The solemn funeral services, or the honors, as they were called, were commenced the next day, Tuesday, the 27th of October. They were an expansion of the rites in which the emperor had himself taken part a few weeks before, and they lasted for three days. Mass was said each day by the Archbishop of Toledo, the prior of Yuste assisting as deacon, and the prior of Granada as subdeacon, amongst the tears of the whole brotherhood. Funeral services were also preached, on the first day by the eloquent Villalva, on the second by the prior of Granada, and on the third by the prior of Yuste. The imperial dust was then committed to the earth. "Let my sepulchre," said the will of Charles, "be so ordered, that the lower half of my body lie beneath, and the upper half before, the high altar, that the priest who says mass may tread upon my head and breast." But the clergy present being divided in opinion as to the lawfulness of placing under the high altar a corpse not in the odor of sanctity, the matter was compromised by laying the coffin in a cavity made in the wall behind, so that it encroached only on a small portion of the holy ground.
Funeral honors also took place in the presence of the regent and her court, in the beautiful church of the Royal Benedictines at Valladolid. A sermon was preached on the occasion by Francisco Borja, from the text, "Ecce longavi fugiens et mansi in solitudine."—"Lo! then would I wander afar off, and remain in the wilderness." (Psalm lv. 7.)[L] It was filled with praise of the emperor for his pious magnanimity in taking leave of the world before the world had taken leave of him—praise which, from the mouth of a Jesuit who had once been a wealthy grandee, must have savored somewhat of self-glorification. Amongst other edifying reminiscences of his friend, Borja told his hearers that he had it from the lips of the deceased, that never, since he was one-and-twenty years old, had he failed to set apart some portion of each day for inward prayer.
Brussels excelled all the other cities of the Austrian dominion in the splendor with which she did honor to the emperor's memory. The ceremonies took place on the 29th and 30th of December. The procession, in which King Philip walked, attended by the dukes of Savoy and Brunswick, and a host of the nobility of Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands, was two hours in passing from the palace to the church of St. Gudule. Its principal feature was a huge galley, large enough for marine service, placed on a cunningly devised sea, which answered the double purpose of supporting some isles, emblematic of the Indies, and of concealing the power which rolled the huge structure along. Faith, Hope, and Charity, were the crew of this enchanted bark; and her sides were hung with twelve paintings of Charles's principal exploits, which were further set forth in golden letter-press on the black satin sails. A long line of horses followed, each led by two gentlemen, and bearing on its housings the blazon of one of the states of the emperor. They were led up the aisle of the church past the altar, and the seats occupied by the order of the Golden Fleece. As the last horse, covered with a black foot-cloth, went by, the count of Bossu, one of the knights, the early playmate and dear friend of the emperor, threw himself on his knees, and remained for some time prostrated on the pavement in an agony of grief.
The chapel of Yuste was merely a temporary resting-place of the royal dead. In his will the emperor had confided the care of his bones to his son, expressing a wish, however, to be laid beside his wife and his father in the cathedral of Granada, in that splendid chapel-royal, rich with the tombs and trophies of Ferdinand and Isabella. Philip, however, shivering in the rear at St. Quentin, had already vowed to St. Lawrence the great monastery which it was his after delight to make the chief monument of the power and the piety of the house of Hapsburg. At the Escorial, therefore, he united the bones of his father and mother, and placed them, on the fourth of February, 1574, in a vault beneath the jasper shrine, which yet contains their fine effigies, wrought in bronze by Leoni. The occasion was marked by one of those terrific storms, sent, as the monks supposed, by the devil, in the hope of overthrowing that fortress of piety. A grand arch of timber, erected at the door of the church, was blown away, and its hangings of rich brocades, rent into minute shreds, were scattered far and wide over the surrounding chase. Eighty years later, the repose of the emperor was once more broken by his great-grandson, Philip IV. For thirty-three years that prince was engaged in building the celebrated Pantheon, begun by his father, Philip III. On the sixteenth of March, 1654, the dust of the Austrian kings of Spain and of their consorts who had continued the line, was translated from the plain vault of Philip II. to this splendid sepulchral chamber, which gleamed, in the light of a thousand tapers, with its marble and jasper and gold, like a creation of oriental romance. Each coffin was borne by three nobles and three Jeromite friars; the procession being headed by that of Charles V., carried by Don Luis de Haro, the Duke of Abrantes, and the Marquess of Aytona. As the remains were to be deposited in a marble sarcophagus, it became necessary to remove the previous coverings, which enabled Philip IV. to come face to face with his great ancestor. The body of the emperor was found to be quite entire. After looking at it for some minutes in silence, the king turned to Haro, and said, "Honored body, Don Luis." "Very honored," replied the minister; words, brief indeed, but very pregnant; for the prior of the Escorial has left it recorded "that they condensed all that a Christian ought to feel on so solemn an occasion."
Charles did not leave the world without some of those portents in which the men of that age loved to trace the influence of a remarkable death upon the operations of nature. A comet appeared over the monastery at the beginning of his last illness, and was seen no more after the night on which he died. In the spring of 1558, a lily in his garden, beneath his windows, bore two buds, of which one flowered and withered in due course, but the other remained a bud through the summer and autumn, to the great astonishment of the gardener and the friars. But on the night of the twenty-first of September it burst into full bloom, an emblem of the whiteness of the parting spirit, and of the sure and certain hope of its reception into bliss. It was reverently gathered, and fastened upon the black veil which covered the sacramental shrine in the church. In the week following the grand obsequies, a pied bird, large as a vulture, but of a kind unknown at Yuste, perched at night on the roof of the church, exactly over the imperial grave, and disturbed the friars by barking like a dog. For five successive nights it barked there in the clear moonlight, always at the same hour, and always arriving from the east, and flying away towards the west. And four years later, a holy Capuchin of the New World, Fray Luis Mendez, as he knelt in his convent-chapel at Guatemala, was blessed with a vision, wherein he saw the emperor before the judgment-seat of our Lord, making his defence against the accusing demons, with so much success that he received honorable acquittal, and was in the end carried off to heaven by the angels of light.
