nd's weakness, Isabel wrote in March 1501
deprecating the great expense he was incurring in the preparations. She
did not wish, she said, for her daughter to cause a loss to England,
either in money or any other way; but to be a source of happiness to
every one. When all was ready for the embarkation at Corunna in April
1501, an excuse for further delay was found in a rebellion of the Moors of
Ronda, which prevented Ferdinand from escorting his daughter to the port;
then both Isabel and Katharine had a fit of ague, which delayed the
departure for another week or two. But at last the parting could be
postponed no longer, and for the last time on earth Isabel the Catholic
embraced her favourite daughter Katharine in the fairy palace of the
Alhambra which for ever will be linked with the memories of her heroism.

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