Through Portugal

by Martin A. S. Hume

SOME BEAUTIES OF THOMAR.

Connected with the walls of the ancient castle, and upon a somewhat higher level than the keep, there stands the high round church of the Templars, with buttresses of immense strength reaching to the parapet, and a crumbling square bell tower upon one of its faces. Upon an ancient slab let into the sides of the church an inscription tells how Dom Affonso, first King of Portugal, and Gualdrim Paes, master of the Portuguese Templars, constructed this edifice in 1108. Joined to this ancient structure is one of the most astounding specimens of Manueline architecture in Portugal, built in the early sixteenth century, when all the country was pulsating with new life and eager longings. It is the choir and chapter-house, and behind them is the ruin of the great monastery of the Order of Christ. Words are weak to convey an idea of the capricious splendour of the choir and chapter-house so far as they remain undefaced, for later ages have done their best to spoil the edifice. Eight cloisters have been built around it, and tacked on to it, by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its lovely Manueline doorway has been marred, and the east end of the building blocked as high as its upper windows by the “Cloister of the Philips.”

The Choir and Chapter-House, Thomar.

But notwithstanding all the vandalism, enough of the Manueline building remains intact to strike the beholder with reverent wonder at the intricate beauty of the work, and the inexhaustible invention of the design. The doorway stands in a recess reaching to the parapet, and enclosed within an arch of surprising beauty, of which the under curve is lined with an elaborate pendent ornament. Within the recess filling the whole space and over the door itself, figures in niches stand under canopies and upon pillars in which caprice and intricacy surpass themselves. Coiled cables, bossed spirals, floreated pinnacles, armillary spheres, crosses, and intertwined branches, stand out in high relief and under cut, as if the sculptors had purposely sought difficulties in order to overcome them. The arch of the door itself is beyond description, so luxuriant is the design of the chiselled stone which forms the three grooves and two spiral pilasters around it. The parapet of the whole edifice is similarly rich, alternating the cross of the Order with the armillary sphere; and although most of the lower part of the walls is hidden, the view of the east end with its two corner towers, as seen from the roof of the adjoining cloister, is magnificent. The lower window, which lights the interior of the choir, is a massive tangle of outstanding cables; each point being crowned by the cross and the armillary sphere which formed the device of the grand master, the famous Prince Henry the Navigator. Around one of the corner towers a great chain cable, each link carved entire in stone, is braced, and around the other an equally tremendous buckled belt, representing the Order of the Garter, which the Prince, a Plantagenet on his mother’s side, possessed. The upper window which lights the chapter-house is more suggestive still. It is a highly decorated circular light bevilled into the deep thickness of the wall, and represents upon the sloping inner face of the circle a series of bulging staysails, each held down by a rope.

But all this description in detail is incapable of conveying an idea of the richness of effect produced by the whole work. The exuberance of the style and its tricky capriciousness may be, and are, condemned by purists as in questionable taste; but as an outcome of national feeling, and as an example of original inventive ingenuity and patience, this and other notable specimens of the style, to which reference will be made later, are of the highest interest to the student, and a delight to the ordinary observer who can free himself from the straightlaced traditions of the schools.

Inside the grave old round church of the Templars, to which this gorgeous edifice was to serve as a choir for the warrior monks of Christ, a fine Byzantine altar stands in the centre. The interior of the edifice itself is a quaint and curious mixture of Byzantine, Moorish, Romanesque, and Gothic, the pillars being painted and gilt in oriental taste, whilst the splendid canopy over the central altar is pure Gothic, and dated 1500. In four of the eleven arched spaces upon the wall of the circular church there are some ancient pictures of the highest interest, the remaining seven having been stolen by the French invaders in the Napoleonic wars. The paintings are fine enough to be by the hand of Jan Van Eyck himself, and are, as usual, ascribed by Portuguese to the mythical Gran Vasco. It is far more likely, however, that they may be the work of a painter called Jean Dralia of Bruges, who was living in this monastery at the end of the fifteenth century, and is buried here. It is lamentable to see the condition to which these masterpieces have been allowed to fall from sheer want of care; and unless they are promptly rescued, a few years more will complete their ruin.

The great choir, added on to the round church, presents in its interior the same wealth of fancy as that already described on the outside; but the wonderful choir stalls of the Manueline period were stolen or destroyed during the French invasion. As I stood under the exquisitely carved ceiling of this choir, looking towards the Byzantine altar in the round church before me, my mind flew back to a scene enacted here in April 1581, which I had more than once endeavoured to describe in writing without having seen the place. Philip II. had followed in the devastating steps of Alba to wrest from the native Portuguese pretender the crown he coveted. Portugal had sullenly bent its neck to the yoke, and the nobles had either been exiled or bought to the side of the Spaniard. But one thing more was needed to make grim Philip legally King of Portugal as well as King of Spain. The Portuguese Cortes, elected of the people, though in this case elected with Alba’s grip upon its throat, had to swear allegiance to the new monarch, and Philip had to pledge his oath to respect the rights and liberties of his new subjects. The stronghold of the Knights of Christ at Thomar was chosen by the Spaniard for the crowning act of Portuguese national subjection; and here Philip arrived on the 15th March 1581. On the 3rd April, in one of those charming little letters to his orphan daughters, he wrote from Thomar saying that the Cortes would sit soon, for many people were already arriving, and the oaths would be taken as soon as they were met. “You have heard,” he says, “that they insist upon my dressing in brocade, much against my will, but they say it is the custom here.”

On the 16th of April the church of the monastery was aglow with shimmer of gold and gems and rich stuffs. Under a dais at the end of this choir Philip sat in a robe of cloth of gold over a dress of crimson brocade; though his heart was sad for the death of his last wife, and he hated splendour in his broken old age. After mass had been said, the Cortes did homage and swore to keep their faith to him as king; and then stepping down from the throne, he advanced to the high altar and solemnly pledged his word to respect the laws and liberties of Portugal. How little he relished the splendour is seen in a letter he sent to his girls from Thomar a fortnight later, as soon as he could find time to write to those whom he loved more dearly than any other creatures on earth. “How much I wish,” he wrote, “you could have seen the ceremony of taking the oath from a window as my nephew [the Archduke Albert] did, who saw everything excellently. But I send you a full account of it all.... I have given the Golden Fleece to the Duke of Braganza, and he went with me to mass, both of us wearing the collar of the Order; which upon my mourning looked very bad, and I can tell you he looked much smarter than I did, although they say that the day of the oath was the first time he had worn low shoes, though everybody is wearing them here now except myself.” Thomar, for the last time in its existence, was a blaze of splendour for those six feverish weeks; for Spanish and Portuguese nobles, jealous of each other, vied in lavish expenditure; and then the fortress of the Knights was left to its solitude: gradually royal encroachments stripped the Order of its wealth and power, and Thomar lived in memory alone.

The upper chamber of the Manueline building over the choir is the chapter-house of the Order of Christ. A grand, low, pillared hall, with the twisted cables and the repeated cross and sphere, testifying once more to the reigning idea of the period of the Navigator Grand-Master. Here it was that the Portuguese Cortes sat to confirm the religious act of allegiance to Philip, and set the seal of subservience upon the nation for nearly a century. Every carved stone and crocket has a story to tell if we could but hear it. Here in the older monastic building the Navigator himself held his chapters, dwelling in the adjoining palace, in the intervals of his life-task upon his eyrie at Sagres; here in the “cloisters of the Philips,” dull Philip III. held his monastic court upon his one visit to Portugal; and the magnificent cloister of John III. testifies to the classical reaction after the exuberance of the times of his father Dom Manuel.