Many years later there was discovered in the Biblioteca Nacional a record which, to Spaniards at least, was much more valuable and interesting. It was a printed tract entitled "Summary and Veracious Relation of the Happy Voyage made by the Unconquered Prince of the Spains, Don Felipe, to England, and his Reception in Vinchester, where he was married, with his Departure for London; in which are contained the great and marvellous things that happened at that time. Dedicated to the Most Illustrious Lady Donna Luisa Enriquez de Giron, Countess of Benavente, by Andres Muñoz, Servant to his Serene Highness the Infante Don Carlos. Imprinted in Caragoca, in the house of Esteban de Najera, 1554, at the cost of Miguel de Çapila, bookseller." The author was a lackey to the unhappy Don Carlos, then a child, and his own personal observation is confined to the elaborate preparations for Philip's voyage made in the city of Valladolid and the journey of the little prince to Benavente, in Castile, to take leave of his father. What he saw and heard he relates with a trivial minuteness of detail, particularly as to the persons who were to accompany Philip and the clothes they took with them, which to an ordinary reader would be tedious in the extreme. But although his own share in the voyage ended at Benavente, whence Don Carlos returned to Valladolid, Muñoz apparently made arrangements with some member of the suite—no doubt of similar rank to himself—to send him particulars from England, and his account is therefore carried down to the departure of Philip and Mary for London after their marriage. This is by far the fullest account known, especially as to the events prior to Philip's embarkation; but the writer's position naturally caused him to dwell mainly upon the sartorial aspect of things which came under his observation, and he describes the splendour and pageantry rather as a spectator than as an actor. I shall call Muñoz's narrative No. 2.
About the same time as the discovery of Muñoz's letter three other letters, which in my opinion are even more valuable, because of the position of the supposed author, were found in the Escorial library. The first is a printed tract in the form of a diary and is entitled "Transcript of a Letter sent from England to this City of Seville, in which is given a Relation of the Events of the Voyage of our Lord the Prince Don Philip, from his Embarkation in the Coruña, a Port of Spain, to his Marriage to the Serene Queen of England. 1554." The book bears the well-known device, although not the name, of the celebrated Sevillian printer Andres de Burgos. In the same library was found a manuscript letter taking up the narrative where the last-mentioned tract ended—namely, after the marriage at Winchester at the end of July—and carrying it to August 19th, when the Court was at Richmond. No printed copy of this continuation is known to exist, but it is almost certainly written by the same hand, and contains many remarks and opinions which would probably have been suppressed if the letter had been published. A continuation of this, again, was also found in the Escorial, written apparently by the same person, bringing the narrative down to October 2nd, and is dated from London, where the King and Queen then were. These three letters, which I shall distinguish by the numbers 3, 4, and 5, were published, together with Muñoz's narrative (No. 2), by the Society of Bibliophilists of Madrid in 1877, under the editorship of Don Pascual de Gayangos.
In inquiring into the probable authorship of these three extremely valuable and interesting letters Señor de Gayangos gives good reason for supposing that they were written by a young courtier named Pedro Enriquez, one of Philip's stewards. He is known to have had a perfect mania for writing relations of what he saw and heard, and has been called the Spanish Tacitus.[[9]] He was a brother of the Marquis of Villanueva and a relative both of the Duke and Duchess of Alba, of whose movements he gives a very minute account in the above letters. He also identifies himself as a steward of the King in one of his complaints of the exclusive service of Philip by Englishmen, and is known to have been one of the very few Spanish noblemen who remained with Philip in London. His style, moreover, is peculiar, and I have had a former opportunity of commenting upon it in connection with a rapid and industrious piece of historical transcription of his, executed in the following year in Ghent;[[10]] and I have no doubt that Don Pedro Enriquez was the author of the three letters I am speaking of. Few people could have had better opportunities of observation than he. He accompanied Philip everywhere; his rank and his relationship to the all-powerful Alba brought him within the inner circle of the Court, and the feelings he expresses are those of the nobles who surrounded the King and not the gossip of the servants' hall or a valet's list of his master's finery. With these four letters the Society for Bibliophilists printed another by a different author, addressed from London at the end of December, 1554, giving a very full account of the reception of Cardinal Pole; but as this does not touch the subject in hand I omit any further reference to it.
