The story was well plotted and contained two figures whom I still remembered with fascination, a hideous witch called Martha the Mare and a giant red-bearded Frisian named Red Martin. The purpose of the plot was to provide opportunities for Spaniards to demonstrate how cruel they were. The sin of the Dutch stemmed from their Bible reading:
‘What has he done?’ asked Lysbeth in a low voice.
‘Done? My dear lady, it is almost too dreadful to tell you. This misguided and unfortunate young man, with another person whom the witnesses have not been able to identify, was seen at midnight reading the Bible.’
‘The Bible! Why should that be wrong?’
‘Hush! Are you also a heretic?’
One of the highlights of the yarn came when the hideous Mare climbed into a pulpit and disclosed the infamy of the man who had made her look the way she now did:
‘You call me the Mare,’ she went on. ‘Do you know how I got that name? They gave it me after they had shrivelled up my lips and marred the beauty of my face with irons. And do you know what they made me do? They made me carry my husband to the stake upon my back because they said that a horse must be ridden. And do you know who said this? THAT PRIEST WHO STANDS BEFORE YOU.’
As the mob surged toward the culprit she reminded the cowering priest who she was: ‘I was once called the Lily of Brussels. Look at him now. He remembers the Lily of Brussels. He remembers her husband and her son also, for he burned them.’ The crime so infuriated the Dutchmen that they hanged the priest, preparing the way for the central paragraph of the book;
Thus ended the life of the Abbé Dominic at the hands of avenging men. Without a doubt they were fierce and bloody-minded, for the reader must not suppose that all the wickedness of those days lies on the heads of the Inquisition and the Spaniards. The adherents of the New Religion did evil things also, things that sound dreadful in our ears. In excuse of them, however, this can be urged, that, compared to those of their oppressors, they were as single trees to a forest full; also that they who worked them had been maddened by their sufferings. If our fathers, husbands and brothers had been burned at the stake, or done to death under the name of Jesus in the dens of the Inquisition, or slaughtered by thousands in the sack of towns; if our wives and daughters had been shamed, if our houses had been burned, our goods taken our liberties trampled upon, and our homes made a desolation, then, my reader, is it not possible that even in these different days you and I might have been cruel when our hour came? God knows alone, and God be thanked that so far as we can foresee, except under the pressure, perhaps, of invasion by semi-barbarian hordes, or of dreadful and sudden social revolutions, civilized human nature will never be put to such a test again.
As I approached the climax of the story, where the Spanish villain was about to condemn the Dutch hero to death by starvation, the horror that I had experienced at first reading came back to me:
‘Now might I trouble you so far as to look out of this little window? What do you see in front of you? A kitchen? Quite so; always a homely and pleasant sight in the eyes of an excellent housewife like yourself. And—do you mind bending forward a little? What do you see up there? A small barred window? Well, let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that a hungry man, a man who grows hungrier and hungrier, sat behind that window, watching the cooks at their work and seeing the meat carried into this kitchen, to come out an hour or two later as hot, steaming, savory joints, while he wasted, wasted, wasted, and starved, starved, starved. Don’t you think, my dear lady, that this would be a very unpleasant experience for that man?’
‘Are you a devil?’ gasped Lysbeth.
But as I finished the passage a strange thing happened. I looked for the illustration, so indelible in my mind, and it was not there. It had never been there. The verbal description of Spanish perfidy had been so real to me that I had imagined the illustration; I can see it yet in perfect detail, yet it never existed. Nothing could better exemplify the persistence of the Black Legend and its deleterious effect on the rest of the world’s relations with Spain. If the average educated American wanted to approach Spain afresh, he would have to cleanse his mind of many illustrations imbedded there without reason.
