Madrid: The History 9780755621255, 9781780762814

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List of Illustrations

1. Las Navas de Tolosa, the turning point in Spain’s 800-year war against the Moorish invaders. Painting by Francisco de Paula Van Halen (nineteenth century). 2. Fernando and Isabel, known as the Catholic Monarchs. This dual portrait was painted for their wedding in 1469. The artist is unknown. 3. Felipe II arrives in Madrid in 1561 after proclaiming it the capital of Spain. Author’s collection. 4. The Plaza Mayor, one of Madrid’s main tourist attractions. Painting by Juan de la Corte, 1623. Courtesy of the Museo de la Historia de Madrid. 5. Fernando VII, ‘the Desired One’. Painting by Francisco de Goya, 1814. Courtesy of the Museo Nacional del Prado. 6. The 2 May 1808 uprising. Painting by Joaquín Sorolla, 1884. 7. Manuela Malasaña, heroine and martyr of the 2 May revolt. Painting by José Luis de Villar. 8. Goya’s Allegory of Madrid, 1810. Courtesy of the Museo de la Historia de Madrid. 9. The 1854 revolution, in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, by Eugenio Lucas Velázquez, c.1855. Courtesy of the Museo de la Historia de Madrid. 10. Aerial bombing in Madrid in the 1936–39 Civil War. Photographer unknown. 11. ‘¡No Pasarán! ’ (‘They Shall Not Pass!’) banner, hanging over the entrance to Madrid’s Plaza Mayor during the Civil War. Photographer unknown. 12. General Francisco Franco’s Civil War victory declaration of 1 April 1939. 13. The Puente de Toledo. Author’s collection. 14. Pedro Almodóvar. Photo by Roberto Gordo Saez. 15. Real Madrid Stadium. Photo by uggboy. 16. Real Madrid celebrates its Spanish Super Cup win against Valencia in 2008. Photo by Juan Fernández. 17. The Cibeles Fountain. Courtesy of Artimagen. 18. The Bear and Strawberry Tree (Oso y Madroño). Courtesy of Artimagen. 19. Plaza Mayor. Courtesy of Artimagen. 20. Palacio Real. Photo by Gryffindor. 21. The Cibeles Fountain facing the start of the Gran Vía. Photo by Louise O’Gorman. 22. The Metropolis Building. Photo by Louise O’Gorman.

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To the People of Madrid

‘Petersburg has finer streets, Paris and Edinburgh more stately edifices, London far nobler squares, while Shiraz can boast of more costly fountains… but the population!’ George Borrow on Madrid, The Bible in Spain (1843)

acknowledgements

I am humbled by and grateful to the Authors’ Foundation of the Society of Authors for their award of a magnificent grant, which enabled me to carry out research work in Madrid. Helen Crisp has once more taken time out from a demanding job to cast a critical eye over the manuscript and bring to my attention some potentially disastrous howlers. One could not ask for a more supportive and skilful agent than Duncan McAra, and thanks also to Joanna Godfrey at I.B.Tauris for seeing the text through the editing process. The work of the copy-editor is too often taken for granted, so many thanks are due to Alex Middleton for applying his skills to the manuscript. I am indebted to the helpful and friendly staff at the Biblioteca Nacional de España (Spanish National Library) and Hemeroteca Municipal de Madrid (Madrid Newspaper Archive), both world-class research facilities. Anyone who endeavours to write about Madrid, past or present, will find Madrid, villa y corte by Pedro Montoliú, an official ‘Cronista de la Villa’ (‘Chronicler of the City’), one of the most insightful and invaluable accounts of the city’s history. I would also like to thank the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Central Library for making available a badly needed space in which to write in peace and quiet. Of course, none of this would have been possible without the people of Madrid. My gratitude goes to them for providing me with such an extraordinary story, and to these frequently exasperating and always endearing Madrileños, I dedicate this book.

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introduction

One could forgive Madrid’s town-hall authorities for failing to observe that 2011 marked the 450th anniversary of the city’s designation as the capital of Spain. My first visit to Madrid came on the heels of the fourth centenary and I do not recall a single event having taken place to commemorate the occasion.1 This is not so surprising, for Madrid is more a way of life than a city, to be accepted rather than commemorated. It is an accident of history, a whim of King Felipe II, with no more legitimate a claim to the title of capital of Spain than Valladolid, Toledo or Sevilla. Perched desolately in the middle of the Castilian plateau, astride the sad little Manzanares River, which not many Madrileños have laid eyes upon, as remote as a place could be from Spain’s historical centres of industry and great ports, Madrid is a village that plays at being a city. ‘Soy hijo de Madrid’ – ‘I’m a native son of Madrid’. This comment came from the driver of a clapped-out and rather dangerous 1950 Citroën Traction Avant taxi, a butane-gas fuel tank bolted to the boot, as we bumped along Calle Serrano on the way into town from the airport, more than 50 years ago. He stated his pedigree with the same bravado as if he had revealed himself to be the Emperor Charles V. ‘Look!’ He pointed with pride to the statue of the pagan goddess Cybele that sits in the city centre, driving a chariot drawn by two lions atop a fountain. ‘Your first view of La Cibeles!’ he proclaimed. The fountain’s proper name is Cibeles – the addition of the definite article represents a singularly Madrileño term of endearment equivalent to the working-class ‘our Maggie’, one indicative of the statue’s exalted status among the city’s people. I was dropped at my hotel in the Puerta del Sol at midday, a punishing July sun beating down on the pavement, to be greeted xv

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by a deafening, shrill chorus from blind lottery vendors with strips of tickets pinned to their shirts. ‘¡Veinte tiras para hoy – tengo la suerte! ’ (‘Twenty strips for today – I’ve got the winning ticket!’) they shrieked across the square. A one-legged Civil War veteran sat crouched on the pavement and, when I dropped a 50-peseta coin into his outstretched hand, he struggled up on his good leg, propped himself on his crutch and flicked me a smart parade-ground salute. It seems I had given myself away as every inch the country cousin, for I later discovered that my handout to the beggar almost matched the cost of a night’s stay at my hotel. To complete the Goya tableau, two moustachioed members of the Guardia Civil (Civil Guard) in patent-leather hats, their sub-machine guns cradled lovingly in their arms, cast a scrutinising glance in my direction. By late afternoon the temperature had risen to the level of the engine room of the Titanic. Desperate to escape the raging furnace, I strolled across town to the Plaza de la Marina Española and parked myself on a granite bench under the shade of a poplar. Presently there appeared a sight that could have walked off a Buñuel film set. A ragged Gypsy leading a donkey, a dog and a monkey sporting a straw hat positioned his menagerie below the windows of a block of flats and began solemnly, expressionlessly beating on a drum. This was the signal for the dog to leap up onto the donkey, followed by the monkey, which clambered atop the dog. And there they stood in the blistering heat, waiting for someone to appear at the window with a peseta or two – or, what is more likely, to release a barrage of expletives for having the siesta hour interrupted. Madrid’s afternoon siestas and the Gypsy with his bedraggled troupe are things of the past, and one is tempted to ask what there is to celebrate in this congested, noise-bedevilled, air-polluted, in-yourface city. Fair question. However, Madrid has one defining feature and this has remained largely immutable over the years: its people. A few years ago, an English acquaintance of mine returned from having spent a year in Madrid, complaining that it had all been good fun, but that the people he came across did not strike him as very ‘inquisitive’. I would strongly disagree, but nevertheless I reminded him of an incident I once witnessed on a bus in Plaza de Cibeles. xvi

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An elderly woman with a stick was having difficulty boarding, so the driver engaged the emergency brake and got off to help her up the step and into a seat before carrying on. It was mid afternoon and people were on their way back to the office, yet I could not fail to notice that none of the passengers rolled their eyes, checked their watches or clucked their tongues. That to me is worth more than any alleged lack of inquisitiveness – and it’s a cause for celebration. I would also celebrate the fact that Madrid remains a very young city in a very old country. In spite of the strains and stresses attendant in a city that is the third largest in the European Union, with nearly 3.5 million inhabitants – 6.5 million, including the greater metropolitan area – Madrid holds fast to its youthful qualities of energy, openness to change and a delightfully presumptuous self-esteem, something expressed in the local proverb ‘de Madrid al cielo’ – once you’ve been to Madrid, the only place to go is heaven. A late-winter afternoon in 2004, more than 40 years after that first encounter with Madrid, found me on a short visit to the capital, walking up the Calle de Alcalá towards the cathedral-like central post office in Cibeles. It was 11 March, a day that was to become one of the most tragic in the city’s history. In the intervening four decades, Spain had moved forward from ruthless dictatorship to drabocracy, dictadura to dictablanda (dura meaning ‘hard’ and blanda meaning ‘soft’), in a popular Spanish play on words of the day, gradually mutating into an embryonic and fully-fledged democracy. Those crucial years of transformation, from the early 1960s to the late 1970s, were a time of stop-start reform, groping in the dark, never knowing for certain where the goalposts stood, and not without their moments of political hilarity. In 1964, the Franco regime choreographed a national jubilee to mark the 25th anniversary of the end of the 1936–39 Civil War. Madrid was festooned with banners proclaiming ‘25 Years of Peace!’ This also coincided with the time Spain began to open its floodgates to mass tourism from abroad. Millions of visitors from the US and Europe flocked to the beaches. These package-holiday sun-seekers returned to Stuttgart, Sacramento and Sheffield with cherry-red shoulders and an affection for tapas and sangría.2 The only problem xvii

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arose when tour operators began picking up on a common quibble: many holidaymakers expressed disappointment that Spaniards don’t smile. This information was passed on to the Ministry of Information and Tourism and the reaction was one of horror at the thought of the dour, po-faced descendants of Seneca refusing to greet foreign visitors with a broad grin. The reality is that the Spanish, and particularly the Castilians, receive foreigners with courtesy, but few would go out of their way to make themselves ‘typical’ for tourists. The government panicked at the prospect of upsetting the goose that was just beginning to lay the golden egg. In response, street hoardings were swiftly covered with a ‘Smiley’, the hideously grinning image created in 1963 by the US artist Harvey Ball. This was placed above the slogan ‘Sonríe, Por Favor’ (‘Smile, Please’). It was not long before a Madrid satirical magazine displayed on its cover ‘25 Years of Peace’, and, below it, ‘Smile, Please’. The publication was shut down for three months. That was in 1964: by 2004, Spain had enjoyed nearly three decades of genuine peace, as well as media freedom. But with the world convulsed by the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and ferocious wars being waged in Iraq and Afghanistan, the country was to suffer the consequences of its having embraced the causes of its NATO allies. On that afternoon in March, a young man sat slumped on a bench in front of the Café del Círculo de Bellas Artes, sobbing bitterly. His friends tried to comfort him, softly uttering words of reassurance, but it was in vain: his face remained buried in his hands. Then he looked up, his expression contorted with grief, and said in a trembling voice, ‘I have lost my faith in humanity.’ A group of Muslim terrorists with links to al-Qaeda had that morning exploded ten bombs on the city’s commuter-train network, killing 191 people and wounding nearly another 2,000. It was the deadliest terrorist action in Europe since the Lockerbie bombing in 1988. Many of the victims were poor immigrants from Latin America on their way to work from the city’s industrial suburbs. The coordinated attacks, it later emerged, had been carried out in revenge for Spain’s support for the Iraq war. Within hours of the bombings, black crêpe hung from Madrid’s most iconic buildings and an eerie quiet descended on the city’s streets, punctuated by the wail of ambulances and rescue vehicles. The xviii

introduction

following night, two million people marched to the Atocha railway station, the scene of the worst carnage. The mood in the street was one not so much of anger as of defiance and indignation. The prevailing sentiment among the demonstrators, their heads held high, seemed to be, ‘We are Madrileños and you do not do this to us.’ The tragedy of that day brought to light the Madrileños’ deep humanity and sense of dignity. Among those lying in hospital or the morgue were many illegal immigrants, whose loved ones dared not make enquiries for fear of being expelled from Spain. The ruling right-wing Partido Popular (People’s Party, PP) rose to the occasion by granting automatic Spanish citizenship to relatives of the victims. But then this same government offended the dignity of the city’s people by making a desperate attempt to claim that the attacks had been carried out by the Basque separatist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Basque Homeland and Liberty, ETA). A general election had been scheduled for 14 March, three days after the bombings. Prime minister José María Aznar’s designated successor Mariano Rajoy was favoured to win, albeit by a narrow margin. Aznar and his ministers knew that acknowledging Islamist responsibility would jeopardise their chances of winning the election, as the attacks would be perceived as a consequence of the PP taking Spain into the Iraq war, a policy highly unpopular with most Spaniards. Ministers therefore strived furiously to convince the elect­ orate that ETA was behind the bombings. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ana Palacio, even sent instructions to all Spanish diplomats to place the blame on the Basque guerrillas at every opportunity. The government’s ploy backfired. ETA denied any involvement in the atrocities. It was not their style, and everyone knew it. When ETA committed an outrage, they were swift to claim responsibility, almost always through a feverish communiqué sent to a radical Basque newspaper. Equally, when they denied responsibility for an act of barbarity such as this one, it was so. Sometime after the attack a van was discovered near the site of one of the explosions, with a tape of the Quran on the front seat. Then, when an Arabic newspaper in London printed a letter from Islamist extremists claiming responsibility for the xix

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bombings, the people of Madrid were outraged. They had been lied to, and the government was to pay the inevitable penalty for having attempted to deceive them. On the day of the election, Madrid voted massively against the government. The rest of the country followed suit. The PP was ousted from office and the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, PSOE) came to power. This book tells the story of a heroic city, which in 1808 led the uprising against Napoleon’s army of occupation and gave the world its first taste of guerrilla warfare. Madrid is a city that in the 1936–39 Civil War held out to the end against General Franco’s troops, suffered constant air raids and shelling for three years and was overrun and captured, but never signed a surrender document. This is a city that in 2004 stood in defiance against the onslaught of Islamist terrorism, and which seven years later, in May 2011, again showed its fighting spirit as the cradle of the worldwide ‘Indignado’ (‘Indignant’) movement.

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— 1 — from maŷrīt to madrid

Muhammad ibn Abd al-Rahman knew the attack would come from the north. In the ninth century, the emir of Córdoba was the most powerful ruler in Spain. His dominions stretched across most of the Iberian Peninsula and covered a large swathe of the modern states of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. The emirate of Al-Ándalus, the Arabic name for Andalucía, was a land of splendour in every sense, with its fields of olive groves extending to the horizon, the cooling breeze of the snow-capped Sierra Nevada peaks to the south, and the vast acres of vineyards and orchards, watered by sophisticated irrigation systems imported from North Africa. In 711, the Berber chieftain Tariq ibn Ziyad led an army of 16,000 warriors across the Strait of Gibraltar,1 the narrow body of water that separates Spain from Morocco, taking advantage of a dynastic civil war between Christian Visigoth pretenders, who three centuries earlier had themselves conquered Roman Hispania when that empire began to crumble. The Moors, as the North African invaders were collectively known, displayed a remarkable tolerance towards their new subjects, Christians and Jews alike. Córdoba, the capital of the Arab-Muslim emirate of Al-Ándalus, became a beacon of multicultural enlightenment, a glittering, bustling city of poets, mathematicians, philosophers and musicians. It is estimated that in those days there existed in France some 700 books worthy of the name, while the library of Córdoba, at the peak of its glory, held more than 100,000 volumes. 1

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For a brief period, Muslim Spain was the most vibrant spot on earth, a place that saw the magical fusion of commerce, learning and power that put it in the rarefied company of classical Greece, imperial Rome, Han China and Renaissance Italy. The Umayyads, exiled from Damascus, had carved out a kingdom, and Córdoba was the jewel in the crown. The city matched Baghdad as a treasure house of culture, wealth, commerce and learning throughout the Muslim world.2 The emir Muhammad ibn Abd al-Rahman, whose dynastic title was Muhammad I, faced a double-edged threat to his authority. A rebellion by Iberian Christians, known as Mozarabs, often in league with Mudalies, a people of mixed Iberian ancestry, required the almost permanent deployment of Muslim troops to rebel-held enclaves. Far more worrisome were the separate uprisings in Toledo, the former capital of the Visigoth kingdom. The city’s overwhelmingly Mudali population had risen in revolt against Córdoba, enlisting the support of Ordoño I, the Christian king of Asturias, something that would eventually, in 1031, result in the fracturing of the Caliphate into a number of smaller, independent kingdoms. It was in Asturias, a remote mountainous region of north-western Spain, that in 718, nearly a decade after the Moorish invasion, the warrior Don Pelayo had raised the standard of insurrection, signalling the beginning of the Reconquista, eight centuries of warfare that saw control of Spain gradually wrested from Muslim hands, with the conquest of the last Moorish redoubt of Granada in 1492. Now, as the emir waited, Ordoño’s forces were marching south under the banner of St James the Apostle, patron saint of Spain, threatening Toledo, the gateway to the Al-Ándalus heartland.3 Forty-five miles north of Toledo lay a small, almost forgotten settlement, sited close to what was once a hub of roads linking the Roman provinces of Emerita, Cesaraugusta, Asturica and Corduba. By the fifth century, though it had been occupied and lightly fortified by the Visigoths, the desolate village on the high Castilian plateau that was to become Madrid began to fade from history. A century later, whatever urban life had existed was lost and the poorly defended 2

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settlement reverted to a small agricultural community.4 Who had occupied this site before the arrival of the Visigoth tribes remains a much-disputed historical enigma. In 1596, an image resembling a dragon was discovered carved into Puerta Cerrada, one of the city’s ancient walls. This inspired some historians to assert that Madrid had once been a Hellenic settlement, for the dragon was used by the ancient Greeks to adorn their cities’ coats of arms. Other scholars claimed that the dragon was in fact a snake, proving that the city had been founded by the Phoenicians. Those who defended the Roman-origin theory contended that the symbol was actually an image of the god Jupiter.5 What is known with certainty is that by the sixth century, many of its inhabitants began to migrate south to the bustling and prosperous town of Toledo, which in consequence grew to become the epicentre of Visigoth Spain. Muhammad I looked northwards and set his sights on this abandoned settlement, less than a two-day march short of the strategic Guadarrama mountain range. This is where the Christian crusaders would have to be stopped, he thought. Here on this featureless plateau, 2,100 feet above sea level, was the perfect position from which to engage an advancing army. The untrustworthiness of Toledo, moreover, added a sense of urgency to the task of building another line of defence against the Christian forces. The emir dispatched his military engineers and troops, who marched to this desolate spot, the site of modern Madrid, where in the late ninth century they erected a small fortification, or alcázar, enclosed by a crenellated, 12-footthick wall. The fort occupied a central position in a line of lookout towers erected at 25-mile intervals along a roughly west–east axis.6 It is relatively easy to locate where these towers stood. The Spanish word for tower is torre, and this became the prefix for lookouts – Torrelaguna, Torrepedrera, Torrecilla, Torrelavega and so on.7 If one drives north from Madrid along the A-6 motorway, one can see a particularly striking tower, thanks to heavy restoration, rising on a promontory at the approach to Torrelodones, 18 miles from the capital. It barely attracts the notice of the thousands of Spanish motorists speeding to and from the insipid dormitory towns that have sprung up alongside the road. 3

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Muhammad I sent his troops to build a fortress on the plains, giving it the name of Maŷrīt (pronounced Mahereet), which translates as ‘waterways’, perhaps inspired by the several small rivers and streams that flowed nearby. In Visigoth days the village, if indeed it had ever attained that status, was called Matrice, or ‘mother stream’.8 The Arabic name stuck for the two centuries the Moors held the citadel in the face of sporadic attacks from the north, until 1083 when it was overrun by a Christian army under Alfonso VI of León and Castilla. When the king’s troops approached the walls, they discovered that what in the eighth century had been a vulnerable Visigoth fort, 300 years later had been transformed into a formidable redoubt, garrisoned by some of the emir’s most fearsome soldiers. The Reconquista was above all a religious crusade, so it was only appropriate that the hand of Divine Providence should intervene on behalf of the Christians. As the column of horsemen and infantry marched on the fortress, brandishing their swords and beating their drums, there appeared before them a vision of the Virgin Mary, who implored the king to allow her to lead his men against the Moorish defences. Suddenly the walls began to crumble before the onrushing host, revealing to their astonished eyes an icon that had been secreted four centuries earlier by the Visigoths when they had come under siege by the Muslim invaders. It was Nuestra Señora de la Almudena (Our Lady of the Almudena), from the Arabic term ‘al-mudayna’ (‘the citadel’). Guided by her image, the army stormed the gap to drive out the Moorish soldiers. Or so the story goes. Once wrested from Muslim hands, the citadel acquired the Mozarabic name of Matrit, and so preserved the same meaning as that it had been given by its former Visigoth and Arab rulers. Today it is known as Madrid, whose patron saint, quite naturally, is Nuestra Señora de la Almudena. The 800-year Reconquista of Spain was not a perpetual military campaign in which Christian forces would drive the Muslims out of a stronghold and then push on southwards and lay siege to their next objective. It was the longest war in history, but there were extended periods of peace and truces in the fighting, and fortresses and towns were sometimes retaken by Muslim armies, who then had to be 4

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expelled a second or third time. It was quite common for rival factions of Christian as well as Muslim rulers to engage in minor civil wars and, in some of these confrontations, mercenaries would be drafted in across faith lines. At times, these conflicts were cast in religious terms, but that does not mean they were fought because of religious differences. The kaleidoscope of coalitions could be dizzying. In the middle of the eleventh century, for instance, the Muslim ruler of Toledo signed a treaty with the Christian prince of Navarra for help against the Muslim city of Guadalajara. The price was steep and included a large payment of gold. In turn, the Navarra Christians were given the right to harvest a portion of the agricultural crop of Guadalajara, if the city was captured. In response, the Muslim elites of Guadalajara concluded a treaty with the Christian king of León and Castilla, whose soldiers then sacked Toledo. The Muslims of Toledo responded by sending emissaries of their own to the king of León, who demanded a large sum of gold from them in return for breaking his initial treaty and switching sides.9 It was not until 500 years after Don Pelayo rallied his followers at his mountain fastness of Covadonga in Asturias that the last remaining Muslim-held outpost in Spain, the emirate of Granada, was forced to become a vassal state of the Christian Crown of Castilla, though remaining under Muslim administration. Even then, it was to be another 250 years before the Christians launched a final offensive to take Granada in 1492, a battle that concluded with the eradication of the last remnants of Muslim authority from Spain. Before this time, the people of the conquered lands, Christians and Jews, were as a rule treated with tolerance insomuch as their religious beliefs were concerned, as had been the case with the first wave of Muslim expansion following the death of the Prophet Muhammad in AD 632, during which the Muslims acknowledged a kinship with their new subjects, who are regarded in the Quran as ahl al-kitāb, people of the Book (i.e. the Bible), chosen by Allah to receive His message. It was no different in Muslim Spain, where during eight centuries of shifting frontiers, a modus of coexistence was devised, which, at various stages of the Moorish conquest and the Christian Reconquista that followed, for the most part amounted to little more 5

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than a change of local tax collector. This arrangement applied to those areas that came under Christian rule during this period as well, at least until 1492, when the Jews were expelled from Spain, followed in the years thereafter by the gradual forced conversion of the Moors.10 In 1502 the ‘Reyes Católicos’ (‘Catholic Monarchs’) Fernando and Isabel11 offered the Mudéjars, Muslims who remained in Christian territory after the Reconquista, the choice of conversion or expulsion. In a final cleansing operation a century later even the converts, known as Moriscos, were made subject to an order of banishment by King Felipe III. Life in Madrid, as it began to evolve after the Christian occupation in the eleventh century, followed a similar pattern to that of other towns during the Reconquista. There remained behind a Mudéjar community of probably fewer than 100 souls, who, by the end of the fifteenth century, that is 400 years later, had risen only to some 250 Moorish inhabitants, roughly three per cent of the population. It may not seem a significant number, but it is worth bearing in mind that this is more than three times the proportion of North Africans living in present-day Madrid, and it was well above the 0.1 per cent average for other towns of medieval Christian Castilla. While by no means a significant segment of Madrid society, the Moors made up a homogeneous group that was eventually organised into hierarchical communities called aljamas. The aljama was effectively a ghetto, typically with its own Muslim butcher, a mosque and a cemetery. The city’s two aljamas were located in what is today the heart of La Latina district, the oldest part of Madrid. They are commemorated on tiled street signs depicting a fanciful rendering of Muslims in turbans and hooded robes: Plaza de Puerta de Moros (Moors’ Gate Square) and Calle de la Morería (Moorish Quarter Street). The number of Muslim inhabitants grew steadily with a wave of immigration from those parts of Spain still under Moorish domination, mainly in and around Granada. They came, in contemporary parlance, to seek a better life, marching northwards in caravans and on foot to a place that was beginning to make its mark on history. Madrid offered these migrants an opportunity to leave behind a 6

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besieged society in constant readiness for warfare, and to escape ‘the rigours of life under the Almoravid and Almohad empires’.12 In coming to Madrid the new arrivals cast their lot with the victors in the land that was beginning to gather form as Spain. Here we have the earliest instance of a pattern of immigration that was to become the stimulus of Madrid’s expansion throughout history. Like London, Madrid has always acted as a magnet for settlers. Since its foundation, it was the continual influx of outsiders who built the city and raised it to greatness, but, unlike London, those who migrated to Madrid came mostly from surrounding areas of the country rather than from abroad. Madrid remained an outpost straddling the frontier of Christendom for at least a century after its conquest by Alfonso VI. It is unknown whether Toledo, the ancient Visigoth capital, was taken shortly before or after the fall of Madrid. The demise of the taifa, or emirate, of Toledo in 1085 marked the first victory by the combined forces of Castilla and León, who were to fight side-by-side for the final liberation of Spain four centuries later. Toledo was also the first major city in Al-Ándalus to succumb to the crusaders. Madrid could have stood as the command centre from which Alfonso VI mustered his troops for the march on Toledo, a more important military trophy. Conversely, Madrid may have been overrun at an earlier date as the Christian forces marched south towards Toledo, which at that time was an objective of far greater strategic value. Toledo, the Visigoth capital and a fountain of knowledge and culture, surpassed only by Córdoba in Muslim Spain, was lost. The once-proud rulers of this gem astride the Tajo River were now regarded as lowly Mudéjars. As such, they were allowed to conserve their religion, their property and their customs, but were diminished to the status of vassals of the Castilian Crown. Islam was still a mighty force to be reckoned with and the Moors did not stop to weep over their loss, much less turn tail. This was to come much later.13 The campaigning continued in Castilla, where the Muslims fought to retake towns and fortifications that had fallen to the Christian armies, and simultaneously in the south, as the crusaders battled to reclaim 7

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the old Visigoth possessions still under Moorish domination. With Toledo under Christian control, all eyes now turned towards Madrid. The city had by default become the gateway to Carpetania, the ancient Spanish lands north of Madrid comprising most of Castilla, a region that had once been inhabited by a pre-Roman Celtic tribe called the Carpetanos. Alfonso VI, the warrior king who had driven the Moors from Castilla, León, Galicia and Portugal, and could with justification proclaim himself emperor of Spain, planned to convert Castilla into the stronghold of his Christian realm, with Madrid as a prominent frontline defensive bastion. It was no doubt an achievable strategy, with the Moors being steadily rolled back to their Andalucían sanctuaries, but in 1086 a fresh breath of life was delivered to the beleaguered Muslim cause. In that year an army of Almoravids, a Berber dynasty from southern Morocco, disembarked in the Bay of Gibraltar, filled with fighting zeal and determined to repair the unity of Al-Ándalus, and defeated Alfonso at the Battle of Sagrajas. The Almoravids pushed northwards and in 1109, the year of Alfonso VI’s death, 26 years after he had taken possession of Madrid in the name of Christendom, the Almoravid chieftain Yusuf bin Ali led his army to the gates of Madrid, there to lay siege to the fortress. The Spanish emperor was succeeded by his son-in-law Alfonso I of Navarra and Aragón, to whom the task of meeting this new challenge from the Moorish enemy fell. Bin Ali pitched his camp in an esplanade at the foot of the citadel, on a spot that would go down in history as Campo del Moro (Moors’ Field), today a sweeping landscaped garden facing the Palacio Real (Royal Palace). The Muslim soldiers set about sacking the out­lying settlements and then turned their attention to the attack on the powerful citadel walls that had been fortified by Muhammad I. This was a time of great peril for the defenders: bin Ali’s troops attacked with such ferocity that parts of the wall crumbled before the onslaught. At that point, according to popular legend, a terrible plague descended on the invaders. The Moorish general, watching with alarm his troops succumb to the epidemic, had no choice but to lift the siege and march back to Muslim-held territory. Far-fetched it may 8

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seem, but the tale is not entirely implausible. Hygienic conditions in twelfth-century Spain, as throughout Europe, were not of a high standard and it is quite possible that bin Ali’s men were laid low by a waterborne infection (the city’s waste drained into the Manzanares River, which flows near to where the citadel stood) or some other source of disease. Madrid was never again to be threatened by Moorish domination, though Mudéjar influence was to remain embedded in the city’s culture for many years. Sadly, all traces of early Muslim architecture vanished in the wake of Madrid’s expansion. The only visible reminder of its presence is a warren of narrow, winding streets in La Morería district, which give onto little squares whose names – Yeseros, Mancebos, del Granado, Alamillo – in some instances refer to crafts that were practised by the city’s Moorish inhabitants, predominantly architecture and masonry, and are derived from words of unmistakably Arabic origin.14 There was to be little respite for the Christian rulers striving to consolidate and expand their dominions south of Madrid. From the mid twelfth century onwards yet another wave of Muslim warriors, this time of the Berber Almohad dynasty, gathered its forces for a strike at the Castilian territories. Once landed on Spanish shores, they quickly wrested control of Al-Ándalus from the enfeebled Almoravids. The Christian enclave at the Mediterranean port of Almería fell into Almohad hands, along with Baeza, north of Granada, the advanced staging post for Christian raids into Andalucía. The Almohads established strongholds at Córdoba and Sevilla, bringing strong pressure on the Tajo River line of defence at Toledo. The Almohad Caliph al-Nasir’s strategy was to drive the Christian kings, who appeared to be far too many to mount a unified defence, back to the Duero River. Wending its way eastward from Portugal, the Duero flows 50 miles to the north of Madrid, thus by definition the city was an objective squarely in the sights of the Almohad army. The great offensive never came. Madrid was subject to sporadic attacks by detachments of the sultan’s troops, but successfully resisted its besiegers. The Almohad forces found themselves confronted with an unexpected challenge: the fragmented realms of Castilla, León, Navarra and Portugal, sensing 9

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the threat of five centuries of Reconquista being lost to a determined and powerful foe, united their armies to clash with the enemy in its heartland of Andalucía. The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, near the city of Jaén, was fought in the summer of 1212. The campaign brought together the four most powerful Spanish kings, whose ranks were swelled by a corps of battle-seasoned troops from Madrid who had already taken part the previous year in the offensive to expel the Moors from Murcia. On a brutally hot July morning the Madrid contingent, commanded by the distinguished nobleman Diego López de Haro, was leading the advance of the Christian army, in search of a route that would take them to the Moorish encampment. The troops snaked their way towards the Despeñaperros mountain pass, a defile flanked by towering rock faces, little suspecting that al-Nasir’s army lay in wait at the bottom. Before they entered, a shepherd appeared before the host, declaring he could guide the army to the Almohads by a side route.15 This enabled the Christian forces to take the enemy, encamped at the bottom of the pass, by surprise. The army descended on the unsuspecting Moors, roaring ‘¡Santiago y cierra, España! ’ (‘For St James and forward, Spain!’) as they charged. It was the first time the battle cry was used in the Reconquista, and today it remains enshrined in the hymn of the Spanish army’s cavalry corps. López de Haro, along with the kings of Castilla, Aragón and Navarra, delivered a crushing defeat to Caliph al-Nasir’s forces, who withered before the cavalry charges and left tens of thousands of dead and wounded on the field. The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa marked the definitive turning point in the Reconquista. From this date forward, until the fall of Granada in 1492, the Almohads suffered a steady attrition of their power in Al-Ándalus. Never again were the Berber invaders to recapture the initiative in any meaningful way. By 1248, Córdoba, Sevilla and Valencia were under Christian sovereignty, and only the death in 1252 of King Fernando III, who consolidated the Reconquista through the permanent union of Castilla and León, prevented the Spanish army from crossing the Strait of Gibraltar to take the crusade to the enemy’s heartland. The Almohad defeat dispelled the threat 10

