Ifmen may be known by their works, the Escorial will help us to a better understanding of Philip of Spain—of his temperament and his purpose—than can be gained by the study of any other architectural monument for which he was responsible. PhilipII.was guilty of craft and duplicity; he inflicted suffering and death upon hosts of his innocent vassals; he has been depicted as a monster of cruelty and bigoted intolerance. But as a monarch inspired with unfaltering belief in the divine right of his kingship, he could not be expected to be tolerant of the stubbornness of others; and as the instrument of God, appointed to enforce religious unity not only among his own subjects, but also upon the rest of Europe, he doubtless felt he was justified in employing any means to accomplish his mission.
The Emperor CharlesV.had exhorted Philip to exterminate every trace of heresy from his dominions, and his son never forgot the injunction nor sought to escape the obligation that had been thrust upon him. Throughout his reign, which was inaugurated by an impressiveauto-da-féat Valladolid—in which twelve tortured creatures were sacrificed on the fiery altar of their sovereign’s religious zeal—and closed in an agony of devotion and unshaken faith, he pursued a course which he never doubted was right. A Spaniard of the Spaniards, convinced that Spain was the only centre of true religion, he allowed nothing to stand between him and the attainment of his high purpose. An intense and dangerous individualist, cursed with the religious exaltation of his house, his ecstatic asceticism enabled him to endure suffering and practise rigid mortifications with the same stoicism as that with which he afflicted others. In his zeal for God and Spain he was sincere; he never permitted failure, disaster, or catastrophe to daunt him. His most cherished schemes were frustrated; his beloved country was pauperised and desolated by his policy; he, who devoted all his energies and power to the crushing of Protestantism, lived to see the hated faith enthronedin England, Scotland, Holland, North Germany, and Scandinavia; yet he died after a lingering illness of indescribable physical suffering in the great monastery he had built to the honour of God, convinced to the end of his acceptability as Vicegerent of Jehovah, and conscious that he had exercised his trust to the brighter glory of his Maker.
As the inheritor of divine rights, Philip could do no wrong, and as the greatest king of the greatest kingdom of the world, he always rose superior to personal or national calamity. His arms suffered overwhelming reverses in the Netherlands; he retaliated with massacre and extermination, and was deaf to entreaty. The defeat of his ‘invincible’ Armada was the death-blow to his hopes of converting England to the true faith, but he heard the news of this crowning catastrophe of his life without suffering his ‘marble serenity’ to be ruffled. Into his dying ears was poured the story of the dire devastation of Cadiz by the English fleet, but he only gnawed his rude crucifix and resigned himself the more devoutly to the will of God.
This was the man who in the leisure of thirty years of his life stamped his individuality upon the Royal Palace and Monastery of the Escorial,and fashioned this mighty pile to be a monument to his power and a revelation of his mind—a mind diseased with that virus of morbidity which turned from the contemplation of mercy, charity, and love to ponder on the awful and retributive side of religion. The man explains the edifice, and the edifice is the picture of the man. The granite towers, resting on deep massive foundations, rise boldly into the heavens—lofty, aspiring, severe, like the prayers his stern heart sent up to God. The spacious halls and lofty corridors, all leading finally to the church and the altar, have been likened to the avenues of his mind.
In 1557, two years before Philip first showed himself to his people as champion of the purity of the faith, the meeting between the Spanish and the French arms at St. Quentin credited Spain with a decisive and sorely needed victory. The battle involved the destruction of a church dedicated to St. Lawrence, and Philip, who had spent the day invoking the aid of the martyred saint, bound himself by an oath to found a monastery to his name. He had also been bound under the will of CharlesV.to provide a royal burial-place for the reception of his father’s remains, and Philip was probably actuated by a desire to fulfilboth these obligations in building the monastery of the Escorial. In the ‘Carta de Dotacion,’ which appears in Cabrera’sVida de Felipe II., the king explains his reasons as follows:—
‘In acknowledgment of the many and great blessings which it has pleased God to heap on us, and continue to us daily, and, inasmuch as He has been pleased to direct and guide our deeds and acts to His holy service, and in maintenance and defence of His holy faith and religion, and of justice and peace within our realms; considering likewise what the emperor and king, my lord and father, in a codicil which he lately made, committed to our care, and charged us with, respecting his tomb, the spot and place where his body and that of the empress and queen, my lady and mother, should be placed; it being just and meet that their bodies should be most duly honoured with a befitting burial-ground, and that for their souls be said continually masses, prayers, anniversaries, and other holy records, and because we have, besides, determined that whenever it may please God to take us away to Him, our body should rest in the same place and spot near theirs ... for all these reasons we found and erect the Monastery of San Lorenzo el Real, near the town of El Escorial, in the diocese and archbishopric of Toledo, the which we dedicate in the name of the Blessed St. Lawrence, on account of the special devotion which, as we have said, we pray to this glorious saint, and in memory of the favour and victories which on this day we received from God....
‘In acknowledgment of the many and great blessings which it has pleased God to heap on us, and continue to us daily, and, inasmuch as He has been pleased to direct and guide our deeds and acts to His holy service, and in maintenance and defence of His holy faith and religion, and of justice and peace within our realms; considering likewise what the emperor and king, my lord and father, in a codicil which he lately made, committed to our care, and charged us with, respecting his tomb, the spot and place where his body and that of the empress and queen, my lady and mother, should be placed; it being just and meet that their bodies should be most duly honoured with a befitting burial-ground, and that for their souls be said continually masses, prayers, anniversaries, and other holy records, and because we have, besides, determined that whenever it may please God to take us away to Him, our body should rest in the same place and spot near theirs ... for all these reasons we found and erect the Monastery of San Lorenzo el Real, near the town of El Escorial, in the diocese and archbishopric of Toledo, the which we dedicate in the name of the Blessed St. Lawrence, on account of the special devotion which, as we have said, we pray to this glorious saint, and in memory of the favour and victories which on this day we received from God....
Although located in a desolate waste of rugged mountains and treeless plains, amid surroundings which most men would shun, the site of the Escorial was selected as the result of much careful thought and personal investigation by ‘the holy founder,’ as Philip is called by the monks. His sentimental attachment to the spot is explained by its air of unrelieved melancholy, but he was also influenced in his choice by the fact that the district contained the abundance and quality of stone suitable for his purpose. Already he had conceived the form and dimensions of his hermitage and sanctuary, the austerity and magnitude of which were to be in harmony with its natural surroundings. Before the work of clearing the land was begun he had erected upon the newly acquired site a rude temporary lodging for his own accommodation. He entrusted his ideas for the construction of the building to Juan Bautista de Toledo, whose plans, ambitious and eccentric in the first place, were severely revised by Philip. On April 23, 1563, the first stone was laid, and from that time until September 13, 1584, when the pile was completed, the king, assailed by the fear that he might die before his scheme was brought to completion, devoted every moment he could seizefrom affairs of State to superintending the work, and urging architects, artists, and decorators to greater efforts in the accomplishment of their several tasks.
