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1603: Marco Tulio Catizone, the false Dom Sebastian

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On this date in 1603, a man claiming to be the long-lost Portuguese king was publicly hanged on a square in the Andalusian city of Sanlucar.

Not Marco Tulio Catizone, but pretty close: the real Dom Sebastian

Dom Sebastian — so named because he was born on the Feast of St. Sebastian in 1554 — would be remembered longingly after his untimely death at age 24 as o Desejado, the Desired. What was truly desired was a return to Portugal’s golden age.

In its day, little Portugal had flourished as a great maritime empire of the Age of Discovery

One could say that trade was the calling-card of this realm of venturesome explorers, but there is no empire but that bears a sword, too. Sebastian, his young head probably bursting dreams of Alexander, undertook in 1577-78 to intervene under the glorious banner of Crusade in a disputed succession of the Moorish kingdom of Morocco.

This sort of personal valor makes for great press in the woodblocks when things go to script, and the allure must be correlated to the disproportionate odds engaged in gratuitously chancing one’s royal person to war. Sebastian was unmarried and had no children; his own father had succumbed to consumption at age 17 so he had no siblings, either. When this sole pillar of royal authority suicidally crashed himself headlong into a superior Moroccan force at the so-called Battle of Three Kings, his chivalrous self-immolation exacted a crippling toll on his kingdom.

An uncle in the cardinalate, Henry, was surprised to find himself suddenly elevated to the now-precarious Portuguese throne; Henry was 66 years old at the time and had taken vows of chastity that he could not maneuver to shed before he too died in 1580 with no heir at all.* In the ensuing succession crisis, the Spanish king soon swallowed up Portugal in a personal union.

It was only natural that the many Portuguese distressed by this staggering sequence of events would indulge the dream of their late king. Besides having the advantage of being frozen in time at the height of his youthful potential, Sebastian had never actually been found after that bloody Battle of Three Kings — or, at least, the identity of the body that the Spanish produced in the way of ending discussion was deeply doubted. Without convincing royal remains, such a dream began to spawn here and there pretenders who would emerge from unhappily unified Iberia to claim the name and the patrimony of the lost desired king.


The Recovering of the Desired King’s Body at Alcácer Quibir by Caetano Moreira da Costa Lima (1888)

The wild cast of longshot characters, according to Bryan Givens in Braudel Revisited, featured the likes of “the anonymous ‘King of Pernamacor’ in 1584; Mateus Alvares, the ‘King of Ericeira’ in 1585; and Gabriel Espinosa, the ‘Pastry-Maker of Madrigal’ in 1595.” These guys are claimants to a sleeping-king tradition aptly named “Sebastianism” which also fronted the prophecy of a visionary Azores blacksmith named Balthasar Goncalves who insisted to the Inquisition that the fallen King would return like a Messiah to liberate Portugal from Spain — and conquer Africa and the Holy Land — and defeat the Antichrist.** These beliefs in turn eddied out of currents of already-existing mystical eschatology, like the Trovas of Antonio Goncalves de Bandarra from earlier in the 16th century, mystically prophesying the return of a Hidden King.

Our man Marco Tulio Catizone (Italian link), a native of the south Italian town of Taverna, was one of these. In Venice he had made the chance acquaintance of an Italian mercenary who had joined Dom Sebastian’s catastrophic crusade, and this soldier was amazed by Catizone’s resemblance to the late king.

Thus handed a compelling calling in life, Catizone announced himself the very man himself, who had wandered the world in penance after the battle but now would like Portugal back if you please. The Venetians jailed and then expelled him (in the vein of the “King of Ericeira” and the “Pastry-Maker of Madrigal”, this one is the “Prisoner of Venice”); the Florentines re-arrested him and eventually deported him to Spain; and in Spain under the gentle suasions of hostile interrogators he coughed up his real name and purpose and was condemned a galley slave for life in 1602.

But no such sentence could squelch the desiring of a return to king and country, and for such a purpose the least plausible pretender could serve a sufficient rallying-point. João de Castro, the illegitimate son of a Portuguese nobleman who would become “the St. Paul of the sebastianista religion”† met the imprisoned “Sebastian” in Italy and became the convinced herald of his return as Bandarra’s Hidden King, the restorer of Portuguese glory and the scourge of Spain and Islam alike.

