Part 3

Valladolid, always on the side of authority, accepted ‘the Catholic Kings’ on the death of Enriqùe, to the exclusion of Juana, whom a modern writer inexplicably calls that monarch’s illegitimate daughter. She was barred from the succession on the ground that she was not his daughter at all. The vigorous but hardly beneficent rule of Ferdinand and Isabel was celebrated in 1489 by eighteen persons being burned alive in the Plaza Mayor, while a few years after the city was emptied of its Jewish inhabitants. A whole quarter left tenantless, deserted homes, and smoking human sacrifices marked the inauguration of the New Monarchy in Valladolid. Yet the city prospered, and was too busy to notice the worn-out adventurer, the Admiral of the Indies, the immortal Christopher Columbus, who died within its walls on May 20, 1506. But all their prosperity could not reconcile the sturdy citizens to the arbitrary government of Charles V.’s regents. Valladolid threw in her lot with the Comunidad. Her sons bled in the cause of liberty beside Padilla on the fatal field of Villalar; and when the Flemish emperor proclaimed an amnesty on visiting the city in 1522, many of her townsmen found themselves among the three hundred specially excluded from its operation.

Philip II. was born here on May 21, 1527; here he was married to his first and Portuguese wife; here also she died in giving birth to his luckless son Carlos. Yet it was this native of Valladolid who reduced it to the rank of a provincial city, and in the year 1560 definitely declared Madrid to be the _unica corte_, the official capital of Spain. This measure has been variously criticised, but it is certainly difficult to perceive the advantages which the new capital possessed over the old, or over Toledo or Zaragoza. This loss of dignity was followed by a more dreadful catastrophe. Valladolid was devastated by a fire in the night of September 21, 1561, four hundred and forty houses being destroyed, though only three persons lost their lives. The silversmiths, for whom the city was renowned, saved their wares by throwing them into the wells. The conflagration was caused by the sparks blown from a fire lit by some beggars in the shadow of a wall. Possibly the citizens were reminded of those other flames so frequently kindled in their midst by the abominable Inquisition, when men and women were roasted to death in the presence and with the approval of His Catholic Majesty Philip II. The furious element was less destructive than the Holy Office.

The city was practically rebuilt by order of the despot, and as a mark of his favour he persuaded the Pope to erect it into a diocese in the last years of the sixteenth century. His successor, with a judgment of which he rarely gave proof, reinstated Valladolid in its rank of capital of the monarchy, and resided here in the palace facing San Pablo (now the Audiencia). Here Anne of Austria and Philip IV. were born. Cervantes lived here in one of the houses in the Rastro behind the Campo Grande, where he finished the first part of _Don Quixote_. His experience of the city was unfortunate. He was, together with his family, imprisoned on the charge of being implicated in a night brawl, wherein as a matter of fact he had simply played the part of Good Samaritan. His brother wits and the literati unceasingly assailed Valladolid as unworthy the residence of the court, and after five years Philip III. was obliged, professedly because the city was unhealthy, to restore Madrid to its pre-eminence. The abandoned capital was hit very hard. Industry and commerce languished, nothing but the religious vocation flourished. The project of rendering the Duero and Pisuerga navigable for large vessels was given up, and, to crown all, the Moriscos to the number of one thousand were expelled, taking the silk industry with them. Inundations and all sorts of calamities followed in quick succession. Whatever money men earned in moribund Castile, they used to build churches and convents. The city’s attachment to the Bourbon cause in the War of the Spanish Succession disposed Philip V. to transfer the court hither a second time; but the pre-eminence of Madrid was too firmly established to permit this. The French invaders, a hundred years ago, found the place ruined and stagnant. Since then Valladolid has awakened from her sleep. The opening of the North of Spain Railway, and the establishment here of the company’s loco-motive works, gave a great impetus to her progress, and she is now an important commercial town, the centre of the corn trade of Castile. No Spanish city north of the Guadarrama gives such promise as Valladolid.

