Old Court Life in Spain; vol. 2

In shape they resemble Grecian triremes without the bank of oars. A raised stern bears a square metal lantern as a night signal, and floating at the prow flies the flag of Spain.

On the deck appears the outline of a giant mariner wearing a broad sombrero, which may represent Columbus, in a thick coat, and with a telescope to his eye.

Within the Capitular Library are his books of reference, neatly annotated in his own clear hand, and a chart drawn by himself on parchment – a rude sketch of the American seaboard and the surrounding ocean, with soundings for sunken rocks; the course of winds, tides, and currents specially noted, the parchment partly blurred, as if by marks of sea-water.

Gazing at these relics, so neatly precise, and finished with the care of a man who knows how to wait with the patience of genius, a tall form rises before the eye, fair-complexioned, thin-faced, blue-eyed, and grey at thirty, such as Queen Isabel saw him, sitting at the poop of his little vessel, his eyes fixed on the chart, issuing orders to his helmsman to steer into unknown seas, while around him a mutinous crew gathers, calling on him to turn the rudder and sail home.

Time after time this happened. The sailors mutinied and threatened to throw him overboard. Time after time his dignity and eloquence mastered them, until that wild cry of “Tierra! Tierra!” broke from the masthead, as the advancing waves gathered on the shore of San Salvador.

On his return from his fourth voyage, his constant friend and protectress, Isabel, was dead!

This was the last drop in the cup of suffering to a broken-hearted man. His robust constitution broke down, and he sank into a premature old age.

At Segovia, where the court was, he presented himself to Ferdinand, but obtained nothing but empty words. He actually lived on borrowed money until his death.

His son and heir commuted his claims, which were enormous and unreasonable, into a large grant of land and the title of Grandee of Spain.

CHAPTER XXVII

Death of Isabel

THE country between Salamanca and Valladolid is very flat, the finest corn-growing region in all Spain. Now a railway passes through it, and when the summer sun blazes on the thick shocks of wheat, they glisten as with living flames, while the crisp, hot wind passes fluttering by. As the sun sinks, a dazzling ball of fire, into banks of intense crimson, the shadows of the after-glow fall long and dark. Nothing but the horizon between earth and sky; a land, boundless, monotonous, reflecting the stubborn will of the nation. The only kingdom in Europe which has retained its mediæval character for good and bad, simple, grand, immutable as its great plains!

Passing the small station of Vento de Baños, the ruins of an ancient castle rise to the sight. It is built of small red bricks, tempered to a pale hue by time and sunshine, and the lofty walls broken by solid towers and bastions. From its low position the height seems great, and for this same reason the walls are of enormous strength.

This is the Castello de la Mota, built for Juan II. in 1444, and here his daughter, the great Isabel, has come to die.

It is not age which is killing her, for she is only fifty-four, but sorrow has done its work upon her tender heart.

Child after child has been taken from her. First, her only son Juan, barely twenty, always delicate, dying of a fever in the midst of rejoicings for his marriage with a princess of France. Vainly did Ferdinand, who had rushed to his side at the first symptoms of danger, break the news to her gently by letter, describing his gradual decline after he was really dead; but the shaft struck home.

“Never,” says Peter Martyr, “could the bereaved parents speak of him.”

They laid him in a sumptuous tomb in the Dominican church at Avila.

Even after the lapse of so many centuries their love appears in the minute care with which each detail of his marble monument is wrought. The calm, pure, upturned face of the boy, so delicate and young, the light regal circlet on the rich curls of hair, the simple folds of drapery, the small shapely feet, and thin, long hands; the iron gauntlets, placed on one side to show that he was knighted by his father in the field.

The mere artistic beauty of the work is forgotten in the anguish of the parents, who used to sit for hours in two stalls opposite, where they could gaze down on the effigy of their son. A picture of lonely grief sweeping the chords of passionate sorrow to all time.

Then her daughter Isabel, Queen of Portugal, whom she loved with all her heart, died; her other daughter Juana, married to Philippe le Bel of Burgundy, is mad, and now a mortal illness has seized herself.

The queen is reclining on a couch, for she cannot sit up, in a vaulted hall divided into various rooms by thick screens of tapestry. Not far from her is an altar, on which the sacrament and various relics are exposed. The glare from the lighted tapers falls on that once lovely countenance with a cruel glare. She is greatly changed. The soft blue eyes have become too prominent, the face has lost its delicacy of outline, the skin its clearness, and the grey locks which have replaced the abundant meshes of her auburn hair are gathered under a thick coil.

