The monastery was always a poorly endowed one, in glaring contrast to the neighbouring Cistercian house of Alcobaça, one of the richest monastic houses in the world. Beckford, in his humorous description of his visit to both houses in 1782, draws a lively comparison between the two. Accompanied by two great Portuguese prelates, of whom he makes merciless fun, he had gone to see Alcobaça at the wish of the Prince Regent. His great train of servants and attendants had been received with lavish splendour and Gargantuan gluttony at Alcobaça, and on the way with the prelate of the latter house to visit Batalha, the whole party had got drunk at Aljubarrota, whose wine is famous. They arrived at Batalha at night.
“Whilst our sumpter mules were unloading, and ham and pies and sausages were rolling out of plethoric hampers, I thought these poor monks looked on rather enviously. My more fortunate companions—no wretched cadets of the mortification family these, but the true elder sons of fat mother church—could hardly conceal their sneers of conscious superiority. A contrast so strongly marked amused me not a little.... The Batalha prior and his assistants looked quite astounded when they saw the gauze-curtained bed and the Grand Prior’s fringed pillow, and the Prior of St. Vincent’s superb coverlid, and basins and ewers and other utensils of glittering silver being carried in. Poor souls! they hardly knew what to do or say or be at—one running to the right, another to the left—one tucking up his flowing garments to run faster, and another rebuking him for such a deviation from monastic decorum.”
I have in my library a manuscript account by Lord Strathmore of the visit he paid to the two monasteries twenty years before Beckford, and his account of the poverty of Batalha in comparison with Alcobaça is more emphatic still. He says:—
“Though far from rich, they received us with great hospitality. The prior, an exceedingly good, kind, old man, exerted his utmost efforts to do us honour, and had a cook sent to him from the Bishop of Leria upon ye occasion. We here with many thanks dismist our militia, who had been mounting guard hitherto at ye door of our apartment. This convent is of ye most elaborate and exquisite Gothic architecture I ever saw, one part being left imperfect, being so beautiful that nobody dar’d to finish it. When we took leave of our old prior next morning ye only request he made us was that we would relate to ye minister how much their fabric had suffered by the earthquake [i.e. of 1755], and how much they needed ye King’s assistance to repair it: whereas I could not help observing that every one of our friends who had been particularly assiduous about us at Alcobaça desired us to remember their names particularly at Lisbon.”
Alas! priors and monks, rich and poor, have all gone now, and the place is a “national monument,” with hardly a pretence of being a place of worship.
The interior of the church is almost severe in its plainness, the lofty narrow nave being divided by clustered pillars arranged in a somewhat peculiar manner; the three pillars facing the nave supporting the groins of the main roof, whilst from the remaining three spring the groining of the aisle. Before the high altar, and close to the steps, are two magnificent tombs side by side, the recumbent figures upon them hand in hand; the male in full armour, the woman clasping a book. “Hic Jacet Eduardus I., Port. et Alg., Rex et Regina, Elenora Uxor Ejus,” runs the inscription around the fillet; and this is the tomb of the unhappy Duarte, son of John the Great and Philippa of Lancaster, who died of a broken heart, whilst still young, at the disaster to his arms and house in the defeat of his crusading attack upon Tangier.
As Beckford saw the church during service it must have throbbed with the life and colour that it now lacks.
“There is greater plainness [i.e. than Winchester], less panelling, and fewer intersections in the vaulted roof: but the utmost richness of hue, at this time of day at least, was not wanting. No tapestry however rich, no painting however vivid, could equal the gorgeousness of the tint, the splendour of the golden and ruby light which streamed forth from the long series of stained glass windows: it played, flickering about in all directions on pavement and on roof, casting over every object myriads of glowing mellow shadows, ever in undulating motion, like the reflection of branches swayed to and fro in the breeze. We all partook of these gorgeous tints, the white monastic garments of my conductors seemed as it were embroidered with the brightest flowers of paradise, and our whole procession kept advancing invested with celestial colours.”
Iconoclasm and war have wrought their fell work upon Batalha since then; but still the lovely fane stands materially uninjured. The transept-chapels and sacristy are fine, especially the latter, though the seventeenth-century carved woodwork matches ill with the exquisite pure Gothic groining of the roof, and the great yellow sarcophagus of Diego Lopez de Souza, master of the Order of Christ, in the adjoining chapel of St. Barbara, is a remarkable piece of sixteenth-century work.
One of the great glories of Batalha is the side chapel already mentioned, the octagonal “chapel of the Founder.” The arrangement of it and its general effect are strikingly like those of Queen Victoria’s mausoleum at Frogmore. In the centre, standing high and imposing in all the pomp of Gothic tracery, are the twin tombs of John the Great and his English wife, their sculptured effigies hand in hand as the noble pair went through life; and around the chapel are ranged the sarcophagi of their sons Pedro, João, Fernando (who chivalrously passed all the best years of his life a hostage to the Moor), and, the greatest of them all, the Prince Dom Henrique the Navigator, who made Portugal a world power. Upon each stone coffin are carved the insignia of the Garter and the arms of England quartered with those of Portugal, and along the fillets run the quaint mottoes that each royal personage adopted for his device. Some of them are enigmatical; such as that which consists of the repetition of the word “Désir” alternating with the scale of justice, and the other that offers the riddle of “VII.,” a cogwheel, and “Jamais” repeated again and again. “Pro rege pro grege,” on the other hand, if hackneyed, is still quite intelligible.