Born:
Michael Cervantes de Saavedra, author of
Don Quixote, 1547, Alcala de Henares; Jacob Augustus
Thuanus (De Thou), historical writer, 1553, Paris;
Bishop George Tomline, author of Refutation of
Calvinism, 1753; Charles Comte d'Artois, afterwards
Charles X, 1757, Versailles.
Died:
Pope Clement II, 1047; Gabriel Fallopius,
eminent botanist, 1563, Padua; Claude Perrault,
architect, 1683; Barbara Villiers, Duchess of
Cleveland, mistress of Charles II, 1709, Chiswick;
Dr. James Johnson, medical and miscellaneous writer,
1845, Brighton.
Feast Day:
St. Dionysius, or Denis, bishop of
Paris, and his Companions, martyrs, 272. St. Domninus,
martyr, 304. St. Guislain, abbot, 681. St. Lewis
Bertrand, confessor, 1581.
ST. DENIS
This saint, properly named St. Dionysius, has been
sometimes stated as the first who introduced
Christianity into France, but this is certainly
erroneous, as the martyrdoms at Lyon and Vienne in the
second century prove. St. Denis was, however, of all
the Roman missionaries in Gaul, the individual who, in
preaching the doctrines of the Cross, penetrated
furthest into the country, and fixed his seat at
Paris, of which he became the first bishop. He is said
to have been put to death during the persecution of
Valerian, and a well-known legend is related regarding
him, that, after suffering decapitation, he
miraculously took up his head, carried it in his hand
for the space of two miles, and then lay down and
expired. The bon mot uttered regarding this
ecclesiastical fable by a witty French lady of the
last century, has become proverbial: 'La distance ne
vaut rien; c'est le premier pas qui coute.'
The bodies of St. Denis and his companions are
recorded to have been interred by a Christian lady
named Catalla, not far from the place where they had
been beheaded. A chapel was thereafter erected over
their tomb, and in the fifth century a church, which
was greatly resorted to by pilgrims. In the seventh
century, King Dagobert founded on the same spot the
famous abbey of St. Denis, in which he himself and his
successors on the French throne were interred, At the
Revolution, this receptacle of the remains of royalty
was sacrilegiously violated, and the contents of its
tombs ignominiously scattered abroad, whilst the
building itself was unroofed, and used for a time as a
cattle market. It was, however, restored with great
splendour after the accession of the first Napoleon,
and now attracts visitors as one of the most
interesting monuments of ancient times, near the
French capital.
The French have adopted St. Denis as their patron
saint, in the same manner as the English have chosen
St. George. The guardianship of
the two countries is
thus expressed in the chorus to the old ballad:
�St George he was for England,
St. Denis was
for France.
Singing, Honi soit qui mal y pense.'
MARRIAGE OF LOUIS XII AND THE PRINCESS MARY
During the reign of Henry VII of England, that
able and crafty monarch had forced the Archduke Philip
of Austria, on the occasion of the latter being driven
by a storm on the English coast, to consent to a
treaty of marriage between his son Charles, afterwards
the celebrated Emperor Charles V, but then a child of
six years old, and Henry's daughter, the Princess
Mary. Such contracts were extremely common in ancient
times, though they seem very frequently to have been
entered upon merely for the purpose of securing some
present advantage, or evading some present difficulty,
and were eventually more generally broken than
fulfilled.
Henry VIII, several years afterwards, was
nevertheless very indignant on ascertaining that
Charles, so far from contemplating the completion of
the engagement into which his father had entered for
him, was on terms with Louis XII of France for the
hand of his second daughter, Rene. The wrath of the
English king, however, was quite inoperative, and just
at this conjuncture a match was suggested for his
sister that soothed his offended dignity whilst it
gratified his vanity. Louis XII of France had, a few
months before, lost his wife, Anne of Brittany, who
had died without leaving any sons; and in the hope of
obtaining male issue, the aged widower of fifty-three
sought the hand of the beautiful young English
princess of sixteen. Mary had formed an ardent
attachment to Charles Brandon, Viscount Lisle,
afterwards created Duke of Suffolk, one of the
handsomest and most accomplished noblemen of his day;
but the indulgence of such private feelings was quite
out of the question, and it is not probable that even
a murmur was ever uttered by her on the subject to her
imperious brother. On 7th August 1514, a
marriage-ceremony, by proxy, was celebrated at
Greenwich between the princess and Louis XII, the Duke
of Longueville representing his master. The French
king became very impatient for the arrival of his
bride, and wrote pressing letters to hurry her
departure.
