The centre of most Spanish cathedrals is dominated by the coro, a dark, carved, boxlike structure that blocks the grand prospect of the nave but provides an intellectual focus for the whole building. Here, beneath the glowering barrels of the organ pipes, the canons intone their litanies and the choirboys their harsh descants, the beadles shuffle past with messages or missals, the huge plain-chant hymnals stand open on their lecterns, and all the thought and reason of the cathedral seems to be concentrated. The coro is less like a sanctuary than a library, or perhaps the study of some misogynist theologian; and the visitor generally finds his way there first, to sniff its bookish atmosphere and inspect its choir stalls in the gloom, before he sets out to tour that mass of sculpture and sanctity, that museum of holy relics, sublime inventions, oddities, excesses, superstitions and splendours that is a Spanish church.
In the great cathedral that is Spain herself, the part of the coro is played by the palace-monastery called the Escorial, for there you may sense, stuffed darkly into granite labyrinths, all the forces that have shaped this tremendous and sometimes frightening country. It stands in the foothills of the Guadarrama mountains, with woods and snows behind its back, and the vast plateau of Castile stretching away to Madrid before it. It is rectangular, and enormous, and implacably severe, unrelieved by any softness of foliage or decoration: part a place of worship, part a royal palace, part a mausoleum, so big that it is officially classed as a city, with 86 staircases, 89 fountains, more than a thousand doors, 13 oratories, cells for 300 monks, tombs for 24 kings and queens, 16 patios, 2,673 windows, and a hundred miles of passages. Wide blank courtyards surround the walls of this marvel, a little town hangs respectfully about its purlieus, and from far away across the plain, even from the streets of Madrid herself, you can see it brooding there on the edge of the mountains, looking at once holy, menacing and obsessed.
The Escorial was built by Philip II of Spain, grandson of Joan the Mad—whose chamber of insanity he once visited as a child, to find her crouched raving and in rags upon the floor, surrounded by plates of mouldering food. He began the building in 1563, to be his family tomb as well as his palace. He loved the raw austerity of the Castilian highlands, so pitilessly hot in summer, so bitter in the winter winds, and he was impelled by the fact that in his generation Spain had reached the apex of worldly power. She was the richest and most formidable nation on earth. From these rooms, Philip said, he ‘ruled the world with two inches of paper,’ and he made the great building not only an expression of his own proud, suspicious character, but also a shrine of the values, that were to govern Spain from his time into our own. Since Philip’s day the history of this country has been generally melancholy and often tragic, but the style that was set in its golden age remains the ruling style today, and there is nothing out of date about the Escorial. In its conception, its flavour, even its meticulous Spanish workmanship, it might have been built yesterday: for only now, four centuries later, is Spain tentatively discarding the attitudes King Philip struck for her.
In these endless corridors and courtyards you may sense the Spanish taste for the grandiose and the overbearing, fostered in the false dawn of an imperial prime, and often vulgarized in bombast. In the coldness and bleakness of this building you may detect the aristocratic stoicism of Spain, something grandly ascetic in the character of the country, which often makes it feel otherworldly and aloof. In the inescapable presence of Philip himself, haunting every corner of his Escorial, you may fancy this nation’s perennial yearning for a strong man at the centre, its recurrent instinct for autocracy. In the clear-cut pattern of the building, said to be grille-shaped in tribute to the martyrdom of St. Lawrence, you may see reflected the clarity and precision that characterizes so much of Spanish life. In its manner of command you may see how the centre of this large country has imposed its will upon the perimeter, stamping all with its own Castilian culture and keeping a watchful check on deviations. In the huge Basilica, embedded in the heart of the structure, you may realize how close the Christian faith has stood to the sources of authority in Spain. In the ornate, cramped galleries of the royal tombs, with their spaces for monarchs yet to die, their separate vaults of bastards and in-laws, their neat little crests and chiselled pedigrees, their rotting-chamber where the corpse of the Queen-Regent Maria Christina, ‘for political reasons,’ lies mouldering to this very day—in all this morbid splendour you may observe the Spanish love of hierarchy and formality, with its conviction that death is only a proper end to a familiar pattern.