De Castro was nothing daunted by Catizone’s confession and confinement and from exile in Paris wrote a tome “with the license of the King” entitled Discurso da Vida do Sempre Bem Vindo et Apparecido Rey Dom Sebiao nosso Senhor o Encuberto, advancing the Prisoner of Venice’s claims. An attempt by De Castro and others like-minded to stir a Sebastianist rebellion in Lisbon in 1603 on Catizone’s behalf led to the latter’s trial for treason, with the outcome we have already noted.

Yet even this did not abate de Castro’s prophetic vigor.

“The man executed by the Spanish had, in fact, been Catizone, de Castro admitted, but Catizone had been switched with Sebastian by the Spanish so that they could quell the growing support for Sebastian without having the guilt of royal blood on their hands,” writes Givens. Our St. Paul would spend the remaining quarter-century of his life churning out treatises in exile “to prove Sebastian’s providential destiny, citing predictions from the full range of the Western prophetic corpus to prove that Sebastian was destined to rule the world.”

* The best who could be advanced as the Cardinal-King’s homegrown successor candidate was an illegitimate cousin of the late Dom Sebastian.

** Instead of burning this fellow as a heretic, the Inquisition instead mercifully judged him a lunatic and released him to some intensive personal indoctrination.

† J.L. de Azevedo in A evolucao do sebastianismo (1918), cited in Portuguese Studies Review, vol. 17, no. 1 (2009).

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1603: The men of the Bye Plot, but not those of the Main Plot

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On this date in 1603, priests William Watson and William Clark were executed for a dramatic (that is, harebrained) plot “to take away ‘the KINGE and all his cubbes.'”

The year was 1603, the first in the reign of James I. (However, he’d been James VI of Scotland since the tender age of 13 months, when his mother Mary, Queen of Scots had been forced to abdicate. He made himself quite a reputation for witch-hunting.)

With the death of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth and all her schismatic Anne Boleyn mojo, hard-pressed English Catholics greeted Jamie’s ascension hopeful of relief from official persecution. Although raised Protestant, both his parents had been Catholic.

Watson was one of these hopeful adherents, and hastened himself to Scotland as Queen Elizabeth lay ailing to extract from the future English monarch the soothing blandishments of good favor that future monarchs make.

When toleration was not extended to Catholics upon the new king’s elevation in late March 1603, the disenchanted Watson almost immediately embarked on a preposterous scheme to

assemble force and strengthe, and on Midsommer-day last, in the night, to come to the Parke pale at Grenewich, to enter in by the gardein with a key, that should be borowed; and when the numbers were come in, there should be a watche set at the dores of principall persons, and at the passages; and then to goe up to the KING’S loding. And when they cam to the KING, they should surprise his person, and carry him to the Tower, and they would move him for 3 things: — 1, for there pardon; 2, for tolleration of relligion; 3, for assuraunce thereof, to preferre Catholiques to places of credit, as WATZON the priest to be Lord Keper; GREY, Erle Marshall; GEORGE BROOKE, Lord Treasorer; and MARCAM, Secretary. They concluded to cutt of many of the Privy Councill, and to have made a Proclamation, purporting howe the KING had bene misled, and to have had many things reformed. They determined to have possessed the principall ports of the realme, and to have kept the KING in the Towre a quarter of a yeare.

The Bye Plot was ironically busted by other Catholics — Jesuits, as distinct from “secular clergy” (clergy not affiliated with an order) like Watson. Jesuits and secular clergy were at loggerheads in this period over tactics, church structure … more or less everything. The need to steal the thunder of whatever restore-the-Church scheme the Jesuits might be cooking up might have helped precipitate Watson into such immediate and desperate disaffection.

At any rate, these other more respectable fathers of the church blew the whistle on the Bye Plot lest it provoke anti-Catholic pogroms, and you’d have to concur with their estimate that taking the king hostage is the sort of thing that would have prompted some blowback.

