Popular monarchs—King Alfonso and the washerwoman—Royal charity—No bull-fight required—Reaction against the bull-ring—A monarchical republican—The guardian of the polo ground—The King introduces the Queen—A loyal old gardener—The grief of Enriqueta—The King at Ronda—A lucky donkey-driver—Careful rioters—Viva el Rey!
Popular monarchs—King Alfonso and the washerwoman—Royal charity—No bull-fight required—Reaction against the bull-ring—A monarchical republican—The guardian of the polo ground—The King introduces the Queen—A loyal old gardener—The grief of Enriqueta—The King at Ronda—A lucky donkey-driver—Careful rioters—Viva el Rey!
I am often asked by visitors whether the English Queen is popular in Spain, and I always wonder why such a question should occur to them. How could she fail to be popular, with youth, beauty, and a kind heart to give an extra gilding to her crown?
As a matter of fact, the longer one lives in Spain and the more one sees of the peasantry and the working classes in general, the more delightful tales one hears of the private dealings of the King and Queen and the rest of the royal family with the “common” people; and as very few of these have been published in the English papers, it seems worth while to put them on record before they are forgotten. I do not vouch for their literal truth, but I hardly think such stories would be current coin unless they had some foundation in fact, and in any case the people believe them to be true, and thus they illustrate the popular feeling towards the Royalties.
GOING HOME FROM THE MARKET.
GOING HOME FROM THE MARKET.
Perhaps the story of King Alfonso and the washerwoman is already a chestnut, although I have never seen it in print. It dates from the days when motors were comparatively in their infancy, and the young King kept his entourage in a state of chronic nervousness by his devotion to the new machine, which in the opinion of the timid might run away or blow up at any moment. One winter afternoon the King did not return at the time he was expected, and there were serious thoughts of sending out a detachment of the Civil Guard with an ambulance in search of the errant motor. When His Majesty appeared, his lateness was explained by his having picked up a lame old laundress laden with clean linen, some little way out of Madrid, and taken her in his motor to the residence of her employers before he came home.
Possibly this may be one of Ben Trovato’s stories, but I can myself quite believe it, having heard at first hand of many other incidents showing the same impulsive kindness to the poor and lowly, and the same disregard of convention and regal state.
Not only the King and Queen, but also the Queen-Mother and other members of the royal family have at one time or another picked up unfortunates who had met with accidents in the streets, and conveyed them to their homes or to a hospital. On one occasion Queen Christina sat for half an hour on a bench in the park at Madrid, while her motor took an unlucky cyclist to hospital. He was a student who had cut his head badly, and the Queen herself directed her servants to lay him as comfortably aspossible on the cushions, after binding up his wounds with her own hands.
The Infanta Isabel, aunt of King Alfonso, recently delighted the crowd by an action which is less common now than it was a century ago. True, the vehicle was a fashionable motor, instead of a great royal coach as formerly, but the inspiration was the same.
The Princess on her afternoon drive met a procession carrying the Viaticum from one of the minor churches to a dying person. She got out of her motor, made the priest get in with his sacred burden, and herself walked to the sick man’s house in the procession behind the Host, carrying a lighted candle. She is a great favourite in Spain, especially among the amateurs of the bull-ring, for her devotion to the national sport is so warm as to compensate them for the unconcealed distaste of some other members of her family.
The King and Queen seldom go to a bull-fight, although when they do appear at one the fact is so freely advertised, and photographs of their Majesties are so widely circulated by those interested in maintaining the “sport,” that probably the outside world believes that they are devoted to it. It is of course impossible that those who love horses and are themselves skilled in horsemanship should have any sympathy with an entertainment in which the mangling of horses is an essential feature, although a King and Queen may sometimes have apparently to condone what they cannot approve. But their real feeling may be judged from a little incident which I hadfrom an excellent authority—the private secretary of the man to whom the King spoke.
The occasion was a visit from their Majesties to a certain town which is renowned for its bull-fights, and has the reputation of producing the besttorerosin Spain. The Alcalde presented his programme of festivities for the King’s approval, and, pointing out one or two vacant dates, asked—
“When would you like to have the bull-fight, sir?”
The King replied that he and the Queen had come for a holiday, and did not wish to have every day filled up in advance; “and therefore,” said his Majesty, “when I want a bull-fight I will ask for it.”
The Court spent a whole month in that town, and no bull-fight took place.
