In Madrid I met an unusual man whose friendship was to mean much, the dour and salty Scotsman, Angus Macnab, who wrote about Spain with such insight that I wondered how an outsider had managed to penetrate so acutely the Spanish mentality. ‘Simple,’ he said, drawing on his pipe and speaking out of the corner of his mouth, ‘I’m a Spanish citizen.’ After knocking about in various countries, he had found Spain the most congenial and had decided to make it his home.
‘I like the cautious form of government, the rocklike stability of the people. Mind you, there are many things wrong, but none that hard work won’t mend. And it’s a marvelous place to bring up children.’
Through visiting Macnab, I came to know the new suburbs whose spectacular proliferation had allowed Madrid to increase its population so sharply. ‘Is there another city in Europe which has built so high a percentage of new homes in the last decade?’ he asked, and I could think of none. Scattered about in all directions, eight-story apartment buildings had spread over the countryside, not a dozen here and there, but hundreds in clusters. Architecturally they were bleak, and some were beginning to crack after only six years of life, but they were homes. Macnab, his lively wife and children lived in such a colony out beyond the bullring, and as I visited him through the years I could watch the sudden manner in which sixty or seventy great buildings appeared during a ten-month absence.
‘Last time I was here you were on the edge of the country,’ I said. ‘Now it’s a new city!’.
Macnab said, ‘You must keep this in mind when you ask why so many Spaniards support the government. It has built homes and it’s given them to us at reasonable rates. You were complaining about the fact you can never find a taxi when you want to come here. Why can’t you? Because the rates are kept so low that any workman in Madrid can afford a taxi. Here the good things are not restricted to the rich.’
Macnab’s apartment in one of the new buildings was comfortable and well arranged. ‘A home for a workman,’ he said proudly. ‘That’s what I am. I work in the foreign office.’ He did not tell me what kind of work he did, but he was such a skilled linguist that I assumed it had to do with international documents.
‘Didn’t you go to Oxford?’ I asked one day.
‘Indeed yes. Some of my chums from those days would be surprised to see me here, spending my years as a Spaniard. But this is a good country … a good country.’ He spoke with such conviction that I felt certain he had found in Spain a depth which other Anglo-Saxons missed.
‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘out in the suburbs like this we have our young hoodlums, just as you do in America. But our police don’t coddle them.’ Macnab showed me many aspects of modern Spain that I would otherwise have missed, but the point he made repeatedly Was that it was an excellent place to raise a family. ‘Here the emphasis has always been on the family. It’s the fundamental fact about Spain, and if you miss that you miss everything.’ On picnics he would point out the families; when we discussed education he would stress what it meant to family life; and often when we were just wasting time gossiping about things Spanish he would revert to this matter of stability. It was obvious that he loved Spain and felt it deep in his bones. One day I accompanied him to Toledo, where he had lived for some years following his arrival in the country, and I remember how, when we reached the church he had attended, people of all ages ran out to greet him as if he were a member of their extended family. I thought it strange that a Scotsman with an Oxford education should have been adopted so easily into Spanish life; perhaps it was through the Macnab children that this acceptance came, for they were Spaniards and indistinguishable from the others.
‘There is a profound permanence in Spain,’ Macnab told me one day, ‘and if you’re lucky enough to identify with it, you have found yourself a very stable home.’ He knew the regions of Spain, and certain of the cities I chose for my tour, those that might not attract others, were chosen because of his recommendation. ‘You’ll like that city,’ he would say. ‘It has an honest quality.’ Talking with him convinced me that he had chosen Spain as his permanent home because of this honesty.
Twenty-eight miles northwest of Madrid lies a vast and gloomy building off to itself, El Escorial (The Slag Heap), a strange pile of gray-black stone set among foothills and the subject of much debate. I find it not only impressive in an overpowering sort of way, but also representative, in its heaviness and simplicity, of the essential Spanish characteristics. El Escorial is Extremadura carved in rock, the barren plains of Castilla set in order by an architect.
