History of the Reign of Philip the Second, King of Spain Part 40 (1/2)

Having thus discharged their painful office, Arellano and the governor withdrew, and, summoning the friar, left the prisoner to the spiritual consolations he so much needed. What followed, we have from Castillo himself. As Montigny's agitation subsided, he listened patiently to the exhortations of the good father; and when at length restored to something like his natural composure, he joined with him earnestly in prayer. He then confessed and received the sacrament, seeming desirous of employing the brief s.p.a.ce that yet remained to him in preparation for the solemn change. At intervals, when not actually occupied with his devotions, he read the compositions of Father Luis de Granada, whose spiritualized conceptions had often solaced the hours of his captivity.

Montigny was greatly disturbed by the rumor of his having been shaken in his religious principles, and having embraced the errors of the Reformers. To correct this impression, he briefly drew up, with his own hand, a confession of faith, in which he avows as implicit a belief in all the articles sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church, and its head, the Vicar of Christ, as Pius the Fifth himself could have desired.[1254]

Having thus relieved his mind, Montigny turned to settle some temporal affairs which he was desirous to settle. They did not occupy much time.

For, as Philip had truly remarked, there was no occasion for him to make a will, since he had nothing to bequeath,--all his property having been confiscated to the crown.[1255] If, however, any debt pressed heavily on his conscience, he was to be allowed to indicate it, as well as any provision which he particularly desired to make for a special purpose.

This was on the condition, however, that he should allude to himself as about to die a natural death.[1256]

Montigny profited by this to express the wish that ma.s.ses, to the number of seven hundred, might be said for his soul, that sundry sums might be appropriated to private uses, and that some gratuities might be given to certain of his faithful followers. It may interest the reader to know that the ma.s.ses were punctually performed. In regard to the pious legacies, the king wrote to Alva, he must first see if Montigny's estate would justify the appropriation; as for the gratuities to servants, they were wholly out of the question.[1257]

One token of remembrance, which he placed in the hands of Castillo, doubtless reached its destination. This was a gold chain of delicate workmans.h.i.+p, with a seal or signet ring attached to it, bearing his arms. This little token he requested might be given to his wife. It had been his constant companion ever since they were married; and he wished her to wear it in memory of him,--expressing at the same time his regret that a longer life had not been granted him, to serve and honor her. As a dying injunction he besought her not to be entangled by the new doctrines, or to swerve from the faith of her ancestors.--If ever Montigny had a leaning to the doctrines of the Reformation, it could hardly have deepened into conviction; for early habit and education rea.s.serted their power so entirely, at this solemn moment, that the Dominican by his side declared that he gave evidence of being as good and Catholic a Christian as he could wish to be himself.[1258] The few hours in which Montigny had thus tasted of the bitterness of death seemed to have done more to wean him from the vanities of life than the whole years of dreary imprisonment he had pa.s.sed within the walls of Segovia and Simancas. Yet we shall hardly credit the friar's a.s.sertion, that he carried his resignation so far, that, though insisting on his own innocence, he admitted the sentence of his judges to be just![1259]

At about two o'clock on the morning of the sixteenth of October, when the interval allowed for this solemn preparation had expired, Father Castillo waited on the governor and the alcalde, to inform them that the hour had come, and that their prisoner was ready to receive them. They went, without further delay, to the chamber of death, attended by the notary and the executioner. Then, in their presence, while the notary made a record of the proceedings, the grim minister of the law did his work on his unresisting victim.[1260]

No sooner was the breath out of the body of Montigny, than the alcalde, the priest, and their two companions were on their way back to Valladolid, reaching it before dawn, so as to escape the notice of the inhabitants. All were solemnly bound to secrecy in regard to the dark act in which they had been engaged. The notary and the hangman were still further secured by the menace of death, in case they betrayed any knowledge of the matter; and they knew full well that Philip was not a man to shrink from the execution of his menaces.[1261]

[Sidenote: HIS LAST MOMENTS.]

The corpse was arrayed in a Franciscan habit, which, coming up to the throat, left the face only exposed to observation. It was thus seen by Montigny's servants, who recognised the features of their master, hardly more distorted than sometimes happens from disease, when the agonies of death have left their traces. The story went abroad that their lord had died of the fever with which he had been so violently attacked.

