Part 7

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.

This glorious victory was won largely by the extraordinary daring and inspiring personality of the Emperor’s bastard, who now, at the summit of human glory, saw himself condemned to retire into the position of a subject. The rest of the life of the “man who would be king” is the record of thwarted ambition and disappointed hopes. Spain and Venice quarrelled, and Lepanto was not followed up; Philip lost the chance of retrieving 1453 and of changing the history of Europe in Spain’s favour ever since. Christian set once more to killing Christian in the old melancholy way; Venice made peace with the Sultan, and Don John set about carving out a kingdom for himself. In dreams he saw himself monarch of Albania, or of the Morea; and in body he actually recaptured Tunis, once so gloriously held by his father. But Philip would not support him and he had to retire. Cervantes, in _Don Quixote_, evidently thinks Philip quite right. Tunis was a “sponge for extravagance, and a moth for expense; and as for holding it as a monument to Charles V, why, what monument was necessary to glory so eternal?” Don John returned home without a kingdom to his brother, who no doubt let him see that he was becoming rather a nuisance with his expensive dreams. In 1576 he was placated by an appointment as Governor-General to the Netherlands, where he quickly found himself confronted by a much greater, though less romantic, man than himself. William of Orange was now the unquestioned leader of the revolt of the Dutch against the Roman Catholic power of Philip, and when Don John reached the Netherlands he found himself Governor with no subjects. After fruitless negotiations he retired, a very ill man, to Namur; he had become thin and pale, and lost his vivacity. His heart was not in his task. He was meditating the extraordinary “empresa de Inglaterra”--the “enterprise of England”--which now seems to us so fantastic. The Spanish army was to evacuate the Netherlands and to be rapidly ferried across to Yorkshire; by a lightning stroke it was to release Mary Queen of Scots, that romantic Queen, and marry her to Don John, the romantic victor of Lepanto; Elizabeth was to be slain, and the Pope was to bless the union of romance with romance. But Elizabeth would have taken a deal of slaying. One cannot help surmising that Don John may have dreamed this fantasy because he had been educated by Quixada; it was a dream that might have passed through the addled brain of Don Quixote himself. The victor of Lepanto should better have understood the mighty power of the sea; the galleys which had done so well in the Mediterranean would have been worse than useless in the North, where the storms are a worse enemy than the Turks.

But Philip, either through timidity, or jealousy, or wisdom, would have none of it; after long delay he sent an important force to the Netherlands under the command of Don John’s cousin, Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma, the greatest general Spain ever produced. Don John abandoned his dreams to fall with this army upon the Protestants at Gemblours, where he, or Farnese--opinions differ--won a really great victory, the last that was to honour his name.

A curious incident in this campaign was that the Spaniards were attacked by a small Scottish force at a place called Rejnements. The Scotsmen began, _more Scotorum_, by singing a psalm. Having thus prepared the way spiritually, they prepared it physically by casting off their clothes, and to the horror of the modest Spaniards attacked naked with considerable success. Many of us, no doubt, remember how the Highlanders in the late war were said to have stained their bodies with coffee or Condy’s fluid and, under cover of a Birnam’s wood composed of branches of trees, emulated the bold Malcolm and Macduff by creeping upon the Germans attired mainly in their boots and identity disks; a sparse costume in which to appear before nursing sisters should they be wounded. I had the honour of operating upon one hefty gentleman who reached the C.C.S. in this attire, sheltered from the bitter cold by blankets supplied by considerate Australians in the field ambulance. We from a southern land considered the habit more suitable for the hardy Scot than for ourselves; though we remembered that an Australian surgeon at Gallipoli, finding that his dressings had run short, tore his raiment into strips and, when the need came, charged the Turks berserk attired in the costume of Adam before the Fall. But we did not remember that gallant Scotsmen had done something similar in 1578. No doubt the sight of a large man, dressed in cannibal costume and dancing horribly on the parapet while he poured forth a string of uncouth Doric imprecations, led to the tale that the British Army was employing African natives to devour the astonished Bosche.

Don John could not follow up the victory of Gemblours. He had neither money nor sufficient men; the few short months remaining to him were spent in imploring aid from his brother. Philip did nothing; possibly he was jealous of Don John; possibly he was fully occupied over the miserable affair of Antonio Perez and the Princess of Eboli. One would like to think that he had lucid intervals in which he recognized the insensate folly of the whole business; but like his father he was spurred on by his conscience. In addition to the other troubles of Don John his army began to waste away with pestilence, no doubt, it being now autumn, with typhoid, that curse of armies before the recent discovery of T.A.B. inoculation. Don John fell sick, in September, 1578, of a fever, but, his doctors considering the illness trifling, continued to work. One Italian, indeed, said that he would die, whereas another sick man, believed to be _in articulo mortis_, would recover. The guess proved right, and when Don John died the Italian surgeon’s fortune was made. Thus easily are some reputations gained in our profession; it is easier to make a reputation than to keep it.