In 1567 Toledo died and was succeeded by Juan de Herrera, who enlarged the convent and added a bell-tower to the building. In 1574 the temporaryPanteon, or royal burying-place, situated under the high altar of the church, was completed, and to this vault the remains of CharlesV.were transferred in 1574. The solemn service with which they were received was terminated by a terrific storm which broke over the monastery and made a wreck of the gorgeous dais that had been erected for the ceremony. During another storm which visited the district, when the construction of the edifice was almost finished, a lightning stroke set fire to the fabric, destroying the fine belfry and its costly peal of bells and doing much other damage. In 1582 an epidemic, which carried off the queen, attacked the king, and for a while his life was despaired of. But Philip survived to see the completion of his initial plans, and two years later he took formal possession of his royal home which had cost the then enormous sum of £660,000. Here for fourteen years he lived, half monarch andhalf monk, exercising alternately the powers of a tyrant and the self-sacrificing humiliations of a saint, and boasting that, from the foot of a mountain, he governed both the old and new world with two inches of paper.
In the first stages of his fatal illness in 1598, Philip desired to be removed from Madrid to his beloved Escorial. The distance is only eight leagues, but the king was so weak that six days were consumed by the journey. It was his wish to inspect every part of the huge building before he died, and during the fifty days in which his tortured body held death at bay his last desire was gratified. He died on the same day of the same month on which the Escorial was completed. Proudest among monarchs and the most devout among monks, his gift to posterity is a convent having the proportions of a palace, and a palace revealing the austerity of a convent—a structure which is at once the first and largest Spanish edifice into which the Græco-Roman element was cast. But although Philip had gratified his ambition, had built monastery, church, and palace, and had established a court and a college in this Castilian highland, had laid out gardens and planted elms brought from England, the royal burying-place at his deathwas nothing more than a plain vault. PhilipIII., in accordance with his father’s wishes, commenced to enrich the chamber, and the present gorgeous sepulchre was finished in 1654 by PhilipIV.‘No monarchs of the earth,’ it has been written, ‘have a mausoleum comparable to this of the Escorial, which, to the glory of Spain, was conceived by CharlesV., undertaken by PhilipII., carried on by PhilipIII., and completed by PhilipIV.’ Thus it was more than a century after the death of the emperor that his remains were laid to rest in the sepulchre which he had commanded to be built for the princes of his house.
To-day the Eighth Wonder of the World, theOctava Maravilla, which it is calculated cost from first to last some ten millions, is but a shadow of its past glory. It is no longer a royal residence, the number of its monks has become few, its revenues have been wrested from them, and the spirit of the palace-monastery has departed. A fire which broke out here in 1671 was not quenched for fifteen days, and the damage then sustained was repaired in 1676 by the queen-regent, Anne of Austria. CharlesIII.effected some further restorations, and his son proposed to make the place more habitable by the construction of a bull-ring. Later, this prince, when CharlesIV.and fast approaching the close of his ignoble reign, discovered at the Escorial the plot of the Queen Maria Luisa, Prince Fernando, and Godoy to betray Spain to France, and the royal monastery became a royal prison.
The French troops pillaged the monastery in 1807, and during the Carlist war its treasures were depleted by the removal of about a hundred of the choicest paintings to the greater security of Madrid. Other pictures were transferred from the Escorial to the capital after the death of FerdinandVII., who had done what he could to repair the ravages of La Houssaye’s troopers. But the days of the Escorial’s importance as a centre of political or courtly life were already numbered, and by the summer of 1861, when the first train arrived at the Escorial station from Madrid, the palace had ceased to be a royal residence.
It must be admitted that, at first sight, the Escorial produces a feeling of disappointment; the first impression of the clean granite, the blue slates, and the leaden roofs is not wholly pleasing. But as one approaches this ‘grandest and gloomiest failure of modern times,’ the size and simplicity of the ashy-coloured pile takes possession of the imagination, its sombreness and its austere magnificence stands out more and more clearly from its sombre and magnificent surroundings, and one begins to realise something of the spirit of the place and of the character of the man that called it into being. The edifice is a rectangular parallelogram, having a length of 744 feet from north to south, and a depth of 580 feet. It has been said that the architecture exhibits a series of solecisms which would have shocked the disciples of Vignola and Palladio, but Mr. Fergusson in hisHistory of the Modern Styles of Architecturedeclares that the whole design shows more of Gothic character than the masterpieces of Wren and Michael Angelo.
One building, which turns its back on Madrid, faces the Sierra on its west or principal side and on the north side, while on the east and south the terraces overlook the hanging gardens and fish ponds. The building covers an area of 500,000 feet and is 3000 feet in circumference. It is not proposed to enter here into a detailed description of the huge structure or its contents. Indeed, a building which boasts 16 courtyards, 15 cloisters, 40 altars, 88 fountains, 86 staircases, 1200 doors, 2673 windows, 3000 feet of painted fresco, and 120 miles of corridor cannot be dealtwith in the space at our disposal, and an enumeration of the literary and artistic treasures that are still left to it would occupy some hundreds of pages of print. But only a tithe remains of the myriad treasures which once adorned its walls and altars. Before the French invasion its pictures were priceless, for PhilipII.drained Europe of paintings and painters for the adornment of his palace, and the church teemed with priceless articles—sacred vessels of gold, a multitude of shrines and reliquaries, and a tabernacle of such exquisite workmanship that it was declared to be worthy to be one of the ornaments of the celestial altar.
The grand central portal in the western façade, which was formerly opened only to admit royalty either alive or dead, leads into the Court of the Kings, named from the statues of the Kings of Judah connected with the Temple of Jerusalem. The figures possess little artistic merit, but they share with the Court and everything connected with the Escorial the distinction of immensity. They are 17 feet high, and were each cut by Juan Bautista Monegro out of one block of granite. On the right of the Court is the Library, with its twenty thousand books and three thousand Arabic manuscripts, and on the right are theHalls of Philosophy, the Seminary and the Refectories. The Relicario, from which one descends to thePanteon, is at the extreme right-hand corner of the church. PhilipII.was a relicomaniac, and here in five hundred and fifteen costly shrines he kept his innumerable precious relics. La Houssaye scattered the relics to strip the precious metals from the shrines that contained them. He also stole upwards of a hundred sacred vessels of gold and silver, the gold and jewelledcustodia, and the life-size silver statue of St. Lawrence, which weighed four and a half hundredweight. A procession of fourteen carts was engaged to convey the treasure to Madrid. The Court of Evangelists and the Palace Court, facing the south, are on the right and left of the church, and beyond it is the palace.
The secret of the grandeur of the Escorial Church is in the conception and proportion, but also from the point of view of architectural beauty it is the finest of the several buildings within the walls. The vaulted roof is ornamented with the frescoes of Luca Giordano, and the screen, which is 93 feet high by 43 wide, monopolised the energies of Giacomo Trezzo of Milan for seven years. The high altar and its superbretabloare flanked on either side by the oratoriesof marble for the royal family, above which are placed bronze-gilt effigies of CharlesV.and his wife, PhilipII.and his fourth wife and their children, inlaid with marbles and precious stones. Here, in his epitaph, is Philip of Spain’s challenge to future kings to surpass him in greatness and power. In the Library are his devotional books, and high up on a pinnacle above the chapel is a plate of gold, placed there to show that the building of the Escorial had not left ‘the holy founder’ penniless.
