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Ferdinand and Isabel, with their son, received him in state in the great hall of the bishop’s palace; and, rising as he approached them, bade him to be seated, an unprecedented honour, due to the fact that they recognised his high rank as Admiral of the Indies. With fervid eloquence he told his tale. How rich and beautiful was the land he had found; how mild and submissive the new subjects of the Queen, and how ready to receive the faith of their mistress. Isabel was deeply moved at the recital, and when the Admiral ceased speaking the whole assembly knelt and gave thanks to God for so signal a favour to the crown of Castile. Thenceforward during his stay in Barcelona, Colon was treated like a prince; and when he left in May to prepare his second expedition to the new found land, he took with him powers almost sovereign to turn to account and bring to Christianity the new vassals of Queen Isabel.

It is time to say something of Isabel’s family and her domestic life. As we have seen, she had been during the nineteen years since her accession constantly absorbed in state and warlike affairs; and the effects of her efforts to reform her country had already been prodigious, but her public duties did not blind her to the interests of her own household and kindred; and no personage of her time did more to bring the new-born culture into her home than she. She had given birth during the strenuous years we have reviewed to five children. Isabel, born in October 1470; John, the only son, in 1478; Joan in 1479, Maria in 1482, and Katharine at the end of 1485: and these young princesses and prince had enjoyed the constant supervision of their mother. Her own education had been narrow under her Dominican tutors, and that of Ferdinand was notoriously defective. But Isabel was determined that her children should not suffer in a similar respect, and the most learned tutors that Italy and Spain could provide were enlisted to teach, not the royal children alone, but the coming generation of nobles, their companions, the wider culture of the classics and the world that churchmen had so much neglected. And not book learning alone was instilled into these young people by the Queen. She made her younger ladies join her in the work of the needle and the distaff, and set the fashion for great dames to devote their leisure, as she did, to the embroidering of gorgeous altar cloths and church vestments, whilst the noble youths, no longer allowed, as their ancestors had been, to become politically dangerous, were encouraged to make themselves accomplished in the arts of disciplined warfare and literary culture.