THE CITY

A city which was so long the capital of the monarchy--the city where Columbus died and Cervantes lived--whose streets are haunted by the immortal creature of Le Sage’s genius--can be no unworthy goal for a pilgrimage. It has memories far more stirring than Madrid, which in physiognomy it rather resembles. A cold, formal town it seems at first sight, with modern-looking squares, straight streets, and severe, imposing buildings; but behind these you find the old city of Juan II. and Enrique IV., a labyrinth of tortuous lanes, gloomy palaces, and ruinous monastic houses.

The handsome Accra de Recoletos, which looks across the spacious Campo Grande--the city’s principal park--leads from the triumphal Puerta del Carmen, commemorating the reign of Charles III., to the majestic Arch of Santiago. We pass through, and presently reach the Plaza Mayor, now called the Plaza de la Constitucion, the focus of the city’s life.

A minor Puerta del Sol, Ford calls this regular, symmetrically planned open space, designed after the great fire of 1561 by Francisco Salamanca. The houses enclosing it are of uniform architecture, with three tiers of balconies in the three Grecian orders, capable, it is said, of accommodating 24,000 spectators. The portico is supported by massive granite columns of a bluish tinge, each a monolith. On the north side is the ungraceful Ayuntamiento (Town Hall), with weather-vanes on its towers and martial trophies surmounting the town clock. The space is as lively and gay as any in Spain. The sun shines brightly, the birds fly as freely overhead as across the innocent plains; here there is no deeper shadow than elsewhere, no abiding gloom or ghostly chill. Yet if ever a spot deserved to be called accursed it is this. Let us project ourselves back into the past, to a bright morning in May in the year 1559. The balconies have not yet been built, but stands and tiers of seats have been constructed round the Plaza. There is a grand display of bunting, and the richest draperies are hung from the crowded windows--silks and cloth of gold and silver, damasks and brocades. On a daïs are seen the little prince, Don Carlos, and his aunt the Infanta Juana. The civic dignitaries of the town are here, the craftsmen in their liveries; but making the bravest show of all are the bishop and the clergy, arrayed in full canonicals, as befits the solemn Act of Faith at which they are about to assist. The square is packed with a vast multitude--men have come from far and near to see this thing--and people are pouring down the narrow streets, an unceasing stream. All eyes are fixed on the platform in the centre of the Plaza, whereon faggots and brushwood are neatly piled round fourteen pillars, and busy varlets are bestirring themselves. A subdued murmur betokens the approach of the procession. For the alguazils who clear the way, for the horribly clad familiars of the Holy Office who stalk before, the spectators have no eyes: the gaze of those thousands is levelled on the fourteen men and women walking slowly to their awful doom. Were ever creatures so shockingly grotesque? They wear a perfectly ridiculous headgear, like an elongated nightcap, or a hat such as our grenadiers wore in days gone by; a sort of smock covers their bodies, an ugly flame-coloured garment, painted with figures of dancing and grimacing devils. You can hardly restrain a smile. I’ll wager those gallants yonder are cracking some clever jokes at their expense, for the Latin is by nature a wag. We all know who they are, these wretches. Not long before Valladolid was thrilled by the rumour that a Lutheran conventicle had been discovered here in the heart of His Most Catholic Majesty’s capital. A holy woman, suspicious of her husband’s orthodoxy, had followed him one day, found him in the midst of this heretical assembly, and denounced him to the Holy Office. That is the man, Juan Garcia, a goldsmith whom all the townsmen have known and dealt with this many a year. Where’s his wife? somewhere in the crowd, doubtless, praying for his soul. Virtue like hers is worthy of heroines or devils. Most notable of the heretical crew is the Doctor Cazalla, one of the king’s most notable preachers; but the Holy Inquisitors are no respecters of persons. They would drag you from behind the throne. The priest with the Doctor is his brother Francisco. The woman is his sister, Doña Beatriz. Burn a woman? Ay, surely. There are four more, one of them a serving-wench. That black-avised fellow is a mere Jew from Lisbon--there is little sympathy for him. Then there are four gentlemen, and--hold!--one has a gag in his mouth. It is the Bachelor, Antonio Herrerruelo, an obstinate fellow, who will not recede one hair’s-breadth from his heretical opinions or concede one iota. The sixteen that follow interest us less. They have been reconciled with Mother Church, and for them no worse fate is reserved than the confiscation of all their goods and solitary confinement for life. Ha! one of them has fainted. It is the youthful daughter of the Marqués de Alcañias, Doña Ana Enriques. They say that one of this batch is an Englishman. Perhaps he has seen Catholics hanged, drawn, and quartered in his own land, and can forgive the Spaniard.