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of any serious military challenge to Madrid, which now stood safely behind the frontline. Madrid’s contribution to this signal victory over the Almohads was acknowledged by the granting of a royal coat of arms. A banner depicting a brown bear, a species that once abounded in the dense forests of El Pardo, on a silver field had been carried into battle at Las Navas de Tolosa, and this came to be recognised as the city’s heraldic arms. Several years later, a dispute arose between a sector of the clergy and the Concejo, or municipal council,16 over the ownership of tracts of hills and grazing land lying within municipal jurisdiction. Given the litigants’ high rank, Alfonso VIII was called upon to mediate in the legal row. The king pronounced his judgement: the grazing land belonged to the Church, the woodland was the property of the Concejo. To affirm its claim on the forests, the Concejo adapted the city’s emblem to show the bear standing upright with its paws clawing at a madroño, or strawberry tree. The wrangle then shifted to the coat of arms itself, with the clergy insisting on slapping two white diagonal stripes across the shield and adding red castles in each corner. The Concejo, for its part, retaliated with seven silver stars placed around the border to symbolise the constellation Auriga, the Charioteer. Today the stars are taken to represent Ursa Major (bears roamed the woodlands around the town) and the five points of each of the stars refer to the five districts of Madrid’s autonomous region. Thus it remains, having taken its definitive design in 1869, with the addition of a royal crown to acknowledge the monarchy’s supremacy. The oldest representation of the coat of arms can be found carved into the remnants of the stone wall of a medieval manor house in the Calle de Segovia. The house was demolished in 1988 to make way for a block of flats, which bears the original name of La Casa del Pastor. Madrid had begun to establish its credentials as a permanent settlement under Christian rule well before the fateful battle of Las Navas de Tolosa. In 1152, King Alfonso VII granted the town the status of villa, a term with broader urban status, ranking above a settlement or village. This also meant Madrid could now exercise its own legal jurisdiction, which until then had been under the administration of 11

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Segovia. In 1202, his successor, Alfonso VIII,17 granted the city the right to draw up its own fuero, a legal charter loosely defined as a compilation of laws and privileges. The most important of these were the rights to administer justice, raise taxes and appoint officials. Until that time Madrid had been governed by the Fuero of Toledo, a code that had been formulated to administer the affairs of a primarily peasant population. Madrid, on the other hand, was rapidly transforming itself into a settled urban society. The city was beginning to take on the life of a bustling metropolis. In the narrow, dust-clogged thoroughfares and squares, fat, snorting cattle and bleating merino sheep jostled for passage with squalling market vendors, whose wares were set out in the streets: domestic and devotional candles, bundles of rope for all occasions, earthenware jugs for storage and drinking, gleaming Toledo blades for kitchen and other, less congenial uses, braces of game strung up on hooks, including rows of drying ham hocks, the prize jamón serrano of Ibérico pigs. The Fuero was the first landmark step towards establishing a system of municipal self-government and it conferred on the Concejo a diverse range of powers, from the right to create a penal code to the authority to set food prices and fix a limit on the cost of wedding ceremonies. The Fuero also banned citizens from carrying daggers in public. Anyone found in violation of this law was fined and the revenue collected was put into a fighting fund to help finance the Reconquista. The Fuero was recognised as the supreme authority, sanctioned by the monarch, and implemented by the Concejo, whose duty it was to promote and safeguard peaceful coexistence with Madrid’s Muslim and Jewish communities, so that ‘rich and poor might live in peace and security’, as enshrined in the 26-page original, which was discovered in 1748.18 The laws applied only to the city’s Christian inhabitants and were not extended to Muslims and Jews, who were free to live under their own legal codes, but conversely found themselves excluded from any privileges the Fuero conferred on Christians. Legal disputes that arose between either of these two religious minorities and the ruling Christians were resolved under the by-laws of the Fuero. The complex framework of religious tolerance that prevailed in medieval Madrid, as well as in other cities that 12

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came under Christian rule during the Reconquista, could scarcely be imagined in any other European country of the day. Let it not be forgotten that Muslims, Christians and Jews lived in a state of reasonable tolerance until 1492, when Fernando and Isabel issued the infamous edict of expulsion after the fall of Granada. France and England banished their Jews fully 310 and 200 years, respectively, before they were expelled from Spain. The Fuero comprises a veritable treasure trove of information about the early life of Madrid. Given the zeal that held sway in those towns and cities liberated by the Reconquista, no effort was spared to reinforce Christian ascendancy over the Muslims. That applied to the Moors who stayed behind to carry on with their lives in Christian communities as well as the enemy lurking without. So it comes as no surprise that as early as the eleventh century Madrid, which at the time could best be described as a large town, with a population of at most 12,000, boasted no fewer than ten parish churches. The Fuero gives a detailed description of each of these along with their location within the walls, and we learn that in a good number of cases the local mosque was forced to give up its existence to accommodate the new rulers’ houses of worship – although none of these travesties equalled that of the plateresque cathedral that was inserted in the mosque of Córdoba, the glory of the Umayyad Caliphate, following Fernando III’s capture of that city in 1236. With the exception of two, San Nicolás and San Pedro,19 both extensively restored and undoubtedly built over mosques to judge by their Mudéjar towers, all of the original churches fell victim to neglect over the centuries or, with the expanding wealth and dominance of the Church, were demolished to make way for grander edifices.20 The Fuero also tells us of the appearance in Madrid, in the early thirteenth century, of two newly founded monastic orders, the Franciscans and that dreaded black-robed scourge of heretics and unbelievers during the Inquisition, the Dominicans. The two religious brotherhoods established themselves as far from one another as possible within Madrid’s walls, which enclosed an 86-acre municipal area. The Dominicans built their monastery on a hill on the city’s 13

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northern perimeter. The order had close ties to the Crown of Castilla and received ample royal donations, with which the monks acquired vast land holdings within the city’s jurisdiction. The monastery, one of the wealthiest and most influential institutions of its day, fell into disrepair and vanished in 1869 in a state of utter ruin. The Franciscans founded their community on a spot south of the Alcázar built by Muhammad I. Nearly 800 years later, the Iglesia de San Francisco continues to thrive, substantiating perhaps the legend that it was founded by St Francis of Assisi himself, who fell ill in Madrid on a journey to Africa, and there had the friary raised as living quarters for his convalescence. Until the mid fourteenth century, under the reign of Alfonso XI – known as ‘el Justiciero’ (‘the Avenger’) for the ferocity with which he repressed any suggestion of disobedience by his nobles – Madrid’s affairs were managed by a council of patricians and pecheros, or worthy commoners. The ordinary citizenry was often invited to take part in meetings held two or three times a week to discuss municipal issues and resolve disputes between litigants. They also voted to elect their supreme representative, known as the Señor de Madrid, the medieval forerunner of the mayor.21 Meetings were usually convened by the ringing of the bells of the church of San Salvador, which until its demolition in 1842 stood in the Calle Mayor, adjacent to the present-day Ayuntamiento, or town hall. The gatherings were held in a small chamber above the cloister, and it is a striking testament to the skills of Gothic architects that the structure managed to remain erect for the more than 600 years of the building’s recorded history. On this same subject, as early as the fifteenth century one of the issues that came before the Concejo was how to raise funds to carry out urgent church-repair work. It took several days of heated debate to arrive at a consensus: the Concejo would levy a proportional tax of 50,000 silver maravedís22 (roughly £1.25 million in today’s money), three quarters of which was to be collected from land revenues and the rest apportioned equally between the city’s nobility on the one hand, and commoners, Jews and Moors on the other.23 14

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In the structure of the ancient Concejo can be found the embryo of Madrid’s present-day Ayuntamiento, an institution at once the object of popular affection and blistering scorn. It is a corporate body that wields enormous power over almost all facets of civic life, and consequently serves as the whipping boy for every Madrileño’s grievances. Well might the people of Madrid hail King Alfonso XI as ‘el Justo’ (‘the Just’), the title by which he was known to his subjects, for it was this fourteenth-century monarch of Castilla who recognised with foresight the city’s coming emergence as a centre of power. In 1339 the king decreed that Madrid was to have an updated Fuero, designated the Fuero Real (Royal Code), which took precedence over the 1202 statutes, and which within a decade had become the template for the modern Ayuntamiento. The same monarch, in 1346, issued a royal warrant, known as a cédula, which essentially confirmed Madrid’s Ayuntamiento as the city’s ruling body. The king ordered the appointment of a host of new officials, the equivalent of councillors, who held twice-weekly meetings, on Mondays and Fridays, chaired by the two men who shared the office of alcalde (mayor), along with the prison bailiff and the scribe, who as one of the few literate men within the city walls performed the role of town-hall secretary. Thus was awakened the southern-European zeal for top-heavy bureaucracy, as one by one the administration expanded to include in its ranks a lieutenant mayor, two standard bearers, six woodland keepers, an official spokesman, a solicitor and a keeper of the seal. In September, each of these authorities was appointed for a one-year term of office, ensuring that none of the city’s notables missed out on this ‘jobs for the boys’ scheme.24 One of the first measures enacted by the new Ayuntamiento was the foundation of the Estudio de la Villa in 1346, a school for Madrid’s children, of which nothing remains but a plaque in the Calle de los Mancebos, a few minutes’ walk south of the Calle Segovia. One of its most illustrious graduates, enrolled at the school two centuries later, was Miguel de Cervantes, the great novelist, who studied under the Spanish humanist Juan López de Hoyos. The fourteenth century saw Madrid’s transformation from a town characterised by the lingering hallmarks of a frontier Reconquista 15

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outpost to a Castilian city of growing prominence. It was around this time that the monarch granted Madrid the honour of hosting the Cortes, an ancient institution that has existed in one form or another since the eighth century and remains deeply embedded in Spain’s legislative tradition. Today the Congreso de los Diputados (Chamber of Deputies) and Senado (Senate) of the Spanish parliament are known collectively as the Cortes. Six centuries ago it was periodically convened as a gathering of the feudal lords and other dignitaries of Castilla, eventually incorporating representatives of the fledgling urban bourgeoisie. The king and his court travelled from Toledo, the royal residence of Christian Spain, to preside over these assemblies. Historians have put forth the argument that the Cortes of León, held in 1188, was the first parliamentary body in Western Europe, and no evidence has yet emerged to refute this claim. Alfonso XI, Madrid’s spirited royal patron, called together the Cortes on two occasions at the Alcázar during his reign, setting in train a precedent for succeeding monarchs who, to the delight of Madrid’s Ayuntamiento, showed their favour by granting royal privileges on the city. These included the right to collect certain taxes and to enjoy exemptions from others, as well as priorities granted in matters of protocol. The Cortes also became a forum for passing judgement on questions of dynastic succession. Thus in 1390, when King Juan I died after being thrown from his horse, leaving as heir his 11-year-old son, the future Enrique III, the Cortes was convened in Madrid to choose a regent to rule in Castilla until the boy came of age. This event, along with the solemn funeral organised by the Concejo for Juan I, reinforced Madrid’s status as an upcoming seat of Castilian power. After his coronation in 1393 (14, in medieval times, was considered a reasonable age to rule a country), Enrique III came to spend long months of the year in Madrid and considered himself as one with the Madrileños.25 In the same year of his enthronement the king married Catherine of Lancaster, daughter of John of Gaunt, a union that brought a temporary peace between England and Castilla. The municipal authorities of Toledo, the chief royal abode of the Castilian monarchs and spiritual capital of Spanish Catholicism, were no doubt displeased with the bestowal of patronage on this 16

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comparative nonentity to the north. They had even greater cause to resent Madrid’s rising prominence when in 1382, some years before Juan I met his death, the king agreed to pay a considerable ransom of precious stones, silks and birds of prey to the warrior class known as the Mamluks for the release of King Leo V of Armenia. This hapless sovereign had been defeated in battle by superior Mamluk forces and taken prisoner to Cairo, whence he succeeded in sending a messenger to Castilla, presumably choosing this land, which he perceived to be a Christian brother-in-arms against the Muslim invaders, to plead for help. Juan I responded by ransoming Leo V and receiving him, not in the royal capital of Toledo, but in Madrid, where he was given the freedom of the city in perpetuity and an annuity of 150,000 maravedís.26 In a gesture of reciprocity, the former ruler of the Armenians rebuilt the much-deteriorated towers of Madrid’s Alcázar before taking his leave of the city, two years later, to live out his days in the more sumptuous ambience of Paris, where he was granted another sizeable pension from King Charles VI of France. Enrique III, like his father Juan I, was an ardent believer in Madrid’s rising star. The king’s desire to proclaim the city’s primacy to the four corners of the earth led to the most bizarre undertaking of his reign. In what was to be one of the last initiatives before his death, in 1403 Enrique III dispatched Ruy González de Clavijo, a Madrid nobleman and the king’s chamberlain, on a mission to modern-day Samarkand in Uzbekistan, there to show the flag to none other than the Mongol emperor Timur (Tamerlane). Clavijo had the advantage of being literate and, what is more, like his predecessor Marco Polo he was a prolific chronicler of his travels. Sailing from Cádiz, the small entourage made its way along the Black Sea coast of Turkey and then carried on overland by camel caravan through Armenia, Persia and Turkmenistan, eventually reaching the fabled city of Samarkand, where in due course Clavijo was granted an audience with the fearsome Mongol conqueror. Timur received the Spanish envoy in a chamber with a silver gilt table, as high as a man… on the top of which there was a bed of silk cloths, embroidered with gold… and here the 17

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lord was seated. The walls were hung with rose-coloured silk cloths, ornamented with plates of silver gilt, set with emeralds, pearls and other precious stones.27 Later there was feasting and drinking such as was never envisaged in austere Castilian Spain, with much wine, as well as ‘cream and sugar… They also brought great quantities of roasted sheep and horses… and they eat all this with much noise, tearing the pieces away from each other, and making game over their food.’28 From his journal, we learn that when Clavijo’s host confronted him with these glories of Samarkand, a dazzling place that could have served as the set for a film of the Arabian Nights, the Madrileño calmly riposted with a tale of his great city of Castilla, which is surrounded by a wall of fire and rests on a body of water, and which one enters miraculously through a closed gate. In this city there is a court of law, he proclaimed, whose judge is a cat and where the lawyers are beetles, and the dead walk the streets. Could Clavijo be having a mischievous jibe at the Concejo? Timur, whose empire stretched from Turkey to India, listened impassively to the Spanish traveller’s tale. The Mongol emperor was fresh from his conquest of Delhi, where he had had 100,000 captives executed, left the city a smouldering ruin and, according to Clavijo himself, needed to employ 90 captured elephants merely to carry precious stones looted from his conquest. Madrid? Could such a place even be worthy of putting to the torch? The audience ended amicably and Clavijo returned to Spain in 1405, content with having secured for Madrid a place on the world stage. The year 1477 marked a decisive turning point, when Madrid began to throw off the trappings of a town, at least in appearance if not in temperament, and experience the most sweeping transformation in its history. For in that year, the Reyes Católicos King Fernando and Queen Isabel (who was reputed to be a Madrileña by birth) entered Madrid and took a broom to a place they found in a state of archaic disarray.

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— 2 — a very catholic facelift

Christian Spain in the fifteenth century was in a phase of dynamic expansion and religious enthusiasm, while Moorish Spain, having attained a high level of civilisation and material prosperity, had lost its military vigour and spiritual fervour. The successors to the warlike Almoravids and Almohads were for the most part weak rulers and, moreover, they were never very popular with their subjects. The powerful Christian mini-states of Aragón and Cataluña were at that time concerned with their Mediterranean possessions, which were the Balearic Islands, Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily, as well as the Duchy of Athens. Portugal had gained its independence from the Crown of Castilla in the twelfth century and was busily creating a vast empire that would one day stretch from South America across Africa and India to South East Asia. So it was left to Castilla and its ruling class of feudal lords to see the Reconquista through to its victorious conclusion with the capture of Granada. The marriage in 1469 of Fernando, heir apparent to the throne of Aragón, and Isabel, the future queen of Castilla and León, all but brought about the final unification of Spain. The Kingdom of Navarra, which stubbornly held out until its annexation by Castilla in 1515, and of course the coveted Moorish emirate of Granada, were the only territories remaining outside the dominion of the Reyes Católicos. When King Juan II of Aragón died in 1479, his son Fernando enjoyed an untroubled accession to the throne. But, to confuse matters, Isabel’s claim to Castilla was contested by Juana, the daughter of Isabel’s 19

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half-brother Enrique IV, who could count on the support of her prospective husband Alfonso V of Portugal. With Enrique IV’s death in 1474, a war of succession broke out between partisans of the two female contenders for the throne of Castilla. Madrid, as the emerging seat of Castilian power, could not remain aloof from the dynastic fight. The city was fairly evenly divided in sentiment between both claimants, with a small majority leaning towards Juana, who was said to be the biological daughter of Enrique IV’s favourite courtier Beltrán de la Cueva, hence her nickname Juana la Beltraneja. Juana’s followers barricaded themselves in the Alcázar fortress, but through an act of treachery by one of Isabel’s partisans, a diplomat named Pedro de Ayala, who was charged with the defence of the Puerta de Guadalajara at the eastern edge of the city, the doors were thrown open to Isabel’s forces, who stormed the Alcázar by surprise and took possession of Madrid. Thus ended the dynastic conflict. As founder, along with her husband Fernando, of the Spanish Inquisition, Isabel could hardly be faulted for a lack of combativeness. Yet she was not a vindictive woman, at least not towards her fellow Christians. No reprisals were taken against the Madrid faction that had opposed her claim to the throne of Castilla, and under her reign the city grew and prospered as never before in its history. Though the Reyes Católicos spent comparatively little time in Madrid, Valladolid being their favoured royal residence, they did convene two meetings of the Cortes in the city, in 1482 and 1499. These semi-public gatherings were held with the active support of the Concejo, which strove to repair the devastation done by the storming of the Alcázar, to say nothing of the damage to Isabel’s pride on seeing a segment of her people rise up against her, by donating public land for resettlement in the vicinity of the fortress. Land was given free of charge to Christians who chose to return to a city that had suffered an exodus of its population, with people fleeing to the countryside to escape the fighting that raged around the citadel. The Concejo’s records speak of outbreaks of arson, looting and the widespread destruction of buildings during the war. The Cortes convened after this minor civil war were used as a forum to launch an ambitious undertaking 20

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of urban regeneration and expansion for this city which, with the gradual return of the populace, boasted between 12,000 and 14,000 inhabitants. Isabel inspired the construction of churches and civil buildings in which attention to decoration was given the same consideration as structural elements. Much of this work took the name of Isabelline Gothic style, representing the transition between the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, a striking amalgam of original features and influences of Gothic, Mudéjar and Flemish art. Many of Madrid’s sixteenth-century buildings erected in this manner were commissioned by the Reyes Católicos or were in some way sponsored by them. One of the most striking of these structures is the church of San Jerónimo el Real, which stands on a rise overlooking a field on which more than three centuries later the Museo del Prado would be erected. The original Jerónimos monastery, no longer in existence, was commissioned in 1463 during the reign of Enrique IV. It stood near the Manzanares River, a remote as well as architecturally faulty spot, given the marshy soil that could scarcely support such a weighty structure. Isabel had ‘Los Jerónimos’, as it is today known to Madrileños, rebuilt in what is still the city centre to serve as the royal residence of the Reyes Católicos during their sojourns in Madrid. For centuries the church was the traditional venue for the investiture of the heir to the throne, the Príncipe de Asturias. The reign of the Reyes Católicos in many ways ushered in a minor renaissance for Madrid. The city stood on a crossroads of trade routes, affording easy passage across a landscape unobstructed by physical barriers and only two days’ journey from the thriving commercial and political centres of Toledo and Segovia. Toledo was in the sixteenth century still the capital city of Castilla and home to Christian Spain’s major source of swords, knives and other metallurgical products. Segovia was in its own right a great centre for the textile trade and it was in this city, in 1474, that Isabel was proclaimed Queen of Castilla in the church of San Miguel. Isabel encouraged a building boom that took Madrid’s urban expansion right up to the city’s defensive walls, running roughly along the Calle Mayor, Cava Baja and Puerta Cerrada. This steadily 21

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drew what had been outlying suburbs, almost separate townships, into central Madrid. The Concejo could scarcely keep up with an avalanche of applications for building permits. The town-hall authorities luxuriated in every bureaucrat’s zeal for enacting by-laws. Between 1476 and 1493, the Concejo produced a deluge of regulations governing the establishment of new shops, and this coincided with a proliferation of tradesmen and artisans. According to the Libros de Acuerdos,1 these new arrivals in the closing years of the fifteenth century were engaged in almost 100 different professions. A number of these occupations, mainly those of scribe and letrado (literally a ‘lettered’ person, usually a lawyer), attested to the spread of literacy and learning. These men were held in high social standing and this was reflected in their wages. A letrado’s annual salary of 1,500 maravedís in old Castilian currency was only exceeded by that of aldermen, doctors and surgeons. Many other new tradesmen – watchmakers, silversmiths, musicians – came to live in this rapidly growing city to practise their specialised skills. The Concejo was determined to put a stop to antisocial customs like casting the contents of chamber pots out of windows – the cry ‘¡Agua va!’ (‘Water below!’) was the signal for passers-by to run for cover. The city was infested with filth and its inhabitants’ social habits could most charitably be termed disagreeable – and this did not go unnoticed by foreign visitors. Camillo Borghese, who was papal nuncio in the late seventeenth century and was later elected pope as Paul V, remarked that the houses of Madrid were bad and ugly and almost all made of mud and among other imperfections have neither doorsteps nor closets, in consequence of which, all perform their necessities in chamber pots which they afterwards throw into the street, a thing which creates an insupportable odour… if one did not use diligence to clean the street frequently one could not move, but even in spite of this cleaning it is impossible to walk.2 Over 1,400 by-laws were brought into effect to regulate the activities of the textile and jewellery trades alone, but even more were required 22

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to oversee the plethora of taverns that began springing up around the city to serve commercial travellers as well as the ever more affluent Madrileños and, underpinned by a climate that favours street life, came to form an integral part of Madrid’s social fabric. It would be woefully inaccurate to portray Madrid’s taverns as a gathering place for the city’s genteel classes. The vast majority of these inns, which were for the most part more like brawling houses than taverns, were rude, dark, poorly ventilated watering holes, frequented by a smattering of civil servants and honest wage earners, but mostly by a coterie of soldiers fresh from butchering Dutch insurrectionists, along with tramps and beggars (who accounted for around ten per cent of the population) and common criminals of every description, not to mention half-starved, down-at-heel noblemen and assorted swashbucklers, always game to wield a dagger or sword to obtain their crust. There was no lack of premises to accommodate all this humanity, since by 1600 Madrid was home to 391 taverns. In reality, there were undoubtedly many more, since the authorities, given their concern with the proliferation of these establishments… strived to limit their numbers, at first to 200, and later to 400, but all in vain.3 The Concejo took the supervision of the city’s taverns with utmost seriousness. By 1616, the lawlessness, brawling and general riotous behaviour endemic to these places had reached such a level that the authorities stepped in to ban innkeepers from providing chairs and tables in their establishments, as well as prohibit patrons from consuming food brought in from outside. The rationale was to discourage people from spending excessive time at these drinking houses.4 Madrid was the birthplace of the picaresque hero, the roguish character popularised by the seventeenth-century literary giants Francisco de Quevedo and Miguel de Cervantes, and early publicans were often men typical of this breed. The practice of diluting wine with water was so prevalent in Madrid’s taverns that the government felt obliged to enact a decree, one of the harshest on the books for a non-capital crime, imposing 100 lashes for anyone convicted of 23

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selling adulterated wine. Moreover, the offender’s stock of wine was to be confiscated and shared equally between the plaintiff and the presiding magistrate. This had no adverse impact on the continual increase in the number of the city’s inns, something that carried on through the centuries to follow. It is reckoned that more taverns and cafés today exist between Madrid’s Plaza Santa Ana and Plaza Antón Martín than in the whole of Norway. It was also around this time that, by popular custom, the Plaza del Arrabal established itself as the city’s central marketplace. The enclosed square, which also served as the venue for bullfights and public executions, was torn down more than a century later and replaced with the more dignified Plaza Mayor, a sprawling, enclosed quadrangle of nearly 200,000 square feet, surrounded by threestorey residential buildings, with more than 200 balconies facing the square. Felipe III’s likeliest motive for having the Plaza del Arrabal demolished in 1617 was to endow his new capital with a worthy rival to Valladolid, the former seat of government, which boasted the largest central square in Spain. When construction was completed in 1619, the Plaza Mayor stood as the symbolic centre of the Spanish Empire. Its inauguration three years later drew 50,000 people to witness a spectacle of bullfighting and jousting. The site of the Plaza del Arrabal and later the Plaza Mayor was also the scene of the canonisations of various saints, among them St Ignatius of Loyola in 1609 and San Isidro in 1622. Four centuries later, the Plaza Mayor remains the most celebrated landmark of Madrid’s historic old town. New buildings went up under the Reyes Católicos, mostly to the east of the city centre, the logical direction for urban expansion, given the barrier of the river to the west, the bumpy terrain rising towards the Guadarrama mountains to the north and Toledo’s boundary to the south, encroaching upon which could pose the risk of a land-rights dispute. Isabel oversaw the construction of five new hospitals, some of which served as rest stops for travellers, though being bled with leeches or having infected wounds doused with vinegar were not necessarily salutary experiences for patients. A major urban clean-up campaign got underway in a city portrayed in contemporary accounts as swarming with filth of every description, where pigs and other farm 24

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animals enjoyed free rein in the streets. Not that the city’s human inhabitants were much more scrupulous in their hygiene: as early as the thirteenth century the framers of the original Fuero had felt compelled to introduce a fine for those who deposited their faeces in the public footpath or doorways. Fernando and Isabel found to their dismay that most Madrileños had cheerfully ignored this law laid down three centuries previously. The monarchs wrote to the town’s chief magistrate, Rodrigo de Mercado, reminding him that the Crown had been responsible for Madrid’s facelift and that it was up to the people ‘to keep the streets clean’ and that nobody ‘should dare to jettison from their windows night soil or anything else that fouls the footpath’.5 The Reyes Católicos ordered the streets to be swept clean every seven days and within two hours of sunrise, and all rubbish was to be collected and taken to one of four public tips. Under Fernando and Isabel, abattoirs, tanning factories, forges and other polluting or malodorous industries were relocated outside the city walls. The streets, if the warren of twisting dirt footways that were turned into streams of mud after a rainstorm could be described as such, by royal decree were given their first paving stones. By the end of the fifteenth century living space was at a premium and as a result new houses were built outside the walls. Markets and fairs began to flourish under the protection of the monarchs, and this gave a boost to trade and likewise to the Concejo’s economic power.6 The Concejo was delighted with this lavishing of royal patronage on their city. Madrid’s star was undeniably in the ascendant: the influx of scholars, craftsmen and merchants, the fact that the great Madrid families – Luzón, Guzmán, Mendoza – were now spending more time in the city in homes worthy of their station, the splendid overall urban revival, all of this presaged days of glory for a Madrid that, a few decades hence, was to become the capital of the Spanish Empire. There was only one hitch: who was to pay for this enterprising and costly expansion and building works? The Concejo claimed to be without a bean, or maravedí, to put it in the vernacular. There wasn’t even 25

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enough money in the municipal coffers to provide the mayor and his staff with a proper assembly hall. The corporation was humbled into holding its meetings in the local parish church. Fernando and Isabel came up with the solution, which was to shift the financial burden onto the populace: Jews, Moors, noblemen and merchants alike, each contributing according to his ability. In addition, a special tax was levied on meat, one maravedí for every arrelde 7 of beef purchased. Apart from public health, the Madrid authorities concerned themselves with an array of administrative matters, from keeping the peace to enacting more humane labour laws. To this end a ban was imposed, applying to citizens of all social rank, on carrying swords in public ‘upon pain of having their weapons confiscated… and broken or disposed of in the manner deemed most appropriate’.8 The Concejo also addressed itself to traditional work practices by fixing a minimum number of hours on employment contracts, with fines imposed for employers who signed up workers for less than the stipulated minimum number of hours to which they were entitled as well as job seekers who accepted work under illegal conditions. The Concejo also set 15 as the minimum age for farm labourers, a seemingly benevolent measure, though it has been argued that this was imposed less in the spirit of child protection than to prevent adolescents running rampant though croplands. Then came 1481, the year of infamy for Madrid’s Muslims and Jews. Fernando and Isabel were becoming increasingly intoxicated with the spread of Christian power in and beyond their dominions. The Reyes Católicos had brought stability to the kingdoms of Castilla, León and Aragón, and this laid the foundation for the permanent political unification of Spain that was to take its definitive form under the reign of their grandson Carlos I. It was in this year that the events were set in train that 11 years later resulted in the ethnic cleansing of Christian Spain, with the expulsion en masse of the country’s Jews. This surge of royal intolerance was precipitated by a signal event that took place the previous year: 1480 saw the establishment of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. The black-robed Dominican friars of Madrid were the driving force behind the witch-hunter tribunal, 26

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whose grand inquisitor held court in the city. The Jews and Moors suffered greatly under this reign of terror, which for more than 300 years kept much of the populace in dread of torture and worse at the hands of malign clerics. That said, the Spanish Inquisition ‘was ostensibly set up to deal with formal heresy, and therefore neither the Jews nor the Moors of Spain, at the time of its creation, were subject to it. Heresy is a crime of Christians: the Jews and Moors were then unbelievers.’9 Despite not being of the Catholic faith, these two minorities were gradually brought under Inquisition control. But it is useful to bear in mind that, thoroughly evil as it was, in terms of the number of people who suffered persecution and were consigned to the flames of purification, Spain’s Inquisition was relatively benign compared with the butchery let loose in other European countries. Spain’s alleged witches were usually let off with a lashing, public humiliation or banishment, quite mild punishments compared with the thousands executed in France and Germany during the heyday of Europe’s witchcraft hysteria. The first edict directed against Madrid’s Jewish inhabitants was issued in March 1481: ‘Let no Jew dare walk the streets of this city without a badge, under pain of paying a 100-maravedí fine [roughly £100 in today’s money] for the first offence, 200 for the second, and for the third, the forfeiture of the clothes he carries.’10 Several months after this proclamation came into effect, the Concejo issued another decree by order of Isabel and Fernando, this one including the Muslims as targets of their intolerance. The edict makes all the more sinister reading for appearing as a single sentence inserted matter-of-factly between one passing judgement on a land dispute between two noblemen and another granting a licence to a butcher to sell meat within the city walls. It reads: ‘The Concejo has agreed to dispatch a letter with the Corregidor [Chief Magistrate] Juan de Guzmán, by which Jews and Moors are required to live in separate quarters, or incur the wrath of our lords the Reyes Católicos.’11 Madrid’s ethnic ghettos had already come into being by the time of this decree, with the Jews confined to the streets around the synagogue and the Moors to the environs of their mosque. Both houses of worship were subsequently razed, and while there are 27

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records attesting to the site of the Moorish quarter, which lies just south of the Calle Segovia, streets between the Plaza Mayor and the Manzanares River, the location of the Judería is largely a matter of guesswork. It is believed that most of Madrid’s Jews lived in the neighbourhood of Lavapiés, now in the heart of the historic city centre. The church of San Lorenzo is believed to stand on the site once occupied by the synagogue, appropriately enough in what was called Calle de la Sinagoga, later renamed, with predictable hubris, Calle de la Fe (Street of the Faith). Indeed, Lavapiés was the scene of several pogroms in the late fourteenth century, leading some historians to claim that the decree to force the Jews to live in a walled compound was actually intended for their protection. This does not stand up to scrutiny in the light of subsequent events. Over the centuries, the intermingling of Madrid’s Christians with the city’s two religious minorities had created a measure of commercial dependence, on Jewish tailors, cloth merchants and spice dealers, and also on Muslim architects and builders, to name a few of the professions that were largely in the hands of these communities. The edict restricting the Jews to the quarter in which they had originally settled quaintly specified an exception for four individuals – Jacon and Hayn Lerma, Mair de Curiel and Juçaf Barbaça – who were allowed to sell their cloth and spices outside the ghetto walls but in daylight hours only, ‘and at night must return to their homes to be with their wives and children, in the same manner as the Moors’.12 The Concejo was also prepared to make an exception for one Rabí Jacó, who was the only Jew granted permission to live outside the ghetto, for the simple reason that he was the city’s most qualified physician. In a medieval town with a dubious sanitary infrastructure and hence frequent outbreaks of disease, Christians required swift and trustworthy medical attention, notwithstanding the religious convictions of the person administering treatment. The memory of 1434 still struck terror into the hearts of many Madrileños. Without warning, on 29 October of that year rain had begun falling in torrents on the city and the downpour continued unabated for 70 days and nights. Homes were flooded, the streets were choked with rotting corpses and the carcasses of drowned animals, and houses collapsed 28

