Quentin, and the only part he took in that memorable fight was to listen
to the thunder of the captains and the shouting afar off, and pray with
great unction and fervor to various saints of his acquaintance and
particularly to St. Lawrence of the Gridiron, who, being the celestial
officer of the day, was supposed to have unlimited authority, and to
whom he was therefore profuse in vows. While Egmont and his stout
Flemings were capturing the Constable Montmorency and cutting his army
in pieces, this young and chivalrous monarch was beating his breast and
pattering his panic-stricken prayers. As soon as the victory was won,
however, he lost his nervousness, and divided the entire credit of it
between himself and his saints. He had his picture painted in full
armor, as he appeared that day, and sent it to his doting spouse, Bloody
Mary of England. He even thought he had gained glory enough, and while
his father, the emperor-monk, was fiercely asking the messenger who
brought the news of victory to Yuste, "Is my son at Paris?" the prudent
Philip was making a treaty of peace, by which his son Don Carlos was to
marry the Princess Elizabeth of France. But Mary obligingly died at this
moment, and the stricken widower thought he needed consolation more than
his boy, and so married the pretty princess himself.
He always prided himself greatly on the battle of St. Quentin, and
probably soon came to believe he had done yeoman service there. The
childlike credulity of the people is a great temptation to kings. It is
very likely that after the coup-d'etat of December, the trembling puppet
who had sat shivering over his fire in the palace of the Elysee while
Morny and Fleury and St. Arnaud and the rest of the cool gamblers were
playing their last desperate stake on that fatal night, really persuaded
himself that the work was his, and that _he_ had saved society. That the
fly should imagine he is moving the coach is natural enough; but that
the horses, and the wooden lumbering machine, and the passengers should
take it for granted that the light gilded insect is carrying them
all,--there is the true miracle.
We must confess to a special fancy for Philip II. He was so true a king,
so vain, so superstitious, so mean and cruel, it is probable so great a
king never lived. Nothing could be more royal than the way he
distributed his gratitude for the victory on St. Lawrence's day. To
Count Egmont, whose splendid courage and loyalty gained him the battle,
he gave ignominy and death on the scaffold; and to exhibit a gratitude
to a myth which he was too mean to feel to a man, he built to San
Lorenzo that stupendous mass of granite which is to-day the visible
demonstration of the might and the weakness of Philip and his age.
He called it the Monastery of San Lorenzo el Real, but the nomenclature
of the great has no authority with the people. It was built on a site
once covered with cinder-heaps from a long abandoned iron-mine, and so
it was called in common speech the Escorial. The royal seat of San
Ildefonso can gain from the general public no higher name than La
Granja, the Farm. The great palace of Catharine de Medici, the home of
three dynasties, is simply the Tuileries, the Tile-fields. You cannot
make people call the White House the Executive Mansion. A merchant named
Pitti built a palace in Florence, and though kings and grand dukes have
inhabited it since, it is still the Pitti. There is nothing so
democratic as language. You may alter a name by trick when force is
unavailing. A noble lord in Segovia, following the custom of the good
old times, once murdered a Jew, and stole his house. It was a pretty
residence, but the skeleton in his closet was that the stupid commons
would not call it anything but "the Jew's house." He killed a few of
them for it, but that did not serve. At last, by advice of his
confessor, he had the facade ornamented with projecting knobs of stucco,
and the work was done. It is called to this day "the knobby house."
The conscience of Philip did not permit a long delay in the
accomplishment of his vow. Charles V. had charged him in his will to
build a mausoleum for the kings of the Austrian race. He bound the two
obligations in one, and added a third destination to the enormous pile
he contemplated. It should be a palace as well as a monastery and a
royal charnel-house. He chose the most appropriate spot in Spain for the
erection of the most cheerless monument in existence. He had fixed his
capital at Madrid because it was the dreariest town in Spain, and to
envelop himself in a still profounder desolation, he built the Escorial
out of sight of the city, on a bleak, bare hillside, swept by the
glacial gales of the Guadarrama, parched by the vertical suns of summer,
and cursed at all seasons with the curse of barrenness. Before it towers
the great chain of mountains separating Old and New Castile. Behind it
the chilled winds sweep down to the Madrid plateau, over rocky hillocks
and involved ravines,--a scene in which probably no man ever took
pleasure except the royal recluse who chose it for his home.
