The Story of the False Sebastian of Portugal
There is not in all that bitter tragi-comic record
of human frailty which we call History a sadder story
than this of the Princess Anne, the natural daughter
of the splendid Don John of Austria, natural son of
the Emperor Charles V. and, so, half-brother to the
bowelless King Philip II. of Spain. Never was
woman born to royal or semi-royal state who was more
utterly the victim of the circumstances of her birth.
Of the natural sons of princes something could be
made, as witness the dazzling career of Anne’s
own father; but for natural daughters—and
especially for one who, like herself, bore a double
load of cadency—there was little use or
hope. Their royal blood set them in a class apart;
their bastardy denied them the worldly advantages
of that spurious eminence. Their royal blood
prescribed that they must mate with princes; their
bastardy raised obstacles to their doing so.
Therefore, since the world would seem to hold no worthy
place for them, it was expedient to withdraw them
from the world before its vanities beglamoured them,
and to immure them in convents, where they might aspire
with confidence to the sterile dignity of abbesshood.
Thus it befell with Anne. At the early age of
six she had been sent to the Benedictine convent at
Burgos, and in adolescence removed thence to the Monastery
of Santa Maria la Real at Madrigal, where it was foreordained
that she should take the veil. She went unwillingly.
She had youth, and youth’s hunger of life, and
not even the repressive conditions in which she had
been reared had succeeded in extinguishing her high
spirit or in concealing from her the fact that she
was beautiful. On the threshold of that convent
which by her dread uncle’s will was to be her
living tomb, above whose gates her spirit may have
beheld the inscription, “Lasciate ogni speranza,
voi ch’ entrate!” she made her protest,
called upon the bishop who accompanied her to bear
witness that she did not go of her own free will.
But what she willed was a matter of no account.
King Philip’s was, under God’s, the only
will in Spain. Still, less perhaps to soften
the sacrifice imposed upon her than because of what
he accounted due to one of his own blood, his Catholic
Majesty accorded her certain privileges unusual to
members of religious communities: he granted
her a little civil list—two ladies-in-waiting
and two grooms—and conferred upon her the
title of Excellency, which she still retained even
when after her hurried novitiate of a single year
she had taken the veil. She submitted where to
have striven would have been to have spent herself
in vain; but her resignation was only of the body,
and this dejected body moved mechanically through
the tasks and recreations that go to make up the grey
monotone of conventual existence; in which one day
is as another day, one hour as another hour; in which
the seasons of the year lose their significance; in
which time has no purpose save for its subdivision
into periods devoted to sleeping and waking, to eating
and fasting, to praying and contemplating, until life
loses all purpose and object, and sterilizes itself
into preparation for death.
