One there was, let us not forget it, who not bodily present, had a lion's share in the victory. A second Moses, with uplifted hands, St. Pius V., had prayed God and Our Lady, to aid Don John's arms. "The night before the battle, and the day itself, aged as he was, and broken with disease, the Saint had passed in the Vatican in fasting and prayer. All through the Holy City the monasteries and the colleges were in prayer too. As the evening advanced, the Pontifical treasurer asked an audience of the Sovereign Pontiff on an important matter. Pius was in his bedroom, and began to converse with him; when suddenly he stopped the conversation, left him, threw open the window, and gazed up into heaven. Then closing it again, he looked gravely at his official, and said, "This is no time for business; go, return thanks to the Lord God. In this very hour our fleet has engaged the Turkish, and is victorious." As the treasurer went out, he saw him fall on his knees before the altar in thankfulness and joy."
The great writer, from whom we have taken the above account of St. Pius the Fifth's supernatural knowledge of the victory, remarks "that the victories gained over the Turks since are but the complements and the reverberations of the overthrow at Lepanto."
Here we may take leave of the hero of Lepanto, leaving him in the midst of his glory, receiving the thanks of Christendom, from the lips of a Saint—its Supreme Pontiff. We need not follow Don John of Austria on his expedition against Tunis—a barren conquest his too imaginative mind dreamed of converting into a great African empire. Nor need we follow him when he goes, disguised as a Moorish page, accompanied by a single cavalier, to undertake the bootless task of pacifying the revolted Netherlands. The incidents and intrigues of this task rather belong to the history of the Low Countries than to the story of our hero. In the midst of them, worn out by too ardent a spirit, or stricken by an epidemic, Don John expired, in his camp near Namur, at the early age of thirty-two, on October 1, 1578. The task of saving a part of the revolted provinces to the Spanish crown, he left to the strong arm and genius of his cousin Alexander Farnese.
Don John's desire was to be buried beside his father in Spain. His body, says Strada, was dismembered and secretly carried across France, onwards to Madrid, where it was, as it were, reconstructed and decked with armor to be shown to Philip, who might well weep at such ghastly display. The heart of the hero is kept, to this day, behind the high altar of the Cathedral of Namur.
Generous, high-spirited, courageous, he was a true knight-errant, the "last Crusader whom the annals of chivalry were to know; the man who had humbled the crescent as it had not been humbled since the days of the Tancreds, the Baldwins, the Plantagenets." Endowed with a brilliant imagination, he dreamed of founding an African empire, and it faded away as the mirage of some oasis amid the deserts of the dark continent. With his sword, he thought to free, some day, Mary Queen of Scots, from her prison, and to place her on the throne held by Elizabeth. But the object of his ravings died on the scaffold, while he himself passed away, leaving behind him little more for history to record than that he was the brilliant young soldier—the Hero of Lepanto.
W. C. R. in Catholic Progress.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] Hita, "Guerras de Granada," quoted by Prescott, "Philip" II., III., 133.