Others who know Spanish architecture better than I condemn the building as an alien monstrosity. Where they ask, is the beautiful ornamentation of plateresque? Where is the echo of Romanesque or Gothic, two styles that made themselves at home in Spain? And where in this enormous rectangle is there even a hint of the fact that Spain was for seven hundred years Moorish? These critics charge that the mausoleum, for that is what El Escorial is now principally restricted to, is a poor rendition of an Italian idea and about as appropriate to Spain as a replica of King Victor Emmanuel’s wedding-cake monument would be if it were translated from Rome to the plains of Castilla.
The traveler must make up his own mind in reference to his own experiences, and since most foreigners visiting Spain see the Gothic, the Romanesque and the Moorish and come to think of them as representing Spanish values, El Escorial must be a disappointment. Those like myself who have identified with Extremadura, and Las Marismas and the lonely plains of Castilla, have developed different visions of the country, and to these El Escorial conforms.
What is it? Four things, interrelated and enclosed within common walls: a palace from which kings ruled Spain; a grandiose mausoleum holding the sarcophagi of many kings; a monastery; and an enormous church. It came about because the death of Carlos V at Yuste in 1558 followed closely upon a signal victory of Spanish troops at St. Quentin on the tenth of August, 1557, which day happens to be the feast day of St. Lawrence (in Spanish San Lorenzo). During his last illness Carlos had directed his son to assume responsibility for burying him wherever Felipe thought appropriate, and the latter had the happy idea of building a monastery of unprecedented dimensions which would serve as a mausoleum for the Habsburgs. He scouted the countryside and found this hill onto which mining scoria had once been dumped, whence the name El Escorial, and there he caused work to begin. St. Lawrence had been martyred by being roasted alive on a gridiron, and whether by conscious design or not, when El Escorial was finished, it resembled a rectangular gridiron, complete with handle.
The building has four severe façades whose rather pleasing lines derive from the multitude of windows set into the otherwise bleak walls. The main façade has an entrance marked by twelve Grecian columns and two bronze doors to which the dead kings of Spain were brought for sepulture.
‘Who seeks entrance?’ the monks asked.
‘The Emperor of the Spanish empire.’
‘Who seeks entrance?’
‘The King of Spain.’
‘Who seeks entrance?’
‘The man Carlos.’ Only then did the gates swing open to admit the dead man to his mausoleum.
Today it is one of the most provocative spots in Spain, an octagonal room deep in the lower reaches of the building. In tiers of four sarcophagi each, the kings of Spain lie as if on file in a library, waiting to be lifted down. At the top of one group lies Carlos V, below him Felipe II, then III, then IV. In other tiers the queens rest, but since some of the kings had three and four wives, only those who gave birth to children who inherited the throne are interred here. Associated with the main mausoleum are others reserved for the royal heirs who died in infancy and for the royal bastards, of whom there was a plentiful supply. In this last room lie the reassembled remains of Don Juan of Austria, who even today has the power to attract more visitors than the legitimate rulers.
El Escorial contains much more: galleries of art, tapestries by Goya, long halls covered with pictorial maps, a fine library
and the living quarters of the ancient rulers. It is so immense that when one has seen all this, the complex of the monastery remains to be explored, for this is a town set within walls.
I am embarrassed to report that it was not until my third visit that I discovered El Escorial contained, hidden away in its capacious interior, a church much bigger than many cathedrals. I had wandered through the halls for two days, vaguely aware that off to one side stood a chapel of some sort, but I was preoccupied with other areas and so missed a building of mammoth dimension. How could such a thing happen? When I travel I am wary of guides, preferring always to look at things for myself. I find that if I do not see an object fresh, on my own terms as it were, I often never see it except through a haze of verbalism. Guides, I find, are trained to reduce all things to a common level, and their flow of words weaves a net over the whole, so that one sees only through the interstices and never clean. Furthermore, the things they point out that I might otherwise have missed I would often have been well advised to miss. When I visit a site I want to see three or four things at most and am never loath to ignore others that might have little interest for me. Sometimes my plan causes me to miss something I should have seen, as at El Escorial; I must be the only visitor ever to have missed so large a church.
