best thing he could have taken in the absence of Epsom salts, but
nothing could get rid of the enormous amount of rich food that poured
down his gullet. He was always thinking of death, and there seems to
be little doubt that he really did rehearse his own funeral. He held
a great and solemn procession, catafalque and all, and, kneeling in
front of the altar, handed to the officiating friar a taper, which was
symbolical of his own soul. He then sat during the afternoon in the hot
sun, and it was thought that he caught a feverish chill, for he took
to his bed and never left it alive; for hours he held the portrait of
Isabella in his hands, recalling her fresh young beauty; he clasped
to his bosom the crucifix which he had taken from her dead fingers
just before they had become stiff. Then came the fatal headache and
vomiting which so often usher in the close of chronic Bright’s disease.
We are told that he lay unconscious, holding his wife’s crucifix,
till he said: “Lord, I am coming to Thee!” His hand relaxed--was the
motor-centre becoming œdematous?--and a bishop held the crucifix before
his dying eyes. Charles sighed, “Aye--Jesus!” and died. Whether or no
he died so soon after saying these things as the good friar would have
us believe, it is certain that his end was edifying and pious, and such
as he would have wished.
The great interest of Charles V to a doctor, now that the questions
over which he struggled so fiercely are settled, is that we can seldom
trace so well in any historical character the course of the disease
from which he died. If Charles had been content to live on milky food
and drink less it is probable that he would have lived for years;
he might have yielded to the constant entreaties of his friends and
resumed the imperial crown; he might have taken into his strong hands
the guidance of Spain and the Netherlands that was overwhelming Philip;
his calm good sense might have averted the rising flood that ultimately
led to the revolt of the Netherlands; possibly he might even have
averted the Spanish Armada, though it seems improbable that he could
have lived thirty years. But Spain might have avoided that arrogant
behaviour which has since that day caused so many of her troubles; with
the substitution of Philip for Charles at that critical time she took a
wrong turning from which she has never since recovered.
The death of Charles V caused an extraordinary sensation in
Europe--even greater than the sensation caused by his abdication.
Immense memorial services were held all over the Empire; people
wondered how they were ever to recover from the loss. Stout old Quixada
said boldly that Charles V was the greatest man that ever had been
or ever would be in the world. If we differ from him, at all events
his opinion helps us to appreciate the extraordinary impression that
Charles had made upon his time, and it is now generally agreed that he
was the greatest man of the sixteenth century, which was so prodigal
of remarkable men. Possibly William the Silent might be thought still
greater; but he was much less resplendent; he lacked the knightly
glamour that surrounded the head of the Holy Roman Emperor; he wore no
Golden Fleece; no storied centuries fluttered over his head. Yet, if
we come to seek a cause for this immense impression, it is not easy
to find. There is no doubt that he was a stout defender of the old
religion at a time when it sorely needed defenders, and to that extent
Romance broods over his memory--the romance of things that are old.
He was a man of remarkable energy, and a great soldier at a time when
soldiering was not distinguished by genius. He appears to have had
great personal charm, though I can find few sayings attributed to him
by which we can judge the source of that charm. There is nothing in his
history like the gay insouciance, the constant little personal letters
to friends, of Henri Quatre; things with Charles V seem to have been
rather serious and legal than friendly. He was fond of simple joys,
like watchmaking, and he got a remarkable clockmaker, one Torriano, to
accompany him to Yuste to amuse his last months. He left behind him a
great many watches, and naturally the story grew that he had said: “If
I cannot even get my watches to agree, how can I expect my subjects
to follow one religion?” But it is probable that this pretty story
is quite apocryphal; it is certainly very unlike Charles’s strongly
religious--not to say bigoted--character. He was proud and autocratic,
yet could unbend, and the friars of Yuste found him a good friend. The
boys of the neighbouring village used to rob his orchard, much to the
disgust of the Emperor; he set the police on their track, but died
before the case came up for trial. After his death it was found that he
had left instructions that the fines which he expected to receive from
the naughty little ragamuffins were to be given to the poor of their
village. Among these naughty little boys was probably young Don John of
Austria, whom Quixada had brought to see his supposed father; and it is
said that Charles acknowledged him before he died.
Lastly, Charles had the inestimable advantage of being depicted by
one of the greatest artists of all time. It is impossible to look
upon his sad and thoughtful face, as drawn by the great Titian,
without sympathy. The strong, if underhung, jaw which he bequeathed
to his descendants and is still to be seen in King Alfonso of Spain;
the wide-set and thoughtful eyes; the care-worn furrowed brow; the
expression of energy and calm wisdom: all these belonged to a great man.