Nothing but her inherent majesty remains, and that unalterable expression of calm which has distinguished her all her life, as one ready to meet good or bad fortune with an unmoved mind.

As she lies, the great pendants of the gilded roof falling above her head, and escutcheons and badges bordering the walls round – everything bears the token of the joint names, Ferdinand and Isabel, entwined and interlaced. In every detail of the furniture it appears. The heavy carved chairs bear it, the table before her, on which stands a crucifix, her illuminated missal, and the finely wrought silver casserole with strong essences to revive her.

Her eyes have closed in a light slumber, for she is very weak. Now she opens them with a smile, and fixes them vaguely on the setting sun, streaming in through the narrow Gothic casements which open into the great court. Then a sudden look of anxiety comes into her face.

“Hiya Marquesa,” she says, addressing her friend Beatrix, who has never left her since her illness, “what news of the king? Have despatches arrived from Don Gonsalvo de Cordoba at Naples? Where is Peter Martyr?”

“Here, your Highness,” answers her secretary, entering at that moment with a bundle of papers in his hand. “A great victory has been gained by Gonsalvo on the Garigliano. The French are driven out of Naples.”

“Ah! Is it so? I have ever esteemed him a hero. But the king! Where is he? When will he return?”

A silence follows. The queen’s countenance falls.

“His Highness was last heard of at Gerona,” answers Martyr, “with the army.”

“War, always war!” says the queen with a deep sigh. “Once we rode out together in the field – I wonder if he misses me!” Here she paused. “Beatrix,” she continues, seizing her hand and wringing it in her own, “I see by your face that something is amiss; the king’s absence, what does it mean? My body is indeed weak, but my heart is strong. Conceal nothing from me.”

“His Grace,” answered Beatrix, making a sign to Martyr not to speak, “is safe with the army at Perpignan.”

“And where is the Princess Juana?”

At the mention of her daughter’s name anxiety and distress are plainly visible on her face.

“She has left the castle” (at these words Isabel grows deadly pale), “and she refuses to return unless she can leave at once to join the archduke in Flanders.”

“Who attends her?” asks Isabel, speaking quickly.

“No one. She escaped alone. But her suite has been sent from the castle.”

“Now Heaven protect us!” cries the queen, greatly agitated. “Martyr, call to me here the Archbishop of Granada.”

“My dearest mistress,” says Beatrix, kneeling beside her and tenderly encircling her with her arms, “these fancies of the Infanta will pass. She is madly in love with the archduke when she is with him.”

“Alas! It is not returned,” interrupts the queen. “He only cares for the succession, not for her.”

The arras was now raised, and the dignified figure of Talavera, Archbishop of Granada, stood before the queen.

For years he had been her confessor, and to her death remained her devoted friend. Raising herself on her couch with difficulty, Isabel kissed the jewel which he wore in his episcopal ring, then sank back exhausted on the embroidered pillows at her back.

“I pray you, my Lord Archbishop,” she says in a low voice, “by the love you bear me and the king, to bring home to the castle the Infanta Juana, who has escaped. Tell her from me – to whom she will not listen in person – that it is her health that alone prevents her from joining her husband. As soon as she has recovered from her confinement she shall start, should the archduke still refuse to join her in Spain.”

Talavera stood before the queen, his eyes cast on the ground. He knew that she was sending him on a fruitless errand to Juana, who, short of main force, would obey no one. He knew how near her extravagance bordered on madness, and that this knowledge was breaking the queen’s heart, but the weakness in which he found her forbade his reminding her of it.

“What I can do I will; your Highness may rely on me,” was his answer.

“Go – go at once!” cried the queen, trembling all over, and almost rising to her feet. “Would I had strength to do it, but – but,” and she sank back, almost fainting, into the arms of the Marquesa de Moya.

“Now we are alone,” she says, in a voice perfectly composed, having swallowed some strong medicine given to her by Beatrix. “Believe me, Hiya, I am deluded by no false hopes. The end is near. Fain would I see the end of these troubles. Oh, that Ferdinand were here!”

“Shall an express be sent to his Highness?” asks the marquesa, endeavouring to master her grief.