Felipe II has suffered much from the embroidery of the Black Legend, and not all the wrong can be charged to aliens. One nineteenth-century Spanish dramatist summarized Felipe thus: ‘Cowardly where his father was brave, cruel where the other was generous, and fanatical where Carlos was religious, no crime frightened Felipe when it was a matter of his security, his revenge, or the misunderstood interests of his religion.’ His reputation was especially damaged by Friedrich Schiller’s poetic drama Don Carlos (1785), which portrays him as an insanely jealous king who orders the murder of his own son because he thinks the boy not only is turning Protestant but also is involved in an incestuous relationship with his stepmother, Felipe’s third wife, Elizabeth of Valois. Felipe comes out of this play poorly, and no better from Verdi’s operatic version, Don Carlos (1867), in which he again orders the murder of his son and a bloody auto-da-fé to celebrate the death. But bit by bit the truth regarding Felipe is coming to the fore. He did not launch the Inquisition, nor was his version of it as harsh as that of his predecessors. He was a good husband to Queen Mary of England, who was eleven years older than he and his full cousin, and he did not adopt covert or immoral strategies to trick England into becoming part of Spain. He was a devout Catholic and naturally he tried to convert the people of the Low Countries to his religion in accordance with the principle of cuius regio, eius religio (whose country, his religion), and if the Armada had been victorious he would surely have tried to bring England back to the religion from which under Henry VIII and Elizabeth I it had strayed. There is now grave doubt that Felipe murdered his son out of sexual jealousy or suspicion of the boy’s incipient Protestantism. Nor is there any proof that he ordered the poisoning of his half brother, Don Juan of Austria, for fear of dynastic rivalry; on the contrary, it was Felipe who generously rescued his much younger brother from obscurity and gave him positions of command. The other murders charged against him do not withstand investigation, and he seems on balance to have been a pedestrian but capable administrator, a just ruler and a king who sought peace more often than war.
The one charge that can truly be laid against him is one which the Black Legend did not make. Felipe ruined Spain. When he was through with it the once-great kingdom was finished, and over the sprawling empire lay the seal of death. The trouble started with Carlos V and his siphoning off of Spain’s wealth into bottomless European adventures, though if one had told the old man this when he was pottering about the monastery at Yuste, he would not have understood. ‘Look at the territory I have brought Spain,’ he would have said, and the new map of Europe would have borne him out; but what he should have been looking at was manufacturing in Spain, agriculture, the decline of the army, the encrustation of incompetence. That balance sheet was dreadfully against him. He knew that something had gone wrong, but he blamed the wrong forces. From Yuste he wrote: ‘Of all the goods that arrive from the Americas at the port of Sevilla, ninety percent goes into contraband that does the nation no good.’ Smugglers had not stolen Spain into poverty; Carlos himself had done the job.
He left Spain bankrupt, so that many of the failures which finally engulfed Felipe were not of his making and were, by that time, inescapable. But he could have avoided others had he comprehended the changes overtaking Europe. Again and again, in his bitter and narrow way, he turned his back on the present and tried to maintain in Spain a type of life and government that should have been allowed to vanish. Industry, the prerogatives of a middle class, a rationalized army, a Church responsive to modern trends and an educational system based on merit he ignored, and in doing so, sealed the ruin of his country. Solely because of the headstrong policies pursued by Carlos and Felipe, the cost-of-living index rose as follows: 1500–100; 1521–140; 1550–200; 1590–315, reflecting the fact that supplies of foodstuffs and ma
nufactures were declining. If ever the principle of divine right of kings aborted, it was in the case of Felipe II, for he may have had the divine right to rule Spain, but he did not have the right to ruin it.