Above all, in the pervading sadness of the Escorial, you may feel something of the tragedy of Spain, her lack of fulfilment. Here at the summit of the known world, Philip lived a dedicated and abstemious life, receiving the gorgeous ambassadors upon a throne of kitchen-chair simplicity, with a high brimless hat upon his head and his foot upon a gout-stool. His life was passed in work and prayer; his bedroom was a kind of cell; he was surrounded by the dossiers of State affairs, code keys and files of secret information. An aura of great power, fear, and sanctity invested him, so that the most experienced of the envoys entered his presence nervously, and even now there is something terrible about his memory. He died, however, miserably. There he lay in ulcerous agony, a crowned skull on the table beside him, watching the rituals of the chapel through a spy-hole near his bed, ordering black cloth for his own mourning draperies, rehearsing the ritual of Extreme Unction, in such pain that he sometimes could not bear the weight of a sheet upon his body, in such gangrenous squalor, it is said, that his courtiers could not bring themselves to approach him. And when at last he died, to have ceaseless prayers for his soul said in the Basilica for two centuries to come—when he died in 1598, it was in the knowledge that already Spain’s brief heyday was over, the vast empire was beginning to disperse, and two inches of Spanish paper, in the hands of a God-fearing Spanish aristocrat, had not been omnipotent after all.
All this you may sense in the Escorial still, and you may learn how the pride, resignation and disillusionment of Philip’s Kingdom were to be projected into twentieth-century Spain. More than most countries, Spain feeds upon her own past. Even now her affairs are subject to the gloomy magnetism of the Escorial, or at least to the pole of emotions that this great work of faith and policy represents.
Spanish geographers are very fond of elevation graphs—diagrams which, by cutting an imaginary slice through the Iberian Peninsula, show how its altitudes vary from sea to sea. If you apply this technique to the slab of Spanish history, you will find that though the graph is often bumpy, its general outline is all too sadly simple. From the beginning of history to the sixteenth century, the Spaniards gradually climbed towards the pinnacle of their success—hindered often by wars and invasions, but steadily accumulating wealth, culture, prestige, and unity. From the sixteenth century until our times, on the other hand, they have been almost constantly slithering downhill, sometimes bravely digging their heels in, more often plunging helplessly downwards in a welter of despair and recrimination. Spanish history does not form a happy pattern, but at least it looks symmetrical.
The Spaniards have always been a warlike people, and the original Iberians were famous for their feats of arms. Some are remembered for drawing bulls in caves and others, the beaker people, are thought to have been the migrants who erected the stones of Stonehenge. But to the earliest chroniclers of their affairs, the Spaniards were above all soldiers—the original guerrillas. The early Phoenicians and the Greeks, who were merchants rather than conquerors, seem to have established their trading colonies in the peninsula without much trouble, but the Carthaginians and the Romans who followed them, with ambitions of dominion, were opposed by tribes-people of violent martial talent. It took two hundred years for the Romans to master Spain, and the country is littered with the legends of communities which, rather than submit to the legions, burnt their homes around them, or threw themselves en masse over precipices. It was the long resistance of the Spaniards that forced Rome to adopt conscription, and it was from a Spanish model that the Roman armourers copied the famous short sword of the legionaries. Spain was full of redoubtable peoples. The people of the centre cleaned their teeth in stale urine, the people of the north ate bear steaks and drank bulls’ blood, the people of the north-west sacrificed their prisoners to read the omens in their entrails. ‘Their bodies inured to abstinence and toil,’ wrote one Roman observer in the first century before Christ, ‘their minds composed against death, all practise a stern and constant moderation. They prefer war to ease, and should they lack foes without, seek them within.’ The war-cry of the Asturians summed them up. It sounded like the howl of an insatiably ravenous wolf, and has been phoneticized thus: Icucuuuu!