Two hundred years after he died, when his body had long been removed
to the Escorial where it now lies in solemn company with the bodies
of many other Spanish monarchs, a strange fate allowed a visiting
Scotsman to view it. Even after that great lapse of time it was,
though mummified, little affected by decay; there were still on his
winding-sheet the sprigs of thyme which his friends had placed there;
and the grave and stately features as painted by Titian were still
vividly recognizable.
We should be quite within the bounds of reason in saying that Charles
V was the greatest man between Charlemagne and Napoleon. He was less
knightly than Charlemagne--probably because we know more about him;
he had no Austerlitz nor Jena to his credit--nor any Moscow; but in
devouring energy and vastness of conception there was little to choose
between the three. Charlemagne left behind him the Holy Roman Empire
with its enormous mediæval significance, whereas Napoleon and Charles
V left comparatively little or nothing. He was the heroic defender of
a losing cause, and wears the romantic halo that such heroes wear; yet
whatever halo of chivalry, romance, and religious fervour surrounds his
name, it is difficult to forget that he deliberately ate himself to
death. An ignoble end.
Don John of Austria, Cervantes, and Don Quixote
Two great alliances, of which you will read nothing in ordinary
history-books, have pre-eminently influenced mankind. The first was
between the Priest and the Woman, and seems to have begun in Neolithic
times, when Woman was looked upon as a witch with some uncanny power
of bewitching honest men and somehow bringing forth useless brats for
no earthly reason that could be discovered. From this alliance grew
the worship of Motherhood, and hence many more modern religions. When,
on Sundays, you see ranks of men in stiff collars sitting in church
though they would much rather be playing tennis, you know that they
are expiating in misery the spankings inflicted by their Neolithic
ancestors perhaps 10,000 years ago: their wives have driven them to
church, and Woman, as usual, has had the last word.
But the other alliance, that between Man and Horse, has been a more
terrible affair altogether, and has led to Chivalry, the cult of the
Man on the Horse, of the Aristocrat, of the Rich Man. Though the Romans
had a savage aristocracy they never had Chivalry, probably because
they never feared the cavalryman. The Roman legion, in its open order,
could face any cavalry, because the legionary knew that the man by his
side would not run away; if he, being a misbegotten son of fear, did
so, then the man behind him would take advantage of the plungings of
the horse to drive his javelin into the silly animal while he himself
would use his sword upon the rider. It was left for the Gran Catalan
Company of Spain and the Scots under Wallace and Bruce to prove in
mediæval times that the infantryman would beat the cavalryman.
The Romans never adopted the artificial rules of Chivalry; it was the
business of the legions to win battles--to make money over the business
if they could, but first and foremost to win battles. They had no ideas
about the “point of honour” which has cost so many a man his life. The
main thing was that the legions must not run away; it was for the enemy
to do the running. To the Romans it never seems to have occurred that
Woman was a creature to be sentimentally worshipped, or that it really
mattered very much whether you spoke of a brace of grouse or a couple,
of a mob of hounds or a pack; but to the Knight of Chivalry these were
vital matters.
With Charlemagne and his Franks a new civilization came into full
flower; and Chivalry--the “worship of God and the ladies,” to quote
Gibbon’s ironic phrase--swayed the minds of Northern Europe for
centuries.
Chivalry has been much misunderstood in modern times. We probably see
Chaucer’s “varry parfit gentil knight” as poets and idealists would
have us see him and not as he really was. There was no sentimentality
about your knight. “Gentle” did not mean “kind”; it meant really “son
of a landowner.” A knight had to do things in the manner considered
fashionable by his class; he had to call things precisely by the names
taught him by some older knight--his tutor and university combined; the
slightest slip and he would be considered as the mediæval equivalent
of our “bounder”; he had to wear the proper clothes at the proper
time, and to obey certain arbitrary--often quite artificial--“manners
and rules of good society,” or he would be considered lacking in
“good form”; he must recognize the rights of the rich as against the
poor, but it did not follow that he should recognize any rights of
the poor as against the rich. Even Bayard, knight _sans peur et sans
reproche_, would probably have seemed a most offensive fellow to a
twentieth-century gentleman if he, with his modern ideas, could have
met the Chevalier; and the sensation caused by the kindly conduct of
Sir Philip Sidney in handing his drink of water to a wounded soldier
at Zutphen shows how rare such a thing must have been. It was done a
thousand times in the late war, and nobody thought anything about it.
To the extent of the sensation of Zutphen Chivalry had debased mankind;
the evil that it did lived after it. It did good in teaching the world
manners and a certain standard of honourable conduct; it did not teach
morality, or real religion, or real kindness. These things were left
for the poor to teach the rich.
