History of Central America, Volume 1, 1501-1530 / The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume 6

by Hubert Howe Bancroft

Mr Irving's estimate of the value of honesty and integrity in a historian may be gathered from his own pages. "There is a certain meddlesome spirit," he writes, "which, in the garb of learned research, goes prying about the traces of history, casting down its monuments, and marring and mutilating its fairest trophies. Care should be taken to vindicate great names from such pernicious erudition. It defeats one of the most salutary purposes of history, that of furnishing examples of what human genius and laudable enterprise may accomplish." Now, if conscientious inquiry into facts signifies a meddlesome spirit; if the plain presentment of facts may rightly be called pernicious erudition; if the overthrow of fascinating falsehood is mutilating the trophies of history; if fashioning golden calves for the worship of the simple be the most salutary purpose of history; then I, for one, prefer the meddlesome spirit and the pernicious erudition which mutilates such monuments to the fairest trophies of historical deception. Again—"Herrera has been accused also of flattering his nation; exalting the deeds of his countrymen, and softening and concealing their excesses. There is nothing very serious in this accusation. To illustrate the glory of his nation is one of the noblest offices of the historian; and it is difficult to speak too highly of the extraordinary enterprises and splendid actions of the Spaniards in those days. In softening their excesses he fell into an amiable and pardonable error, if it were indeed an error for a Spanish writer to endeavor to sink them in oblivion." When a writer openly avows his allegiance to falsehood, to amiable falsehood, to falsehood perpetrated to deceive in regard to one's own country, about which one professes to know more than a stranger, nothing remains to be said. Nothing remains to be said as to the veracity of that author, but much remains to be said concerning the erroneous impressions left by him of the persons and events coming in the way of this work.

With what exquisite grace, with what tender solicitude and motherly blindness to faults Mr Irving defends the reputation of Columbus! Is the Genoese a pirate, then is piracy "almost legalized;" is he a slave-maker, "the customs of the times" are pleaded; without censure he lives at Córdova in open adultery with Beatriz Enriquez, and there becomes the father of the illegitimate Fernando; a bungling attempt is made to excuse the hero for depriving the poor sailor of the prize offered him who should first see land; Oviedo is charged with falsehood because he sometimes decides against the discoverer in issues of policy and character; Father Buil was "as turbulent as he was crafty" because he disagreed with the admiral in some of his measures; the most extravagant vituperation is hurled at Aguado because he is chosen to examine and report on the affairs of the Indies; Fonseca is denounced as inexpressibly vile because he thwarts some of the discoverer's hare-brained projects; and so with regard to those who in any wise opposed him, while all who smiled on him were angels of light. All through his later life when extravagant requests were met by more than the usual liberality of royalty, Irving is petulantly complaining because more is not done for his hero, and because his petulant hero complains. And this puerile pride from which springs such petulance the eloquent biographer coins into the noble ambition of conscious merit. Though according to his own statement the madness of the man increased until toward the latter end he was little better than imbecile, yet we are at the same time gravely assured that "his temper was naturally irritable, but he subdued it by the magnanimity of his spirit." The son Fernando denies that his father once carded wool; Irving does not attempt to excuse this blemish because his readers do not regard work ignoble.

Now it is not the toning-down of defects in a good man's character that I object to so much as the predetermined exaltation of one historical personage at the expense of others utterly debased under like premeditation. Did Mr Irving, and the several scores of biographers preceding and following him, parade the good qualities of Bobadilla, Roldan, and Ovando as heartily as those of their hero, the world would be puzzled what to make of it. We are not accustomed to such statements. Unseasoned biography is tasteless, and we are taught not to expect truth, but a model. We should not know what these writers were trying to do if they catalogued the misdemeanors of Columbus and his brothers with the same embellishments applied to Aguado, Buil, and Fonseca; telling with pathetic exaggeration how the benign admiral of the ocean sea was the first to employ bloodhounds against the naked natives; how he practised varied cruelties in Española beyond expression barbarous; and how he stooped upon occasion not only to vulgar trickery, but to base treachery.

On the other hand, with those who seek notoriety by attempting to degrade the fair fame of noble and successful genius because more credit may have been given by some than is justly due, or by affecting to disbelieve whole narratives and whole histories because portions of them are untrue or too highly colored, I have no sympathy. Books have been written to prove, what no one denies, that centuries before Columbus other Europeans had found this continent, and that thereby the honor of his achievement is lessened—of which sentiment I fail to see the force. So far as the Genoese, his works, and merits are concerned, it makes no whit difference were America twenty times before discovered, as elsewhere in this volume has been fully shown.

IRVING AND PRESCOTT COMPARED.

Prescott was a more exact writer than Irving, though Prescott was not wholly above the amiable weakness of his time. In the main he stated the truth, and stated it fairly, though he did not always tell the whole truth. The faults of his heroes he would speak, though never so softly; he seldom attempted entirely to conceal them. He might exaggerate, but he neither habitually practised nor openly defended mendacity. Prescott would fain please the Catholics, if it did not cost too much. Irving would please everybody, particularly Americans; but most of all he would make a pleasing tale; if truthful, well; if not, it must on no account run counter to popular prejudice. The inimitable charm about them both amply atones in the minds of many for any imperfections. Since their day much new light has been thrown upon the subjects treated by them, but not enough seriously to impair the value of their works. In their estimates of the characters of Ferdinand and Isabella, relatively and respectively, these brilliant writers are not alone. They copied those who wrote before them; and those who came after copied them. It has been the fashion these many years, both by native and foreign historians, to curse Ferdinand and to bless Isabella, to heap all the odium of the nation and the times upon the man and exalt the woman among the stars. This, surely, is the more pleasant and chivalrous method of disposing of the matter; but in that case I must confess myself at a loss what to do with the facts.