But already the Spaniards, urine, bulls’ blood, wolf-calls, and all, were clambering up that graph. From the Phoenicians they learnt to write, to use money, to mine for their metals. From the Greeks they learnt to grow vines and olives, and to make beautiful things. From the Romans they learnt so much that they eventually became the most advanced and cultivated of all the Empire’s subject races. Spanish soldiers naturally became a mainstay of the legions, but during the six centuries of Roman occupation the Spaniards also matured marvellously in the gentler arts. Most of the later Roman literature came out of Spain, from the satires of Martial to the Stoic sermons of Seneca, and the emperors Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, and Theodosius the Great were all Spaniards. When the Romans withdrew at last, it was a prosperous Christian country that they left behind; and the Visigoths who succeeded them in the fifth century, driving out the rabble of miscellaneous barbarians that had swept in from Gaul, soon found themselves tempered by its culture, their crude, fissiparous Christianity smoothed into orthodox Catholicism, their rough manners softened and scented. From a cruel western land of dangerous peoples—the ne plus ultra of the ancient navigators, the horrida et bellicosa provincia of the Roman invaders—Spain had become a country to be coveted, civilized and productive, whose standards had declined indeed since the golden days of Rome, but whose prizes were well worth the plucking.
No wonder the Muslims, storming along North Africa in the fury of their seventh-century expansion, soon cherished designs upon the place. Only twenty miles of water separated Morocco from Spain, and in many ways the country seemed a kind of idealized Africa—Africa without the heat, without the drought, without the sand, the flies, or the diseases, where maidens ‘as handsome as houris’, so one Arab of the time thought, ‘recline on soft couches in the sumptuous palaces of lords and princes’. In 711 the Muslims crossed the strait, egged on by dissidents on the other side. It took them only two years to subdue the whole of southern Spain, and most of the north too, and the last of the Visigothic kings, we are told, sank with such mystic finality into the marshes of Cádiz that he was never seen again, only his horse with its golden trappings surviving mud-flecked to show the spot. The Moors, as the Spaniards called the mixed Arabs, Syrians, Egyptians, and Berbers of this conquest, made Spain the westernmost province of Islam, and stayed on her soil for seven hundred years.
Once again Spain profited. The Moors squabbled incessantly among themselves, but out of their tribal antipathies there presently evolved the supreme caliphate of Córdoba, which was set up in rivalry to the Abbasside dynasty of Baghdad, and was so cultured, sophisticated, broad-minded and fastidious a State that for a century southern Spain was the lodestar of Europe, and Cordoba herself was second in size only to Constantinople. Religion was free, in the great days of this admirable caliphate, women had equal educational chances, libraries, universities, and observatories flourished, poets abounded and musicians were great men. Life itself, which was seen elsewhere in Europe as a kind of probationary preparation for death, was interpreted as something glorious in itself, to be ennobled by learning and enlivened by every kind of pleasure. The Moors, springing out of an arid background, were the waterers of Spain, the gardeners: they brought a new grace to her culture, they taught her people the techniques of irrigation, and as their own spirit degenerated into excess and sybaritic fancy, so they infused into the Spanish stream some embryo traces of its romanticism—early inklings of swirl, smoulder, quarter-tone and castanet.
They never, however, quite obliterated Christian Spain. Even in the south there were Christian grandees who obtained for themselves a sort of autonomy, and in the drizzly north a little nucleus of Christians never surrendered at all. At the legendary battle of Covadonga in 718 a band of 31 Christians, we are told, halted the advance of 400,000 Muslims, and thus kept the Moors out of the mountains of Asturias; and around the memories of this feat, over the generations, there assembled the dream of reconquest. This was the age of the Cid and his fellow stalwarts of romance. Led by such magnificos, the Christians fought back in fits, starts, and marauds, gradually nibbling their way southwards again, sometimes fighting among themselves, sometimes cohering, sometimes turning coat to help a Muslim friend against a Christian enemy. It was a haphazard kind of Crusade, but by the end of the eleventh century the Christians, grouped in several principalities, had recaptured the central plateau of Spain. By the end of the thirteenth they had taken Córdoba, and mastered all but a southern coastal strip. And in 1492 the Catholic Monarchs of Christian Spain, Isabel of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragón, expelled the last of the Moorish kings from his delectable palace in Granada, and completed the liberation. The cross went up in the mosques of the Alhambra, somebody produced a grammar of the Castilian language, and Spain became recognizably herself.
