SEGOVIA

All Europe is hungry for kingship: for the restoration of responsible power: for the recovery of a government which can not be bribed and which is stronger than secret finance on the one hand and its ally, demagogy, on the other.

Now there is in Spain one town where, above all others, this spirit of kingship remains as a sort of inhabiting soul, always alive, built into the very stones of the place and haunting the mind of one who dwells in it and surveys the past and the future. That town is Segovia.

Madrid, hard by, only one long day’s ride away over the mountains, has been the capital for centuries. All around, at the Granja and in the sombre glory of the Escurial, you might say that kingship had far more powerful memorials; while further beyond, above the trench of the Tagus, in the very centre of Spain, the hill of Toledo carries the ancient root of authority and was the central support of all this people for generation upon generation: Roman, Christian, Monarchical. And in Leon town are older origins of kingship, and even in the hills of Cavadonga or in Saragossa, of which I have spoken, or in that last ancient rough cloister of Jaca, where the first chieftains gathered under one lord, or at Huesca of Aragon a man might be expected to feel the thing more strongly. But I feel it most when I see from nearby, peering above the dust of the parched and rolling plain, the high belfry of Segovia. Then I know that I am coming, not only to the memory of kingship, but to the promise of its resurrection.

For Segovia must be seen thus, by a man coming in on foot from the north-west, if its character is to be fully seized. It stands on a great isolated island of rock, which it crowns, and the lines of which it gathers up into the lines of its cathedral and great soaring tower. But it does not dominate the treeless, waterless, grassless, brown plateau of Castille. Though it is itself 3000 feet above the sea, yet is it somewhat lower than the immense empty billows of land to the north and west of it, and the citadel lifts up out of a hollow, dominating its own narrow, sunken valley, but not rising above the high plains beyond.

You come upon Segovia suddenly enough, if you approach thus and see, all in one view, the town close at hand; not quite upon a level with the edge of the steppe which you have so long been tramping across alone.

It is an astonishing vision. There thrusts out towards you, compared by a hundred tongues and pens to the prow of a ship, the graceful strength of the palace and fortress, the Alcazar, which was the very heart of the kingship of Castille. To the left, the line of wall runs away along the edge of the rock, the town huddled within upon the uneven summit, and, at its highest point, the splendid mass of the cathedral. The two torrents of the two ravines which bound that rock meet just below the stronghold of the Alcazar, which overhangs them—the Eresma to the north, to the south the well-named Clamores: a torrent which, when the snows of the Guadarrama are melting, fills all the gorge with its noise. It is wise not to descend at once into the hollow, nor to approach the town by the nearer gate facing one from this west side, but to go round painfully towards the south of the city, where the bare land lifts upwards to the first distant slopes of the mountains, and to contemplate from that point the packed mass of the city, built of rock on its rock foundation. There the abrupt island of granite is united with the high land to the east by the finest Roman aqueduct in Europe, which they say that Trajan made. It still brings the clear water of the Rio Frio—the cold stream—from the mountains into the town. The Mohammedans left it to ruin, as they left everything, they who destroyed the forests and left such permanent scars on all the countries of the Mediterranean; but at the end of the Middle Ages it was restored, and stands now complete, an immense series of arches, three stages high, huge blocks laid without mortar. The only thing I have seen to which it may be compared is the Pont du Gard.

Not this stamp and seal of Rome, which was built to stand for ever; nor the cathedral, which was the last movement of the Gothic before the Renaissance, the last expression of the Middle Ages—but the Alcazar holds the soul of Segovia; and _there_ is kingship. While Aragon to the east was pushing back Islam and thrusting at the outpost of Saragossa, Castille swept in great rides over the burned upland, finding in the Guadarrama a sort of barrier which it could not finally force for many years. Halted on the hither side of that barrier, Castille dug itself in at Segovia, and that advanced post was the fortress of its kings. The walls of Segovia when Alphonso VI. rebuilt them (in the generation which saw Hastings and which was full of a tide of movement in Christendom already quick with the Crusades) were the crown of Castille.

It is again typical of monarchy, its perils and resurrections, that the Alcazar has been destroyed again and again.

At the time of year in which I am writing, in the heat of August, in the mid-thirteenth century, when the kings of Castille had had their establishment here for more than two hundred years, Alphonso the Wise sat in his great hall, with his nobles and his bishops about him, and, musing, said aloud, ‘Had the Creator but consulted me, the world would have been made better.’ Whereupon it grew dark and a flash of lightning fell and struck the Alcazar and destroyed half of it with flames.

That was but the first destruction. Others have followed throughout the centuries. The last was in memory of men now living, and it is symbolic of the spirit of monarchy that even in its last resurrection, even in our own degraded time, the majesty and dignity of that building have re-arisen. Indeed, Spain can boast what no other European country can boast to-day, that its modern building is continuous with that of its fathers. Therefore, the Alcazar, though nearly all the stones are new, and though only the great façade remains of the original palace, is still the shrine of monarchy. It is still the place where the populace rose, under the minority of Alphonso XI. (a little after Bannockburn), and where, five years later, when the child had become a man, such awful vengeance was taken against the rebels. It is still the place where, young and great, Isabella, the last heiress of Castille, was proclaimed queen: she who by her marriage with Aragon was at last to unite all Spain and to open the great century in which Spain made the New World. It is still the same place from which that young, proud woman, only two years after her crowning, rode out alone and dominated the mob with her single presence. It is still the place where (again, how symbolic of the Crown!) he who was to be Charles I. of England, in that Spanish adventure which failed, Charles, the last to be possessed in his own country of full kingship, sat at meat and looked out of the high windows upon the tumbling of the Clamores far below.

Segovia was, and remains, the last of those intensely national kingly centres of the Reconquista, whence the final charge was made which swept all Spain into the Christian net; leaving only Andalusia to Mahomet as a vassal remnant. For it was hence, as from a base, that Alphonso VI. went out to seize Toledo, and to ride south as far as the Morena, and to plant the seed which three lifetimes later flowered in the final victory of Navas.

All this is in Segovia, and Segovia, as I have said, is kingship. Any one who would get into himself the spirit of kingship and revive the mood of that institution which was a necessity to our fathers, will do well to pass a lonely week in Segovia, thinking upon all these things. For Spain is now beginning the restoration of the kings. That with which Italy first startled the world not many years ago Spain has now undertaken: the re-erection of Monarchy. We are watching, with very little news of it and allowed very little comprehension of it here in the north, the most significant and the most profound of experiments. If the example shall spread to France, the victory will be won: the professional politician and his financial masters will pass from Europe and a moral anarchy will have ended.

Indeed, the new Spanish experiment is much fuller of meaning than Europe of the north and west has as yet grasped. In one form or another one nation after another falls back, from sheer necessity of living, upon this old stable model of personal rule, of real and responsible authority; popular, not yet traditional, but already welcomed. Elsewhere than in Spain it is either masked by an electoral process, as in the United States; or it is a dictatorship, as in Italy, with no provision as yet for its own continuance; or it is a military organisation, as in Germany to-day—an act of police not fully developed there yet and certainly not yet fixed. But in Spain the riddance of the professional politician, the establishment of responsible and real authority is avowedly and openly a preliminary to the full establishment of monarchy: traditional, hereditary, popular, permanent.

Whether this good thing will succeed or no, none can prophesy. The chances are in its favour so far as public support is concerned; one can be very sure of that, for there is not a nation in Europe but is disgusted with the falsehood, hypocrisy, and weakness of parliamentary oligarchy and the sham catch-words of ‘suffrage’ and ‘deputy’ which confused the nineteenth century. But two great perils, among many lesser ones, threaten the final success of the experiment. One is what was the running sore, and is still the scar, of Morocco. The other is the problem of Catalonia.

It is not for a foreigner to judge either of these; but it is for all observers interested in this critical experiment to note them and to watch their effect. For the rest, the main forces are in kingship’s favour. The blood is there. The dictatorship is courageous, among people who worship courage; it is devoid of hypocrisy, among a people contemptuous of hypocrisy; and when the time shall come for the full restoration of monarchical power, there is a monarch present who can use it. Would that other nations to-day, after so long an atrophy of kingship, could say that!

Perhaps when I am an old man I shall return and stop again in my little inn at Segovia, and hear of some kingly act done, some kingly order given to a new Spain from the Alcazar of Segovia. I hope so; for the place should bring luck: and that one hardly feels of Madrid.