Читать книгу The Queens and the Hive - Edith Sitwell - Страница 9
ОглавлениеChapter Three
On Monday the 23rd of July 1554, a procession made its way from the sea towards Winchester. And, at the head of the cortège, riding through the rain that shone with such brilliance, fell with such violence, that it seemed forked lightning, rode a figure in a black velvet suit with a felt cloak of ‘damned-colour’ (flame or black) thrown over it—a figure with a face as pale as that of the White Horseman of the Apocalypse—Prince Philip, only lawful son of the Emperor, Charles V.
From his earliest childhood, indeed from his birth, duty flowed in his veins instead of blood. Grandeur was his relentless fate. There could be no yielding to impulse, no softening, no natural expression of pain or of distaste.
His mother the Empress, in her birth-pangs, being implored by one of her Portuguese ladies to allow herself to yield to her agony, was so conscious that she was giving birth to one who would rule over half the world, that afraid to detract, by relapsing into ordinary humanity, even for a moment, from the greatness of that supreme hour, she replied, ‘Die I may, but wail I will not’. And she ordered the ladies in attendance upon her that her form and face should be shrouded in darkness, so that the light could not shine upon that human failing, pain.
This seemed a portent of her only surviving son’s whole life—(other sons she had, but these soon died of epilepsy). It gave him, perhaps, the ‘marble serenity’ of which Martin Hume spoke—a serenity as of the tomb—and his supreme dignity of demeanour.
Looking at his portraits, it is difficult to understand what there was in his appearance, in that cane-coloured hair and beard, and the tepid blue moleskin-soft eyes that not even cruelty could fan into flame—(for cruelty was not, with Philip, a main characteristic, was indeed, when brought into being, purely the result of intellectual processes and a sense of duty)—to arouse a desperate passion.
Mary’s heart was invaded, and killed, by a chimera, a vampire masquerading as a dream, and born of her own nature.
Philip was a cold, not a bad man, and his character was just. He would not tolerate the enslaving of the Indians in his American colonies, nor the importation of negro slaves, and this at a time when the English made a prosperous trade out of this barbarity. (Horrible cruelties were, however, perpetrated in his dominions, induced by the hideous greed of the colonists.)
He has been vastly misjudged. He was blamed by the English for the fires lit by Mary, but he was in no way guilty of them. When the sparks from Mary’s madness lit the countryside with a wild-beast glare as of blood, the King’s principal confessor denounced the burnings in a sermon, probably instigated by the King, and certainly approved by him.
Francesco Soranzo, the Venetian Ambassador to Spain, wrote, after the King’s death, that ‘he was profoundly religious and loved peace. He had vast schemes, of which he never counted the cost, but in small matters he was rather parsimonious. He feigned not to feel small injuries, but never lost an opportunity of avenging them.’ It was said of him that ‘his dagger followed close upon his smile’. But again, according to the Venetian Ambassador, he was ‘patient, flegmatic, temperate, melancholy, hated vanity, was never in a rage, had his desires under absolute control, and an immutable temper’.
When he was sixteen and a half years old, the Emperor’s son was given in marriage by his father to Maria, daughter of King John the Third of Portugal and the Emperor’s sister Catherine. For King John ruled over the infinite riches of the Portuguese East Indies. But the marriage ended, eleven months later, with her death—brought about, it was said, by her being left alone while the ladies in attendance on her after the birth of Don Carlos ran to witness the processions and judgment of the Auto da Fé. While they were gone, she imprudently (so soon after the birth of her son) ate a lemon, which caused her death.
For three weeks the Prince, mourning for his young wife, remained unseen by the people. From duty? From grief?
When, nine years later, he was told that it was his father’s will that he should marry his cousin Mary—shrunken, ageing, and ill—and must go to live in a cold and sunless land, he answered that the Emperor’s commands must be obeyed.
This, he knew, was to be the end of his personal happiness. But what did personal happiness matter when religion and the needs of the Empire bade him put it aside! To the wife of an officer in his train who enquired if they should sell all their possessions, that they should not be an encumbrance, he replied, ‘I do not order you either to sell or not to sell your property, for know ye that I am not going to a marriage feast, but to a fight’.