The learned Dominican in the pulpit reads the sentences of the Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition, and we may be sure his voice shakes with paternal tenderness when _he absolves_ those who are passing into the shadow of perpetual imprisonment. As for those fourteen others--the Church has done with them, and in sorrow, not in anger, she hands them over to the secular arm.

Now who will face the flames? for even the secular arm is merciful at the eleventh hour. Thousands of eyes are strained towards the scaffold. What is passing? Cazalla is making a farewell speech. Is he obdurate? No; from mouth to mouth the rumour runs that he professes penitence, that he abjures his errors. His brothers, the women--look at their blanched faces!--mutter some such words. Their necks are encircled by the collars of the garrote--they stand on the well-laid pyre. But it is not lighted yet. Swiftly the executioner steps from one post to the other. A quiet turn of the screw, and the souls of the heretics have fled, and the flames may have their corpses.

But he with the gag, Herrerruelo? We watch him breathlessly. At all admonitions he simply shakes his head. The executioner even hesitates to fire the pile. He has his hand on the spring of the garrote. A word from the heretic, and he will be dead, unscorched, instantaneously. It is useless. Herrerruelo will not speak that word. The fire is lighted. The logs crackle and blaze. We can hardly see the victim’s form. No groan nor sigh escapes him. But on his face, says one close to him, is stamped the extremest sadness that ever human being knew. Is it for yourself, Castilian of the old Roman mould? Nay, rather, I think, for your country which you see perishing beside you slowly but inevitably on the pyre of fanaticism and superstition.

It is over. The integrity of the faith of Spain has been vindicated. But the heroism of Herrerruelo soon finds imitators. His wife follows him to the flames a few years later. Philip II. himself comes to assist at a superb act of faith which demands another holocaust. He solemnly swears to defend the faith and to enforce the decrees of its tribunal. ‘And you leave me to burn?’ is the bitter reproach a Veronese gentleman among the doomed men dares to address to the king. ‘Ay,’ says Philip, ‘I would bring the wood myself to burn my own son were he a heretic.’ There was thus something of the Roman spirit on both sides. The brave Italian’s fortitude so inspires a fellow-sufferer that he leaps gaily into the flames, calling for wood, more wood.

The shame of the Inquisition rests not on the Spanish people. The citizens of Valladolid were kept in check on these dreadful occasions only by large bodies of troops. Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor, dared not go forth without an armed escort of two hundred and fifty men. The Spaniards of to-day, with few exceptions, refer to the institution with expressions of abhorrence, startling even to Protestant ears. But it must be admitted that some writers more or less half-heartedly attempt a defence. Don J. M. Quadrado observes that the Holy Office saved the country from the horrors of religious wars, to which the obvious rejoinder is that the wars of religion, judged by their results, proved less disastrous to France, Germany, and Switzerland, than the policy of repression proved to Spain, and that the religious unity of other countries, such as Italy and Austria, has been preserved with comparatively little physical suasion.

We will leave the Plaza Mayor, this bright place with such gloomy memories, and see what monuments Faith has raised of a more honourable and durable kind. We cross the prettily named Place of the Golden Fountain, and the Plaza del Ochavo, where Alvaro de Luna died, and a little farther on find the Cathedral of Valladolid.

