Those Beautiful Young Swells In
Riding-Breeches And Tight Gray Jackets Approached An Italian Type Of
Cavalry Officer; They Did
Not look very vigorous, and the common
soldiers we saw marching through the streets, largely followed by the
populace, were
Not of formidable stature or figure, though neat and
agreeable enough to the eye.
While I indulge the record of these trivialities, which I am by no means
sure the reader will care for so much, I feel that it would be wrong to
let him remain as ignorant of the history of Valladolid as I was while
there. My ignorance was not altogether my fault; I had fancied easily
finding at some bookseller's under the arcade a little sketch of the
local history such as you are sure of finding in any Italian town, done
by a local antiquary of those always mousing in the city's archives. But
the bookseller's boy and then the boy's mother could not at first
imagine my wish, and when they did they could only supply me with a sort
of business directorv, full of addresses and advertisements. So instead
of overflowing with information when we set out on our morning ramble,
we meagerly knew from the guide-books that Valladolid had once been the
capital of Castile, arid after many generations of depression following
the removal of the court, had in these latest days renewed its strength
in mercantile and industrial prosperity. There are ugly evidences of the
prosperity in the windy, dusty avenues and streets of the more modern
town; but there are lanes and alleys enough, groping for the churches
and monuments in suddenly opening squares, to console the sentimental
tourist for the havoc which enterprise has made. The mind readily goes
back through these to the palmy prehistoric times from which the town
emerged to mention in Ptolemy, and then begins to work forward past
Iberian and Roman and Goth and Moor to the Castilian kings who made it
their residence in the eleventh century. The capital won its first great
distinction when Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile were
married there in 1469. Thirty-five years later these Catholic Kings, as
one had better learn at once to call them in Spain, let Columbus die
neglected if not forgotten in the house recently pulled down, where he
had come to dwell in their cold shadow; they were much occupied with
other things and they could not realize that his discovery of America
was the great glory of their reign; probably they thought the conquest
of Granada was. Later yet, by twenty years, the dreadful Philip II. was
born in Valladolid, and in 1559 a very famous _auto da fe_ wag
celebrated in the Plaza Mayor. Fourteen Lutherans were burned alive for
their heresy, and the body of a woman suspected of imperfect orthodoxy
after her death was exhumed and burned with them. In spite of such
precautions as these, and of all the pious diligence of the Holy Office,
the reader will hardly believe that there is now a Spanish Protestant
church in Valladolid; but such is the fact, though whether it derives
from the times of the Inquisition, or is a modern missionary church I do
not know.
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