As if to rub it in, it was a professional guide who finally pointed it out to me, and I was surprised at how clean and beautiful it was. The Patio de los Reyes, the enclosed area before the entrance to the church, was big enough for army maneuvers, while the interior vistas, all severely neoclassical, were much more spacious than I would have guessed. When imprisoned inside the church and unable to see the expanse of the surrounding building, I felt it to be totally un-Spanish, and even when I came to the two groups of stautary for which the church is famous, I found them also alien, which was not surprising, since they were cast in Italy by Pompeo Leoni.
They are delightful and were described to me by an Englishman as ‘poor art but pure heart.’ Facing the high altar on the gospel side is a group of five life-size figures, three kneeling in prayer, two standing in the rear. They are Carlos V, accompanied by his faithful wife Isabel of Portugal—not to be confused with the earlier Isabel of Portugal, who went mad—his two queenly sisters, María of Hungary and Leonor of France, and his daughter María, who married Maximilian II. The group is ranged behind a beautifully draped table carved in bronze and topped by a pillow whose tassels are so real they seem ready to flutter should a breeze come unexpectedly through the church. I liked especially the bronze robe worn by Carlos and decorated with the Habsburg eagle and panels from the lives of saints. The whole group is sized so as to fit comfortably in the towering spaces of the church and placed so high that it is not dwarfed, a delightful Italian version of a Spanish royal family.
Son of a wealthy landowner poses with his schoolboy medals.
Poised opposite, on the epistle side, is a matching set, also of five figures, also ranged behind a draped table and a pillow, but this shows Felipe II, brooding spirit of El Escorial, and it has a certain quality of arrogance befitting that prince. Where the eyes of Carlos are downcast in prayer, those of Felipe stare straight forward, as if daring God to touch him. He is surrounded by three of his four wives—María of Portugal, Elizabeth of Valois and Ana of Austria, with his second wife, Mary of England, appropriately absent, for she had always been difficult for him to handle—and by his heir, Don Carlos who is shown as a thin-faced, intelligent young man of sixteen or seventeen.
If I had missed the hidden church, I wouldn’t have lost much, but if I had missed these two sculpture groups I would have missed a view of Spain that I could have acquired in no other way. I had always felt kindly toward Carlos, but the austerity of Felipe repelled me, proving that I was guilty of the grave error which Spanish critics charge against most Anglo-Saxon writers, that I had been contaminated by the Black Legend, that body of charges assembled by non-Spanish scholars, especially Protestants, to discredit Spain and Catholicism.
In recent years much has been written about the Black Legend and its genesis. A personal enemy of Felipe’s fled Spain and supported himself for the rest of his life by peddling lurid rumors involving the Spanish court. William the Silent, of the rebellious Low Countries, saw a chance to unite his fractious countrymen by creating in Felipe an object of terror and scorn, so he added to the rumors and gave them circulation. Protestant apologists saw in the charges a chance to defame Catholicism, so they added their inventions, but the worst damage was done by fellow Catholics, the Italians, who wanted to create a political counterbalance to Spanish influence in Italy and did so by spreading existing rumor and creating new. As I read these new studies deflating the Black Legend, I found that they were directed at people like me, for I was almost the archetype of the person corrupted by the legend. It consisted of these postulates: 1. Catholicism captured Spain and adopted a policy of keeping the country in darkness. 2. Using Spain as a base, Catholicism intended to enslave the world. 3. In order to police its conquests, Spanish Catholicism invented the Inquisition, which it proposed to install in subdued territories. 4. The archpriest of these evil designs was King Felipe II. 5. He was personally evil and committed many crimes in furtherance of his aims.
