“Señor ducado de à dos
No topó Xebres con vos.”
“Salveos Dios, ducado de à dos
Que Monsieur de Xebres no topó con vos.”
The favourite had to fly from the city, and when his nephew, William of Croy, was appointed to the great see of Toledo, there was a frantic explosion. Everything combined to excite indignation. Austrian fashions were adopted to please Charles, goods were imported from every foreign port to the detriment of home productions, and Toledo, that employed over ten thousand workmen in silk factories, was nearly ruined by the royal decree limiting the use of silk, and forbidding the use of Spanish embroideries of gold, and silver, and rich brocade. This tyranny brought about the famous rising of the Comuneros, under Juan de Padilla. Padilla is the greatest figure of mediæval Toledo. Historians delight in him as a true hero, brave, gallant, honourable, wise, a perfect hidalgo, as romance paints him, punctillious, unaffected and pious. The worst his bitterest enemies ever said of him was, that he played second fiddle to his heroic wife, Maria de Pacheco, and coveted the mantle of Master of Santiago. His influence over the citizens and people was immense. For a single word of his, 20,000 workmen armed themselves, and stood round him. They named him captain-general of the combined forces of the Comuneros, with Francisco Maldonado in command at Salamanca, and Juan Bravo in command at Segovia. Toledo seized all the outlying towns and villages, and her voice of command reached to the Portuguese frontier and as far north as Valladolid. The cruelty and treachery practised by the Imperial army, with the prince of perfidy at its head, were such to send all Castille vigorously marching behind the heroic Padilla. War once set a-going, Padilla went down to Tordesillas to see the queen. Toledo remembered that the outraged sovereign had been born within her walls, and despatched her gallantest son with words of sympathy and allegiance. At a sign from Juana, he was ready to translate the junta from Toledo to Tordesillas, and make a rampart of his men for her protection. He forced the gates, and learnt the miserable tale of the queen’s compulsory detention and sufferings, and found that “she was in her right senses, and quite as capable of governing as her mother, Isabel.” To every urgent prayer to sign the decree proclaiming her inviolable rights, and her son’s base usurpation, she answered “that all that she has is her son’s.” “The queen,” wrote Hurtado de Mendoza to Charles, “spoke nobly to the rebels,” and adds that he regards her as “perfectly sane.”
While Padilla was being worshipped as a popular idol at Valladolid, jealousy and disunion were working against him at Toledo. Great men had joined the people and Padilla, the Duke of Infantado, the Marquis of Villena, Juan de Avila, and many prelates and knights. They had imprisoned the King’s messengers and ministers in the Chapel of St Blas, and forced the governor to swear fealty to the Commindad. The mayor defending the Bridge of St Martin had fallen, and the Silvas, guarding the Alcázar against 4000 men, were forced to evacuate when the insurgents burnt down the gates and walls, and were masters of all the fortifications. They made canons of the church bells, stopped up every entrance by the river, and defied the Imperial army. Such a proud and congenial hour for Toledo. All the citizens went about puffed up with glory and addressed one another as “Brutus,” swaggering abroad, and ready to ring the bells as soon as word came from Tordesillas that the queen had signed.[12] Padilla hurried back, hearing his wife was ill, and in his absence the Imperial army sacked Tordesillas. Jealousy as usual had weakened the force of the Comuneros, though Padilla’s gallant presence impelled them to some brilliant skirmishing. But their fate was sealed at Villalar, where the Conde de Haro defeated them, and took prisoners to the Castle of Villalar, the infamous Ulloa’s property, three noble gentlemen of old Castille, Padilla, Maldonado and Bravo, whose names are writ upon the walls of the parliament house of Madrid, and printed large upon the hideous page of Charles Quint’s early reign. Padilla’s noble letters of farewell to his wife, Maria de Pacheco, and to Toledo, may be seen in the archives of Simancas, letters full of stately sentiment, of dignified tenderness and virile pathos. History proudly records his rebuke to Bravo’s last lament as they walked to the gallows: “Señor Juan Bravo, yesterday it befitted us to fight like cavaliers; to-day it befits us to die like Christians.” Their heads were exposed over the gates of Toledo, and then flung into the river.
