Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. I.djvu/240

96 96 CASTILE UNDER HENRY IV. PART I. Among these suitors, was a brother of Edward the Fourth, of England, not improbably Richard, duke of Gloucester, since Clarence was then engaged in his intrigues with the earl of Warwick, which led a few months later to his marriage with the daugh- ter of that nobleman. Had she listened to his pro- posals, the duke would in all likelihood have ex- changed his residence in England for Castile, where his ambition, satisfied with the certain reversion of a crown, might have been spared the commission of the catalogue of crimes, which blacken his memory.^' Another suitor was the duke of Guienne, the unfortunate brother of Louis the Eleventh, and at that time the presumptive heir of the French mon- archy. Although the ancient intimacy, which sub- sisted between the royal families of France and Castile, in some measure favored his pretensions, the disadvantages resulting from such a union were too obvious to escape attention. The two coun- tries were too remote from each other, "^^ and their ^1 Isabella, who in a letter to Henry IV., dated Oct. 12th, 1469, adverts to these proposals of the English prince, as being under consideration at the time of the convention of Toros de Guisan- do, does not specify which of the brothersof Edward IV. was intend- ed. (Castillo, Cr6nica, cap. 130.) Mr. Turner, in his History of England during the Middle Ages, (London, 1825,) quotes part of the address delivered by the Spanish envoy to Richard III., in 1183, in which the orator speaks of " the iinkindncss, which his queen Isa- bella had conceived for Edward IV., for his refusal of her, and his taking instead to wife a widow of Eng- land." (Vol. iii. p. 274.) The old chronicler Hall, on the other hand, mentions, that it was currently reported, although he does not appear to credit it, that the earl of Warwick had been despatched into Spain in order to request the hand of the princess Isabella for his master Edward IV., in 1463. (See his Chronicle of England, (London, 1809,) pp. 263, 264.) — I find nothing in the Span- ish accounts of that period, which throws any light on these obvious contradidioiis. Castile touched, indeed, on one
 * ^ The territories of France and