This unsentimental harangue leads us to “the last knight of
Europe”--Don John of Austria, around whose name there still shines a
glamour of romance like the sound of a trumpet. About nine years after
the death of the Empress Isabel, Charles V went a-wandering, still
disconsolate, through his mighty empire. He was sad and lonely, for
it was about the time when the arterio-sclerosis which was to kill
him began to depress his spirits. At Ratisbon, where he lay preparing
for the great campaign which was to end in the glorious victory of
Muhlburg, they brought to him to cheer him up a sweet singer and pretty
girl named Barbara Blomberg, daughter of a noble family. She sang to
the Emperor to such purpose that he became her lover, and in due
course Don John was born. By this time Charles had discovered that his
pretty nightingale was a petulant, extravagant, sensual young woman,
by no means the sort of mother a wise man would select to bring up his
son; so he took the boy from her care and sent him to a poor Spanish
family near Madrid. Whatever Charles V did in his private life seems
to have borne the stamp of wisdom and kindness, however little we
may agree with some of his public actions. Probably Barbara did not
object; it must have been rather alarming for the flighty young person
to have the tremendous personality of the great Emperor constantly
overlooking her folly; she married a man named Kugel, ruined him by her
extravagance, and died penniless save for an annuity of 200 florins
left her by the Emperor in his will. I read a touch of sentimentality
into Charles’s character. It is difficult to wonder more at his
memory of his old light-of-love in his will, or at his accurate and
uncomplimentary estimate of her value. Probably he was rather ashamed
of some of his memories; so far as I can find out there were not many
such, and he wished to hush up the whole incident. Probably Barbara was
not worth much more than 200 florins per annum.
Still keeping secret the parentage of the child, whom he called
Jeronimo after his favourite saint, Charles handed him over to the care
of his steward, Don Luis de Quixada, asking that Maddalena his wife
should regard Jeronimo as her own son. Quixada had not been married
very long, and naturally Maddalena wondered whence came this cheery
little boy of which Quixada seemed so fond; nor would he gratify her
curiosity, but hushed her with dark sayings; she kissed the baby in
public, but wept in secret for jealousy of the wicked female who had
evidently borne a son in secret to her husband before he had married
his lawful wife. One night the castle caught fire, and Quixada, flower
of Spain’s chivalry though he was, rescued the child before he returned
to save Maddalena. It is wrong to call him a “grandee of Spain,” for
“grandee” is a title much the same as our “duke”; had he been a grandee
I understand that his true name would have been “Señor Don Quixada,
duca e grandi de España.” One would think that this action would have
added fuel to Maddalena’s jealousy, but she believed her husband when
he told her that Jeronimo was a child of such surpassing importance to
the world that it had been necessary for a Quixada to save him even
before he saved his wife, and quite probably she then, for the first
time, began to suspect his real parentage. Charles V was then the
great Catholic hero, and the whole Catholic world was weeping for his
abdication. So Maddalena developed a strong love for Jeronimo, which
died only with herself. She lived for a great many years and bore no
children; Jeronimo remained to her as her only son. He always looked
upon her as his mother, and throughout his life wrote to her letters
which are still delightful to read; whatever duty he had, in whatever
part of the world, he always found time to write to Maddalena in the
midst of it, and, like a real mother, she kept the letters.
It is said that Charles when dying kissed Jeronimo and called him son;
he certainly provided for him in his will. After his death Quixada
at first tried to keep the matter secret, but afterwards sent him
to live at the Court with his brother Philip II, who treated him as
he treated everybody else but Charles V--“the one wise and strong
man whom he never suspected, never betrayed, and never undervalued,”
as Stirling-Maxwell says. Jeronimo was then openly acknowledged by
Philip as Charles’s natural son, being called Don John of Austria.
Philip’s own son, a youth of small intelligence, who afterwards died
under restraint--Philip was of course accused of poisoning him--once
called him _bâtarde et fils de putaine_--bastard and strumpet’s son.
The curly-headed little boy kept his hands by his side and quietly
replied, “Possibly so; but at any rate I had a better _father_ than
you!” Even by that time he had begun to see that his mother was no
saint, and could tell between a great man and a little. Philip could
never forgive Don John for being a gallant youth such as his father
had hoped that Philip would be and was not; and Don John, conscious
of his mighty ancestry, ardently longed to be a real gallant King of
Romance, such as his father had hoped Philip would become. Charles,
in his will, had expressed a hope that he would be a monk, and Philip
actively fought for this, though Charles had left the decision to Don
John’s own wishes. In Philip’s eyes no doubt a gay and bold younger
brother would be less dangerous to the State--i.e. to Philip--as a monk
than as a soldier; yet is it not possible that Philip only thought he
was loyally helping to follow out his father’s wishes? He was generally
a “slave of duty,” though his slavery often led him into tortuous
courses. The Church is a great leveller, and religion is a pacifying
and amaranthine repast. But no monkish cowl would suit Don John; his
locks were fair and hyacinthine, and no tonsure should degrade them.