In the course of rolling up the now-exposed Bye Plot, investigators also caught wind of the parallel Main Plot, courtesy of one conspirator who was involved in both and unable to hold his tongue under torture.

The Main Plot was a sketchier affair to a similar end, allegedly among Catholic-sympathizing nobles to depose James for his cousin. As befits its title, the Main Plot implicated much bluer blood than Watson’s: Lord Cobham,* Baron Grey, and the knighted soldier Griffin Markham.

Oh, and a guy you might have heard of by the name of Walter Raleigh.

All these Main Plot gentlemen were likewise condemned to death. December 9, 1603 was the date appointed for Watson and Clark to expiate the Bye Plot in the grisly manner that commoner priests were wont to suffer in that age — they as the undercard to the beheadings of Cobham, Grey, and Markham. (Raleigh was on deck for a later date.)

The drama that unfolded on the Winchester scaffold that day was wonderfully narrated in the correspondence of Sir Dudley Carleton and well worth extracting at length.

The two priests that led the way to the execution were very bloodily handled; for they were both cut down alive; and Clarke, to whom more favour was intended, had the worse luck; for he both strove to help himself, and spake after he was cut down. They died boldly both … Their quarters were set on Winchester gates, and their heads on the first Tower of the castle.

…

Warrants were signed, and sent to Sir Benjamin Tichborne, on Wednesday last at night, for Markham, Grey, and Cobham, woh in this order were to take their turns … A fouler day could hardly have been picked out, or fitter for such a tragedy. Markham being brought to the scaffold, was much dismayed, and complained much of his hard hap, to be deluded with hopes and brought to that place unprepared. One might see in his face the very picture of sorrow; but he seemed not to want resolution … [and] prepared himself to the block. The sheriff, in the mean time, was secretly withdrawn … whereupon the execution was stayed, and Markham left upon the scaffold to entertain his own thoughts, which, no doubt, were as melancholy as his countenance, sad and heavy. The sheriff, at his return, told him, that since he was so ill prepared, he should yet have two hours respite, so led him from the scaffold, without giving him any more comfort, and locked him into the great hall … The lord Grey, whose turn was next, was led to the scaffold by a troop of the young courtiers … and thereupon entered into a long prayer for the king’s good estate, which held us in the rain more than half an hour; but being come to a full point, the sheriff stayed him, and said, he had received orders from the king, to change the order of the execution, and that the lord Cobham was to go before him … he had no more hope given him, than of an hour’s respite; neither could any man yet dive into the mystery of this strange proceeding.

The lord Cobham, who was now to play his part, and by his former actions promised nothing but matiere pour rire, did much cozen the world; for he came to the scaffold with good assurance, and contempt of death. … [he] would have taken a short farewel of the world, with that constancy and boldness, that we might see by him, it is an easier matter to die well than live well.

He was stayed by the sheriff, and told, that there resteth yet somewhat else to be done; for that he was to be confronted with some other of the prisoners, but named none. So as Grey and Markham being brought back to the scaffold, as they then were, but nothing acquainted with what had passed, no more than the lookers-on with what should follow, looked strange one upon the other like men beheaded, and met again in the other world. Now all the actors being together on the stage (as use is at the end of a play,) the sheriff made a short speech unto them, by way of the interrogatory of the heinousness of their offences, the justness of their trials, their lawful condemnation, and due execution there to be performed; to all which they assented; then, saith the sheriff, see the mercy of your prince, who, of himself, hath sent hither to countermand, and given you your lives. There was then no need to beg a plaudite of the audience, for it was given with such hues and cries, that it went from the castle into the town, and there began afresh, as if there had been some such like accident. And this experience was made of the difference of examples of justice and mercy; that in this last, no man could cry loud enough, ‘God save the King;’ and at the holding up of [the previously executed] Brookes’s head, when the executioner began the same cry, he was not seconded by the voice of any one man, but the sheriff. You must think, if the spectators were so glad, the actors were not sorry; for even those that went best resolved to death, were glad of life … Raleigh, you must think (who had a window opened that way), had hammers working in his head, to beat out the meaning of this strategem. His turn was to come on Monday next; but the king has pardoned him with the rest, and confined him with the two lords to the Tower of London, there to remain during pleasure.

