QUEENS OF OLD SPAIN
[Illustration:
MARY TUDOR, QUEEN OF ENGLAND AND SPAIN.
_After a Painting by Sir Antonio More._
]
Queens
of
Old Spain
BY
MARTIN HUME
EDITOR OF THE CALENDARS OF SPANISH STATE PAPERS LECTURER IN SPANISH
HISTORY AND LITERATURE PEMBROKE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
ILLUSTRATED
LONDON
GRANT RICHARDS LTD.
PUBLISHERS
_Published October 1906_
_Re-issued July 1911_
TO THE SEVERE BUT HONEST PUBLIC
The books left by a man whose every thought was about books, are even
more himself than were his actions during life. In fact, at times, I
think it is the case with all who write; for, after all, what a man
writes is really far more important than anything he does.
Most of us in wandering through a churchyard where we come upon a
friend’s name, on a tombstone, feel a spirit of revolt. It is no good to
tell us death is as natural as life. We all know that, and still feel
that in some strange way we have been defrauded by the death of a dear
friend. Nothing is more unjust than is a natural cause.
Even the Greeks, with all their joyousness, must have felt this when
they invented Nemesis.
We Caledonians, who took our faith from Hippo (nane o’ yer Peters, gie
me Paul), perhaps stand up against the stabs of Fate better than those
nurtured in the most damnable doctrine of freewill. Once allow it, and
life becomes a drunken whirligig on which sit grave and reverend
citizens playing on penny whistles, all attired in black.
If though the name upon the tombstone strikes a chill to the heart, half
of regret and half of fear—for what, when all is said and done, is your
_memento mori_ but blue funk?—when we pick up a dead friend’s book upon
a stall, published at twelve-and-sixpence and ticketed a penny, we must
reflect—that is, the most of us—that to that favour we shall come, and
all the pages, that cost us so much thought in the writing, to be tied
together with a piece of string and sold with the base trash of Smith
and Jones and Brown, fellows who had no style, nor knew the difference
betwixt invention and imagination, humour or wit, and did not know a
colophon from an illuminated capital, and sold all in a lot.
Therefore I am glad that this edition of one of Hume’s best works is
coming out, and I who saw him laid to rest in the dry, marly earth of
that drear East End cemetery only a year ago—or was it ten, for when a
man is dead time ceases for him and for ourselves in thinking of him—am
writing these few lines to do my best to keep his memory green.
His ‘Queens of Spain’ was one of the books that he liked best.
Some say an author always likes his weakest book, but, even if he does,
what does it matter? A mother not infrequently adores the least
desirable of all her sons, but the world judges him; and she who bore
him has to submit to all its judgments of her well-beloved, just as the
author has to bow the head to what it says about his books.
Hume was a man who valued what the public said about his work. I used to
fancy him, as a good gladiator, some Roman citizen who for his debts, or
some cause or another, was forced to live by push of sword, and took it
up in the same spirit in which my friend took up the pen, and set about
to write.
Such a man, I fancy, fighting of course like Tybalt, by the book of
arithmetic, would feel a pride in dying well. Just as he fell,
despatched by some rude Dacian who in his life had never come within the
walls of any fencing school, he would wrap his mantle round him
decently, and murmur: ‘Civis Romanus sum,’ as he lay dying in the dust.
These kind of men are never vanquished. Even if they die, their death
serves as an example to the world, and makes boys miserable at school
who have to put it into Greek hexameters.
Hume was of these good gladiators and passed laborious days. How many
reams of paper he must have filled; how many miles of writing he must
have traced in his hard-working life, only himself could have been sure
of, and perhaps not he, for who shall say if a silkworm measures the
length of silk that comes from the cocoon.
When in a music hall I see a man do something easily which seems
impossible, I always think upon the hours he must have passed—missing,
remissing, perspiring, cursing, and at last see him successful, and then
no matter how respectable my neighbours in the stalls appear, or tight
my gloves are, clap with a will. Noise, after all, is the reward,
perhaps the sole reward, that we accord success.
A modest modicum was all Hume had to show for a self-denying life
spent—that is to say, for the last twenty years of it—in burrowing in
archives and writing ceaselessly upon the facts he found.
