The Queen was still weak with fever, and could not accompany her daughter on the way, but she stood stately in her sternly suppressed grief, sustained by the exalted religious mysticism, which in her descendants degenerated to neurotic mania. Grief unutterable had stricken the Queen. Her only son was dead, and her eldest daughter and her infant heir had also gone to untimely graves. The hopes founded upon the marriages of their children had all turned to ashes, and the King and Queen saw with gloomy foreboding that their daughter Juana and her foreign husband would rule in Spain as well as in Flanders and the Empire, to Spain's irreparable disaster; and, worst of all, Juana had dared to dally with the hated thing heresy. In the contest of divided interest which they foresaw, it was of the utmost importance now to the Catholic kings that England at least should be firmly attached to them; and they dared no longer delay the sacrifice of Katharine to the political needs of their country. Katharine, young as she was, understood that she was being sent to a far country amongst strangers as much an ambassador as a bride, but she from her birth had been brought up in the atmosphere of ecstatic devotion that surrounded her heroic mother, and the din of battle against the enemies of the Christian God had rarely been silent in her childish ears. So, with shining eyes and a look of proud martyrdom, Katharine bade the Queen a last farewell, turned her back upon lovely Granada, and through the torrid summer of 1501 slowly traversed the desolate bridle-roads of La Mancha and arid Castile to the green valleys of Galicia, where, in the harbour of Corunna, her little fleet lay at anchor awaiting her. From the 21st of May, when she last looked upon the Alhambra, it took her nearly two months of hard travel to reach Corunna, and it was almost a month more before all was ready for the embarkation with the great train of courtiers and servants that accompanied her. On the 17th August 1501 the flotilla sailed from Corunna, only to be stricken the next day by a furious north-easterly gale and scattered; the Princess's ship, in dire danger, being driven into the little port of Laredo in the north of Spain. There Katharine was seriously ill, and another long delay occurred, the apprehension that some untoward accident had happened to the Princess at sea causing great anxiety to the King of England, who sent his best seamen to seek tidings of the bride. The season was late, and when, on the 26th September 1501, Katharine again left Laredo for England, even her stout heart failed at the prospect before her. A dangerous hurricane from the south accompanied her across the Channel and drove the ships finally into the safety of Plymouth harbour on Saturday the 2nd October 1501.