The Great Catholic King
Ferdinand Inherited The Place With The Mastership Of The Order Of
Santiago; Charles V. Used To Come There For The Shooting, And Philip
II., Charleses III.
And IV., and Ferdinand VII.
Built and rebuilt its
edifices. But it is also memorable because the wretched Godoy fled there
with the king, his friend, and the queen, his paramour, and there the
pitiable king abdicated in favor of his abominable son Ferdinand VII. It
is the careful Murray who reminds me of this fact; Gautier, who
apparently fails to get anything to his purpose out of Aranjuez, passes
it with the remark that Godoy built there a gallery from his villa to
the royal palace, for his easier access to the royal family in which he
held a place so anomalous. From Mr. Martin Hume's _Modern Spain_ I learn
that when the court fled to Aranjuez from Madrid before the advance of
Murat, and the mob, civil and military, hunted Godoy's villa through for
him, he jumped out of bed and hid himself under a roll of matting, while
the king and the queen, to save him, decreed his dismissal from all his
offices and honors.
But here just at the most interesting moment the successive bells and
whistles are screeching, and the _rapido_ is hurrying me away from
Aranjuez. We are leaving a railway station, but presently it is as if we
had set sail on a gray sea, with a long ground-swell such as we
remembered from Old Castile.
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