If men may be known by their works, the Escorial will help us to a better understanding of Philip of Spain—of his temperament and his purpose—than can be gained by the study of any other architectural monument for which he was responsible. Philip II. was guilty of craft and duplicity; he inflicted suffering and death upon hosts of his innocent vassals; he has been depicted as a monster of cruelty and bigoted intolerance. But as a monarch inspired with unfaltering belief in the divine right of his kingship, he could not be expected to be tolerant of the stubbornness of others; and as the instrument of God, appointed to enforce religious unity not only among his own subjects, but also upon the rest of Europe, he doubtless felt he was justified in employing any means to accomplish his mission.

The Emperor Charles V. had exhorted Philip to exterminate every trace of heresy from his dominions, and his son never forgot the injunction nor sought to escape the obligation that had been thrust upon him. Throughout his reign, which was inaugurated by an impressive auto-da-fÉ at Valladolid—in which twelve tortured creatures were sacrificed on the fiery altar of their sovereign’s religious zeal—and closed in an agony of devotion and unshaken faith, he pursued a course which he never doubted was right. A Spaniard of the Spaniards, convinced that Spain was the only centre of true religion, he allowed nothing to stand between him and the attainment of his high purpose. An intense and dangerous individualist, cursed with the religious exaltation of his house, his ecstatic asceticism enabled him to endure suffering and practise rigid mortifications with the same stoicism as that with which he afflicted others. In his zeal for God and Spain he was sincere; he never permitted failure, disaster, or catastrophe to daunt him. His most cherished schemes were frustrated; his beloved country was pauperised and desolated by his policy; he, who devoted all his energies and power to the crushing of Protestantism, lived to see the hated faith enthroned in England, Scotland, Holland, North Germany, and Scandinavia; yet he died after a lingering illness of indescribable physical suffering in the great monastery he had built to the honour of God, convinced to the end of his acceptability as Vicegerent of Jehovah, and conscious that he had exercised his trust to the brighter glory of his Maker.

As the inheritor of divine rights, Philip could do no wrong, and as the greatest king of the greatest kingdom of the world, he always rose superior to personal or national calamity. His arms suffered overwhelming reverses in the Netherlands; he retaliated with massacre and extermination, and was deaf to entreaty. The defeat of his ‘invincible’ Armada was the death-blow to his hopes of converting England to the true faith, but he heard the news of this crowning catastrophe of his life without suffering his ‘marble serenity’ to be ruffled. Into his dying ears was poured the story of the dire devastation of Cadiz by the English fleet, but he only gnawed his rude crucifix and resigned himself the more devoutly to the will of God.

This was the man who in the leisure of thirty years of his life stamped his individuality upon the Royal Palace and Monastery of the Escorial, and fashioned this mighty pile to be a monument to his power and a revelation of his mind—a mind diseased with that virus of morbidity which turned from the contemplation of mercy, charity, and love to ponder on the awful and retributive side of religion. The man explains the edifice, and the edifice is the picture of the man. The granite towers, resting on deep massive foundations, rise boldly into the heavens—lofty, aspiring, severe, like the prayers his stern heart sent up to God. The spacious halls and lofty corridors, all leading finally to the church and the altar, have been likened to the avenues of his mind.

In 1557, two years before Philip first showed himself to his people as champion of the purity of the faith, the meeting between the Spanish and the French arms at St. Quentin credited Spain with a decisive and sorely needed victory. The battle involved the destruction of a church dedicated to St. Lawrence, and Philip, who had spent the day invoking the aid of the martyred saint, bound himself by an oath to found a monastery to his name. He had also been bound under the will of Charles V. to provide a royal burial-place for the reception of his father’s remains, and Philip was probably actuated by a desire to fulfil both these obligations in building the monastery of the Escorial. In the ‘Carta de Dotacion,’ which appears in Cabrera’s Vida de Felipe II., the king explains his reasons as follows:—

