Spanish Highways and Byways

by Katharine Lee Bates

Bull-Fight of To-Day

Cordova cathedral, although this lovely mosque recks little of Christian majesties, has the ordinary equipment of an Alfonso and a Fernando, and the Royal Monastery of Las Huelgas in Burgos shelters Alfonso VIII, with his queen, Eleanor of England. In less noted churches, one continually chances on them, rey or reina, infante or infanta, dreaming the centuries away in rich recesses of fretted marble and alabaster, with the shadow of great arches over them and the deep-voiced chant around.

But since Philip II created, in his own sombre likeness, the monastery of the Escorial, rising in angular austerity from a spur of the bleak Guadarrama Mountains, the royal houses of Austria and Bourbon have sought burial there. The first and chief in the dank series of sepulchral vaults, the celebrated Panteón de los Reyes, is an octagon of black marble, placed precisely under the high altar, and gloomily magnificent with jasper, porphyry, and gold. It has an altar of its own, on whose left are three recesses, each with four long shelves placed one above another for the sarcophagi of the kings of Spain, and on whose right are corresponding recesses for the queens. As the guide holds his torch, we read the successive names of the great Charles I, founder of the Austrian line; the three Philips, in whom his genius dwindled more and more; and the half-witted Charles II, in whom it ignobly perished. The coffin lid of Charles I has twice been lifted, once as late as 1871, in compliment to the visiting Emperor of Brazil, and even then that imperial body lay intact, with blackened face and open, staring eyes. The gilded bronze coffin of Philip II was brought to his bedside for his inspection in his last hour of life. After a critical survey he ordered a white satin lining and more gilt nails—a remarkable sense of detail in a man who had sent some ten thousand heretics to the torture.

Looking for the Bourbons, we miss the first of them all, the melancholy Philip V, who would not lay him down among these Austrians, but sleeps with his second queen, the strong-willed Elizabeth Farnese, in his cloudy retreat of San Ildefonso, within hearing of the fountains of La Granja. His eldest son, Luis the Well-Beloved, who died after a reign of seven months, rests here in the Escorial, but Fernando VI, also the son of Philip's first queen—that gallant little Savoyarde who died so young—was buried in Madrid. Charles III, best and greatest of the Spanish Bourbons, is here, the weak Charles IV, Fernando VII, "The Desired" and the Disgraceful, and Alfonso XII, while a stately sarcophagus is already reserved for Alfonso XIII.

To the cold society of these five Austrian and five Bourbon sovereigns are admitted nine royal ladies. Of these, the first three are in good and regular standing—the queen of Charles I and mother of Philip II, the fourth queen of Philip II and mother of Philip III, the queen of Philip III and mother of Philip IV. But here is an intruder. Philip IV, who had an especial liking for this grewsome vault, and used often to clamber into his own niche to hear mass, insisted on having both his French and Austrian queens interred here, although the first, Isabel of Bourbon, is not the mother of a Spanish king, the promising little Baltasar having died in boyhood. The brave girl-queen of Philip V is here, in double right as mother both of Luis and Fernando VI, and here is the wife of Charles III and mother of Charles IV. But of sorry repute are the last two queens, the wife of Charles IV and mother of Fernando VII, she who came hurrying down those slippery marble stairs in feverish delirium to scratch Luisa with scissors on her selected coffin, and this other, Maria Cristina, wife of Fernando VII and mother of the dethroned Isabel, a daughter who did not mend the story. It will not be long before she returns from her French exile to enter into possession of the sarcophagus that expects her here, even as another sumptuous coffin awaits the present regent. Pity it is for Isabel, whose name is still a byword in the Madrid cafés! But she always enjoyed hearing midnight mass in this dim and dreadful crypt, and will doubtless be glad to come back to her ancestors, such as they were, and take up her royal residence with them in "dust of human nullity and ashes of mortality."

XVIII

CORPUS CHRISTI IN TOLEDO

"A blackened ruin, lonely and forsaken,

Already wrapt in winding-sheets of sand,