Just beyond the precincts of the church, as one enters the palace, is the ‘Room of the Founder,’—the name given to the apartment occupied by PhilipII.whenever he visited the monastery—a simple cell rather than a chamber befitting a king. It was in this room that he died on September 13, 1598. On the wall is a slab with the following inscription:—
‘En este estrecho recintomurió Felipe segundo,cuando era pequeño el mundoal hijo de Carlos quinto.’
‘En este estrecho recintomurió Felipe segundo,cuando era pequeño el mundoal hijo de Carlos quinto.’
‘En este estrecho recintomurió Felipe segundo,cuando era pequeño el mundoal hijo de Carlos quinto.’
There still remain the bedroom he had built next to the royal oratory; the study, some of the chairs he used, and two chairs without arms on which he used to repose the leg in which hehad gout. The ceiling is smooth and without ornaments; the walls are whitewashed, and the floor is of brick. From this bedroom the high altar can be seen through two doors that lead to the galleries.
The palace contains a series of small rooms, the most remarkable of which are a set of four. The other apartments are covered with beautiful tapestry made from designs by Rubens, Teniers, and Goya, but the walls of these particular rooms are covered with the finest inlaid woodwork. The hinges, locks, and handles of the doors are in gilt-bronze and steel, and the ceilings are painted by Maella. The entire work is said to have cost £280,000.
The Battle Room derives its name from the battle-scenes painted on the walls; these frescoes are by the celebrated Italian artists Granelio and Fabricio. This gallery is 198 feet long by 28 wide, and 25 high to the keystone of the vault. The principal fresco, which is very large, represents the battle of Higueruela and the victory obtained over the Arabs by JohnII.on the Vega at Granada. The other frescoes refer to the battle gained on the day of St. Lawrence, 1557, by Duke Filiberto, commander of the Spanish army; the capture of the French general,the Constable de Montmorency, and the siege and capture of San Quentin. There are also representations of two expeditions to the Azores in the time of PhilipII.The vault contains a variety of figures and caprices all designed fantastically and ingeniously, with taste and consummate skill.
Of the three hundred and thirty-eight rich tapestries in the palace, one hundred and fifty-two of them were manufactured in the old Royal Factory of Madrid; one hundred and sixty-three in Flanders, from designs for the most part by David Teniers; twenty in France and five in Italy. Nearly all represent country scenes, landscapes, Spanish customs, views of Madrid, and hunting scenes.
The Casa del Principe was built in 1772 by order of CharlesIV., when Prince of the Asturias. When the War of Independence broke out the treasures that adorned it were taken to Madrid and many of them disappeared. It was redecorated and embellished in 1824, and carefully restored some years later. It is entirely built of stone and is called ‘Casita de Abajo,’ to distinguish it from another called ‘Casita de Arriba,’ built by the Infante Gabriel. The curiosities and works of art in this pleasant edifice are innumerable. Of the ceilings twenty are of great merit, painted by Duque, Gómez, Gerroni, Maella, Briles, Pérez, Japeti, and López. In the nineteen rooms, of which the two floors of the edifice consist, there are over two hundred oil-paintings and prints, the subjects for the most part religious, some of them of real merit. There is also a fine collection of ivory reliefs consisting of thirty-seven pictures, representing mythological and sacred and profane scenes, and a beautiful collection of two hundred and twenty-six pieces of porcelain made at the Buen Retiro factory. In the time of FerdinandVII.the house was valued at thirty-seven million pesetas, and it is at present a veritable museum of curiosities.
The Royal School of AlfonsoXII., which occupies the north-east end of the edifice, is entered from the principal façade. Among its many and notable apartments is the spacious and magnificentparaninfo, the ceiling of which is formed by a painting of extraordinary size, which is believed to have been painted by the pupils of Jordán. Two smaller paintings represent symbolical figures of different sciences, and are signed by Llamas. Near theparaninfoare the fine Physics and Natural History rooms, thelucernaor light court, andthe children’s dining-rooms, adorned with a collection of pictures representing incidents in the life of Alexander. These were painted for the palace of San Ildefonso by order of PhilipV., and they are all signed by eminent Italian artists. Over theparaninfois another fine room, the centre of which is occupied by a beautiful statue of St. Augustine, carved in wood, conceived and executed by the lay-friar S. Cuñado to commemorate the fifteenth centenary of the conversion of St. Augustine.
In 1878, by the direction of AlfonsoXII., the studies at this Royal College were reorganised with great success. Later (in 1885) the teaching being entrusted to the Augustinians, its credit was so enhanced that now, owing to the unsurpassed position of the place, the installation of electric light, the perfection and abundance of teaching material, and still more the competence and zeal with which the learned corporation carries out its delicate task of the moral, physical, and scientific education of a large number of youths, the Royal College at the Escorial well fulfils the high aims of its royal restorer, and is one of the most important centres of instruction in Spain.
George Borrowloved Spain well, but he loved not the solitude in which PhilipV.found respite from the cares of State and from the dominating personality of Elizabeth Farnese. ‘So great is the solitude of La Granja,’ he writes, ‘that wild boars from the neighbouring forests, and especially from the beautiful pine-covered mountain which rises like a cone directly behind the palace, frequently find their way into the streets and squares, and whet their tusks against the pillars of the porticos.’ But at the time this was written the country was overrun with Carlists. Candido lurked in the undergrowth, Garcia and his fellow-conspirators had driven Queen Cristina from the palace, and nine-tenths of the inhabitants of the town had fled. Even in the season La Granja may be described as solitary, but it is not desolate, to quote another word thatBorrow employed to describe it. Situated at an altitude of nearly four thousand feet above the sea, it has been styled, with much truth, a ‘castle in the air.’ Surrounded as it is by lovely woods, which extend for leagues in every direction, by gardens, lakes, and streams, the Palace of San Ildefonso, in the month of flowers, is a paradise and a miracle combined. For the site, although not exactly hit upon at random, was selected with a royal inconsequence of the difficulty and expense involved in the labour of transforming a monkish farmhouse into a palace rivalling the glittering creations of Versailles.
The Bourbon PhilipV., like his Austrian predecessor PhilipII., conceived a craving for solitude, and while hunting at Valsain in 1720 he observed La Granja (the Grange, or farmhouse) of the Segovian monks of El Parral, and coveted it for a place of retirement. Philip’s nature had undergone a great change since he entered Spain, a handsome, resolute soldier, in 1701. His first wife, Marie Louise of Savoy, had been at his side during the troublous, early days of his reign, and in 1714, when Spain was at peace for the first time since he assumed the crown, his wife died. Under the stress of warlike excitement and the gentle, sustaining sympathy and influence ofMarie Louise, Philip had proved himself a prince of high spirit, determination, and resource, but under the domination of the ambitious, intriguing, masterful Elizabeth he lost all initiative and sunk into a moody inaction, which subsequently developed into lethargic insanity. It has been said that, personally, Philip did little good for Spain, and it must be admitted that, when it was most incumbent on him to play the man, he weakly involved the country in prolonged wars at the bidding of his wife. If the national revenue increased enormously during his reign, the expenditure was more than proportionately increased in the construction of the three palaces he left to Spain and in the extravagant collection of works of art with which he furnished them. From Versailles he had brought the love of letters which prompted him to found the Royal Spanish Academy, the National Library, the Royal Academy of History, and the School of Nobles. His training at the Court of LouisXIV.was also evident in the change in the social customs of the country. The nobles adopted French fashions in costumes and cookery, they affected French furniture and French books. The king, who had thus stamped his personal tastes upon the Court, saw his opportunity of further gratifying hisFrench sympathies by creating a ‘Spanish Versailles’ and a ‘Spanish Fontainebleau.’