Now we are approaching the top of that graph, for at this moment of her history Spain became, almost simultaneously, free, united, rich and powerful. She became free by the subjugation of the Moors. She became united because her two dominating Christian kingdoms, Castile and Aragón, were joined in marriage. She became rich and powerful because in the very month of the fall of Granada, when the last of the Moors tumbled out of the Alhambra to be forcibly baptized, Christopher Columbus was summoned to the presence of the Catholic Monarchs, and given a mandate to explore the western ocean. He discovered America, and instantly made Spain one of the Great Powers of the world. Now her indomitable adventurers, escaping from the impoverished gloom of her plateaus, strode irresistibly through Latin America, toppling the fantastic kingdoms of Aztec and Inca, building churches, missions, and palaces, sending home a dizzy stream of bullion. In the flush of excitement and achievement, the Spaniards seemed invincible. Charles I lopped the negative off the old tag, and adopted the slogan plus ultra, as if to imply that nothing was beyond the reach of Spain. The Pope grandly gave the Spaniards title to all land west of the Cape Verde Islands, and they themselves, by war and advantageous weddings, boldly extended their dominions until they ruled the greatest empire since the Romans.
The Hapsburg Charles I, father of Philip II, was Holy Roman Emperor too, and the territories he bequeathed to his son included the whole of South and Central America, much of what is now the United States, large chunks of France, the Low Countries, southern Italy, the Philippines, Ceylon, the Congo, and miscellaneous islands and settlements from Sumatra to the Azores. When Philip moved into the Escorial, having supervised every finicky detail of its still unfinished construction, Spain had reached the top. She was the supreme Power, and the universal champion of Catholicism. Her culture a rich mixture of Christian and Moorish, Iberian and Roman, her national image so proud that the Spanish patrician was Europe’s cynosure of elegance and command, her voyagers outrageously swashbuckling and her experience of the New World unrivalled, she must have seemed, in the eyes of less vivid States, a very prodigy of a nation. She was flamboyantly, aggressively Christian, and God seemed to be distinctly on her side. Truth, the Spaniards thought, was not only indivisible, but essentially Spanish: and if an empire knows the only truth, who can supersede it?
But every empire thinks it knows, and the Spaniards did not stay long upon that glittering apex. Gangrene and exhaustion set in, upon the nation as upon the king, and when Philip’s catafalque was borne away, and his body committed to the pudridero in the vault, Spain had already set out upon the long descent. Everything, excepting only art, rotted. At home and abroad enemies were recklessly made in the cause of Catholic unity. The treasures of the New World were squandered in war and political mayhem all over Europe. The Dutch rebelled, and the Catalans, and the Protestant English, who had already defeated the Armada, now went about crowing heretical triumph. The glory turned out to be no more than a mirage, and even the heroic past of Spain went sour, as Cervantes mocked its pretensions of chivalry in the book that is said to have killed a nation. Spain was rich in talents still, in painters and writers, mystics and philosophers, but behind her façade of pomp she was already a kingdom of poor men and self-delusions. The sap of the Moor had dried, as the irrigation works were allowed to crumble. The old centrifugal forces of Spain, inherited from tribe and rival kingdom, revived to plague the body politic, and tug at the strong nub of power that was represented by the Escorial. Never was a nation’s moment of supremacy quite so brief, or quite so dazzling; and never again was Spain to be quite certain about her role in the world.
