He therefore made ready to receive death with perfect, manly courage, with the dignity of a Prince and the humility of a Christian, and his first arrangement was that he should be conveyed to the fort which Gabrio Cervelloni was then making a league away. He ordered himself to be carried on a stretcher by his servants, without order or arrangement, to prevent the soldiers having the grief of saying good-bye to him, and to cause no one alarm or trouble. There remained inside the surrounding wall of the fort the only part yet finished, a hut, or rather a pigeon house, where D. Bernardino de Zúñiga, D. John's Captain of Infantry, lodged, and there he ordered himself to be taken to disturb no one. "There was only," says Vander Hammen, "a pigeon house to make him a chamber." They cleared out the young pigeons, cleaned it, hung a few coverings on the ceilings and wall to exclude the light, and over them some pieces of cloth, which they sprinkled with perfumed waters, and made a wooden staircase for mounting to it. The father confessor Fr. Francisco de Orantes writes to Philip II: "He died in a hut, as poorly as a soldier. I assure Y.M. there was nothing but a cock-loft over a farm-yard, in order that in this he should imitate the poverty of Christ."
All this took place on Saturday, the 20th, and on Sunday, the 21st, very early in the morning, D. John ordered his confessor, Fray Francisco de Orantes, to be called, and with great humility and with much sorrow for his sins he made a general confession of his life, with the eagerness and fervour of one who is preparing to die; and although the doctors still held out hopes of saving his life, and tried to dissuade him, he asked for the Viaticum, and received it with great devotion and fervour, at a mass celebrated in his room by the Jesuit Juan Fernández. Then he sent for all his Field-Marshals to his miserable retreat, also the Councillors of State and other personages attached to the army, and before them solemnly resigned the command and gave the baton to Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma, who was present, kneeling at the foot of the bed, and so overcome and afflicted because of his great love for D. John, that he buried his forehead in the bed-clothes, and the Count de Mansfeld had to lift him up and comfort him. It was an extraordinary thing, which moved and brought tears to the eyes of all those veterans, to see that thunderbolt of war, Alexander Farnese, daring and brave and of indomitable courage, afflicted and overcome like a weak woman on receiving the supreme command from the hands of his dying friend and kinsman.
Then he directed his confessor Fr. Francisco de Orantes to declare before them all what D. John had already told him privately. That he left no will, because he possessed nothing which was not his Lord and Master the King's. That he commended his body and soul to the King; his soul in order that the King should order suffrages to be made for the great need there was; his body that it might be buried near that of his Lord and father the Emperor, by which he should consider his services were repaid. But if this were not so, then that they should give him burial in the monastery of Our Lady of Montserrat. Item, he begged the King to look after his mother and brother. Item, to look after his servants, pay them and reward them, because he died so poor that he could not do so. "As to my personal debts and bills," he said at the end, "they are very few and are very clear."
He said this with great firmness, taking leave of them all with his hand, and himself taking leave of the things of earth to think and speak of nothing beyond those of heaven.
He, however, retained Father Juan Fernández, and showing him a little manuscript book which he kept under his pillow, said these were the prayers which he recited every day, without ever missing one in his life, and as the dreadful pain in his head troubled his sight, so that he could not read, begged the father, for the love of God and for the love of him, to do him the favour of reciting them in his name. Much moved, the father promised, and, according to his own testimony, it took him a good hour to recite those prayers which the devout Prince said "every day of his life," in the midst of the fatigues of war, the occupations of Governor, and, most difficult of all, in the midst of the dissipations of worldly pleasures. The little book was all in D. John's writing. It began with the baby prayers he had learnt in his childhood from Doña Magdalena de Ulloa; then followed various pious exercises, and it ended with several prayers composed by D. John himself, according as he had been inspired in the course of his life, by his difficulties, his sorrows, hopes and joys, and his warm effusions of thanksgiving. In short, it was an index, showing his attitude towards God in all the events of his life, which the grateful heart of D. John daily remembered, and which only the holy Father Juan Fernández had the happiness of knowing.
It was this father who, a few months later, under the command of Alexander Farnese, performed the extraordinary deed of heroism, at the same time an act of incredible charity, in the trench of Maestricht, which we have told in another place. D. John had known him in Luxemburg, on his first arrival, and astonished at his holiness, prudence and learning, and profoundly struck by his untiring zeal for the welfare of the soldiers, attached him at once to the army, and took him everywhere; and although he was not D. John's official confessor, he confessed to him often, and consulted him privately in all difficult matters. During D. John's short last illness, together with Fr. Francisco de Orantes, he assisted him all the time, and when D. John's dreadful headache and delirium left him, the father sustained him with spiritual talks which maintained the sick man in his peace and resignation, and gave the Jesuit the ineffable comfort that the just experience before the marvels of Divine Grace.
In one of these conversations D. John told P. Juan Fernández of his firm determination, taken four months beforehand, if God spared his life in Flanders, to retire for ever from the world to the hermitage of Montserrat, there to serve "that Lord who could and would do much more for him than his brother D. Philip." A bitter phrase this, which without, as some have thought, censuring Philip (because there would be none in supposing greater power and love in the King of heaven than in the most powerful and saintly King on earth), still reveals the profound disillusionment which had taken hold of the victor of Lepanto, for the last four months, that is to say since the death of Escovedo.
Photo Anderson
D. JOHN OF AUSTRIA'S PLACE OF BURIAL
Escorial and surrounding country, present day