Of course this, like everything else in Spain, is a political question. The Reactionaries, true to their principles, support existing institutions, while the Conservatives, Liberals, Radicals, Republicans, both reforming and revolutionary, Socialists, etc., all combine to denounce what they regard as one of the main factors in theatraso de España(the backwardness of Spain).
Foreigners who object to the bull-fight must bear in mind that an immense amount of money is sunk in it, by the owners of large estates who breed the bulls, in the building and upkeep of the bull-rings, and in the very costly apparatus of the show, and it is only natural that capitalists should fight for the institution in which their money is invested. When foreigners indignantly ask why the King doesnot put a stop to the barbarous “sport,” if it be true that he dislikes it, they do not realise that a constitutional King, however radical a reformer he may be, cannot by a stroke of the pen destroy the vested interests of a great and powerful section of the community. To suggest that King Alfonso should arbitrarily close all the bull-rings would be something like proposing that the King of England should,propio motu, close all the music-halls, regardless of the rights of the shareholders. And the bull-fights can at any rate plead a venerable antiquity. Their origin is not certainly known, but it is possible that they date from the days of the Liby-Tartessians, when Minos ruled and encouraged bull-fights in Crete.
What is new is the reaction against the ring, which is spreading with encouraging rapidity. One of the greatest virtues of IsabelII., in the opinion of her time, was that she “was very fond of the bulls,” and even now old ladies and gentlemen of that unlucky Queen’s generation speak of her affection for the bull-fight as one of her redeeming qualities. Whereas not the least of King Alfonso’s acknowledged claims on the respect and sympathy of the Radical and Republican sections of his subjects (and these include the mass of the working classes) is his obvious preference for other and more manly forms of sport.
The republicanism of the peasant is a curious and interesting study, and I always love to draw him out on the subject. One day when I was digging in the mountains a heavy shower came on,and I took shelter with my workmen in a chambered tomb that we had been clearing. How the subject of the Monarchy came up between them I did not notice, for I was absorbed in a dramatic shifting of the storm-scene as I saw it framed by a rough opening in the rock where a fallen stone had revealed the existence of our burial cave. The hills had been purple, almost black, against the thunderclouds, when suddenly there was a rift in the overcast sky, a streak of sunshine shot out, and through the pouring rain a great sheet of silver appeared like magic on the distant hillside, where an instant before all had been unrelieved gloom. It was only a patch of grey rock, but it was transformed by a cascade of rain-water from the peaks above into a thing of ethereal beauty which vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
A small boy—a goat-herd in his Sunday best on his way to a fair in the neighbouring town—had taken shelter with us in the cave, and at the men’s request had been singing the local songs in a shrill treble for my benefit; and when my thoughts began to wander from the company to that glorified hillside, he was wailing a love-song of which I could not make out a word. It was rather a shock to me to be brought back to earth by hearing the gentlest and most courteous of my two diggers remark that he wished he had the King and the Alcalde of the town together in the cave, so that he might throttle them both.
He explained that the Town Council owed him a considerable sum of money for a contract carried outby his father (recently dead) and himself, and his view was that if the King really was up to his work he would long ago have made an end of corruption and jobbery, and would have replaced the existing bureaucracy with honest men, who would pay poor labourers what they owed them instead of buying motors for their private amusement. And as the King had not done this, let him be throttled, or if not that, at least let us have a republic and make him the President of it.
Poor Ramón! He was suffering from a bad attack of political indigestion, and no wonder, for the unpaid bill, amounting to some hundreds of pesetas, meant a very heavy loss to a young man who had to support a widowed mother and various young brothers and sisters. I gave him a note of recommendation to the Alcalde, whom I knew to be rather better than most of his class, and I hope he got his money when the next pay-day came. But I sadly pondered over the state of Spain, administered on a system which poisons every limb of the body politic and makes it almost impossible for the local authorities to pay their workers and at the same time meet the demands of the blood-suckers who live without working, while they pull the strings that make the office-holders dance to their piping.
In a country where politics permeate and pollute everything it is not easy to keep clear of them, but I have heard many little anecdotes of the King and Queen which fortunately are free from that taint; and if most of them relate to Seville, my excusemust be that most of my life in Spain has been spent in that city.
About a mile outside the town there is a large expanse of meadow land alongside the Guadalquivir, known as the Tablada, which has played a part many times in Andalucian history.