In 1700 the Hapsburgs were succeeded upon the throne of Spain by the Bourbons, a family whose name has become synonymous with decay, and under their aegis the nation sank into provincial impotence. The War of the Spanish Succession stripped the Spaniards of their European empire, plus their own Rock of Gibraltar. The Napoleonic Wars led first to the loss of Louisiana and Trinidad, then to the calamity of Trafalgar, and finally to the French occupation of the peninsula and the elevation of Joseph Bonaparte to be King of Spain. The Peninsula War—which the Spaniards call the War of Independence—restored the Bourbons to power and demonstrated the ferocious fighting spirit of the Spanish working people, but it only emphasized Spain’s dependence upon more powerful allies. A succession of colonial wars led only to the independence of the South American republics. The two Carlist Wars, concerned with succession to the throne, ravaged the Spanish countryside and inflamed the people in internecine passion. The Rif wars in North Africa drained Spain’s coffers and decimated her man-power. The Spanish-American War, ending ignominiously in 1898, not only lost her Cuba, the last of her great colonies, but also demonstrated her isolation in the world, neither fish nor fowl among the States, proud but poor, famous but powerless, imperial without an empire. At home there were constant conflicts between traditionalists and liberals, landowners and working classes, centralists and federalists, and for thirty years of the Victorian era the titular ruler of Spain was the nymphomaniac Isabel II, whose red-plush love-nest above a restaurant in Madrid is still shown to tourists of scholarly instinct. Even the Industrial Revolution failed to ignite. Even the artistic genius dried up. Never was a century more disastrous to a nation than the nineteenth century was to Spain.
So she limped into our own times—with one half of her being, for the other half was still lingering wistfully with the Cid and the conquistadores. She was a mess of a country: addled by bitter politics at home—between 1814 and 1923 there were forty-three coups d’état; embroiled in constant wars in the pathetic remnants of her empire, now confined to a few sandy or foetid enclaves in Africa; diplomatically a cipher, strategically so inessential that the First World War contemptuously passed her by. Conflicting ideologies tortured her—dogmas of monarchy, theocracy, despotism, democracy, socialism, anarchism, Communism. Her rural poverty and urban squalor periodically erupted into violence. Her colonial policies were so inept that in 1921 her Moroccan army was annihilated in the Rif. A dictator, Primo de Rivera, came and went; in 1931 the last of the Bourbons, bowing himself out of the chaos, gave way to a left-wing Republic; and in 1936 all these centuries of failure, schism, and frustration gave birth to that ultimate despair, the Spanish Civil War.
It was theoretically a revolt by the Nationalist conservatives against the Republic, but in the end it was really a double revolution—by Right and Left against Centre. The passions it brought so hideously to the boil had been simmering for five centuries, and were so wounding that to this day the scars still show. ‘The Others’ is how Spaniards of the defeated Left sometimes referred to their adversaries, and this dark reticence, so muffled, so oblique, properly expressed the heritage of the conflict. For more than forty years after General Francisco Franco’s victorious Nationalists set up their autarchy of the Right, Spain was trapped within the aftermath of war, subjected to a despotism whose first aim was to ensure that the status quo would never be broken again. Only with Franco’s death in 1975, and the re-establishment of the monarchy as he decreed, did Spain begin to escape from her crippling inhibitions.
What next? We do not know. Here the graph peters out, with King Juan Carlos on the throne of Spain and a liberal democracy spluttering and sometimes exploding into life around him, complete with all the paraphernalia of parties, elections, strikes, protests and graffiti. Spain is a democracy now, but still the Spanish role remains uncertain, the Spanish destiny seems unfulfilled, and we can only look at the Spanish future through a veil of memory and conjecture—‘a cloud of dust’, as the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset once put it, ‘left in the air when a great people went galloping down the highroad of history’.
Generally the visitor, adjusting his eyesight to the shadows, pauses for a time in the coro to consult his guidebook—resting his back against a sculpted crocodile, perhaps, or propping the book upon a fourteenth-century music-stand. When he feels he has the gist of the building, has mastered its origins and sorted out its periods, he sets off to explore the rest of it: and so the traveller too, if he has read the text of the Escorial, may feel equipped to inspect the aisles and chapels of Spain, where the dust loiters and dances on the sun-shafts, and you can faintly hear the rumble of the cars outside.