In works of charity—that redeeming virtue of the monastic system—the fathers of Yuste were diligent and bounteous. Six hundred fanegas, or about one hundred and twenty quarters of wheat, in ordinary years, and in years of scarcity, as much as fifteen hundred fanegas, were distributed at the convent-gate; large donations of bread, meat, and oil, and some money, were made, either publicly or in private, by the prior, at Easter and other festivals; and the sick poor in the village of Quacos were freely supplied with food, medicine, and advice.
The lodging, or palace, as the friars loved to call it, of the emperor, was constructed under the eye of Fray Antonio de Villacastin, a brother of the house, and afterwards well known to fame as the master of the works at the Escorial. The site of it had been inspected in May, 1554, by Philip II., then on his way to England to marry queen Mary Tudor. Backed by the massive south wall of the church, the building presented its simple front of two stories to the garden and the noontide sun. Each story contained four chambers, two on either side of a corridor, which traverses the structure from east to west, and leads at either end into a broad porch, or covered gallery, supported on pillars, and open to the air. All the rooms were furnished with ample fire-places, in accordance with the Flemish wants and ways of the inhabitants. The chambers which look on the garden are bright and pleasant, but those on the north side are gloomy, and even dark, the light being admitted only by windows opening on the corridor, or on the external and deeply-shadowed porches. Charles inhabited the upper rooms, and slept in that at the north-east corner, from which a door or window had been cut through the church wall, within the chancel, and close to the high altar. From the eastern porch, or gallery, an inclined path led down into the garden, to save him the fatigue of going up and down stairs. His attendants were, for the most part, lodged in apartments built for them near the new cloister; and the hostel of the convent was given up to the physician, the bakers, and the brewers. His private rooms being surrounded on three sides by the garden, he took exclusive possession of that, and put it under the care of gardeners of his own. The friars established their potherbs in a piece of ground to the eastward, behind some tall elm trees, and adjoining the emperor's domain, but separated from it by a high wall, which they caused to be built when they found that he wished for complete seclusion.
Time, with its chances and changes, has dealt rudely with this fair home of the monarch and the monk. Yuste was sacked in 1809 by the French invader; and in later years, the Spanish reformer has annihilated the race of picturesque drones, who, for a while, re-occupied, and might have repaired the ruins of their pleasant hive. Of the two cloisters, the greater is choked with the rubbish of its fallen upper story, its richly-carved capitals peeping here and there from the soil and wild shrubs. Two sides of the smaller and older cloister still stands, with tottering blackened walls, and rotting floors and ceilings. The strong, granite-vaulted church is a hollow shell; the fine wood-work of its stalls has been partly used for fuel, partly carried off to the parish church of Quacos; and the beautiful blue and yellow tiles which lined the chancel are fast dropping from the walls. In the emperor's dwelling, the lower chambers are turned into a magazine of firewood, and in the rooms above, where he lived and died, maize and olives are garnered, and the silkworm winds its cocoon in dust and darkness. But the lovely face of nature, the hill, the forest, and the field, the generous soil and the genial sky, remain with charms unchanged, to testify how well the imperial eagle chose the nest wherein to fold his wearied wings. From the balcony of Charles's cabinet the eye ranges over a foreground of rounded knolls, clad in walnut and chestnut, in which the mountain dies gently away into the broad bosom of the Vera. Not a building is in sight, but a summer-house, peering above mulberry tops, at the lower side of the garden, and a hermitage of Our Lady of Solitude, about a mile distant, hung upon a rocky height, that swells like an isle out of the sea of forest. Immediately below the windows the garden slopes gently to the sun, shaded here and there with the massive foliage of the fig, or feathery almond boughs, and breathing perfume from tall orange-trees, cuttings of which some monks, themselves transplanted, vainly strove to keep alive at the bleak Escorial. And beyond the west wall, filling all the wide space in front of the gates of the convent and the palace, rises the noble shade of the great walnut-tree, el nogal grande, of Yuste—a forest king, which has seen the hermit's cell rise into a royal convent, and sink into a ruin; which has seen the beginning and the end of the Spanish order of Jerome, and the Spanish dynasty of Austria.
At Xarandilla, Charles had cast aside the last shreds of the purple. The annual revenue which he had reserved to himself out of the wealth of half the world, was twelve thousand ducats, or about fifteen hundred pounds sterling. His confidential attendants were eleven in number: Luis Quixada, chamberlain and chief of the household; Martin Gatzelu, secretary; William Van Male, gentleman of the chamber; Moron, gentleman of the chamber and almoner; Juan Gaytan, steward; Henrique Matisio Charles Pubest, usher; and two valets. Juanelo Turiano, an Italian engineer, who had acquired a considerable reputation by his hydraulic works to supply water to the Alcazar of Toledo, was engaged to assist in the philosophical experiments and mechanical labors which formed the emperor's principal amusement. Last, but not least, a Jeromite father from Sta. Engracia, at Zaragoza, Fray Juan de Regla, filled the important post of confessor. The lower rank of servants, cooks, brewers, bakers, grooms, and scullions, and a couple of laundresses, swelled the total number of his household to about sixty persons, an establishment not greater than was then maintained by many a private hidalgo.