FERDINAND AND ISABELLA.

None but the simple are deceived by the gentle Irving when he insinuates "she is even somewhat bigoted;" by which expression he would have us understand that the fascinating queen of Castile was but little of a bigot. Again: "Ferdinand was a religious bigot; and the devotion of Isabella went as near to bigotry as her liberal mind and magnanimous spirit would permit"—that is to say, as the plan of Mr Irving's story would permit. Quite as well as any of us Irving knew that Isabella was one of the most bigoted women of her bigoted age, far more bigoted than Ferdinand, who dared even dispute the pope when his Holiness interfered too far in attempting to thwart his ambitious plans. She was, indeed, so deeply dyed a bigot as to allow her ghostly confessor to overawe her finest womanly instincts, her commonly strict sense of honor, justice, and humanity, and cause her to permit in Spain the horrible Inquisition, the most monstrous mechanism of torture ever invented in aid of the most monstrous crime ever perpetrated by man upon his fellows, the coercion and suppression of opinion. Fair as she was in all her ways, and charming—fair of heart and mind and complexion, with regular features, light chestnut hair, mild blue eyes, a modest and gracious demeanor—she did not scruple, for the extermination of heresy, to apply to such of her loving subjects as dared think for themselves the thumb-screw, the ring-bolt and pulley, the rack, the rolling-bench, the punch, the skewer, the pincers, the knotted whip, the sharp-toothed iron collar, chains, balls, and manacles, confiscation of property and burning at the stake; and all under false accusations and distorted evidence. She did not hesitate to seize and put to death hundreds of wealthy men like Pecho, and appropriate to her own use their money, though her exquisite womanly sensibilities might sometimes prompt her to fling to the widows and children whom she had turned beggars into the street a few crumbs of their former riches. This mother, who nursed children of her own and who should not have been wholly ignorant of a mother's love, turned a deaf ear to the cries of Moorish mothers as they and their children were torn asunder and sold at the slave mart in Seville. Thousands of innocent men, women, and children she cruelly imprisoned, thousands she cast into the fiery furnace, tens of thousands she robbed and then drove into exile; but it was chastely done, and by a most sweet and beautiful lady. We can hardly believe it true, we do not like to believe it true, that when old Rabbi Abarbanel pleaded before the king for his people, "I will pay for their ransom six hundred thousand crowns of gold," Isabella's soft, musical voice was heard to say, "Do not take it," her confessor meanwhile exclaiming "What! Judas-like, sell Jesus!" Besides, thrice six hundred thousand crowns might be secured by not accepting the ransom. And yet this was the bright being, and such her acts by Prescott's own statements, cover them as he will never so artfully, whose practical wisdom, he assures us, was "founded on the purest and most exalted principle," and whose "honest soul abhorred anything like artifice." Isabella was unquestionably a woman of good intentions; but with such substance the soul-burner's pit is paved.

Prescott throws all the odium of the Inquisition on Torquemada, and I concur. The monk's mind was the ashy, unmelting mould in which the woman's more plastic affections were cast. But then he should be accredited with some portion of the virtues that adorned the character of Isabella, for he was the author of many of them. To be just, if Isabella is accredited with her virtues, she must be charged with her crimes. And if the queen may throw from her shoulders upon those of her advisers the responsibility of iniquity permitted under her rule, why not King Ferdinand, who likewise had men about him urging him to this policy and to that? True, we excuse much in woman as the weaker, and very justly so, which we condemn in the man of powerful cunning. But Isabella was not exactly clay in the hands of those about her; or if so, then praise her for her imbecility, and not for any virtue. But she could muster will and spirit enough of her own upon occasion—witness her threat to kill Pedro Giron with her own hand rather than marry him, and the policy which speaks plainly her sagacity and state-craft in the selection of Ferdinand, and in the strict terms of her marriage contract which excluded her husband from any sovereign rights in Castile or Leon. Most inconsistently, indeed, in reviewing the administration of Isabella, at the end of three volumes of unadulterated adulation Prescott gives his heroine firmness enough in all her ways; independence of thought and action sufficient to circumscribe the pretensions of her nobles; and she "was equally vigilant in resisting ecclesiastical encroachment;" "she enforced the execution of her own plans, oftentimes even at great personal hazard, with a resolution surpassing that of her husband." When, however, she signed the edict for the expulsion of the Jews, the excuse was that "she had been early schooled to distrust her own reason." But why multiply quotations? The Ferdinand and Isabella of Prescott is full of these flat contradictions.

We all know that when carried away by feeling women are more cruel than men; so Isabella under the frenzy of her fanaticism was, if possible, more cruel than Ferdinand, whose passions were ballasted by his ambitions. Her feelings were with her faith; and her faith was with such foul iniquity, such inhuman wrong as should cause her euphemistic apologists to blush for resorting to the same species of subterfuge that makes heroes of Jack Sheppard and Dick Turpin. Again, murder and robbery for Christ's sake suits the devil quite as well as when done for one's own sake. And here on earth, to plead in a court of justice good intentions in mitigation of evil acts nothing extenuates in the eyes of any righteous judge. Therefore there is little to choose between those of whom it may be said—Here is a man who perfidiously robs, tortures, and murders his fellow-beings by the hundred thousand in order to glorify himself, and extend and establish his dominions; and, Here is a woman who perfidiously robs, tortures, and murders her fellow-beings by the hundred thousand in order to glorify herself, her priest, her religion, and extend and establish the dominions of her deity. At the farthest, and in the minds of the eloquent biographers themselves, the relative refinement and nobility of the two characters must turn wholly upon one's conception of the relative refinement and nobility of earthly selfishness and heavenly selfishness.