John Baptist of Toledo laid the corner-stone on an April day of 1563,
and in the autumn of 1584 John of Herrera looked upon the finished work,
so vast and so gloomy that it lay like an incubus upon the breast of
earth. It is a parallelogram measuring from north to south seven hundred
and forty-four feet, and five hundred and eighty feet from east to west.
It is built, by order of the fantastic bigot, in the form of St.
Lawrence's gridiron, the courts representing the interstices of the
bars, and the towers at the corners sticking helpless in the air like
the legs of the supine implement. It is composed of a clean gray
granite, chiefly in the Doric order, with a severity of facade that
degenerates into poverty, and defrauds the building of the effect its
great bulk merits. The sheer monotonous walls are pierced with eleven
thousand windows, which, though really large enough for the rooms, seem
on that stupendous surface to shrink into musketry loopholes. In the
centre of the parallelogram stands the great church, surmounted by its
soaring dome. All around the principal building is stretched a
circumscribing line of convents, in the same style of doleful
yellowish-gray uniformity, so endless in extent that the inmates might
easily despair of any world beyond them.
There are few scenes in the world so depressing as that which greets you
as you enter into the wide court before the church, called El Templo.
You are shut finally in by these iron-gray walls. The outside day has
given you up. Your feet slip on the damp flags. An unhealthy fungus
tinges the humid corners with a pallid green. You look in vain for any
trace of human sympathy in those blank walls and that severe facade.
There is a dismal attempt in that direction in the gilded garments and
the painted faces of the colossal prophets and kings that are perched
above the lofty doors. But they do not comfort you; they are tinselled
stones, not statues.
Entering the vestibule of the church, and looking up, you observe with a
sort of horror that the ceiling is of massive granite and flat. The
sacristan has a story that when Philip saw this ceiling, which forms the
floor of the high choir, he remonstrated against it as too audacious,
and insisted on a strong pillar being built to support it. The architect
complied, but when Philip came to see the improvement he burst into
lamentation, as the enormous column destroyed the effect of the great
altar. The canny architect, who had built the pillar of pasteboard,
removed it with a touch, and his majesty was comforted. Walking forward
to the edge of this shadowy vestibule, you recognize the skill and taste
which presided at this unique and intelligent arrangement of the choir.
If left, as usual, in the body of the church, it would have seriously
impaired that solemn and simple grandeur which distinguishes this above
all other temples. There is nothing to break the effect of the three
great naves, divided by immense square-clustered columns, and surmounted
by the vast dome that rises with all the easy majesty of a mountain more
than three hundred feet from the decent black and white pavement. I know
of nothing so simple and so imposing as this royal chapel, built purely
for the glory of God and with no thought of mercy or consolation for
human infirmity. The frescos of Luca Giordano show the attempt of a
later and degenerate age to enliven with form and color the sombre
dignity of this faultless pile. But there is something in the blue and
vapory pictures which shows that even the unabashed Luca was not free
from the impressive influence of the Escorial.
A flight of veined marble steps leads to the beautiful retable of the
high altar. The screen, over ninety feet high, cost the Milanese Trezzo
seven years of labor. The pictures illustrative of the life of our Lord
are by Tibaldi and Zuccaro. The gilt bronze tabernacle of Trezzo and
Herrera, which has been likened with the doors of the Baptistery of
Florence as worthy to figure in the architecture of heaven, no longer
exists. It furnished a half hour's amusement to the soldiers of France.
On either side of the high altar are the oratories of the royal family,
and above them are the kneeling effigies of Charles, with his wife,
daughter, and sisters, and Philip with his successive harem of wives.