On the 14th of May 1554, the Prince, with the Dukes of Alva and Medina Celi, the Count of Egmont, the Count de Feria, Ruy Gómez, and twenty other of the highest grandees of Spain, followed by nearly a thousand horsemen, the Prince’s Spanish and Teuton Guards, and three hundred servants in the red and yellow livery of the King of Aragon, rode through the flaunting yellow dust, yellow as the sanbenitos of the prisoners of the Inquisition, yellow as the flames in which they were consumed, from Valladolid to Tordesillas, where the Prince would say farewell to his grandmother, the mad Queen Juana of Castille.
The old Queen, who at seventeen had been married to Philip of Burgundy, whom she loved passionately, and who was unfaithful to her, began to go insane at the age of twenty-three; then, when she was twenty-six, flamed into raging madness brought on by the mysterious death of that beloved traitor. (Some said her father, King Ferdinand, had caused him to be poisoned.)
The mad Queen rushed, like a comet, in the darkness of each night, across Spain to Granada, in her flight from those who would take her husband from her; but from time to time she would stop, and force her attendants to open the coffin, that she might see the dead body of her husband had not escaped from her; for one of these days he would surely rise from his coffin, as she had often seen him rise from his bed after a long sleep. And this time he would not look at her coldly, but with a smile. But now no woman must approach him, lest she should steal him from Juana! ... And when, one night, she halted in the dark countryside with her train, only to find that she had taken the dead man, unwittingly, into a convent of nuns, she fled again, and, in that night of storm, insisted on the coffin being opened, that she might see, by the wind-blown light of torches, that the dead man was still there.
She lived, in raging madness, for forty-nine years.
The old madwoman and her grandson said farewell in the darkness of the Castle. Then he made his way once more into the flaunting sunshine, the fluttering banners of the yellow dust. The procession wound down the great roads to the ship The Holy Ghost.
Scarlet silk streamers and banners of many colours floated from end to end of the ship. Huge standards of crimson damask thirty yards long, on which were painted the Imperial arms and gold flames, and other standards bearing the royal devices, floated from every mast, bulwark, castle. The Prince’s cabin was of scented woods and gold; and the ship was manned by three hundred sailors in scarlet liveries.
But the Prince was going to a land where his food must be prepared by his own servants, for fear he should be poisoned. He was twenty-seven, and was going to a bride who, at thirty-eight, had been withered and aged by misery, by illness, by fear, beyond her years.
It was after he had been received in Winchester Cathedral by Bishop Gardiner in full pontificals, with many priests singing the Te Deum, it was after many prayers, that, at ten o’clock at night, the bridegroom was led across a dark garden to a moated house to meet his bride.... (The yellow, shrunken face that seemed a part of the dust, or like faded yellowing flowers thrown away from some ancient bridal bouquet ... the dwindling form that was soon to be distorted by the dropsy from which she died ... the relentless greed for possession with which she received him, as the grave receives the dead....)
The wedding, which took place on the 25th of July, was of the utmost magnificence—the Queen (whose train was borne by her cousin Lady Margaret Douglas) and the bridegroom wore garments that glittered like starlight.
There was great pomp and splendour. There was courtesy; there was consideration. And yet, something was missing. What could that something be?
•••••
In Spain, in a dark palace whose rooms never knew the arid, many-coloured fires of that country’s sun, Juana, the nineteen-year-old widowed Princess of Portugal, whom her brother Philip had left as Regent, presided over the upbringing of his little nine-year-old half-mad son, Don Carlos. He was not as yet subject to the ferine rages that filled the whole Court with terror.* But he was even then becoming increasingly strange. And the quality of strangeness in him was equalled by that in his aunt.
The Princess of Portugal seems to have inherited some of the madness of her grandmother. Her religion was of the deepest gloom—a blackness not even shot through with the lightnings of that madness. All was darkness, all was silence.
She was in the habit of dropping a long black veil over her face before she gave audience to a foreign Ambassador. But, in order that he should not think he was being received by a ghost, or a spy, she would, at his entrance, raise her veil, stare at the Ambassador with eyes like phantom suns in her ghostly pale face, then drop her veil again. The rest of the audience would be conducted with the Ambassador speaking to a veil behind which there was no sign of life.
At one moment the Princess formed the ‘unusual determination’[1] to become the bride of the nine-year-old Carlos. And this she only relinquished because he did not grow quickly enough.
This was the strangeness, the accustomed gloom, that Prince Philip was forced, by duty, to exchange for a gloom to which he was unaccustomed.
NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE
* See Appendix D.
[1] Hume, M. A. S., Two English Queens, Mary and Elizabeth, and Philip.