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under the incessant deluge. The people of Madrid were to have only a four-year respite, until in 1438 a deadly plague swept over the city. King Enrique IV, the nobility, the clergy and anyone who could find a means of survival outside the walls fled towards the high ground of the Guadarrama range, leaving the commoners to suffer the ravages of disease. Fearful of the ever-present threat of natural disaster, the Concejo was only too happy to make allowances for those skilled in dealing with such calamities. That the Jews, as non-Christians, could not by definition be accused of heresy was no justification for allowing them to share the same soil as those who had spent the better part of seven centuries battling to rid Spain of its non-believers. So went the reasoning of the Reyes Católicos. Therefore, in 1492, a year after the Treaty of Granada was proclaimed, guaranteeing religious freedom to Jews and Muslims alike in the emirate of Granada’s transition to Castilian sovereignty, the Reyes Católicos performed an historic volte-face by issuing the Decreto de la Alhambra (Alhambra Decree). At a stroke of the pen some 200,000 Jews were expelled from Spain, with the blessing of the Church and in the name of Christian unity. Spain’s Muslims may have believed – erroneously, as history was to demonstrate – that Fernando and Isabel were simply following medieval European trends: after all, pogroms were commonplace in other countries, some of which had forced their Jews to flee long before the Spanish Inquisition was conceived. The Muslims reasoned that this campaign was directed against the Jews, not themselves, who had after all called the Iberian Peninsula home since the eighth century. But ancestral links proved no safeguard against persecution. For that matter, there is strong evidence that the Jewish presence in Spain predated Christianity itself, with the first settlers arriving at the time of the Diaspora that followed the Roman conquest of Judea in the first century BC. The 1492 decree in reality fired the monarchs’ (and the Inquisition’s) eagerness to cleanse Spain of all vestiges of religious impurity. This meant the Muslims would have to leave as well. The Moors put up some armed resistance to abandoning what they considered to be their homeland. Spanish troops quickly quelled these uprisings in villages near Granada, Valencia and elsewhere 29

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in the most recently conquered territories. Then came the forced conversions, followed by the burning of Islamic texts13 and finally the brutal suppression of a major insurrection a fuego y sangre (by fire and sword) in Granada in 1499 at the hands of the notorious Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, a grand inquisitor who hailed from a town near Madrid. In 1501, the Moors were given the choice of embracing Christianity or going into exile. Most chose the former, thus preserving their property and traditional family life. These converts, known as Moriscos (literally ‘little Moors’), stayed on in Spain, paying lip service to the Christian faith, until 1609 when the Habsburg King Felipe III issued the definitive order of expulsion. Fernando and Isabel’s greatest achievement was to have financed Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the New World.14 It was left to their grandson and first of the Habsburg dynasty, Carlos I, to preside over the expansion and consolidation of the empire which followed that remarkable sea voyage in 1492. Carlos I arrived in Madrid from Flanders in 1517, a 17-year-old king with little hope of endearing himself to a city whose regard for foreign masters verged on the xenophobic. Three years later, at the age of 20, he was also crowned Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire, a realm that brought under his authority Germany, Austria, Naples, Sicily, the Netherlands and immense territories of South America. Little did this matter to the Madrileños, who were more concerned with the fact that he spoke no Spanish, that he was almost totally ignorant of Spanish affairs and that he surrounded himself with a coterie of Flemish advisers who lost no time in exploiting their privileges vastly to enrich themselves at court. A good deal of grumbling was heard in Madrid’s taverns about the imposition of this foreign teenager, whose mother, Queen Isabel’s daughter Juana, was quickly removed from public life to make room for the young interloper from Flanders. Juana was the last ruler of the venerable Castilian Trastámara line. She was wedded to Philip, Duke of Burgundy, thus introducing the Habsburg dynasty into Spain. The early death of her siblings had left Juana heiress to the throne, but nine years into their marriage, Philip died suddenly and, some whispered, in suspicious circumstances. Juana’s grief was such 30

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that she succumbed to a state of hopeless despair and was incapable of dealing with affairs of state. Hence her nickname: ‘Juana la Loca’. She apparently suffered from what would today most likely be diagnosed as severe clinical depression. Her state of mind is frighteningly depicted in the painting by Francisco Pradilla Ortiz, which hangs in the Museo del Prado, of the queen holding vigil over Philip’s coffin, convinced that he will come back to life. Carlos ensured his domination as well as his throne by having his mother confined for the rest of her days in the convent of Santa Clara in Castilla, where her condition degenerated further, and where she ruled in name only as her son’s co-monarch. The mistrust felt by Madrileños towards their foreign monarch was matched by Carlos’s bewilderment as to why his forebears had chosen to sojourn for extended periods in this isolated town perched on the stark Castilian plateau. ‘The people of Madrid took note of the fact that during the first four years of the monarch’s reign, until he went to Germany to be crowned emperor, Carlos held Cortes in Valladolid, Zaragoza, Barcelona and Santiago, but never in Madrid.’15 The grumblings of discontent rose to an uproar over taxes levied to finance Carlos’s foreign wars, which were of scant interest to Madrileños. People observed with sullen anger how French-speaking courtiers were appointed to high office and finally, in 1520, Castilla declared itself in open revolt. Toledo and Segovia were the first to take up arms against the Crown in an insurrection called La Guerra de los Comuneros, so named for the Castilian comuneros (followers of the Castilian cause) who took up arms against the Crown. As they were to prove later, the Madrileños were never ones to stand on the sidelines when there was a good uprising in the offing. The Alcázar was besieged by a mob, which raided the armoury and made off with a sizeable haul of lances, pikes and firearms. Apart from the storming of the citadel, the only other act of vandalism was an attack on the home of the royalist leader Diego de Vargas, whose furniture was hurled out of the windows. The rebellion was to be fleeting: in 1521 the Comuneros laid down their arms on learning that Carlos had issued a decree from Germany agreeing to abrogate the unpopular measures that had driven the people into the streets. 31

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Quite a different mood reigned when Carlos next entered Madrid, in 1525, where he was received with an outpouring of acclaim. The emperor rode through the city with his distinguished prisoner, François I, in tow. The French king’s army had been crushed at the Battle of Pavia, after which he was imprisoned by Carlos and forced to sign the Treaty of Madrid, surrendering significant territory to his captor. A French monarch marched in humiliation through the city streets – this was much more to the Madrileños’ liking. Carlos was at last beginning to win his people’s hearts, something that was consolidated in 1528 when he finally chose Madrid to convene the Cortes. It was at this gathering of nobles and officials that the emperor conferred on his son, the future Felipe II, the title Prince of Asturias, making him the recognised heir to the Spanish throne. One of the unintended outcomes of the Comuneros’ rebellion was the birth of a structure that would in time come to be accepted, only slightly erroneously, as the geographical centre of Spain.16 To protect themselves from the banditry and general lawlessness that follows in the footsteps of armed conflict, the citizens of Madrid erected a fortification on the city’s eastern edge, and over its gate they emblazoned a golden sun. The small citadel and the gate were demolished when hostilities ceased and peace was restored to Castilla. But the square in which the fortification had stood and the name of the gate became one of the city’s most celebrated icons, the Puerta del Sol (Gate of the Sun). The square, known as ‘Kilómetro Cero’ (‘Kilometre Zero’), is marked by a plaque, and is the starting point from which all road distances in Spain are measured. Nearly a decade was to pass before Carlos I summoned the Cortes in Madrid for a second time. At this gathering he announced, to the delight of the Concejo, that he had acceded to their request to bestow on Madrid the title of ‘Villa Imperial y Coronada’ (‘Imperial and Crowned City’), decreeing at the same time that the royal crown be displayed on its coat of arms. The usage of the Spanish imperial crown took Madrid a step closer to becoming the official capital, though it would be nearly another three decades before the bumptious little town on the plains was to upstage its historic rivals Toledo and Valladolid. 32

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The emperor now began to take a deeper interest in Madrid, its hunting grounds, its architecture, even its commercial life, which he did much to stimulate by exempting all tradesmen who had to journey more than five leguas (leagues) to market from paying a tax levied on each article sold. Likewise, Carlos’s wife Isabel, who was also his first cousin, became a benefactor of the city, having ordered a chapel to be built on the site where San Isidro was believed to have discovered water for his master Iván de Vargas. The chapel was built as an offering of thanks to the future saint, whose miraculous water was supposed to have restored her ailing infant son Felipe to health. The shrine has become a popular pilgrimage for Madrileños, who every year on 15 May, the saint’s birthday, gather on this spot in classic nineteenth-century Castilian dress, the women in long polka-dot frocks and mantillas, sporting carnations in their hair, riding in colourful Gypsy carts drawn by mules. Carlos I divided a good deal of his time between the historic Castilian cities of Toledo and Valladolid. Then, towards the middle of the sixteenth century, he began to make preparations for Madrid to receive his exalted person and the Spanish court on a more permanent basis. In 1537 he had the long-suffering Alcázar enlarged to twice its original size and restored to a standard worthy of a royal residence. Around 1551, the court was unofficially shifted from Toledo to Valladolid, a city favoured for its less extreme climate and abundant water supply. By then Madrid had grown to some 15,000 inhabitants living in 2,500 houses. At the time of Carlos’s death in 1558, the population had soared to 25,000, with people constantly pouring in from surrounding towns to seek their fortune close to the court and partake in the dynamic life of Castilla’s fastest-growing town. Of far greater importance for Madrid than the multitude of new arrivals was the spread of churches, monasteries and seminaries, all of which proclaimed Madrid’s status as a bastion of Catholic traditionalism. The Council of Trent was instituted in 1545 under Carlos I and came to a close in 1563 with his son Felipe II, the arch defender of the faith, on the throne. This commission of cardinals had been initiated by the Vatican to uphold the structures of the Church in response to the reformist currents of Protestant Europe. 33

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Within a very brief period, construction was started on a multiplicity of religious as well as grand civil edifices. The Real Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Atocha (Royal Basilica of Our Lady of Atocha), with a Dominican monastery attached, soon became Madrid’s most venerated place of worship.17 The parish church of San Luis Obispo was built next to the Puerta del Sol, but the building was gutted by fire in 1935. Carlos’s son Felipe founded the Augustine monastery of San Felipe el Real, dedicated to the saint whose name he bore. This also adjoined the Puerta del Sol, and was demolished in 1838 under the so-called Desamortización Eclesiástica (Ecclesiastical Confiscation) enacted by prime minister Juan Álvarez Mendizábal. In 1557 the widowed Princess Juana of Portugal founded the convent of Las Descalzas Reales near the Puerta del Sol, a veritable gem of classic Renaissance architecture, now a national monument whose museum contains priceless masterpieces by Titian, Rubens and Brueghel the Elder, as well as religious treasures. Madrid’s name as a repository of Christian heritage was thus secured throughout Spain. After the fall of Granada and the consolidation of the Reconquista, Spanish monarchs spent a good deal of their time migrating between Toledo, Valladolid and Madrid to conduct court affairs. Not only did these continual royal relocations create a climate of political instability in Castilla, which ranked as the undisputed centre of power, they also gave rise to a rivalry, indeed a mutual animosity, among the three chief towns of Christian Spain. Valladolid served as Carlos I’s capital for most of his reign. The city’s history was an illustrious one – it had been granted important commercial privileges as far back as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by Alfonso VIII and Alfonso X. In 1469 Valladolid was chosen as the venue for the marriage of Fernando and Isabel, and it was also the birthplace of Felipe II and the site of Columbus’s first burial place.18 The city grew and prospered until 1561, when it was partially destroyed by fire, thus virtually knocking it out of the running to become the permanent capital of the newly unified Spain. That aside, Felipe was repelled by an outbreak of Lutheranism that had taken hold in the city’s recent past. Toledo, the other contender, left Madrid completely in the shade in terms 34

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of history and culture. But from the monarch’s point of view Toledo suffered at least two serious drawbacks: on the one hand, the city had been a major Comunero stronghold in the 1520 uprising against the monarchy, thus provoking fears of lingering resentment against the king’s absolutist rule. More troubling was that its archbishop was the Primate of Spain, therefore making Toledo the seat of Spanish ecclesiastical power, thanks to which it also happened to be the second richest episcopal see after Rome. The Spanish Church and Crown as they existed at the time of the Counter-Reformation were perceived as inseparable, not least by those unfortunates accused of heresy, for the Inquisition was a religious institution under the control of the monarchy. The same could be said for the enemies of Spain in Europe and the Americas who were destined to feel the wrath of the Spanish tercios19 that waged war in the name of the cross. As far as the monarch was concerned, however, in temporal matters the Church was nothing but a troublesome meddler that, in exercising its moral authority, often posed a challenge to the Crown’s absolutist powers. In Toledo, the monarch and his court were always under the watchful and frequently reproachful eye of the Church.20 This left only one candidate in the running for the title of capital of Spain, and that was Madrid.

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— 3 — a capital idea – but why?

In February 1561, edicts issued by the Concejo of Toledo attested to the fact that the city’s corporate body was the recognised agent of the Spanish Crown. By July of that year, decrees concerning state business were being promulgated in Madrid. What had transpired in this five-month interim to bring about Toledo’s demise? This is a matter of conjecture, for not a single document exists to explain the decision to shift the Spanish Empire’s official seat of power to Madrid. Five years earlier Carlos I, having grown weary of his worldly burden, transferred the title of Holy Roman Emperor to his brother Fernando. Carlos then retired to the secluded monastery of Yuste in the Gredos mountains of Extremadura, there to devote the remaining two years of his life to contemplation and prayer.1 The throne of Spain, the Spanish imperial dominions throughout Europe and the New World – all this went to his son, who reigned as Felipe II from 1558, the year of Carlos’s death. Ascetic, severe, bigoted, unattractive, fanatical, cruel – most historians would agree that Felipe answered faithfully to all these attributes, in character as well as appearance. In his defence, it could be said that Felipe was certainly no less attractive in appearance than his second wife, the dour-faced Mary I of England, a marriage that made her queen consort of Habsburg Spain, while Felipe was styled ‘King of England’. One has only to contemplate the great monastery of El Escorial, high in the hills 28 miles north of Madrid, to grasp how this tormented king was determined to hold his far-flung empire in 37

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an iron grip. Starkly imposing, almost threateningly so, the gigantic structure casts a grim shadow across the plain below, a pall that extended to Spanish possessions near and far. The monastery is as sinister as it is grandiose. Its architecture reveals sexual repressions, political ambitions and the peculiarity of character of the king who built it. Felipe’s personality impregnates the entire structure… El Escorial reflects Felipe’s desire to compare himself to the Christ figure. This is evident in the pale and blond crucified Christ in the cloister, physically identical to Felipe himself. The entire monastery is a condemnation of traditional magic, religious and sexual forces.2 The ‘sexual repressions’ detectable in the architecture stem perhaps from Felipe’s deep distress at the death of his uncle Juan, the son of the Reyes Católicos, whose passionate relationship with Margaret of Austria ended when Juan died in the act of making love to her. Felipe’s father Carlos I was determined to prevent his son from meeting a similar fate and charged his tutor to ration the young prince’s physical contact with his first wife, Maria of Portugal. El Escorial in this sense embodied Felipe’s resolve to stem the tide of Protestant heresy. The king engaged the celebrated Spanish architect Juan Bautista de Toledo to be his collaborator in the design of El Escorial. Together they erected a monument to Spain’s role as a centre of the Christian world, second only to Rome. The principles underlying the mathematical harmony obtained in the architecture of El Escorial were also applied to the selection of a capital. It seems that the move was not, at the time, intended to be permanent, but Madrid was conveniently close to the new palace of the Escorial, and it gradually came to be recognised as the capital of the monarchy. The town’s only claim to this particular honour lay in its geographical position as the mathematical centre of Spain, and somehow this conferred upon its choice a kind of inevitability.3 38

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It seems scarcely credible that ‘el Rey Burócrata’ (‘the Bureaucrat King’), so enamoured of promulgating decrees and documents, should leave no written testimony explaining his choice of imperial capital. If Felipe’s obsession with paperwork has justifiably been diagnosed as monomania, how is it possible that there are no records of this momentous event? ‘If they ever did exist, they were most certainly misplaced, just as in Spain we tend to misplace items such as the mortal remains of Cervantes, Lope de Vega and Velázquez.’4 It was a momentous event in every sense of the word, for with the court went a legion of civil servants, army hierarchy and ecclesiastics. Moving the capital, as had been the case when Toledo took over from a Valladolid devastated by fire, involved a formidable marshalling of state bodies and their attendant paraphernalia: the army command, the royal treasury, the office for the colonies and the tribunal of the Holy Inquisition, to name but the most prominent of the host of institutions in the monarch’s service. Moreover, the whole plan went against the wishes of Felipe’s father, Carlos I, who had advised Felipe to make a stationary court, not the nomadic one which he himself had, in common with the Spanish kings of the Reconquista. The Spanish Empire, the most ambitious political enterprise which the world had seen since the fall of Rome, needed sound administration: a capital to which dispatches could be sent regularly, and where they would be at hand.5 Carlos had urged his son to take the court to Lisbon, the second largest city on the Iberian Peninsula after Sevilla, thereby adding a more global dimension to his kingdom. Felipe was well acquainted with the city: after becoming king of Portugal in 1581, he resided in Lisbon until 1583. Portugal’s principal port, the gateway to the Atlantic and the New World, was undoubtedly a strong contender to become the Spanish capital, but the country was at heart an alien land to the monarch, who was a Castilian by birth and temperament. Carlos had been of the opinion that making a relative upstart like Madrid the imperial capital would leave his son with an impoverished reign, while Toledo, if nothing else, ensured the preservation of the status quo. 39

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Felipe was not intimidated by these words of counsel. In March and April of 1561, the king enquired of the Madrid Concejo how many people lived in the city and its capacity to supply their daily needs. The move from Toledo began in mid May, with the Royal Seal, the tribunals and the king’s household.6 The general registry and paraphernalia of the Seal, the symbol of sovereign power, arrived in Madrid on 3 July of the same year. Madrid had now added to its title of villa that of corte, and it is still fondly referred to as ‘La Villa y Corte’. Relocating the court 44 miles north to Madrid came at a huge environmental cost. Felipe’s elaborate establishment of 2,000 personal officials and servants at one fell swoop boosted the city’s population by more than ten per cent, something equivalent to 700,000 people taking up residence in London overnight. The impact of this upheaval was dramatic and irreversible. Forests were felled for timber to expand the Alcázar and make space for the king’s colossal entourage and provide firewood to keep them warm. Game was frightened away from traditional hunting grounds, waterways dried up, wheat and grape harvests failed, pastureland vanished and farmers were forced to herd their cattle to distant grazing land. With the virtual denuding of the countryside, Madrid’s climate grew harsher, with drier and greater extremes of weather, giving rise to the proverb ‘Nueve meses de invierno y tres de infierno’ (‘Nine months of winter and three of hell’). The nineteenth-century British traveller Richard Ford arrived in the capital on a four-year journey on foot across Spain to find that ‘winters have occurred in Madrid of such severity that sentinels have been frozen to death, and frequently all communication is suspended by the depth of the snow in the elevated roads over the mountain passes.’7 Before 1561, no one would have associated Madrid’s climate with so extreme a description. The flurry of church-building that took hold in Madrid in the century prior to Felipe’s accession could not have failed to endear him to the city. Felipe was an inveterate champion of the Inquisition, an institution that he inherited, along with the titles of ‘Catholic King’ and ‘King of Jerusalem’, first granted by Spanish Pope Alexander VI 40

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to his great-grandfather Fernando of Aragón. Felipe was a regular spectator at heretic trials in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor, though he had little stomach for the heretic burnings, known as ‘autos de fe’ (‘acts of faith’, usually referred to in English by the Portuguese ‘autos-da-fé ’), and would take his leave before the pyres were set alight. But leniency towards enemies of the true faith was not one of his failings. In 1565, concerned about religious laxity, the king wrote: ‘Let all prisoners be put to death, and suffer them no longer to escape through neglect, weakness and bad faith of the judges. If any are too timid to execute the edicts, I will replace them by men who have more heart and zeal.’8 Madrid, whose pious credentials were above reproach, and which lay a mere two days on horseback or in a palanquin from Felipe’s El Escorial monastic retreat, was therefore the ideal administrative centre from which to rule his Catholic empire. In spite of his lugubrious, almost monastic disposition, as well as his notorious penchant for paperwork, Spain’s Habsburg sovereign was more a man of action than of words, spoken or written. This concerned not only the matter of choosing a capital, but applied to all major affairs of state. There can be little doubt, for instance, that the grand plan prescribed for the Armada expedition was dictated by Felipe alone. The monarch’s religious and imperial crusade, always refusing to heed the advice of military strategists, and his squandering of vast amounts of New World gold and silver on European campaigns were to ensure that Felipe II would be remembered as the monarch who drove the Spanish Empire into oblivion and set his nation on the road to political and economic decline and collapse. In June 1598 Felipe, suffering from a crippling attack of gout, was carried off from Madrid to El Escorial in a litter. Soon after reaching his sprawling granite hilltop retreat, the king’s legs began to ulcerate, and for the next 53 days he endured excruciating pain. Then on 11 September he called his son to his bedside to bid him farewell, exhorting the future Felipe III to keep the faith with the Catholic Church and treat his subjects justly. The king spent the next two days in meditation and prayer, dying on 13 September at the age of 71. Felipe took to the grave his motives for making Madrid his capital, and all we know for certain is that it was a deliberate, 41

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personal decision. National capitals generally become so by decree.9 Only Madrid remains a mystery, and it is this very obscurity that has breathed life into a surfeit of speculation. It was no secret that Felipe, as well as his third wife Isabel de Valois, held Toledo in contempt as a cold and generally unpleasant place to live. The antipathy was mutual, for the citizens of Toledo resented the royal presence which, as well as sparking the occasional confrontation with the archbishopric, brought to the city a small army of functionaries whose main impact was to push up prices and create a scarcity of foodstuffs. Furthermore, Toledo’s only water supply presented logistical problems. The Tagus flows an uncomfort­able distance below the city and drawing water required a relay of hundreds of servants up and down the slopes. As for courtly functions, Toledo’s narrow, hilly streets, unlike Madrid’s spacious Plaza Mayor, provided little room for receiving ambassadors, foreign dignitaries and the like, or for grand spectacles and events that called for displays of pomp. ‘Toledo… was marked by a mass of small steep alleys through which monarchs and noblemen could pass only slowly: in Madrid there were some fine straight streets, the central artery being the line of an old cañada, or walk for transhumant sheep.’10 Madrid’s cooler summers and milder winters (until, ironically, the city’s surrounding countryside was cleared to accommodate the court) were another incentive for moving the capital. Felipe may well have preferred Madrid for its silence as well,11 which suited his taciturn nature, so much more restful than the bustle of an overcrowded Toledo, whose rugged topography placed serious constraints on urban expansion. It did not take Madrid long to acquire the trappings of intrigue and political turmoil that were endemic to sixteenth-century European society. France under the reign of Charles IX was being torn asunder by religious wars, epitomised most horrifically by the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in Paris of up to 30,000 Huguenot Protestants. The reign of Mary, Queen of Scots was marked by violent death, Catholic plots and ultimately the queen’s beheading at Fotheringhay in Northamptonshire, at the insistence of her and 42

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Felipe II’s sister-in-law Elizabeth I. Was Madrid, now the nerve centre of the Spanish Empire, incapable of producing dramatic affairs on a scale equal if not superior to Paris or London? The answer came late on the night of 19 January 1568, when Felipe II, accompanied by 20 soldiers, four members of the Consejo de Estado (Council of State) and a prior, burst into the bedchamber of the monarch’s tormented son Don Carlos, taking him prisoner. The event, which was to inspire Friedrich Schiller’s historical drama Don Carlos and Giuseppe Verdi’s grand opera of the same name, was set off by Felipe’s frustration with his eldest son’s wild and erratic behaviour. Recent studies by a medical team from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Complutense University of Madrid) have concluded that the heir to the Spanish throne was almost certainly a victim of Klinefelter’s syndrome, a chromosome condition affecting young males that can affect their ability to develop language skills, to express thought and process what is heard. The king’s morbid mind had little room for feelings of compassion towards his deeply disturbed son – what Felipe most dreaded was the thought of himself dying and leaving Spain with an heir wholly unfit to govern the empire. Carlos was the son of Felipe’s first wife, Maria of Portugal, who died within days of giving birth. The boy had little contact with his father and was raised by governesses and tutors, who discovered early on that their royal charge spoke with a stammer, was a compulsive eater, at times seemed unable to communicate and exhibited a sickly disposition. Carlos was a perennial source of embarrassment, if not outright scandal, at court. At the age of 17, the Prince of Asturias took a tumble down a flight of stairs in frantic pursuit of the gatekeeper’s daughter. He lost consciousness and failed to respond to the usual treatments of bleeding and trepanation. As a last resort, Felipe requested his trusted governor of the Spanish Netherlands, the Duke of Alba, to exhume the allegedly incorrupt body of the Franciscan friar Diego de Alcalá, and place it next to his son. It is said that this extreme measure was followed by a rapid improvement in Carlos’s condition. Whether this was due to divine intervention or the young prince’s repulsion at discovering a century-old corpse in his bed is a matter for speculation.12 43

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No sooner was he back on his feet than the young prince once again began spreading alarm throughout the palace. He now found himself in love with the queen, Isabel de Valois, whom he regaled with all kinds of gifts. The household servants had to endure beatings at random and without warning. The horses of the royal stables, and for that matter any animal unfortunate enough to cross his path, fared no better. Carlos finally pushed his father’s patience to the limit after brandishing a dagger in the Duke of Alba’s face. At one point, he even threatened the king’s life. Felipe had his wayward son locked up in his chambers, with the windows and doors nailed shut. His meat was served sliced to prevent him laying his hands on a knife. The queen was forbidden access to his rooms, his correspondence was confiscated. Finally, the king convened the Consejo de Estado for the purpose of declaring his heir apparent incapacitated, thereby depriving him of his rights of succession. From the moment of his imprisonment the deranged Carlos, true to his word at the time of his arrest, never ceased attempting to kill himself. He first stopped eating for several weeks, but as he was incapable of bearing hunger he decided to swallow some rings, believing the diamonds to be poisonous.13 The next step was more in keeping with his voracious habits: he began to devour food without stopping, hoping to reach the bursting point and die. This cocktail of desperate actions, along with others such as subjecting himself to extremes of temperature by covering his bed with ice, had the desired effect: Don Carlos died in July 1568 at the age of 23, wasted in body and mind after seven months of solitary confinement. Felipe decreed a year of mourning at court for his son, whose body, after a brief internment in Madrid’s church of Santo Domingo, was laid to rest in El Escorial’s Panteón de los Reyes (Royal Pantheon). ‘At this juncture, it must be said that as monarch Felipe II heaved a sigh of relief, but as a father, his suffering was great. According to his secretary Antonio Pérez, the king wept for three days after his son’s 44

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death.’14 Just when Felipe in his despondency thought that life could deal him no crueller a blow, it did: for shortly afterwards the king lost Isabel de Valois, the most beloved of his four wives. But a little more than two years after Don Carlos’s death, the prevailing mood in Madrid was to shift from one of gloom and anxiety over the monarchy’s future to one of joyous exultation such as the city had never known. Felipe, a widower with two young daughters, needed a male heir to administer the empire on which the sun never set,15 to protect Spain from the Ottomans menacing the gates of Europe, from Albion’s perfidious designs on Spanish treasure ships returning from the New World, and from the seditious Netherlands to the north. The woman chosen for the task was Felipe’s niece, the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II, Anna of Austria, whose vivid personality and passion for needlework furnished the Spanish court with some sorely needed colour and cheer. Madrid turned out in its best bib and tucker on a frosty November morning in 1570 to witness the grand appearance of its 43-year-old, thrice-widowed king, and his new bride, who was 22 years his junior. The Concejo had spent more than three months and some 40,000 ducats (the equivalent of a little more than £1 million in today’s money) embellishing and tidying up the city in preparation for the extravaganza. The streets were cleared of the customary droves of roving pigs, dogs and donkeys, more than 100 builders and craftsmen were sent out to repair and decorate the façades of all the houses in the vicinity of the Alcázar, the church of Los Jerónimos and all along the ceremonial route. Four new glittering fountains were built and three triumphal arches were erected, the first depicting Felipe’s forebears, a second bearing maps of Spain and the New World and the last portraying the king himself in full regalia of armour, sceptre and crown. More than 6,500 soldiers stood guard along the streets where the royal carriages were to pass and these, preceded by cornets and drums, carried an array of nobility, grandees of Spain all, followed by standard bearers and the king’s personal attendants marching on foot and horseback. The young queen rode in an open carriage, for all to admire her black, gold and silver velvet frock and hat adorned with plumes of the royal colours of white, red and gold, an image 45

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immortalised in a painting by Alonso Sánchez Coello that hangs in the Museo del Prado. This show of pageantry could never have been staged on the same scale in Toledo or Valladolid – only the grandeur of Sevilla would have served as an appropriate setting for Felipe and Anna’s royal procession. But Sevilla never stood a chance of seducing the monarch whom some Madrileños quietly referred to as ‘la araña de El Escorial’ (‘the spider of El Escorial’). The great inland Atlantic port lies more than 300 miles from Madrid and this fact alone made it an impossible choice. Apart from his austere Castilian character, Felipe’s obsession with centralism would have put Napoleon to shame. Madrid began to come of age that November morning in 1570. Almost at a stroke, the city acquired the self-confidence (or insufferable cockiness, if we accept, for instance, the Basque or Catalán take on Madrid) of an imperial capital. Ironically enough, the Madrileños’ enthusiasm for fiestas and celebrations originated and took form in the reign of one of Spain’s most joyless monarchs, or conceivably in reaction to the shroud of gloom and intrigue that emanated from the court. With cheerful disregard for the Inquisition’s finger-wagging, the pagan celebration of Carnival came back into fashion, bringing hordes of masked and costumed merrymakers into the streets. Carnival fever took hold at court as well as among the masses: under Felipe IV’s reign (1621–65) no one was allowed access to the court without a mask for the duration of the festivities.16 The raucousness in the streets could easily get out of hand, which prompted the Concejo to ban the sale of rotten eggs, which revellers were given to pelt the mayor and councillors during official processions. The supposedly solemn convocation of the Cortes in Madrid was taken as a cause for jollity, along with pilgrimages and bullfights in honour of this or that saint. Almost any official or religious act became a legitimate excuse for revelry, a way of life that remains deeply entrenched in a city in which restaurants remain virtually empty before ten o’clock at night and the worst traffic jams start building up around one in the morning. Constitution Day on 6 December and the Feast of the Immaculate Conception two days later translate into a three-day 46

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break from the office. The city’s uprising against Napoleon’s troops of occupation on 2 May 1808 has been declared a public holiday, likewise the days set aside to venerate Madrid’s patron saints San Isidro and Nuestra Señora de la Almudena. All this quite apart from the official Easter holiday, the 12 October Hispanic Day (Columbus Day in the US), All Saints’ Day on 1 November and then Christmas, New Year and Epiphany, which ensure that the Christmas festivities roll on to 6 January. In the 1940s, the Hispanist Gerald Brenan came up with the theory that we in the West (in contrast with the more accepting, contemplative peoples of the East) lead a life of such intensity that the only time available to address our conflicts is when we are not slaving away at a desk – consequently the need for a decent night’s sleep. The Spaniards, Brenan concluded, are not troubled by these inner contradictions, and this is what fuels their ability to party to the wee hours and confront the working day with only a few hours’ sleep. The great day of jubilation came on 15 April 1578. In her first seven years of marriage to the king, Anna had brought two sons into the world, Fernando and Diego, both of whom had died by their seventh birthdays. In an age when superstition and faith were as one, people furtively speculated whether malign spirits had been casting a spell of misfortune on the royal couple, perhaps reaping revenge for Don Carlos’s murky death. Their fears were laid to rest on that Tuesday morning in April, when Madrid woke to the booming voice of the town crier proclaiming the birth of a royal son. The boy had been pronounced robust and assured of long life by the court physicians attending the queen.17 The king was overjoyed at the prospect of an heir at last, so much so that he could do no less than have the child named after himself, making him the future Felipe III. Felipe II’s reign had another 20 years to run, but it was the latter stages of his despotic rule that stoked what is known as ‘La Leyenda Negra’ (‘the Black Legend’), the attempt to demonise the conquistadores and the Empire, something that lingered long after the king’s death, and continued to plague Spain for centuries.18 The destruction of the Armada in 1588 not only made England mistress of the seas: the calamitous loss of ships, manpower and money fatally weakened the 47

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entire imperial edifice, encouraging Spain’s religious and political enemies to make their voices heard.19 The Leyenda Negra had its origins in the terrors of the Inquisition, along with reports of the unbridled pillaging of the New World colonies and the slaughter of their indigenous populations. The equally brutal repression of Flemish rebels by the Duke of Alba, Felipe’s captain general in the Netherlands, added another stain to Spain’s already tarnished reputation,20 while the episode of Don Carlos’s imprisonment and sordid death produced widespread disgust and suspicion abroad. The main store of ammunition for Spain-bashers of the sixteenth century came from the saga of Antonio Pérez, one of the most controversial characters of Madrid’s Habsburg era. As Felipe II’s private secretary, his life was necessarily entangled in a web of perennial intrigue and double-dealing, and this was to prove his undoing. Early in his appointment, as successor to his father who had held the same position, Pérez, seeking to enhance his political influence, persuaded Felipe to designate the king’s legal representative in Madrid, Juan de Escobedo, as private secretary to Don Juan de Austria, Felipe’s half-brother. Pérez assured the monarch, who suspected Don Juan of plotting against him, of Escobedo’s usefulness as servant and spy. The intrigue deepened: Don Juan had misgivings of his own about Felipe’s involvement in the death of his son Don Carlos, but to Pérez’s dismay, rather than informing the king of Don Juan’s intentions, Escobedo developed a close loyalty to his master. That was when Pérez decided to act: he cooked up a story for the king, telling him that Escobedo had prevailed on Don Juan to plot against Felipe, perhaps even to usurp the monarch, and that the most expedient course of action was to have the traitorous Escobedo put out of the way. Felipe gave his assent to the murder, which was duly accomplished by a gang of cut-throats, typical of those to be found roaming the alleyways of Madrid. When Don Juan died a few months later, having never shown any inclination to have his half-brother deposed, Felipe began to reflect on the crime he had sanctioned. Not only that, the king now realised he had placed himself in a highly compromised position: Pérez might easily reveal the king’s complicity in Escobedo’s assassination. 48