For nearly three weeks Don John struggled to work, encouraged by his physicians; there came a day, towards the end of September, when he, being already much wasted by his illness, was seized by a most violent pain and immediately had to go to bed. He became delirious, and babbled of battle-fields and trumpet-calls; he gave orders to imaginary lines of battle; he became unconscious. After two days of muttering delirium he awakened, and, as he was thought to be _in extremis_, took extreme unction. Next day the dying flicker continued, and he heard the priest say mass; though his sight had failed and he could not see, he had himself raised in the bed, feebly turned his head towards the elevation of the Host and adored the body of Christ with his last glimmer of consciousness. He then fell back unconscious, and sank into a state of coma, from which he never rallied. In all, he had been ill about twenty-four days.

These events could be easily explained on the supposition that this young man’s brave life was terminated by that curse of young soldiers--ruptured typhoid ulcer in ambulatory typhoid fever. His army was dwindling with pestilence; he himself walked about feeling feverish and “seedy” and losing weight rapidly for a fortnight; he was just at the typhoid age, in the typhoid time of the year, and in typhoid conditions; his ulcer burst, causing peritonitis; the tremendous shock of the rupture, together with the toxæmia, drove him delirious and then unconscious; being a very strong young man he woke up again as the first shock passed away; as the shock passed into definite peritonitis unconsciousness returned, and he was fortunate in being able to hear his last mass before he died. I see no flaw in this reasoning.

The rest of the story is rather quaint. By next spring Philip had given orders for the embalmed body to be brought to Spain, and it was considered rather mean of him that the body of his brother was to be brought on mule-back. But Philip was at his wits’ end for money to prosecute the war, and no doubt he himself looked upon his “meanness” as a wise economy. The body was exhumed, cut into three pieces--apparently by disjointing it at the hips--and stuffed into three leather bags which were slung on mule-back in a pack-saddle. When it came within a few miles of the Escorial it was put together again, laid upon a bier, and given a noble funeral in a death-chamber next to that which had been reserved for the great Emperor his father. There I believe it still lies, the winds of the Escorial laughing at its dreams of chivalrous glory.

Philip, suspicious of everybody and everything, had given orders that, should Don John die, his confessor was to keep an accurate record of the circumstances; and it is from the report of this priest that the above account has been drawn by Stirling-Maxwell, so we can look upon it as authoritative. Philip was accused of poisoning him, and for a moment this supposition was borne out by the extreme redness of the intestines; but this is much more easily explained by the peritonitis. Again, Philip’s enemies have said that Don John died of a broken heart, because the priest reported that one side of his heart was dry and empty; but this too is quite natural if we suppose that the last act of Don John’s life was for his heart to pump its blood into his arteries, as so often happens in death. Young men do not die of broken hearts; “Men have died and worms have eaten them--but not for love!” as Rosalind says in her sweet cynicism. In elderly men with high blood-pressures it is quite possible that grief and worry may actually cause the heart to burst, and to that extent novelists are right in speaking of a “broken heart.” Otherwise the disease, or casualty, is unknown to medicine. No amount of worry, or absence of worry, would have had any effect upon Don John’s typhoid ulcer.

Besides the suspicion of poisoning, Don John was rumoured to have died of the “French disease,” even the name of the lady being mentioned. While he was certainly no more moral than any other gay and handsome young prince of his time, there is not the slightest reason for supposing the rumour to have been anything but folly. Syphilis does not kill a man as Don John died, while ambulatory typhoid fever most assuredly does. Therefore the lady in question must remain without her glory so far as this book is concerned, though her name has survived, and not only in Spanish.

Don John was a handsome young man, graceful and strong. There are many contemporary portraits of him, perhaps the best being a magnificent statue at Messina, which he saved from the Turks at Lepanto. He had frank blue eyes and yellow curls, and a very great charm of manner; but he was liable to attacks of violent pride which estranged his friends. He was the darling of the ladies, and was esteemed the flower of chivalry in his day; but William of Orange warned his Netherlanders not to be deceived by his appearance; in his view Philip had sent a monster of cruelty no less savage than himself. But William was prejudiced, and Don John is still one of the great romantic figures of history. It is difficult to speculate reasonably on what might have happened if he had not died. It has been thought that he might have led the Armada, in which case that most badly-managed expedition would at least have been well led, and no doubt England would have had a more determined struggle; but it seems to me more likely that Don John and Philip would have quarrelled, and that Fortune would have been even less kind to Spain than she was. Those who love Spain must be on the whole rather glad that Don John died before he had been able to cause more trouble than he did. It is difficult to agree entirely with those who would put the blame entirely on Philip for the troubles between him and Don John, or would interpret every act of Philip to his detriment. The whole story might be equally interpreted as the effort of a most conscientious and narrow-minded man endeavouring to follow out what he thought to be his father’s wishes and at the same time to keep a wild young brother from kicking over the traces. Compare Butler’s, _The Way of All Flesh_.

But the real interest to us of Don John is in his relations with Cervantes.

Cervantes on his galley puts his sword into its sheath (_Don John of Austria rides homewards with a wreath_), And he sees across a weary land a winding road in Spain Up which a lean and foolish knight rides slowly up in vain.