One of the few luxuries this fierce bigot allowed himself was that of a
new widowhood every few years. There are forty other altars with
pictures good and bad. The best are by the wonderful deaf-mute,
Navarrete, of Logrono, and by Sanchez Coello, the favorite of Philip.
To the right of the high altar in the transept you will find, if your
tastes, unlike Miss Riderhood's, run in a bony direction, the most
remarkable Reliquary in the world. With the exception perhaps of Cuvier,
Philip could see more in a bone than any man who ever lived. In his long
life of osseous enthusiasm he collected seven thousand four hundred and
twenty-one genuine relics,--whole skeletons, odd shins, teeth,
toe-nails, and skulls of martyrs,--sometimes by a miracle of special
grace getting duplicate skeletons of the same saint. The prime jewels of
this royal collection are the grilled bones of San Lorenzo himself,
bearing dim traces of his sacred gridiron.
The sacristan will show you also the retable of the miraculous wafer,
which bled when trampled on by Protestant heels at Gorcum in 1525. This
has always been one of the chief treasures of the Spanish crown. The
devil-haunted idiot Charles II. made a sort of idol of it, building it
this superb altar, consecrated "in this miracle of earth to the miracle
of heaven." When the atheist Frenchmen sacked the Escorial and stripped
it of silver and gold, the pious monks thought most of hiding this
wonderful wafer, and when the storm passed by, the booby Ferdinand VII.
restored it with much burning of candles, swinging of censers, and
chiming of bells. Worthless as it is, it has done one good work in the
world. It inspired the altar-picture of Claudio Coello, the last best
work of the last of the great school of Spanish painters. He finished it
just before he died of shame and grief at seeing Giordano, the nimble
Neapolitan, emptying his buckets of paint on the ceiling of the grand
staircase, where St. Lawrence and an army of martyrs go sailing with a
fair wind into glory.
The great days of art in the Escorial are gone. Once in every nook and
corner it concealed treasures of beauty that the world had nearly
forgotten. The Perla of Raphael hung in the dark sacristy. The Cena of
Titian dropped to pieces in the refectory. The Gloria, which had sunk
into eclipse on the death of Charles V., was hidden here among
unappreciative monks. But on the secularization of the monasteries,
these superb canvases went to swell the riches of the Royal Museum.
There are still enough left here, however, to vindicate the ancient fame
of the collection. They are perhaps more impressive in their beauty and
loneliness than if they were pranking among their kin in the glorious
galleries and perfect light of that enchanted palace of Charles III. The
inexhaustible old man of Cadora has the Prayer on Mount Olivet, an Ecce
Homo, an Adoration of the Magi. Velazquez one of his rare scriptural
pieces, Jacob and his Children. Tintoretto is rather injured at the
Museo by the number and importance of his pictures left in this monkish
twilight; among them is a lovely Esther, and a masterly Presentation of
Christ to the People. Plenty of Giordanos and Bassanos and one or two
by El Greco, with his weird plague-stricken faces, all chalk and
charcoal. A sense of duty will take you into the crypt where the dead
kings are sleeping in brass. This mausoleum, ordered by the great
Charles, was slow in finishing. All of his line had a hand in it down to
Philip IV., who completed it and gathered in the poor relics of royal
mortality from many graves. The key of the vault is the stone where the
priest stands when he elevates the Host in the temple above. The vault
is a graceful octagon about forty feet high, with nearly the same
diameter; the flickering light of your torches shows twenty-six
sarcophagi, some occupied and some empty, filling the niches of the
polished marble. On the right sleep the sovereigns, on the left their
consorts. There is a coffin for Dona Isabel de Bourbon among the kings,
and one for her amiable and lady-like husband among the queens. They
were not lovely in their lives, and in their deaths they shall be
divided. The quaint old church-mouse who showed me the crypt called my
attention to the coffin where Maria Louisa, wife of Charles IV.,--the
lady who so gallantly bestrides her war-horse, in the uniform of a
colonel, in Goya's picture,--coming down those slippery steps with the
sure footing of feverish insanity, during a severe illness, scratched
_Luisa_ with the point of her scissors and marked the sarcophagus for
her own. All there was good of her is interred with her bones. Her
frailties live on in scandalized history.