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Pérez was apprehended and placed under house arrest. Thus he languished for six years, at times in generous comfort, at others in more austere circumstances, until one night he leapt from a window and fled north to his family’s home in Aragón, a region that still enjoyed a measure of judicial autonomy from Madrid.21 But he was recaptured and, with breathtaking hypocrisy, was accused by Felipe of having contrived to have Escobedo killed. Felipe was desperate to recover Pérez’s incriminating papers, and to this end he dispatched his former confidant to the Inquisition’s torture chambers, where in his agony Pérez implicated the king in the Escobedo murder plot. Pérez knew this meant a death sentence, and once again he managed his escape from Madrid. As before, he was recaptured but, astonishingly, he made yet another getaway, this time disguised as a shepherd, crossing the Pyrenees in heavy snow into France. Pérez the supreme survivor took his secrets to the French monarch Henri IV, and in 1593 to James I in England, where he lived for two years. He spent the remainder of his life travelling between England and France, striving to make a living off the sale of secret information on the chicanery that had infested the court. His efforts brought him little in the way of financial gain, but he did manage to confirm all the worst suspicions about Felipe II and his rule, every bit of it exquisite fodder for the Leyenda Negra. The last events of Felipe II’s life were highlighted by the 1598 Treaty of Vervins, which put an end to war between Spain and France. Under the peace terms, Felipe agreed to withdraw his troops from French territory, thus depriving the Catholic League22 of Spanish support. After the loss of part of the Spanish Netherlands in 1588 and the Armada debacle of the same year, the Treaty of Vervins signalled a final defeat for Felipe II and the start of the Spanish Habsburg dynasty’s steady decline. When Felipe returned to Madrid from a visit to Aragón in 1592, ‘the Madrileños had even then been shocked at his appearance, for the hand of death was clearly upon him: he still had six years of life left to him, but he was a dying man during them all.’23 When the king’s time finally came in the autumn of 1598, Felipe retired to El Escorial, the source of the spiritual strength he needed to cope with an excruciatingly painful death. He suffered severe gout, 49

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fever and dropsy for nearly two months. The monarch was in such agony that he could no longer bear to be moved to be washed, thus a hole was cut in his mattress for the release of bodily fluids. It was an ignominious end for the proud sovereign who had presided over the greatest empire the world had ever known. There is a theory, a rather seductive one it may be argued, that nations tend to produce their greatest literary geniuses just when things are going down the pan. Stendhal and Balzac wrote their masterpieces in the wake of Napoleon’s downfall and the disintegration of imperial France. Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy attained their pinnacle of literary glory amid the decadence of Tsarist society, with Russia’s political cataclysm not many years away. While Felipe II busied himself with bankrupting his kingdom and watching his Armada Invencible vanish beneath the North Sea waves, Madrid was becoming the cradle of the period of artistic and literary glory known as the Siglo de Oro, the Golden Age. Alcalá de Henares lies 18 miles east of Madrid along the Barcelona road, yet the town’s cultural and political history situates it squarely within Madrid’s gravitational orbit. In 1547, Alcalá was the birthplace of a future soldier who was severely wounded fighting the Turks at Lepanto,24 where he lost the use of his left arm. On his return to Spain he worked as a tax collector, and in his spare time cultivated a parallel career as one of the world’s greatest literary geniuses. Miguel de Cervantes, the creator of Don Quixote, may have been born in Alcalá, but it was inevitable that he, like any aspiring writer, should migrate to Madrid, the throbbing heart of the country’s literary and artistic scene. In 1605 Cervantes published in Madrid the first volume of his masterpiece, holding up to ridicule a society on the skids and exposing with brilliance the delusions of empire. Félix Lope de Vega, the man whom Cervantes called ‘the Monster of Nature’ due to his prolific output (he was the author of some 3,000 sonnets and 1,800 plays), was a dyed-in-the-wool Madrileño. So too was his contemporary and archrival Tirso de Molina (the pseudonym adopted by the monk Gabriel Téllez), who allegedly turned up at performances of Lope’s plays to hurl rotten eggs at the stage. Francisco de 50

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Quevedo, the club-footed, obese, myopic nobleman noted as the most prominent lyricist of the Siglo de Oro, was a native of Madrid. His deadly adversary, the scholarly poet and compulsive gambler Luis de Góngora, was born in Córdoba but made his name in Madrid, where he and Quevedo engaged in relentless attacks on one another in their verse. The patrician dramatist Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s magnum opus La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream) was written and staged in his native Madrid. The play perfected the dramatic forms and genres of Spanish baroque theatre that had been so brilliantly pioneered by Lope de Vega. So beloved was Lope by the theatre-mad Madrileños that his death in 1635 was mourned with a display of ceremony never before conferred on a public figure, deceased monarchs included.25 The funeral cortège that departed Lope’s home, in the street now named after Cervantes,26 of all people, was composed of knights of various military orders, members of craft guilds carrying their standards, clergymen, soldiers, members of the Concejo dressed in mourning and onlookers in their thousands, who turned out to pay their last respects to the Monster of Nature. Then came along the most high-profile Madrileño of the seventeenth century, Felipe III, nicknamed ‘el Piadoso’ (‘the Pious’), whose ‘only virtue appeared to reside in a total absence of vice’.27 It is ironic that the first Spanish king to be born in Madrid should within three years of ascending the throne be branded a traitor to his city. This rather miserable monarch was known as the scourge of the Moriscos, whom he expelled from Spain, and as a rather dim-witted man who attempted to undo one of his father’s few great achievements – indeed, his most praiseworthy – by moving the court from Madrid to Valladolid, a decision the younger Felipe lived to regret. Few Spanish monarchs can lay claim to having presided over a simultaneous decline and upsurge in their country’s fortunes. Felipe III, a pallid, vague creature, divided his time between fanatical devotion to the Church and turning Madrid’s Alcázar into a palace of delight. If he was generally tolerated, rather than admired, by his contemporaries, this must be judged in comparison with his deranged and, fortunately for Spain, deceased brother Don Carlos. Felipe’s accession to the 51

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throne came as a source of relief to those at court who had looked on in horror at those calamitous proceedings. On becoming monarch in 1598, Felipe III admittedly inherited a kingdom in sorry economic straits. If the prospect of sovereign default today verges on the unthinkable, people moving the financial markets in what some might contend to be an irresponsible fashion would do well to reflect on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, when the country declared bankruptcy on eight occasions between 1557 and 1680. Felipe II’s Spain was almost totally reliant on the revenue flowing in from the empire. Spanish industry and domestic commerce, or what little of it existed at the time, failed to furnish the tax revenues required to fund the king’s military campaigns. The country was over-borrowed and, by the 1590s, interest payments to Genovese and Augsburg bankers accounted for 40 per cent of state income. A still more sobering fact for today’s European leaders is that this happened at a time when the Spanish doubloon was accepted across the Continent – a kind of forerunner to the modern single currency. In 1575 and 1596, things became so desperate that Felipe II suspended all payments to his bankers. The king eventually devised a compromise arrangement for debt repayment, by the transformation of a floating into a consolidated debt. For the disgruntled creditors, it was a case of take it or leave it. Felipe III did little to put his house in order. His father’s death changed everything and yet changed nothing. The 20-year-old monarch’s ultraCatholic piety rendered him vulnerable to an unscrupulous, bigoted clergy. In 1609 the fanatical Archbishop of Valencia, Juan de Ribera, instigated the king to issue a royal decree ordering the expulsion of some 300,000 Moriscos from Spain. It is true that these Muslim converts had been the source of trouble and unrest since the conquest of Granada more than a century earlier, staging armed insurrections from time to time. As a result, many had moved to Castilla, extending their presence (and visibility) to a region whose populace had been composed largely of cristianos viejos (old Christians), those of ‘pure’ Catholic ancestry. This step had devastating consequences for large parts of the country, mainly Aragón and Valencia where the Moriscos were most numerous. With the Moriscos gone, these regions suddenly 52

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found themselves deprived of cheap labour and rental income from small landowners. Agricultural output in many places collapsed and the inevitable outbreak of famine was exacerbated by bubonic plague, in which up to ten per cent of the country’s population perished in the early years of Felipe III’s reign. Madrid was fortunate to have escaped the worst of the catastrophe: there was still a comparatively high demand in the capital for goods and services, notably to supply the aristocracy and the thousands of officials, servants and hangers-on at court, enough to keep the wheels of commerce moving. Madrid’s relative prosperity brought an influx of immigrants from the hard-hit hinterlands, so that by the turn of the sixteenth century it had become the most populous city in Spain. Madrid’s nearly 100,000 inhabitants, a figure that rose by another 50 per cent in the 23 years Felipe III sat on the throne, was now more than double that of Toledo. It was in this context that, in 1601, Felipe III came up with the remarkably twisted idea of removing his court to Valladolid. If Felipe II’s rationale for making Madrid his capital is shrouded in mystery, equally puzzling is what motivated his son, a Madrileño born and bred, to turn his back on his native city and move the entire establishment 100 miles to the north. As with the expulsion of the Moriscos, however, the idea of abandoning Madrid was engineered by someone who wielded great influence over the king. Within hours of ascending the throne on 13 September 1598, Felipe III bestowed the rank of royal counsellor on Francisco Gómez de Sandoval, a man of an ancient and powerful family who would later be ennobled as the Duke of Lerma and rise to become the most powerful figure at court. The duke was also soon to be the king’s valido, or royal favourite. Whoever carried that title was recognised as the person closest to the monarch, the confidant who could at all times be assured of his ear. Lerma was effectively the king’s shadow, the filter through whom all information passed. On his first trip to Spain in 1603, Peter Paul Rubens travelled to Valladolid to paint a portrait of the man considered the most powerful in the country. The result was an equestrian painting of the Duke of Lerma, which attested flawlessly to his exalted stature at court: there he sits astride a 53

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white charger, attired in armoured breastplate, the royal baton grasped firmly in his hand, his pose almost identical to that of Felipe III in Velázquez’s portrait, painted after the king’s death. The difference is in the facial expressions of the two subjects: the duke’s steely, self-confident, take-no-prisoners gaze contrasts with the Habsburg monarch’s rather silly attempt to affect a pose of regal self-importance. Lerma never denied that it had been his wish to see the court moved to Valladolid, though his justification for convincing the king to do so is highly suspect. Playing on Felipe’s extreme piety, the duke declared that Madrid had become a corrupt and hedonistic place, populated by a multitude of vagrants, villains and the sinful, whereas Valladolid was uncontaminated by such sybaritic evils. This all rings a bit hollow from a courtier who cheerfully accepted gifts of patronage from the Medici in Florence, assembled a magnificent private collection of paintings and used his office to lobby the Vatican to create a cardinalship for his uncle. A more cynical, as well as a more persuasive explanation is that prior to the relocation Lerma had acquired several grand houses in Valladolid and was undoubtedly aware of the impact the court’s presence in the city would have on the value of his property portfolio. Indeed, he managed to sell several of these houses to courtiers who had taken up residence in Valladolid. At the same time, the crafty wheeler-dealer duke had taken advantage of the property collapse in Madrid to purchase homes and land in the very centre of the city at knock-down prices. In January 1601 Felipe III set off to Valladolid, his immediate retinue to be followed in the weeks and months ahead by several thousands of servants, bureaucrats and officials of all ranks, whose horses, carriages and baggage wagons wound their way along the 100-mile road, trundling noisily and pointlessly north-west across the snow-covered expanse of the Castilian plateau. The sudden disappearance of the court was a severe blow that took Madrid to within a whisker of turning into a ghost town. In later years, the city would shrug off the expulsion of the Moriscos and the devastation of bubonic plague, but the loss of its status as the country’s capital came close to being its undoing. No one knew for sure if this was to be a permanent move, or if it merely obeyed 54

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a whim of the Duke of Lerma’s, with the likelihood of the decision being reversed under a future monarch. Therefore, court officials with homes in Madrid were paying people simply to occupy and maintain their properties. Nevertheless, buildings fell into disrepair and became derelict, while tradesmen and artisans deserted the former capital, sapping its commercial lifeblood. The Concejo begged the monarch to reconsider his decision, and went so far as to offer Lerma a grand ducal palace in the city, or the princely lump sum of 100,000 ducats, if he could persuade the king to reconsider. Tradesmen, artisans and farmers wrung their hands in despair at the imminent loss of their livelihoods. During the court’s five-year sojourn in Valladolid, a forgotten Madrid took on an appearance that has been described as tragic by contemporary visitors. ‘Madrid was deserted, official buildings and houses abandoned, churches and taverns empty, streets and squares unoccupied, a veil of sadness everywhere.’28 The distinguished Madrileño actor and playwright Agustín de Rojas Villandrando took away this impression of his visit to Madrid in 1603: My soul wept at the sight of such sadness, such loneliness, so much misery, and all because of this move. I didn’t recognise it – I looked at the streets, which were a pathetic sight… I saw all of this and most remarkable of all was the solitude, for in this great city one hardly saw a soul in public. All was misery and melancholy, and the cause was the move to Valladolid.29 The people of Valladolid could hardly give credence to their good fortune. The arrival of Felipe’s royal carriage was received with tremendous acclamation, a prelude to what in essence became a permanent five-year party, during which little if any significant business of state was conducted. The only noteworthy event in this period was the signing of the Treaty of London in 1604, which concluded the longrunning Anglo-Spanish War. It was on the one hand a diplomatic victory for Spain, in bringing to an end English support for the Dutch rebellion, but it also amounted to an abandonment of any hopes of restoring Roman Catholicism in England. 55

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And then, as swiftly and as unexpectedly as it had begun, the whole bizarre episode was unwound. The timing of the return to Madrid may shed some light on the Duke of Lerma’s motives for contriving to have the court moved in the first place. At the very least it adds fuel to one of the most popular conspiracy theories that circulated around Madrid’s mentideros, or public discussion forums. These venerable institutions bore a close similarity to Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park and were at the heart of Madrid’s animating spirit. The three most famous mentideros, which each consisted of a wooden speakers’ platform and a scattering of chairs, were located in the Calle León (in the heart of the barrio de las letras, the literary quarter), in a square in front of the Alcázar and in Calle Montera, adjacent to the Puerta del Sol. The mentideros were the scene of animated public discussion and tales of valour by soldiers returned from the wars in Flanders, the latest rumours of court intrigues as well as everyday happenings in Madrid life. They were as much a source of popular entertainment as a platform for spreading news. During the reign of Felipe IV (the son of Felipe III), a would-be prophet rigged up a camouflaged hoist, giving him the appearance of floating in mid-air. There he preached his version of the Gospel to an astonished public, until word of his antics reached the Inquisition, who had the holy man arrested and marched off to prison.30 There was only one person in Madrid whom Lerma feared as a threat to his all-powerful ascendancy over the king. That was Felipe III’s grandmother, the Archduchess Maria of Austria, wife of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II. She was the daughter of Carlos I and twice served as regent of Spain, hence Lerma knew full well he was confronted by a woman of immense political astuteness. Maria’s integrity and generosity, in stark contrast to the scheming, morally corrupt duke, assured her a position of great popularity at court. Foremost among her admirers was Felipe himself: the king spent many hours at his grandmother’s side, sharing meals and family reminiscences. ‘It comes as no surprise that the empress served as her grandson’s adviser in the early days of his reign, and it is equally logical that she would view with disgust the direction the monarchy was taking in the hands of the Duke of Lerma.’31 Clearly, from Lerma’s 56

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point of view there would be no chance of neutralising Maria’s influence over the king while the court remained in Madrid. On 26 February 1603, Madrid’s Descalzas Reales convent, where Maria had taken up residence in 1582, announced that the empress had passed away at the age of 75. Shortly after the news reached Valladolid, Lerma instructed one of his aides to inform the mayor of Madrid that the court would in due course be returning to its former home. Taking into account the timing of these events, one could make a rather uncomplimentary assumption about the duke’s sudden change of heart. But there was more to it than the mere disappearance of Lerma’s feared adversary. The duke had prevailed on his master to accept a sweetener which had been extended by an ever more desperate Concejo in Madrid. To coax the king back, the Concejo made an offer of 250,000 ducats, payable over ten years, plus a sixth of the rental income collected by the city over the same period. This was too tempting for a cash-strapped royal treasury to resist, so in March 1606 Felipe III and the queen consort Margaret of Austria made their triumphal return into Madrid. ‘The Concejo did not neglect its debt to the all-powerful Duke of Lerma, who was appointed a permanent city councillor and given certain facilities to acquire a home with grounds… similar to the one he owned in Valladolid.’32 With the exception of the 1936–39 Civil War, when the government of the Republic was evacuated first to Valencia and then to Barcelona, Madrid’s status as the Spanish capital was never again to be usurped.

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— 4 — days of glorious decadence

Felipe III’s greatest single achievement in the five years of the court’s exile in Valladolid was to have fathered a son, the future Felipe IV, whose ascendancy to the throne in 1621 meant that Madrid could at last take pride in having a cultured, enlightened Habsburg presiding over the Alcázar. Felipe IV’s life in Madrid, much like that of the empire he ruled for 44 years, was beset by contradictions. By the time of his death in 1665, Spain’s colonial possessions were spread across the known world, covering an almost unheard-of five million square miles. Yet these dominions, which included the Spanish Netherlands and Portugal, were far from happy at having to pay obeisance (to say nothing of taxes) to a monarch in faraway Madrid. Moreover, this discontent embraced realms within Spain as well as foreign lands. The lights burnt late at the Alcázar as Felipe and his royal favourite Gaspar de Guzmán, the Count-Duke of Olivares (whose corpulence was surpassed only by his pomposity), tried to deal with ruinous wars in France, Flanders and Germany, not to mention a revolt much closer to home in Cataluña. The capture of a massive treasure fleet by Dutch privateers in 1628 tipped the country into an economic crisis, exacerbated by the cost of the Thirty Years War,1 which required Felipe to sell off much of the family silver in order to finance his foreign conflicts. The war with France that ensued from 1635 touched off large-scale uprisings across the empire in protest against the rising costs of these campaigns. By the end of Felipe IV’s reign, Spain found itself crippled by military reverses and economic distress, and though 59

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it would require time for the rot to take hold, the once mighty realm of the man dubbed by Olivares ‘el Rey Planeta’ (‘the Planet King’) had been reduced to a second-rate power. The paradoxes of Spain’s fortunes and misfortunes are closely mirrored in Felipe’s personal life, in a culturally throbbing Madrid where Lope de Vega and Diego Velázquez rubbed shoulders in the streets and taverns with cut-throats and social outcasts of every description. Felipe was a man for whom lyric poetry and debauchery each held a special fascination. The king has aptly been described as ‘quick witted, intelligent and cultivated’, though resembling his father ‘in his absence of character’.2 This made him at once an enthusiastic patron of Madrid’s Siglo de Oro (the king regularly attended plays by Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca, and he summoned Velázquez to Madrid in 1624 to take up the position of court painter), while a noticeable shortage of moral fibre made him easy prey for Olivares’s disastrous machinations.3 Olivares was fastidiously moral – moralising might be a more accurate term for the count-duke’s crusade to stamp out what he considered the decadence and irreverence taking hold of the city. No sooner had Felipe begun his reign than Olivares embarked on a campaign for a more sober dress code in public and the closure of brothels, along with other unworkable social and economic ‘reforms’. His efforts to impose temperance by decree were ill-timed, to say the least, for in 1623 Madrid was in the throes of a riotous and prolonged street party. On the night of 17 March, two travellers wrapped in their capes knocked at the door of the Casa de las Siete Chimeneas (the House of the Seven Chimneys) in Calle de las Infantas, directly behind the thoroughfare that was to become the Gran Vía. This stately home was the residence of John Digby, Earl of Bristol, England’s ambassador to Spain. Digby’s late-night visitors announced themselves to the servants as Messrs John and Tom Smith, who had urgent business with the ambassador. The two men were in reality Charles, Prince of Wales, and Charles Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham. The future Charles I had journeyed for several days from Calais, across the Pyrenees and the Castilian plateau, 60

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to seek the hand in marriage of Felipe IV’s younger sister, the 17-year-old Infanta María Ana. When Digby discovered his callers’ true identity and the purpose of their visit, he rushed out the following morning to convey word to Olivares not only of the prospects for a lasting peace between the two countries, but also of a grand political alliance between the two great European powers. Within days, the news was being proclaimed from Madrid’s mentideros, accompanied by a deluge of jubilation in the streets. The Prince of Wales’s intentions were now made public and thousands of ducats were distributed to enable the nobility to attend the festivities being organised in Madrid. The money was drawn from Felipe’s overstretched treasury in the form of loans, but there is no record of these subsidies having found their way back into the royal coffers. The Prince of Wales had been in Madrid barely a week when preparations were underway for his gala official entry into Madrid. The procession advanced slowly up the Carrera de San Jerónimo, passing through the Puerta del Sol and arriving at the Alcázar, the route festooned with bunting and groups of dancers and musicians. Felipe welcomed the heir to the English throne into his palace to prepare for his first encounter with the Spanish infanta. The court’s hopes were pinned on a marriage that would at once arrest Spain’s political decline and put paid to strife between the two nations. The infanta was suitably taken by the handsome young prince before her – her beguiling, blushing smile said it all, and Madrid held its breath. Alas, it was not to be. Felipe, and more to the point Olivares (for the count-duke was as always calling the shots), laboured under the belief that Charles was prepared to convert to Catholicism, thereby removing the foremost obstacle to the marriage. Conversion was not an option the Prince of Wales had taken into account, however. It was far more than a personal decision – a Catholic heir to the throne of England would have been, at the very least, unconstitutional. A compromise solution was forthcoming from Rome: in April, the nuncio in Madrid delivered a papal dispensation to Felipe giving the Vatican’s assent to his sister’s wedding, but on the condition that England abolish 61

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its laws which discriminated against Catholics, with ratification by the English parliament and Spain’s Consejo de Estado. Olivares laid down stipulations of his own, the most draconian of which was that the infanta was not to step foot outside Spain until the pope’s demands had been endorsed. The count-duke sent an ultimatum to the Consejo de Estado to come up with an answer or put an end to all talk of a marriage. In June, the Spanish synod jumped into the fray demanding that Charles comply with the Vatican’s terms. This led to a late-night shouting match between Olivares on the one hand and Buckingham and the Prince of Wales on the other. It seemed a foregone conclusion that the marital alliance between Spain and England was doomed. Then, to the astonishment of all, Charles inexplicably acquiesced to Pope Gregory XV’s decree, the news of which brought the party-loving Madrileños into the streets with an explosion of bonfires and fireworks across the city. That thorny issued settled, Charles and Buckingham took their leave of the king and Olivares in an atmosphere of cordiality, only to discover on their return to London that the Vatican had backtracked in its policy, and that papal consent was being withheld after all. This sudden breakdown in plans for a royal wedding sparked rapid deterioration in political relations between Madrid and London. A state of war looked imminent, a humiliated British parliament rang with shouts for vengeance, though it would be another 20 years before the two countries’ armies were once again locked in combat. Felipe IV and his sister played a secondary role in this drama, which had been led all along by Olivares. The whole affair in the end wrecked the chances of Spain’s joining hands with a strong ally in its conflict with northern Europe, while England, for its part, had missed the chance to be catapulted to the first division among Continental powers. A union through marriage between both nations was above all Spain’s last opportunity to staunch the decline of the Habsburg dynasty. There can be no doubt as to who came out the winner in this broken romance. The Infanta María did not get her prince charming, but she did get her cousin Ferdinand, King of Hungary, as whose wife she was later elevated to Empress of the Holy Roman Empire. 62

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Charles got the throne of England, but not for as long as he might have hoped. A January morning in 1649 found the king prostrate on an executioner’s chopping block in Whitehall, allegedly wearing two shirts lest the crowd of onlookers think the king was shivering in fear at his impending death. By a twist of fate, Madrid was to feel the repercussions of Charles’s execution. In 1650 Anthony Ascham, the tutor to Charles’s son, the future King James II, was sent as ambassador to Madrid for Oliver Cromwell’s republican government. Upon his arrival he was set upon in front of his residence by five dagger-wielding English royalists, who butchered him in revenge for Charles’s beheading. Until 1643, when Felipe bowed to court pressure and had him dismissed from office as the king’s valido, Olivares directed Spain’s foreign policy, dragging the country into unaffordable wars with the Dutch and the French, and provoking bloody uprisings in Cataluña and Portugal. Few would have denied, including the reluctant monarch himself, that Olivares’s departure was long overdue. He had presided over the Portuguese Restoration War that ended with the loss of that dominion, years of domestic hostility towards the court of Madrid, the perpetual economic crisis and almost permanent state of warfare with France and the Low Countries. By the 1640s a tormented Felipe, deprived of the confidant who relieved him of having to take decisions on his own, was losing his grip. The king professed a fanatical devotion to his Catholic faith, yet there was also a darker side to his character. Felipe IV was the most lascivious of the Spanish Habsburgs and his sexual appetite was nearly inexhaustible. In the days of Olivares, the count-duke was widely rumoured to be acting as royal procurer of Madrid’s nubile damsels. ‘The sovereign was given to late-night escapades, in disguise, through the streets of Madrid, frequenting theatres and taverns in search of tender flesh.’4 It was in one of these outdoor theatres that Felipe encountered his most celebrated mistress, María Calderón, who months after their first encounter presented the monarch with an illegitimate son, Juan José of Austria. His mother retreated to a convent after his birth, but the boy was well looked after by his father, who saw to it that he was appointed a general in the Spanish 63

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army, and rose to become a popular figure in his own right. There are copious accounts of Felipe’s nocturnal escapades in the heart of Madrid. The king was a frequent visitor to a house in Puerta Cerrada, near the Plaza Mayor, where on one occasion he was discovered in flagrante with one of his favourites, known only as Doña Laura, by a passing magistrate. The woman was said to have kept a portrait of the monarch on her bedroom wall and when the magistrate peeped in through the curtains he exclaimed, ‘A true likeness. God keep your royal person’ – after which he made a discreet departure. There was an affair with the Duke of Veragua’s wife. Felipe had the duke sit in for him at the card table while he went off to pay the woman a visit. The duke, according to contemporary chronicles, feigned an attack of colic and surprised the king and one of his aides, wrapped in their capes, as they fled from his home. Felipe apparently sustained some light injuries in this incident.5 The most notorious of Felipe’s frolics, which has doubtlessly undergone a bit of embellishment over the centuries, concerns the nun known as Doña Inés, who lived cloistered in Madrid’s San Plácido convent. The tale goes that the king visited the convent hoping to have sexual relations with the nun, but once inside the walls Felipe was given the shock of his life: the prioress was aware of the royal visitor’s dishonourable intentions and had Doña Inés placed in an open coffin surrounded by candles, feigning death. When Felipe was confronted with this macabre scene he turned on his heels and fled, never again to breach the convent’s gates. In the final years of a life shrouded in solitude, widowed and morose (he was said to have been seen to laugh only three times in the entire course of his public life), Felipe IV found himself progressively drawn into the realm of mysticism. The king came to rely on the advice of a nun reputed to possess occult powers, María de Ágreda, who corresponded with him on spiritual matters and affairs of state. The king also surrounded himself with quack mystics summoned to Madrid from various parts of Europe. Felipe was particularly 64

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fascinated by a painting entitled Nuestra Señora del Milagro (Our Lady of the Miracle), which is now on display in Madrid’s Descalzas Reales monastery. The Virgin depicted in this canvas, by Paolo da San Leocadio, was said miraculously to raise and lower her eyes to devotees who prayed before her image. Despite the reckless and inept policies of his reign, there was one corner of the empire that had cause to celebrate a monarch whose rule, in almost all other dominions of his realm, was marked by abject failure. In the four decades that El Rey Planeta occupied the throne, Madrid was given a regal makeover that elevated its appearance to a city far more closely resembling an imperial capital. Felipe’s Madrid was inadequate in size for the ruler of what was still, despite the creeping rot, a colossal empire. The city walls enclosed an area that could be comfortably traversed in less than an hour on foot. Although the king was determined to expand the city, the measure taken to achieve this was initially designed to broaden the tax base rather than make space for new imperial buildings. It was not a question of extending the walls for the purpose of military defence: the plan was to draw out the city limits by setting up new cercas, or boundary walls, outside the existing fortifications with the aim of bringing more people into the taxable catchment area, which barely extended beyond the Plaza Mayor. The walled city is masterfully depicted in Pedro Texeira’s famous map of 1656, reproduced in the endpapers. The most striking example of Felipe’s architectural legacy was the Casón del Buen Retiro, a pleasure palace that originally occupied a 270-acre site around the church of Los Jerónimos and the modernday Jardines del Buen Retiro. The choice of location was logical, as here were (and still are) the homes of much of Madrid’s nobility. The complex of grounds and stately buildings became the venue for court balls, theatrical performances, sumptuous banquets and even a zoo. In those sombre days of warfare and uprisings, the principal cost of the Crown’s expensive policies was being borne by Castilla and, in particular, the exchequer of Madrid. Madrileños did not take kindly to this show of ostentation, knowing full well that their tax money was going to finance dysfunctional royal policies, and listening at 65

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the mentideros to soldiers returning from devastating wars recount their tales of disaster. Olivares was at that time still serving as the king’s valido. He had also been given responsibility for overseeing the royal residences, an office he used to promote the construction of the Casón del Buen Retiro, a flamboyant undertaking that directed much public anger at the count-duke and contributed to his downfall. The only structures left of this once sprawling compound are the baronial Casón itself, which in 1971 was transferred to the Museo del Prado, along with another palace that served as the army museum until it too became a part of the Prado. In 1622, Felipe laid the foundation of one of Madrid’s most venerable churches, the Colegiata de San Isidro, in Calle Toledo off the Plaza Mayor. The church served as the city’s temporary cathedral from 1885, when the Archdiocese of Madrid was created by Pope Leo XIII, until 1993 when the Almudena cathedral was completed. It was designed in classic baroque style by Jesuit priests, an outstanding example of the seventeenth-century Madrid churches built in Felipe IV’s reign. These initiatives, however, resulted in a more punitive tax burden levied on Madrileños, even after bringing in new taxpayers with the extension of the city’s boundaries. A number of residents fled Madrid for the countryside as a result, and the city’s population was believed to have suffered a decline in those years. But the majority who stayed behind reverted to the Madrileños’ time-honoured ritual of fiestas to enliven a difficult existence. Madrid in the Felipe IV years, especially towards the latter part of his reign, pulsated with gaiety and partying, as the people took to the streets to thumb their noses at the deepening adversity on the political and economic fronts. It was enough to strike terror into the hearts of Church authorities, as indeed was the case. ‘There were so many [festivities] that a scandalised Vatican reduced the number of their nuns in the city from 40 to 21. There were parties to celebrate births, saints’ days, christenings, weddings, great victories of the Spanish tercios, funerals, comings and goings at court and pilgrimages.’6 Felipe in old age (a man in seventeenth-century Spain would have considered himself fortunate to reach the age of 60) could not look back on a happy or successful reign, which, incidentally, was the 66

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longest of any Habsburg and the third longest of a Spanish monarch. ‘His later years had been as melancholy as those of [the heyday of] his monarchy, for whose misfortunes he considered his own sins to blame.’7 Towards the end of his days, Felipe faded into a shadow of his former self. He spoke little, emitting grunts and sighs in place of words, unsmiling to the end. One of his few remaining pleasures was to stroll along the high galleries of the Alcázar, contemplating the Castilian landscape that his close friend Velázquez had taught him to love. Velázquez had gone, as had the other great influence in his life, the Count-Duke of Olivares, and the king was lost for conversation with his wife and courtiers. Felipe’s eldest son by his first wife Élisabeth of France, the heir apparent Baltasar Carlos, died of smallpox at the age of 16. Of the eight children Élisabeth bore him, only two survived to adulthood, and both of these were girls. In 1647, three years after Élisabeth’s death, Felipe married his niece Maria Anna of Austria, the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III. It was she who at last presented him with a male heir to the throne, the future Carlos II, known as ‘el Hechizado’ (‘the Bewitched’), Spain’s last Habsburg king. Carlos’s other nickname was ‘el Deseado’ (‘the Desired One’), for his birth eliminated the threat of a conflict for the succession, had Felipe failed to leave a male heir. There was great relief in Madrid, in the streets as well as at court. It had been widely feared that the elderly, infirm monarch was by now incapable of begetting a child. The rumour circulating at the mentideros, which emanated from the Alcázar, was that Carlos had been conceived on the last night of his life the king was capable of performing in bed. The boy was born on 6 November 1661 under the sign of the Scorpion, the most catastrophic of the zodiac. It was not long before the celestial forebodings were fulfilled and Madrileños found that their celebrations were a bit untimely. It soon became apparent, and in the most ghastly way imaginable, that generations of inbreeding by the Spanish Habsburgs had finally come home to roost. From roughly 1500 onwards, all of Carlos’s forebears had been descendants of Juana la Loca, the deranged mother of Carlos I. As a result, the gene pool was exhausted and the last of the Habsburgs had the misfortune of being born both physically and 67

