[326] "No se si toviera sufrimiento para no salir de aqui arremediallo." Carta del Emperador á la Princesa, 25 de Mayo, 1568, MS.
[327] The history of this affair furnishes a good example of the crescit eundo. The author of the MS. discovered by M. Bakhuizen, noticed more fully in the next note, though present at the ceremony, contents himself with a general outline of it. Siguença, who follows next in time and in authority, tells us of the lighted candle which Charles delivered to the priest. Strada, who wrote a generation later, concludes the scene by leaving the emperor in a swoon upon the floor. Lastly, Robertson, after making the emperor perform in his shroud, lays him in his coffin, where, after joining in the prayers for the rest of his own soul, not yet departed, he is left by the monks to his meditations!—Where Robertson got all these particulars it would not be easy to tell; certainly not from the authorities cited at the bottom of his page.
[328] "Et j'assure que le cœur nous fendait de voir qu'un homme voulût en quelque sorte s'enterrer vivant, et faire ses obsèques avant de mourir." Gachard, Retraite et Mort, tom. I. p lvi.
M. Gachard has given a translation of the chapter relating to the funeral, from a curious MS. account of Charles's convent life, discovered by M. Bakhuizen in the archives at Brussels. As the author was one of the brotherhood who occupied the convent at the time of the emperor's residence there, the MS. is stamped with the highest authority; and M. Gachard will doubtless do a good service to letters by incorporating it in the second volume of his "Retraite et Mort."
[329] Siguença, Hist. de la Orden de San Geronimo, parte III. pp. 200, 201.
Siguença's work, which combines much curious learning with a simple elegance of style, was the fruit of many years of labor. The third volume, containing the part relating to the emperor, appeared in 1605, the year before the death of its author, who, as already noticed, must have had daily communication with several of the monks, when, after Charles's death, they had been transferred from Yuste to the gloomy shades of the Escorial.
[330] Such, for example, were Vera y Figueroa, Conde de la Roca, whose little volume appeared in 1613; Strada, who wrote some twenty years later; and the marquis of Valparayso, whose MS. is dated 1638. I say nothing of Sandoval, often quoted as authority for the funeral, for, as he tells us that the money which the emperor proposed to devote to a mock funeral was after all appropriated to his real one, it would seem to imply that the former never took place.
It were greatly to be wished that the MS. of Fray Martin de Angulo could be detected and brought to light. As prior of Yuste while Charles was there, his testimony would be invaluable. Both Sandoval and the marquis of Valparayso profess to have relied mainly on Angulo's authority. Yet in this very affair of the funeral they disagree.
[331] Siguença's composition may be characterized as simplex munditiis. The MS. of the monk of Yuste, found in Brussels, is stamped, says M. Gachard, with the character of simplicity and truth. Retraite et Mort, tom. I. p. xx.
[332] Mignet, Charles-Quint, p. 1.