One other royal shade at least haunts the royal convent of Santa Clara. Here, retired from the turmoil of ambitions and wrongs, of which through her youth she had been the victim, passed the long years of her devout renunciation that injured Princess Joan, “the Beltraneja,” daughter of Henry IV. of Castile, whom the great Isabel the Catholic ousted from her inheritance. Here in Coimbra, too, the tragedy of Maria de Telles, subject of poems and plays innumerable, was enacted in real life. King Ferdinand the Handsome, about 1371, though betrothed to a Castilian princess, fell in love with a lady called Leonor de Telles, and so endangered the recently concluded alliance. His people rose in revolt, and the lady’s family, especially her sister Maria, resented the adulterous connection. Leonor, secure in her mastery over the king, wreaked a terrible revenge upon those who opposed her; poison, the dagger, and the dungeon doing her fell work, until all Portugal was in fear at her feet, and the king became her wedded husband. The virtuous sister, Maria de Telles, happily married to the king’s half-brother, João, and safe in her palace at Coimbra, was difficult to attack. But the wicked Leonor was equal to the occasion, and, like a female Iago, instilled into the ears of the prince suspicions of his wife’s fidelity, and with forged evidence prompted him to revenge. The enraged husband murdered his protesting and innocent wife in cold blood at Coimbra (but not at the house now shown as the scene of the tragedy), and as soon as the foul deed was done Queen Leonor, who had been waiting in an adjoining room, entered, and, in the presence of the murdered Maria, mocked at the husband’s pain, and showed him that her sister was innocent. The prince in his rage attempted to murder the treacherous queen, but was seized, and subsequently escaped into exile, whilst Leonor lived to perpetrate other misdeeds.