The mayordomo, Luis Quixada, or, to give him his entire appellation, Luis Mendez Quixada Manuel de Figueredo y Mendoza, is worthy of notice, not only as first minister of this tiny court, but as being closely associated with one of the greatest names in the military history of Europe. A courtier and soldier from his early youth, he was heir of an elder brother, slain before Tunis, who had been one of the most distinguished captains of the famous infantry of Castille; and he had been himself for many years the tried companion-in-arms and the trusted personal friend of the emperor. In 1549, he married Doña Magdalena de Ulloa, a lady of ancient race and gentlest nature, with whom he retired for a while to his patrimonial lordship of Villagarcia, near Valladolid.
On his quitting the court at Brussels, Charles confided to his care his illegitimate son, Don Juan of Austria, then a boy of four years old, exacting a promise of strict secrecy as to his parentage. The boy was accordingly brought up with the tenderest care by the childless Magdalena: and the secret of his birth so well kept, that she, for many years, suspected him to be the fruit of some early attachment of her lord. When the emperor retired to Yuste, Quixada followed him thither, removing his household from Villagarcia, and establishing it in the neighborhood of the convent, probably in the village of Quacos.
He was thus enabled to enjoy somewhat of the society of his wife, and the emperor had the gratification of seeing his son when he chose. Don Juan was now a fine lad, in his eleventh year. He passed amongst the neighbors for Quixada's page, and remained under the guardianship of Doña Magdalena, whose efforts to imbue him with devotion towards the Blessed Virgin are supposed by his historians to have borne good fruit in the banners, embroidered with Our Lady's image, which floated from his galleys at Lepanto. He likewise exercised in the Yuste forest the cross-bow, which had dealt destruction amongst the sparrows of Leganes, his early home in Castille.
If the number of servants in the train of Charles should savor, in this age, somewhat of unnecessary parade, the ascetic character of the recluse will be redeemed by a glance at the interior of his dwelling. "The palace of Yuste, when prepared for his reception, seemed," says the historian Sandoval, "rather to have been newly pillaged by the enemy, than furnished for a great prince." Accustomed from his infancy to the finest tapestry designed by Italian pencils for the looms of Flanders, he now lived within walls entirety bare, except in his bedchamber, which was hung with coarse brown or black cloth. The sole appliances for rest to be found in his apartments were a bed and an old arm-chair, not worth four reals. Four silver trenchers of the plainest kind, for the use of his table, were the only things amongst his goods and chattels which could tempt a thief to break through and steal. A few choice pictures alone remained with him, as memorials of the magnificence which he had foregone, and of the arts which he had so loved. Over the high altar of the convent church, and within sight of his bed, he is said to have placed that celebrated composition known as The Glory of Titian, a picture of the Last Judgment, in which Charles, his beautiful empress, and their royal children, were represented, in the great painter's noblest style, as entering the heavenly mansions of life eternal. He had also brought with him a portrait of the empress, and a picture of Our Lord's Agony in the Garden, likewise from the easel of Titian; and there is now at the Escorial a masterpiece by the same hand—St. Jerome praying in his garden, which is traditionally reputed to have hung in his oratory at Yuste.
From the garden beneath the palace windows the emperor's table was supplied with fruit and vegetables: and a couple of cows, grazing in the forest, furnished him with milk. A pony and an old mule composed the entire stud of the prince, who formerly took peculiar pleasure in possessing the stoutest chargers of Guelderland, and the fleetest genets of Cordova.
To atone, perhaps, for such deficiency of creature comforts, the general of the Jeromites and the prior of Yuste had been at some pains to provide their guest with spiritual luxuries. Knowing his passionate love of music, they had recruited the force of their choir with fourteen or fifteen brethren, distinguished for their fine voices and musical skill. And for his sole benefit and delectation, they had provided no less than three preachers, the most eloquent in the Spanish fold of Jerome. The first of these, Fray Juan de Açaloras, harangued his way to the bishopric of the Canaries; the second, Fray Francisco de Villalva, also obtained by his sermons great fame, and the post of chaplain to Philip II.; while the third, Fray Juan de Santandres, though less noted as an orator, was had in reverence as a prophet, having foretold the exact day and hour of his own death.