Turns out that James wanted to do only the minimum amount of butchery necessary to establish his bona fides, and it sure seems like the mercy play proved a public relations triumph.** Raleigh was left by this reprieve languishing in the Tower for years, before his own final adventure saw him to the block after all in 1618.

Would you like some bootless speculation that Raleigh’s being caught up in this mess led him to nurture during his imprisonment a decade-long grudge against William Shakespeare and eventually murder the playwright? Of course you would.

In the world of more demonstrable historical consequences, the failure of these plots and continuing frustration with Catholics’ lot under a new boss who seemed a lot like the old led two years later to the ne plus ultra of English sectarian terrorism, Guy Fawkes‘s Gunpowder Plot to blow King James and his court straight to kingdom come.

* Cobham was a descendant of John Oldcastle and is supposed to have forced Shakespeare to redact the family name in his Henry V plays — giving us, instead, the character of Falstaff.

** One is obliged to notice Carleton’s disquieting footnote indicating that the entire affair was staged so well that someone almost actually lost his head:

… there was another cross adventure; for John Gib could not get so near the scaffold, that he could speak to the sheriff, but was thrust out amongst the boys, and was fain to call out to sir James Hayes, or else Markham might have lost his neck.

Topical sourcing: Mark Nicholls, “Treason’s Reward: The Punishment of Conspirators in the Bye Plot of 1603” The Historical Journal, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Dec., 1995).

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1603: Not Tommaso Campanella

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The wise were forced to live as the mad were accustomed, in order to shun death, such that the greatest lunatic now possesses the royal burdens. The wise now lived alone with their wisdom, behind closed doors, applauding only in public the others’ mad and twisted caprices.

-Tommaso Campanella

On this date in 1603, freaky-deaky Dominican philosopher Tommaso Campanella drew a life sentence — avoiding execution by dint of a painfully convincing performance of insanity.

Campanella had some problematically heterodox notions about the sun (namely, that it was going to consume the earth) and everything under it, and had had a recent scrape with the Inquisition.

What really got him in trouble was trucking with a Calabrian conspiracy to overthrow Spanish domination, apparently a product of the monk’s millenarian anticipation of a sort of proto-communist revolution.

Campanella was a strange guy, but this was quite a far-out plot.

As Joan Kelly-Gadol writes in this fine tome,

This took place, let it be noted, after he had written two works advocating a Papal monarchy for Italy and the world and two works promoting the interests of the Spanish Empire also in Italy and throughout the world.

Past performance is no guarantee of future returns. Once the conspiracy was betrayed,

Campanella was imprisoned … in the Castel Nuovo, one of the principal fortresses in which the Spaniards maintained a military garrison. He was arraigned before the civil tribunal for rebellion and before the ecclesiastical tribunal for heresy. His “examination” which began in January 1600 was gruesome. He claimed innocence in his first interrogation before the civil tribunal, was thrown into a dungeon, actually a cleft in the bedrock of the Castle, to remain there for seven days. Then followed torture. He “confessed,” admitting that he preached about the coming political upheaval but denying that he was part of a conspiracy to bring it about …

His desperation at this point can be gauged by the fact that by April of 1600 he began to feign madness. The ecclesiastical action against him began now, and he persisted in this attitude of insanity through three interrogations, including an hour of torture … On the fourth and fifth of June 1601, he was subjected to the cruel torture of “the vigil” to test whether his insanity was genuine. This was the usual torture of the rope, suspending the body of the victim by his tied hands over a blade which cut into his flesh whenever he yielded to the strain of holding himself in the air; but the vigil refined this cruelty by continuing it for forty hours. Campanella endured the ordeal without breaking.

And it wasn’t just a feat of toughness to beat the torturer at his own game, impressive as it is on those terms alone: Campanella pulled off a genius gambit exploiting the Inquisition’s own legal machinery to duck the separate capital charges he faced in civil and ecclesiastical court.