Twice, it is said, the coffin of the emperor has been opened by curious
hands,--by Philip IV., who found the corpse of his great ancestor
intact, and observed to the courtier at his elbow, "An honest body, Don
Luis!" and again by the Ministers of State and Fomento in the spring of
1870, who started back aghast when the coffin-lid was lifted and
disclosed the grim face of the Burgess of Ghent, just as Titian painted
him,--the keen, bold face of a world-stealer.
I do not know if Philip's funeral urn was ever opened. He stayed above
ground too long as it was, and it is probable that people have never
cared to look upon his face again. All that was human had died out of
him years before his actual demise, and death seemed not to consider it
worth while to carry off a vampire. Go into the little apartment where
his last days were passed; a wooden table and book-shelf, one arm-chair
and two stools--the one upholstered with cloth for winter, the other
with tin for summer--on which he rested his gouty leg, and a low chair
for a secretary,--this was all the furniture he used. The rooms are not
larger than cupboards, low and dark. The little oratory where he died
looks out upon the high altar of the Temple. In a living death, as if by
an awful anticipation of the common lot it was ordained that in the
flesh he should know corruption, he lay waiting his summons hourly for
fifty-three days. What tremendous doubts and fears must have assailed
him in that endless agony! He had done more for the Church than any
living man. He was the author of that sublime utterance of uncalculating
bigotry, "Better not reign than reign over heretics." He had pursued
error with fire and sword. He had peopled limbo with myriads of rash
thinkers. He had impoverished his kingdom in Catholic wars. Yet all this
had not sufficed. He lay there like a leper smitten by the hand of the
God he had so zealously served. Even in his mind there was no peace. He
held in his clenched hand his father's crucifix, which Charles had held
in his exultant death at Yuste. Yet in his waking hours he was never
free from the horrible suggestion that he had not done enough for
salvation. He would start in horror from a sleep that was peopled with
shapes from torment. Humanity was avenged at last.
So powerful is the influence of a great personality that in the Escorial
you can think of no one but Philip II. He lived here only fourteen
years, but every corridor and cloister seems to preserve the souvenir of
his sombre and imperious genius. For two and a half centuries his feeble
successors have trod these granite halls; but they flit through your
mind pale and unsubstantial as dreams. The only tradition they preserved
of their great descent was their magnificence and their bigotry. There
has never been one utterance of liberty or free thought inspired by this
haunted ground. The king has always been absolute here, and the monk has
been the conscience-keeper of the king. The whole life of the Escorial
has been unwholesomely pervaded by a flavor of holy water and burial
vaults. There was enough of the repressive influence of that savage
Spanish piety to spoil the freshness and vigor of a natural life, but
not enough to lead the court and the courtiers to a moral walk and
conversation. It was as profligate a court in reality, with all its
masses and monks, as the gay and atheist circle of the Regent of
Orleans. Even Philip, the Inquisitor King, did not confine his royal
favor to his series of wives. A more reckless and profligate young
prodigal than Don Carlos, the hope of Spain and Rome, it would be hard
to find to-day at Mabille or Cremorne. But he was a deeply religious
lad for all that, and asked absolution from his confessors before
attempting to put in practice his intention of killing his father.
Philip, forewarned, shut him up until he died, in an edifying frame of
mind, and then calmly superintended the funeral arrangements from a
window of the palace. The same mingling of vice and superstition is seen
in the lessening line down to our day. The last true king of the old
school was Philip IV. Amid the ruins of his tumbling kingdom he lived
royally here among his priests and his painters and his ladies. There
was one jealous exigency of Spanish etiquette that made his favor fatal.
