Garcilaso was written by J. Breckenridge Ellis. Ellis (1870-1901) wrote twenty-six books, many of them historical romances like Garcilaso, and was a longtime president of the Missouri Writers Guild.

There was a historical Garcilaso de la Vega, the protagonist of Garcilaso. De la Vega (circa 1501-1536) was a Spanish soldier who fought in several wars (and died from injuries gained in battle) and was a celebrated and influential poet.

Garcilaso is a charming little novel about Garcilaso de la Vega, Lord of Bartas, a Spanish chevalier fighting against the Moors during the years of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. Garcilaso is a memoir of the high points of Garcilaso's youth. He is a noted knight who saved the life of the king himself as well as performed other brave feats in the war against the Moors. Unfortunately, Garcilaso aches for love and keenly feels its absence. His best friend, Lady Margaret Guzman, who may have feelings for Garcilaso herself, decides to set him up with her friend Petonilla Fontane. Garcilaso is instantly smitten with Petonilla. Unfortunately, she does not immediately reciprocate, so he tries to prove himself to her. But he discovers that she is a Vaudois, not a proper Catholic. The Vaudois are a sect loathed by the Church, and in Garcilaso’s eyes this makes her an apostate. He spurns her, although he continues to love her, so when his best friend Herbert Klein, a German knight whose life Garcilaso had earlier saved, rescues Petonilla, Garcilaso bids them farewell rather than apprehending them. This earns Garcilaso the displeasure of the Holy Office of the Inquisition–he assisted in the escape of a heretic from the auto-da-fé–so Garcilaso is imprisoned and tortured. Proud as always, he refuses to reveal who rescued Petonilla despite repeated tortures. In the prisons of the Inquisition Garcilaso meets a Jew he had formerly turned over to the Inquisition (and who, by plot device, is the adoptive father of Petonilla), and they become friends. Garcilaso begins to change and mature. He is being marched toward the auto-da-fé when he is rescued by a group of his fellow knights, Herbert Klein, and Petonilla. Garcilaso recovers from the torments inflicted on him by the Inquisition, but he knows he has to leave Madrid, since the Inquisition is still looking for him. Garcilaso enlists with Columbus and helps discover the New World. Garcilaso eventually realizes that he really loves Lady Margaret, and returns to Spain. She accepts him, and they live happily ever after.

A recitation of the Garcilaso’s plot does not really convey what is so charming about the novel. Its romantic sub-plots are handled with a much greater skill than most historical novels achieve; the characters’ relationships are natural and not forced, and Garcilaso's marriage to and happiness with Lady Margaret is earned through his suffering and maturation, rather than being simply given to him as his due as the hero of the novel. Garcilaso’s narrative style and rhetoric are old-fashioned but not outdated. Ellis is of the Stanley J. Weyman (see: From the Memoirs of a Minister of France, The Red Cockade) school of swashbuckling historical romance writing, in which understatement and pith replace the fustian and stiffness of a Victor Hugo (see: The Hunchback of Notre Dame) or Walter Scott (see: Rob Roy, Waverley). Garcilaso has all of the enjoyable trappings of any adventure novel set in the Middle Ages; there are knightly duels, with both Moors and Spaniards treating each other chivalrously and being concerned with honor, and there is enough swordplay and derring-do to satisfy any fan of Alexandre Dumas père. But Garcilaso has further virtues, one of which is its sense of humor. There is wit, of course, with Garcilaso getting off some good lines, but there is also humor at Garcilaso's expense. He is none too bright, and the reader will enjoy a number of chuckles at his expense as his pride and stubbornness lead him to rash and stupid statements and acts. A typical moment, for Garcilaso:

For if I have one quality of which I am more proud than another, it is my modesty; and scorning to sprinkle my pages with the pronoun “I,” Garcilaso will often speak of himself as if he were another.

It was a clear, bright evening in June, and the year was 1491. Leaving Herbert Klein in my tent, I sought the pavilions occupied by the ladies of Queen Isabella.¹

It is no accident that Garcilaso so quickly reverts to using “I” after scorning its use.

For all the novel's humor, however, it is essentially a serious novel, and while the plot is concerned with romance the novel’s underlying theme is religious tolerance. Garcilaso is a strident, inflexible, humorless Catholic who lacks any mercy toward “heretics,” and his own words and deeds early in the novel damn him and his pre-Luther, Inquisitional Catholicism in the eyes of the modern reader, to whom the torture and burning of Jews and non-Catholics are not likely to be amusing. This is deliberate on Ellis' case, of course. Garcilaso is the protagonist of the novel, but at its start he is no hero. That changes once he is exposed to the mercies of the Inquisition's torturers, and the reader has meanwhile seen all too vividly the brutality and mercilessness of the Spanish Church. (Garcilaso is another novel that perpetuates the leyenda negra [see: The Yellow Peril] as well as indulges in the anti-Catholicism of so much popular fiction during the Victorian era [see: “The Demon Pope”], although Ellis was American rather than British and his anti-Catholicism sprang from both anti-immigration sentiment and nativist sentiment.²) The values most modern readers cherish, including tolerance and a celebration of diversity, are the exact opposite of Garcilaso's, but they are the values of Herbert Klein and Petonilla, who Garcilaso repeatedly scorns. But life deals Garcilaso harsh blows, and eventually he changes.

Garcilaso has a number of virtues and is well worth the effort to find and read.

¹ J. Breckenridge Ellis, Garcilaso (Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1901), 38.

² John Corrigan and Lynn S. Neal, eds., Religious Intolerance in America: A Documentary History (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 51-53.