On the 16th of April the church of the monastery was aglow with shimmer of gold and gems and rich stuffs. Under a dais at the end of this choir Philip sat in a robe of cloth of gold over a dress of crimson brocade; though his heart was sad for the death of his last wife, and he hated splendour in his broken old age. After mass had been said, the Cortes did homage and swore to keep their faith to him as king; and then stepping down from the throne, he advanced to the high altar and solemnly pledged his word to respect the laws and liberties of Portugal. How little he relished the splendour is seen in a letter he sent to his girls from Thomar a fortnight later, as soon as he could find time to write to those whom he loved more dearly than any other creatures on earth. “How much I wish,” he wrote, “you could have seen the ceremony of taking the oath from a window as my nephew [the Archduke Albert] did, who saw everything excellently. But I send you a full account of it all.... I have given the Golden Fleece to the Duke of Braganza, and he went with me to mass, both of us wearing the collar of the Order; which upon my mourning looked very bad, and I can tell you he looked much smarter than I did, although they say that the day of the oath was the first time he had worn low shoes, though everybody is wearing them here now except myself.” Thomar, for the last time in its existence, was a blaze of splendour for those six feverish weeks; for Spanish and Portuguese nobles, jealous of each other, vied in lavish expenditure; and then the fortress of the Knights was left to its solitude: gradually royal encroachments stripped the Order of its wealth and power, and Thomar lived in memory alone.
The upper chamber of the Manueline building over the choir is the chapter-house of the Order of Christ. A grand, low, pillared hall, with the twisted cables and the repeated cross and sphere, testifying once more to the reigning idea of the period of the Navigator Grand-Master. Here it was that the Portuguese Cortes sat to confirm the religious act of allegiance to Philip, and set the seal of subservience upon the nation for nearly a century. Every carved stone and crocket has a story to tell if we could but hear it. Here in the older monastic building the Navigator himself held his chapters, dwelling in the adjoining palace, in the intervals of his life-task upon his eyrie at Sagres; here in the “cloisters of the Philips,” dull Philip III. held his monastic court upon his one visit to Portugal; and the magnificent cloister of John III. testifies to the classical reaction after the exuberance of the times of his father Dom Manuel.