The codicil of the will of Charles, the only part of the document which belongs to his life at Yuste, is drawn up with a minuteness of detail very characteristic of the careful habits of the man. After a profession of attachment to the church, and hatred of heresy, and after the directions for his burial which have been already noticed, he proceeds to describe a monument and an altar-piece which he wished to be erected in the church of the convent, in the event of Yuste being chosen by his son for the final resting-place of his bones. The altar-piece was to be of alabaster, a copy in relief of Titian's picture of the "Last Judgment," the picture on which he was gazing at the moment when he first felt the touch of death. A custodia, or sacramental tabernacle, was likewise to be made of alabaster and marble, and placed between statues of himself and the empress. They were to be sculptured, kneeling with hands clasped as in prayer, barefoot, and with uncovered heads, and clad in sheets like penitents. For further particulars, he referred the king to Luis Quixada, and the confessor Regla, who were fully instructed in his meaning and wishes. In case of the removal of his body, instead of the altar-piece and monument, the convent was to receive a picture for their altar, of such kind as the king shall appoint. In compliance with this desire, Philip presented the monks with a copy of Titian's "Judgment," which adorned their high altar until the suppression of the convents, in 1823, when it was carried off to the parish church of Texeda.
The emperor next expresses his concern at hearing that the pensions which he had granted to the servants whom he had dismissed at Xarandilla, had been very ill-paid, and he entreats the king to order their punctual payment for the future. He directs that the friars of Yuste and the friars from other convents, who had been specially employed in his service, as readers, preachers, and musicians, shall receive such gratuities as shall appear sufficient to father Regla and Quixada. To the confessor himself he bequeaths an annual pension of four hundred ducats (about 80l. sterling), and four hundred ducats in legacy. Of Luis Quixada he twice speaks in the most affectionate terms, acknowledging his long and good service, and his willing fidelity in incurring the expense and inconvenience of removing his wife and household to Yuste. Lamenting that he has done so little to promote his interest, he earnestly recommends him to the king's favor, and, with a legacy of 2000 ducats, he leaves him a pension to the value of his present appointment (without mentioning the sum), until he is provided with a place of greater emolument. He also desires that the Infanta will cause the amount of fines recovered by his attorney, or that might be recovered in cases still pending against the poachers and rioters of Quacos, to be paid into the hands of a person named by the executors for distribution amongst the poor of the village. The contents of his larder and cellar, and his stores of provisions in general, at the day of his decease, and likewise the dispensary, with its drugs and vessels, he leaves to the brotherhood of Yuste, and to the poor any money which may remain in his coffers after defraying the wages of his servants.
These are all mentioned by name, and for the most part receive pensions, except a few to whom small gratuities are given, it being explained that previous provision has been made for them. The pensions range from four hundred florins (32l. sterling), conferred on the doctor, Enrique Mathesio, to ninety florins, which requite the services of Isabel Plantin, the laundress of the table-linen. The gratuities vary from 150,000 maravedis (about 45l. sterling), left to the secretary Gaztelu, to 7500, given to Jorge de Diana, a boy employed in the workshop of Torriano. That mechanician being already pensioned to the amount of 200 crowns, receives only 15,000 maravedis; he is likewise reminded that he has been paid something to account on the price of a clock which is in hand, and for which his employer is content that the executors shall pay a fair valuation.
These sums were all to be paid at Valladolid. After the funeral service was ended, therefore, on the 29th of October, when the count of Oropesa and the other neighbors returned to their homes, and the archbishop took the road to Toledo, most of the household of the emperor were also ready to depart. Only three Flemings remained behind for a few days to bring up the rear with the heavy baggage. Within about a fortnight after the death of Charles, the Jeromites of Yuste were again alone among the yellow October woods, and the convent relapsed into its ancient obscurity, never more to be remembered, except as the cell of the imperial recluse.
So ended the career of Charles V., the greatest monarch of the memorable sixteenth century. The vast extent of his dominions in Europe, the wealth poured into his coffers by the New World, the energy and sagacity of his mind, and the important crisis of the world's history in which he acted, have combined to make him more famous than any of the successors of Charlemagne. The admiration which was raised by the great events of his reign was sustained to the last by the unwonted manner of its close. In our days, abdication has been so frequently the refuge of weak men fallen on evil times, or the last shift of baffled bad men, that it is difficult for us to conceive the sensation which must have been produced by the retirement of Charles. Now that the "divinity which doth hedge a king" has decayed into a bowing wall and a tottering fence, it is almost impossible to look upon the solemn ceremony which was enacted at Brussels, with the feeling and eyes of the sixteenth century. The act of the emperor was not, indeed, a thing altogether unheard of, but it was known only in books, and belonged, as the Spaniard used to say, to the days of king Wamba. The knights of the Fleece who wept on the platform around their Cæsar, knew little more about Diocletian than was known by the farmers and clothiers who elbowed each other in the crowd below. It was only some studious monk who was aware that a Theodosius and an Isaac had submitted their heads to the razor to save their necks from the bowstring; that a Lothaire had led a hermit's life in the Ardennes; that a Carloman had milked the ewes of the Benedictines at Monte Cassino. The retirement of Charles, therefore, was fitted to strike the imagination of men by the novelty of the occasion, by the solemnity of its circumstances, by the splendor of the resigned crown, and by the world-wide fame with which it had been worn.