The memory of Philip the Prudent is still held in honour by Spaniards, for he reigned in the days of their glory, and was probably the most powerful autocrat who ever occupied the throne. But history’s more equable judgment has condemned the reign as a failure, and the monarch as one of the scourges of mankind. True, he has not lacked apologists; for there is an uncanny fascination about his grim personality; and it is not difficult to show some redeeming quality even in a Louis XI. or a Richard III. But most of us prefer our history broadly coloured, with good strong lights and shadows. We must be allowed a real villain occasionally; and, till such time as we get Iago incarnate, Philip II. will do very sufficiently well. “A rake in his youth, a monster in his manhood, a miser in his old age;”—the bitter epitaph scribbled up over his deathbed paints his character in three lines.
And yet none who has once visited the Escorial will thereafter think of Philip without some glimmerings of respect. Our loathing for his{189} selfish and cruel tyranny is tempered with a kind of shuddering pity for that other side of his character;—his gloomy religious mania, the taint inherent in his blood. There was something of gruesome greatness in the mind which could conceive such a building, “reserving for himself but a cell in the house he was erecting for God.”
The Escorial was Philip’s most cherished creation. Probably he had a large share in designing it; certainly he watched it stone by stone as it grew. Here he dwelt as “Brother Philip,” a monk in his own monastery, “ruling two worlds with a scrap of paper, from a cell on a mountain side.” Here he was worshipping when he received the news of Lepanto, and of the destruction of the Armada. And it was with the same resolute stoicism that he learned of the victory and of the defeat. Here he died—the death of Herod Agrippa; sustaining his two months’ agony with a constancy worthy of de Seso himself.[29] And all that is left of him rests in the little octagonal chapel beneath the High Altar, where his sire and his successors share his tomb. His portrait by Pantoja hangs on the walls of the library. A dreadful visage,—heartless, deceitful, obstinate,—miserable beyond the power of words to{190} express. But no picture ever painted, no statue ever carved, could reveal his character more vividly than the great gloomy pile of hard grey granite which he himself has bequeathed as a legacy to posterity.
Yet on one point the tyrant-hermit claims our unreserved approbation. He displayed a most excellent taste in the matter of selecting a site. Here we can feel no shadow of sympathy for his critics. His choice was unexceptionable: and those who impugn it are blind. Indeed, this whole range of Sierras is a region of singular beauty, and the charming old towns which lie on the foot hills beneath it,—Béjar and Plaséncia, Ávila and Segóvia,—give it an added interest which mountain districts do not often possess. Charles V. was drawn hither to Yuste, as Philip to Escorial: yet each held an ample dominion and neither was an incapable connoisseur. The jaded soldier and statesman could wish for no pleasanter resting-place than these grave highland solitudes which form the backbone of Spain.
The road which leads plainwards from Escorial to Madrid—“that splendid road constructed regardless of cost for the gratification of a royal caprice”—seems now scarce worthy of Macaula{191}y’s eulogies. Many of the roads to the northward have had to encounter far greater engineering difficulties, and show quite excellent results. Yet this and all other Madrid roads are uniformly villanous; and when they amalgamate they produce the Madrid paving, which is a thing to remember in bad dreams.