Various entries appear among the accounts of the royal expenses for splendid presents and rich dresses purchased “for the marriage of her Majesty the Queen of Spain.” Blanche, then about fourteen or fifteen years old, went to Valladolid to meet her husband. She is said by contemporary historians to have been beautiful, gentle, and attractive, notwithstanding which her fate was one of the most tragic that ever befel a woman sacrificed to political expediency. The destinies of the French princesses who have married Kings of Spain have always seemed tinged with melancholy and gloom. The intolerable rigour of that etiquette which reduced the lives of the Spanish queens to a dignified slavery, the cruelty of the national amusements, the jealous tyranny and bigotry of many of the kings, must surely have made these young girls look back with regret and longing to the gay court and “_plaisant pays de France_.” Even when, as in other cases, the King, however bigoted, morose, or relentless in general, was really fond of his wife, the life of a Queen of Spain can scarcely have been a very cheerful one.
But Blanche de Bourbon was more than usually unfortunate. Pedro, who came to the throne before he was sixteen, began by putting to death various Spanish nobles and gentlemen, and also Eleanor de Guzman, his late father’s mistress, by whom that King had had several sons, and for whom the Queen and her son, the present King, had been slighted and neglected. He also murdered two or three of his natural brothers, and it was by the hand of one of those who escaped from his power that he met the due reward of his crimes.
The Queen-mother had urged Pedro to revenge her wrongs and his own upon Eleanor de Guzman; but when he began not only to imitate but far to surpass the faults of his father, by taking a Jewess named Maria de Padilla for his mistress, deserting his young wife three days after their marriage and keeping her a prisoner, his mother offered the most strenuous opposition to his conduct and warmly espoused the cause of the young Queen, her daughter-in-law. It was of no avail, however. Blanche was doomed to wear out her youth in captivity, in one Spanish castle after another, while Pedro carried on intrigues with various women, but remained chiefly under the influence of Maria de Padilla.