national alliances, and were supported by powerful parties in Spain or abroad. In order that their lives should be properly understood, it will be necessary to keep in view contemporary events in other parts of Europe which more or less concerned them; and to relate the history of all the Queens of Spain upon such a plan would exceed the capacity of a single volume and the patience of the ordinary reader. It is proposed, therefore, to select for treatment only the lives of some of the Queens of Spain who, for their greatness, their political significance, their attractions, or their misfortunes, stand forth most prominently in the romantic history of their country. The temptation is great to dwell upon certain of the earlier Queens of the small kingdoms which constituted Spain before the union of the crowns: to tell the heroic story of the great Berengaria, the mother of St. Ferdinand, and those of Queen Maria de Molina and Blanche of Bourbon; to recount the matrimonial vagaries of Peter the Cruel, and dwell upon Catharine of Lancaster, whose marriage with the heir of Castile closed the war of succession to the Castilian crowns waged by her father John of Gaunt. She, especially, stands forth with almost photographic precision in the pages of the genius who penned the chronicles of her time. Gigantic in size she seemed to the more diminutive Spaniard: florid, fat, and fair; a vast eater and drinker, whose valiant prowess at the festal board astounded the abstemious people amongst whom she lived; strong and masculine, but idle, and careless of the feminine arts by which woman’s attraction is increased; ruled by her favourites, but withal a good woman and a good Queen, who governed Spain honestly for ten years, during the minority of her weak son, John II. of Castile.