It was on the rocky eminence of La Granja, overlooking Segovia’s brown towers and the distant Roman aqueduct, that PhilipV.gave orders for an estate to be laid out that should be reminiscent of his beloved Versailles. The fact that no suitable level existed on the sharp mountain slope for the erection of a palace mattered nothing. The level must be made. Tens of thousands of tons of rock were blasted away; tens of thousands of tons of soil were brought up from the sunny plain below; and on the astonishing ledge thus torn out of the sides of the mountain, the Royal Palace arose in a garden of the most beautiful flowers and adorned with the choicest fountains in all Spain.
The building itself, which cannot compare with the Palace of Versailles, is a severe-looking structure of two stories, and is the antithesis of the proud, gloomy Escorial on which it turns its back. The façade facing the gardens is white and cheerful, but the multitude of windows gives it the air of a monster conservatory. The place, which is so essentially French, appears incongruous amid surroundings which are so characteristically Spanish; but the Castilian people findno fault with it on that account. It is, they say, a worthy château of the King of Spain. As he is the first and loftiest of all earthly sovereigns, so his abode soars nearest to Heaven. The argument is Spanish and unanswerable!
The cost of building the palace and laying out the gardens, and of acquiring the pictures and sculptures to adorn the saloons, reached the enormous total of forty-five million pesetas, the precise sum in which PhilipV.died indebted. In this luxurious retreat in the mountains of Segovia he surrendered himself to the morbid mysticism of that form of devotion which exaggerates the vanity of all earthly things. Sunk at length into a condition of religious melancholy, in January 1724, at La Granja, he swore to renounce his crown for ever and abdicate in favour of his son Louis. Seven months later the boy-king died at the age of seventeen, and Philip, reluctantly acceding to the urgent requests of his wife, who had already tired of the domestic retirement of La Granja, resumed the burden of sovereignty.
Many strange historical events have taken place in the Palace of San Ildefonso since PhilipV.declared before the Baño de Diana that it had cost him three million pesetas and had amused him for three minutes. It was here, in1783, that the great king, CharlesIII., received the Count d’Artois when he started upon his fruitless mission to wrest Gibraltar from the English. Here, in 1796, Godoy, the notorious favourite of CharlesIV.and the paramour of his wife—who in the previous year had earned the title of Prince of the Peace by negotiating the shameful surrender by which the war between Spain and France was concluded—signed the famous and fatal treaty by which Spain was dragged at the tail of France until such time as the French Emperor chose to annex it.
In 1830, when FerdinandVII.lay ill at La Granja, and his heir and brother, Don Carlos, was holding himself in readiness to assume the responsibility of sovereignty, Queen Cristina, anxious for her three-year-old daughter’s interest, induced the king to abolish the Salic law and declare his daughter Isabel to be his successor. Three years afterwards, Ferdinand died, and three years later the king’s abrogation of the constitution was revoked by a mob of common soldiers, led by Sergeant Garcia, who compelled the queen to renounce her royal rights and proclaim the Cadiz constitution of 1812. George Borrow, who was in Madrid at the time these events were taking place, had the story of the revolution ofLa Granja from eye-witnesses, and it is related here in his words. ‘Early one morning,’ he writes—‘it was the morning of 12th August 1836—a party of these soldiers, headed by a certain Sergeant Garcia, entered her apartment, and proposed that she should subscribe her hand to this constitution, and swear solemnly to abide by it. Cristina, however, who was a woman of considerable spirit, refused to comply with this proposal, and ordered them to withdraw. A scene of violence and tumult ensued, but the Regent still continuing firm, the soldiers at length led her down to one of the courts of the palace, where stood her well-known paramour, Muñoz, bound and blindfolded. “Swear to the constitution, you she-rogue,” shouted the swarthy sergeant. “Never!” said the spirited daughter of the Neapolitan Bourbons. “Then yourcortejo(lover)—he was in reality her husband—shall die!” replied the sergeant. “Ho! ho! my lads; get ready your arms and send four bullets through the fellow’s brain.” Muñoz was forthwith led to the wall and compelled to kneel down, the soldiers levelled their muskets, and another moment would have consigned the unfortunate wight to eternity, when Cristina, forgetting everything but the feelings of her woman’s heart,suddenly started forward with a shriek, exclaiming, “Hold! hold! I sign! I sign!”’
Still more recently, it will be remembered, AlfonsoXIII.carried his English bride from the wedding festivities of Madrid to spend their honeymoon amid the natural beauties of the scenery of Segovia. The Royal Palace consists of a large rectangular building, in the centre of which is preserved the ancient cloister of the friars’hospitium, now called the Patio de la Fuente. The idea for the central façade of the palace originated with the Abbé Juvara, the Italian architect who was summoned to Spain to assist PhilipV.in his palace-building operations, but it was his pupil, Sachetti, who prepared the finished designs. It was carried out in 1739 at a cost of 3,360,000 reals. The general façade of the edifice at the back, overlooking the Palace Square, recalls the Roman-Spanish style created at the Escorial by Herrera. One of the best views of the palace is from the back, where the building with its slate-covered towers at the sides, and the Collegiate Church in the centre, surmounted by its elevated cupola and the simple towers accompanying it, compose an agreeable picture. The principal entrance to the edifice is in this façade facing the Palace Square, and leadsto the vestibule of the principal staircase. This is of simple construction, and is composed of two flights of stairs which meet at the top landing-place. The steps are of granite, as well as the pillars of the balustrade which support a small iron banister painted white and gold. The whole well of the staircase is surmounted by a semicircular vault finished by a lantern, in which are the windows. This staircase did not exist in the time of CharlesIV., as may be ascertained by examining the plans of the palace made at that time, and its construction should be attributed to FerdinandVII.
The palace is a structure of two stories. On the ground floor are the ‘Galeria baja de estatuas’ (lower gallery of statues), one of the rooms in which is the dining-room, the High Court of Halberdiers, the offices of the Lord High Steward, and other dependencies; while the upper floor consists of the ‘Galeria oficial’ (Official Gallery), used for receptions, audiences, and councils of ministers, and the private apartments of their Majesties and Royal Highnesses. The ‘Galeria de estatuas’ is open to any one provided with a permit supplied by the Administration Patrimonial when the Court is absent. The apartments are generally decorated in good style.Most of the furniture is in the Empire style, especially that in the Official Gallery; but there is also some in LouisXIV., Regency, and LouisXV.style.
The collection of pictures, especially of the Flemish and Dutch schools, was very fine, for Queen Isabella Farnese acquired in Rome for this palace in 1735, through the Venetian painter G. B. Pittoni, and on the recommendation of the Abbé Juvara, a considerable number of very notable pictures of these schools. On the creation of the Royal Prado Museum in 1829, the best were taken there by order of FerdinandVII., and there are at present in its catalogue three hundred and fifty-one pictures which came from this palace, among them three by Correggio, two by Luca Giordano, four by Il Guido, one by Paul Veronese, six by Tintoretto, one by Claudio Coello, sixteen by Murillo, two by Ribera, four by Velazquez, four by Van Dyck, fourteen by Rubens, and twenty-four by Teniers.