A special emphasis in Spain’s refutation of the Black Legend has been the charge that it was promulgated in the first place by a conspiracy among Protestant scholars who had consciously engineered a campaign to defame Spain and had manipulated historical facts to do so. Phrases like these were common in Spanish writing on the subject: ‘una fobia contra España’ (a phobia against Spain) and ‘un complot contra España’ (a plot against Spain). Certainly my initial experiences with the legend supported these Spanish charges, for I became aware not only of manipulation of fact but also of a phobia against Spain. I did not come to believe the legend by accident; I was taught it by professors. I remember how my sixth-grade teacher created in me a long-lasting ambivalence toward Spain by first teaching us that western civilization owed Spain much, in that she had saved Europe by preventing Islam from moving north of the Pyrenees, and that if she had not done so, we would all now be Muslims. We then analyzed how horrible life would be in our little town if we had mosques instead of churches, and it was fifteen years before I lost my fear of Islam. Shortly, however, this same teacher showed us how Europe was saved in 1588 by the English fleet that drove off the Armada. This time we were told, ‘If the English had not defeated the Spaniards, we would now all be Catholics,’ and we analyzed what our town would be like under those conditions, and it was equally bad.
My problem was simple: ‘How could Spain have been civilization’s savior in the fight against Islam and only a few centuries later the villain in the fight against England?’ The answer was also simple; ‘Felipe II was an evil man.’ Thus the Black Legend was promulgated.
I was so fascinated by the ominous character of Felipe that I read all I could find about him, and when the normal histories were exhausted, a librarian dug up the only book in my life that I wish I had not read. I once heard a spellbinding gospel preacher in Colorado shout that as a young man he had read a filthy book which had so contaminated him, he would gladly cut off his right hand if he could erase having read the book; I was amused at his ranting, because I’d read such books and they hadn’t hurt me much. But I have often wished that I had not as a boy read Rider Haggard’s Lysbeth, A Tale of the Dutch (1901), because it imprinted on my mind so evil a picture of Spain in the age of Felipe and the Duque de Alva, who represented him in The Netherlands, that it was fifteen years before I was able to counteract it. No other book had so baleful an influence on me, nor one so permanent, partly because it confirmed what my teacher had said about Spain, partly because it carried a series of prejudicial pictures. Two remained with me, as vivid now as when I first saw them. Two Dutch Protestants were reading the Bible furtively at night while a spy from the Inquisition peered from behind a door, and such an air of terror was engendered that I required to know no more
about Spain than that. The second picture was more direct. One of the leaders of the Protestants was captured by the Spaniards, and when he refused to betray his fellow Bible readers, he was locked in a room containing a small barred window and there starved to death … but not just any room. This one overlooked the kitchen, whose sights and odors came to him as he starved. This was so diabolic, so typically Spanish, it was not until years later that I realized Rider Haggard was merely a storyteller in need of detail who had invented the room and the kitchen.
I had read Lysbeth fifty years ago and wanted to check whether it was as virulently anti-Spanish as I remembered, but I was unable to find a copy of the book; in its day it had been widely read but was no longer in print or on library shelves. However, my town librarian located a copy in Minneapolis and borrowed it for me, and in the introduction I came upon the first phrase I remembered: ‘By an example of the trials, adventures, and victories of a burgher family of the generation of Philip II and William the Silent, the author strives to set before readers of to day something of the life of those who lived through perhaps the most fearful tyranny that the western world has known.’ I found the book as intemperate now as it had been terrifying half a century ago; the Spanish were real villains, especially the clergy: ‘Before he answered the priest threw off his dripping hooded cape … revealing a coarse, wicked face, red and blear-eyed from intemperance.’ The Dutch were invariably heroic: ‘This was William of Orange, called the Silent, one of the greatest and most noble of human beings who ever lived in any age; the man called forth by God to whom Holland owes its liberties, and who forever broke the hideous yoke of religious fanaticism …’