Most certainly he lived the simple life. Up early in the morning, he
used to begin writing just as a mill horse turns round in a mill. Three
or four thousand lines by tea-time, and then perhaps he would review a
book. Then twice a week (no more) he used to walk down to the club, dine
simply, and sit reading till it was time to walk back home, to sleep and
rise again to work.
With almost lightning speed he wrote, so that, when once he had his
facts, nothing remained but the material labour of the pen.
‘Martin fa presto’ I used to call him, and certainly, considering how
much he wrote, the level he maintained was high; not perhaps in the vein
of Hallam or of Robertson, but then in history there are many bypaths,
and along them he strayed. Sometimes a ramble in a country lane is
better than a tramp upon the Great North Road.
I like to fancy that in the Record Office, at Simancas, Brussels, and in
the Archives of the Indies (that great red pile, in Seville), there are
some old librarians who remember him, and talk about his work. I hear
them say, at Seville or Simancas, ‘There was an Englishman who used to
come here, one who spoke Christian. He used to sit and write, and knew
the documents better than we ourselves’ (which was not difficult). ‘I
tell you that that Englishman was like a devil at his work.’
If they exist, and Hume could hear of them, I am certain he would smile
in his grave way and say: ‘Ah, yes; old Don Saturino Lopez, or Don
Eustaquio Perez,’ as the case might be, ‘I well remember him. He never
knew where to find anything; he came from Coria, I think.’
R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM.
INTRODUCTION
In a previous volume I have remarked upon the extremely small political
significance of most of the Queens Consort of England, although socially
the country has become what it is mainly through feminine influence. In
Spain the exact reverse has happened, and in no Christian country has
the power of women been less formative of the life and character of the
nation, whilst, largely owing to personal and circumstantial accident,
the share of ladies in deciding the political destinies of the country
from the throne has been more conspicuous than in other European
monarchies. The oriental traditions dominant in Spain for centuries
tended to make wives the humble satellites rather than the equal
companions of their husbands; and the inflated gallantry, before
marriage at least, that sprang from the chivalrous obsession grafted
upon mixed feudal and Islamic ideals, affected to exclude woman from the
harder facts of existence, and from the practical problems that occupied
the minds of men. But whilst these traditions limited the power of
Spanish women generally, they were insufficient to counteract the
extraordinary political influence of a series of remarkable feminine
personalities who, mainly owing to feebleness and ineptitude of
consorts, or to long minorities of sons, have on occasion during the
course of four centuries practically wielded the sceptres of Spain. It
is true that queens regnant in England as well as in Spain have usually,
and quite naturally, been powerful political factors, but in most
instances they necessarily differed but little, either in aims or
methods, from male sovereigns. The difference between the queens of the
two countries is most remarkable in the case of queens consort, who in
Spain have, either as wives or widowed regents, influenced government to
an extent quite unparalleled in England. Apart from the accident of
forceful personal character, or other influential qualities possessed by
some of these ladies, the reason for their importance must be sought in
the fact that most of them represented great dynastic interests or
national alliances, and were supported by powerful parties in Spain or
abroad. In order that their lives should be properly understood, it will
be necessary to keep in view contemporary events in other parts of
Europe which more or less concerned them; and to relate the history of
all the Queens of Spain upon such a plan would exceed the capacity of a
single volume and the patience of the ordinary reader. It is proposed,
therefore, to select for treatment only the lives of some of the Queens
of Spain who, for their greatness, their political significance, their
attractions, or their misfortunes, stand forth most prominently in the
romantic history of their country. The temptation is great to dwell upon
certain of the earlier Queens of the small kingdoms which constituted
Spain before the union of the crowns: to tell the heroic story of the
great Berengaria, the mother of St. Ferdinand, and those of Queen Maria
de Molina and Blanche of Bourbon; to recount the matrimonial vagaries of
Peter the Cruel, and dwell upon Catharine of Lancaster, whose marriage
with the heir of Castile closed the war of succession to the Castilian
crowns waged by her father John of Gaunt. She, especially, stands forth
with almost photographic precision in the pages of the genius who penned
the chronicles of her time. Gigantic in size she seemed to the more
diminutive Spaniard: florid, fat, and fair; a vast eater and drinker,
whose valiant prowess at the festal board astounded the abstemious
people amongst whom she lived; strong and masculine, but idle, and
careless of the feminine arts by which woman’s attraction is increased;
ruled by her favourites, but withal a good woman and a good Queen, who
governed Spain honestly for ten years, during the minority of her weak
son, John II. of Castile.
