The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

isolationist Spain, which was beginning to sink into disillusion, believed that the cause of so great a decline was the peace which the nation enjoyed. In the end, he hoped, wars would start again and the ancient vigorous qualities would return, enabling Spain to carry out her Catholic destiny.
    Quevedo was the first political commentator of his age, and he knew the secret of interpreting to the world the subsconscious thoughts of his people. The crisis which had taken place in the fortunes of St. James, the Apostle of Spain, was due to the religious changes that had taken place in the second half of the sixteenth century, as a result of the mysticism of St. Theresa and St. John of the Cross. They had shown by their writings and by their example the way to a more profoundly intimate and spiritual experience. But neither Quevedo nor the other religious Orders approved of the Carmelite reforms, which preached solitude with God and manual labour. Quevedo felt that he had been reduced to the category of a serf by those who had dethroned the great Patron Saint of Spain and sacrificed him to the ideal of the Carmelites, whom he considered ineffectual and effeminate. He addresses the King, saying: ‘How can those Carmelite fathers imagine that Santiago will give Your Majesty arms to turn against himself: and that you will relieve him of his sword and hand it to St. Theresa who is always represented by her devotees holding a distaff?’
    Quevedo was passionately convinced that Santiago Matamoros was essential to Spanish history: ‘God made him Patron of Spain, which then did not exist, in order that when the day came he might intercede for her and with his doctrine and his sword bring her to life again.’
    But Quevedo, in spite of his passionate defence of Santiago, isolation and war, lived long enough to see Spain lose her military prestige in the national misfortunes of Catalonia, Roussillon, Portugal and Rocroy. Quevedo’s trust in Santiago was as unbounded as that of the areat warlike Bishop Gelmirez of the twelfth century, and in his rnphlet he answered the Carmelites who had proposed Santa Theresa with the words: ‘Cristo quiso que elpatronato fuese de su primo solamente (Christ Himself insisted that Spain’s Patron should be His cousin alone), referring to the belief in a family relationship between St. James and Jesus. In early days James had been considered to be a brother and later a cousin of the Redeemer. The Carmelites pleaded for a patron saint who would intercede for Spain as St. Theresa had done in the case of Philip II, who, they argued, would have remained, God knows how long, in Purgatory but for the Saint from Avila, who ransomed him by her intercession from there on the eighth day. Quevedo scorned the intercession of women even when canonized: he clamoured for the hounds of war and the vision of St. James the Moor-slayer on his great white charger riding triumphantly in the storm clouds. And Quevedo, whose indignation, at times, is Swiftian in its intensity, was not alone in conjuring up the spirit of the warlike Apostle at'a critical moment of Spain’s history. * Even the wordly, much travelled diplomat Saavedra Fajardo, the Spanish representative at the Peace of Westphalia, which sounded the knell for Spain as a military power, becomes as mystical a devotee of Santiago as Quevedo when he has to speak from the heart as a Spaniard: ‘His Highness Don John of Austria ordered the Cross and the following words to be embroidered on all his banners: “With these arms I vanquished the Turks: with these I hope to conquer the heretics.” These and the standard of Constantine I will use to show the princes with what confidence they may hoist the flag of religion, for immediately divine spirits will appear to defend that flag: two of them on white chargers were seen fighting in the vanguard of the Battle of Simancas when King Ramiro II conquered the Moors.... And at the Battle of Merida, in the days of Alfonso IX, there appeared that Son of the Thunderbolt, Santiago, Patron of Spain leading the squadrons with his sword dripping gore.’ *
    At Westphalia in 1648, let us add, Saavedra Fajardo did not speak as a chauvinistic Spaniard but as a model European, one who saw that the mad divisions between the nations would bring untold calamities upon Europe such as could only be warded off with the divine help of a crusading Spain led by Santiago Matamoros.

CHAPTER 2

PILGRIMS

    How should I your true love