Maria de Pacheco, “the great widow,” as a Spanish poet calls her, still held the town against the Imperial army. She was found praying at the foot of the cross when her servants brought her the news of Padilla’s defeat and death. She rose, robed herself in black, and walked to the Alcázar between her husband’s lieutenants, Davalos and Acuña, who bore a standard representing Padilla’s execution. They named her captain of the insurgents, and found her implacable and violent, but still a sovereign commander. She took gold from the churches without any compunction, ordered the massacre of her enemies and their bodies to be flung over the castle walls, but could liberally admire gallantry in an enemy too. Pedro de Guzman, wounded, was carried into her presence. He had fought magnificently, and she ordered him to be treated well. When cured, she offered him the command of the Comuneros which he indignantly refused, whereupon she gave him freedom and paid for his carriage, only asking him to free any Toledan who should fall into his hands. A generous if a ruthless enemy! Her influence over the town was extraordinary. The Imperialists and Comuneros met in a violent clash upon the Zocodover. On one side shouts of Viva el rey; on the other, Padilla y Commindad. Too ill to walk, Maria was carried out in a chair into the midst of the conflict, and cried out loudly, “Peace! Peace!” Her cry was enough. There was no need of eloquence, of menace, of adjuration. One single word and a look, and swords were sheathed as by magic, and both parties, in pacific rivalry, enthusiastically escorted her back to the Alcázar where she was throned a queen. She it was who interposed between Charles and Toledo, and obtained the town’s pardon. But the dead remained unforgiven, and Padilla’s palace, by royal decree, was levelled to the ground, and the place is now an ugly little square planted with acacias, without even the tablet that used to mark the spot where the house stood. The great widow died in exile in Portugal. Her flight from Toledo was worthy of her romantic career. Dressed as a villager, by dead of night, she stole out of the town to join her knights in the silent Vega. Here a horse awaited her, and the little band, gallantly guarding a brave woman and the baby son she clasped in her arms, Padilla’s proscribed heir, made for the Portuguese frontier. With this heroic figure vanishes the last gleam of Toledo’s greatness.
Charles V. came here, and had some liking for the town, since he rebuilt the Alcázar with its magnificent staircase, but did not live to enjoy it, and his wife, Doña Isabel, died here. To him Toledo owed the great water works of Juanelo Turriano, the wonder of the times, a machine composed of tin cases pinned together and rising in file from the river to the castle. The water entering the first case was pushed into the second by wheels, and thus up to the castle, where it fell into a reservoir. This artificio is written of in Paris in 1615 in “L’Inventaire général des plus curieuses recherches des Royaumes d’Espayne”: “Là tu verras le grand, fort et mémorable Alcázar, où l’eau monte en grande abondance par un artifice admirable, qui rejaillit de la rivière du Tage. A ceste invention est semblable celle que fit faire Henry le Grand d’heureu mémoire sur le Pont Neuf de cette bonne ville de Paris où il y a deux belles figures de bronze, l’une de Jésus Christ, et l’autre de la Samaritáine. Il n’y a que cette différence que l’eau de Tolède monte deux fois plus haut que l’autre, et jette aussi gros que le corps d’un bœuf.”
But henceforth Toledo is an effaced figure among Spanish towns. She is no longer the Imperial city or the Royal town, and is only a great historic memory.
CHAPTER V
The old Spanish Capital, once and now
THE tale of Toledo’s rough and broken history, ending as I have shown with the last struggle of the Comuneros, will have amply prepared the reader for the town’s present physiognomy. Few cities in Europe that for so long were accustomed to opulence and power, have known a reverse so instantaneous, so complete, an extinction against which all effort, all hope, all aspiration have proved vain, as that which Toledo was crushed beneath, when Felipe Segundo chose miserable, ugly, undistinguished Madrid for his country’s capital. Until then the vicissitudes, the fortunes of Toledo were those of all Spain. Even now in her ruin, the violent and imperious character of the race remains imperishably stamped on the harsh, sad mixture of beauty and ugliness of her conservative features. But the country itself takes no note of her. She has lived, she lives no more, except in the memory of historians, for the fugitive admiration of the traveller.
Unchanged I have said she is in all respects; a perfect mediæval picture in high relief against the background of civilised Europe. Nothing less civilised will you find along the least traversed byways of our modern world. Of her ancient splendours she presents such vestiges as to shame all that the ages have done for us. In beauty, alas, we have not progressed. That remains behind along with many other divine things, the portion of this sadly-used old world’s bright morning. Such vast centres as London and Paris are mean enough compared with what such a town as Toledo must have been when her semi-royal archbishops flourished and kings were proud and delighted if she but smiled upon them, more used as they were to her frowns and her visage of haughty revolt; when the Jews throve, great capitalists, and ruled the Exchange, when the Muezzin was heard over her narrow streets and the crescent floated from her towers, and her weekly markets in the Zocodover were so thronged that magistrates had to preside at the coming and going of strangers, such was the influx on all sides. If the town wears so unique and imposing an aspect after centuries of silence and decay, what must it not have been in each of its great hours of domination, under Goth, Moor, and Christian?