitioned for the relaxation of the law. Their prayer was granted, as if in irony, to the extent of allowing them to wear silk against the law. But they did not want to wear silk, but to make it for other people to wear, and their industry languished, never entirely to recover. By the time Isabel the Catholic had died the Spanish silk industry was nearly at an end, and the skittish young Bearnaise princess, Germaine de Foix, who succeeded her as old Fernando's wife, came too late to do it much good. It is true she snapped {222} her slender fingers and threw up her pretty chin at the straitlaced sumptuary laws, and surrounded herself with silks and velvets, gold brocade and gems, wherever she went; but unfortunately they mostly came from the looms and workshops of Southern France, and gave no work to Spanish hands. Money, of course, had to be sent out of Spain to pay for the finery, and in 1515 the Cortes of Burgos complained of this to Jane the Mad, Isabel's nominal successor, who thereupon issued a decree entirely forbidding brocades and gold or silver embroidery and trimmings to be worn at all, and strictly limiting the wearing of silk in any form to people of rank. But Jane's power was the merest shadow; Spain was in the throes of a great struggle for its democratic institutions, which it lost, and no notice was taken of poor Crazy Jane's decree. If she understood it she probably had as little sympathy with it as her young stepmother, for she had lived for years with her handsome husband Philip as head of the most pompous and splendid Court in Europe, in busy Flanders, surrounded by all the traditional magnificence of the house of Burgundy, and her young son, the coming Emperor Chares V., Fleming as he was by birth and instinct, was even less likely than she to revert willingly to the simple, democratic, and patriarchal traditions of the Spanish Court.