We Can See What He Couldn't

His next port of call is only a short walk away, and it's the Convent of Las Huelgas - once a very upper-crust nunnery indeed.  You had to be a princess to get in, practically.  'Huelga' in modern Spanish means a strike, but not in Nathaniel's day, when it meant something more like 'rest'. Consequently he believes 'Las Huelgas' means something like '(place of) rest', because it was to this convent that not merely unmarried royals, but even widowed ones, eventually retired. (But Wikipedia says it means 'fallow lands'. Bit prosaic.)

Either way the place is absolutely stacked solid with royal tombs, and Nathaniel knows this, but he can't see most of them...because the nuns are still there, and the main part of the church is partitioned for their private use.

"The convent is said to contain handsome cloisters, courts, chapter-hall, and other state apartments,...The whole is surrounded by a complete circle of houses, occupied by its various dependants and pensioners. These are enclosed from without by a lofty wall...their appearance is that of a small town, surrounding a cathedral and palace."

So here is a selection of the sights our boy missed, (all courtesy of Wikimedia Commons):

The cloister and gardens...[Author: Rafaelji]

Medieval textiles and tomb of Lady Blanche [Author: Lancastermerrin88]

Another cloister.  (I could retire here.  I really could.) Author: Jesusccastillo

Yes But It's Still A Tomb

We're still indoors, in that shadowy vaulted room, enthusing over the tomb of King Juan II of Castile and his wife.

"It is impossible to conceive a work more elaborate than the details of the costumes of the King and Queen. The imitation of lace and embroidery, the exquisite delicacy of the hands and features, the infinitely minute carving of the pillows,"

"the architectural railing by which the two statues are separated, the groups of sporting lions and dogs placed against the foot-boards, and the statues of the four Evangelists, seated at the four points of the star which face the cardinal points of the compass,—all these attract first the attention as they occupy the surface; but they are nothing to the profusion of ornament lavished on the sides. The chisel of the artist has followed each retreating and advancing angle of the star, filling the innermost recesses with life and movement. It would be endless to enter into a detailed enumeration of all this. It is composed of lions and lionesses, panthers, dogs,—crouching, lying, sitting, rampant, and standing; of saints, male and female, and personifications of the cardinal virtues... Were there no other object of interest at Burgos, this tomb would well repay the traveller for a halt of a few days, and a country walk."

Yes, well I'm trying to like it. But it’s still a tomb. Here is a photo held by Cornell University Library, which was taken about twenty years after Nathaniel's visit.

Wonderful workmanship I grant you, but still - it's a fancy box for two dead bodies.

The close-up image above, by the way, is by Ecelan and is taken, with permission, from Wikimedia.

This Would Be Good For Hallowe'en!

We're still in the Cartuja near Burgos, eagerly waiting to admire its greatest treasure - the sole reason it has been allowed to continue in existence as a Carthusian monastery - its splendid royal tomb. Actually it's a double tomb, containing the remains both of King Juan II and his queen, Isabella. And as royal tombs - even Spanish royal tombs - go, it's pretty weird-looking. Nathaniel's attempt to capture on paper its strange form, its intricate surface of carved alabaster, all lying beneath that great vaulted roof receding into the darkness...well, it could be a set from a Hammer Horror. If Dracula rose from this tomb we wouldn't be surprised. It's one of the creepiest illustrations in the book.

I think for me the effect is made worse by the vaulted roof, which reminds me very unpleasantly of a whale's skeleton. As seen from inside.

We Meet A Monk We Do Like

We're still in Burgos, we've done the Cathedral and the tomb of El Cid, we're moving swiftly on to Letter VI, yet more tombs, and especially

The Chartreuse of Miraflores. 

Chartreuse to me means green cocktails: but a bit of rootling around on the net and I learn Chartreuse is called Chartreuse because it was originally a drink made by Carthusian monks - Chartreuse being French for 'Carthusian' -  and the Carthusians are a 'contemplative order'.  This means that they...contemplate. So, to all intents and purposes they stay in their monastery and pray.  They don't go out into the world helping the poor, tending the sick, converting the heathen and generally doing good, and so to a certain mindset - mainly Protestant - they and their ilk are rather a waste of space.  They give the whole idea of being a monk a bad name.

Happier days: Zurbaran's painting of St Bruno in the cartuja

It interests me that there is no trace of this attitude in Nathaniel, despite his having a conventional British upbringing and at least one brother who was an Anglican vicar. Nor is it that he is pro-religious.  On the contrary, I get the feeling he is probably pretty much agnostic. He is certainly oddly calm when reflecting that Christianity is a creed whose time has passed.

