The Scots College, Valladolid, "From a Heretic".

The Tablet 16th February 1889

Reproduced with permission from the publisher. www.thetablet.co.uk

Gloomy, vaulted roofed corridors, the stone flags re-echoing our footsteps, looking out into a courtyard garden out of which tall cypresses rise up and tower over the red tiled roofs, cleaving the damp January sky; the monotonous fall of rain drops from the dripping eaves; a neat stone flagged refectory, the long lain solid wooden tables on which are coarsely made but beautiful jugs of Valencian pottery; Mary, Queen of Scots, looking down from the wall in the gloaming; fronted by Temple of Temple, one of the founders and his Spanish wife; the iron studded door, a long low solid building full of nooks and corners, a silver lamp swinging before a shrine, a veiled kneeling figure at a side altar, an air of complete rest and quiet, such is my first impression of the Scottish College at Valladolid. How many Scotchmen have ever heard of it? How many visited it? That this should be the case with Protestants is not strange; but how many Catholics when in Spain have knocked at its doors? And yet it was one of the few places in which a Scottish priest could be educated by Scottish priests at one time. Oh those good old times, and oh that odium theologicum, how I hate it whether in Catholic or Protestant, Turk or Jew! And how I admire the absence of it in those gentle savages of whom Mark Twain relates, that of whatever faith the missionary was, irrespective of creed, into the hot stone oven straight he went!

Still this College, this little bit of Scotland, lost in the heart of Castile, with its pictures of Stuart kings, its flavour of old world, is not a place that any Scotchman may behold unmoved. Philip II founded it, perhaps, from mixed motives. Who does not act from mixed motives? Locality, perhaps, influences motives; the Bloody Mary of England is the Pious Mary of Spain; Claverhouse, detested in Ayrshire, is admired in the Highlands. No matter, let us not judge his motives, but merely thank him for having presented to us a memorial of his life and times. However, in a long rambling street of the decaying and famous Spanish capital the College stands. Hard by Cervantes lived, and wrote the second part of Don Quijote; close by Columbus died poor and broken-hearted; not far off dwelt Gondomar. Somehow it has always seemed to me that in these decaying towns, such as Valladolid, that the men of the past, the men who walked and swaggered in their cloaks, and French sleeves, who discovered the Indies and condemned a heretic apparently with the same pleasure, are the real inhabitants, and that the actors of to-day, dressed in their nineteenth century hats and clothes, are the ghosts. And so when the ponderous street door with its curious medieval knocker was opened, and I had exchanged greetings with the rector and priests, the present seemed to melt away, all the din and confusion of modern life to vanish, and the place began to people itself (to my eyes) with Temples of Temple; out of every nook and dark corner came a Jesuit; Suarez, the great casuist, and many more. Across the silent courtyard came Father Del Puente, another famous Jesuit, and from silent chapel and dark passage seemed to emerge the silent Scottish priests, the Jacobites, who in disguises lurked in English manor houses and Scottish castles. The men who occupied the "priest's chamber" in the homes of the Catholic families, who came and went, whose life was a mystery; and who now lie buried in the chapel here. The curious collection of relics, the writing of St. Thomas Aquinas, the autograph of Saint Teresa, and many curious pictures all passed into the care of this community of Scots Spaniards.

Looking round the College with its air of rest and quiet, one is at once impressed with the idea that it was a fit place in which to educate men to minister to the scattered Catholic counties in Scotland, in the glens of Lochaber, in the upland parishes of Aberdeenshire; a place in which to bring up men to face persecution, to endure the scoffs of a herd meekly, and, perhaps, to face martyrdom. Its air of piety and silence must have communicated itself to its inhabitants. The chapel and the building generally are in the usual style of Jesuit architecture, Italian in style, fine in proportion, perhaps too highly ornamented; inside, on the altars, the Spanish decorator has set his tinsel hands. The roof, fine and well arched, the choir gallery, unlike that of most Spanish churches, is at the end; another peculiarity, too, is the flooring of fine wood, I do not believe to be seen in another church in all Spain. Two priests I saw and the rector—the pupils I did not see—one priest, a native of Aberdeenshire the other an Irishman—need I say a Home Ruler.

And the Rector, Father Macdonald; how shall I describe him? Often have I read of, never seen such a priest. In Redgauntlet, in Scott generally, in Jacobite legend, but never in the flesh, till then. Tall, thin, very picturesque. A Highlander of the Highlanders (from Strathglas), a gentleman of the old school, a cosmopolitan speaking many tongues, withal a Scotchman at heart, the tears starting to his eyes as he spoke of Lochaber, unvisited for 50 years. Grave, courteous, such a man as must have come and gone betwixt Spain and England in times gone by on perilous messages such a sort of man as would have been a dignitary of the Church; but time goes well with him. I hear that not a few Scottish priests have been educated in Valladolid, and know the old college and its good red wine better than I do, but I hear that in the latter days few Scottish laymen visit it. I would not have them forget it, either Catholice or Protestants. I hear that Scottish Catholic families ars rare, but there are still a few remaining, and to them I say it is almost a sacred duty, when in Spain, to visit Valladolid. And so I have written this letter, urged by the deep impression made on me by this short visit to this bit of last century Scotland extant, if I may say so, with very choice Castilian. And because, in particular, I think that it has enabled me to understand better much that has hitherto seemed to me a neutral page in Scottish history.