This church was begun in 1585, by order of Philip II., and replaced the old Iglesia Mayor founded by Pedro Ansúrez. The work was intrusted to Herrera, the architect of the Escorial, but his plans were never fully carried out, and the cathedral remains to-day unfinished, and also unfortunately marred by Churriguera and his disciples. The style of Herrera very eloquently expressed the temper and spirit, if not of the Spain of his day, certainly of his sovereign. The model of the church is to be seen in the muniment room. It is cruciform, the nave and transept to be flanked with aisles and chapels, the crossing to be surmounted by a dome, and a tower to be at each of the four corners. Only one of the towers was ever finished, and that collapsed in 1841; it is now being rebuilt. Street, who is very severe on all non-Gothic buildings in Spain, says that ‘nothing could ever cure the hideous unsightliness of the exterior. Herrera’s west front was revised by Churriguera in the eighteenth century, and cannot therefore be fairly criticised; but the side elevation remains as Herrera designed it, and is really valuable as a warning. Flying buttresses were, of course, an abomination; so in their place he erected enormous solid buttresses above the aisles to resist the thrust of the nave vault. They are shapeless blocks of masonry, projecting about forty feet from the clerestory wall, and finished with a horrid concave line at the top.’

The interior is not wanting in majesty and massiveness. Only the nave, with its aisles and chapels, has been completed. The huge piers carry bold arches, separated by a broad cornice from a plastered and panelled groined ceiling. The walls are destitute of ornament, but over the arched entrances to the chapels runs an open gallery with balustrades. The aisles have been obstructed by ‘provisional chapels,’ which Herrera would have indignantly swept away; and the choir, which he intended to place behind the High Altar, is now placed so as to block the best view of the nave. The Capilla Mayor, placed in the crossing, is in bad taste, with innumerable doors and tribunes piercing its walls. One cannot but agree with the Spanish writer who says that nothing is wanting to destroy the impression of ‘a grand whole,’ which Herrera was especially anxious to create.

The choir stalls, mostly from the convent of San Pablo, were designed by the architect, and display some fine inlay work. The remainder are in the Gothic style, and come from the old church. The chapels contain nothing worthy of note, except a picture by Lucas Jordaens, and the tomb of Count Pedro Ansúrez, whose remains were brought here from the church he founded. A very poor effigy represents the hero, whose merits are set forth in rhymed verse.

In the sacristy is one of the finest specimens of the metal-work for which Spain has always been renowned. The solid silver monstrance, by Juan de Arfe, is 6½ feet high, and weighs upwards of 150 lbs. It is in the shape of a temple in four stories, two of which are octagonal, and two circular. Statuettes of Adam and Eve, and a relief of the mystery of the Conception, adorn this exquisite work, for which the artificer received 44,000 reals.

Adjacent to the cathedral are some remains of the Iglesia Mayor, founded by Pedro Ansúrez, and rebuilt in the reign of St. Ferdinand. A doorway, still standing, and the various scattered pillars are in the Romanesque style, but there are also traces of Gothic work. A cloister existing at the end of the sixteenth century is described as one of the finest in Spain, containing many sculptures, all coloured, and tombs of notable people. Part of this cloister has gone to form a room called the Library, but that it still contains books I was unable to ascertain.

The Iglesia Mayor is said to have been built at the same time as the church of Santa Maria la Antigua, on the other side of the square, and both by Count Ansúrez. Comparing conflicting testimony, and the opinions of various architects, the conclusion would appear to be that the church was founded before the Count’s time (for it is mentioned in documents as far back as 1088, and was in his day called the Ancient), and that the existing fabric dates mainly from the reign of Alfonso IX. (1230-44)--not from the time of the alleged restorer, Alfonso XI. Santa Maria is, beyond doubt, the most interesting church in the city. Its lofty steeple, with tiled roof and semicircular windows in all its four stages, is one of the few prominent landmarks of the wayfarer to Valladolid. The side apses are Romanesque, but the nave terminates in an apse, Gothic in style, and pierced with lancet windows. The buttresses taper off into graceful finials, with crockets and gargoyles. The main apse and transept are both pierced near the roof with an elegant openwork balustrade. The steeple is thoroughly Lombard in character.

