son Charles II., only to beat herself to death against the bars of her
gloomy golden cage and break her heart to old Mariana’s undisguised joy,
throws a flood of lurid light upon Spanish society in its decadence, and
proves the baseness to which human ambition will stoop. More repugnant
is the career of poor Marie Louise’s German successor as the Consort of
the miserable Charles the Bewitched in his last years, and the tale of
the extraordinary series of plots woven by the rival parties around the
lingering deathbed of the King, whom they worried and frightened into
his grave, a senile dotard at forty. Only briefly dealt with here are
the Queens of the Bourbon renascence, stout little Marie Louise of
Savoy, and the forceful termagant Isabel Farnese, who, chosen to serve
as a humble instrument of others, at once seized whip and reins herself,
and drove Spain as she listed during a long life of struggle for the
aggrandisement of her sons, in which Europe was kept at strife for years
by the ambition of one woman.
These and other Queens Consort will pass before us in the following
pages, some of them good, a few bad, and most of them unhappy. There is
no desire to dwell especially upon the sad and gloomy features of their
history, or to represent them all as victims; but it must not be
forgotten, in condonation of the shortcomings of some of them, that they
were sent from their own homes, kin, and country, often mere children,
to a distant foreign court, where the traditional etiquette was
appallingly austere and repellent; sacrificed in loveless marriage to
men whom they had never seen; treated as emotionless pawns in the game
of politics played by crafty brains. No wonder, then, that girlish
spirits should be crushed, that young hearts should break in despair,
or, as an alternative, should cast to the winds all considerations of
honour, duty, and dignity, and seek enjoyment before extinction came.
Some of them passed through the fiery ordeal triumphant, and stand forth
clear and shining. Great Isabel herself, another more colourless Isabel,
the Emperor’s wife, a third, Isabel of the Peace, most beloved of
Spanish Queens, and Anne her successor, as solemn Philip’s wife. Of
these no word of reproach may justly be said, nor of Margaret, the
Austrian consort of Philip III., nor of the spirited Isabel of Bourbon,
daughter of the gay and gallant Béarnais, and sister of Henriette Marie
of England. These and others bore their burden bravely to the last; and
of the few who cast theirs down, and strayed amongst the poisoned
flowers by the way, it may be truly urged that the trespasses of others
against them were greater than their own transgressions. Such of their
stories as are here told briefly are set forth with an honest desire to
attain accuracy in historical fact and impartiality in deduction
therefrom. There has been no desire to make either angels or devils of
the personages described. They were, like the rest of their kind, human