Here grazed the long-horned Tartessian cattle mentioned in the last chapter. Here Julius Cæsar reviewed the native militia when the natives of Hispalis enlisted under his banner after refusing to open their gates to Varro, the lieutenant of Pompey. Here the offspring of Witiza, the last legitimate King of the Visigoths, grew rich as they cultivated the fertile plain and built ships to carry on that profitable trade with the East which made Ishbiliyah rich under the rule of Witiza’s descendants, who amicably intermarried with Arab princes and ruled the land under nominal subjection to the Sultans of Cordova. Here the Northmen, ten centuries ago, after sailing up the river, were repulsed when they tried to set fire to the town. Here Saint Fernando set up his camp when he besieged Seville in 1248 and spent a year and a half in the vain endeavour to effect an entrance through the imperishable walls which were first built somewhere about the time that Minos brought bull-fighting into fashion.
True the Carthaginians conquered Tharsis, sacked and destroyed the city of their rivals the Greco-Tartessians (who in recent centuries had twice possessed themselves of Cadiz), and even deprived Tharsis of its name, adding it to that of Cadiz by way of an extra jewel in the Gaditanian crown. Butthe encircling wall defied their vengeance, and although they may have made a breach here and there they could not destroy it, for the “cob” of pre-Roman Spain is as hard as stone, and luckily for posterity the Carthaginians did not know the uses of dynamite.
Unless aided from within, none of her enemies ever got into Seville until the walls fell into disrepair. Even Marshal Soult would hardly have found the siege of Seville such a farce as he did, but for the ruinous condition into which Spanish neglect had allowed the fortifications to decline. True he did not have to encamp on Tablada to starve the town into surrender, as did Saint Fernando, but the inhabitants had time to hide a good many of their treasures, artistic and other, in the subterranean vaults and galleries which have existed since Tharsis was built, before the French general battered down their gates.
The plain of Tablada is now a busy place, for right across it a great canal is in course of construction, which, coupled with a further deepening of the channel of the river, will open Seville, some fifty miles inland, to steamers of over 10,000 tons and make it the principal port in Spain, except perhaps Barcelona.
But part of this plain is devoted to sport of different sorts, and here a polo ground is laid out when the Court comes to Seville. Thus here, as in Moguer, my little anecdotes are linked to a thread of history, and this long digression has more object than at first appears.
A certain old man had been appointed gatekeeper to the entrance to the Tablada sports ground, because his son, atorero, had been killed in a bull-fight and the bulls destined to die in the Seville ring are always enclosed in a field at Tablada a day or two before the fight. He was a conscientious old man and never deserted his post, even when all the town turned out to receive the King and Queen on their arrival from Madrid. They had an exceptionally enthusiastic reception that year, because King Alfonso had recently granted a large piece of ground from the Alcazar gardens to give access, light, and air to a poor quarter packed away behind the lofty walls of the palace; and it was a good deal of a sacrifice on the part of the old man to go out to Tablada at the usual time instead of shoutingVivaswith his friends at the station first: but he had his reward in a little-expected shape.
A few days after the arrival of the Court, word was sent to our friend that he must be extra careful to admit no unauthorised persons to the enclosure, because their Majesties would be driving out in the course of the afternoon to see the polo ground preparatory to a match fixed for the next day. So when a young man whom he did not know galloped up, slightly dishevelled from riding fast in a stiff wind, the gatekeeper flatly refused to open the gate, saying in explanation that the King and Queen were coming.
“Do you know the King?” inquired the rider.
“No; nor the Queen either,” answered the old man, “and I only wish I did, for my grandchildrenplague the life out of me every day asking whether I have seen her and whether she is as beautiful as everybody says.”
“Well, now you will be able to tell them,” said the horseman, “for here she comes.”
Up drove the Queen, and the old man thereupon became aware that his interlocutor—as of course my readers have guessed—was the King himself, for he proceeded to tell her of the conversation in a way that made her laugh heartily.
“And now that you have seen the Queen, what shall you tell your grandchildren? Is she as beautiful as everybody says?” asked the King in the best of humours, for, as all the world knows, nothing pleases him more than these spontaneous evidences of the admiration bestowed on his wife.
“More, more, a thousand times more,” stammered the old man, quite abashed.
The royal cortége waited while the Queen asked about the children, how many there were, what were their ages, and why they lived with their grandfather. And on hearing how they had been orphaned and were dependent on his modest earnings at the gate, the King gave him a bank-note—which could not have been less than twenty-five pesetas, for that is the smallest paper money, and may have been more—telling him to let the children have a feast of cakes and chocolate by which to remember the Queen.
