Mad World
Carlos the Bewitched. By John Nada. (Cape, 30s.) PROFESSIONAL historians rarely bother with the flesh of history: their concern is with the bone structure; the way it grows and changes and breaks. And rightly so; technological change, economic growth, social conflict and constitu- tional crises are the processes by which we have become ourselves and which we desperately need to understand. It does, however, diminish one's sense of the past; the flavour of history is leeched away by a deluge of detailed investiga- tions. Either that or it is rendered arid by intellectual argument. And so I, for one, am delighted to welcome an historian such as Mr. Nada. He ignores almost all the problems that were involved in Spanish history of the seven- teenth century. He concerns himself with the Royal Family, the puppets on whose fertility or impotence the fate of Spain seemed to hang, and did not. And yet by so limiting himself, by refusing to consider problems of the mesta, bullion, irrigation, land ownership and the host of other difficulties that first weakened, then crippled Spain, and concentrating solely on life at Court, he evokes an exceptionally vivid picture of life as it was for those who attempted to govern Spain.
The result is as enthralling as it is repulsive. Carlos II whose death in 1700 was to unleash a war for which France, the Empire and England
had been impatiently waiting for a decade, was the pitiful result of gross inbreeding. He could
scarcely walk, let alone read or write. He was a prey to fevers, rashes, eczema, and his lower jaw, the famous Hapsburg jaw, protruded so far that
he had to swallow his food in chunks as he could
not chew. His joys were few. Like most of his fellow monarchs he enjoyed killing droves of
animals and birds. A well-staged auto da íé. a
gruesome pageant in which the Last Judgment was enacted for the sake of lapsed Jews who
were burnt alive, buoyed up his spirits. He derived some comfort from his confessors. He stood in need. He had horrors enough. He could not get an heir—sexual pleasure, of a sort, yes; but full consummation of marriages seems to have been denied him. He was, according to Mr. Nada, too excitable (Mr. Nada does not burke the details; every alternative form of impotence is thoroughly discussed). However, neither his mother nor his ministers got to the root of the problem. Was his wife, a French princess, deliberately aborting or being secretly poisoned or aborted by her French servants— all so that France might gain the succession? Was she sterile? Such questions pullulated like malevolent sores in his mother's mind. And then the wife died, so suddenly that everyone sus- pected poison. Within eight days Carlos II had been urged to remarry with all possible speed. A buxom young German princess had no better luck than the elegant, frivolous French one. Aphrodisiacs, charms, prayers, saints' relics, exorcism all failed. Indeed the doctors tried the explosive force of three weeks' con- tinence—to no avail. Appetite betrayed per- formance once again. Then the Inquisitor- General learned that a devil, who was harrying three nuns in a remote convent in the Asturias, had indicated that r he might part with very special information. Dealing with devils was dangerous business but the physical condition of Carlos II was decaying so rapidly that the niceties of moral theology were not so much ignored as delicately sidestepped. When asked, the devil spewed up a great deal of nonsense that the reverend fathers took with the utmost solem- nity and the wretched body of Carlos was sub- jected to spiritual purgations that were as horrible as the doctors' attempted cures.
And so Carlos slowly, slowly died; in spite of the presence of San Isidro's mummified body or of San Diego of Alcala's corpse sitting in its urn; in spite of bits of saints, of vestiges of Christ's Agony, and shreds of the garments of the holy; in spite of the freshly killed pigeons on his head and the cantharides on his feet; in spite, even, of the steaming entrails of freshly killed animals on his stomach. Nothing availed. He died as he lived, in a maniac world, darkened by religious bigotry and clamped in an idiot ritual. And this is the true flesh of history, the way men and women had to live and die, not so very long ago, here in Europe. Remember th:s was the age of Newton and of Locke, and then ask yourself, 'Is the idea of progress all that naïve?'
J. H. PLUMB
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