Among the pictures of the original collection which exist at the present time, there are none of great merit; but the large number painted by Michel Ange Houasse, of the French school, who was born in Paris in 1675, and died in Spain in 1730, being the chief painter of PhilipV., are ofno little merit. The marble statues that enrich the Lower Gallery, some of them Greek ones of great merit, like the Castor and Pollux group, form the greater part of the sculptures of the Madrid Museum. They were acquired in Rome through the celebrated Venetian sculptor Camillo Rusconi, and came from the collection made by Queen Christina of Sweden. Their cost, 12,000 doubloons, or 36,000 dollars, was defrayed by PhilipV.and Isabella Farnese equally.
The lower gallery of statues were paintedal frescoby Bartolomé Ruscha, and with them were placed, under the direction of Don Domingo Sanni, and by order of the royal founders, the statues of the collection formed by Queen Christina of Sweden and acquired by them in Rome. The sculptors Fremin and Thierri, who at the time were doing work for the gardens, restored many of them and added some others by themselves, but the majority of the best statues were removed in 1829 to the sculpture room in the Madrid Museum, where they are still preserved and constitute almost its only statuary wealth. At present there are in these rooms very few marble statues, and nearly all those forming their decoration are copies in plaster of the original ones, and they have therefore lost the great artistic value which the pure Greek sculpture in the collection of Queen Christina of Sweden conferred on them. Among them the most valuable pieces to be seen here are the group of Castor and Pollux; two colossal statues of Julius Cæsar and Augustus in alabaster, with heads, arms, and legs of gilded bronze; a fine urn which it is believed contained the ashes of Caius Caligula; the representations of Day and Night; a very handsome Apollo; a Daphne; a Venus coming out of the bath; a Faun leaning on the trunk of a tree; another Venus with her knee on a tortoise; many handsome busts of deities and Roman emperors; the nine Muses; two superb heads of Antinous and Alexander; the recumbent statue of Ariadne, a replica of the one in the Museum of the Vatican; a copy of the Venus de Medici; an excellent small statue representing Seneca; Leda with the swan; a head of Homer; a colossal head, in bronze, of Queen Christina of Sweden; and Ganymede attacked by the eagle. With this array of sculpture and antiquities, the Palace of Ildefonso may be said to be more like a museum than a home; and in truth, apart from the Royal Chapel which contains the tomb of PhilipV.and his queen, Elizabeth Farnese, andboasts some superbly embroidered vestments and mantles of the Virgin, the visitor must seek the beauties of the palace in its church and in its gardens and fountains.
In order to enhance the splendour of the worship that should be conducted in the Palace Chapel, PhilipV.obtained from Pope BenedictXIII.a bull,Dum Infatigabilem, dated 20th December 1724, making it a collegiate church. Among other provisions in this bull it conceded that the new collegiate church should be the mother-church of all the churches and chapels of the town and its abbey; that it should have a chapter composed of an abbot, four officiating prebendaries, eight canons, six prebendaries, and four chaplain-acolytes; that the abbots should be a royal appointment with exclusive ecclesiastical jurisdiction throughout the district to be marked out by the Pope’s Nuncio, and at liberty to use the pontifical insignia and dress; that the abbot and canons should devote half the masses celebrated to the royal founders during their lifetime, and for their souls after their death, and that the canons should wear the choral dress of those of St. Peter’s in Rome. The same bull contained the king’s promise to endow the new collegiate church with the sumof 8625 gold ducats (276,000 reals of present Spanish money), to be distributed as follows: 5764 ducats for the fabric and its dependents, and the remainder, 2861, for the abbot and prebendaries.
In the reign of CharlesIII.the collegiate church was renovated at the expense of the royal treasury and under the direction of Marshal Sabatini, the vaults were painted with frescoes by Bayeu and Maella, and the mouldings and reliefs were decorated by Vega. By the decree of Joseph Bonaparte, given in Madrid on May 30, 1810, the collegiate church was suppressed, and it was reduced to a simple private chapel of the Royal Palace, uniting its parish with that of the Cristo Church, and adding the territory of the abbey to the bishopric of Segovia. The church was only closed four years, and on June 24, 1814, FerdinandVII.restored things to their original condition, this event being celebrated by four days of public rejoicing and fêtes.
The church is in the shape of a Latin cross, the ends of the four arms being occupied by the high altar, choir, and two principal doors.
The ‘platillos’ of the four vaults, surrounded by a moulding, were paintedal frescoby Maella, and all the paintings on the cupola are byBayeu, brother-in-law of Goya. Some of the studies for these paintings were purchased by Queen IsabelII., and are now in the Madrid Museum.
The gardens with which PhilipV.surrounded his palace cover an area of three hundred and sixty acres, and are the finest in the kingdom, while even the admirers of Versailles admit that La Granja has the more amazing fountains. From the grand walk one looks out across a panorama of the rocks and forests of New Castile, or gazes down upon the beautiful extravagancies of these literally hand-made gardens. The formal design of the ground-plan, the regularity of its well-ordered box avenues and mazes, the artificiality of its numerous fountains, its marble vases and statuary, and the baths and summer-houses that rise out of the dwarf-like vegetation, are all in striking contrast with the wild grandeur of the distant scenery. Yet, artificial as the aspect undoubtedly is, the gardens are a sheer delight, for beyond the flower-beds are masses of yellow broom and springing ferns, and the grass is a blaze of wild hyacinths, forget-me-nots, cowslips, and periwinkle. Higher up the mountain, to where the sky-line shows, 3000 feet above the palace, are woods of chestnut trees, oaks, elms, and innumerable pines, in which myriad butterflies of every hue disport themselves, and scores of streams trickle down to feed the royal fountains in the gardens below. The statues representing Lucretia, Bacchus, Apollo, Daphne, America, Ceres, and Milo, and many others, are of no great artistic value; while the fountains, to the number of twenty-six, are unique. The Fama, which throws up its waters to a height of 130 feet, is the most renowned; and from another fountain, compact of sculptured flowers and fruits, forty spouts send out their two-score jets 80 feet high. The Cenador is a single vast cascade of gleaming water from the mountain snows. Then there are the Ranas (Frogs), Ocho Calles, Canastillo, Tres Gracias, and the Neptuno, at which, says M. Bourgoin, the Egotist read Virgil and quoted ‘quos ego.’ Last of all, there is the wonderful Baño de Diana, to which reference has already been made.
Here, where Art is truly French, and Nature is truly Spanish, where even Nature conceives in bleak discomfort for eight months in each year to bring forth four months of flowers and faërie, the King of Spain and his English bride retired to surroundings amid which a honeymoon will not be forgotten. Madrid has its magnificent royal palaces; El Pardo boasts its wondrous tapestries; Aranjuez its gardens, and Rio Frio its orchards; El Escorial is the eighth wonder of the world, and Miramar looks over the yellowest of golden sands into the bluest of blue waters; but La Granja, in the Guadarrama Mountains, is that place apart where lovers may find a bower
‘Of coolest foliage, musical with birds’;
‘Of coolest foliage, musical with birds’;
‘Of coolest foliage, musical with birds’;
and here one may listen to
‘The murmurs of low fountains that gush forthI’ the midst of roses!’
