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.
Isabel, like all her descendants upon the throne, set a high standard of regal dignity, and in all her public appearances assumed a demeanour of impassive serenity and gorgeousness which became traditional at a later period; but she could be playful and jocose in her family circle, as her nicknames for her children prove. Her eldest girl, Isabel, who married the King of Portugal, bore a great resemblance to the Portuguese mother of Isabel herself, and the latter always called her child ‘mother,’ whilst her son Juan to her was always the ‘angel,’ from his beautiful fair face. She could joke, too, on occasion, though the specimens of her wit cited by Father Florez are a little outspoken for the present day; and her contemporary chroniclers tell many instances of her keen caustic wit. Her tireless and often indiscreet zeal for the spread of the faith has been mentioned several times in these pages; but submissive as she was to the clergy, she was keenly alive even to their defects, and the laxity of the regular orders, which had grown to be a scandal, was reformed by her with ruthless severity. Her principal instrument, perhaps the initiator, of this work was the most remarkable ecclesiastical statesman of his time, and one of the greatest Spaniards who ever lived, Alfonso Jimenez de Cisneros.