The burial of Philip
Seven altars and scores of lighted tapers were erected in the chamber, and offices for the dead King's soul went ceaselessly on, as the courtiers came and went before the painted clay that had been once so potent; but when, late on Saturday, the time came to carry the body through the night across the plains to the snow-tipped Guadarramas glimmering afar off, where in the stately jasper chamber he had wrought for his royal house Philip IV. was to lie amongst the greater dead, few of the high nobles and officers cared to absent themselves from Madrid in these early days; and one after the other they refused to do the last sad offices to him who had so often commanded them with a glance. At last the Duke of Medina de las Torres peremptorily ordered a kinsman of his own to take charge of the body to the Escorial. Even the bearing of the body to the mule litter that awaited it gave rise to a hot dispute, in which threats of violence between two sets of officials were flung across the coffin.[[58]]
With fourscore friars and the great officers of the palace who were obliged to accompany the corpse, the litter, surrounded by torches, travelled throughout the night, and on Sunday, 20th September 1655, the prior of the Escorial relieved the courtiers of the burden of which they were so glad to be free; whereafter they all scurried back, as fast as horses could carry them, to make the preparations and ensure their own important participation in the glorious series of bull-fights, cane-tourneys, masques, and sumptuous parades which within a fortnight were to greet the accession of his Catholic Majesty King Charles II.
The end
There were still thirty-five years more of national humiliation and grief for Spain before the great convulsion that awoke her to a new life; but these years were but a prolongation of the agony preceding the dissolution that had been made inevitable during the reign of Philip IV. The Court over which he was the presiding spirit had exhibited in the forty-five years he ruled it the strange phenomenon of corruscating intellectual activity, accompanied by unexampled moral and social corruption. Literature and art had blazed up with sudden refulgence before they too sank into twilight; and when Philip passed in, the generation of geniuses that illumined his Court were dead or hastening to the grave, whilst all else was sinking deeper and deeper into darkness.
It needed the formation of new ideals, the evolution of a new patriotism, to make Spain worthy of her history again; and the outworn, incestuous blood of the Philips was powerless to lead the nation back to health and sanity after its splendid epoch of heroics. Philip did his best, but he himself was but a product of his time and country: a kindly gentleman of noble aspirations and ignoble practice, weak of will and tender of conscience, a poet and a dilettante, doomed to an overwhelming task for which he was unfit. In his long reign he saw moral decadence that he could not arrest, national ruin that even his frantic prayers were powerless to avert; and he lived through half a lifetime of martyrdom, because he ascribed his failure to the vengeance of a ruthless deity whom he had offended by his sins, and believed that he, gentle-hearted as he was, had brought upon the people that he loved the wide-spread woe he saw around him.
[[1]] Avisos de Barrionuevo (Coleccion de Autores Castellanos), Madrid, 1892; Voyage en Espagne (1655), Aersens Van Sommerdyk, Amsterdam, 1666; Relation de l'État et Gouvernement d'Espagne, Bonnecasse, Cologne, 1667. Barrionuevo, who was brother of the Marquis of Cusano, was a "character." He was a jovial priest, not ashamed to boast of his love affairs, of his good looks, of his bravery: and he belonged to a turbulent family who were always getting into affrays of some sort, He himself records without any word of reprobation a murder committed in the open streets of Madrid by his kinsman, Francisco Barrionuevo, upon a man who had boasted of making love to his wife; and the chronicler quite unconcernedly predicts that the murderer, who had fled to sanctuary, will get off. Barrionuevo confesses that he is insatiably curious, and gathers news from everyone, going every morning to the palace to learn what was passing there. His brother, who was Spanish ambassador in London, also kept him well posted as to what happened in England. See Barrionuevo's biography by Señor Paz y Melia in the first volume of the Avisos.
[[2]] Van Sommerdyk.
[[3]] Ibid. The population at this time was between 250,000 and 300,000.
[[4]] Aersens and Bonnecasse. The charge for entrance was 1½ sous, which went to the actors; 2 sous were charged for admission to the seated part, which went to the Town Council; and 7 sous was the cost of a seat in the cheapest part, 1½ sous of which went to charity, and the rest for the lessee.