But, interesting as some of these earlier personages are, they cannot
rightly be called Queens of Spain; and the first of all Spanish Queens,
the great Isabel of Castile and Aragon, may fittingly begin the volume,
which will contain the stories of other ladies perhaps more loveable,
more feminine, more sympathetic, but none so splendidly steadfast, so
noble of aim, or so strong as she. Her function in the world, aided by
her husband, was to crush the rieving nobles, and bring unity to Spain
by religious exaltation. The end endowed her country with transient
greatness and febrile force, whilst the methods by which it was attained
doomed the nation she loved so well to a long agony of decay, and
ultimate exhaustion. The problems facing Spanish rulers thenceforward
were no longer centred upon the development of the country as a
prosperous Christian land, or even upon the maintenance of the
Mediterranean as a Christian sea. The policy of the ‘Catholic Kings’
plunged Spain into the vortex of mid-European politics at the critical
period of the world’s history, when new lines of demarcation were being
scored by religious schism across the ancient boundaries: when deep,
unbridgable crevasses were being split between peoples hitherto bound
together by common interests and traditional friendship. At this crucial
time, when the centre of all earthly authority was boldly challenged,
Spain was pledged by Isabel and Ferdinand to a course which
thenceforward made her the champion of an impossible religious unity,
and squandered for centuries the blood and treasure of her people in the
fruitless struggle to fix enduring fetters upon the thoughts and souls
of men. Myriads of martyrs shed their blood to cement the solid Spain
that might serve as an instrument for such gigantic ends; and the
ecstatic Queen, though gentle and pitiful at heart, yet had no pity for
the victims, as her clear eyes pierced the reek of sacrifice, and saw
beyond it the shining glory of her goal. To her and to her descendant
kings the end they aimed at justified all things done in its attainment,
and the touch of mystic madness that in the great Queen was allied to
exalted genius, grew in those of her blood who followed her to the
besotted obsession that blinded them to the nature and extent of the
forces against them, and led them down at last to babbling idiocy, and
their country to impotent decay. The pale figure of Joan the distraught
flits across our page, and forces to our consideration once more the
awful problem of whether she was the victim of a hellish conspiracy on
the part of those who should have loved her best, or a woman afflicted
by the hand of God; whether her lifelong martyrdom was the punishment of
heresy or the need of her infirmity. Pathetic Mary Tudor, Queen Consort
of Spain, demands notice because her marriage with Philip II. marked the
vital need of Spain, at any cost, to hold by the traditional alliance
with England amidst the shifting sands of religious revolt which were to
overwhelm and transform Europe; whilst, later, the desperate attempt of
Philip to form a new group of powers which should enable Spain to
dispense with unorthodox England, is personified in the sweet and noble
figure of his third wife, Isabel of Valois, upon whose life-story,
poignant enough in its bare reality, romancers have embroidered so many
strange adornments. The Austrian princesses, who in turn became consorts
of the Catholic Kings, all represent the unhappy persistence of the
rulers of Spain in clinging to the splendid but unrealisable dream
bequeathed by their great ancestor the Emperor to his suffering realm;
that of perpetuating Spanish hegemony over Europe by means of compulsory
uniformity of creed, dictated from Rome and enforced from Madrid. And in
the intervals of discouragement and disillusionment at the impotence of
Habsburg Emperors to secure such uniformity even within the bounds of
the empire itself, and the patent impossibility for Spain alone to cope
with the giant task, we see the turning of kings and ministers in
temporary despair towards the secular enemy of the house of Austria, and
Spain in search of French brides who might bring Catholic support to the
Catholic champion. When, at last, exhausted Spain could deceive herself
no longer, and was fain to acknowledge that she had been beaten in her
attempt to hold the rising tide and deny to men the God-given right of
unfettered thought, the matrimonial alliances of her Kings, whilst
ceasing to be instruments for the realisation of the vision of her
prime, still obeyed the traditionary policies which drew Spain
alternately to the side of France or Austria. But the end of such
efforts now was not to serve Spanish objects, wise or otherwise, but to
snatch advantage for the rival birds of prey who were hovering over the
body of a great nation in the throes of dissolution, ravening for a