All the same, the specifically Catholic aspects of Spanish religion - the processions, the emotion, the incense, celibacy, statues of the Virgin, candles and all, which occasionally had Victorian Brits rolling their eyes to heaven or snorting in outright contempt - don't faze him in the slightest. He takes them as they come.  No doubt had he found the Carthusian monks reeling round the cloisters drunk while pawing the local girls he would have passed a dry comment or two.  But he doesn't find that.  He finds instead a sadly dwindled place. The once-great Chartreuse of Miraflores is now home to only four monks and a single elderly Prior, the head of his order, who in former days presided over the great monastery at Xeres (Jerez). But there has been a revolution in Spain, and those in charge of it have found, like Henry VIII before them, that monasteries yield rich pickings.  Only two or three of these cartujas have been spared, and purely because the monarchy has been spared. Basically, if a monastery contains royal tombs, it survives. 

"The great Chartreuse of Xeres contained probably no such palladium, for it was among the first of the condemned: its lands and buildings were confiscated; and its treasures of art, and all portable riches, dispersed, as likewise its inhabitants, in the direction of all the winds."

What Nathaniel calls 'Xeres de la Frontera' modern Spaniards call Jerez, and its name has entered English via its most famous product, a fortified wine which was even more indispensable to Victorian dining tables than it is to ours - Sherry. Naturally he has to glance at this:

"In England the name of Xeres is only generally known in connection with one of the principal objects of necessity, which furnish the table of the gastronome; but in Andalucia the name of Xeres de la Frontera calls up ideas of a different sort.  It is dear to the wanderer in Spain, whose recollections love to repose on its picturesque position, its sunny skies, its delicious fruits, its amiable and lively population, and lastly on its magnificent monastery, and the treasures of art it contained.  The Prior of that monastery has been removed to the Cartuja of Burgos, where he presides over a community, reduced to four monks, who subsist almost entirely on charity.  This amiable and gentleman-like individual, in whom the monk has in no degree injured the man of the world, - although a large estate, abandoned for the cloister, proved sufficiently the sincerity of his religious professions, - had well deserved a better fate than to be torn in his old age from his warm Andalucian retreat, and transplanted to the rudest spot in the whole Peninsula, placed at an elevation of more than four thousand feet above the level of the Atlantic, and visited up to the middle of June by snow storms."

This likeable old guy, "this innocent victim of reform", is ill. He has only just recovered from one serious attack, and now he is bedridden again.

Reform, we feel, is not a word that carries pleasant associations for Nathaniel. 

Haverty, Viardot and rivals in print

I am slowly coming round to the view that our boy may have been a bit full of himself. I do not think Nathaniel suffered from lack of self-belief.  Do these sound like the words of a man diffident about offering his own opinions?

"I had read of Toledo being in possession of the finest church in Spain,—and that in the book of a tourist, whose visit to this town follows immediately that to Seville. Begging pardon of the clever and entertaining writer to whom I allude, the Cathedral of Toledo strikes me as far from being the finest in Spain; nor would it be the finest in France, nor in England, nor in other countries that might be enumerated, could it be transported to either."

So take that, Martin Haverty, you, you - tourist!  Because it was Martin Haverty, an Irish journalist, who Nathaniel here claims had recklessly and foolishly preferred the Cathedral of Toledo to that of Seville: and what's more he compounded the offence by saying so in print in a book about his travels in Spain - a year or two earlier.

Thus annoyingly pipping our boy at the post, travel-writing-about-Spain-wise.

All of which makes me wonder, was Nathaniel consulting Haverty's book as he went on his own tour? Or did he read it afterwards, snorting contemptuously at its opinions? Possibly ripping out pages, screwing them into balls and slam-dunking them into a wastepaper basket?

Or did Haverty's book in fact give him the bright idea of turning his letters to Mrs C-----r and his assorted Spanish sketches into solid cash?

Sadly I don't know.  All I know is, he had clearly read the "clever and entertaining" Haverty's book, otherwise he wouldn't have patronised its judgment quite so...so..patronising-gittishly.

(You can read about Haverty here, and his book Wanderings in Spain is available free as an e-text in Google books.)

Indeed, so eager is Nathaniel here to show his opinion on cathedrals is better than anyone else's in the world  that he actually misrepresents what the harmless Haverty wrote. In fact it was:

"I shall proceed at once to enumerate the principal curiosities of Seville, and begin with the Cathedral, one of the finest in the world, and unrivalled by any one in Spain, except by that of Toledo."

See, Nathaniel?  See what he's saying there?  Haverty is extolling the cathedral of Seville.. Seville is the one he considers - as you yourself do - to be among the finest in the world: and not Toledo, which he merely thinks is the only other one in Spain that is even close.

Calm down, dear.

As for Viardot and his input in Nathaniel's work, I shall save it for another post.