Part 2
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 death was nothing more than a plain vault. Philip III., in accordance with his father’s wishes, commenced to enrich the chamber, and the present gorgeous sepulchre was finished in 1654 by Philip IV. ‘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 Charles V., undertaken by Philip II., carried on by Philip III., and completed by Philip IV.’ 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, the _Octava 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. Charles III. 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 Charles IV. 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 Ferdinand VII., 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 his _History of the Modern Styles of Architecture_ declares 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 dealt with 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 Philip II. 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 the Halls of Philosophy, the Seminary and the Refectories. The Relicario, from which one descends to the _Panteon_, is at the extreme right-hand corner of the church. Philip II. 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 jewelled _custodia_, 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 superb _retablo_ are flanked on either side by the oratories of marble for the royal family, above which are placed bronze-gilt effigies of Charles V. and his wife, Philip II. 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 Philip II. 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 recinto murió Felipe segundo, cuando era pequeño el mundo al 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 he had 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 John II. 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 Philip II. 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 Charles IV., 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 Ferdinand VII. the house was valued at thirty-seven million pesetas, and it is at present a veritable museum of curiosities.
The Royal School of Alfonso XII., 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 magnificent _paraninfo_, 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 the _paraninfo_ are the fine Physics and Natural History rooms, the _lucerna_ or light court, and the 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 Philip V., and they are all signed by eminent Italian artists. Over the _paraninfo_ is 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 Alfonso XII., 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.
II
LA GRANJA
(SAN ILDEFONSO)
George Borrow loved Spain well, but he loved not the solitude in which Philip V. 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 that Borrow 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 Philip V., like his Austrian predecessor Philip II., 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 of Marie 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 Louis XIV. 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 his French 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 Philip V. 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 find no 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 Philip V. 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 Philip V. declared before the Baño de Diana that it had cost him three million pesetas and had amused him for three minutes. It was here, in 1783, that the great king, Charles III., 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 Charles IV. 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 Ferdinand VII. 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 of La 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 your _cortejo_ (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, Alfonso XIII. 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 Philip V. 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 leads to 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 Charles IV., as may be ascertained by examining the plans of the palace made at that time, and its construction should be attributed to Ferdinand VII.