After a struggle Philip yielded, and Don John was sent in command of
the galleys against the Algerian pirates. He did well, and next year
he commanded the land forces against the rebel Moriscoes of Granada.
Here, in his very first battle, he lost his foster-father and mentor,
Quixada, who died a knightly death in rallying the army when it
meditated flight. A true knight of Spain, this Quixada, from the time
when he took the little son of imperial majesty under his care till
the time when he gave up his life lest that little son, now become a
radiant young man, should suffer dishonour by his army running away.
All Spain, from Philip downward, mourned the death of this most valiant
gentleman, which is another thing that makes me think that Philip’s
conduct towards Don John was not quite so black as it has been painted.
He could certainly recognize worth when it did not conflict with his
own interests--that is to say, with the interests of Spain as he saw
them. Quixada’s action in concealing the parentage of Don John from his
wife was just the sort of loyal and unwise thing that might have been
expected from a chivalrous knight, using the word “chivalrous” as it is
commonly understood to-day; a dangerous thing, for many a woman would
not have had sufficient faith in her husband to believe him when he
suddenly produced an unexplained and charming little boy soon after he
was married. Maddalena de Ulloa acted like an angel; Don Quixada acted
like--Don Quixote! Now we see why I asked you particularly to note the
name when we first came across it in the essay on Charles V. Whence did
Cervantes get the idea for Don Quixote if not from the foster-father of
Don John?
Two years later he got the real chance of his life. The Turks, having
recovered from the shock inflicted on them by Charles V, captured
Cyprus and seemed about to conquer all the little republics of the
Adriatic. The Pope, Pius V, organized the “Holy League” between Spain
and Venice, between the most fiercely monarchical of countries and the
most republican of cities; and Don John was appointed Admiral-in-chief
of the combined fleets of the “Last Crusade,” as the enterprise is
called from its mingled gallantry and apparent unity and idealism. For
the last time men stood spellbound as Christendom attacked Mohammed.
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
And Don John of Austria is going to the war,
sings Chesterton in _Lepanto_, one of the most stirring battle-poems
since the _Iliad_.
Sudden and still--hurrah!
Bolt from Iberia!
Don John of Austria
Is gone by Alcalar.
It is difficult for us nowadays to realize the terror of the Turks
that possessed Europe in the sixteenth century; mothers quieted
their children by the dreadful name, and escaped sailors recounted
indescribable horrors in every little seaport from Albania to
Scotland. Many thousands of Christian slaves laboured at the oars
of the war-galleys, not, as is generally thought, as hostages that
these galleys might not be sunk. They were the private property of
the captains, who treated their own property better than they treated
the property of the Grand Turk. Thus, it was not the worst fate for a
Christian galley-slave to serve in the galley of his owner. He would
not be exposed to reckless sinking at any rate; if the galley sank, it
would be because the owner could not help it. Nor would he be likely
to be impaled upon a red-hot poker or thrown upon butchers’ hooks, as
might happen to the slave of the Sultan. So it would seem that some
unnecessary pity has been spilt upon the slaves of the galleys. Their
lot might have been worse, to put things in their most favourable light.
King Philip’s in his closet with the Fleece about his neck,
(Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines
Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
(“_But Don John of Austria has burst the battle line!_”)
Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate’s sloop.
_Vivat Hispania!
Domino gloria!_
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!
This “last crusade” culminated in the great battle of Lepanto, in 1571,
where the Turks lost about 35,000 men and their whole battle fleet
except forty galleys which crawled home disabled. There was a good deal
of discussion about the action of an Italian galley under Doria, but
Cervantes, in _Don Quixote_, seems to have been quite satisfied with
it. No such wonderful battle was fought at sea until the Nile itself,
which is the most perfect of all sea-fights.
The sensation throughout Europe was indescribable. Everything helped to
make the victory romantic--the gallant young bastard admiral compared
with the unattractive king under whom he served, the sudden relief from
terrible danger, and the victory of Christ over Mahound, so dramatic
and complete, all combined to stir the pulses of Christendom as they
had never been stirred before--even in the earlier Crusades when the
very tomb of Christ was the point under dispute. Men said that Mahound,
when he heard the guns of Don John, wept upon the knees of his houris
in his Paradise; black Azrael, the angel of death, had turned traitor
upon his worshippers.