Joseph Scalzo’s “Campanella, Foucault, and Madness in Late-Sixteenth Century Italy”,* an academic paper that reads like a thriller, narrates Campanella’s “dangerous competition” with his persecutors.

In fine: on Easter Sunday 1600,** as he was approaching conviction and condemnation in his state trial for treason, Campanella began his insanity ploy, successfully forcing a delay in that case and initiating his separate church trial for heresy.

Then, by remaining stubbornly committed to what most of his examiners believed was a charade, Campanella won … by forcing them to inflict that juridically determinative 40-hour “vigil” torture.

the jurisprudence of the time accorded torture so much force, such as to annul all other proofs and “to purge circumstantial evidence”; if the torture had been vigorous and unusual. The accused came, all the more to avail himself of the result obtained, according to the scholarship of the criminologists most in vogue. Thus, Campanella had judicially to be regarded as insane, although everyone was persuaded that he probably simulated insanity. The consequence, in the tribunal of the Holy Office, was not indifferent: He was a “relapsed heretic,” and even if repentant, he would have been disgraced and consigned to the secular court of justice, which would have executed him; being mad, he could no longer suffer condemnation, and in the circumstance in which he might already have been condemned, he would have been spared the death penalty, to reason and repent.

(this is Scalzo’s quotation of Luigi Amabile, an Italian who wrote the book on Campanella; I have been unable to find the Amabile original online.)

Home free.

Having reached this judicial safe haven, Campanella soon — in fact, according to the man who tortured him, literally on the walk from the vigil back to his cell — resumed a recognizable rationality.

He’d languish in prison until 1626 (a few years after he got out, he had to flee to France), but he made the most of it. Campanella wrote his magnum opus, the utopian City of the Sun, while awaiting his sentence in 1602. A number of other works on a wide array of subjects — science, philosophy, theology, political governance (he returned to giving the Spanish empire supportive advice), a vigorous defense of Galileo — were also composed during his 27 years under lock and key.

Campanella’s visionary anticipation of radical egalitarianism would, like Thomas More‘s, help shape the utopian literary genre. But Campanella’s take, while still a theocratic one, lent itself to distinctly more subversive interpretation.†

For example, this Brezhnev-era Soviet essay‡ (unearthed and translated by Executed Today friend and sometime guest-blogger Sonechka) decants the Dominican’s heretical notions into Marxist orthodoxy.

How many times were the communists denounced by their enemies for this “commonality of wives”! Scientific communism, certainly, is not responsible for the figments of a monk like Campanella. But it is instructive to penetrate his logic. It is not commodification or dehumanization that hides behind Campanella’s “commonality of wives”. The women of the “City of Sun” have the same rights as men … The “commonality of women” is equivalent to the “commonality of men” on the basis of mutual equality. That is why, though [we are] decisively rejecting this type of family-free communism, it is necessary to consider who stands on the higher moral grounds — Campanella’s woman, alien to deceit and pretense, or a false bourgeois woman, whose lot in life is adultery and legalized prostitution.

Ultimately, this wild man not only got the high moral ground: he got to die in bed. Once in a while, we get a happy(ish) ending.

So although it actually has nothing to do with Tommaso, “La Campanella” — “Little Bell”, a Paganini violin concerto — allows us here at this blog (in common with our day’s hero) an atypically soothing* denouement.

* Joseph Scalzo, “Campanella, Foucault, and Madness in Late-Sixteenth Century Italy”, The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Autumn, 1990)

** Campanella’s Easter 1600 madness was initiated only a few weeks after fellow intellectual omnivore Giordano Bruno was burned for heresy up the road in Rome. Strictly coincidence.

† Since so much of Campanella’s work was produced while the author was under duress — fighting capital charges, applying for clemency and release — it remains disputable just which parts of it can be taken to represent his real beliefs.

‡ L. Vorob’ev. “Utopija i dejstvitelnost”. (“Utopia and Reality”) in Utopicheskij roman XVI-XVII vekov (Utopian Novel of XVI-XVII century); Series “Biblioteka vsemirnoj literatury”, Khudozhestevnnaja literature, Moscow, 1971, p. 19.

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