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mentally disabled. Felipe IV was mortified by his son’s abnormalities, of which extreme ugliness was the least serious. At the time his father died in 1665, when Carlos was just four years old, the child could hardly stand erect, much less walk. His mammoth jaw made it almost impossible for him to chew and his tongue was so large his speech could barely be understood. In fact he remained virtually an infant in body and mind until he was ten years old. When his father Felipe was approaching death, his physicians began plying him with a nursemaid’s milk in the belief that it contained extra­ ordinary healing powers. No sooner had word of this sordid quack treatment filtered out from the Alcázar than signs began to appear across Madrid proclaiming, in a rather malicious vein, ‘Castilla is left dangling between two breast-feeding infants,’ a reference to the monarch and his son. Carlos II came to the throne in 1676 when he was 15 years old, the legal age to rule under Spanish law. His mother Maria Anna of Austria had acted as regent from the death of Felipe IV, though she was for a time exiled by the young king’s illegitimate half-brother Juan José of Austria. In the year of Carlos’s ascendancy Castilla had reached its economic nadir. Madrid, the powerhouse of the Castilian economy, was in a state of paralysis, as was the cultural and intellectual life that had flourished under Carlos’s predecessor. The shift of economic predominance was towards Cataluña and other regions of the periphery, where people did not labour under the punitive taxes introduced by Felipe IV. In 1680 the French envoy to Madrid, the Marquis de Villars, expressed shock at the change for the worse since his first mission to Madrid 12 years earlier. ‘Although the power and the policy of the Spaniards had been diminished constantly… since the beginning of the century, the change had become so great in recent times that one can actually see it occurring from one year to the next.’8 In this set of circumstances, it was inevitable also to find Madrid caught up in a wave of crime and social disorder. This was a reality with which people were obliged to coexist on a daily basis, knowing that when they ventured into the streets there was a reasonable chance of encountering violent death. Soldiers returning brutalised 68

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and penniless from the wars became an ever-present menace to the ordinary citizenry. Vagrants, the homeless, people with nothing to lose accounted for at least ten per cent of the city’s population. The shambolic state of Madrid in the seventeenth century was recorded by more than one horrified visitor. Notable among them was Cosimo de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who passed through the city in 1668, and discovered to his alarm that even the most basic of sanitary facilities, such as proper drainage, were nowhere to be found. He also remarked that shopkeepers stood apprehensively outside their premises, sword in hand, while anxious women walked the streets cloaked in shawls and veils, leaving only one eye uncovered. One of Cosimo’s more cheerful observations was the Madrileños’ obsession with a new comfort food, a delicacy called chocolate, which had been introduced into Spain by the conquistador Hernán Cortés.9 So enamoured were the Madrileños with the drink that the court petitioned Pope Benedict XIV to change the rules regarding fasting to exclude chocolate. To their delight, the pope agreed that since one drank it, it did not break the fast. Those desperate days produced a catalogue of underworld expressions which became common coin in the Madrid vocabulary, in the tradition of classic Spanish black humour: an ‘armpit reliever’ was in those days a bag snatcher, to ‘wish one a good evening’ was a euphemism for a murder, and to be afflicted with the ‘rope illness’ meant to die on the scaffold. A famous piece of doggerel written by a priest declaiming against the culture of violence was often recited from the mentideros: Matan a izquierda y derecha, Matan de noche y día, Matan a la Ave María, Matarán al Santo Padre [They kill left and right, They kill by day and night, They kill the Ave Maria, They’ll kill Our Holy Father.]10 69

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In the midst of the surge of disorder and insecurity sweeping the streets of Madrid, the court could hardly be said to have set an example of decorous behaviour. In response to this coarsening of day-to-day life, Carlos’s monarchy offered its own brand of Church-sponsored violence. In 1680, Madrid’s Plaza Mayor was the scene of the largest ever auto de fe organised by the Spanish Inquisition. On the evening of 30 June, a blaring of horns and beating of drums at the Inquisition’s palace in the Lavapiés quarter announced the commencement of what might have been taken as a festive occasion by all but the unfortunate prisoners being led off to receive their punishment or meet their doom. A column of more than one thousand people marched in great solemnity to the Plaza Mayor. The procession was led by Inquisition officials bearing the standard of the Holy Office. Behind them came a multitude of Church commissioners and legal officials, accompanied by drums and trumpets and clarions. There followed a crowd of Dominican friars and those of other religious orders, chanting psalms. The procession was led by the green cross, the symbol of the Inquisition, and Madrid city officials and Church ministers. At stated places, a bell was rung and the town crier proclaimed ‘Know all dwellers of this city that the Holy Office of the Inquisition, for the glory and honour of God and the exultation of the holy Catholic faith, will celebrate a public auto de fe in Madrid on 30 June 1680.’ The green cross was placed atop a large scaffold and the 120 prisoners were taken to the foot of the pyre. Several came with nooses tied round their necks and these were the ones condemned to suffer flogging. Others wore vestments of shame, and behind them were brought forward the macabre effigies of prisoners who had died in custody, along with coffins bearing their bones. Those who had survived their incarceration were to endure diverse punishments, from flogging to banishment, for the heresies to which they had confessed, and which were not classified as capital crimes. Lastly there came a trembling huddle of 21 prisoners, wearing the caps and shawls of those who have been condemned to death. Unlike his pusillanimous grandfather, Carlos remained in the Plaza Mayor’s royal enclosure throughout the appalling ceremony, apparently devouring with relish the sight of flesh being seared 70

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from the screaming victims’ bodies. A streak of deep perversity was definitely among the king’s many afflictions, as was demonstrated when, towards the end of his life, Carlos travelled to El Escorial to demand that the bodies of his family be exhumed so he could look upon the corpses. Economic decline, pickpocketing and heretic-burning were the defining features of Carlos II’s Madrid. The nearly four decades from 1661 to 1700, the year of the king’s death, were a time of stagnation, if not retrogression for the city, with only a few accomplishments of lasting value to note. Luca Giordano’s painting of the labours of Hercules on the walls of the Casón del Buen Retiro and his decoration of that building’s cupola stand out as singular works of art. A tightening up of professional standards at the Concejo was a welcome development. The quality of housing construction was improved and homes were built to larger and more spacious specifications, thanks to a law requiring court officials to pay rent to landlords who were obliged to provide them with lodgings. This in turn encouraged the landlords to improve living standard in their homes. But that was about the extent of the enhancement of city life. Carlos entered into two miserably arranged and fruitless marriages during his reign. In 1679, at the age of 18, he was wedded to Marie Louise d’Orléans, the eldest daughter of Philippe I of France. The union ended in tragedy ten years later with the death of the petite and bouncy princess, ‘surely out of boredom, no longer able to put up with a sinister, slavering husband and an imbecilic mother-inlaw’.11 In 1690, a year after Marie Louise’s death, the court once again put out bunting to receive Maria Anna von Neuburg, a daughter of Philipp Wilhelm, Elector of the Palatinate, a territory of the Holy Roman Empire. Carlos’s second marriage met with no more success in presenting his kingdom with the much-desired male heir, and it is more than likely that impotence was another of the king’s misfortunes. This domineering, short-tempered woman, who provoked one scandal after the next with her imaginary pregnancies, survived her husband by 51 years. A hard-nosed Bavarian, Maria Anna managed to endure Carlos’s insupportable presence for fully a decade, yet she 71

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too failed to produce a Habsburg heir to the throne. Like her predecessor, Maria Anna (known as Mariana in Spain) was on very bad terms with her mother-in-law and namesake Maria Anna of Austria, who wished that the crown would devolve upon her great-grandson, Joseph Fernando of Bavaria. This was also a time of economic hardship and social unrest. In 1699 an angry mob took to the streets, demanding the head of the Count of Oropesa, who was in charge of the city’s provisions. The people charged him with having exported vast quantities of grain to Portugal, thereby inflating bread prices in Madrid. The crowd took their vengeance on any official within reach. They hurled stones at the Corregidor, who happened to be passing with his escort, and then moved on to besiege the Alcázar itself. Carlos was overcome with terror, utterly confused as to what course to take. Several of his more arrogant courtiers tossed coins to the crowd in an attempt to pacify the insurgents, but this only served to raise the temperature of their fury. The palace guard managed with difficulty to repulse an attempt to force the gates. Oropesa was warned of an imminent assault on his house, which fortunately was next door to that of the grand inquisitor, who allowed the count and his family to open a hole in his wall and make good their escape. In the end, the insurrectionists dispersed after being given assurances that the price of bread would be reduced to its former level. But the doubt lingered – what had gone awry in Madrid? On a winter’s day in 1698, while contemplating his failed marriages and the people’s growing disgust with his royal person,12 Carlos was struck by a sudden revelation: evil spirits were undoubtedly conspiring against him, this had to be the Devil’s own work. The logical step was to take his suspicions to Juan Tomás de Rocaberti, the Dominican friar appointed by Carlos II as grand inquisitor of Spain. No attempt was made to discourage Carlos’s barmy notions. What is more, talk of the king being the victim of witchcraft had even come up during his first marriage. The presence of demonic forces offered a handy scapegoat to explain away the spreading political unrest caused by the throne not having a successor. Thus the court found a willing ally in the Inquisition, always eager to raise the witchcraft bogeyman 72

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to explain all sorts of awkward circumstances. ‘Rocaberti… found support in the king’s confessor, Fray Froilán Díaz, who was in turn a good friend of an Asturian priest, Antonio Álvarez de Argüelles. This priest had successfully carried out numerous exorcisms.’13 From that moment, the whole sordid affair descended into the realm of pure quackery. The priest was given the task of determining whether the king was truly bewitched, so he went off to consult with Beelzebub, using as his intermediary a nun who was possessed by the Devil. And, lo, Satan informed her that Carlos had indeed been under his spell since he was 14 years old, which neatly accounts for his impotence as well as his inability to govern his people. It further emerged that the Devil’s evil spell had been passed on to Carlos through a cup of hot chocolate. Satan agreed to reveal more details of the curse, but only inside the Real Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Atocha, one of Madrid’s most venerated altars of worship. At this point Carlos’s wife, the fiery Maria Anna, began to take issue with the wacky goings on. The rumour had been going round that she too was under the Devil’s influence, which in essence amounted to a convenient ploy to shift the blame from Carlos’s malady to the queen’s infertility. Meanwhile, it was decided that exorcism was the only treatment possible for Carlos, and the job was placed in the hands of a Madrid priest, Fray Mauro Tenda, who was known to the king. If the scene had not been so frightful, it might have passed for a black comedy sketch. Carlos was seated in a locked chamber, facing an altar. In his hands was placed a fragment of the True Cross, as a talisman to ward off evil spirits. Tenda then went into a convulsion of screams, ranting like a madman and gesticulating grotesquely. This macabre ceremony went on for several hours, at the end of which Carlos was reduced to a trembling, sobbing wretch. Maria Anna was having no part of it. She herself had now been formally denounced as the guilty party behind the monarch’s impotence. But instead of cowering under the Inquisition’s accusing finger, the queen arranged for one of her confidants, the Bishop of Segovia, Baltasar de Mendoza, to be appointed grand inquisitor as successor to the recently deceased Rocaberti. Through Mendoza’s good offices, 73

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she opened a case against Carlos’s confessor Froilán Díaz, who was convicted of falsehood and given three years. And that put an end to the exorcism fever. The king may not have been possessed by demonic spirits, but he was most definitely a dying man. He had been living on borrowed time for most of his life and, by the turn of the century, at the age of 39, his hour had finally come. It was a painful, agonising death, during which Carlos the Bewitched was plagued by visions of demons wheeling about his chamber and lurking under his bed, before finally expiring on 1 November 1700.

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— 5 — madrid gets a taste of bourbon

As Carlos II lay hallucinating on his deathbed in Madrid’s Alcázar, a sinister character from Toledo drew up at the fortress gates, with an urgent matter in hand. The visitor was the cardinal archbishop Luis Manuel Fernández de Portocarrero, and as such he was led without demur into the royal bedchamber. It had always been Carlos’s wish to keep his kingdom in the family; that is, to see a Habsburg ascend to the throne. This was one more issue on which the king and his subjects failed to see eye-to-eye. No one in Madrid had much enthusiasm for a foreign dynasty taking up residence in the Alcázar, specifically not a monarch from the other side of the Pyrenees, after waging decades of war with France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But with the unhappy experiences of the recently departed Habsburgs fresh in their thoughts, Madrileños were open to a new face, and this is precisely what the duplicitous Portocarrero had in mind. Expecting great favours from a new master, the cardinal used his great authority to terrify Carlos into making a will in favour of Philippe de France, the Duke of Anjou and grandson of France’s reigning king, Louis XIV, a move that would represent the end of the Spanish Habsburgs and the dawn of a possible Bourbon era for the country. To no one’s surprise, no sooner was the news of Carlos’s death communicated to the Consejo de Estado and proclaimed from the balcony of the Alcázar than Portocarrero contrived to have himself appointed regent, a post he held until Philippe’s arrival in Madrid as the city’s new ruler in April 1701. But Portocarrero’s machinations turned out to be a 75

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wasted effort. The artful cleric was too clever by half: Felipe V (as the new king was known) sensed in him a potential source of mischief. Portocarrero therefore found no favour with the Bourbon monarch, who ordered him removed and returned to his diocese, in response to which the cardinal, led by vexation, backed the wrong horse by throwing in his lot with the Habsburgs. Felipe was barely 17, little more than the age at which Carlos I had succeeded to the throne. Like his illustrious predecessor, ‘the young Felipe spoke no Spanish and had no personal experience of the Iberian Peninsula. He therefore came accompanied, as had Carlos nearly two centuries earlier, by a host of French officials and advisers.’1 He received a cool reception. Madrileños generally display indifference to new arrivals from other parts of Spain as well as from abroad. There is no point in showing contempt towards outsiders, for Madrid has always been a city of immigrants. Records from the early eighteenth century show that only a quarter of Madrid’s inhabitants were between sixteen and forty years of age, suggesting a relatively aged population for the period. This is typical of a city with a large number of newly arrived immigrants, reflecting the fact that comparatively few people have been born in a place compared to the number who have moved there in adulthood. The presence of the court acted as a magnet for manual labourers as well as members of the landed aristocracy, who found it advantageous to live close to the centre of power. The commoners came mainly from elsewhere in Spain – Segovia, Toledo and other towns of Castilla – and sought jobs that would afford them a better and more secure existence than their small landholdings. The waves of immigration of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not equalled for centuries, in fact not until the 1980s when thousands of job-seekers arrived from Latin America, eastern Europe and North Africa. These foreigners have been received, by and large, with a notable absence of hostility, but if ever Madrileños’ goodwill towards outsiders was put to the test, this was with the arrival of the first Bourbon king. Felipe V looked about him and was mistrustful of what he saw. The echelons of the city administration were filled by Madrid’s upper 76

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classes, those with means and influence at their disposal. That would change, but naturally the favouritism the monarch dispensed to his vast French entourage did not sit well with the established aristocracy, whose concern in those troubled economic times was job security. This helps explain why a good number of these patricians took up the cause of the Archduke Charles of Austria, in the dynastic conflict known as the War of the Spanish Succession. Felipe V might have enjoyed a peaceful life in Madrid had it not been for the actions of his grandfather the Sun King of France. In February 1701, Louis XIV effectively announced his intention to annex the Spanish Empire by naming Felipe V heir to the French throne should the current occupant die without issue. This left his European enemies with no choice but to go to war, as Britain, Portugal, the Netherlands and Austria joined forces in a coalition to prevent Spanish power in Europe and America falling into the hands of the Bourbons. More than a decade later, what had turned into a virtual world war, waged as far afield as Peru, was brought to a close with the treaties of Utrecht and Rastatt. The final arrangements left Felipe V as king of Spain but removed him from the French line of succession, thereby averting a merger of the two most powerful states of continental Europe. Austria had from the outset refused to recognise the Bourbon monarchy in Spain, a development that it knew would wreck its hopes of placing an Austrian candidate, the Archduke Charles, on the Spanish throne. England’s fear was that a Bourbon monarch in Spain would upset the balance of power in Europe in favour of French hegemony. For Portugal, it was a golden opportunity to get its own back after decades of Spanish rule. Likewise, the Dutch had a long-standing grievance to settle with their former masters. In Spain itself, Cataluña, Aragón and Valencia, resentful of war and taxation, embraced the cause of the allies opposed to Felipe V. In the midst of all this sabre rattling, with war looming on the horizon, Madrid remained overwhelmingly loyal to their king: better the devil you know than risk seeing another inbred, dim-witted Habsburg in the Alcázar. Leading figures at court also rallied around him as the best hope to preserve intact the Spanish Empire. 77

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For having stood loyal to the Bourbon cause, Madrid was to suffer two brief invasions during the war, and on both occasions Felipe was forced to flee the city. The first time in history Madrid was captured by foreign troops was in 1706, when a Portuguese and Austrian column marched on the capital under the Portuguese general António Luis de Sousa, Marquês das Minas. That is to say, the allies launched an assault on the city, but were at first repulsed by a furious citizenry who took up arms against the invaders. In the end, the two armies’ superior firepower prevailed and Madrid became an occupied city. By the end of the year, the capital was recovered by Felipe V and his ally James FitzJames, first Duke of Berwick, the illegitimate son of James II, who was serving with the French forces. The taking of Madrid was a glorious hour for the Portuguese, who but 70 years before had been Spanish vassals. ‘Unfortunately for them, their elation at this honour… prevented them from pushing forward and securing their success.’2 The generals and their officers had settled into a life of leisure and inaction, spending their time hunting in the Pardo woodlands near the city and enjoying the local women and wine, and this proved to be their undoing. Felipe rushed back to Madrid to savour the fruits of victory – shortlived and rather bitter though they were, as it turned out. In 1710, Madrid was in the grip of a panic. The English commander-in-chief, General James Stanhope, was reported to be massing the allied armies to march once again on the capital. On the face of it, there was little to justify the Madrileños’ effusion of popular goodwill towards their Bourbon king. The apparatus of government was preparing to be removed to Valladolid as a precautionary measure, to be followed soon afterwards by the king himself, along with his wife María Luisa of Savoy and their three-year-old son Luis. Madrid had taken on the appearance of a city digging in for a siege. Despite the spread of mayhem in the streets, when evacuation at last became inevitable people still rallied round the monarch, who for the second time was about to abandon his capital to its fate. In the words of Philip Henry Stanhope, a British historian and descendant of General James Stanhope, in an account written a century later and based on the latter’s papers, ‘The same loyal flame seemed to burn in every breast. With very few 78

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exceptions, all the nobles clung to what seems the falling cause… the other classes caught their spirit… all the people who remained attended the emigrants to the gates with tears and prayers.’3 In all, some 30,000 people left Madrid in the face of Stanhope’s advancing army, which took possession of the capital on 21 September 1710. A few days later the Archduke Charles entered the city, and after a show of devotion at the Real Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Atocha, the Austrian pretender made his way towards the Alcázar with full military pomp. The proclamation of Charles as King of Spain elicited a thunderous shrug of the shoulders from Madrileños: Shut up at home, they left the deserted streets to silence and gloom. Deeply mortified at a reception so contrary to his hopes, the archduke soon stopped short, refused to continue his progress to the palace, and indignantly exclaiming ‘This city is a desert!’ again left Madrid by the gate of Alcalá.4 Charles took up residence at the country house of a nobleman friendly to his cause, from where he ‘ruled’ for little more than a month. The Duke of Berwick had effectively pulled the Bourbons’ chestnuts out of the fire in 1707 at Almansa, near Albacete, where his Franco-Spanish forces dealt the allies a resounding defeat.5 In 1710, Louis Joseph, Duke of Vendôme’s army delivered the coup de grâce at Brihuega, attacking as the allies retreated from Madrid to Barcelona. After this defeat, Charles withdrew from Madrid to become the new Holy Roman Emperor, and the contenders on both sides accepted the Utrecht and Rastatt peace treaties. The historic Madrid–Barcelona rivalry that today manifests itself most notably in football was decided three centuries ago in Madrid’s favour when the Cataláns made the disastrous mistake of joining the antiBourbon cause. ‘The fall of Barcelona [in 1714] was followed by the wholesale destruction of Cataluña’s traditional institutions.’6 Cataluña was to regret taking up arms against Felipe, for two years later the king issued a decree (the Nueva Planta) imposing Castilian, the dialect spoken in Madrid, as the official language of the entire country, a cause 79

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for grievance that has lasted to our own times. A triumphant Felipe wasted no effort in reinforcing an absolutist state with its centre in Madrid, by depriving Cataluña, along with Valencia and Aragón, of the autonomous privileges they had enjoyed in the past. The ancient Consejo de Aragón was revoked, and captains-general were appointed in this region as well as Valencia to replace the more powerful office of viceroy. The king had convened the Cortes in Madrid in 1713 to proclaim his son Luis Prince of Asturias, following the established tradition of succession. But on this occasion representatives of the Cortes of Valencia and Aragón had been in attendance at the ceremony by royal command, a harbinger of Madrid’s assumption of these regions’ political and fiscal powers as a result of the decree three years later. Felipe’s victory on the battlefield greatly reinforced the Bourbon monarchy’s authority, and with it that of the city which served as its power base. Madrid experienced the beginnings of a physical transformation under its first Bourbon monarch. Felipe invested the city with his grandfather’s predilection for grandeur in the style of Versailles and the Louvre, but of course on a less pretentious scale, in deference to the Castilian abhorrence of ostentation. The proposal that was made under the newly appointed Corregidor, the Marqués de Vadillo, identified the need for expansion beyond the boundary fences that had been fixed two centuries earlier by Felipe II. The first step was to demarcate a new perimeter ring around the existing limits, and this required the extension of bridges across the Manzanares River – the Puente de Toledo leading south towards La Mancha was one of the most noteworthy achievements. The original bridge had been twice destroyed by flood, in 1671 and 1680. The Madrid-born architect Pedro de Ribera was assigned the task of reconstructing the bridge, which still spans the Manzanares, and this was carried out in the Spanish baroque style known as churrigueresco, after Ribera’s mentor José Benito de Churriguera. The new bridge was made of granite, its turrets giving it the appearance of a solid, unconquerable fortress. Ribera ranked as something comparable to a court architect and was responsible for five new churches, two stately homes and several new 80

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roads, all of which have survived. He also came up with a design for a new royal palace to replace the Alcázar, when the old fortress was gutted by fire in 1734. Ribera was a precursor of modern architects in that he created an awareness of the need for urban green space and the idea of zoning, which developed into the concept of neighbour­ hoods grouped around a definable centre. His projects were typically adorned with fountains, statues, water wheels and wooded areas, adding a sense of open space and leisure. Ribera’s greatest legacy is the Cuartel del Conde-Duque (the Count-Duke’s Barracks), built in 1717 by order of Felipe V to house his Guardia Real (Royal Guard).7 The Concejo raised 2,000 escudos de vellón (equivalent to almost £240,000 in today’s money) through special tax levies to finance the construction of this massive baroque edifice, which sprawls over 244,000 square feet of the old city. In keeping with Madrid’s clever reinventing of historic buildings (the Reina Sofía museum, once a military hospital, the Matadero arts centre, the old municipal abattoir, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum, the former headquarters of a failed bank, stand as examples) the Cuartel del Conde-Duque near the Plaza de España now serves as a cultural and civic centre. Under the reign of Felipe V, Madrid was to witness the commencement of the city’s most imposing monument, the Palacio Real (Royal Palace). Nearly twice the size of Buckingham Palace, with almost four times the number of rooms (2,800 compared with 775), it is one of the largest royal residences in Europe. It arose from the ashes of the Alcázar, where on Christmas Eve 1734 a fire broke out in the rooms of the French artist Jean Ranc, who a decade before had been summoned to Madrid by Felipe as portrait painter to the royal family. Most unfortunately for someone of his profession, Ranc suffered from poor eyesight and he therefore failed to spot the blaze in time. When the cry was raised, the warning bells were confused with the call to midnight Mass, and before the dawn hours the entire sixteenth-century fortress had been reduced to a smouldering ruin. Felipe was not in residence at the Alcázar that night. Like most of his predecessors, the king preferred the more sumptuous surroundings of the Palacio del Buen Retiro. For fear of looting, the fortress doors had been ordered shut, which hampered evacuation efforts, though 81

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in the end there was little loss of life, with only a handful of palace attendants dying in the blaze. But several hundred works of art were consumed by the flames, among them Velázquez’s painting depicting the expulsion of the Moors, which in 1627 won a competition on the subject set by Felipe IV for the best painters of Spain.8 Several unsung heroes had the presence of mind to hurl what paintings they could lay their hands on into the courtyard, including Velázquez’s Las meninas, widely acclaimed as the artist’s greatest masterpiece. There is no record of Felipe, who had been born and brought up amid the opulence of the Palace of Versailles, shedding any tears over the destruction of the cold and gloomy Habsburg fortress. What is now the official residence of the king of Spain in Madrid9 was the work of the Italian architect Filippo Juvarra, who had designed festive settings for Felipe’s wedding, and the painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, who was responsible for the frescoes on the throne-room ceiling depicting Spain as ruler of the globe. Another Italian master builder, Juan Bautista Sachetti, was brought to Madrid after Juvarra’s death. Sachetti worked in close collaboration with another Italian architect, Francesco Sabatini, and with Spaniards Martín Sarmiento and Ventura Rodríguez, and the palace was completed in 17 years. The third of Felipe’s sons to ascend the throne, Carlos III, was to become its first royal occupant. It is thanks to Felipe V that the French Enlightenment found its way across the Pyrenees to the court of Madrid. These were good days for the capital. The end of the war ushered in a period of intellectual and cultural revival, in which Felipe inspired the founding of learned bodies like the Real Academia Española (Royal Spanish Aacdemy), the institution that regulates the Spanish language, and the Biblioteca Pública de Palacio (Palace Public Library), the forerunner of today’s Biblioteca Nacional de España (National Library of Spain). In 1739, the first Spanish dictionary was published in Madrid in six volumes, and the city was inundated with newspapers and gazettes to satisfy the appetite of an ever more inquisitive and literate public. Madrileños’ insatiable appetite for stage entertainment was satisfied by two new theatres, which have survived as the Teatro Real and Teatro Español. One of the few traditions to suffer under the Bourbons was 82

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the bullfight. The spectacle of six bulls being hacked to death for the amusement of a cheering crowd, whatever its alleged artistic merits, was abhorrent to Felipe’s Versaillesque sensibilities. Taking their cue from the monarchy, the nobility turned away from the sport. Until then it was common for members of the aristocracy, even grandees of Spain, to take a cape and sword into the ring to match their skills against a half-ton fighting bull. But people still mobbed the ring, as they had since the days of Felipe II, when up to 40,000 spectators, a third of the city’s population, would amass in the Plaza Mayor on bullfight days. The gap left by the demise of the high-born bullfighter was filled by recruiting salaried matadors for the first time in Spain. The Inquisition was not officially abolished until 1834, but under Felipe’s reign it all but ceased to operate. The only religious edifices built during this period were two convents, of which no trace remains. Despite the king’s lack of interest in church-building, religion was, like bullfighting, still held close to the common people’s hearts. While the Inquisition decayed, a religious fervour began to take hold in the form of pious brotherhoods. The one that became most deeply embedded in the city’s life was the ‘Hermandad del Pecado Mortal’ (‘Brotherhood of Mortal Sin’), a popular nickname for what translates in English as the long-winded ‘Royal Congregation of Servants of Our Lady of Hope and Holy Ardour for the Salvation of Souls’. ‘Its mission was to provide shelter for repentant young prostitutes and beg alms at night from the people of Madrid.’10 It was a terrifying sight to gaze upon the procession, lit by a torch at its head, as it marched through the deserted streets, chanting hymns about eternal damnation. Few dared refrain from tossing a few coins to the supplicants from their windows, the money tied up in bundles that were set alight so that they could easily be found. Felipe V ruled until his death in 1746, with the exception of a strange nine-month interlude in 1724 when he handed over the kingdom to his son Luis, for reasons that have never been clarified. The king had married Elisabetta Farnese, an Italian noblewoman of imperious temper, in 1714, after the death from tuberculosis of María Luisa earlier that year at the age of 25. The marriage had been arranged by Cardinal Giulio Alberoni and the head of the queen’s bedchamber, 83

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Marie Anne de la Trémoille, Princess des Ursins. Alberoni found in the new queen a tool for promoting his plans to restore Spain’s greatness in Europe, and as a result sent his erstwhile accomplice the princess packing, leaving Felipe at the mercy of both him and an insanely ambitious wife. Felipe’s concern was that their aggressive policies would constitute a violation of the Utrecht Treaty and lead to a renewal of hostilities. In desperation, in 1724 he stepped aside to remove himself from the line of succession to the French throne. Fate was to thwart his strategy, for his son Luis died of smallpox after ruling for less than a year. Felipe V holds the distinction among European royalty of having sired three ruling monarchs. The year of the king’s death, 1746, brought his second surviving son by María Luisa to the throne as Fernando VI. Fernando, the fourth in the Spanish Bourbon line, was a patron of the arts and learning, who was driven by his secretary of the treasury, the all-powerful Marqués de la Ensenada, to modernise the country. Fernando introduced a means-tested system of taxation based on property holdings, and in 1758, probably for the first time in the corporation’s history, the Madrid Concejo was able to report a budget surplus. The monarch stimulated trade with the South American colonies and he was also responsible for the creation of the Giro Real, an institution that would evolve into the Banco de España. The king founded the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (Royal Academy of San Fernando for the Fine Arts) in 1752,11 as well the city’s botanical gardens and an astronomical observatory, all of which continue to thrive. His wife, the Portuguese princess María Bárbara de Bragança, to whom he was devoted, shared his love of music and the opera, and both of these art forms captivated audiences in Madrid during her husband’s reign. After the death of María Bárbara in 1758, Fernando fell into a state of depression in which he would not even dress, but wandered unshaven, unwashed and in a nightgown about the palace grounds. He survived his wife by only a year and as it was a childless marriage the crown passed to Fernando’s half brother Carlos, hitherto king of Naples. *

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Carlos III was the most beloved monarch in Spanish history and the wisest of the Bourbon rulers. He was affectionately known to Madrileños as ‘el Rey Alcalde’ (‘the Mayor King’), a tribute to all he accomplished in his 29-year reign, culturally and architecturally, in his attempt to put Madrid on an equal footing with Europe’s great cities. More than any of his predecessors, Carlos III felt a deep affection for his noticeably dilapidated, grimy and imperfect capital. Foreign observers, from the papal nuncio to European travellers, often expressed dismay at the state of things, but this can be explained not by any innate slovenliness on the part of the Madrileños, but rather by a lifestyle that kept the streets filled with people at almost all hours. The streets were an open space that encouraged strolling and contemplation, socialising and entertainment, and in which were found circulating or even residing hawkers, knife grinders, rag-andbone men, the blind, beggars, tricksters and so on. The tavern was the main meeting place: The 1791 census tells us there were 481 taverns in Madrid and 45 wine shops (for a population of fewer than 200,000), eloquent figures in themselves which require no commentary. We must not forget that alcohol was also available in cafés, inns and many other establishments, all of which were unlicensed.12 Small wonder that little time was devoted to maintaining a network of streets that were rarely if ever free of traffic. Carlos III took the decision to initiate a programme of reforms, and so quickly did this become a reality that even the king himself was taken by surprise. The monarch could not help but strike a comparison with his former kingdom of Naples and its wealth of historic monuments and museums. Madrid might not have millennia of history behind it, but there was definitely scope for an overhaul of the city’s physiognomy. Carlos saw to the construction of a network of coherent roads converging on the capital. The streets and public squares were cleaned and restored, to the extent that bailiffs were sent out once a week on an inspection tour, with the power to impose fines on residents who failed to keep a tidy home. Street lighting came to 85