Although located in a desolate waste of rugged mountains and treeless plains, amid surroundings which most men would shun, the site of the Escorial was selected as the result of much careful thought and personal investigation by ‘the holy founder,’ as Philip is called by the monks. His sentimental attachment to the spot is explained by its air of unrelieved melancholy, but he was also influenced in his choice by the fact that the district contained the abundance and quality of stone suitable for his purpose. Already he had conceived the form and dimensions of his hermitage and sanctuary, the austerity and magnitude of which were to be in harmony with its natural surroundings. Before the work of clearing the land was begun he had erected upon the newly acquired site a rude temporary lodging for his own accommodation. He entrusted his ideas for the construction of the building to Juan Bautista de Toledo, whose plans, ambitious and eccentric in the first place, were severely revised by Philip. On April 23, 1563, the first stone was laid, and from that time until September 13, 1584, when the pile was completed, the king, assailed by the fear that he might die before his scheme was brought to completion, devoted every moment he could seize from affairs of State to superintending the work, and urging architects, artists, and decorators to greater efforts in the accomplishment of their several tasks.

In 1567 Toledo died and was succeeded by Juan de Herrera, who enlarged the convent and added a bell-tower to the building. In 1574 the temporary Panteon, or royal burying-place, situated under the high altar of the church, was completed, and to this vault the remains of Charles V. were transferred in 1574. The solemn service with which they were received was terminated by a terrific storm which broke over the monastery and made a wreck of the gorgeous dais that had been erected for the ceremony. During another storm which visited the district, when the construction of the edifice was almost finished, a lightning stroke set fire to the fabric, destroying the fine belfry and its costly peal of bells and doing much other damage. In 1582 an epidemic, which carried off the queen, attacked the king, and for a while his life was despaired of. But Philip survived to see the completion of his initial plans, and two years later he took formal possession of his royal home which had cost the then enormous sum of £660,000. Here for fourteen years he lived, half monarch and half monk, exercising alternately the powers of a tyrant and the self-sacrificing humiliations of a saint, and boasting that, from the foot of a mountain, he governed both the old and new world with two inches of paper.

In the first stages of his fatal illness in 1598, Philip desired to be removed from Madrid to his beloved Escorial. The distance is only eight leagues, but the king was so weak that six days were consumed by the journey. It was his wish to inspect every part of the huge building before he died, and during the fifty days in which his tortured body held death at bay his last desire was gratified. He died on the same day of the same month on which the Escorial was completed. Proudest among monarchs and the most devout among monks, his gift to posterity is a convent having the proportions of a palace, and a palace revealing the austerity of a convent—a structure which is at once the first and largest Spanish edifice into which the GrÆco-Roman element was cast. But although Philip had gratified his ambition, had built monastery, church, and palace, and had established a court and a college in this Castilian highland, had laid out gardens and planted elms brought from England, the royal burying-place at his death was nothing more than a plain vault. Philip III., in accordance with his father’s wishes, commenced to enrich the chamber, and the present gorgeous sepulchre was finished in 1654 by Philip IV. ‘No monarchs of the earth,’ it has been written, ‘have a mausoleum comparable to this of the Escorial, which, to the glory of Spain, was conceived by Charles V., undertaken by Philip II., carried on by Philip III., and completed by Philip IV.’ Thus it was more than a century after the death of the emperor that his remains were laid to rest in the sepulchre which he had commanded to be built for the princes of his house.

To-day the Eighth Wonder of the World, the Octava Maravilla, which it is calculated cost from first to last some ten millions, is but a shadow of its past glory. It is no longer a royal residence, the number of its monks has become few, its revenues have been wrested from them, and the spirit of the palace-monastery has departed. A fire which broke out here in 1671 was not quenched for fifteen days, and the damage then sustained was repaired in 1676 by the queen-regent, Anne of Austria. Charles III. effected some further restorations, and his son proposed to make the place more habitable by the construction of a bull-ring. Later, this prince, when Charles IV. and fast approaching the close of his ignoble reign, discovered at the Escorial the plot of the Queen Maria Luisa, Prince Fernando, and Godoy to betray Spain to France, and the royal monastery became a royal prison.

The French troops pillaged the monastery in 1807, and during the Carlist war its treasures were depleted by the removal of about a hundred of the choicest paintings to the greater security of Madrid. Other pictures were transferred from the Escorial to the capital after the death of Ferdinand VII., who had done what he could to repair the ravages of La Houssaye’s troopers. But the days of the Escorial’s importance as a centre of political or courtly life were already numbered, and by the summer of 1861, when the first train arrived at the Escorial station from Madrid, the palace had ceased to be a royal residence.

