Authors: James Michener
Iberia (78 page)
In the spring of 1593, before any overt acts had occurred in
Madrigal, Fray Miguel began having a new set of visions, and
these, too, he communicated to Doña Ana, as was only natural
since she appeared in them. ‘I saw a vision of Jerusalem,’ he told
her, ‘and it was groaning under the heel of Islam, but at the right
side of the city I saw you standing to bring deliverance and on
the left side the handsome young man who now wore the crown
of a king.’ When Doña Ana asked what this signified, her confessor
replied, ‘I suppose it means that you are destined to save
Jerusalem.’ And the young man? It was someone Fray Miguel had
seen before but he could not remember exactly who he was.
He next had a vision of Jesus Christ being crucified, with Doña
Ana on his right side and the same fair king on the left. This
signified, he said, that Doña Ana and the king were to work
together for Jesus, as man and wife.
Hard on this exciting vision came one which spelled out the
future in specific terms. The young king was her cousin, Sebastián
of Portugal. He was alive and God intended Doña Ana to be his
wife and queen. For the rest of that year the monk continued to
ensnare the nun with a kaleidoscope of visions in which she
appeared as the bride of King Sebastián, and he hammered at
how much more pleasant it would be to rule as queen with a
handsome man at her side than to wither away as a nun in a cell.
‘Where is the king?’ she asked. ‘We have only to wait,’ Fray Miguel
assured her. ‘If it is God’s intention that you marry the king, God
will bring him to you.’ So the beautiful nun waited.
Everything I have told you so far is a matter of history, well
recorded in documents, because what happened in Madrigal
beginning in June of 1594 shook Spain, and many self-serving
reports were filed in the royal archives by participants in the
drama. What happened in the next four months, however, cannot
be accurately determined and has been the subject of much
speculation. The best historical summary is found in
Portugal
, published in 1964, by the student of Portuguese history,
Mary Elizabeth Brooks. The best dramatic account appeared on
the Madrid stage in 1849 and often thereafter,
Unconfessed Traitor
and Martyr
, the work that José Zorilla, who also wrote
Don Juan
Tenorio
, considered his masterpiece. And recently, at a date I have
not been able to determine, Alonso de Encinas, a native of
Madrigal, published an enchanting little essay titled ‘The Pastry
Cook of Madrigal.’ The Zorrilla play is pure invention and I shall
not borrow from it. The Encinas essay purports to be fact but is
at variance with Dr. Brooks, so I shall use it sparingly. I shall,
however, rely for the next few pages upon fact and legend as I
heard it in Madrigal.
A major point of difference between history and legend centers
upon the person of Don Rodrigo de Santillán. Legend says that
he was the leading citizen of Madrigal, and a man who took
seriously his role of alcalde and confidential agent of King Felipe.
A petty noble, pompous, suspicious and easily swayed by the
merest whisper from the king, he kept an eye on all that happened
in Madrigal and dispensed an honest justice in any matter that
did not impinge upon the crown. That is, if two farmers quarreled
over a pig, Don Rodrigo could be depended upon to ferret out
the facts and render a just decision. But if the pig happened to
belong to the king…well, that was quite another matter. That
demanded looking into, and when Don Rodrigo looked into
something where the king’s interest was at stake, there was apt to
be a hanging.
On this point history is clear-cut and firm. Don Rodrigo de
Santillán was not the mayor of Madrigal; he was a senior and
respected judge of the Chancilléria de Valladolid (High Tribunal
of Justice) and so far as can be ascertained had no personal
connection with Madrigal. The Royal Archives at Simancas
contain literally a thousand pages of reports written by Judge
Santillán and these show him to have been a perspicacious
gentleman, jealous of his prerogatives and determined to do the
king’s will. Legend required him to be the alcalde of Madrigal so
that his daughter María, a quiet girl, reserved and lovely, could
play a major role in developments. When the events began to
unfold she had not yet given signs of being interested in any of
the young men in nearby towns who would normally have married
her, and villagers began to wonder what was going to happen to
her.
They liked her and their speculations were without rancor.