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Madrid for the first time in 1765, along with patrolling nightwatchmen known as serenos, an institution that survived until the 1970s. But the monarch’s greatest achievement was in the sphere of architecture. The Puerta de Alcalá was given its definitive form. The celebrated Cibeles fountain took its place in the square of the same name. The grand church (now Royal Basilica) of San Francisco el Grande was built and later decorated with works by Goya, after the Franciscan monks whose monastery had stood on the same spot petitioned the king to have the architect Francesco Sabatini design the church’s façade and two towers. The Palacio de Liria, now the ducal palace of the Alba family, was completed in 1773 by the classicist Madrid architect Ventura Rodríguez. Carlos III also ordered the construction of the Real Fábrica de Porcelana (Royal Porcelain Factory), which would be destroyed by the British in 1812 during the Peninsular War. The Real Fábrica de Tapices (Royal Tapestry Factory), still in operation, had been commissioned in 1720 by Felipe V. The kindly old king, whose unattractive face was not spared Goya’s acerbic brush, will always be remembered in history for his greatest project, the Museo del Prado. Carlos approved the specifications for the gallery, which was originally planned as a natural-history museum, in 1785, three years before his death. He was fortunate to have reigned at a time when Madrid had great architects living in the city, such as Sabatini, Ventura Rodríguez, the master of Spanish classicism, and Juan de Villanueva,13 all of whom worked on the Prado. Villanueva was a child prodigy who entered the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in 1750 at the age of 11. Carlos III later appointed him architect to the royal family, a position he retained for the rest of his life, into the reign of Carlos’s grandson Fernando VII. The king wanted an expansive building with a grand rotunda, a central gallery full of natural light and a cube-shaped space at either end. This is exactly what emerged from the plans and today, along with the National Gallery in London and the Hermitage in St Petersburg, the Prado ranks as one of the world’s three great picture galleries. Carlos III worked tirelessly to improve his capital and the lives of its people. The love affair was reciprocal: on 7 December 1788 Madrid came to a standstill after reports from the Palacio Real confirmed 86

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what all had feared, that the king was gravely ill. The city was held in suspense while the court physicians, in an unmistakable sign of their despair, called for holy relics, including the remains of San Isidro and his wife Santa María de la Cabeza, to be placed at the king’s bedside. When Carlos expired in the early hours of 14 December, some 60,000 people held a silent procession around the palace. ‘They had lost the most illustrious of their neighbours, the most illustrious Mayor of Madrid.’14 Carlos’s death, and the accession of his son as Carlos IV, represented far more than the mere passing of another monarch. For Madrid, it marked the start of a renewed period of turbulence, with the coming of the Peninsular War and a new century beset with confrontation and fratricidal conflict. The year of Fernando VI’s enthronement, 1746, had seen the birth of Francisco Goya, a painter whose work represents a faithful chronicle of Madrid life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Goya was born the son of an Aragonese gilder and he died, 82 years later, a political exile in Bordeaux. But he will always be indentified with the Madrid courts of the three Bourbon monarchs he immortalised on canvas, Carlos III, Carlos IV and Fernando VII. Goya’s first artistic endeavours in Madrid took him to the Real Fábrica de Tapices, where he executed designs, based on everyday life, of pleasure-seeking and popular traditions, such as colourful romerías – country outings to religious shrines. Looking at one of his tapestry cartoons, La cometa (The Kite), one observes a gathering of revellers who reflect the relaxed self-confidence of Carlos III’s enlightened capital. The foppishly attired Madrileños frolicking on a grassy mound, their gaze turned to a kite bobbing lazily overhead, could be taken for a scene at Versailles or an English stately home. Goya’s vast output is in itself a rogues’ gallery of Madrid society under the Bourbon monarchy. He became court painter to Carlos III in 1786 and during the reign of Carlos IV remained a great favourite at the Palacio Real. The life of the Madrid court was frankly libertine, and Goya was no exception. His name is linked with the Duchess of Alba, who appears in many of his portraits, including, it is conjectured but not proven, the famous La maja desnuda (The Naked 87

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Maja). Unlike painters who sought favour at court by flattering their subjects on canvas, Goya stood aloof from royal toadying. Despite the extraordinary candour and realism of his ‘warts and all’ portraiture, almost all the patricians of Madrid society were eager to pose for him. Goya’s paintings and etchings left no recess of Madrid life unexplored, from taverns to lunatic asylums, boudoirs and throne rooms – and of course the macabre pinturas negras (black paintings) and his political masterpieces depicting the Madrid uprising of 1808. It was only Goya’s credit at court that made possible the publication of his Los desastres de la guerra (The Disasters of War) etchings, a series of horrific scenes from the Peninsular War which constitutes an indictment of mankind rather than the statement of a reformer bent on correcting specific abuses. But these works were withheld from the public until 35 years after the artist’s death. Standing in the presence of Goya’s two masterpieces in the Museo del Prado depicting Madrid’s defining moment, the resistance to Napoleon’s occupying armies of 1808, the spectator is awed by the horrors of war. These works do not express the august magnificence of Velázquez’s Las meninas, rather their grandeur stems from raw emotion: the furious dagger-wielding citizenry falling upon Napoleon’s Mamluk cavalry in El dos de mayo de 1808 en Madrid (The Second of May 1808 in Madrid), the Madrid partisans huddled in terror before a French firing squad in El tres de mayo de 1808 en Madrid (The Third of May 1808 in Madrid). The artistic transcendence of these paintings is undeniable: the grim execution scene served as inspiration for Édouard Manet’s L’Exécution de Maximilien (The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian), as well as Pablo Picasso’s Guernica. One of the few blemishes on Carlos III’s otherwise peaceful reign took place in March 1766, when an insurrection broke out in the streets of Madrid. This was the Motín de Esquilache (Esquilache Revolt), so named for its intended victim, the Marquis of Esquilache, Carlos III’s chief minister. The near state of siege that took over the capital for several weeks provided Goya with inspiration for his Motín de Esquilache rendition of the riots, as well as his future masterpieces on the catastrophes-of-war theme. 88

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Discontent with the government had been brewing for some time. This was fuelled by a sharp rise in food prices and commodities, mainly bread, olive oil, coal and cured meat, a consequence of Esquilache’s liberalisation of the grain trade. People were also angered by Spain’s strategic defeat in the 1761–63 Spanish–Portuguese War, which in turn was part of the larger Seven Years War between 1756 and 1763, involving most of the great European powers in a confrontation over colonial and trade empires. Esquilache’s decision to increase contributions to the royal treasury was another detonator of the crisis. But the straw that broke the camel’s back and sent mobs rampaging through the streets of Madrid was an incident that could have inspired a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. The uprising began on a Sunday afternoon in the Plaza de Antón Martín, one of Madrid’s most popular gathering places for people to hear about and debate local issues. Madrileños had woken to what might be taken as just a piece of trivia, shouted through the streets by the town criers and posted on buildings in main squares. Esquilache had banned the wearing of the traditional cape and floppy wide-brimmed hat, such as those worn by Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s swashbuckling hero of the Captain Alatriste novels. Since time immemorial, this garb had been accepted as part of a Madrileño’s birthright. But it was not the aesthetics of the hat and cape that Esquilache took issue with: too often, he rightly asserted, the brim pulled down over the eyes masked the face of a thief or an assassin, whose cloak concealed a sword, the carrying of which in public had been banned since the days of the Reyes Católicos. Esquilache had intended to replace the long capes and broadbrimmed fedora-style hats with French-style short capes and three-cornered hats, as part of his plan to ‘Europeanise’ and modernise Spain. The gabachos (a contemptuous term for the French) were viewed with suspicion since the Bourbons had been foisted upon them in the War of the Spanish Succession, and in a few years’ time Spain would be at war with the new French Republic, with a full-scale French invasion of the country not far behind. With Napoleon casting a covetous eye on Spain, this was not an auspicious time to be telling the people of Madrid to adopt French dress.

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King Carlos IV was quite taken by the dashing young nobleman from Extremadura, Manuel de Godoy, whose meteoric rise at Madrid’s Palacio Real would later give the monarch much cause for reflection. The same might be said for Godoy’s well-publicised affair with the queen, María Luisa de Parma, of which Carlos learnt in a letter from his opposite number in France, Napoleon Bonaparte. As prime minister in 1801, Godoy took Spain down the road to war, something the country could ill afford. With support from France, Spain declared war on Portugal. The campaign got off to an unpromising start, although the superior firepower of the two great European allies prevailed in the end. The following year Godoy negotiated a treaty with Great Britain, by which Spain recovered sovereignty of Menorca in exchange for handing over Trinidad to England. Three years later, this impetuous megalomaniac (who had been granted, not without a touch of irony, the title of ‘Príncipe de la Paz’ – ‘Prince of the Peace’) declared war on his erstwhile friend Great Britain after the seizure by the British navy of Spanish treasure ships on their way home from Peru. This episode led to the Battle of Trafalgar in October 1805, which destroyed the French fleet and conclusively ended Spain’s last hopes of retaining world-power status. In October 1807, Godoy’s corrupt machinations reached their limit when, in the name of the Spanish sovereign, he negotiated a secret treaty at Fontainebleau with Napoleon. This shameful document proposed nothing less than a carve-up of Portugal between Spain and 91

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France, with each of the signatories annexing a third of Portuguese territory, and the final third going to Godoy himself, as ‘King of the Algarve’. The pretext for the invasion was Portugal’s refusal to abide by Napoleon’s Berlin decree of November 1806, under which Continental nations were to close their ports to British subjects and have no communication with Great Britain. Portugal, however, refused to blockade its ports to British ships. Napoleon thought the treaty signed with Godoy a splendid arrangement and it was agreed to allow French troops to march through Spain to join up with their Spanish allies, thence to descend arm-in-arm on Portugal. The French emperor, however, was a far cannier operator than even Godoy might have suspected. Napoleon’s army crossed the Spanish border in November 1807 and by January his forces had reached Burgos and Valladolid. The French took Lisbon a month later but Carlos IV disappointed Napoleon by failing to act swiftly to take his share of the territory that had been agreed under the Fontainebleau treaty. Moreover, the hapless monarch was soon to find out that Napoleon’s agenda was not so much the conquest of Portugal: he had a much bigger prize in his sights. The emperor’s real objective was the subjugation of Spain and the expulsion of the Bourbon dynasty, a temptation almost impossible to resist with a feeble ruler on the throne being the only obstacle in his path to conquest. And the key to achieving this objective was Madrid. Carlos IV took an indifferent attitude towards governing his kingdom, which in any event was in the hands of Godoy and the queen, and he seemed equally apathetic about his energetic wife’s infidelity. The king preferred to spend his time in the pursuit of the wild boar and stag that abounded around Madrid, seldom playing more than a passive role in state affairs. That arrangement suited Godoy down to the ground, although the all-powerful chief minister was rapidly losing favour with the people. Godoy was with justification accused of selling Spain out to Napoleon, which made the 24-year-old heir Fernando, a strong supporter of closer ties with Great Britain, the rising star in the eyes of the public. In connivance with Carlos, Godoy had spared no effort to exclude Fernando from any share in government. The heir to the throne was now cast as 92

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Godoy’s deadly rival, a young upstart who could be eliminated by appealing to Napoleon. What became of the Spanish crown once that conflict erupted into the open could be described as a round of pass the parcel. Carlos took Godoy’s side but after a short-lived uprising at Aranjuez, south of Madrid, the king took fright and in March 1808 he abdicated in favour of his son, who took the throne as Fernando VII. Carlos removed himself to France, straight into the waiting arms of Napoleon, who made him his prisoner. The emperor confronted father with son in Bayonne, when the former king had to be restrained from landing a fist on his successor, whom he saw as a traitor. Napoleon ‘persuaded’ Carlos to retract his abdication and instead hand over the crown to the emperor himself. That done, Napoleon then passed it to his own younger brother Louis, who refused to accept it, hence it came to rest on the head of the French emperor’s elder brother Joseph. Napoleon then dispatched his brother-in-law General Joachim Murat into Spain at the head of an elite corps of 50,000 soldiers, cavalry and artillery. By the time the mob at Aranjuez was doing its utmost to murder a terrified Godoy, who was being rushed away wrapped in a carpet and under heavy escort, Murat’s troops had crossed the Somosierra pass and stood within striking distance of Madrid. If Napoleon’s plan was to capture and dismember Portugal, now that his objective had been achieved what strategic sense was there in marching a huge army on Madrid instead of, for instance, taking Salamanca or Ciudad Rodrigo, which would have shortened supply lines to his troops in Portugal? And if what he really had in mind was to recover the French fleet, which had been under British blockade at Cádiz since Trafalgar, why did he not send Murat to besiege that port instead? A look at the map of Spain sheds light on this mystery: Madrid and the roads leading from the capital made it the stronghold from which either of these objectives, an invasion of Portugal or an assault on Cádiz, could most effectively be achieved. Moreover, if the British had it in mind to attempt an invasion of their own, the quickest route to any point along the coast was from Madrid, the centre of the Iberian Peninsula. General Pierre Dupont’s advance was even more revealing of Napoleon’s grand strategy. His troops were garrisoned 93

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in Valladolid and when given the order to march, instead of moving west to Portugal, the route they followed was towards Segovia and the Guadarrama passes, leaving no doubt that the grand design was to encircle the capital. In 1807, shortly before Carlos IV’s abdication, the people of Madrid were told that the advancing French army came as Spain’s ally. There was no cause for alarm – on the contrary, Madrileños were to receive Napoleon’s troops in peace and with fraternal love. France was, officially at least, a friend. Carlos, María Luisa and Godoy were under virtual house arrest in Bayonne. Fernando was in a coach headed in the same direction, having ignored his people’s pleas to remain behind and place himself at the head of the defence of Madrid. Fernando left a Supreme Junta in the capital under Carlos’s brother, Don Antonio, with orders to show respect and loyalty to Murat and his occupying forces. The Junta dispatched a letter to Fernando in Bayonne, enquiring if it was his intention to open hostilities against Napoleon and seal the border, to prevent the entry of more French troops. There was no reply: Madrid had been abandoned to its fate. A municipal decree issued on 18 March 1808 called on Madrileños to show friendship towards the foreign soldiers and even provide them with shelter if required. The Junta had resigned itself to unconditional surrender to Napoleon’s army. By late April, Murat and Dupont had deployed some 55,000 soldiers in and around Madrid. The Garde Impériale (Imperial Guard) artillery was dug in at the Retiro park, Mamluk and lancer cavalry units held the area around the pósito (grain store) where the Cibeles fountain stands, and all other strategic locations were garrisoned by French battalions. With only 6,500 Spanish troops in the city, all of whom were confined to barracks, the potential defenders were outnumbered almost ten-to-one. The bulk of the Spanish army, nearly 80,000 men, were scattered around the Iberian Peninsula and as far afield as Denmark. Even if they had been recalled and placed under a unified command, pitching the Spanish forces against a well-trained and equipped French army of 117,000 that had now crossed the Pyrenees and was advancing on Madrid, it would have ended in disaster. 94

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The presence of thousands of foreign troops in Madrid created the usual friction between an occupying force and the city’s inhabitants. French soldiers engaged in frequent rape and looting, resulting in violent confrontations in taverns and dark alleyways. A general edginess had taken hold of the city, with tension mounting by the day. Monday 2 May dawned bright and crisp after a night of heavy rain. People awoke with a sense of dread, as the events of the previous days bode ill and no one could have faith in the future in that court without a king, occupied by a foreign army whose soldiers, day after day, committed outrages, often with a tragic outcome.1 Early that morning news went out that the last remaining member of the royal family in Madrid, Don Francisco de Paula, was to be removed to France. A large crowd gathered in front of the Palacio Real’s cobbled courtyard and, as feared, presently a coach and horses came clattering out of the gates, Carlos’s youngest son gazing forlornly from the window. A locksmith named José Blas de Molina rushed past the guards, broke into the palace and from a balcony proclaimed to the angry crowd below: ‘Treason! They have robbed us of our king and they want to take away all the royal family. Death to the French!’ Murat had been briefed about the threat of an uprising and had sent one of his aides to gather intelligence on the intentions of the multitude in front of the palace. The officer was lucky to escape with his life, as the mob had worked itself up into a state of anti-French frenzy. Murat dispatched a platoon of grenadiers to rescue his aide, while at the palace gates a member of the Junta pleaded with the crowd to disperse. Without warning, there came a volley of musket fire followed by the boom of cannon. The grenadiers had opened fire on the protestors, leaving a number of dead and dying scattered on the ground. Murat then sent in his Polish light cavalry in support of the foot soldiers. Those in the crowd who were armed returned fire with muskets, while others brandishing daggers and swords tore suicidally into the French lines. 95

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Madrid’s modern history began on the morning of 2 May 1808. Carlos III’s Puerta de Alcalá, erected in 1776, still bears the impact of French artillery shells that were fired at the insurrectionists, who gave the world the word guerrilla, from the diminutive of the Spanish guerra (war). Murat saw the situation was getting out of hand and quickly ordered his men to take up key positions in the city where the rebels were congregated: the Plaza Mayor, the streets around the Puerta del Sol and at the main gates. People began arming themselves with whatever weapons they could lay their hands on, ancient pistols, carving knives, pointed sticks and the like, while women stood ready on their balconies, with paving stones and pots of boiling water. The first battle of the Peninsular War, a conflict that was to herald Napoleon’s downfall, had broken out in the streets of Madrid. But while popular heroes were being created in the early-afternoon hours, the Spanish troops garrisoned in Madrid stood by impassively, under orders from the collaborationist Junta to maintain strict neutrality. The people had pitched themselves against three French infantry detachments, one squadron of cavalry, four companies of artillery and the elite Garde Impériale, in all somewhere between 25,000 and 35,000 troops. The signal act of heroism on that day took place in what is now one of the hearts of Madrid’s nightlife, the café-lined Plaza Dos de Mayo (2 May Square). Two centuries ago it was the Monteleón artillery park, defended by a handful of Spanish patriots and regulars. The action that took place on the afternoon of 2 May inspired the Valencian artist Joaquín Sorolla’s monumental painting of the battle’s tragic final moments. At one o’clock that afternoon, a group of rebels rushed into the artillery park imploring its commander, Captain Luis Daoíz, to open the arsenal to the people. Daoíz thought the uprising a hopeless enterprise and at first refused to distribute arms to the insurrectionists, until the arrival of 33 volunteer troops and two officers under Captain Pedro Velarde, who supported the fight. Once they were armed, the people began to dig in behind hastily erected barricades, the armoury’s single cannon was wheeled into place at the entrance, and women tore up their bed sheets to prepare bandages for the expected carnage. They did not have long to wait: 96

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a squadron of French grenadiers took up positions in front of the barricades, demanding the rebels’ surrender. That the Spanish, in the face of battle-seasoned enemy troops ten times their number, could hold out for three unrelenting hours of combat, stands as a tribute to the fighting spirit of those who defend their homeland against a foreign invader. When Murat received reports of the failure to clear the insurgents, he sent General Joseph Lagrange, a hardened veteran of the French Revolutionary Wars, to do the job at the head of a column of cavalry and infantry, plus four cannon. Velarde and Daoíz came under heavy bombardment, yet they managed to hold their positions until four that afternoon, by which time all knew that the battle was a lost cause. Lagrange launched a furious assault with 2,000 men: Velarde was shot at point-blank range; Daoíz went down mortally wounded, sword in hand, and died a few hours later after being carried in secret to a patriot’s home. The uprising was crushed and with it, at least for the time being, all hopes of ridding Madrid of Napoleon’s troops. A people’s rebellion in the cause of liberty, especially one that is romantically doomed to failure, would not be complete without a woman martyr to adorn the pantheon of heroes. Manuela Malasaña was a 15-year-old seamstress who had followed the women volunteers to Monteleón artillery park. After the uprising had been brutally put down, Murat issued orders that any Spaniard found carrying arms of any sort was to be summarily executed. Manuela tried to escape her pursuers but was captured as she was making a dash for home. The French troops, intoxicated with the blood of battle, forced Manuela to the ground, intending to rape her, but she lashed out at her attackers with her seamstress’s scissors, but this was her fatal self-incrimination: a weapon. She was put against a wall and shot on the spot, dying with her honour intact. Manuela is listed in the Archivo General Militar de Madrid (Madrid Military Archives) as victim 74 of 409 Spaniards killed that day. (The number of French dead varies wildly, from 25 to 1,700, depending on whose figures one chooses to accept.) She is commemorated by the name of a neighbourhood, Malasaña, whose centrepiece is the Plaza Dos de Mayo. That evening, a French officer knocked at the Malasaña family’s door in the narrow, winding 97

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Calle del Barco, behind what is now the Gran Vía. In a gesture of questionable taste, the officer handed over to Manuela’s family the clothes she wore on her back when she was shot: a cotton blouse and waistcoat, black trousers, woollen socks, shoes and felt hat, along with 60 reales in cash. Manuela Malasaña was not the only woman to die that day in the defence of Madrid. The archives list five other known victims, the most celebrated of whom participated in the Monteleón battle. Clara del Rey, a 43-year-old mother of three, was behind the barricades with her husband and children when she was hit in the forehead by shrapnel from a French cannon. An article in a Madrid newspaper two years later reported that she left two orphans who survived the uprising, hence it can be assumed that her husband and one of her children were also killed in the fighting. In addition to those who fell in combat, an unknown number of Madrileños were stood in front of French firing squads, most of them in the hours immediately following the capitulation. The most graphic description of the reprisals is Goya’s El tres de mayo de 1808 en Madrid, which depicts the torch-lit executions that took place that same night at the Montaña de Príncipe Pío. Some claim the artist witnessed the shootings through a spyglass, although this is highly improbable. What is more likely is that he arrived at the site before the bodies were allowed to be taken away for burial and was therefore able to take sketches from ‘real life’. The painting that hangs in the Prado embodies the most powerful historical document of the 2 May uprising. An uneasy peace descended on the city, as grieving Madrileños clustered at the cemeteries to bury their dead, but only when Murat allowed the corpses to be lifted, for he wanted them to remain in the streets for several days as a warning to those who might be harbouring seditious sentiments. Slowly, a weary and defeated people returned to their homes to come to terms with a daily existence under French occupation. The Diario de Madrid newspaper of 5 May carried a message from Murat to the people, referred to as ‘valiant Spaniards’. The general’s version of events speaks of a well-planned and well-executed conspiracy by ‘our common enemies’, and alerts all 98

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‘good citizens… gentlemen, property owners, traders, manufacturers, clergymen, those who hold civil and military office… to the threat of renewed revolutionary activity’.2 The series of edicts that followed from French staff headquarters were aimed at nipping another revolt in the bud. Firstly and most important of all, Murat was to assume the presidency of the Junta. Once in control of civil as well as military power, in other words with full dictatorial powers, the general thought it tactful to try to ingratiate himself with the people who a few days before would have cheered the sight of him dangling from a lamp post in the Puerta del Sol. Nonetheless, the ban on capes and broad-brimmed hats, which had been the detonator of the Esquilache riots, was lifted. The populace was allowed to carry clasp knives (but not daggers), as well as scissors and shaving razors on their person. Those political prisoners not accused of blood crimes, most of whom had been shot out of hand, were released and on 7 May the theatres reopened their doors, giving the performances that had been on the programme for five days earlier. The brutal suppression of the insurgency failed to dampen the people’s hostility towards the French invaders, not only in the capital but throughout Spain. Indeed, the first declaration of war was proclaimed by the regional government of Asturias in northern Spain, which sent an envoy to London to try to enlist the aid of a gravely ill George III in the battle to oust the French occupiers. The Madrid rebellion had collapsed, but the anger it generated soon exploded in a war that was to last five years, culminating in the expulsion of Napoleon’s army and the emperor’s undoing. In exile on the island of St Helena, Napoleon acknowledged that it was not the failed 1812 invasion of Russia, but the Spanish war that had destroyed him. On 20 July 1808 Joseph Bonaparte3 entered Madrid from the Puerta de Alcalá, where he was greeted with silence by a small crowd of onlookers. It was a replay of the cold reception shown to a previous foreign usurper, the Austrian pretender Archduke Charles, when he entered the city by the same route a century earlier. Joseph came at the head of a procession of more than 100 carriages bringing generals, ministers, noblemen and parliamentary deputies. It was to all intents 99

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and purposes a court and government on wheels, under the escort of two battalions of infantry, a squadron of Murat’s cavalry and a company of Polish horse. Those who longed for the return of the legitimate ruler, Fernando VII, had dubbed him ‘el Deseado’ (‘the Desired One’), which had also been the nickname of Carlos II. If ever there reigned in Madrid an undesired monarch, it was Napoleon’s elder brother. ‘The Brief ’ would have been an apt title for José I, for his first attempt to rule Spain lasted but 11 days. On 19 July, General Pierre Dupont was marching his army north from Andalucía, confident that the obstacle looming ahead in the road, the town of Bailén, would fall easy prey to the crack imperial forces under his command. What he failed to count on were the Spanish guerrilla fighters, who would render meaningless the notion of a front or rear in any engagement. When the Madrid-born General Francisco Javier Castaños arrived on the scene at midday, his men had barely to fire a shot. Dupont’s forces had been cut to pieces and the general had capitulated, marking the first major defeat for the Grande Armée, for which Dupont was later imprisoned by a furious Napoleon. Castaños took nearly 18,000 French prisoners, including the elite Garde Impériale. The French left 2,200 dead on the battlefield, the Spanish fewer than 300. The humiliation dug deep enough for Napoleon to rant about ‘le bourbier espagnol’ (‘the Spanish quagmire’). When news of the catastrophe reached Madrid, the French commanders ordered a general retreat north to the Ebro River, abandoning the capital and much of central Spain. Madrid’s Palacio Real was once again left without a monarch in residence. The French began their withdrawal at dawn on 31 July, the rearguard relentlessly harassed as they marched from the city by a mass of jeering Madrileños, who wasted no time in organising street parties to celebrate their liberation once José departed the city the following day. A number of merrymakers broke into the French army stores in the Retiro park, where apart from 20,000 muskets and 80 guns, they discovered a large cache of wine with which to enliven the festivities. On 21 August the people of Madrid proclaimed Fernando VII king – the only hitch was how to bring the monarch home from his 100

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gilded imprisonment in France. This would require clearing the rest of the country of the French occupiers. Napoleon was not amused at the news of his mighty army having been ousted from Madrid by a people he scorned as a backward rabble. In November 1808, the emperor concentrated eight army corps on the Spanish border, in all some 250,000 troops. He called up 140,000 new conscripts and transferred three armies from Prussia to Spain. In a very short time, Napoleon had shattered the Spanish defences and cleared the road to Madrid in a ten-day lightning advance. Nevertheless, the French found it difficult to subjugate the newly conquered areas, as the Spanish reverted to their now much-feared guerrilla-warfare tactics. As General Matthieu Dumas recalled: ‘Each day saw the murder of several Frenchmen, and I travelled over this assassins’ countryside as warily as if it was a volcano… French soldiers, including a number of Napoleon’s aides, regularly disappeared, never to be seen again.’4 To meet this onslaught, the Junta of Madrid dispatched the units at its disposal, 9,000 men and 16 cannon, to defend the northern approaches to the capital. From the flatlands to the east, the French batteries were close enough to shatter part of the wall enclosing the Retiro park. Madrileños awoke to the thunder of 30 cannon hammering the city’s feeble defences, which one by one crumbled to pieces, allowing French grenadiers to charge in through the breaches, where they were confronted by fanatical hand-to-hand fighting. The people were armed with 8,000 muskets that had been removed from the armoury and distributed to all those taking part in the city’s defence, on orders of General Castaños, who had arrived in Madrid to take his place at the barricades. It was a valiant gesture, but a futile one in the face of overwhelming numbers of battle-seasoned imperial troops. To the north, the handful of cannon at the Spaniards’ disposal miraculously managed to hold off the enemy’s advance for a few hours, but they too were eventually silenced. On 1 December, Napoleon was at a local aristocrat’s estate on the northern outskirts of Madrid, where the Chamartín railway station now stands. The following day, during a lull in the artillery duel, Madrileños could see Napoleon’s troops, the emperor himself astride his horse in a clutch of mounted officers, arrayed along a rise less 101

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than a mile from the city centre. The French sent a delegation under a flag of truce to the Junta to negotiate Madrid’s surrender. With the reprisals in the aftermath of 2 May fresh in people’s minds, the reply was not unexpected: ‘The people of Madrid are prepared to die in the ruins of their city rather than surrender.’5 Napoleon was aware of the cost in lives that would result from house-to-house combat and he was probably not inclined to destroy the Spanish capital with artillery fire. He sent a second, more generous offer, which was handed to General Tomás de Morla, who was behind the barricades in Calle de Alcalá. Morla and one of his aides went to meet Napoleon at his encampment half a mile north of where the main battle was taking place. Further resistance was useless, and they knew it, though this was to bring great disgrace to Morla in the eyes of most Madrileños. Napoleon offered to guarantee the lives and property of the people, as well as the city’s churches. The terms were accepted and at four o’clock that afternoon the defenders at the barricades turned their astonished eyes to a white flag waving from the bell tower of Santa Cruz church. A great lamentation was heard in the streets as people fired their muskets in the air, shouting abuse at the French as well as their own Junta. On 6 December, Murat re-entered Madrid. Napoleon was good to his word: a curfew was put in force from ten p.m. and taverns were forced to shut an hour before, but there were no reprisals, arrests or summary executions. French sentries were deployed at the city gates and troops patrolled the streets. A column of Spanish army regulars marched south-westwards to Extremadura, unmolested by the occupying French forces. Napoleon briefly assumed the crown and in this short span he took a broom to everything he detested about Spain, mainly the people’s steadfast loyalty to the Catholic Church. The emperor spent two weeks camped on the outskirts of Madrid issuing proclamations regarding the reform of what he considered Spain’s medieval ways; he revised the tax code, abolished the Inquisition and many religious orders, and created a new administrative system. Feudal privileges were eliminated, along with customs posts within national territory, a tradition that was pure anathema to Europe’s most fanatical centralist. 102

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With the retaking of Madrid in early December 1808, Napoleon regarded victory in the Iberian campaign a done deal. All that remained was to occupy southern Spain and oust the British from Portugal. Rather than push on, in January 1809 the emperor returned to France, leaving his brother Joseph and Marshal Nicolas Jean-de-Dieu Soult to finish the job. Despite having at their disposal a total force that had now swelled to more than 270,000 men, three-fifths of the empire’s total military strength, they failed. Joseph Bonaparte, who was shortly to ascend the Spanish throne for the second time as José I, was determined to take the emperor’s reforms even further. Had he not been Napoleon’s brother and as such tainted as one of the despised enemy, José I might have gone down as a popular ruler. During a reign that lasted almost four years, he changed the physiognomy of Madrid in a way that most would agree was a benefit to the city. A few crumbling churches were torn down to make way, in most cases, for sturdier, more modern places of worship. An unintended consequence of one of these demolitions, that of the church of San Juan Bautista, was the loss of Velázquez’s tomb. Recent excavations have sadly failed to uncover any traces of the painter’s remains. A number of convents also fell victim to the wrecking ball, but in their place Madrileños gained much-needed green areas, like the plazas Santa Ana and Los Mostenses. Streets were widened and paved, and some squares were enlarged, all of which was intended to make Madrid a healthier and more habitable place. When the Spanish delegation reached the court of George III to plead for British support in their war against the French, they were received with courtesy and circumspection. The emissaries, some of whom had never before set foot outside their native land, must have approached their mission with trepidation. England, the ‘Perfidious Albion’, still aroused a feeling of wariness in many prominent Spanish thinkers of the day. But it was also the only European power with the military strength to oust the French from their homeland. It is a pity the delegation left no record of their stay in London, or their encounter with William Cavendish-Bentinck’s government.6 Helping Spain militarily would require fighting the French on land, and 15 103

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years of on-and-off warfare with France since 1793 had brought mixed results. But in the end, the chance to strike a blow at Napoleon through Spain proved irresistible to the British government. The first Royal Navy units set sail while Madrid was still recovering from the 2 May debacle. ‘In mid May 1808 Britain dispatched ships to patrol the waters outside Cádiz, one of Spain’s most important ports. Emboldened by the British presence, Spanish troops seized the French fleet docked at Cádiz. An unofficial alliance between Spain and Britain had begun.7 In the summer of 1808 Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, led an expeditionary force of 9,000 men from Cork. The troops landed, unopposed, at the mouth of the Mondego River, north of Lisbon, on 1 August. From there they marched on the capital and defeated the French, eventually ousting them from Portugal. With that theatre secured, and after further campaigns in Portugal, Wellesley turned his force eastward to begin his campaign in Spain. A two-day battle at Talavera de la Reina, south of Madrid, in July 1809 ended in the defeat of the French forces, which fell back on the capital along with Joseph Bonaparte. His brother the emperor’s hunch that Wellesley would advance by the mouth of the Tagus River against Madrid proved wrong, and for this campaign Wellesley was created Viscount Wellington. Meanwhile, a great flurry of political activity was taking place in the port of Cádiz. In 1810, Madrid was the capital of Spain in name only. The city was occupied by foreign troops, the Junta’s writ did not run beyond Castilla, at most, and the king was in exile, a prisoner of the enemy ruler. In September of that year, Spanish patriots, intellectuals and political leaders converged on Cádiz, the only city in Europe to have withstood a bombardment by Napoleon’s forces. More than 300 deputies, as they styled themselves, convened an emergency session of the Cortes on a national level. It took nearly two years to produce, in March 1812, a constitution in which for the first time the term ‘liberal’ entered the world’s political lexicon. Spain was one of the first countries to frame a Magna Carta based on the principle of national sovereignty and embodying the separation of Church and state, with individual liberties guaranteed by the latter. Fernando VII was recognised as the legitimate monarch, albeit a 104