The funeral obsequies were performed, according to the royal orders, with all due solemnity. The vicar and beneficiaries of the church of St.

Saviour officiated on the occasion. The servants of the deceased were clad in mourning,--a token of respect recommended by Philip, who remarked, the servants were so few, that mourning might as well be given to them;[1262] and he was willing to take charge of this and the other expenses of the funeral, provided Montigny had not left money sufficient for the purpose. The place selected for his burial was a vault under one of the chapels of the building; and a decent monument indicated the spot where reposed the ashes of the last of the envoys who came from Flanders on the ill-starred mission to Madrid.[1263]

Such is a true account of this tragical affair, as derived from the king's own letters and those of his agents. Far different was the story put in circulation at the time. On the seventeenth of October, the day after Montigny's death, despatches were received at court from Peralta, the alcayde of the fortress. They stated that, after writing his former letter, his prisoner's fever had so much increased, that he had called in the aid of a physician; and as the symptoms became more alarming, the latter had entered into a consultation with the medical adviser of the late regent, Joanna, so that nothing that human skill could afford should be wanting to the patient. He grew rapidly worse, however, and as, happily, Father Hernando del Castillo, of Valladolid, chanced to be then in Simancas, he came and administered the last consolations of religion to the dying man. Having done all that a good Christian at such a time should do, Montigny expired early on the morning of the sixteenth, manifesting at the last so Catholic a spirit, that good hopes might be entertained of his salvation.[1264]

This hypocritical epistle, it is hardly necessary to say, like the one that preceded it, had been manufactured at Madrid. Nor was it altogether devoid of truth. The physician of the place, named Viana, had been called in; and it was found necessary to intrust him with the secret.

Every day he paid his visit to the castle, and every day returned with more alarming accounts of the condition of the patient; and thus the minds of the community were prepared for the fatal termination of his disorder. Not that, after all, this was unattended with suspicions of foul play in the matter, as people reflected how opportune was the occurrence of such an event. But suspicions were not proof. The secret was too well guarded for any one to penetrate the veil of mystery; and the few who were behind that veil loved their lives too well to raise it.

Despatches written in cipher, and containing a full and true account of the affair, were sent to the duke of Alva. The two letters of Peralta, which indeed were intended for the meridian of Brussels rather than of Madrid, were forwarded with them. The duke was told to show them incidentally, as it were, without obtruding them on any one's notice,[1265] that Montigny's friends in the Netherlands might be satisfied of their truth.

In his own private communication to Alva, Philip, in mentioning the orthodox spirit manifested by his victim in his last moments, shows that with the satisfaction which he usually expressed on such occasions was mingled some degree of scepticism. ”If his inner man,” he writes of Montigny, ”was penetrated with as Christian a spirit as he exhibited in the outer, and as the friar who confessed him has reported, G.o.d, we may presume, will have mercy on his soul.”[1266] In the original draft of the letter, as prepared by the king's secretary, it is further added: ”Yet, after all, who can tell but this was a delusion of Satan, who, as we know, never deserts the heretic in his dying hour.” This sentence--as appears from the ma.n.u.script still preserved in Simancas--was struck out by Philip, with the remark in his own hand, ”Omit this, as we should think no evil of the dead!”[1267]

Notwithstanding this magnanimous sentiment, Philip lost no time in publis.h.i.+ng Montigny to the world as a traitor, and demanding the confiscation of his estates. The Council of Blood learned a good lesson from the Holy Inquisition, which took care that even Death should not defraud it of its victims. Proceedings were inst.i.tuted against the _memory_ of Montigny, as had before been done against the memory of the marquis of Bergen.[1268] On the twenty-second of March, 1571, the duke of Alva p.r.o.nounced sentence, condemning the memory of Florence de Montmorency, lord of Montigny, as guilty of high treason, and confiscating his goods and estates to the use of the crown; ”it having come to his knowledge,” the instrument went on to say, ”that the said Montigny had deceased by natural death in the fortress of Simancas, where he had of late been held a prisoner!”[1269]

The proceedings of the Council of Blood against Montigny were characterized, as I have already said, by greater effrontery and a more flagrant contempt of the common forms of justice than were usually to be met with even in that tribunal. A bare statement of the facts is sufficient. The party accused was put on his trial--if trial it can be called--in one country, while he was held in close custody in another.

