century is Juan Ruiz, arch-priest of Hita, a little town not far from Guadalaxara, who flourished in the reign of Alfonso XI. His poems consist of an immense variety of tales, fables and apologues, chiefly amatory and satirical, in some 7000 verses of which about 1700 remain with prose introductions and additions. The verses, as a rule, are the rhymed couplets of Berceo; but no less than seventeen different metres are used in the course of the work, which is as free and original in matter as in manner. The whole is interspersed with indecent episodes and very immoral reflections, in which the Lady Trotaconventos figures with the Lady Cuaresma and the Lady Venus. Don Amor, Don Carnal, and Don Tocino are found, not unnaturally, in the company of the Ladies Cocina and Merienda, nor are more sacred personages absent from the party. The variety of the style is no less remarkable than the diversity of the subjects; at one time, grave, tender and dignified; at another, sarcastic, jocular, didactic, devout and indecent, but ever fresh, lively and natural. Ruiz has been called the Spanish Chaucer, and his poems have much in common with the Canterbury Tales, which were written about the same time.1 The Libro del Rabbi Sem Job, a poem addressed to Peter the Cruel on his accession by a learned and liberal Jew, is worthy of notice among the writings of the period; as is a dance of death, la Danza General de la Muerte, probably adapted from the French of the same period; and perhaps the Poema de Jose, the story of Joseph or Yusuf, derived, strange to say, from Moslem and not from Christian sources, and written more probably in Aragon than in Castile.

But if Alfonso was a patron of letters, a lover of law, and a professed scourge of evil-doers, he was not in his own domestic life either as virtuous or as prudent as became a reformer and a judge. The court of Castile was ruled by rival ladies. Within and without the palace the kingdom was divided. The king's mistress, the beautiful Leonora de Guzman, had her court and her courtiers, and not only vied with the legitimate queen in her influence over her royal lover, but for nigh on twenty years she claimed a large share in the administration of his kingdom. The wife, as so frequently happens in such cases, was not only less powerful but less wise, less fit for command, less favoured

1 An enthusiastic admirer of the arch-priest, and no mean critic, has even compared him with Cervantes. Ferdinand Wolf, Jabrbuch der Literatur (Vienna, 1832), vol. lviii., pp. 220-225, art. b. For a fair comparison between Chaucer and Ruiz, see Ticknor, vol. i., chap. v.

by fortune than her rival the mistress. The only legitimate child that Queen Maria of Portugal bore to her husband combined in his own person the worst qualities of his father, Alfonso XI., his grandfather, Ferdinand IV., and his greatgrandfather, Sancho the Bravo; and at a time when cruelty was the fashion among kings, earned a widespread and longenduring notoriety as Peter the Cruel.

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CHAPTER XXIX.

PETER THE CRUEL.

(1350-1369.)

I-A Royal Assassin.

Or the nine children whom Leonora de Guzman had borne to Alfonso XI., Henry, the eldest, was endowed with the magnificent domain and title of Trastamara.1 His twin brother, Fadrique, was elected, at ten years of age, to the more than princely position of Grand Master of Santiago. His cousin, Perez Ponce, already enjoyed the scarcely inferior honour of the Grand Mastership of Alcantara. It was but natural, upon the sudden death of Alfonso XI., that his illegitimate family should seek to maintain their exceptional position, in spite of the queen's son, Peter, who had lived up to this time neglected and almost forgotten at Seville.

But the Guzmans were too prosperous to be popular; and the young king found a powerful protector in his father's palace. Don Juan de Albuquerque, a scion of the royal house of Portugal, who had accepted the friendship of the mistress during the life-time of King Alfonso XI., and had thus risen to the highest position in the State, at once turned upon the Guzmans, imprisoned Doña Leonora-provided with a safe conduct under his own hand-in the Alcazar at Seville, drove her many sons into exile, and constituted himself the guide, if not the master, of the legitimate sovereign, who had but just attained the year of his legal majority.2

One of the first political incidents of his reign was the assassination of his step-mother (1351), in which it is possible

1 The name is spelt by contemporary writers indifferently as Trestamera, Trastameira, Trastamena. The modern conventional Spanish is Trastamara. 2 He was born at Burgos, 30th August, 1333.

that he took no personal part.1 But if the murder was, as is suggested, entirely the work of Albuquerque, the minister had an apt pupil, who at least approved of the act that was done under his royal authority. And it was not long before he was able to walk alone. Within the year (1351) Garcilaso de la Vega, Adelantado of Castile, the highest dignitary of the kingdom, had his brains beaten out in the presence chamber by order of his royal master, and his body was thrown out of the window into the great square of Burgos, among the combatants and spectators of the bull-fight that was being celebrated in honour of the royal visit.