In the British Museum there is a small tract in Italian, apparently printed in Milan in 1554, called "The Departure of the Serene Prince with the Spanish Fleet, and his Arrival in England, with the Order observed by the Queen in his Highness's Reception, and the most Happy Wedding; with the Names of the English, Spanish, and other Lords and Gentlemen who were present, and the Liveries, Festivities, and other Things done at the Wedding." It is signed "Giovanni Paulo Car," and the writer was a servant of the Marquis of Pescara. A paraphrase or adaptation of the letter also exists in the Museum, and appears to have been published in Rome in the same year, but it is not signed, and contains many additional particulars. The contents of these two tracts, again, appear to have been blended into a narrative published in the following year, probably in Rome, in which the person to whom the letter is addressed is described as the "illustrious Signor Francesco Taverna Cracanz," and although it is not signed by Car it evidently is by him, as he speaks of the Marquis of Pescara all through the narrative as his master. I propose in referring to this narrative to call it No. 6. We have thus a mass of contemporary evidence from persons who were certainly attached to Philip's suite, by the aid of which and the authorities already known a more minute and trustworthy account than any hitherto presented of the events in question may be constructed.
Renard had first broached the subject of the marriage to Mary in August, 1553, and all the attempts of Noailles to inspire fear and hatred of the match in the breasts of the Queen and her people had only made her more determined to carry out the wishes of her heart, and, as she no doubt herself thought, to enhance the happiness and prosperity of her people. Egmont and his glittering train had been snowballed by the London 'prentices when he came formally to offer Philip's hand to the Queen in January, 1554. A whirlwind of passion and panic had passed over southern England at the thought of a Spanish consort ruling in the land, and at about the time that gallant Wyatt and his dwindling troop of "draggle-tayles" were wearily toiling up Fleet Street, only to find that the Queen's courage and their leader's irresolution had wrecked their enterprise, a dusty courier clattered into Valladolid with the premature news that Lord Privy Seal, the Earl of Bedford, and another English lord had started for Spain with the contract that was to make Philip king of England. His Highness was hunting at umbrageous Aranjuez, a hundred miles off, and the messenger, just alighting to kiss the hand of poor lame little Prince Carlos, went scouring over the tawny plains again, bearing his pregnant tidings.
The courting had all been done by the Emperor through clever Renard; and the Prince, dutiful son as he was, bent to his father's will without even knowing the terms of the bargain by which he was to be bound for life. The conditions imposed by the patriotism of Mary and her Council were hard for the most powerful monarch on earth to brook for his son. Philip's power was so fenced round by limitations and safeguards that it was plain to see the English nobles meant his sceptre to be a shadowy one, and the sombre, sensitive pride of the Prince was wounded to the quick at the light esteem in which they seemed to hold him; but, as Sandoval says, "he, like a second Isaac, was ready to sacrifice himself to his father's will and the good of the Church." And he did so gracefully and with dignity. No sooner had the courier delivered his message at Aranjuez than Philip set off on his return to Valladolid with his gaudy escort of horsemen in their red and yellow doublets. In hot haste the old Castilian capital put on its holiday garb to celebrate the event; the great square, standing much as it stands to-day, was bravely adorned, and costly hangings covered all one side of it where the Prince sat to see the jousts, tourneys, cane-play, and fireworks, and where he sat, alas! the next time he saw Valladolid, on his return five years afterwards, to watch unmoved the hellish fireworks of the great auto de fé.