The court before which he was tried--or rather the jury, for the council seems to have exercised more of the powers of a jury than of a judge--was on this occasion a packed body, selected to suit the purposes of the prosecution. Its sentence, instead of being publicly p.r.o.nounced, was confided only to the party interested to obtain it,--the king. Even the sentence itself was not the one carried into effect; but another was subst.i.tuted in its place, and a public execution was supplanted by a midnight a.s.sa.s.sination. It would be an abuse of language to dignify such a proceeding with the t.i.tle of a judicial murder.

[Sidenote: NOTICE OF GACHARD.]

Yet Philip showed no misgivings as to his own course in the matter. He had made up his mind as to the guilt of Montigny. He had been false to his king and false to his religion; offences which death only could expiate. Still we find Philip resorting to a secret execution, although Alva, as we have seen, had supposed that sentence was to be executed on Montigny in the same open manner as it had been on the other victims of the b.l.o.o.d.y tribunal. But the king shrunk from exposing a deed to the public eye, which, independently of its atrocity in other respects, involved so flagrant a violation of good faith towards the party who had come, at his sovereign's own desire, on a public mission to Madrid. With this regard to the opinions of his own age, it may seem strange that Philip should not have endeavored to efface every vestige of his connection with the act, by destroying the records which established it.

On the contrary, he not only took care that such records should be made, but caused them, and all other evidence of the affair, to be permanently preserved in the national archives. There they lay for the inspection of posterity, which was one day to sit in judgment on his conduct.

In the part of this History which relates to the Netherlands, I have been greatly indebted to two eminent scholars of that country. The first of these, M. Gachard, who had the care of the royal archives of Belgium, was commissioned by his government, in 1844, to visit the Peninsula for the purpose of collecting materials for the ill.u.s.tration of the national history. The most important theatre of his labors was Simancas, which, till the time of his visit, had been carefully closed to natives as well as foreigners. M. Gachard profited by the more liberal arrangements which, under certain restrictions, opened its historical treasures to the student. The result of his labors he is now giving to the world by the publication of his ”Correspondance de Philippe II.,” of which two volumes have already been printed. The work is published in a beautiful form, worthy of the auspices under which it has appeared. It consists chiefly of the correspondence carried on by the Spanish government and the authorities of the Netherlands in the reign of Philip the Second,--the revolutionary age, and of course the most eventful period of their history. The official despatches, written in French, are, it is true, no longer to be found in Simancas, whence they were removed to Brussels on the accession of Albert and Isabella to the sovereignty of the Low Countries. But a large ma.s.s of correspondence which pa.s.sed between the court of Castile and the Netherlands, is still preserved in the Spanish archives. As it is, for the most part, of a confidential nature, containing strictures on men and things intended only for the eyes of the parties to it, it is of infinite value to the historian. Not only has it never before been published, but, with the exception of a portion which pa.s.sed under the review of the Italian Strada, it has never been submitted to the inspection of the scholar. With the aid of this rich collection, the historian is enabled to enter into many details, hitherto unknown, of a personal nature, relating to the actors in the great drama of the revolution, as well as to disclose some of the secret springs of their policy.

M. Gachard has performed his editorial duties with conscientiousness and ability. In a subsequent volume he proposes to give the entire text of the more important letters; but in the two already published he has confined himself to an a.n.a.lysis of their contents, more or less extended, according to circ.u.mstances. He has added explanatory notes, and prefixed to the whole a copious dissertation, presenting a view of the politics of the Castilian court, and of the characters of the king and the great officers of state. As the writer's information is derived from sources the most authentic as well as the least accessible to scholars, his preliminary essay deserves to be carefully studied by the historian of the Netherlands.

M. Gachard has further claims to the grat.i.tude of every lover of letters by various contributions in other forms which he has made to the ill.u.s.tration of the national history. Among these his ”Correspondance de Guillaume le Taciturne,” of which three volumes in octavo have already appeared, has been freely used by me. It consists of a collection of William's correspondence, industriously gathered from various quarters.