But none of the king's early crimes was more characteristic of his dark and dastardly nature than his treatment of the young and innocent princess, Blanche de Bourbon,3 whose hand was, at his earnest solicitation, bestowed upon him by the King of France. Engaged, after his betrothal to that gentle lady, in an intrigue with the notorious Maria de Padilla, he refused even to receive the French princess-a bride, a stranger and a royal guest-on her arrival in his dominions.

Degraded at length to the wretched position of Queen of Castile (3rd June, 1353) treated for two days as a wife, and for ten years as a prisoner, poisoned at last by her royal gaoler, while yet in the bloom of her innocent beauty, the fate of this gentle and unfortunate lady excited but the feeble sympathy

1 Mérimée is very positive upon this point, and as to Peter's early subordination to Albuquerque. Mariana says that the odium of the murder fell upon the queen, and the place where Leonora was murdered thus acquired the addition of Talavera de la Reina, by which it is known to this day. Mariana, lib. xvi., cap. xvi. ; Ayala, Cron., 36. (Peter the Cruel has much cause to complain of the verdict that has been handed down to posterity upon him. Lopez de Ayala, who wrote in the days when Peter's name was anathema, was conspicuously unjust to him, and he has been followed by all subsequent historians. The king, who was not sixteen when he succeeded, did not assume the reins of government until 1354 when he was nineteen, and most of the principal acts which have gained for him his murderous reputation were committed before then, when Albuquerque was practically regent. Peter had to deal with a powerful revolt, which drove him into exile, and in his suppression of it he was no whit more severe than his predecessors had been under similar circumstances. I am indebted to my friend the Duke of Wellington for an interesting manuscript vindication of Peter, copied in the sixteenth century from the testimony of contemporaries of the king.-H.)

2 The powers of the office are fully set forth in the laws of the Partidas. The Adelantado of Castile ranked next in dignity to the king, and was commander-inchief of the troops in time of war, and chief justice in time of peace.

3 She was the daughter of Pierre, Duke of Bourbon, who fell at Poictiers, and younger sister of Jeanne de Bourbon, wife of Charles V. of France.

Prosper Mérimée. Histoire de Don Pèdre I., Roi de Castile (Paris, 1848), pp. 348, 351. Pedre is rather an ingenious compromise between Pedro and Pierre. The King of Aragon is always spoken of by the author as Pierre.

of the gallant men of two nations; and her husband's behaviour, which amounted not only to a domestic outrage, but to almost a national affront, did not rouse the spiritless Valois who lost his kingdom at Poictiers to strike one blow for the protection of a princess of France.

The record of the first fifteen years of the reign of Peter of Castile is not only odious, but it is also supremely uninteresting. One of the most brilliant of modern French historians has essayed with moderate success to invest the story with something of his own romance; but the fact remains that if Peter was not absolutely the most cruel of men, he was assuredly one of the greatest blackguards that ever sat upon a throne.

The one agreeable feature of his character is that he was affable with his humbler subjects, that he took an interest in their everyday life, and that he was wont, after the manner of the Caliph Harun Al Rashid, whose legendary exploits were no doubt familiar to him, to spend many of his nights in some humble disguise, seeking adventures and information in the streets of Seville.1 This was at least human. But such displays of his humanity were rare. His sham reconciliation with his brother, in order to rid himself of his own too powerful friend Albuquerque, who had unhappily raised him to power, is only surpassed in atrocity by his sham marriage with Juana de Castro, whom he dishonoured and abandoned after the gratification of a passing whim, under cover of a most astounding sacrilege.

Peter indeed was married to no less than three wives, all alive at the same time, before he was twenty-one. According to the solemn pronouncement of the Archbishop of Toledo, he was lawfully married in 1352 to the lady who passed during her entire life as his mistress, Juana de Padilla; he was certainly married to Blanche of Bourbon in 1353; and his seduction, or rather his violation of Juana de Castro was accomplished by a third profanation of the sacrament, when the Bishops of Salamanca and Avila, both accessories to the king's scandalous bigamy, pronounced the blessing of the Church upon his brutal dishonour of a noble lady.

Whether Peter's marriage with Maria de Padilla,2 which

1 As to the legendary origin of the name of the Calle del Candilejo at Seville, and the king's interrupted duel--the tale is too long to be told here-see Mérimée, op. cit., pp. 135, 136, and Zuñiga, Ann. Eccles. de Seville, tom. ii., p. 136.

2 Ayala, 350. Zuñiga, Ann. Eccles. Sev., ii., 162.