The interior of the church presents a marked contrast to the façade. The impression produced is one of ponderous solidity and permanence, and the stern devotional character of all the ecclesiastical buildings founded by the great Affonso Henriques, first king of Portugal, in the twelfth century is again conspicuous, though even here a cornice of gilt curly wood lines the fine chancel arch. The nave though somewhat narrow is impressive and handsome, separated from the aisles by square pillars of immense size, broader than the spaces between them. From brackets or ledges at various heights from the ground upon the front and sides of these pillars spring the simple arches and groining of the roof, each pillar carrying its arch right over the nave, so that each set of simple groins is separated from the rest by the arch moulding. The aisles, very narrow, seem overwhelmed by the immense square pillars, and it is easy to understand in the face of this stern interior that the notoriously luxurious and self-indulgent monks of Alcobaça did their best to soften the austerity of their surroundings. That they did so to some purpose is seen both by Beckford’s account of his visit and by my Strathmore manuscript of 1760. The account given by Lord Strathmore is worth transcribing:—
“The minister having ... ordered them to do us ye utmost honour they were capable of, we found a large place before the convent so crowded with people that it was necessary for a guard of militia which they had summoned to make a lane for us up ye steps. At ye door we were reciev’d in form by ye guardian and first people of ye fraternity with ye utmost ceremony, and conducted by ye light of torches thro’ cloisters of Gothic arcades with ye whole college in procession to our apartments.... Our rooms were extremely spacious, and were hung with crimson damask and gold, ye floor cover’d with Persian carpets, and our beds in alcoves deck’d with embroidered coverlids. We had a basin and ewer brought to wash before supper, and on another salver a napkin of fine linen, curiously pinck’t and strew’d with rose-leaves and orange-flowers. We then pas’t into the next room, where we found a large table groaning under a service of monstrous dishes.”
The writer comments unfavourably upon all the eatables placed before him, reeking, as they did, he says, of garlic, bad oil, and other horrors, and he comments upon the tasteless lavishness of the fare. He then continues:—
“At last, after having drank reciprocally all ye healths that we thought would be required on either side, we retir’d to repose. The next morning we were no sooner dres’t than we found ye whole college assembled in ye next room at our levee. We breakfasted in state, at ye end of a long table with ye rest seated round ye room, and admiring ye peculiar grace with which we put every morsel into our mouths. After breakfast we were attended thro’ ye convent, and had everything explain’d to us, which I must own gave me great pleasure. They are of ye Cistercian order, and ye richest in Portugal, possessing a vast tract of land which is said to bring them in £50,000 per annum. Their magnificence is in every way proportionable. Their church is Gothic, but extremely noble, ye plate, jewels and ornaments, copes, etc. are as rich as possible.... They have no taste or design in their expenditure, and seem to study richness rather than elegance in all they do. As they reign, so they entertain, like princes over the district. In the evening we saw their great altar lighted up at vespers, which at the end of a long Gothic aisle had a most striking effect with ye organ and voices altogether impressing upon the mind most solemn awe.”
Remains of the tasteless splendour referred to are still to be seen on all sides. The gilt-trimmed chancel arch, the high altar, with its blue starred globe and wooden gilt rays in the centre, and popes carved and gilt in niches each side, amidst gold whirligigs galore, are as incongruous as can be with the stern, simple nave: and the altars of the north transept and retro choir all present the same features, some of them, moreover, being in a lamentable state of dilapidation, inciting to derision rather than devotion. In the north transept, hard by the thirteenth-century sepulchral stones of Affonso II. and Affonso III., is a dark but beautiful Gothic hall, the holy of holies of the monastery, “the chapel of the tombs,” the resting-place of several of the earlier princes of the royal house.
UNDER THE ACACIAS, ALCOBAÇA.
The most striking objects in it are two magnificent sarcophagi in florid decorated Gothic. The recumbent figures of king and queen upon them, as fair and perfect as the day they were sculptured, rest, not hand in hand as upon most similar tombs, but foot to foot. For these are the sepulchres of Pedro the Just and his murdered mistress, Ines de Castro, done to death by servile nobles beside the “fountain of love” in the “garden of tears” at Coimbra, and the faithful king ordered the body of himself and his beloved to be laid thus, so that when the universal trump should call him to arise, the first object upon which his reopened eyes should rest would be her, who, though unwed, was yet his wife through all eternity.
Kings, queens, and princes, whose names now mean little even in the country where they held sway and nothing elsewhere, lie around in tombs of varying magnificence, together with débris and relics of times earlier than any of them. The usual dense ignorance is displayed by the guardian of the objects he is supposed to describe; for he points out two very small ancient sarcophagi, one of them obviously Byzantine Romanesque, and the other probably pre-Christian, and tells you gravely that they once contained the bodies of Ines de Castro’s children. Both of them are centuries earlier than her time, and her only children grew up and survived her. But this is not more absurd than the representation, in the current English “History of Portugal,” of a lady in the height of the Portuguese fashion of the end of the seventeenth century as Ines de Castro, who lived in the fourteenth.
The cloister of the monastery presents the characteristics of two styles. The lower part is pure early Gothic, like the church and chapter-house, with simple rose lights in each arch; but the upper storey has evidently been added or rebuilt in the early sixteenth century in good Manueline taste; and in one corner there is a very beautiful fountain in the same style bearing the monogram of the “Fortunate” monarch Manuel himself. The vast refectory, of which Beckford spoke so sneeringly, as dirty and slovenly, is entered by a handsome Manueline doorway, and is now being restored. The entrance to the sacristy is also a fine specimen of Manueline, but inside the bad taste of the late seventeenth-century monks is rampant. All around the great square apartment are carved and gilt niches, in which are dozens of life-sized busts also carved and gilt, of saints and bishop, each of which has a hollow for a relic upon the breast, all now despoiled of their contents; and the precious treasury of jewels, ornaments, and embroidery that aroused the envious admiration of the virtuoso Beckford, has all disappeared, many of the most beautiful and precious objects being now in the Museum of Fine Arts at Lisbon, a storehouse of mediæval goldsmith’s work unsurpassed in Europe, though almost completely neglected both by residents and visitors to the capital.