The wedding rejoicings had hardly begun when they were changed to mourning by the news of the death of Don Juan of Portugal, the husband of Philip's sister Juana; and the narrator, Muñoz, breaks off in the midst of his rapture over the splendour of Valladolid's joy to relate the pompous grandeur of its sorrow—how between the screen and the altar of St. Paul's there were 3,000 candles of white and yellow wax, and how all the solemnity of previous exequies paled before these. In the meantime Philip had sent one of his stewards, Don Gutierre Lopede Padilla, to receive the English envoys at Laredo. After waiting there for a month with the Prince's guard to pay them due honour, he found that the news sent had been premature, and that the marriage treaty had not yet even been ratified, and was not, indeed, until Egmont's second visit to England in March. So Padilla found his way back again to Valladolid by the end of March, and they decided to take the matter in more leisurely fashion in future. But in a few weeks came news from the Emperor himself that the contract was ratified, and then the Marquis de las Navas was ordered to take the Prince's first present to his bride. We are told that the Marquis fitted himself out for his mission regardless of cost, and his splendour appears to have been equalled by the princely gifts of which he was the bearer, and the noble hospitality extended to him in England.[[11]] Philip's offering to Mary consisted of "a great table diamond, mounted as a rose in a superb gold setting, valued at 50,000 ducats; a collar or necklace of 18 brilliants, exquisitely worked and set with dainty grace, valued at 32,000 ducats; a great diamond with a fine large pearl pendant from it (this was Mary's favourite jewel, and may be seen on her breast in most portraits). They were (says narrative No. 2) the most lovely pair of gems ever seen in the world, and were worth 25,000 ducats. Then comes a list of pearls, diamonds, emeralds, and rubies of inestimable value, and other presents without number for the Queen and her ladies. Eighty fine horses and fifty hackneys were sent on to Corunna to await the Prince's coming, and all Castile and Aragon, not to speak of Leon, were alive with artificers of the gorgeous garb and trappings to fit out the proud nobles who were to follow their Prince, each, with true Spanish ostentation, bent upon outstripping the others in the richness and splendour of themselves and their train.[[12]] Muñoz, in narrative No. 2, gives a list of the clothes made for each of the principal grandees, which it would be tedious and unnecessary to repeat here.
The Prince, great as he was, was only first among his peers, and if he could be magnificent so could his train, and Alba and Medina-Celi, Egmont and Aguilar, Pescara and Feria vied with their master in their finery. Each great noble—and there were twenty of them—took his train of servants in new liveries, and the Prince had a Spanish guard of 100 gentlemen in red and yellow, 100 Germans in the same uniform, but with silk facings, "as their custom is to go bravely dressed," 100 archers on horseback, and 300 servants in the same gaudy colours of Aragon. All this splendid apparatus was a comparatively new thing for Spaniards at the time; the homely, unceremonious relations between sovereign and people had only been put aside for the pompous etiquette of the house of Burgundy, on the coming of Philip's grandfather from Flanders with his Spanish bride to take up the sceptre dropped by the dead hand of Isabel the Catholic, and the gold of the Indies had since that time poured into Spain and spread a thirst for showy pomp even amongst the frank, honest, homely gentlemen who had formed a majority of the Spanish hidalgo class. The changed taste, however, was new enough still to attract the attention of the crowd who had not yet become accustomed to so much splendour.
All these elaborate preparations being completed, Philip, with nearly 1,000 horsemen, glittering and flashing in the pitiless Castilian sun, left Valladolid on the 14th of May—not for England yet, but far down on the Portuguese frontier, at Alcantara, to meet his widowed sister, who had been forced to come out of her bitter grief to govern her father's kingdom during Philip's absence. He accompanied her five days on her journey to Valladolid, and then turning aside to take a last leave of his mad grandmother, Juana la Loca, bent his course towards Benavente, on the high road to Santiago, arriving there on the 3rd of June, covered with dust of travel, but gracious, as he could be, to those who had entertained his boy Carlos, who had preceded him.
Next day there was a grand bull-fight in the plaza, which Philip and Carlos saw from Pero Hernandez's flower-decked house. The return of the Princes to Count Benavente's castle was not quite so dignified as it might have been, as one bull was so "devilish" that it refused to be killed, and held the plaza victoriously against all comers until the next morning, whereupon Philip and his son had to slip out by Pero Hernandez's back door and reach the castle by a roundabout way. The day after there was a hunt and a tourney, and then after supper the Princes mounted on a high scaffold, richly dight, to see "a procession of beautiful and strange inventions." Torches blazed all round them, and each device was led by one of the neighbouring squires with twenty pikemen and drummers and fifers, each detachment in a separate livery. Elephants manufactured out of horses and pasteboard, castles with savages inside, a green tabernacle with a lovely maiden borne by savages, a model of a ship dressed with English and Spanish flags, and, strangest of all, a girl in a coffin complaining of Cupid, who came behind on horseback. When the device reached the middle of the plaza the god of love was suddenly hoisted on high by a rope round his middle, and let off fireworks, to the delectation of the crowd. As a relief to this foolery the great Lope de Rueda then represented "a sacred play with comic interludes," which, no doubt, was better worth seeing than the "conceits and fireworks" that pleased the narrator so much. The next day, after bidding good-bye to the son who was afterwards to hate him so bitterly, the Prince started in the cool of the summer night on his way to the sea.