The object of his adoration, when his errant fancy strayed to another,
must go into a convent and nevermore be seen of lesser men. Madame
Daunoy, who lodged at court, heard one night an august footstep in the
hall and a kingly rap on the bolted door of a lady of honor. But we are
happy to say she heard also the spirited reply from within, "May your
grace go with God! I do not wish to be a nun!"
There is little in these frivolous lives that is worth knowing,--the
long inglorious reigns of the dwindling Austrians and the parody of
greater days played by the scions of Bourbon, relieved for a few
creditable years by the heroic struggle of Charles III. against the
hopeless decadence. You may walk for an hour through the dismal line of
drawing-rooms in the cheerless palace that forms the gridiron's handle,
and not a spirit is evoked from memory among all the tapestry and
panelling and gilding.
The only cheerful room in this granite wilderness is the library, still
in good and careful keeping. A long, beautiful room, two hundred feet of
bookcases, and tasteful frescos by Tibaldi and Carducho, representing
the march of the liberal sciences. Most of the older folios are bound in
vellum, with their gilded edges, on which the title is stamped, turned
to the front. A precious collection of old books and older manuscripts,
useless to the world as the hoard of a miser. Along the wall are hung
the portraits of the Escorial kings and builders. The hall is furnished
with marble and porphyry tables, and elaborate glass cases display some
of the curiosities of the library,--a copy of the Gospels that belonged
to the Emperor Conrad, the Suabian Kurz; a richly illuminated
Apocalypse; a gorgeous missal of Charles V.; a Greek Bible, which once
belonged to Mrs. Phoebus's ancestor Cantacuzene; Persian and Chinese
sacred books; and a Koran, which is said to be the one captured by Don
Juan at Lepanto. Mr. Ford says it is spurious; Mr. Madoz says it is
genuine. The ladies with whom I had the happiness to visit the library
inclined to the latter opinion for two very good reasons,--the book is a
very pretty one, and Mr. Madoz's head is much balder than Mr. Ford's.
Wandering aimlessly through the frescoed cloisters and looking in at all
the open doors, over each of which a cunning little gridiron is inlaid
in the woodwork, we heard the startling and unexpected sound of boyish
voices and laughter. We approached the scene of such agreeable tumult,
and found the theatre of the monastery full of young students rehearsing
a play for the coming holidays. A clever-looking priest was directing
the drama, and one juvenile Thespis was denouncing tyrants and dying for
his country in hexameters of a shrill treble. His friends were
applauding more than was necessary or kind, and flourishing their wooden
swords with much ferocity of action. All that is left of the once
extensive establishment of the monastery is a boys' school, where some
two hundred youths are trained in the humanities, and a college where an
almost equal number are educated for the priesthood.
So depressing is the effect of the Escorial's gloom and its memories,
that when you issue at last from its massive doors, the trim and
terraced gardens seem gay and heartsome, and the bleak wild scene is
full of comfort. For here at least there is light and air and boundless
space. You have emerged from the twilight of the past into the present
day. The sky above you bends over Paris and Cheyenne. By this light
Darwin is writing, and the merchants are meeting in the Chicago Board of
Trade. Just below you winds the railway which will take you in two hours
to Madrid,--to the city of Philip II., where the nineteenth century has
arrived; where there are five Protestant churches and fifteen hundred
evangelical communicants. Our young crusader, Professor Knapp, holds
night schools and day schools and prayer meetings, with an active
devotion, a practical and American fervor, that is leavening a great
lump of apathy and death. These Anglo-Saxon missionaries have a larger
and more tolerant spirit of propaganda than has been hitherto seen. They
can differ about the best shape for the cup and the platter, but they
use what they find to their hand. They are giving a tangible direction
and purpose to the vague impulse of reform that was stirring, before
they came, in many devout hearts. A little while longer of this state of
freedom and inquiry, and the shock of controversy will come, and Spain
will be brought to life.