It must be admitted that, at first sight, the Escorial produces a feeling of disappointment; the first impression of the clean granite, the blue slates, and the leaden roofs is not wholly pleasing. But as one approaches this ‘grandest and gloomiest failure of modern times,’ the size and simplicity of the ashy-coloured pile takes possession of the imagination, its sombreness and its austere magnificence stands out more and more clearly from its sombre and magnificent surroundings, and one begins to realise something of the spirit of the place and of the character of the man that called it into being. The edifice is a rectangular parallelogram, having a length of 744 feet from north to south, and a depth of 580 feet. It has been said that the architecture exhibits a series of solecisms which would have shocked the disciples of Vignola and Palladio, but Mr. Fergusson in his History of the Modern Styles of Architecture declares that the whole design shows more of Gothic character than the masterpieces of Wren and Michael Angelo.

One building, which turns its back on Madrid, faces the Sierra on its west or principal side and on the north side, while on the east and south the terraces overlook the hanging gardens and fish ponds. The building covers an area of 500,000 feet and is 3000 feet in circumference. It is not proposed to enter here into a detailed description of the huge structure or its contents. Indeed, a building which boasts 16 courtyards, 15 cloisters, 40 altars, 88 fountains, 86 staircases, 1200 doors, 2673 windows, 3000 feet of painted fresco, and 120 miles of corridor cannot be dealt with in the space at our disposal, and an enumeration of the literary and artistic treasures that are still left to it would occupy some hundreds of pages of print. But only a tithe remains of the myriad treasures which once adorned its walls and altars. Before the French invasion its pictures were priceless, for Philip II. drained Europe of paintings and painters for the adornment of his palace, and the church teemed with priceless articles—sacred vessels of gold, a multitude of shrines and reliquaries, and a tabernacle of such exquisite workmanship that it was declared to be worthy to be one of the ornaments of the celestial altar.

The grand central portal in the western faÇade, which was formerly opened only to admit royalty either alive or dead, leads into the Court of the Kings, named from the statues of the Kings of Judah connected with the Temple of Jerusalem. The figures possess little artistic merit, but they share with the Court and everything connected with the Escorial the distinction of immensity. They are 17 feet high, and were each cut by Juan Bautista Monegro out of one block of granite. On the right of the Court is the Library, with its twenty thousand books and three thousand Arabic manuscripts, and on the right are the Halls of Philosophy, the Seminary and the Refectories. The Relicario, from which one descends to the Panteon, is at the extreme right-hand corner of the church. Philip II. was a relicomaniac, and here in five hundred and fifteen costly shrines he kept his innumerable precious relics. La Houssaye scattered the relics to strip the precious metals from the shrines that contained them. He also stole upwards of a hundred sacred vessels of gold and silver, the gold and jewelled custodia, and the life-size silver statue of St. Lawrence, which weighed four and a half hundredweight. A procession of fourteen carts was engaged to convey the treasure to Madrid. The Court of Evangelists and the Palace Court, facing the south, are on the right and left of the church, and beyond it is the palace.

The secret of the grandeur of the Escorial Church is in the conception and proportion, but also from the point of view of architectural beauty it is the finest of the several buildings within the walls. The vaulted roof is ornamented with the frescoes of Luca Giordano, and the screen, which is 93 feet high by 43 wide, monopolised the energies of Giacomo Trezzo of Milan for seven years. The high altar and its superb retablo are flanked on either side by the oratories of marble for the royal family, above which are placed bronze-gilt effigies of Charles V. and his wife, Philip II. and his fourth wife and their children, inlaid with marbles and precious stones. Here, in his epitaph, is Philip of Spain’s challenge to future kings to surpass him in greatness and power. In the Library are his devotional books, and high up on a pinnacle above the chapel is a plate of gold, placed there to show that the building of the Escorial had not left ‘the holy founder’ penniless.

