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Updated: June 29, 2025
The mysterious King, in his den in the Escorial, dreary and silent, and bent like a scribe over his papers, was the type and the champion of arbitrary power. More than the Pope himself, he was the head of Catholicity. In doctrine and in deed, the inexorable bigotry of Madrid was ever in advance of Rome. Not so with France. She was full of life, a discordant and struggling vitality.
Had he now allowed himself to be driven from his post, he would have exactly fulfilled their object. By remaining, he counteracted their schemes. By taking Matthias wholly into his own possession, he obtained one piece the more in the great game which he was playing against his antagonist in the Escorial.
We were going northward over the track which had brought us southward to Madrid two weeks before, and by and by the pleasant levels broke into rough hills and hollows, strewn with granite boulders which, as our train mounted, changed into the savage rock masses of New Castile, and as we drew near the village of Escorial gave the scene the look of that very desolate country.
Certainly, here were reasons more than sufficient why Henry should be making but feeble preparations for open war in alliance with England and the republic against Philip, as such a step was hardly compatible with the abandonment of England and the republic and the espousal of Philip's daughter projects which Henry's commissioner had just been discussing with Philip's agent at Madrid and the Escorial.
The enthusiast, who had passed away at last from the dreams of the Escorial into the land of shadows, had spent a lifetime, and melted the wealth of an empire; but universal monarchy had never come forth from his crucible. The French king, although possessed likewise of an almost boundless faculty for ambitious visions, was capable of distinguishing cloud-land from substantial empire.
I do not know why any one comes there, and I search my consciousness in vain for a better reason than the feeling that I must come, or would be sorrier if I did not than if I did. The worthy Howell does not commit himself to any expression of rejoicing or regretting in having done the Escorial.
A courier, despatched post haste to Spain, bore the glorious news, together with the, sacred, standard of the Prophet, the holy of holies, inscribed with the name of Allah twenty-eight thousand nine hundred times, always kept in Mecca during peace, and never since the conquest of Constantinople lost in battle before. The King was at vespers in the Escorial.
It had been Don John's dying request to Philip that his remains might be buried in the Escorial by the side of his imperial father, and the prayer being granted, the royal order in due time arrived for the transportation of the corpse to Spain. Permission had been asked and given for the passage of a small number of Spanish troops through France.
We stopped at the little station of Villalba, in the midst of the wide brown table-land that stretches from Madrid to the Escorial. At Villalba we found the inevitable swarm of beggars, who always know by the sure instinct of wretchedness where a harvest of cuartos is to be achieved. I have often passed Villalba and have seen nothing but the station-master and the water-vender.
Pattison's drawing- room, I saw Saragossa, Granada, the Escorial, and that survival of the old Europe in the new, which one must go to Spain to find. Not that the description was particularly vivid in talking of famous places John Richard Green could make words tell and paint with far greater success; but it was singularly complete and accomplished.
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