‘The murmurs of low fountains that gush forthI’ the midst of roses!’
‘The murmurs of low fountains that gush forthI’ the midst of roses!’
The auxiliary residence to the palace of San Ildefonso, located some fourteen miles from it beyond the city of Segovia, is the royal house of Rio Frio, situated in a picturesque park which is full of game of every description. The small elegant building which stands in the centre of the park was begun by Isabel, the widow of PhilipV., and was completed internally by AlfonsoXII.It is a two-storied square building, the four sides of which are all exactly alike, and a large square court, paved with granite flags, occupies the centre of the building. A large portico of Tuscan pilasters surrounds the court and supports a covered gallery on the level of the first floor. From this court a noble staircase, consisting of two independent flights, which start from the vestibule in opposite directions, each subdividing into two other parallel ones, on the level of the first landing. The two independent flights end at the first floor at the opposite ends of the room which is used as a guardroom for the halberdiers. The steps are of granite, and the balustrades, which are supported by figures of children in various attitudes, are of a pretty yellow limestone. The sculpturing is also in stone, but it was unfortunately painted white, thus depriving it of its artistic merit, and giving the appearance of plaster. The whole of this work is from the chisel of Bartolomé Seximini. The entire weight of the staircase rests on four large Tuscan columns (monoliths), constructed of granite, and eight semi-columns of the same kind.
The apartments on the first floor, which with the exception of the sacristy and chapel on the ground floor are the only rooms that call for description, are decorated and furnished with a simplicity that would seem to betoken actual poverty. This is accounted for by the fact that the royal family very seldom resides in thispalace; and at such times whatever is required is conveyed there from the palace of San Ildefonso. On the other hand, the collection of pictures is superior in number and merit to that of San Ildefonso, for among its six hundred and fifty-eight pictures there are many originals of the great masters of the different schools. There is one each of Van Dyck, Titian, Albert Dürer, and Goya; two by Zurbaran, Navarrete, Guido de Reni, Pantoja de la Cruz, and Correggio; eight by Jordán, three by Teniers, four by Domenichino, and six by Poussin.
Atthe royal residence of El Pardo Maria Cristina was lodged on the eve of her marriage with AlfonsoXII.in 1879. Seven years later in the same palace she wept beside the deathbed of her husband, the father of the unborn king, AlfonsoXIII.For a score of years El Pardo was avoided by the queen-mother, until, in 1906, Don Alfonso brought to the suburban palace the English princess who, on the 31st of May of that year, went in state to the church of San Jeronimo to be married to the King of Spain.
From the earliest days of Madrid’s claim to royal favour, over a hundred years before CharlesV.transferred the Court from Valladolid to the present capital, the Kings of Spain have had a residence at El Pardo. HenryIII.,El Doliente, when making some additions to the old town of Madrid about 1461, built a pleasure-house on this site. The attraction of the district wasundoubtedly the abundance of boar and bear which found ample cover in the forests which surrounded the capital. Generations of improvident inhabitants have destroyed these woods, but the preserves within the stone wall which surrounds the royal residence are well timbered, and the plantations are full of deer and boar and all kinds of small game. CharlesV.transformed the building into a winter palace and left the task of completing it to PhilipII., who, one imagines, spared but scant leisure from his colossal building operations at the Escorial to superintend the furnishing of a mere shooting-box. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the original structure was destroyed by fire and the present château was built by PhilipIII.CharlesIII.altered and added to the palace in which he found refuge after the famous riots against Squillaci, and here in the reign of CharlesIV.were hatched the plot and counterplot of Ferdinand and Godoy which culminated in the revolution of Aranjuez, the fall of the much-abused favourite, and the deposition of Charles and his crafty sons.
PhilipII.by the prosecution of his religious policy, which was fruitful of ruinous wars, had beggared Spain in money and credit. PhilipIII.succeeded in 1621 to the crown of a country that the Cortes officially described as ‘completely desolated.’ Agriculture and every form of manufacture was fallen into decay, the land was left desert for want of cultivators, the looms were idle, and the wealth of the Spanish-American possessions was swallowed up by the crowd of avaricious and unscrupulous office-holders and their underlings. But if PhilipII.had reduced the nation to these straits by his bigoted zeal and arrogant vainglory, his son aggravated the conditions by his reckless extravagance and riotous splendour. When the country’s resources had been taxed to an extent that made further taxation an impossibility, the king, through the agency of his all-powerful favourite, the luxurious Duke of Lerma, raised funds to gratify his prodigal expenditure by the sale of knighthoods and patents of nobility. When that source failed him, he attempted to wrest from the church its silver plate and ornaments, and being terrified out of this resolve by the threats of the bishops, he made a personal appeal to the people. The king’s officers went from door to door begging in the name of the sovereign for the money required for carrying on the business of the Government.
But PhilipIII.still claimed to be the richest potentate in Christendom; his subjects still believed themselves the richest people in the world. The king could afford to expel 500,000 of his Moslem subjects to Barbary, after robbing them of all they possessed; he could afford to plunge his country into a foolish war to gratify Spanish pride; and he could still afford to indulge his wildest and most extravagant personal whims, of which the rebuilding of El Pardo was one of the least expensive.
The palace, located in contiguity to the village, which consists of about two hundred houses whose inhabitants are employed on the Royal Patrimony, has a length of 432 feet and a depth of 192 feet. A tower commands each corner, and the entire building is surrounded by a moat, 30 feet wide, which once served the double purpose of irrigation and defence. The principal entrance to the estate is through the ancient and beautiful Puerta de Hierro (Iron Doorway), built about the year 1753 by FerdinandVI.and distant about five miles from the town of El Pardo. From the doorway a wall of stout masonry, six feet high, runs right and left round the demesne for a distance of sixty-two miles. The property is intersected from north to south by the RiverManzanares. The stream enters on the Sierra side beneath a high stone bridge, the piers of which rest on the tall rocks that enclose the narrow pass of Marmota. From this bridge may be obtained a magnificent view of the country bounded and framed by the distant snow-clad Guadarrama Mountains. The rugged and broken ground is prolific in evergreen oaks, cork trees, and extensive areas of the cistus shrub. For purposes of defence the estate is divided into twenty departments, and the fifty warders who guard the royal residence are accommodated in twenty-six spacious and well-built houses.
The impression conveyed by the sombre, granite-built palace is distinctly imposing. Several stone staircases lead to the royal apartments, consisting of sixty commodious rooms, nearly all of which are covered with rich and brilliantly coloured tapestries, manufactured at Madrid from designs of Goya, Bayeu, Castillo, and Teniers. The subjects portrayed are landscapes, hunting and country scenes, and passages in the history ofDon Quixote. The stucco of the ceilings of most of the saloons is the exquisite work of Roberto Michel, while the many fresco paintings were executed by Patricio Carcéo, Carducho, Bayeu, Maella, Galvez, Ribera, and Zacarias Velazquez. The fine collection of pictures that once adorned the walls was destroyed by the fire of 1604, and of the forty-seven portraits by such famous masters as Titian, A. Moro, and Coello, only a few remain. The magnificent glass chandeliers are a feature of the royal apartments, and in the Retablo of the Oratory there is a copy of Christ bearing the Cross, by Ribalta, the original of which is in Magdalen Chapel, Oxford. The Court officials are lodged in a commodious building having a complement of a hundred rooms.
