At Poitiers the journey was unexpectedly interrupted. A few days before his arrival, his old friend and collaborator, Antoinette d’Orleans, had died, leaving the newly established congregation of Calvary without a head. While Father Joseph was at Poitiers, settling the troubled affairs of his Calvarians, an odd piece of news was brought to him. The Emperor’s representatives in Bohemia had been thrown out of a third-story window of the palace at Prague. The long anticipated war had begun-the war that was destined, though nobody dreamed that such a thing was possible, to last for thirty years.
As soon as the new abbess was elected, and her rule securely established, Father Joseph hastened on to Madrid, at such a rate and through summer weather so torrid, that both of his companions died before the journey was completed. Of tougher constitution and supported by a more indomitable spirit and a more constant practice of the divine presence, Father Joseph reached his destination in safety and at once plunged into negotiations with the Duke of Lerma and his royal master. The reception accorded to the Pope’s representative was courteous and cordial in the extreme; the idea of the crusade was pronounced to be eminently catholic and meritorious.
But when it came to the question of the means by which this pious approval in principle might be translated into active diplomatic, military and naval co-operation with France, Father Joseph found that he was dealing, not with obedient sons of the Church, but with Spanish nationalists. Simultaneously, of course, the Spaniards made a corresponding discovery about Father Joseph.
Having a Béarn in one’s own eye may actually sharpen one’s vision for similar Béarn’s in the eyes of others. To Lerma and his master it was abundantly obvious that, though the friar sincerely believed that a crusade would be highly pleasing to God, he was also convinced that France should lead the crusade and derive the chief benefits from it. Father Joseph rationalized this last belief by an appeal to history. France had played the chief part on earlier crusades-had played it because it was evidently the will of Providence that she should do so. If France were to play any part below the highest in the present crusade, it would be a rupture of historical tradition and a flouting of God’s will. Therefore, France must play the leading part. It seemed an irrefragable argument, to a Frenchman.
To the Spaniards, unfortunately, it was less convincing. All they felt certain of was that a crusade such as Father Joseph projected would strengthen France at the expense of Spain. Experience had taught them that the old crusading motto, ‘Gesta Dei per Francos,’ 13 could all too easily be transformed in practice into ‘Gesta Francorum, gesta Dei’14 and they shrewdly suspected that some such transformation had actually taken place inside the tonsured skull of Father Joseph. After four months of strenuous and perfectly ineffective negotiations, the friar was forced to return home, with nothing but the vaguest promises, the most non-committal of good wishes. Spanish coolness and the rigours of winter on the sierras had no power to chill Father Joseph’s enthusiasm. On the way home he composed a long lyrical rhapsody on the liberation of the Greeks from Turkish bondage. Two stanzas of this poem are peculiarly illuminating.
‘Si, pour te soulager,’
he writes, apostrophizing Greece,
“Si pour te soulager, l’univers je tournoie,
C’est trop peu pour mes vœux;
Dans une mer de sang il faut que je me noie
Pour eteindre mes feux.16”
In other words, Father Joseph’s zeal for a crusade was too burningly hot to be extinguished by anything short of a sea of other people’s blood. Few political idealists have spoken so frankly about the consequences of their idealism. The reason, it may be, is that few political idealists have spent half a lifetime brooding upon the torture and death of a man-god, by comparison with whose sufferings those of ordinary human beings are so infinitesimal as to be practically negligible. And when the sea of blood had been spilled, what then? Most political idealists have no doubt at all; liquidate the people who don’t agree with you, and you will have Utopia. Again Father Joseph is strangely free from illusions and strangely frank about that freedom.
“J’ignore où mon dessein, qui surpasse ma vue,
Si vite me conduit;
Mais comme un astre ardent qui brille dans la nue,
II me guide en la nuit.”17
The results of any plan of action are always unknown and unknowable; the plan must be pursued for its own sake, as an end in itself. This is the bald truth about politics; but how few politicians have ever had the perspicacity to see it, or the courage, if they have seen it, to tell the disquieting truth!
The crusade against the Turks remained to the end of his life one of Father Joseph’s principal concerns. True, by 1625 he was forced to admit that any scheme for an international expedition would have to be abandoned, probably for many years to come. The reasons for this abandonment were the troubled state of Europe and the persistent opposition of the two branches of the House of Hapsburg.’ This opposition to the crusade transformed Father Joseph’s early Spanish policy into an intense and fixed dislike of ‘the hereditary enemy.’ At the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War he was whole-heartedly on the side of the Emperor against the Elector Palatine and the Protestants. Of the imperial victory of the White Mountain, in 1620 he wrote enthusiastically: ‘Satan has lost one of his horns, and Jesus, expelled from these regions, will be re-established in Bohemia.’
A few years later he was doing everything in his power to make Satan’s horn grow again. Why? Because a Hapsburg triumph would be dangerous to France and an obstacle to the launching, under French auspices, of a great crusade against the infidel. The most ardent of Catholics, he came to believe that Catholic Austria and Catholic Spain were a menace to the best interests of Catholicism. This view was far from unorthodox; for it was shared by no less a person than the Pope. As an Italian prince, the Pope had very good reasons to fear the House of Hapsburg. A too-sweeping victory in Germany would make the Emperor and the King of Spain the undisputed masters of the Peninsula.
On his return from Madrid, Father Joseph continued to work with unabated zeal for the crusade. Behind the scenes, he helped the Duke of Nevers to organize the new order of chivalry, which was to form the nucleus of the projected international army. This Christian Militia, as it was called, was to enroll its knights and commanders in all parts of Catholic Europe. Each recruit was to take a crusader’s oath and to contribute to the common war chest a sum proportionate to his rank and fortune. The Christian Militia did as well as such an organization could be expected to do in the circumstances.
Many nobles and gentlemen joined the order; a considerable amount of money was promised; and questions of leadership and prestige provoked a great deal of heartburning and resulted in interminable disputes. The Militia received its first serious set-back when Philip IV of Spain refused to allow its establishment in any of his possessions. Then, with the absorption of Europe’s best energies in the war, the order rapidly lost its reason for existence. In 1625, when Father Joseph obtained its official recognition by Pope Urban VIII, the Christian Militia was for all practical purposes dead and buried.
Nevers’ war effort was not confined to organizing an order of chivalry. He raised troops in his domains and had a number of fine ships built to transport them to Greece. As commander of his little navy, he engaged a well-known Norman pirate, who had specialized in the Mediterranean and possessed an unrivalled knowledge of Levantine waters. Father Joseph did what he could to help the potential Emperor of Byzantium in these preparations, none of which, however, bore any fruit. The troops evaporated, the ships were seized by a Protestant squadron from La Rochelle, the pirate returned to his own line of business, and finally the Duke of Nevers himself got bored with crusades and began to think about other things.
“Blest madman, who could every hour employ
With something new to wish, or to enjoy !”
Only Father Joseph remained, a voice crying in the wilderness; and soon that voice would be changing its tune, would cry no longer for the destruction of the Turk, but for the humiliation of the Hapsburgs. But before abandoning (how reluctantly!) his policy of a-crusade-in-our-time, Father Joseph made one last and most extraordinary contribution to the cause. In 1617, on his way back from Rome, he had begun the composition of his Turciad. Thirty-five miles, three hours of meditation and two hundred hexameters -such was the daily programme of that strenuous journey. In the years that followed, and on the roads of France and Spain, he completed and polished the work. By 1625 the epic, in four thousand six hundred and thirty-seven lines, was complete. That year he took with him to Rome the two printed copies which constituted, so far as can be discovered, the first and only edition of the work. One copy was for Urban VIII, the