It is for this reason that I find El Escorial so moving; it is a fitting monument to Felipe, a vast, dark building to commemorate his monolithic soul. He caused it to be built. He selected the architect and approved the design. In the hills back of the building you can still see the seat carved in rock where he used to sit and watch the progress of the construction, and it was he who conceived the happy idea for the two groups of bronze statuary in the church. There is a small room in El Escorial where Felipe used to sit, his foot propped up to relieve the unbroken agony of his gout, and here he spent his last days surrounded by deepening woe. He had survived the death of his insane grandmother Juana, his father, his mother, his first three wives, his heir Don Carlos, his half brother Don Juan and many of the advisors who had been close to him. From the loneliness of this room he could peer down into the church through a little window and eavesdrop on the progress of the Mass. Here also he met his couriers and studied by candlelight the reports they brought him from all parts of the world. I suppose no other king in history applied himself so diligently to his paper work as Felipe, for the margins of his documents are cluttered with his minute and often pertinent observations: ‘He should be hung.’ ‘The ships should be sent south.’ ‘The governor must be changed.’ Energy, dedication, devotion, constancy and courage Felipe had, but sympathetic intelligence he did not, and in the end it was this lack that undid him.
From El Escorial I traveled over the mountains to Alcalá de Henares, the ancient city known to the Romans as Complutum, where Cardinal Cisneros had built his famous university. It had long since been abandoned, for reasons we shall inspect in the next chapter, but I wanted to see what buildings remained, and I was directed by a policeman to a former residence hall now converted to a public hostel. The doorman said, ‘You are welcome to see the ruins of the university,’ but this was hardly what I was looking for. The guard understood. ‘You want to see the building of Cisneros! Ah, it’s on the other side of the square.’
There, shaded by trees and set back from the road, I found the stately building which had formed the core of the university. From the outside it was dignified, with a façade of carefully balanced items; from the inside it offered as noble a cloister as I was to see in Spain, three-tiered and marked off by thirty-two half-columns. In the park facing the building stood a statue of Cisneros, showing his intense, small face, his high cheekbones and his penetrating eyes. His military adventures behind him, the burning of Islamic treasures forgotten, he stands as a churchman with a book and stave in his left hand; a heavily knotted cord in his right. Nearby, in an old chapel, rests his modest tomb, so different from the bombastic one of Cardinal Mendoza in the cathedral at Toledo.
In Cisneros’ university great things had been accomplished. The cardinal had insisted that his students be trained in the most advanced theories of their day, and Alcalá became a center of liberalism. In one stroke Cisneros established thirty-three full professorships, ‘according to the number of years of Our Lord,’ including some in subjects new to Spain, such as recondite ancient languages, new concepts of philosophy and a chair for that abstruse intellect, Pedro Ciruelo, who claimed that theology could be understood only if studied in conjunction with mathematics. Three of the professors personally selected by Cisneros had been born Jews, even though he was at the time head of the Inquisition; when suspicious Catholics protested, Cisneros defended his nominations and said the men were needed for a major task which only they could fulfill.
In 1513, when King Fernando inspected the university to see if there was truth in the condemnatory rumors which had reached him, Cisneros said calmly, ‘Sire, it is your job to gain kingdoms and make generals. It is mine to build those men who will honor Spain and serve the Church.’ The roster of great men who acquired their education here has seldom been equaled: Lope de Vega and Calderón, to name two of the writers; Tomás de Villanueva and Ignacio Loyola, to name two who attained sainthood.
As we saw earlier, Alcalá was famed internationally for its Biblia Poliglota Complutense, a particular brainchild of Cisneros. It provided the first printing of the Hebrew text ever to have been compiled by Christians and the first Greek text to have been printed anywhere. Both remained standard till well into the nineteenth century; the compilation as a whole has been termed ‘the first scientific work of the modern world.’ Books were being printed in Spain at least three years and probably nine before William Caxton published his first work in England, but the Poliglota was long delayed because Cisneros had to encourage his Spanish paper makers to produce pages of the size and thickness he required and his imported French and German type founders to cast Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek type faces. In an edition of six hundred copies, Volume Six appeared first, in May of 1514, followed by Volume Five a month later. The first four volumes appeared at intervals, the last on July 10, 1517, four months before the death of Cisneros. The completed volumes were not put on sale till 1520, for the Spanish government was apprehensive about distributing them prior to their having been approved by the Pope. In the interim the university generously allowed scholars from other countries to consult the finished volumes, and in this way much of the original work was published elsewhere before it appeared in Spain. Cisneros would not have minded, for his memorial existed not in printed books but in ideas.