And it will be a sad world indeed when Don Quixote at last reaches the top of that winding road and men cease to love him.

At Lepanto Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (please pronounce the “a’s” separately) was about twenty-five years of age, and was lying below deck sick of a fever. When he heard the roar of the guns of Don John he sprang from his bed and rushed on deck in spite of the orders of his captain; he was put in charge of a boat’s crew of twelve men and went through the thick of the fighting. Every man in Don John’s fleet was fired with his religious enthusiasm, and Cervantes’ courage was only an index of the wild fervour that distinguished the Christians on that most bloody day. He was wounded in the left hand, “for the greater glory of the right,” as he himself quaintly says, and never again could he move the fingers of the injured hand; no doubt the tendon sheaths had become septic, and he was lucky to have kept the hand at all. It has been sapiently remarked that the world would have had a great loss if it had been the right hand; but healthy people who lose the right hand can easily learn to write with the left. Cervantes remained in the fleet for some years until, on his way home, he was captured by Algerian pirates; put to the service of a Christian renegade--a man who had turned Mussulman to save his life or from still less worthy motive--Cervantes made several attempts to escape, but these were unsuccessful, and he remained in captivity for some years until his family had scraped up enough to ransom him. In _Don Quixote_ there is a good deal about the renegadoes, and much of the well-known story of the “escaped Moor” is probably autobiographical; from these hints we gather that the renegadoes were not quite so bad as has been generally thought, or else that Cervantes was far too big-minded a man to believe unnecessary evil about anybody.

Back in Spain, he went into the army for two years, until, in 1582, he gave up soldiering and took to literature. He found the pen “a good stick but a bad crutch,” and in 1585 returned to the public service as deputy-purveyor of the fleet. In 1594 he became collectors of revenues in Granada, and in 1597 he became short in his accounts and fell into jail. There he seems to have begun _Don Quixote_; he somehow obtained security for the repayment of the missing money, was released penniless into a suspicious world, and published the first part of _Don Quixote_ in 1605. It was enormously well received, and from that day to this has remained one of the most successful of all books. Ten years later he found that dishonest publishers were issuing spurious second parts, so he sat himself down to write a genuine sequel. This differs from most sequels in that it is better than the original; it is wiser, mellower, less ironical; Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are still more lovable than they were before, and one imagines that Cervantes must have spent the whole ten years in collecting--or inventing--the wonderful proverbs so wisely uttered by the squire.

Though Cervantes wrote many plays he is now remembered mainly by his one very great romance, which is read lovingly in every language of every part of the world, so that the epithet “Quixotic” is applied everywhere to whatsoever is both gallant and foolish; an epithet which reflects the mixture of affection and pity in which the old Don is universally held, and is more often considered to be a compliment than the reverse. Curiously enough, women seldom seem to like Don Quixote; only the other day a brilliant young woman graduate told me that she thought he was a “silly old fool!” That was all she could see in him; but he is universally now thought to represent the pathos of the man who is born out of his time. As has been so well said, “This book is not meant for laughter--it is meant for tears.” I can do no more than advise everybody to get a thin-paper copy and let it live in the pocket for some months, reading it at odd moments; it is the wisest and wittiest book ever published. “Blessed be the man who invented sleep,” is a typical piece of Panzan philosophy with which most wise men will agree.

But when we have done sentimentalizing over the hidden meaning that undoubtedly underlies Don Quixote, we must not forget that it is extraordinarily funny even to a modern mind. The law that the humour of one generation is merely grotesque to the next does not seem to apply to _Don Quixote_; and I dare swear that the picture of the mad old Don, brought home from the inn of Maritornes, looking so stately in a cage upon a bullock-wagon, guarded by troopers of the Holy Brotherhood, and escorted by the priest and the barber, with the distracted Sancho Panza buzzing about wondering what has become of his promised Governorship, is absolutely the funniest thing in all literature; all the funnier because the springs of our laughter flow from the fount of our tears.

Now I cannot help thinking that when Cervantes began to write _Don Quixote_ in prison, feeling bitter and sore against a world which had imprisoned him, and stiffened his hand for him, and condemned him to poverty and imprisonment, he must have had in his mind the story of the young bastard of Imperial Majesty who had risen to such heights of glory over Lepanto. It is not contended that Don Quixote was consciously intended to be a characterizature of Don Quixada or Don John, though his real name was Alonzo Quixana or Quixada, Don Quixote being a _nom de guerre_ born of his frenzy; but I find it hard to believe that Cervantes had not heard of the foolish loyalty of Quixada in the matter of Jeronimo, or of the romantic dreams of Don John. It would seem that in these two incidents we find the true seeds of _Don Quixote_. It is not true that “Cervantes laughed Spain’s chivalry away.” Chivalry, meaning the social order of the true crusades, had long been dead even in Spain, the most conservative of nations. What really laughed Spain’s chivalry away was the gay and joyous laugh of Don John himself, who would have plunged her into a great war for a dream. The man who seriously thought of dashing across the North Sea to marry Mary Queen of Scots would have been quite capable of tilting at windmills. In his inmost heart Cervantes must have seen his folly.