“No, no!” cries Isabel, in a full voice, rousing to a momentary excitement. “The king is commanding the army in France. Let me not trouble him. He knows that I am ill. He might,” – she stops – a deep sigh escapes her, a look of inexpressible longing comes into her eyes, fixed on vacancy, as if, by the spell of her great love, she would draw him to her. Even to Beatrix she would not own the anguish she feels at his prolonged absence.

“Before I die,” she continues, “I must see the succession settled, and the king named Regent. All the documents are prepared. I should have liked to tell him so face to face. I will not command his presence, but I would that he had come to me as he was wont.”

Something in the pathetic insistence with which she spoke of him told an ill-assured mind. She dared not look at the marquesa, for she felt she would read her thoughts.

Had Ferdinand changed? There was agony in the thought, but it was there. That strange prescience, which so often accompanies the passing of life into death, had come to her with a revelation more bitter than the grave.

Worn with a life of constant hardship (in peace or war she was ever by his side) and broken by the loss of her children, although of the same age, she had become old while he was still comely enough to wed another wife. She knew it. Martial, erect, the fire of youth still gleaming in his eye, and his masterful spirit still unsubdued.

That others had pleased his fickle fancy she knew to her cost, and had suffered from pangs of silent jealousy. But that he would be absent from her dying bed did not seem possible.

So united had they been, the thought that he might survive her had never troubled her. Now it was a phantom she could not banish – Ferdinand alone!

Would another sit beside him in her place?

“We wait sorrowfully in the palace all day long,” writes the faithful chronicler of her life, Peter Martyr, “tremblingly waiting the hour when she will quit the earth. Let us pray that we may be permitted to follow hereafter where she will go. She so far transcends all human excellence that there is scarcely anything mortal about her. She can hardly be said to die, but to pass into a nobler existence. She leaves the world filled with her renown, and she goes to enjoy life eternal with God in heaven. I write this,” he says, “between hope and fear, while the breath is still fluttering within her.”

But the faithful pen of the secretary does not record the presence of Ferdinand at her side.

She was mercifully spared the knowledge of his inconstancy.

Already, during his campaigns, he had seen the young princess of eighteen, Germaine de Foix, cousin of the King of France, whom he married in such indecent haste, a volatile beauty, brought up at the dissipated Court of Louis XII. For her sake (had she borne him children) he would have severed the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, a greater insult, if possible, to the memory of the queen than his marriage.

Indirectly, this marriage was the cause of his death. It is the busy pen of Peter Martyr which records it.

In order to invigorate his constitution, he placed himself in the hands of quacks. A violent fever ensued, and (in 1515) he died at Granada.

The body of Isabel had already been brought there from the Castle de la Mota and interred within the Capilla Real.

Side by side they lie, the royal spouses united at least in death; the truant Ferdinand yearning for the presence of his first love, and at his own request laid beside her.

There they rest on two alabaster tombs, a marvel of exquisite workmanship, erected to their memory by their grandson, Charles V.

A frigid smile yet lingers on the queen’s marble lips as she turns her head lovingly towards Ferdinand, who, as in life, looks straight out, determined and warlike as he ever was. Both wear their crowns.

Beside them, on another monument, is their daughter Juana la loca (mad), her fickle Burgundian at her side. Their countenances are averted, their position as uneasy as was their life. Troubled lines wander over Juana’s form, and the comely head of Philip sinks on a marble pillow in selfish rest.

The four coffins lie in a narrow cell beneath; “a small place,” said their grandson, Charles V., “for so much greatness.”

A lofty Gothic portal separates the Capilla Real from the cathedral by a reja, or iron gates, elaborately worked.

No gilded canopy obscures the figures from the light, so royal is their simplicity, and when the radiance of the eastern sun lights up the vaulted ceiling, knitted into broad bands into bosses, leaves, and borders, and pictures, golden retablos and sculptured saints stand out on the subdued splendour of the walls, the effect is as a scene of actual history, enacted in what was once the great mosque of the Moors, conquered by the arms of these dead sovereigns (Los Reyes Catolicos) and converted into this Christian sepulchre, as a triumph to last as long as the world stands.

THE END

1

The Balax of the Red King was given by Don Pedro after the battle of Navarrete. This is the same “fair ruby, great as a racket ball,” which Queen Elizabeth showed to Melville, the ambassador of Mary Queen of Scots, and which he asked her to bestow on his mistress, which she refused, and it is the identical gem which adorned the centre of the royal crown of Queen Victoria.

2

“To the memory of the greatest sinner who ever lived, Don Juan de Mañara.”