Forty-five years after his death an event occurred in his university which has ever since preoccupied historians. To Alcalá for their education had been sent three young men: Don Carlos, son of King Felipe II; Don Juan, the bastard brother of the king and therefore half uncle to Don Carlos; and Alexander Farnese, nephew of the king and thereby cousin to Don Carlos. They were not regular students at the university, for they had private tutors, but they did attend classes and participate in university life.
Their regimen, as laid down by King Felipe, was strict, but on the night of April 19, 1562, young Carlos slipped out of his room to visit the attractive daughter of a porter, and in creeping down the darkened stairs he failed to see that the fifth step was broken and pitched headlong downward, so that his forehead struck a closed door. He was found stretched out unconscious and the matter was reported to the king.
Fortunately, young Carlos made an easy recovery and the escapade was forgiven, but on the tenth day alarming symptoms suddenly appeared and it looked as if he were going to die, presumably from pressure on the brain. Nine specialists were summoned, among them the Fleming Andreas Vesalius, skilled in performing trepanations of the skull. Fifty separate consultations were held, for the stricken boy was heir to the crown, and while the doctors were trying to decide what to do, help came from two unexpected quarters. From Valencia a quack arrived, a Moor bearing two jars of ointment. ‘The black one,’ he explained, ‘has a repercussive action, but the white one is a strong unguent to attenuate it. Black, white. Black, white. It is the warring of the ointments that saves the life.’ At the same time a strange troupe appeared from a nearby community, a group of peasants attending several Franciscan friars who bore the cadaver of one Diego (1400–1463), a Franciscan who had died a century before but whose body had not been contaminated by the grave. Standing before the doctors, they pulled back a cloth and displayed Fray Diego’s face, and the sunken eyes seemed to be alive. The peasants explained that the cadaver had already worked miracles in their community and they believed it could save Don Carlos.
So three alternatives were laid before the doctors and the king’s representatives: Dr. Vesalius could trepan the skull and thus let out the diseased blood that was pressing on the brain and causing the damage; or the Moor could apply his alternating unguents; or the cadaver of Fray Diego could be placed in bed with the unconscious prince in hopes that it might work one more miracle.
What happened that day has since been the subject of much speculation. Don Carlos’ two
principal physicians each left behind his own report; they agree in the main but are contradictory on important points; foreign ambassadors then resident in Spain collected rumors, which they sent home; and other participants left diaries. From certain reports it seems clear that Dr. Vesalius and his team prepared to do a trepanation and laid back the scalp so that the white skull was well exposed, but when they had done this they satisfied themselves that the blood oozing through the bone of the skull was normal and that a complete trepanation was not called for, so they sewed the scalp back together; other reports indicate that the trepanation was completed and that it saved the boy’s life.
We know that the Moor was allowed to apply his unguents, first black, then white, but they seem to have been so powerful, especially the black or repercussive one, that the dying youth grew noticeably worse. The doctors grew frightened and packed the Moor out of Alcalá; he went to Madrid with his jars and there offered to cure the knight Hernando de Vega, but after a few applications of the powerful stuff Hernando died.
Don Luis Morenés, Marques de Bassecourt.
We also know that when hope was almost gone, the century-old cadaver of Fray Diego was placed in bed with Don Carlos while the Franciscans prayed, and in the morning Don Carlos awakened, with clear mind, and said that in the night he had seen a vision of a friar in Franciscan habit lying beside him, and this had cured him. At any rate, both he and his father petitioned Rome to declare Fray Diego a saint, for this was but the latest of the miracles this obscure friar had worked; three separate popes delayed action on the matter, but King Felipe was so insistent that a fourth pope, Sixtus V, speeded up the investigation and took pleasure in announcing in 1588 the entry of San Diego into the saintly brotherhood. His day was identified as November 13, and in honor of his having saved the intended King of Spain, a pueblo in the colony of California was some years later named after him.
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