At last the young queen with her attendants, among
whom were the Duke of Suffolk and Anne
Boleyn,
afterwards so famous as the consort of her brother
Henry, embarked at Dover, and landed safely in France
in the beginning of October. On the 8th of that month,
Mary made her public entrance into the town of
Abbeville, where she was received with the greatest
joy by her impatient husband, King Louis. The
following day the marriage was duly solemnised between
the parties themselves, and Mary was subsequently
crowned with great pomp at the abbey of St. Denis, and
made her entry into Paris with great splendour. Her
married life was by no means a period of unruffled
felicity, as the king very ungallantly dismissed all
his young wife's English friends and attendants almost
immediately after the celebration of the ceremony.
Fortunately for Mary, however, her season of probation
was but short. Louis was sinking under a complication
of infirmities, and at the rejoicings which
accompanied his queen's triumphal entry into the
capital, was so weak as to be obliged to be carried in
a litter.
Doubtless the prospect of his speedy demise, which
took place on the ensuing New-Year's Day, had its
influence in rendering Mary and the Duke of Suffolk,
who remained in France as English ambassador, very
discreet and circumspect in their conduct. But the
former displayed little delicacy in availing herself
of the recovery of her liberty, and in less than two
months from Louis's death, Mary and the duke were
privately wedded at Paris. In thus contracting a union
without obtaining the permission of Henry VIII, both
parties exposed themselves to the risk of his serious
displeasure, which to Suffolk, as his own subject,
might have proved fatal. But the dowager French queen
and her English husband having crossed the Channel,
and taken up their abode in their manor in Suffolk
without venturing near the court, a reconciliation was
in a short time effected; a consummation the
accomplishment of which was greatly owing to the good
offices of
Cardinal Wolsey, who appears to have been a
stanch friend of the young couple.
CERVANTES
The age which gave Shakspeare to England gave
Cervantes to Spain. Cervantes was Shakspeare's senior
by seventeen years, but their lives were otherwise
contemporaneous; and nominally, though not actually,''
on one day, the 23rd of April
1616, both died.
The life of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was one of
almost continuous hardship and privation. He was born
in 1547 at Alcala de Henares, about twenty miles from
Madrid. His parents had noble relations, but were
poor, and concerning his youth little is positively
known beyond what he incidentally tells us in his
writings, as that he took great pleasure in attending
the theatrical representations of Lope de Rueda, that
he wrote verses when very young, and that he read
everything within his reach, even as it would seem the
torn scraps of paper he picked up in the streets. At
Salamanca, he completed his education, and at the age
of twentythree he accompanied Monsignor Aquaviva to
Rome, in the capacity of chamberlain. At Rome, in
1571, he entered the papal army as a common soldier,
to serve against the Turks. Perhaps with oblique
reference to himself, he observes:
'I have always
noticed that none make better soldiers than those who
are transplanted from the region of letters to the
fields of war, and that never scholar became soldier,
that was not a good and a brave one.'
He was present
at the great seafight of Lepanto, on the 7th October
1571, when the combined fleets of Spain, Venice,
Genoa, Malta, and the pope, in 206 galleys, met the
Turks in 250 galleys, and utterly defeated them,
checking decisively Turkish intrusion into the west of
Europe. Cervantes was in the thickest of the fight,
and besides two wounds, received one which deprived
him of the use of his left hand and arm during the
rest of his life.
In 1576, he received a command in a regiment for
the Low Countries, but on his voyage thither, he was
captured by an Algerine squadron, and he and his
comrades were carried to Algiers, and sold as slaves.