It is pretty to see the real affection inspired by this brilliant young couple even in the humblest of their entourage.
While the piece of ground given to the town was being cut off from the palace gardens, there was for a week or more a long space by the new road which was open to the world at large, for although the work was pressed on with all speed, a high and strong wall had to be built, and that could not be run up in a moment. It was January, and very cold for Seville, and one day when I walked round the gardens I missed the oldest of the gardeners, who with his chubby, cheerful daughter are particular friends of mine.
It appeared that old Toro was crippled with a serious chill, and could only just hobble across from his cottage to the place where the building was going on, where he was acting as watchman until the new wall was finished.
“How has he managed to get ill just now?” I asked, for he was a sturdy old fellow whom no amount of work ever seemed to tire.
“It is because he has been up for several nights, keeping guard over there,” explained his daughter. “The Town Council put on two extra policemen, but my father thought they were not enough to make sure that no bad characters got in in the dark, for it is a long piece of road as you see, and he was not going to have bad characters in His Majesty’s garden ifhecould help it.”
“Well done, Toro,” said I; “I know how loyal he is to the King, and I hope he will get a handsome tip for his extra care.”
“Oh no, he didn’t do it for that, it is purely voluntary; and anyhow he won’t get anything,because the Señor Marqués (the Governor of the Alcazar) doesn’t know anything about it. You may be sure my father is not going to tell him. And please, Doña Elena, don’t say anything to my father about it, for he would be angry with me for telling you. He feels he is only doing his duty.”
One admires the King whose kindness to his employés secures such unselfish affection, and one admires the high ideal of duty which leads an old man nearer seventy than sixty to stop out of doors all night for a week at a stretch to guard his royal master’s garden. I do not know if Toro’s devotion ever reached the King’s ears, but I fear not, for the last time I saw chubby Enriqueta she was in tears because, owing to extensive alterations in that same garden, the house she and her father had lived in for so many years was to be pulled down and they had to seek a new abode outside of the precincts.
She cheered up, however, as I led her back to talk about the royal family, always her favourite subject of conversation.
She adores the little Prince of Asturias, and related with pride how she had long ago heard him talking in English to his pony. “He was hardly four years old, and yet he could already talk in a language I did not understand!”
But her most cherished recollection relates to a day of alarms and excursions when, owing to some political crisis, the Court left Seville at a few hours’ notice, a day or two earlier than had been intended.
“I have never been employed inside the palace,” said Enriqueta, “only to wash table linen and such-likehere in our own laundry. But that day every one was so busy that we were all called to help with the packing. There are certain things that the Queen herself directs the packing of, and one of her ladies told me to carry a tray of silver and spoke rather sharply because I was slow with it, being unused to such delicate work. And a voice behind said in the kindest tone, ‘Don’t scold the poor girl; I am sure she is doing her best.’ And there was the Queen herself, who had come to see if the silver was ready! We would all go down on our knees to serve their Majesties, who have kind words for everybody, and it is a deep grief to me that when we live away from the palace I shall have no chance of serving the Queen even by washing her table linen.”
I heard a pleasant story of the King at Ronda, which he visited a year or so ago on his way from a military review at Algeciras.
The Alcalde, although of noble birth, was very old and had not been to Court for so long that he had even forgotten how to address his King. He began by taking the seat of honour in the carriage, and when the King asked him the depth of the Tajo—that tremendous cleft in the rock through which flows the Guadelevín—he replied that he did not know. The Tajo is the pride and glory of all good Rondeños, for the gorge has a sheer drop of between five hundred and six hundred feet, and great was the indignation of the town when the Alcalde’s indifference to those all-important local statistics became known.
The King was driven up to the new hotel, the Reina Victoria, on the crest of a hill where the Tajo opens out into a fertile valley. And here the Alcalde seems to have set his royal guest down and left him to his own devices, without so much as having a glass of wine set before him.
Later in the day a poor muleteer, toiling up the winding path which leads from the flour mills below to the “old town” on the top of the hill, was accosted by a strange young gentleman who, with a companion, was beginning the ascent. No one is more responsive to a pleasant greeting than the Andalucian peasant, and thearrieroat once slipped off his donkey in order to carry on the conversation more comfortably on foot.
“I suppose you gentlemen, being strangers, got a sight of the King this morning,” said he. “They say he is verysimpático, and very good to the poor.”