To the north of the town is the Prince’s Cottage, another creation of that villa-building monarch, CharlesIV.It is a delightful example of the three noble arts that vie with one another to give beauty to the villa—the old silks that cover the walls, the carvings that adorn them, and the magnificent chandeliers and rich, varied furniture, which make a valuable museum of this so-styled cottage. There are also other two palaces calledLa Zarzuelaand theQuinta. Both are surrounded by fine gardens, and contain sumptuous oratories where Mass is celebrated on special occasions. These two buildings are surviving portions of the old edifice. InLa ZarzuelaDon Fernando, the brother of PhilipIV., was wont to organise those little vaudeville entertainments which were christenedZarzuelas. It is no longer used for that purpose, the theatrical performances at El Pardo now taking place in the small but elegant theatre in the palace which AlfonsoXIII.had restored when the residence was prepared for the accommodation of Princess Victoria Ena.
To the Royal Patrimony also belongs the parish church and the Capuchin convent of Santo Cristo, situated on the left bank of the river, and hither, on St. Eugene’s day, the people of Madrid journey in crowds. On other feast days, also, the beautifully wooded slopes and shady avenues of El Pardo attract thousands of visitors from the city. It would be difficult to find anywhere in Europe, at the very doors of the capital, such beautiful rustic scenery as that enclosed in this royal estate.
We have said that CharlesIII.retired to El Pardo after the Squillaci riots, and it is curious to reflect that this best of Spanish kings was sadly out of touch with the character of his own people. He was a man of extraordinary ability, sound experience, and commanding personality. He had the will and the power to carry thegovernment of the State on his own broad shoulders, and to manage the domestic affairs of his subjects into the bargain. He realised the crying need for domestic reforms in his capital, but the Madrileños failed to recognise the necessity, and resented his interference. The king found the city ugly, filthy, and insanitary, and he decreed that it should be made clean and kept so. He was the apostle of order and decency, and not understanding the pride of the Spaniards, he could not comprehend that they were affronted by this imperious resolve to bring them into line with more advanced European nations. Moreover, the decree was published by Squillaci, the king’s Italian minister. Squillaci was a marked man from that day, and the clergy who had been made to recognise that the King would tolerate no clerical interference with his policy, fanned the spirit of revolt which manifested itself among the people. In 1766 Charles, having commenced his crusade by cleansing the city, now turned his attention to the national costume. As a dress-reformer he objected to the long cloaks and wide-brimmed hats affected by the citizens, and in March 1766 he issued another decree forbidding their use. Immediately Madrid was in revolt. The king’s Walloon guards were massacred, the detested Italian, Squillaci, sought safety in flight, and for two days the city was in the hands of the murdering, destroying mob. On the third day the king abolished the Walloon guards and promised to rule without foreign ministers. The revolution was at an end, and Charles retreated to El Pardo to reflect upon the situation. The king was convinced that the priests, and particularly the clever, intriguing members of the Society of Jesus, were at the bottom of all the agitation against his policy of reform, and the result of his reflections was made known in the following year when he decreed that every Jesuit should be forthwith expelled from his dominions. The people could not believe their ears, but Charles was firm as a rock. He cleared Spain of the power which was behind the priesthood, and twelve months later he wrung from Rome the papal decree by which the Society of Jesus was temporarily suppressed. CharlesIII.was engrossed in business more serious than hunting when he retired from the riot of the capital to take counsel with himself in the woods of El Pardo.
Still nearer to the city of Madrid, from which it is only divided by the River Manzanares, is theroyal shooting-box, calledCasa de Campo, the grounds of which, abounding in beautiful scenery and stocked with well-preserved game, are twelve miles in circumference. A network of channels irrigate the estate, many fountains adorn the gardens, and the great pond is full of carp and other fish. The residence was built in the middle of the sixteenth century by PhilipII., who characteristically gave orders that the house was to be surrounded by a forest. To this end a royal decree was issued on January 17, 1562, authorising the acquisition of some adjoining lands, and this tract was augmented by the king’s private purchase of the ancient and noble estate of the heirs of Fadrique de Vargas. Philip, in a fine moment, declined to have their coats-of-arms removed, saying that in a king’s palace the blazonry of the families that had rendered signal service to the State were well placed. In 1582, by order of the same monarch, additional land was purchased; and though his successors have made little alterations in the original demesne, FerdinandVI., when Prince of the Asturias, increased it by the purchase of a tract of country valued at 1,250,211 reals, and still later a smaller area was purchased by the order of CharlesIII.The documents relating tothe acquisition of these properties have been carefully preserved, and are now in the archives of the royal house. The wall around the estate was commenced in 1736 and finished twenty-two years later; it is twelve feet high and about two feet thick, and is composed entirely of brick and solid masonry.
ThePalace of Aranjuez became a patrimony of the Crown of Spain by virtue partly of the wise and able economic reforms instituted by Ferdinand the Catholic, and partly as a result of his characteristic greed. The husband of Isabel of Castile safeguarded his country by stripping the nobles of many of their privileges and powers, and readjusting their sources of income. He prohibited them from erecting new castles and coining money, and as the masterships of the vast estates of the military orders fell vacant, he retained the masterships and the estates in the royal family and paid the knights by fixed pensions. Aranjuez sprang into existence in the fourteenth century as the summer residence of Lorenzo Suarez de Figueroa, the master of the illustrious and wealthy Order of Santiago, who planted the land with trees and vines and olives, and erected a building that answered the doublepurpose of castle and convent. When Ferdinand incorporated the mastership of the Order of Santiago with the Crown, Aranjuez became the summer palace of the Catholic king and his consort. In 1536 CharlesV.made it a shooting villa, and PhilipII.introduced English elms into the grounds, and employed Herrera, of Escorial fame, to construct additional buildings to better accommodate his growing family. The palace was partially destroyed by fire in 1650, and five years later a second fire reduced it to a ruin. In this condition it remained until 1727, when PhilipV., who had tasted the pleasures of palace-building at La Granja, rebuilt the present edifice, which was successively improved by CharlesIII.and FerdinandVII.
PhilipV.was better advised when he decided to erect a palace on the site of the master of the Order of Santiago’s summer residence than when he wrested a foothold for La Granja from the side of the mountains of Segovia. The royal home at Aranjuez is charmingly situated in the midst of avenues of stately elms and sycamores at the confluence of the Tagus and Jarama—a verdurous oasis in the midst of treeless, waterless Castile. He constructed the palace and the public chapel from stone taken from a quarry in the districtof Colmenar, which he bought for the purpose. The timber he procured from the mountains of Cuenca, and the lead for the roofing from some mines that existed near Consuegra. PhilipIII.enriched the gardens with many of the fine bronzes and marbles that are to be seen there, and some of the splendid fountains were also added by his orders; but the Parterre department which PhilipII.laid out was completed by the art-loving PhilipIV., who furnished the busts of the Roman emperors, the statues, and the beautiful medallions. In 1748 the palace was again on fire, and the principal façade was restored by FerdinandVI.in its present more elegant form.
