Castles and Chateaux of Old Navarre and the Basque Provinces

by M. F. Mansfield

Orthez was deserted by the court for Pau, and in time the natural destruction of wind and weather, and the hand of man, stripped the château to what one sees to-day.

The Pont d’Orthez is a far better preserved monument of feudal and warlike times, and it was a real defence to the city, as can be readily understood by all who view it. Its four hardy arches span the Gave as they did in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It was from the summit of one of the sentinel towers of this most remarkable of mediæval bridges that the soldiers of Montgomery obliged the monks to throw themselves into the river below. The “Brothers of the Bridge” were a famous institution in mediæval times, and they should have been better treated than they usually were, but too frequently indeed they were massacred without having either the right or the means to defend themselves.

The history of Montgomery’s connection with Orthez, or more particularly the Pont d’Orthez, reads almost as if it were legend, though indeed it is truth. The story is called by the French historians “La Chronique de la Tour des Caperas.”

Jeanne d’Albret, the mainstay of Protestantism in her day, wished to make Orthez the religious capital, and accordingly she built here a splendid church in which to expound the theories of Calvin and brought “professors” from Scotland and England to preach the new dogma. Orthez became at once the point of attack for those of the opposite faith, and as horrible a massacre as was ever known took place in the streets of Orthez and gave perhaps the first use of the simile that the river flowed as a river of blood. Priests and monks were the special prey of the Protestants, while they themselves were being attacked from without. One by one as they were hunted out from their hiding-places the priests and lay brothers were pushed from the parapet of the bridge into the Gave below. If any gained the banks by swimming they were prodded and stabbed by still other soldiery with lances, and from this great noyade the great Tour des Caperas became known as the Tour des Prêtres.

To-day Montauban and Orthez have relatively the largest Protestant populations of any of the cities of France.

The old Route Royale between Bayonne and the capital of Béarn and Navarre passed through Orthez, and the same narrow streets, irregular, badly paved, and badly kept up, are those which one traverses to-day on entering and leaving the city. One great improvement has been made in the ancient quarter of the town—though of course one does not know what historical souvenirs it may have supplanted—and that is the laying out of a mail or mall, planted on either side with great elms, and running from the banks of the Gave to the fine fifteenth-century—but still Gothic—church, well at the centre of the town.

The “jambons de Bayonne” are mostly cured at Orthez, and it is indeed the leading industry of the city. The porkers of Orthez may not be corn fed, but they are well and cleanly nourished, which is more than can be said of many “domesticated pigs” in New and Old England, which are eaten with a great relish by those who have brought them up.

In the religious wars Orthez played a grand rôle, and in 1814 it was the scene of one of the great struggles of France against alien invasion of her territory. Just north of the city, on the height of a flanking hill, Wellington—at the head of a force very much superior, let no one forget—inflicted a bloody defeat on Maréchal Soult. The Duc de Dalmatie lost, it is recorded, nearly four thousand men, but he wounded or killed six thousand in the same engagement. General Foy here received his fourth wound on the field of battle.

Orthez is one of the really great feudal cities of the south of France. In the ninth century it was known as Orthesium, and belonged to the Vicomtes de Dax, who, only when they were conquered by Gaston III, Prince of Béarn, ceded the city to the crown of Béarn and Navarre.

It was in the château of Orthez that the unfortunate Blanche of Castille, daughter of the king of Aragon, was poisoned by her sister, the wife of Gaston IV, Comte de Foix. This was one of the celebrated crimes of history, though for that matter the builder of the château, the magnificent (sic) Gaston Phœbus, committed one worthy to rank with it when he killed his brother and “propre fils” on the mere suspicion that they might some day be led to take sides against him.