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constitutional ruler subservient to the national government. Spanish liberalism, as defined in the constitution, embraced neither atheism nor agnosticism. Spain was to be a secular state in which the clergy’s role was confined exclusively to spiritual matters, though Catholicism was recognised as the official religion.8 The Church bitterly attacked the framers of the constitution when they reaffirmed the abolition of the Inquisition, a step that had already been taken by Napoleon. The result of this clash made it virtually impossible for liberal Catholicism to take root in the country, as the Church hierarchy entrenched itself in a hostile and fanatical opposition to the new leaders. Then in 1813, the new government dissolved the traditionalist-dominated Cortes and several prominent conservatives, called ‘afrancesados’ (‘Frenchified’), went into voluntary exile in France. It may not have been to the liking of the reactionaries, but the 1812 constitution has been hailed as ‘more far-reaching than that of any representative government of its day, whether Great Britain, the United States or France, in bestowing political rights on the vast majority of the adult male population’.9 On the battlefield, the allied operations were at first marked by a series of setbacks. The British had underestimated the strength of France’s presence in Spain. Despite Napoleon’s order to transfer 30,000 troops to the Russian front, his Peninsular army still numbered more than 200,000 men. On 22 July 1812, Wellesley and his Spanish guerrilla fighters inflicted a stinging defeat on the French at the Battle of Salamanca. Joseph, Napoleon’s brother, was between Wellington and Madrid, but with just 22,000 troops. Wellington took only a short time to make Madrid his target. If he went north, he risked allowing [General Nicolas Jeande-Dieu] Soult and Joseph to unite and threaten his rear. If he headed for Madrid, Joseph would be unlikely to risk a battle and would retreat to the east. Besides, the occupation of the Spanish capital would be a spectacular political coup.10 Wellington now marched across the Guadarrama range, encountering virtually no resistance along the way, to descend south on the capital. 105

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Madrid was at this moment a scene of tumult and despair. The king [Joseph] had retired from Segovia [to Madrid] still in a state of uncertainty as to whether Wellington intended to turn against him. He quite realised the fact that… it would be too late for him to arrive in time to save Madrid.11 He was right: Wellington’s forces had set up camp just outside the city on 6 August, while the French king was for the second time making hasty preparations for his departure. On 11 August, General Louis Joseph Hugo (uncle of Victor) evacuated the capital, leading a column of troops followed by more than 2,000 vehicles loaded with bundles and bales, furniture and whole families of afrancesados, as well as the elderly, women and children. The general was relentlessly harassed on his retreat by Spanish guerrilla forces, led by their almost mythical commander Juan Martín, known as ‘el Empecinado’ (‘the Undaunted’).12 The government of Cádiz, in recognition of the guerrilla commander’s iron-willed leadership, appointed him governor of the Madrid region. On 12 August El Empecinado entered Madrid through the timehonoured route of the Puerta de Alcalá, joining up with Wellington, whose Anglo-Portuguese army marched in from the other side that same afternoon, to an ecstatic welcome from the population, who were cheering, laughing and singing. ‘Women wept with joy… a great multitude awaited the allied army: banners waved from the balconies of the Post Office, Customs House and Royal Academy… the people’s joy struck a sharp contrast with the lugubrious picture of Madrid of previous days.’13 Wellington and El Empecinado addressed the crowds from the Ayuntamiento balcony: the constitution of Cádiz, framed in the name of Fernando VII, was to be proclaimed the following day and Madrid was to have a new government. The people shouted their support to both commanders, despite the Madrileños’ weariness with foreigners dictating policy to their city. One person of note who was not overly fond of the English general was Goya, who came close to eliminating the future victor of Waterloo from history. Wellington knew of the artist’s fame and did not want to miss the chance of having his portrait painted, but the result was not at all to his liking. When 106

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Wellington’s blustery disapproval was translated into Spanish, Goya cast a furtive glance at a brace of loaded pistols on his table, took a step in their direction and had to be restrained. The taking of Madrid and ousting of the French was a day of great jubilation for the troops who had undergone months of rough campaigning in a desolate land. A military surgeon with the British army was able to exclaim: ‘The town itself is the most beautiful I ever saw. There are an immense number of palaces and other fine houses, and the streets are wide and well built. It far exceeds the expectations of everyone.’14 The allies had reached Madrid none too soon, given the extreme calamities the city’s inhabitants were experiencing. There was widespread hunger in Madrid throughout 1811 and the following year. Poor harvests forced up the prices of wheat to a level that made bread unaffordable to the vast majority of Madrileños, with the result that up to 25,000 people, of a population of 175,000, died of hunger in those months of misery. Wagons were sent out twice a day from the city’s churches to collect the emaciated cadavers that littered the streets. Madrid’s parish records for that year laconically list ‘nourishment deficiency’ as the primary cause of death, compounded of course by outbreaks of typhus and dysentery. After taking the winter to regroup, Wellesley and an allied army composed of British, Spanish and Portuguese troops struck through the hills north of Burgos, which led to the French abandoning that city too. Continuing to outflank the French lines, Wellington caught up with and smashed the army of King José at Vitoria in June 1813, for which he was promoted to field marshal. In December of that year, Napoleon ordered the release of Fernando VII from his splendid incarceration at Talleyrand’s Loire Valley Château de Valençay. It was nothing to do with an act of magnanimity on the emperor’s part – Napoleon had signed a treaty with Spain that provided for the Spanish pretender’s freedom in exchange for a complete cessation of hostilities. However, the Spanish were mistrustful of Napoleon’s intentions and they carried on chasing the enemy across the Pyrenees. By that time, Wellesley had marched his forces over the mountain passes into French territory. Now on the run, Soult did his best to 107

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counter the allied advance, but to no avail. With the French defeat at Toulouse in April 1814 and Napoleon’s abdication, the Peninsular War came to a victorious end. One month earlier Fernando VII had come back to ascend the Spanish throne, to the great elation of the people of Madrid, who poured into the streets in their thousands to cheer their returning king. Fernando’s popularity among Madrileños was unshakable during the years of warfare against the French occupation. Carlos IV’s son was the people’s best safeguard against a seizure of power by the hated Godoy, after Napoleon finally quitted Spain. Fernando was seen as an innocent victim of a web of intrigue spun by the former prime minister, the creature of France. So it was all the more painful to find out the king’s true intentions the hard way, and this in short order turned Fernando VII into one of Spain’s most detested monarchs. It took only a few weeks on the throne for the king to repudiate the constitution of Cádiz and impose his rule as absolute monarch. The seeds of the constitution’s demise had been sown at Cádiz, when the country’s reformers produced a document that was destined to antagonise the privileged classes and the clerics. It was on Fernando’s triumphal march back to Madrid, and in the weeks that followed, that disaffected conservative politicians and the Church hierarchy poisoned his mind against the progressive-minded framers of the constitution. The king ordered its abolition on 4 May and a week later he had the liberal leaders arrested and imprisoned. For Madrileños, who had once hailed their absent monarch as El Deseado, the king had now become Fernando ‘el Traidor’ (‘the Traitor’). One of the first acts of Fernando’s autocracy was to restore the Jesuits, an order that aroused deep-rooted opposition in many quarters. This sparked years of conflict, once again turning the streets of Madrid into a battleground. The only potential challenger to Fernando’s tyrannical rule was his father Carlos IV, who languished in exile for five years after his son’s enthronement before dying broken-hearted on 20 January 1819, less than three weeks after having lost his wife, María Luisa de Parma. As for Godoy, the supreme rascal, he returned quietly to Madrid in 1844, 11 years after Fernando’s death, to reclaim his confiscated property and titles. That done, he went to Paris to 108

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indulge in a comfortable life, one that came to an end in 1851, when he was 84. Things began to go badly wrong for Fernando in 1820, when a revolt broke out in favour of the 1812 constitution.15 The uprising began with a mutiny of the troops under Colonel Rafael del Riego, who sent his men to the Palacio Real to arrest Fernando. The king grovelled to the insurgents as he had done to his parents, but Riego was not impressed by Fernando’s entreaties. He ordered that the king be taken from Madrid to Cádiz. His captors continued to ignore the monarch’s pleading and empty promises to liberalise his regime. These events represented the beginning of the Trienio Liberal, a brief period of greater tolerance during which the 1812 constitution was reinstated. It was brought to an end in 1823, however, when France launched the invasion of the Hundred Thousand Sons of St Louis in order to preserve the Spanish throne for their puppet, Fernando, who had little choice but to rely on foreign support. The French intervention ended with the defeat of the Spanish liberals at the Battle of Trocadero, after which Fernando VII was reinstated. The king revenged himself on his enemies with great ferocity, executing his opponents on a scale that left even his French rescuers sickened and horrified. Needless to say, one of his first victims was Riego, who in November 1823 was hanged in public in Madrid’s Plaza de la Cebada in front of a crowd of 1,500 spectators. Fernando had steadfastly refused to allow his parents to return to Madrid, mindful of the very real danger this would pose of the people rallying round the old king. He would have done better to keep a watchful eye on his younger brother Don Carlos, who had his own designs on the throne. Reactionary to the core though he was, Fernando’s policies were not regressive enough to appease the powerful faction of fanatical Catholics who wanted to see the Inquisition restored as an unconditional religious safeguard. In December 1829, the woman who was to become Fernando’s fourth wife, his niece María Cristina de Borbón-Dos Sicilias, arrived in Madrid to a clamour marking one of the most memorable events of the day. It had been a long time since Madrileños were able to take to the streets for a royal celebration, and 109

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the partying went on for several days and nights. There was a repeat performance of the festivities less than a year later, when in October 1830 the queen gave Fernando a female heir. A ripple of relief was felt at the Junta of Madrid at the prospect of a smooth transition to a new and hopefully more enlightened reign under the future Queen Isabel II. But there was a hitch: Isabel had now displaced her uncle Don Carlos in the line of succession, thanks to a last-minute manoeuvre by the king, who revoked the Salic Law that had been introduced by Felipe V at the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession. The law had already been repealed by the Cortes in 1789, but Carlos IV failed to publish a ‘pragmatic sanction’, a royal decree that carries the force of law, to confirm this resolution. What Fernando did in 1830, conveniently during the queen’s pregnancy, was no more than to recognise the will of the Cortes. But in doing so he unwittingly drew Spain into an upheaval known as the Carlist Wars, Europe’s last dynastic conflict, for Don Carlos, Fernando’s younger brother, refused to recognise the abolition of Salic Law. The three Carlist Wars of 1833–76 had little material impact on Madrid. On the other hand, the political turmoil stirred up by this clash between reactionaries and liberals was very much centred on the capital. Fernando’s death in September 1833 gave his brother an opportunity to vindicate his claims to the throne without offence to his principles, for in his own opinion and that of his partisans he was now King Carlos V. The rigid orthodoxy of his religious opinions, the piety of his life while residing as a prince at Madrid, and his firm belief in the divine right of kings to govern despotically, made Carlos an abomination in the eyes of Spanish liberals. Before Fernando’s death, the extreme clerics close to the court, who were called the apostólicos, found even this reactionary despot wanting in religious energy. But the prospect of an enlightened female ascending the Spanish throne was too horrible even to contemplate, hence the clerical coterie closed ranks around Don Carlos as their legitimate claimant. But to no avail, for on 24 October 1833, less than a month after Fernando VII’s death, the three-year-old Isabel was proclaimed Queen of Spain, with her mother María Cristina assuming the regency until her daughter reached her majority in ten years’ time. 110

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It would be a banal tyranny indeed that failed to bequeath to its subjects some extravagant shrine for posterity: Timur’s Bibi-Khanym Mosque in Samarkand, Titus’s Roman Colosseum, the Giza Pyramids of the pharaohs – all testaments to the despotic pursuit of immortality. Fernando VII was little more than a conniving mediocrity, one who did leave Madrid a legacy of his presence, but on a far less imposing scale. Yet it could be argued that the capital gained more from the enhancements carried out under his rule than whatever splendour might be attributed to the colossal piles of the aforementioned. The 19 years of Fernando’s reign were a period of brutal repression of all those who opposed his ruthless brand of absolutism, but politics aside, during these years Madrid benefited from a number of small-scale yet lasting improvements. The first great works of art were hung in the newly completed Museo del Prado, which opened its doors under Fernando. An exchange, known as the Bolsa de Comercio, was founded to facilitate trading in companies that were setting up in Madrid, though these were mercantile societies in the main, as Spain had not experienced an industrial revolution. The Retiro park was replanted and given statues and fountains to repair the devastation it had suffered under the French occupation. In short, Madrid acquired a more genteel appearance in accord with, belatedly, the age of European Romanticism. The only monument raised specifically to Fernando’s narcissism was the Puerta de Toledo,16 which stands at what was the southern approach to the city. Its construction could be the best representation of the political vicissitudes of the time. José I laid the foundation stone and inserted next to it an image of the constitution of Bayonne. With the expulsion of the French in 1813, it was decided to make this a triumphal arch to receive the Constitutional Congress… and the old symbols were replaced by the new constitution and some coins.17 But then came Fernando VII, under whom the gate was once again redecorated, replacing all the previous symbols with an almanac of 111

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the year of his enthronement, a carving of the pro-Fernando Diario de Madrid newspaper and, rather curiously, a ‘guide for foreigners’. In 1824, the emblems that had been displayed on the arch during the liberal uprising were dynamited and in 1827 the gate acquired its final form.

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María Cristina’s position with regard to the 1812 constitution was somewhat ambiguous, and mistrusted by the progressive elements at court. Hence in April 1834 the Consejo de Ministros (Council of Ministers) drew up an Estatuto Real (Royal Statute), which superseded the constitution, establishing a bicameral legislature with extended male suffrage, with a strong presence of deputies from the newly formed Partido Moderado (Moderate Party) and Partido Progresista (Progressive Party). But there was no doubt that Spain was to continue having an absolute, albeit more liberal, form of monarchy. The regency by no means marked a seamless transition to Isabel’s reign. Shortly after the death of Fernando VII, María Cristina had secretly married an ex-sergeant from the royal guard, Agustín Fernando Muñoz, with whom she had several children while trying to keep their marriage a secret. Had she made the marriage public, she would have forfeited the regency, but her relations with Muñoz were widely known at the Palacio Real and at every Madrid mentidero. When the news finally became public, the army and government liberals demanded she stand aside. María Cristina and Muñoz left for France in 1840, with General Espartero replacing her as regent until Isabel’s coming of age. Spain was then engulfed in several decades of strife known as the Carlist Wars. The three conflicts were fought primarily in the Basque Country, from where the partisans of Don Carlos drew the bulk of their support, and to a lesser degree in Aragón, Cataluña and Valencia. Carlos accompanied his armies in the field during the 113

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first war, without displaying any of the qualities of a general or even much personal courage. He was often carried over difficult places on the back of a stout guide known as the ‘burro real’ (‘royal jackass’). The first war ended in August 1839 with a treaty signed in the Basque Country between the loyalist General Baldomero Espartero and the Carlist Rafael Maroto. As a result, Don Carlos crossed the Pyrenees into exile in France, but one of his commanders, an exceedingly vile sadist named Colonel Ramón Cabrera, vowed to continue the fight. Cabrera planned to march his forces south for an assault on Madrid, but was obliged to call it off when England failed to deliver the shipment of arms he had requested. In 1836, as civil war was raging across Spain, there pitched up in Madrid an Englishman who, as an agent of the Bible Society, came intent on persuading the government to authorise a translation of the Holy Scriptures into Spanish, for a population that was more than 60 per cent illiterate. George Borrow took lodgings in a posada, or inn, adjacent to the Puerta del Sol, Madrid’s bustling central square, which he described as the great place of assemblage for ‘the idlers of the capital, poor or rich’.1 He was aware that the idea of printing and circulating a vernacular version of the New Testament in a country in the stranglehold of a fanatical Catholic Church was always going to be a hard sell. Borrow sought the help of Britain’s ambassador to Madrid, George Villiers, in attempting to arrange an interview with the liberal-minded prime minister Juan Álvarez de Mendizábal, a quirky individual in his own right. When Fernando VII repudiated the constitution of 1812 and unleashed his persecution of its supporters, Mendizábal joined the exodus of like-minded liberals and took refuge in London, where he opened a trading company. Borrow reasoned that having spent 13 years in England and with his mastery of the English language, Mendizábal would lend him a sympathetic ear. Thanks to Villiers’s good offices, Borrow’s request was granted and he was off to the palace to meet the prime minister, ‘a huge athletic man, somewhat taller than myself, who measures six feet two without my shoes’.2 Mendizábal received Borrow in silence and kept him standing in his office for a quarter of an hour, while he shifted through a pile of papers on his desk. Just as Villiers had warned, Mendizábal, 114

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whose family was of Jewish origin, was a bitter enemy of the Bible Society and all it stood for. But there was a glimmer of hope for the missionary in that the prime minister agreed to consider Borrow’s entreaties in a few months’ time, when he hoped the country would find itself in a more tranquil state. He sent his visitor away, suggesting that on his next visit he bring not Bibles but guns and powder to put down the Carlist insurgency. Alas, by the time Borrow returned to the palace, Mendizábal was out of a job. In spite of his failure on behalf of the Bible Society, Borrow managed to fill his time in Madrid profitably, taking in a bullfight and even a double execution by garrotte, a device by which a metal band around the victim’s neck is tightened with the turning of a crank, until death is accomplished by a broken neck or strangulation. His observations of the capital nearly two centuries ago are of a remarkably contemporary flavour. This world traveller found Madrid the most interesting city he had ever visited, a crowded place barely able to contain its 200,000 inhabitants, who in Borrow’s words made Madrid what it was. ‘Petersburg has finer streets, Paris and Edinburgh more stately edifices, London far nobler squares, while Shiraz can boast of more costly fountains… but the population!’3 Madrid also differed from the world’s great capitals in that unlike a place like Constantinople, a city that embraced more than 20 nationalities, Madrid was monocultural, its ‘mass is strictly Spanish’.4 If Borrow was happy to see nothing but Spanish faces in Madrid, he expressed particular dislike for the growing phenomenon of American cultural imperialism: Madrid has ‘no multitude of insolent Yankees… with an air that seems to say, the land is our own whenever we choose to take it.’5 Borrow’s confidence that Madrid’s population ‘is Spanish and will remain so as long as the city itself shall exist’6 was misplaced. He would be horrified to learn, for instance, that 7,500 of his detested multitude of Yankees, insolent or otherwise, now reside in the city. Before Mendizábal was forced to resign over failing to make good on his promise to conclude the Carlist Wars, he brought in his sweeping Desamortización Eclesiástica (Ecclesiastical Confiscation), a set of decrees that resulted in the expropriation and privatisation of Church properties in the name of liberal reform. The government wished to 115

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use the land to encourage the enterprises of small property owners, since much of the land was underused by languishing monastic orders. This initiative had radical consequences for Madrid, by opening up new streets and squares, bringing a change in ownership of religious edifices and allowing for the construction of new residential housing. ‘It was logical for the confiscation of religious property to have an impact on Madrid, since despite the demolitions carried out by the French king [Joseph Bonaparte] there were still 146 Church properties in the city.’7 Mendizábal’s programme for Madrid went ahead on a tide of anti-clericalism. Public hostility towards the Church was incited when an outbreak of cholera was wrongly attributed to the deliberate poisoning of the city’s drinking water by monks.8 This triggered a wave of violence in which a number of priests and monks were murdered by the mob. A more rational diagnosis might find the cause of the cholera epidemic in the 575 open sewers that still polluted Madrid in the 1830s, despite Joseph Bonaparte’s aborted plan to place a covering – 1,375 feet in length and 11 feet in width – over the city’s principal drainage system. Potable water was in any case a constant problem for Madrileños, who at that time could draw less than a gallon per day per inhabitant from the city’s 150 public fountains, and this of highly questionable cleanliness. The Ayuntamiento forbade using drinking water for washing or other personal uses, which had to be attended to with fetid well water. Under such conditions, and taking into account that bathrooms were unknown to Madrid homes, it is a wonder that waterborne epidemics were not an everyday occurrence. It was not until 1851 under prime minister Juan Bravo Murillo that work began on a proper water supply for Madrid, the Canal de Isabel II, which is still the capital’s primary source of drinking water. As a former finance minister, a portfolio he took up again when he later returned to politics, Mendizábal saw the Desamortización as a priceless opportunity to use the proceeds of the expropriations to pay off government debt. He found many enthusiastic buyers in the business community who were keen to acquire church buildings at knock-down prices. The next eight years witnessed Madrid’s first – but by no means last – stampede into property speculation. To no avail did professional bodies like the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San 116

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Fernando appeal to the government to halt the levelling of historic churches. A number of convents and monasteries left vacant as a consequence of the expropriations found a new use as government dependencies, army barracks, almshouses and literary societies. The Spanish parliament moved into the Espíritu Santo convent in the Carrera de San Jerónimo, where after much refurbishment and enlargement it stands today as Las Cortes Españolas. When the parliament was split into upper and lower chambers in 1837, the Senado (Senate) took up residence in an Augustine convent in the Plaza de la Marina Española, and the Universidad Complutense (Complutense University) was moved from the city of Alcalá de Henares, 20 miles north-east of Madrid, to a Jesuit seminary in Calle de San Bernardo.9 These edifices are still standing, but those that were torn down became marketplaces, squares and residential houses, leased to tenants by the entrepreneurs who had cashed in on Mendizábal’s fire sale. In some cases, the Desamortización simply enlarged upon previous confiscations and demolitions, for this was in reality an ongoing process, one that was given greater impetus and scope under Mendizábal. Such was the case of the Plaza Santa Ana, where once stood a seventeenth-century Carmelite monastery, demolished in 1810 by Joseph Bonaparte, presumably to make way for some grand project, but which never developed beyond a vacant plot of land. Under the Desamortización the square was brought up to the fashionable standards of the Romantic age, and the Plaza Santa Ana is now one of Madrid’s most popular venues for tapas crawls and the walking of rather bizarre breeds of dog. Central squares such as Plaza Tirso de Molina and Plaza Vázquez de Mella were created in place of demolished convents. The streets to the north of the Palacio Real were opened up to accommodate an entirely new residential neighbourhood, one of several that gave rise to the expression ‘los Madriles’ (‘the Madrids’), which acknowledges the fact that Madrid is indeed a city of barrios (neighbourhoods), each with its own style. The person who endowed Madrid with a modern infrastructure, one that would remain largely unchanged for the better part of a century, was the acclaimed mayor Joaquín Vizcaíno. Typical of the 117

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city’s great reformers, Mendizábal among them, Vizcaíno was not a Madrileño by birth. He was a Galician, as well as a nobleman, a soldier and the founder of Spain’s first savings bank (Caja Madrid). Like many newcomers from the provinces, Vizcaíno devoted his life’s work to the capital. Under his brief, two-year administration, which ended when he fell foul of the political turmoil of the 1830s, the mayor initiated a series of vital urban reforms: new sewers were created, numerous trees were planted in the main streets and squares, house numbering was brought up to date, gas lamps were added to the street-lighting system, roads were widened to facilitate the flow of traffic and pavements were raised to protect pedestrians from passing carriages. There was also extensive building work, including four covered markets and a monument to the 2 May uprising. While all this sprucing up was in progress and, it must be added, with the young Isabel II struggling to defend her throne against hostile politicians and some clerics, not to mention bands of heavily armed Carlists, a new culture was taking hold in Madrid, one based around ‘a social landscape of cafés, theatres, squares and boulevards in which the new middle class were prominently visible’.10 The most charming and, fortunately, enduring expression of this renaissance were the tertulias, the daily intellectual gatherings held in the many cafés that began to proliferate throughout the city. The 35 years of Isabel II’s reign were marked by the Carlist Wars, political instability of the highest order,11 a plethora of pronunciamientos (political declarations, usually announcing a coup d’état) and the occasional street barricade. The café tertulia played a dual role in this hotbed of intrigue. It served as a meeting place for conspirators to plot the government’s downfall, but, to a far greater extent, it was a forum for debate about the latest political events and the discussion of literature and art over coffee, brandy and cigars. ‘From the Romantic era onwards, it is impossible to talk of literary life in Madrid without including a café.’12 The dramatist Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, famed for his violent temper and for having lost an arm in a row with a fellow writer, once stated, ‘The Café de Levante has had a greater impact on contemporary literature and art than any two or three universities or academies.’13 118

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The Madrid café tertulia is a nineteenth-century offshoot of the mentidero, which gradually faded away under Fernando VII, a monarch who had little sympathy with freedom of expression, especially when it was critical of his repressive regime. The mentidero, in turn, had arisen from Madrid’s so-called literary academies of the Siglo de Oro, a Spanish replica of the institutions that flourished in Renaissance Italy. Madrid’s most celebrated gathering of this kind was the Academia Mantuana, which in the seventeenth century attracted greats like Lope de Vega. These salons continued to thrive into the next century, and were hosted by cultured members of Madrid’s nobility. The Academia del Buen Gusto (Academy of Good Taste) was a famous weekly event that met in the home of Josefa de Zúñiga, Countess of Lemos, in the mid nineteenth century. This later inspired the first café tertulia, that of the Fonda de San Sebastián, near the Puerta del Sol, founded by Nicolás Fernández de Moratín, poet and father of the playwright Leandro. It became a forum for poetry readings and discussions of literature, love and bulls. The tertulia was attended by ‘a group of enlightened people who wanted to put an end to the rococo stench that still pervaded Spanish culture, and that of Madrid in particular. They discussed Rousseau… and spoke out for a new genre of theatre that would come to be known as neoclassical.’14 On any given evening, one might find at the tertulia table luminaries such as the writers Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, Félix de Samaniego and Juan Meléndez Valdés, while Francisco de Goya also put in an occasional appearance at the café. An important catalyst for the growth of the tertulias was the invasion in 1823 of the Hundred Thousand Sons of St Louis, which brought to an end the brief period of tolerance that followed the reinstatement of the 1812 constitution known as the Trienio Liberal. During this period, Madrid as the seat of government and the court became the rallying point for opposing bands of partisans, liberals and reactionaries, and this made it the logical incubator of the tertulia. The Fontana de Oro café exercised the strongest gravitational pull on garrulous young intellectuals of a mostly liberal persuasion. This was also the first of Madrid’s cafés to be immortalised in literature when Benito Pérez Galdós, in his novel La fontana de oro, spoke of 119

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two distinct sections of the café, one for having coffee and another for political discussions. In the first enclosure there were a few tables for serving coffee to customers. But at the rear… was the place where meetings were held. At first, the orator would climb on top of a table to speak. Later on, the café proprietor had to install a raised platform.15 The Romantic era’s literary rendezvous of greatest renown was the Café del Príncipe, whose tertulia was christened ‘el Parnasillo’, a diminutive of Mount Parnassus, abode of the Muses. It was a highly appropriate nickname given the array of great literary figures who gathered in its squalid basement. The dramatist José Zorrilla, famed for his work Don Juan Tenorio, the Romantic essayist Mariano José de Larra and even the prime minister Juan Bravo Murillo were some of the celebrities to be found in the smoke-filled café. Larra substantiated beyond question his Romantic credentials when, at the age of 28, as a consequence of a disastrous love affair, he went home one evening and put a pistol to his head in front of a mirror. The tertulias were a microcosm of Madrid as a city of immigrants. Only Larra was a native of the capital, while the other writers, artists and statesmen to be found at the café tables had all converged on Madrid to establish their careers. Zorrilla was from Valladolid, Galdós a native of the Canary Islands, Bravo Murillo an Andalucían from Sevilla, Jovellanos from Asturias, Samaniego a Basque, Meléndez Valdés from Extremadura and Goya from Aragón. Madrid cafés of those years served specialities to satisfy the most refined tastes. The Fontana de Oro was the place to go for hot chocolate a la francesa, while the Café del Ángel served a proper English tea, and the Café San Luis (which closed at dawn and reopened a short while later after tidying up) was the favourite of the local clergy who stopped in for breakfast on their way home from morning Mass. With two notable exceptions – Café Comercial and the illustrious Gran Café de Gijón – the great tertulia cafés of the nineteenth century have disappeared. The most recent to go was Café Levante, which opened its doors in 1860 and remained in the Puerta del Sol for more than a century, until its conversion into a discount shoe emporium in 120

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1966. It was a sedate late-night haunt for those seeking refuge from the argumentative clamour of the mainstream tertulia cafés. Poetry readings were held on Thursday evenings and at least one eminent novelist, Manuel Fernández y González,16 treated it as his writing den. The Levante attracted an older set of tertulia aficionados, including retired military men, and on the night in 1966 when the last coffee was served, one of the waiters tearfully read out a somewhat cringemaking poem in tribute to the teeth and hair he had left in the café during his decades of service. A remarkable Madrileño who in many ways encapsulated the romantic glamour, political turbulence and not infrequent violence of nineteenth-century Madrid was the bandit Luis Candelas, born in 1804 in his father’s carpenter’s workshop in the very ‘castizo’17 neighbourhood of Lavapiés. Though he came from a relatively prosperous family, Candelas held up his first shop when he was 15 and became notorious for robbing stagecoaches, though he boasted of never having committed a blood crime. His Madrid hideout was apparently a cave, now a restaurant at the foot of the Arco de Cuchilleros, depicted on the book jacket. Candelas cut a dashing figure and was something of a folk hero in his own day. He was eventually arrested in Madrid, having returned to the city after a frustrated attempt to flee to London with his 16-year-old lover María Clara. He was condemned to death by garrotte in 1837 and his appeal for clemency was turned down by the regent, María Cristina. When, at the age of 31, Candelas was strapped into the executioner’s chair and the iron collar was placed round his neck, his last words were: ‘Be happy, my country.’ One of the most controversial issues of the 1840s was the question of a consort for the young queen. This became a matter of state that gave rise to long and difficult diplomatic negotiations with the leading European courts. Bowing to French pressure, on 10 October 1846, the day of Isabel’s 16th birthday, she was married to her cousin Francisco de Asís de Borbón, the same day that her younger sister, Luisa Fernanda, married Antoine d’Orléans, Duke of Montpensier. These marriages suited the French king Louis Philippe, but it was only a matter of months before the union failed. Francisco was rumoured to be a homosexual and it was said that few if any of Isabel’s 12 children 121

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were fathered by her consort. The Carlists went so far as to assert that the heir to the throne, the future Alfonso XII (one of only four of Isabel’s 12 offspring to reach adulthood), had been fathered by a captain of the royal guard. Isabel II’s reign was not a happy one, much less a period of calm in Madrid, but it was in these years that the city made great strides towards becoming a modern European capital. In 1851, as work got underway to construct the 48-mile viaduct to transport fresh water to the city from the Lozoya River, the queen and her entourage of government officials boarded the first steam-driven train to depart Atocha station on the 27-mile journey to Aranjuez.18 Not everyone was convinced that Spain could build a workable railway network. The English writer Richard Ford visited Madrid in 1845 and was amused to observe that the city was embarking on a railway-construction programme, since in other countries roads, canals and traffic usher in the rail, which in Spain is to precede and introduce them. Thus, by the prudent delays of national caution and procrastination, much of the trouble and expense of these intermediate stages will be economised, and Spain will jump at once from a medieval condition into the comforts and glories of Great Britain, the land of restless travellers.19 The Aranjuez line was dubbed ‘el Tren de la Fresa’ (‘the Strawberry Train’), as a result of Aranjuez’s famous April strawberry harvest, something that was to have an impact on transporting goods and people to and from the capital. ‘This new mode of transport even influenced Madrileños’ diet, by gradually bringing fresh food to the city as a substitution for salted produce.’20 Why the first railway line from Madrid was laid between the capital and this relatively insignificant royal resort, and not between Madrid and Toledo or Valladolid, for instance, could perhaps be explained by an analogy with the country’s first long-distance, high-speed train (Alta Velocidad Española, AVE), which entered into service between Madrid and Sevilla in 1992. The more logical link in terms 122

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of passenger and cargo volume would have been Barcelona, or France via Irún. In other words, if travellers can get from Madrid to Sevilla in two and a half hours, does it make sense to have to spend up to six hours on a train from Madrid to Barcelona? As the socialist PSOE prime minister Felipe González confided unofficially at the time, if the government had done the ‘logical’ thing, they would have faced great difficulties raising the funds and political support for extending the network to less heavily trafficked destinations, such as Sevilla. On a February morning in 1851, the streets around Atocha station were clogged with more than a thousand spectators, Madrileños as well as people from surrounding villages who had come to the capital to catch a glimpse of the smoke-belching monster pulling its load of distinguished passengers on the 75-minute journey south to Aranjuez. A great fête had been organised and paid for by the financier José de Salamanca, Marqués de Salamanca, one of the founders in 1847 of the operating company Sociedad del Ferrocarril de Madrid a Aranjuez, a venture-capital firm set up with 45 million reales in equity and which, three months after the first train departed Atocha station, was making a profit of 50,000 reales a day. The Archbishop of Toledo was on hand that morning to bless the garlanded locomotive, which was welcomed by an equally ecstatic crowd as it chugged up to the station that had been built for it at Aranjuez’s royal palace. Thirteen years later, in 1864, the first direct train from Paris arrived at Atocha station, the line having been built in less time than it took to complete the Madrid–Barcelona high-speed link. The advent of the railway entailed a radical change for Madrid, from its comfortable isolation in the middle of the Castilian plateau, ‘a predator of its own environment, inexplicably the court of an imperial monarchy’,21 to a capital accessible from every city of the Spanish periphery. The concept of the Puerta del Sol as the centre of the world began to vanish, as the north–west axis along the Paseo de la Castellana was extended and gradually took on the role of Madrid’s gateway to the industrial ports of Bilbao and Santander to the north, and the great Andalucían cities of Sevilla, Granada and Málaga to the south. 123

