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.