That weak and fatuous monarch CharlesIV., who added the Casas del Principe to the Escorial, and El Pardo, and the auxiliary Casa del Labrador to the palace of Aranjuez, had a particular affection for the ‘Spanish Fontainebleau.’ Here the king and queen and their favourite, Godoy, passed much of their time in the anxious days that preceded the fall of the monarchy; and here, in March 1808, the determination was arrived at by which the detested Prince of the Peace was torn from office and power, literally by the hands of the incensed mob. What a curious spectacleof a family group they present to our eyes! CharlesIV.and Maria Luisa, Ferdinand and Godoy, with mutual hatred in their hearts and the sound of the tumult of Madrid ringing in their ears. King, prince, and minister each believed the advancing French to be his friends; each felt confident that Spain was being trampled under foot by foreign soldiers to advance their several conflicting interests. But suddenly from the rapidly approaching host came messengers with an ultimatum from Napoleon, containing impossible conditions that would have dismembered Spain and deprived her of her independence. It was evident now that Napoleon was coming not as a saviour but as a conqueror, and now it was too late to resist him by force of arms. In the palace of Aranjuez it was resolved that the Court should retire to Seville, and from there, if the worst happened, sail for America.
Although this secret resolution was carefully guarded, a rumour of the projected flight got about, and the mob vented their anger upon Godoy, whom they believed was prepared to sell the country to the Corsican. In vain Charles addressed proclamations to ‘my dear vassals,’ and assured them that his dear ally, the Emperorof the French, was only making use of Spanish soil to reach points threatened by the English enemy; in vain he denied the story of his intended flight. The greater part of the garrison in Madrid was ordered to Aranjuez, but with the soldiers went an army of country people who surrounded the king’s palace and the palace of the favourite, and closely guarded every avenue of escape. At midnight of the 17th March a bugle-call rang out, a shot responded to the summons, and in a moment the revolution was in full swing. Around the royal residence, in which Charles was lying ill with gout, the mob contented itself by howling threats and imprecations, but Godoy’s palace was carried by assault. The work of destruction was stayed for a few moments while the Princess of the Peace, a member of the royal family, and her daughter were respectfully conveyed to the royal palace. Then the ruffians got to work in terrible earnest. With murderous thoroughness they searched every room and corridor for the despised author of the national trouble, wrecking everything in their path. But Godoy had slipped from his bed, and found a refuge under a roll of matting in a neighbouring lumber-room. For thirty-six hours he remained in hiding until hunger and thirstdrove him from his retreat, and he was led from his ruined house to the barrack guardroom through a populace that thirsted for his life. The wretched fugitive, ill with fear and fatigue, was placed between two mounted guards, and the journey was made at a sharp trot, but he could not out-distance the vengeance of the crowd, and his guards could not protect him. Fierce blows were rained upon him by the infuriated multitude, and the man who had been master of Spain, bleeding from a score of wounds and gasping for breath, was only rescued from instant death by a miracle.
The mob still overran the streets of Aranjuez, and swarmed around the royal palace in which CharlesIV.signed the decree handing the crown of Spain to Ferdinand. A few days later he withdrew his abdication privately at the instigation of General Monthion, Murat’s chief of the staff, and shortly afterwards left Aranjuez for the Escorial, from whence, on the 25th April following, he set out for Bayonne, to lay the crown at the feet of the Emperor of the French. The king died at Rome in 1819; Ferdinand, having spent six years at Valençay, where he was virtually a prisoner of the French, was restored to the throne of Spain. During thenineteen years of his reign FerdinandVII.and the coarse, ignorant vulgarians who composed the camarilla by which he surrounded himself, spent much of their time at Aranjuez. Here the vast conspiracy was hatched against the Constitution, which led to the battle between the militia and the citizens in 1822; and here the worthless monarch intrigued until his death to re-establish absolutism, and restore the old rotten order of things which the nation had shed its best blood to wipe out.
The nearness of Aranjuez to Madrid and the beauty of its situation has always made it a favourite residence of the Spanish royal family. The town itself, which has a population of some ten thousand inhabitants, is composed of wide streets and large squares, and many noble families possess villas in the neighbourhood. The interior of the palace, which reveals an incongruous jumble of modern innovations adapted to the architecture and decoration of bygone generations, is filled with a large assortment of works of art, some possessing a very high order of merit, and others very little. The celebrated staircase which faces the principal entrance is magnificent. It leads to theSaleta, a room embellished with a granite chimney-piece andchandeliers of rock crystal and bronze, and containing several paintings by the famous Italian artist Luca Giordano, who is known in Spain by the name of Juan Jordán. Other pictures by Giordano, painted on white silk damask, are to be seen in an adjoining apartment. In the Oratory is a superb altar, with an agate inlaid table, and Titian’s ‘Annunciation of the Virgin.’ Next to the Oratory is the Hall of Ambassadors, a modern apartment, with a ceiling painted in 1850 by Vicente and Maximino Camarón. The walls of the queen’s study in the same suite are covered with white damask, and the room is furnished with twelve chairs and a carved mahogany table of the time of CharlesIV.
The ball-room and the dining-room, even the Moorish room, in which Rafael Contreras has revived the beauties of the Alhambra, are surpassed by the music-room, which is the finest saloon in the palace. Here all the decorations are Chinese in character, worked out and enamelled with great skill; and the chandelier, which is in one piece, is an exquisite specimen of workmanship. The walls of this room are entirely covered with large porcelain plaques, representing in high relief groups of beautifully modelled Oriental figures. The looking-glasses,made at La Granja, with their frames composed of fruits and flowers, enhance the effect. Joseph Gricci, who modelled and painted the music-saloon, was one of the artists brought over from Naples by CharlesIII.in 1759, when he established in Madrid the factory of Buen Retiro. In addition to this superb porcelain, the palace boasts a bedstead of splendidly carved lignum-vitae, and some pictures by Bosch (Jerome van Aeken), a painter of the sixteenth century, who is almost unknown outside Spain. These canvases represent fantastic subjects and allegories in the style of Breughel, and were highly praised by the critics of his time.
The Convent of San Pascual was founded by CharlesIII., and the theatre in the town owed its inception to the same monarch. The convent church contains only a few valuable pictures, but it is rich in marble and beautifully carved wood. The convent library possesses many ancient manuscripts, and the convent grounds are famous for their beauty, but the gardens of the royal palace are the crowning glory of Aranjuez.
That most entertaining author and indefatigable dispenser of Testaments, George Borrow, travelled in Spain at a time when royalty was battling for its very existence. He found thecountry dangerous and desolated, and the country homes of its kings fallen into a state of neglect. When he was in La Granja, the palace of San Ildefonso was shut up, and the town which surrounds the patrimony of the Crown of Spain was practically deserted. He had no better luck in Aranjuez. He admits the beauty of the district, but he describes the place as in a state of desolation; he recalls the fact that FerdinandVII.spent his latter days in its palace surrounded by lovely señoras and Andalusian bull-fighters, and quotes—perhaps with more sentiment than sympathy—the words of Schiller: