the rise and fall of the Royal Chapel

        Isabel, a devout Franciscan, desired an austere mausoleum in the medieval style, appropriate for a woman who had confessed her sins and turned her back on the world. But she died before work on the chapel could even begin. King Ferdinand supervised the first years of the construction, taking a few liberties with her precise instructions because he himself, like most men of his time, was fascinated by all the exciting new things going on in Italy -the movement we call the Renaissance. And after Ferdinand died, the throne went to his grandson Charles, who wasn’t even a Spaniard - he was born and raised in sophisticated Ghent and brought with him all those humanistic ideas which Isabel can only have dreaded.

        For the men of the Renaissance, a mausoleum was meant to exalt the occupant’s worldly achievements, his physical and men-tal attributes - and when the new King arrived on the scene, in 1517, he was dismayed to find that such a plain, old-fashioned and downright small sepulcher - “estrecho sepulcro” - was being built for his grandparents. Charles - Carlos Quinto, as he is universally known - made several major changes and additions, such as the iron screen and the altarpiece, which gave the whole thing a more contemporary dash.

        Charles’ next step was to build a cathedral alongside, to supplant the bastardized mosque which stood at the foot of the Royal Chapel. And this time he gave full rein to his Italianate leanings. He ordered a massive temple in the classical or Hellenic style (what the apologists of the time curiously called the “Roman style” to draw attention away from its pagan origins). He even decided to jettison the Royal Chapel altogether and move its occupants to a new - and much grander - Pantheon of Kings in the middle of the new Cathedral, a project which, like many others he had, was never carried out, fortunately since this would have entirely stripped the church of its raison d'être.

        As it was, Charles had himself buried in the remote northern monastery where after abdicating the throne he spent the last years of his life, deeply disillusioned by his failure to impose Catholicism on the peoples of the Netherlands, then under Spanish rule. And not only did he expressly desire to break with his grandmother’s wish, but, in his final moments, he even staged a famous rehearsal of his own funeral, which he watched from the coffin to be sure that the monks had every detail right! It is indeed curious to imagine him lying there observing it all with his eyes half-open...

        However his son, Philip II was wont to doing things on an even grander style: he saw Spain, quite simply, as the God-ordained center of the world, and to provide this center with an appropriate inner sanctum he built El Escorial, the vast monastery-palace where he was to spend the rest of his life, overlooking a barren plain north of Madrid. Deep in its cellars his workers carved the circular Pantheon of Kings, lining it with green marble and gold. As soon as it was done he had the bodies in the Royal Chapel, with the exception of the original five, brought from Granada. Again, it is wonderful to imagine the convoy of mules, soldiers and priests wending its way through mountain passes and across arid plains with the cargo of... old bones!

        Philip also took away the chapel’s precious books to add to the monastery’s already incomparable library. The effect was to strip the old sepulcher of much of its prestige and financial support,and by the time the French troops broke open the coffins two centuries later, it had become a half-forgotten relic. A touching episode in Philip’s youth suggests that he had a very special reason for wanting his family’s remains closer to home.. When his mother, Isabel of Portugal died, her corpse had to be carried on a bier all the way from Toledo to Granada for burial,in the stifling heat. The bereaved Charles was so shattered that he withdrew into a monastery, and ordered his 12-year old son to take his place at the burial. The funeral procession took several weeks, although the smell of the poorly embalmed body had the effect of hastening the grievers on their way.

        According to tradition, the coffin had to be opened before burial, to ascertain that the Queen was really the one inside, and the experience of viewing his mother’s decomposed remains was to mark Philip forever - especially since he was known to be strongly attached to the lady, once renowned for her beauty... It seems to me likely that he swore then to put an end to his eccentric great-grandmother’s dream and bring as many of his relatives back to Castile as he decently could.

The conversion of the Duke of Gandía

        The gruesome scene has been portrayed in a painting whose title seems to have no relation to the subject, The Conversion of the Duke of Gandía. The young Philip was accompanied on his journey by the personal escort of the Queen, the Duke of Gandía, an aristocrat well known in the Court for his passion for the pleasures of the flesh, and it was his official duty to confirm that the corpse about to be buried was “the right one”. When the moment came, the Duke was so horrified by what he saw that he immediately decided to devote the rest of his life to God and charity. He expressed himself thus, before the mourners in the Royal Chapel, all holding handkerchiefs to their noses, “I cannot swear that this is Her Majesty, but I swear that I put her body here”, and then turned his back on the world, with the solemn declaration, “No longer shall I serve Lords whom Death can take from me”. The Duke of Gandía became a Jesuit monk and was canonized a century later..

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