He served successively three cruel masters a Greek
and a Venetian, both renegadoes, and the dey himself.
Many were his plots to escape, and severely did he
suffer when detected. He had a grand project for the
insurrection of all the Christian slaves in Algiers,
who numbered full 25,000; and the dey declared that 'if he could but keep that
lame Spaniard well guarded,
he should consider his capital, his galleys, and his
slaves safe.' Four times he expected death by
impalement or at the stake, and once the hangman's
rope was round his neck. After five years of cruel
bondage, he was ransomed for the enormous sum of 500
gold ducats, which had been scraped together by
friends and relatives in Spain.
Without means, Cervantes resumed the profession of
soldier, and served in three expeditions against the
Azores. In 1584, at the age of thirty-seven, he
married a lady of good family, but with trifling or no
fortune. To earn a livelihood, he commenced writing
for the stage, and produced, he informs us, thirty
dramas, which were all acted with considerable
applause. It would appear, however, that the theatre
did not pay, for, in 1588, we find him at Seville,
then the great market for the vast wealth coming in
from America, and as he calls it, 'the shelter for the
poor and a refuge for the unfortunate.'
At Seville, he acted as agent and money collector,
but did not thrive. In 1590, he made an ineffectual
application to the king for an appointment in America,
setting forth his adventures, services, and sufferings
while a soldier in the Levant, and all the miseries of
his life while a slave in Algiers. From Seville he
moved to Valladolid, and tradition runs, that he was
imprisoned there as a debtor or defaulter, and that,
whilst in prison, he commenced writing Don Quixote.
The tradition may be true, but it is based on no
certain evidence. At any rate, in poverty, at
Valladolid, the first part of the immortal romance was
written, and at Madrid it was printed and published in
1605.
The book at once attracted attention, and before a
year was out a second edition was called for in
Madrid, and two editions elsewhere. Successful
authorship, however, did little to mend Cervantes's
fortune. The Duke of Lerma, minister of Philip III,
engaged him to write an account of the festivities and
bull-fights with which Lord Howard,
ambassador of
James I, was received at Valladolid in 1605!
Meanwhile, Cervantes went on writing, and produced a
number of tales, Novelas Exentplares, and A Journey to
Parnassus, a satire on the bad poets of his time,
which made him many enemies, but which, next to Don
Quixote, is thought his finest production. The second
part of Don Quixote did not make its appearance till
1615. The author's end was then near. Some years
before, he had joined the brotherhood of the Holy
Sacrament, one of those religious associations which
were then fashionable, and which included among its
members Quevedo, Lope de Vega, and other men of
letters. Subsequently, he assumed the habit of a
Franciscan, and three weeks before his death, he
formally entered the sacred order
'Who, to be sure of Paradise,
Dying put on the
weeds of Dominic,
Or in Franciscan think to pass disguised.'
He was buried in the convent of the nuns of the
Trinity, Madrid, but, a few years afterwards, this
convent was removed to another part of the city, and
what became of his ashes is quite unknown. No monument
was raised to his memory till 1835, when a bronze
statue of him, larger than life, was cast at Rome and
set up in Madrid. It may seem incredible, but it is
nevertheless the fact, that this statue of Cervantes
was the first ever erected in Spain to the honour of a
man of letters.
Though Cervantes led a poor life, we shall err if
we think of him as miserable. If any inference may be
drawn from the tenor of his writings, his was that
happy temper, which out of adversity derives not
bitterness, but matter for reflection and humorous
enjoyment. What to the majority of men would be simple
affliction, would, we conceive, to the author of Don
Quixote be softened in a halo of humorous suggestions.
Humour is a rare sweetener of life, and, as Carlyle
remarks:
'Cervantes is indeed the purest of all
humorists; so gentle and genial, so full, yet so
ethereal is his humour, and in such accordance with
itself and his whole noble nature.'
The world dealt hardly by him, but we shall search
in vain for a sour or malignant passage from his pen.