They were therefore pleased when a tall stranger, who seemed to
be about forty years old, accompanied by a fair-haired girl of two
and a maidservant, appeared in town to open a pastry shop. He
announced that his name was Gabriel de Espinosa and he posed
only as an honest workman who baked good pastry and looked
after his little girl, but his bearing was so noble, his speech so
reflned and his accidental references to past deeds in which he
had participated so convincing, that the citizens of Madrigal were
satisfied that he must be an important man in hiding.
‘The younger son of some noble family,’ was the general
judgment. ‘Got into trouble with the daughter of a duque or
something. The mother died and he has their little girl. He’s here
in Madrigal only till it’s safe to go back home and claim his
inheritance. And his titles.’
Among those bedazzled by the handsome, taciturn pastry cook
was María. She started frequenting his shop and soon made no
secret of the fact that she was madly in love with him. Don
Rodrigo had rather more exalted plans for his daughter than a
pastry cook, and he interposed all sorts of objections, but María
was firm. ‘He’s a great gentleman,’ she insisted. ‘One day you’ll
be proud of him.’ Whenever her father was obliged to be in
Valladolid, strong-willed María crept out of her house to visit
with Gabriel.
On one such occasion Gabriel dropped certain hints about his
past. When he had come to Venice…‘From where, Gabriel?’‘From
Africa.’ And in Venice he had had a series of wild adventures.
He’d been married to a noble Italian lady, had fought duels, had
been privy to many secrets of the Venetian government.
‘Why?’‘Because they saw in me someone who…’ Whenever
pressed about his exact identity his voice trailed off. But it was
clear that the Venetian state had devised plans whereby Gabriel
de Espinosa could be of service to them in their war against Spain.
‘I left Venice,’ he said. ‘Is the little girl the daughter of the Venetian
noble lady?’ He preferred not to speak of that.
The love affair of the alcalde’s daughter and the pastry cook
went forward at a steady rate, except that the more María spoke
in behalf of her lover, the more the mayor objected. ‘He’s a tricky
one,’ Don Rodrigo said. Sometimes he would leave his office in
one of the towers and stand looking at the pastry shop, and when
he had about decided that this Espinosa was a fraud, the cook
would greet a customer in such grandeur that even Don Rodrigo
had to acknowledge that here was a most unusual man. Most
unusual.
Don Rodrigo’s problem was about to be resolved in a way he
could not have anticipated. As soon as Gabriel de Espinosa arrived
in Madrigal, Fray Miguel, still serving as confessor to Doña Ana,
doubled his visits to her cell and warned her that the hour of
decision was at hand. ‘I had a vision. God appeared and told me
that he was about to bring King Sebastián into our presence. Are
you prepared?’ She said she was ready for whatever God required
of her, but how could she marry Sebastián, since she was already
a nun? Her confessor reasoned, ‘You were thrown into this
convent at a tender age and against your will. When you took
your vows to become a nun, did you do so willingly?’ Doña Ana
said she had never wanted to become a nun, and Fray Miguel
cried, ‘See! Your vows are void and you are free to marry.’
When this was settled, Fray Miguel had a further vision telling
him that the long-absent king was about to arrive in Madrigal.
‘How will we know him?’ Doña Ana asked, and the friar said,
‘When I was preacher to the kings of Portugal I knew Sebastián
well. He was tall and gracious, bold and daring, a superb horseman
and blond. I would know him.’
Finally, one day Fray Miguel arrived in a state of agitation. In
his vision the night before he had seen God’s finger pointing at
a handsome man whom he had seen earlier standing with Doña
Ana at Jerusalem and at the Crucifixion. ‘He is King Sebastián
and he lives,’ said the voice of God. What was more, he was hiding
right here in Madrigal until the day came to disclose himself. And
what was best of all, he was now in the anteroom. Fray Miguel
kept Doña Ana from fainting, and when she had composed herself
he kicked open the door and there stood the king, waiting to claim
her as his bride.
It was not long before the pastry cook was sleeping at the
convent. (Many historians, especially those of the Church, deny
that the affair reached this point; however, much evidence suggests
that it did. At any rate, oral tradition in Madrigal insists that it
did.) At the trial several nuns were convicted of having connived
at slipping Gabriel into the convent, and the conspiracy was
probably greater than the testimony admitted to public record
showed. The whole convent seems to have been enchanted at the
prospect that one of their members might become Queen of
Portugal.