share of her substance when the hour of death should strike. Sordid and
pathetic as the story of these intrigues may be in their political
aspect, the personal share in them of the Queens Consort themselves,
their methods, their triumphs and their failures, are often fraught with
intense interest to the student of manners. The life of the unscrupulous
Mariana of Austria, who in the interests of her house held Spain so long
in the name of her imbecile son, and in her turn was outwitted by Don
Juan and the French interest, presents us with a picture of the times so
intimate, thanks to the plentiful material left behind by a
self-conscious age, as to introduce us into the innermost secrets of the
intrigues to an extent that contemporaries would have thought
impossible. And again the sad, but very human, story of the young
half-English Princess, bright and light-hearted, torn from brilliant
Paris to serve French interests, as the wife of Mariana’s half-witted
son Charles II., only to beat herself to death against the bars of her
gloomy golden cage and break her heart to old Mariana’s undisguised joy,
throws a flood of lurid light upon Spanish society in its decadence, and
proves the baseness to which human ambition will stoop. More repugnant
is the career of poor Marie Louise’s German successor as the Consort of
the miserable Charles the Bewitched in his last years, and the tale of
the extraordinary series of plots woven by the rival parties around the
lingering deathbed of the King, whom they worried and frightened into
his grave, a senile dotard at forty. Only briefly dealt with here are
the Queens of the Bourbon renascence, stout little Marie Louise of
Savoy, and the forceful termagant Isabel Farnese, who, chosen to serve
as a humble instrument of others, at once seized whip and reins herself,
and drove Spain as she listed during a long life of struggle for the
aggrandisement of her sons, in which Europe was kept at strife for years
by the ambition of one woman.
These and other Queens Consort will pass before us in the following
pages, some of them good, a few bad, and most of them unhappy. There is
no desire to dwell especially upon the sad and gloomy features of their
history, or to represent them all as victims; but it must not be
forgotten, in condonation of the shortcomings of some of them, that they
were sent from their own homes, kin, and country, often mere children,
to a distant foreign court, where the traditional etiquette was
appallingly austere and repellent; sacrificed in loveless marriage to
men whom they had never seen; treated as emotionless pawns in the game
of politics played by crafty brains. No wonder, then, that girlish
spirits should be crushed, that young hearts should break in despair,
or, as an alternative, should cast to the winds all considerations of
honour, duty, and dignity, and seek enjoyment before extinction came.
Some of them passed through the fiery ordeal triumphant, and stand forth
clear and shining. Great Isabel herself, another more colourless Isabel,
the Emperor’s wife, a third, Isabel of the Peace, most beloved of
Spanish Queens, and Anne her successor, as solemn Philip’s wife. Of
these no word of reproach may justly be said, nor of Margaret, the
Austrian consort of Philip III., nor of the spirited Isabel of Bourbon,
daughter of the gay and gallant Béarnais, and sister of Henriette Marie
of England. These and others bore their burden bravely to the last; and
of the few who cast theirs down, and strayed amongst the poisoned
flowers by the way, it may be truly urged that the trespasses of others
against them were greater than their own transgressions. Such of their
stories as are here told briefly are set forth with an honest desire to
attain accuracy in historical fact and impartiality in deduction
therefrom. There has been no desire to make either angels or devils of
the personages described. They were, like the rest of their kind, human
beings, with mixed and varying motives, swayed by personal and political
influences which must be taken into account in any attempt to appraise
their characters or understand their actions. Several of the lives are
here told in English for the first time by the light of modern research,
and in cases where statements are at variance with usually accepted
English teaching, references are given in footnotes to the contemporary
source from which the statements are derived. The opening of the
archives of several European countries, and the extensive reproduction
in print of interesting historical texts in Spain of late years, provide
much of the new material used in the present work; and the labours of
recent English, French, and Spanish historians have naturally been
placed under contribution for such fresh facts as they have adduced.
Where this is the case, acknowledgment is made in the form of footnotes.
MARTIN HUME.
CONTENTS
BOOK I
PAGE
ISABEL THE CATHOLIC 1