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.
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