The interior exhibits an interesting blending of the Romanesque and Gothic styles. On the outer door, defaced by a modern portico, formerly hung the knockers wrenched off the gates of the Mezquita at Cordova by the first Count Armengol. The mouldings of the arch are Romanesque, but Gothic is the beautiful groining of the interior. At the west end of the church is a gallery for the choir, with stalls and organ. In the days when this was built churches were built for the laity, and the clergy did not insist on taking up the greater part of the nave, as they did in after years. The chapel of the Counts of Cancelada contains some good paintings. The most valuable accessory is, however, the reredos by the celebrated Juan de Juni, begun in 1551 and finished in 1557. The work betrays an extraordinary degree of skill and vigour, but it is over-elaborate and in parts fantastic.

On the north this venerable church is flanked by a very beautiful Romanesque cloister of fourteen semicircular arches in three bays. The shafts, says Street, are moulded and wrought in imitation of the coupled columns of early Italian artists. This cloister, together with the steeple, makes up the most picturesque group of buildings in Valladolid, and is well worth careful preservation, if not restoration.

We will visit the University on the south side of the square another time, and will now thread our way northwards to the Plaza de San Pablo, a very interesting site. At the corner of the Calles de las Angustias and San Martin is the house where the Andalusian painter Alonso Cano is said to have killed his wife. He fled (so we are told) in consequence to his native city of Granada, where he became a prebendary of the cathedral, and executed his finest work. The church of San Martin is a very ordinary seventeenth-century structure; but it was founded soon after the resettlement of the city, and preserves its steeple, in the same style as that of Santa Maria la Antigua, and dating from about 1200. There was a baseless story that this was originally a Moorish watch-tower.

The Dominican monastery of San Pablo was founded in 1276 by Queen Violante, the rebellious consort of Alfonso XI. Maria de Molina showered favours on the community, whose friendly rivals, the Franciscans, were established in the Plaza Mayor. Later on, as we have said, Juan II. made the building his home, and died here in 1454--near to, if not in, the odour of sanctity. Here, too, the Cortes often used to sit. The present building may be considered the creation of Cardinal Juan de Torquemada (not the notorious Inquisitor), whose death took place in 1468. The façade was constructed in the latter part of the fifteenth century, and restored in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries; it is a debased late-Gothic style, the main object of the architects being evidently to multiply evidences of their skill. In this they succeeded, for no one can question the merit of the execution. The riotous exuberance of the decoration renders a description difficult. The doorway is placed within an arch of a curious waved line. On either side are shown saints of the order, standing on pedestals, with pinnacle-like canopies above them. Above the arch is an indifferent relief of the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin, attended by Cardinal Torquemada with his patron saints, the Baptist and the Evangelist. All this part of the decoration is enclosed within an ugly flattened arch. Above is the figure of Christ Enthroned, and on each side of Him a trefoil arch containing the figures of the Four Evangelists. These arches frame windows with exquisite traceries, such as fill the circular window above the Christ. The upper part of the façade is in three stages, each filled with figures of saints and heraldic devices. ‘Every vacant space,’ says Street, ‘seems to have a couple of angels holding coats-of-arms, so that it is impossible not to feel that the sculptor and the founder must have had some idea of heaven as peopled by none with less than a proper number of quarterings on their shields, or without claim to the possession of _Sangre Azul_.’ The arms displayed on the lower part of the façade are not, however, those of Torquemada, but of the Duke of Lerma, the favourite of Philip III., by whom the church was restored. Here he celebrated his first Mass in the year 1618, having sought refuge in the church from the cares of state, or the disappointments of a courtier’s life; and here, too, he was ultimately buried. The church was plundered and dismantled by the French during the Peninsular War, and the interior is now inaccessible to visitors.

On the other side of the Plazuela is the palace built by Lerma on the site of the house where Don Carlos was born, and sold by him to Philip III. for thirty-seven million maravedis. The façade is simple, not undignified, and adorned with the royal arms over the doorway. The patio, or inner quadrangle, is decorated with busts of the Roman emperors and the arms of the old provinces of Spain. Here, says Ford, Napoleon took up his quarters on that memorable visit to Spain which at once altered the complexion of affairs. The building is now the Audiencia, or Law Court.