Too warm a welcome was not a fault into which the males fell. In Madrid a Protestant might feel safe, and in centres of international trade, such as Medina del Campo, free from insult; at Burgos there was even courtesy, and at Barcelona civility, although it went hand in hand with robbery. But for the most part, it was needful to be both callous and plucky. In particular, the traveller must take care to get his hair cut short at Vittoria at the latest. French and many Germans as well as English wore their hair long, and nothing laid them open to insult, and even injury, so much as that; if they were clean-shaven as well, it was taken as certain that they carried effeminacy to extremes; neither were they the last to hear of it. "Rogue" and "thief" were ordinary terms, even after a hair-cut, and when the queen was a German, one of her countrymen, a man who could be trusted not to give offence, had to buy a new hat at Toledo because the one he was wearing bore too many traces of cow-dung; at Seville he was stoned.
Yet considering the average elsewhere, the individual Spaniard stood to gain by comparison; one of the most prejudiced and illiterate of the tourists admits being treated with great courtesy, and there is a general agreement that the standard of honesty was remarkably high. It is amusing, too, to notice what disconcerting answers were sometimes received by the gentlemen from abroad who thought that the peasantry of a Roman Catholic and poverty-stricken country only needed to be questioned in order that the pitiable state of their mind should become apparent, even to themselves.
To one question, why extreme severity should be reserved for heretics, the reply was that heresy was the only crime which had not the excuse of giving pleasure; while another who was asked why a saint's day should be honoured so highly and Sunday practically ignored, pointed out that the saint's day came but once a year and Sunday every week. So, too, it came as a surprise to the Protestant to find Spanish nuns neither neurotic, depressed, nor prim, but bright and attractive, and their education "infinitely beyond all our English schools."[63]
Nevertheless, what with the above experiences, together with others which will be more in place farther on, it is not surprising if Spain was considered a country of especial danger and difficulties, where there was nothing to be learnt that had not better remain unlearnt, nor anything worth seeing.
The best guide, in answering this last objection, urges that the court at Madrid and the church of San Lorenzo at the Escorial are alone worth the journey, and names fifty-eight towns to complete the answer. It would be superfluous to enter into details; it is more difficult for us to doubt it than for them to believe it. But Seville must not be passed over altogether, the Seville of Cervantes' "Novelas Ejemplares," the Seville which was what Madrid pretended to be, the Spanish capital of Spanish Spain. Half the buildings that the modern visitor goes to see there were new in 1600, but the great sight, as great a sight as any in Europe both in itself and for its associations, was the arrival of the silver fleet from the "Indies."
Of the two chief places of pilgrimage, Montserrat, being on a main road from France and not far from Barcelona, is very frequently mentioned, but an account of a journey to Compostella is far rarer. Concerning the former, one account contains a particular of which there is perhaps no other record. The occupant of the highest of the almost inaccessible hermitages around the monastery, that of St. Jerome, in 1599, could bring the wild birds flocking round him when he called them, in such numbers that the writer, who had been throughout the peninsula, mentions the sight as the most wonderful in all Spain. Two ravens lived with the hermit in his cell.[64] As for Compostella, Andrew Boorde tells how he met nine men leaving Orleans on the way thither, and how he tried to dissuade them, saying he would rather go from England to Rome five times than once to Compostella, and that the government might well set in the stocks persons who proposed going thither without special leave, as being a waste of valuable lives. They persisted, and he accompanied them. Not one of the ten survived the journey except himself; and he was a doctor. Only one account preserves much detail of a stay at Compostella, that of a German soldier,[65] in 1581, who confessed to an Italian priest, nicknamed Linguarius for knowing Italian, Spanish, French, German, Latin and other languages; and saw all that a good pilgrim should see, including the two great bells whose sound was so terrific as to frighten lady pilgrims into miscarriages. At Santo Domingo de la Calzada on the road, according to a Pole,[66] there remained a curious survival of divination by birds. In the church porch white capons were reared in a copper-wire cage, to which the pilgrim used to offer bread on the end of his staff; if the bird refused the bread, it was held an omen that the pilgrim would die on the journey.
Among the other things that Spain had in common with "European Europe" may be mentioned the royal Zoos: one at Madrid, where a crocodile was to be seen, also the first rhinoceros that had been brought to Europe; the other at Valladolid, containing four lions, an eagle, four seals, and canary-birds. In water-works Aranjuez could hold its own against Italy, with its brazen statue of Priapus, casting forth water from every extremity, a cave with two dragons and many birds, the birds being made to sing by the movements of the water; with satyrs and savages, and artificial cypresses and white roses which soaked the visitor who touched them. Neither were the horribles kept out of sight: at Seville some one speaks of seeing a thief shot to death with arrows, and two other criminals beheaded with swords, the bodies being laid up against a church-wall to attract alms to pay for their burial.
The coupling of Ireland with Spain does not result from the mere chance of westernmost position, nor even from the political needs that they shared, or from the supposed kinship of the peoples. While other countries aroused curiosity and then gratified it, these two occasioned, successively, illusion, disillusion, mystification. Which often led to abuse, but not so often, as regards Ireland, by Englishmen, as is represented by experienced controversialists who well know the effect of sixteenth-century phrases torn from their context and set up on a background of journalese, where the flavour of the original spelling fixes their seeming harshness in the memory of those controversialists cater for.
There can be no more effective counterblast to this than a study of the books of the time recording journeys from everywhere to everywhere, for from these it will be evident that what the Englishmen say of Ireland and the Irish is more favourable than what contemporary foreigners usually say of the countries and nations that they visit; and also that where the English are unfavourable they are borne out by other foreigners. All adverse comment may be included under the charge of barbarism. Now Captain Cuellar, as unprejudiced a witness as could be required, being a Spaniard wrecked there from the Armada and a man who took everything as it came, invariably speaks of each Irishman as "el selvaje," which cannot be translated as anything but "the savage."