the
unhappy lady and even gained some influence over her feeble mind.
Mazzuchelli states that, at one period, there were but two bishops and
Peter Martyr to whom the Queen consented even to listen. Now and
again the figure of the insane queen appears like a pallid spectre in
Martyr's pages. Her caprices and vagaries are noted from time to time
in the _Opus Epistolarum_; indeed the story of her sufferings is all
there. The insanity of Dona Juana was not seriously doubted by her
contemporaries--certainly not by Martyr, whose portrait of her
character is perhaps the most accurate contemporary one we possess.
He traces her malady from its incipiency, through the successive
disquieting manifestations of hysteria, melancholia, and fury,
broken by periods of partial and even complete mental lucidity. Such
intervals became rarer and briefer as time went on.[3]

[Note 3: The efforts of the historian Bergenroth to establish
Dona Juana's sanity and to depict her as the victim of religious
persecution because of her suspected orthodoxy have been conclusively
refuted by Maurenbrecher, Gachard, and other writers, who have
demolished his arguments and censured his methods of research
and interpretation. The last mention of Dona Juana in the _Opus
Epistolarum_ occurs in Epistle DCCCII. Peter Martyr describes the
visit paid her by her daughter Isabella, who was about to be married
to the Infante of Portugal. The insanity of the Queen was used as a
political pawn by both her husband and her father, each affirming or
denying as it suited his purpose for the moment. The husband, however,
was stronger than the father, for the unhappy Juana would have signed
away her crown at his bidding in exchange for a caress. Consult
Hoefler, _Dona Juana_; Gachard, _Jeanne la Folle_; Maurenbrecher,
_Studien und Skizzen zur Geschichte der Reformationszeit_; Pedro de
Alcocer, _Relacion de algunas Cosas_; and Bergenroth's _Calendar of
Letters, Despatches, and State Papers_, etc. (1869).]

Upon the death of King Ferdinand in 1516, the regency devolved upon
Cardinal Ximenes, pending the arrival of the young King, Charles, from
the Netherlands. The character of Cardinal Ximenes and his methods of
government have been extolled by his admirers and condemned by his
adversaries. The judgment of Peter Martyr is perhaps the least biassed
of any expressed by that statesman's contemporaries. His personal
dislike of the Cardinal did not blind him to his qualities, no