Espinosa had no trouble in convincing Doña Ana of his royal
claims. He had indeed fled Africa in disguise, as Fray Miguel had
guessed, and he had been wandering the earth looking for a queen
exactly like Doña Ana. All auguries were now good for his recovery
of the throne, and if she would stand by him in the months
ahead…She wanted to know exactly what this meant, and he said
there was the matter of expenses. ‘I have these jewels,’ she said,
and he thought they would just about cover the cost of regaining
the crown.
At the same time, however, he was not neglecting his duties
with the alcalde’s daughter, ‘because,’ as an old gentleman at
Madrigal suggested, ‘he wasn’t at all sure he could get Doña Ana
out of the convent.’
In October, 1594, events came to a climax and Fray Miguel
prevailed upon Doña Ana, who was hopelessly in love with the
pastry cook, whom she habitually called ‘Your Majesty,’ to give
him her jewels to pay for a clandestine trip to France. ‘There are
in that country,’ Fray Miguel said, ‘thousands of loyal men waiting
to rise on your husband’s behalf.’ The friar had fallen in the habit
of speaking to Doña Ana as if she were already married to the
king. ‘It will be a simple matter,’ he assured her, ‘to explain to the
Pope that you were made a nun against your will. He’ll permit
you to marry the king.’ The passionately involved nun gave
Espinosa her jewels, but at the last moment she either enclosed
or mailed him two love letters as well, and in so doing condemned
him to a dreadful death.
So much for the blend of legend and fact. From here on, each
item of the story is historically founded and based on existing
documents except as specifically noted. On October 7, 1594,
Gabriel de Espinosa, on his way to consult with a group of
supporters in France, left Madrigal and journeyed to Valladolid,
where at an inn he fell in with a pretty country girl, whom he
sought to impress by showing her the jewels he was carrying. He
looked forward to spending a pleasant evening with the girl and
offered her a drink from a cup carved from what he assured her
was the horn of a unicorn. But she was no fool. She knew that
unicorns were so rare that if a man of apparently modest means
had such a cup he must have come by it evilly. She slipped out of
the inn to inform upon him and by sheer coincidence came upon
Judge Rodrigo de Santillán, making his nightly snooping rounds,
for as he later boasted in a letter to King Felipe,
You have undoubtedly understood and noticed, sir, throughout
my life, how lacking I have been in greed and how much more I
esteem honor than wealth, and I seek this by patrolling by night
and laboring by day as everyone knows.
Don Rodrigo listened to the girl’s story and agreed with her
that it sounded suspicious. He accompanied her to the inn and
found there the mysterious pastry cook of Madrigal. Here was
the chance he had been awaiting and he summoned the guard to
arrest the man. When he searched Gabriel’s belongings he found
a cache of jewels, some of which were so marked as to make him
think they belonged to Her Excellency Doña Ana de Austria, the
nun at the convent in Madrigal.
‘We have caught a thief,’ Don Rodrigo announced, and after
clapping Espinosa into jail, he returned to his quarters and at
midnight wrote two letters which speak well for his sagacity in
dealing with matters touching upon the royal family. The first
was to Doña Ana and was couched in deferential terms, as befitted
a letter addressed to the king’s niece.
Most Excellent Lady: Tonight I have personally arrested, at an
inn of Valladolid, a certain Gabriel Espinosa, who claims to be a
pastry-maker in the town of Madrigal, in whose possession I have
found some valuable jewels which seem to belong to Your
Excellency, and he says that he has been commissioned by Your
Excellency to come to Valladolid to sell them. I humbly beg Your
Excellency to inform me if what this Gabriel Espinosa has claimed
is true, and, in the meantime, he remains in jail and the jewels in
my possession, at the disposal of Your Excellency. May God keep
Your Excellency many years as is the wish of this humble servant
of Your Excellency, who kisses your hands. From Valladolid,
September 28, 1594.
As soon as this was dispatched to Madrigal, Don Rodrigo sent
a much different type of directive to Don Luis Portocarrero.
Alcalde de la Real Chancillería de Valladolid.