“I am glad to hear that,” said one of the strangers, “but haven’t you seen him yourself?”
“Not I,” said thearriero; “I can’t afford to lose my day’s wage merely to enjoy myself, and I have no chance of seeing His Majesty unless he comes down into the Tajo to look for me.”
They climbed on up the stony zigzag path, and presently the young man asked thearrieroif the donkey could carry his weight, for he found walking up the almost vertical hill rather hard work.
“Of course he could get on the donkey, and welcome. Castaño often carried two hundredweight of potatoes up to the town, and the Señor certainlydid not weigh that. He, Castaño’s owner, thought very little of climbing the hill several times a day when there was a lot of produce to take to market, but he could understand that aforastero[stranger—any one not belonging to the speaker’s native place] who was not used to the Tajo might find it heavy walking.”
So the gentleman got on the donkey, sitting on the panniers with his long legs dangling on each side of the beast’s neck in true country fashion, and in this wise the little procession reached the new road recently made through a breach in the town walls to give an easy approach for motors.
Here the “stranger” dismounted and gave a gratuity to thearrierowhich left him speechless with surprise and delight, for it was more than a week’s wages that he found in his hand.
“Thank you for my pleasant ride,” said the gentleman. “And you can tell your friends that the King not only went to see you at the bottom of the Tajo, but was very glad to borrow your donkey to come up again.”
When he left that evening King Alfonso is reported to have said that he would never forget Ronda, for it was the first place he had been to in all his life where he was neither offered nor asked for anything.
These are but a few of the many stories we hear of the King, the Queen, and their people, but they will suffice to show the estimation in which their Majesties are held, as well as some of the reasons for it. And to end the chapter I will add one incidentin very modern history, which occurred as recently as November 1913, and is significant, it seems to me, of the present state of Spanish politics.
The tax known in France as theoctroiand in Spain as theconsumos, because it is levied on nearly everything that is consumed in the use,—i.e.food and firing,—bears heavily on the poor and causes more discontent than any other detail of local administration. It is very harshly enforced in many places, every box, basket, or bundle that enters the town being examined with irritating and unnecessary thoroughness. Every traveller has suffered from it on arrival at the railway station, and what is worse, one often sees weary labourers forced to unload and reload again their tired donkeys on their way home from work, because theconsumistachooses to imagine that some article of food may be concealed under a hundredweight of charcoal or firewood. I have myself been detained in pouring rain at the entrance to a town after a long day on the hills, while a surly official poked and prodded the panniers of a mule laden with nothing more dutiable than ancient tiles, bricks, and such-like from my excavations. A shocking accident occurred, in connection with this tax, at a seaside village where we spent one summer; for a poor woman had put her sleeping infant in the panniers of her donkey, and theconsumista, assuming without inquiry that they contained vegetables, ran the baby through with the long sharp spike used for testing the contents of a load that is not unpacked before them, and killed it on the spot.
At election times, when the whole country is greatly excited, theconsumosgrievance is always prominent, and the popular indignation is apt to explode in plain language about the Town Councils, for these have a legal right to substitute some other local tax for theconsumos, if they choose to do so. Naturally the poor feel that they, in whose starvation wages every farthing is of importance, suffer more by a direct tax on food than do the rich, and thus it has become a class question, needing extremely delicate handling at critical moments.
In a modest village of two or three thousand inhabitants, in the province of Huelva, called Bolullos del Candado, feeling about theconsumoshad risen to boiling-point before the 1913 municipal elections began, and some mismanagement at the Town Hall led the malcontents to believe—perhaps justifiably—that the voting would not be fairly conducted. In less than no time some five hundred people collected outside the Town Hall, and the authorities, alarmed at their menacing aspect, locked the doors and ordered the Civil Guard to fire on the crowd. Infuriated by being shot at when they had done nothing wrong or illegal, the people burst in the doors, and a free fight ensued. When it ended they were masters of the situation, and then they sacked the Town Hall and made a bonfire of the furniture in the village square.
But before a hand was laid on the municipal property, one of the “rioters” took down a picture of the King, which hung in the council-room, and a detachment of them conveyed it to a place ofsafety, while the whole crowd shoutedViva el Rey!
It was the triumph of King Alfonso’s personality over political passion, and shows, I think, that there is not much fear of a popular revolution against the Monarchy in Spain.
A REST AT THE FORD.
A REST AT THE FORD.