Just beyond the precincts of the church, as one enters the palace, is the ‘Room of the Founder,’—the name given to the apartment occupied by Philip II. whenever he visited the monastery—a simple cell rather than a chamber befitting a king. It was in this room that he died on September 13, 1598. On the wall is a slab with the following inscription:—

There still remain the bedroom he had built next to the royal oratory; the study, some of the chairs he used, and two chairs without arms on which he used to repose the leg in which he had gout. The ceiling is smooth and without ornaments; the walls are whitewashed, and the floor is of brick. From this bedroom the high altar can be seen through two doors that lead to the galleries.

The palace contains a series of small rooms, the most remarkable of which are a set of four. The other apartments are covered with beautiful tapestry made from designs by Rubens, Teniers, and Goya, but the walls of these particular rooms are covered with the finest inlaid woodwork. The hinges, locks, and handles of the doors are in gilt-bronze and steel, and the ceilings are painted by Maella. The entire work is said to have cost £280,000.

The Battle Room derives its name from the battle-scenes painted on the walls; these frescoes are by the celebrated Italian artists Granelio and Fabricio. This gallery is 198 feet long by 28 wide, and 25 high to the keystone of the vault. The principal fresco, which is very large, represents the battle of Higueruela and the victory obtained over the Arabs by John II. on the Vega at Granada. The other frescoes refer to the battle gained on the day of St. Lawrence, 1557, by Duke Filiberto, commander of the Spanish army; the capture of the French general, the Constable de Montmorency, and the siege and capture of San Quentin. There are also representations of two expeditions to the Azores in the time of Philip II. The vault contains a variety of figures and caprices all designed fantastically and ingeniously, with taste and consummate skill.

Of the three hundred and thirty-eight rich tapestries in the palace, one hundred and fifty-two of them were manufactured in the old Royal Factory of Madrid; one hundred and sixty-three in Flanders, from designs for the most part by David Teniers; twenty in France and five in Italy. Nearly all represent country scenes, landscapes, Spanish customs, views of Madrid, and hunting scenes.

The Casa del Principe was built in 1772 by order of Charles IV., when Prince of the Asturias. When the War of Independence broke out the treasures that adorned it were taken to Madrid and many of them disappeared. It was redecorated and embellished in 1824, and carefully restored some years later. It is entirely built of stone and is called ‘Casita de Abajo,’ to distinguish it from another called ‘Casita de Arriba,’ built by the Infante Gabriel. The curiosities and works of art in this pleasant edifice are innumerable. Of the ceilings twenty are of great merit, painted by Duque, GÓmez, Gerroni, Maella, Briles, PÉrez, Japeti, and LÓpez. In the nineteen rooms, of which the two floors of the edifice consist, there are over two hundred oil-paintings and prints, the subjects for the most part religious, some of them of real merit. There is also a fine collection of ivory reliefs consisting of thirty-seven pictures, representing mythological and sacred and profane scenes, and a beautiful collection of two hundred and twenty-six pieces of porcelain made at the Buen Retiro factory. In the time of Ferdinand VII. the house was valued at thirty-seven million pesetas, and it is at present a veritable museum of curiosities.

The Royal School of Alfonso XII., which occupies the north-east end of the edifice, is entered from the principal faÇade. Among its many and notable apartments is the spacious and magnificent paraninfo, the ceiling of which is formed by a painting of extraordinary size, which is believed to have been painted by the pupils of JordÁn. Two smaller paintings represent symbolical figures of different sciences, and are signed by Llamas. Near the paraninfo are the fine Physics and Natural History rooms, the lucerna or light court, and the children’s dining-rooms, adorned with a collection of pictures representing incidents in the life of Alexander. These were painted for the palace of San Ildefonso by order of Philip V., and they are all signed by eminent Italian artists. Over the paraninfo is another fine room, the centre of which is occupied by a beautiful statue of St. Augustine, carved in wood, conceived and executed by the lay-friar S. CuÑado to commemorate the fifteenth centenary of the conversion of St. Augustine.

In 1878, by the direction of Alfonso XII., the studies at this Royal College were reorganised with great success. Later (in 1885) the teaching being entrusted to the Augustinians, its credit was so enhanced that now, owing to the unsurpassed position of the place, the installation of electric light, the perfection and abundance of teaching material, and still more the competence and zeal with which the learned corporation carries out its delicate task of the moral, physical, and scientific education of a large number of youths, the Royal College at the Escorial well fulfils the high aims of its royal restorer, and is one of the most important centres of instruction in Spain.