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The railway was the most conspicuous symbol of the city’s transition into the industrialised era. New banks arose in mid century to capture the growing assets and manage the investments of a burgeoning mercantile class. Some 40 insurance companies were set up in Madrid in this period, allowing developers, investors and home-seekers alike to partake with confidence in Mendizábal’s Desamortización property jamboree. The realist novelist Benito Pérez Galdós was the unrivalled social chronicler of this period, the astute observer of nineteenth-century life, whose work is comparable to Cervantes’s accurate fictionalised account of Spain’s age of imperial decline. Galdós lived and wrote in Madrid during the years of the Desamortización, and became an amused spectator of a fledgling bourgeoisie swelling the ranks of the civil service as they scrambled up the property ladder. This was the era when the middle class was beginning to come into its own, taking up the jobs created by the new political and administrative system, buying up all the properties (to which the Church had held the title) with instalment plans, thus making itself the chief landowner and beneficiary of the budget – in a word, gathering the spoils of absolutism and clericalism to found the empire of the frock coat.22 The railway continued its steady expansion across the peninsula and Madrid, as its central hub, reaped the commercial benefits of faster access to Bilbao, Barcelona, Valencia and other key industrial and manufacturing centres and ports. Foreign capital was also attracted to the railway-construction industry, and some of the great financiers of Europe set up investment companies to fund this growth, including the Rothschilds, who were awarded the concession for the Madrid– Zaragoza link. The development of Madrid’s urban-transport network enabled a growing labour force to travel to work a greater distance from home. The Compañía de Omnibus de Madrid was founded in 1856, with a 20-year contract to operate six lines. This meant that labourers living deep within the old city, in neighbourhoods such as Lavapiés, could reach hitherto inaccessible new middle-class barrios 124

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like Argüelles and Salamanca, where jobs were to be had in the construction sector. It is remarkable that people found time for leisure pursuits or, for that matter, that anything got built in Madrid during the years of Carlist warfare, coups and counter-coups, marathon pronunciamientos and liberal–reactionary factionalism. The turbulent period 1841–43 saw one uprising per year, the first of which involved an attempt to seize the queen from the Palacio Real after the Cortes had sanctioned Espartero to take over as regent from the exiled María Cristina. Two years later Espartero was overthrown by the military, after which the deposed regent fled to England. It would have been rightful for more moderate politicians to have had a turn at running the country, only this time the government fell into the hands of Luis González Bravo, a hardliner and founder of the Guardia Civil, who with scant regard for moderation dissolved the Cortes and declared Spain to be in a state of siege. As self-styled dictator, Bravo dismantled many of the institutions associated with progressive ideas, Madrid’s elected council being one of the first to disappear. The liberal constitution that María Cristina had been compelled to sanction was revoked and in its stead a new charter was drawn up under the next government, led by another general, Ramón Narváez. To counter the Carlists’ claims to their historic fueros (regional charters), the new code brought in sweeping centralist laws that conferred unprecedented powers on Madrid. It would take more than political turmoil or economic crises to deter Madrileños from seeking enjoyment. By mid century, between a costly war fought with Morocco and Narváez’s sixth term of office, there was sufficient demand in Madrid for entertainment to support nearly a thousand music societies, casinos, amateur-theatrical clubs and dance halls. ‘Another pole of attraction was the theatre. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Madrid experienced the biggest growth in the number of theatres of its history.’23 More than 20 theatres offered a variety of productions, from Lope de Vega classics to the zarzuela operetta. The tradition also arose of putting on José Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio in early November, commencing on All Saints’ Day, a ritual that lives on to this day. 125

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July 1854 saw an outbreak of riots in Madrid and other cities, initially a protest against a sharp rise in grain prices and the introduction of the power loom, which meant job losses for the weavers. It was a particularly bad time for Spanish society as a result of a widespread European economic crisis that led to the collapse of many banks and insurance companies holding family savings. General Leopoldo O’Donnell, a supporter of the Progressives, led a column to Vicálvaro, a district of Madrid, where he fought an inconclusive battle against government troops. O’Donnell and his forces retired to the south, where they connected with the progressive General Francisco Serrano. Together they issued the Manifesto de Manzanares on 7 July 1854, an enlightened-sounding document calling for elections and a free press, among other reforms. It was distributed among the populace, inviting the people to rise up in support. The reaction was immediate: people took to the streets in their thousands, sacking the homes of two government ministers and the mansion belonging to the Marqués de Salamanca. The police chief was dragged from his office and shot in the Plaza de la Cebada. Espartero, the radical leader who enjoyed wide popularity among much of the working class, was once more back in charge, with the queen’s blessing. By now it was no longer a matter of what had become general frustration with the queen’s round-the-clock appointments and dismissals of this or that general. Madrid tertulias had become the forum for heated debate on the future of the monarchy itself. What emerged from these late-night café sessions was a republican movement composed of Spain’s fledgling political parties: the Partido Moderado, the Partido Progresista and the Unión Liberal, a political grouping founded by O’Donnell to forge a compromise between radicals and conservatives. In April 1865, Isabel’s political awkwardness was rewarded with riots and barricades in the streets of Madrid. This time the altercations were provoked by a decree on the sale of royal property, including parts of Madrid’s Retiro park. The disposal would see 75 per cent of the proceeds going to the central government and Madrid Ayuntamiento, with the remainder paid into the queen’s exchequer. The cash-strapped government and Ayuntamiento gave their wholehearted support 126

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to the scheme, but opposition was voiced by the eminent professor of history, Emilio Castelar, who denounced it in a newspaper article as ‘trickery, a usurpation and an affront to the law’.24 When the government brought pressure to have Castelar sacked from his chair at Madrid’s university, student riots broke out that left 12 dead and some 200 injured. Isabel II now found herself in total disrepute with large swathes of the political class and intelligentsia, as well as with a disgruntled army, something that was far more worrisome in this turbulent political environment. Seizing his opportunity, General Juan Prim led what became known as the ‘Sergeants’ Revolt’ on 22 June 1866 at Madrid’s San Gil barracks. Three artillery regiments were incited to rise up and made their way to the Puerta del Sol, where they clashed with the Guardia Civil and regular troops loyal to the queen. There was hand-to-hand fighting around the Palacio Real and other parts of the city, before O’Donnell and his accomplice General Serrano crushed the last barricades held by rebel soldiers and militiamen. Seventy officers were arrested, court-martialled and shot the next day outside the bullring, which was adjacent to the Puerta de Alcalá. The revolt had failed to achieve any military objectives, other than to send out a signal of dissension in the ranks that could be harnessed into a broader anti-Isabel front across party lines. The tension that had been building for 35 years, since the death of Fernando VII, came to a head in September 1868. ‘La Gloriosa’ (‘the Glorious Revolution’) erupted with a mutiny by naval forces in Cádiz, where half a century before Riego had launched his coup against Isabel’s father. The queen abruptly found herself alone, her loyal Narváez having deserted what was clearly a sinking monarchy. Isabel was lacking in political acumen and this was a key factor in, if not the spark for, the military uprising. ‘The revolution of September 1868 was a pronunciamiento of those politicians and generals denied office by Isabel’s exclusivist reaction, the Liberal Unionists and Prim’s Progressives.’25 Madrileños being somewhat experienced in street fighting and the erecting of barricades, the city quickly made common cause 127

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with the army rebels. The Puerta del Sol once again assumed its traditional role as muster station for revolutionaries. ‘All that was violent, political and social in the nineteenth century took place in the Puerta del Sol.’26 In 1776 the revolt against Esquilache broke out on this spot, while three decades later the people chose this same square to launch their uprising against Napoleon’s troops, and then in 1866 the Puerta del Sol became the battleground for the ‘Sergeants’ Revolt’. Now it was to become the stage for a radical upheaval in Spanish politics, a mass gathering that in many respects resembled a giant street party. A graphic description of the insurrection comes from the French painter Henri Regnault, who happened to be visiting the Museo del Prado on the morning of the riots. Regnault was one of the very few foreigners in Madrid that 29 September day and his observations are worth quoting in detail: At 11 a.m. we saw a young painter, very pallid, whispering something to his friends, and suddenly all the tills were shut tight. Moments later, the museum was deserted. We were told a revolution had broken out in Madrid and we were advised to go home. We took the long way round to our lodgings in order to pass by the Puerta del Sol, which we found completely filled by the crowd. We rushed home to drop off our cases and returned to see what was happening. The moment we reached the square, we saw a great gold and crimson flag and above it the words ‘Long live the people! Down with the Bourbons!’ Another banner, red and white, appeared with the slogan ‘Out with the queen! Death to the Bourbons!’ Regnault watched as people climbed up gas mains to the balconies of government headquarters, where they placed more flags across the façade. The air was filled with hats, berets, handkerchiefs… streets bearing the names ‘Príncipe’ [‘Prince’], ‘Reina’ [‘Queen’] and so on were torn down and instantly rechristened. The revolution 128

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has triumphed. Madrid is taken without a drop of blood being shed. The fountain of the Puerta del Sol, which had been dry for weeks, is filled. Water pumps out, everybody is happy, the whole of the army is with the revolution.27 Regnault may have been privy to a more privileged source of information than the European press was able to uncover. For if Isabel II no longer reigned in Spain, it was certain that general confusion did. The Times’s correspondent in Madrid had this to say about the state of the Glorious Revolution: The Spanish insurrection has two voices, and they speak in very different tones. There is the official voice… telling of rebel disasters and miscarriages, of Córdoba in the hands of one general, of others marching hither and thither to bring back the revolted towns of Galicia and Andalucía to their duty, of failures of disloyal admirals to propagate their disloyalty in the Bay of Biscay, of another insurgent failure at Alicante, or yet another at Granada, of a prevalence of tranquillity throughout the kingdom everywhere… The non-official voice [says] Marshal Serrano is on his way to meet the Royalist army at Córdoba, General Prim is commanding in Andalucía, is marching on Madrid, is sailing for Valencia. A panic prevails on the Bourse of Madrid, and barricades have been raised in the streets.28 In keeping with time-honoured tradition, in September 1868 Madrid’s balconies had become a grandstand for patriotic ferment and the unseating of governments. In Galdós’s novel Fortunata y Jacinta, the tertulia regular Estupiñá had been a witness to the great balcony pronunciamientos of the era. He had seen Fernando VII on 7 July when he appeared on the balcony to tell the militiamen to shake up the Guardia Real. He had seen O’Donnell and Espartero when they embraced… And Espartero once, greeting the people. And O’Donnell doing the same, all on balconies. And finally, he 129

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had seen another historical character on the balcony not long ago, proclaiming in a high-pitched voice that it was all over for the kings. The history Estupiñá knew as written on the balconies of Madrid.29 One person who had a clear grasp of the situation was Isabel: she knew her days as Spanish queen had come to an end. After a failed attempt by loyal forces to oppose the revolutionaries, Isabel retired with her family to San Sebastián, the belle époque playground of the Spanish nobility a few miles south of the French border, there to be informed that she had been dethroned. Having defeated the loyalist forces, General Francisco Serrano marched his revolutionary army to Madrid, where he formed a provisional government, convoked the Cortes and had himself appointed president and regent. The royal entourage crossed the border and was taken under the wing of Napoleon III. Isabel spent the rest of her life in Paris, where she grew to an enormous size, developed chronic bronchitis and died in 1904. Despite having separated from him in 1870, in her final years Isabel discovered a renewed affection for her estranged husband, Francisco de Asís de Borbón. She and two of her daughters remained by his side until the moment of his death in 1902. Two years after abandoning Spain, Isabel officially abdicated in favour of her son, the future Alfonso XII, who accompanied his mother into exile in France, not having been recognised as successor by the government in Madrid. The generals and politicians now had a sticky problem on their hands, in that the monarch had been ousted but the monarchical system of government was still enshrined in the constitution. La Gloriosa was gloriously lacking in direction and the civil–military coalition of liberals, moderates and republicans faced the daunting task of finding a replacement for Isabel. An urgent session of the Cortes was convened in Madrid, in which to the relief of nearly all the deputies a bid tabled by anti-Isabel deputies to abolish the monarchy was defeated. Prim was placed at the head of a provisional government, with the additional portfolio of president of the Consejo de Regencia (Council of 130

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Regency), and the hunt was on for a suitable monarch willing to abide by liberal–democratic principles. Espartero’s name was put forward by the Partido Progresista, though the constitutionality of placing on the throne a career soldier and commoner who had trained to be a priest was something of a mystery. Isabel’s son Alfonso, who happened to be the legitimate heir, was rejected for fear that his aged mother might use the boy to impose her will on the government that had ousted her. The candidacy of Fernando of Saxe-Coburg of Portugal, regent to his son Pedro V, was mooted but also discarded. The government then turned to Germany and Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. Pressure from European courts forced the prince to decline the offer, but this did not stop France and Prussia going to war as a result. 30 Finally, in 1870 the Cortes came up with a viable contender, Amedeo di Savoia, the Duke of Aosta and younger son of King Vittorio Emanuele of Italy, who accepted the honour with misgivings about Spain’s governability. Amedeo was a man of solid liberal credentials and scant political baggage, hence Spain’s warring factions welcomed with relief this first and last monarch from the house of Savoy. The future King Amadeo I entered Madrid on 28 December 1870 under an ominous cloud, for on the day after his arrival Prim was assassinated in his carriage as he rode through the Calle del Turco (now Marqués de Cubas) next to the Cortes. With a suitable show of Italian flamboyance, Amadeo swore on Prim’s body to uphold the constitution. No sooner had Amadeo been installed at the Palacio Real than he fell victim to repeated assassination attempts. When not riding his bicycle round the Retiro park, the king spent three years in Madrid having to deal with ten prime ministers of various warring factions. The Carlists were once again and for the last time in armed rebellion against the government, republican agitators had taken to the streets of Madrid and elsewhere, and troops had to be dispatched to Cuba to fight a savage and unpopular war fuelled by centralist elements in Madrid. It was a state of mayhem that would have tested the mettle of a Carlos I, never mind a reluctant Italian with no political experience and, by all accounts, of less than average intelligence. 131

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Three years after ascending the throne, on the afternoon of 11 February 1873, Amadeo I made an appearance before the Cortes. In his address, this son of the land of the Medicis and Machiavelli pronounced the Spanish people ungovernable, after which he abdicated with grace and made his way back to Italy. Within hours of Amadeo’s announcement, Spain was proclaimed a republic.

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The declaration of the Spanish Republic by the Cortes on the evening of 11 February 1873 met with acclamations by a cheering multitude outside the parliament building. It was a near ten-to-one vote in favour of doing away with a system of government that had ruled Spain for centuries. The deputies proclaimed a republic based on a decentralised state, justice for one and all, free education for the masses and religious freedom. It was hailed as the dawn of a new era of liberty and egalitarianism for a country that, with few exceptions, had for nearly 200 years laboured under the thumb of Austrian and French despots, but it was to prove a miserable failure. The 1873 republic did not come into being as a result of grassroots pressure – though it was widely acclaimed by the people – but rather as a result of the vacuum created by King Amadeo’s abdication. The republicans were neither strong nor united, and Spain was a country with a long history of resolving its political disputes by force of arms rather than by consensus. Four presidents in the space of two years was quite an achievement, even in the context of Spanish political hyper-instability. The rub is that these leaders were all respectable and capable statesmen, but who lacked a clear programme to counter the Carlist uprisings, the demands of the federalist extremists and a hostile army that had been reduced by political attacks to a state of impotence. Too late did Emilio Castelar, the last president of the republic, try to recapture the military’s loyalty. On 3 January 1874, General Manuel Pavía, who 133

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had fought Carlists and Andalucían separatists, lost patience with the government when Castelar was defeated in a vote of confidence. He stormed the Cortes on horseback at the head of a column of the Guardia Civil.1 Several shots were fired and this sufficed to drive the republican deputies scurrying from the chamber. Pavía turned power over to General Francisco Serrano, who had played a key part in unseating Isabel, to form a coalition government. Serrano took over as president of a centralist republic ruled from Madrid, but his efforts to crush the Carlist rebels in northern Spain met with failure. This raised discontent in the ranks and, accordingly, Spain reverted to its tradition of political change by pronunciamiento when in December 1874 a young brigadier, Arsenio Martínez de Campos,2 declared for a restoration of the monarchy under the exiled Isabel’s son Alfonso. The prince’s youth was not spent luxuriating in the fleshpots of Paris – far from it. From an early age, Alfonso was sent on a course of studies that took him to Geneva, Vienna and lastly the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. It was there, four years after his mother’s formal abdication and following Martínez de Campos’s pronunciamiento, that Alfonso issued a statement that paved the way for his smooth return to Madrid. On the pretext of thanking well-wishers on the occasion of his 17th birthday, Alfonso presented himself to his future subjects as a model king: a devout Catholic, of a liberal and conciliatory temperament and, above all, a Spaniard. In keeping with tradition, on 14 January 1875 a smartly turned-out and somewhat self-important Alfonso XII rode into Madrid through the Puerta de Alcalá. Three years later, the king married his cousin, the 18-year-old María de las Mercedes, a Madrileña by birth. This re-established the Bourbon dynasty through both bloodlines, as María was the daughter of Isabel II’s sister Luisa Fernanda de Borbón. The wedding took place in the Real Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Atocha, after which Madrid erupted in splendorous festivities – Madrileños had been lacking a cause for celebration since the departure of Amadeo I and proclamation of the First Republic. The streets of the capital were embellished with great arches and floral displays, Madrileños were treated to parades, processions, street banquets for the masses, 134

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bullfights, illuminated fountains, concerts and gala balls. Four months later, the young queen was dead of typhus. All that remained of this royal love affair was Alfonso’s lingering grief and a ballad that became popular with Madrid schoolchildren: ¿Dónde vas, Alfonso Doce, Dónde vas, triste de ti? Voy en busca de Mercedes, Que ayer tarde no la vi. Si Mercedes ya se ha muerto, Muerta está, que yo la vi, Cuatro duques la llevaban Por las calles de Madrid. [Where do you go, Alfonso Doce, Where do you go, you poor man? I go to seek Mercedes, For yesterday I saw her not. If Mercedes has died, Dead she is, and I saw her. Four dukes bore her body, Through the streets of Madrid.]3 As Mercedes died without issue, she could not be buried in the Panteón de los Reyes at El Escorial. Nonetheless, Alfonso was determined to give his wife a proper resting place and he ordered a cathedral built in Gothic-revival style opposite the Palacio Real. Because of the intervening conflicts and budgetary constraints, the cathedral of Santa María la Real de la Almudena was not completed for another century. The Spanish Civil War brought an abrupt halt to construction on the cathedral, and work was not resumed until more than a decade after the war. The project was placed in the hands of the acclaimed Madrid architect Fernando Chueca, who took up De Cubas’s plans to provide the cathedral with a baroque exterior, which harmonises with the façade of the nearby Palacio Real. The cathedral was completed in 1993 and consecrated by Pope John Paul II. In 2002 135

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the Almudena received Mercedes’s coffin, with the inscription ‘María de las Mercedes, the sweet wife of Alfonso XII’. On 22 May 2004, the marriage of Felipe, Prince of Asturias to Letizia Ortiz Rocasolano took place at the Almudena, disregarding protests by some of the Madrid nobility, who considered the church too vulgar in style for such an event. Alfonso’s reign was brief, but unlike the regency that was to follow his death, far from uneventful. The Sandhurst cadet led his army in the campaign to eradicate the last vestiges of Carlist resistance, for which he became known as ‘el Pacificador’ (‘the Pacifier’). Shortly after putting down a Carlist rebellion in the Basque Country, in October 1878 the king attended a service at the Atocha basilica to celebrate his safe return to Madrid. As he rode on his horse to the palace along the Calle Mayor, an anarchist leapt out of the crowd and fired two shots at the king. He missed, and from that day Madrileños added ‘el Galán’ (‘the Gallant’) to the king’s titles. Alfonso was devastated by the loss of Mercedes after only five months of marriage. His behaviour became more erratic and this is when he turned to drink and secret liaisons. But the country needed a royal heir, which meant that Alfonso would have to find another wife. A year later, in November 1879, Alfonso had cause to attend another service at the Atocha basilica, when he married the daughter of the Archduke of Austria, Maria Christina von Habsburg-Lothringen, known in Spain as María Cristina de Habsburgo-Lorena. The tall, fair queen was to bear Alfonso three legitimate children, one of whom was to become Alfonso XIII of Spain. Then, in December of that year, Alfonso and María Cristina were riding back to the Palacio Real in an open phaeton driven by the king. As the carriage reached the Plaza de Oriente facing the palace, another anarchist, a young pastry cook, rushed up and fired two shots at point-blank range. María Cristina flung herself upon her husband to shield him from the bullets, which, like in the first assassination attempt, went wide of the mark. ‘Madrid did not know what to admire most, Alfonso’s good luck or the poor aim of Spain’s first paladins of anarchism.’4 The darker side to Alfonso’s character became prominent after Mercedes’s death. Unlike tales of his soldierly valour, this remained 136

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a topic of quiet café speculation. To his sobriquets of ‘Pacifier’ and ‘Gallant’ could have been added that of Alfonso the Promiscuous. A living Madrid restaurateur relates the story of a walled-up tunnel in his wine cellar, which is believed to connect to the Palacio Real. It is said that Alfonso, who was known to have a close relationship with the opera singer Elena Sanz,5 availed himself of this tunnel to dine in seclusion with his mistress. One of the most colourful incidents in the king’s extracurricular life took place when Alfonso, ensconced in his thick black cape, was returning from one of his frequent nocturnal ambulations around the streets of old Madrid. He had lost his way and ran across a sereno, or nightwatchman, on his rounds. The king asked for Calle de Bailén, which leads to the palace. The sereno offered to show this obviously respectable gentleman the way and a short stroll brought them to the palace gates, when the king turned and said, ‘Many thanks, my friend. If I can ever be of assistance, just ask for Alfonso XII.’ To which the sereno replied, ‘Of course, and I’m Pope Pius IX, if ever you need anything from the Vatican.’6 In 1876, Spain framed a new constitution, which recognised a shared sovereignty between the monarch and the Cortes, modelled on the king’s personal observations of the British system of constitutional monarchy. This was the period known as the ‘Restauración Borbónica’ (‘Bourbon Restoration’), in which the two-party system of conservatives and liberals bundled together under various alliances came into being, the former drawing support from the Partido Moderado and the latter mainly from the Partido Progresista. This arrangement lasted for nearly half a century, from General Arsenio Martínez de Campos’s pronunciamiento in 1874 to the 1923 coup by General Miguel Primo de Rivera. Alfonso was genuinely fond of his second wife, but he was under no illusion that the marriage to María Cristina was going to be anything other than one of political expediency. Their relationship came under acute strain from the start, due to the king’s increasingly frequent extramarital escapades. María Cristina’s shrill voice was often heard from the royal bedchamber late at night, reprimanding her wayward husband. But the couple drew closer towards the end of their married life, the queen no doubt sensing that her husband was not destined 137

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to enjoy an old age. Alfonso never got over the loss of Mercedes, and his despair contributed to a weakened physical state and eventually a severe chest infection, believed to have been brought on by tuberculosis, which on 25 November 1885, three days short of the king’s 28th birthday, put an end to his life. The following day, Madrid’s church bells sounded a dirge every quarter of an hour throughout the day, and the guns of the army garrison fired salvos from morning to sunset. María Cristina, who was three months pregnant at the time, pasted some dried leaves into her diary that morning, with an inscription in German in the margin which reads: ‘From the branch I gave to my Alfonso in our residence of [the French resort of] Arcachon, 22 August 1879.’ Six months after Alfonso’s death, on 17 May 1886, María Cristina gave birth to a son, later to rule as Alfonso XIII. His mother became the second queen of that name to hold the title of regent, after Fernando VII’s death left his wife María Cristina de Borbón-Dos Sicilias as regent until Isabel II came of age. Now, however, there was no repeat of the dynastic quarrel that pushed Spain into civil war. Quite the contrary, María Cristina’s 17-year regency transpired in one of Madrid’s rare periods of near absolute peace. María Cristina was a stern, rather dour Austrian, who was conscious of her duty to prepare the future king to rule a country rife with factionalism of the most irreconcilable variety. There was at the time in Madrid a Jesuit priest, Luis Coloma, who when not performing his religious duties was much given to writing children’s stories. The regent invited Coloma to the palace in 1887, a year after Alfonso’s birth, to propose a book that would inspire her son to follow a path of kindness towards his subjects and moral rectitude. The result was Ratón Pérez (Pérez the Mouse), written in longhand and presented to the prince when he was eight. Ratón Pérez is the story of a mouse who takes young King Buby Buby, which was María Cristina’s nickname for her son Alfonso, on a walk about Madrid. In one episode, the monarch is shocked when he comes across a destitute and hungry family. King Buby exclaims, ‘How was it possible that until now I had not known that there were poor children who were hungry and cold, and died of sadness in 138

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a horrible loft?’7 When the king returns home he asks his mother why he, as monarch, has so much, while the poor have nothing. She takes her son to her breast and explains, ‘This is because you are the older brother, and that is what being a king means. God has given you everything, so that you may take care, inasmuch as it is possible, that your younger brothers and sisters lack nothing.’8 Buby becomes a wise and merciful ruler and he lives to a ripe old age. When he dies, thousands of the poorest of his subjects who have gone before him come to open the gates of heaven to their beloved king.9 Ratón Pérez became a favourite of children in early-twentiethcentury Spain, and though it remained out of print for nearly a century, the story gained popularity abroad. It was translated into English by Lady Claire Alison Moreton as Perez the Mouse, and there is even a Japanese version, Nezumi to Ō-sama. The story of the celebrated king and mouse has been turned into a display at Madrid’s Casa Museo del Ratón Pérez, appropriately located in the same house near the Puerta del Sol where King Buby is said to have lived. Ratón Pérez had come into Buby’s life to bring a replacement for the milk tooth the king had left under his pillow. Few Spanish children have any awareness of Coloma’s story, but Ratón Pérez is still known as the tooth fairy. Madrid benefitted under the regency. These were the years of technological innovation and modernisation as the capital stood on the threshold of the twentieth century. The first electric trams10 began running in 1899 and they remained a visible feature of the city’s transport system until the 1970s. Madrid also got its first hydraulic lift in the same decade, installed in a building in the Calle Mayor. The telephone arrived, streets were asphalted and the Cibeles statue was placed in the fountain that came to bear the goddess’s name. The clock tower above what was police headquarters in the Puerta del Sol was mechanised so that a great golden globe would descend on the 12 chimes of midday and midnight. It has become a ritual for Madrileños celebrating New Year’s Eve at home or in the streets to swallow one grape with each tolling of the clock. Stately new buildings appeared in the regency years: the Banco de España in 1891, the Bourse two years later and the Real Academia Española in 1894. The 139

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majestic Barrio de Salamanca, intended for the city’s nouveau riche, was well under development. This was a project of the flamboyant Marqués de Salamanca, once the wealthiest man in Spain, who died in bankruptcy, leaving debts of six million reales. The Barrio de Salamanca was one of the first neighbourhoods in Europe to be laid out on a grid system, and it is today the fashionable home of mainly affluent business executives and civil servants with a distinct affinity for right-of-centre politics. Alfonso XIII attained his majority on 17 May 1902 and was proclaimed king. His accession was accompanied by a week of street parties, bullfights, balls and receptions, festivities that helped to soften the blow of the recent loss of empire, with the independence of Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Americas, and the Asian colonies of Guam and the Philippines.11 Alfonso’s reign was marked by an intensive urban-regeneration programme for Madrid, the most ambitious undertaken since the days of Isabel II. In April 1910, pickaxe in hand, the king delivered the first blow to a ramshackle house in central Madrid, marking the commencement of the Gran Vía, the buzzing three-quarter-mile long shopping artery linking the new prosperous barrios of Argüelles and Salamanca. This was for decades the capital’s chic centre for fashion and café society, and until the 1960s men would rarely set foot in the Gran Vía without a trilby and tie. The street has suffered the invasion of fast-food chains and tourist shops selling the usual assortment of ‘I ♥ Madrid’ T-shirts and bullfighting posters, but when the Gran Vía was officially inaugurated in 1911, the plateresque, neo-Mudéjar and art-deco buildings that line the street were hailed as one of the marvels of modern European architecture. By the time the last building was put up in 1929, nearly 50 streets and more than 350 houses had been demolished to make way for the extravagant new boulevard and its iconic landmarks like the Teléfonica headquarters and baroque Metropolis building. Much of the construction carried out under Alfonso XIII was focused on affordable housing to accommodate an enormous influx of immigrants arriving from the provinces to seek work, the majority of them in the building trade. Madrid’s population almost trebled 140

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to 540,000 in the 30 years between 1870 and the turn of the century, and by 1929 it was approaching the million mark. The Affordable Housing Law passed in 1911 allowed developers to acquire land outside the city centre, on which they could build a maximum of 100 two-storey dwellings. ‘This gave rise to small housing developments called “garden cities”, since in addition to the building regulations already in force, they were required to provide green space for trees, parks and communal areas.’12 Pío Baroja, the early-twentieth-century chronicler of social discontent, highlighted in one of his novels, published in 1911, just how desperately these dismal outlying barrios needed to be upgraded. The Madrileño who, at some point, finds himself by chance in the poor barrios near the Manzanares River, will be shocked by the spectacle of sordidness and depravity, of sadness and ignorance, he encounters in the outskirts of Madrid, with its miserable streets, full of dust in summer and mud in winter. The court is a city of contrasts, brilliant light alongside dark shadows, a refined, almost European life in the city centre, and the life of an African village in the suburbs.13 The building programme amounted to quite a modest enterprise compared with Madrid’s monster dormitory communities of sixstorey redbrick neighbourhoods, only slightly less grim than British high-rise council estates, that began to spring up in the 1950s, most of them erected with planning permission obtained by greasing palms in the Ayuntamiento. Once these flats were completed, developers would walk away with bulging pockets, leaving it to the same Ayuntamiento to work out how to transport thousands of new Madrileños to and from the city centre every day. One of these colonias, as they were dubbed, went by the contradictory name of ‘Parque Urbanizado’ (‘Urbanised Park’), a term evocative of Soviet workers’ concrete anthills. In fact, the name does not do justice to what was in this particular case a pleasant enough barrio of small, one-family dwellings. This became a much-visited part of Madrid when the Estadio Metropolitano, at that time Spain’s largest football stadium, with 141

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capacity for 25,000 spectators, was opened in 1923. The inaugural match on 13 May of that year between Atlético Madrid and Real Sociedad de San Sebastián was attended by Queen María Cristina. The most ambitious infrastructure project of the era was the Metro de Madrid, which was opened by the king in October 1919. The scheme initially encountered stiff resistance from investors who were sceptical about the commercial logic of building an underground rail network in a relatively small city with broad streets and as yet little road traffic. The Banco de Vizcaya put up four million pesetas, but it was Alfonso XIII’s personal one-million-peseta investment that provided the operating company with the clout to persuade other capitalists to contribute the remaining funds required. The Metro company was appropriately established as La Compañía Metropolitana Alfonso XIII. The first line did the two-mile journey from the Puerta del Sol to Cuatro Caminos, a major road junction, in ten minutes. The network now covers 182 miles, not far behind the London Underground, which extends over 249 miles. The Metro de Madrid’s claim to fame, as displayed in signs posted outside some of the main stations, is that it offers the cheapest fares of any of the world’s urban rail networks.14 Four years after assuming control of the government, in May 1906 the 20-year-old Alfonso married Princess Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg (known in Spain as Victoria Eugenia, or Ena), the niece of Edward VII, granddaughter of Queen Victoria and grandmother of the present Spanish monarch Juan Carlos I. The royal union came close to becoming the shortest in history, however, when, on the day of the gala ceremony held in the church of Los Jerónimos, an anarchist, Mateo Morral, hurled an explosive device hidden in a bouquet of flowers from a fourth-storey balcony above Casa Ciriaco, a restaurant, at the state carriage and its escort of mounted cuirassiers, which was passing along the Calle Mayor. The bomb hit a tram cable and was deflected from its course. The royal couple escaped unharmed from the blast, which killed 23 bystanders and left more than 100 injured. The police had clearly fallen down on the job that day, for a week before the attack someone had carved an inscription on a tree in the Retiro Park. The crudely written message read: ‘Alfonso XIII 142

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will be executed on his wedding day.’ It was signed ‘Irredeemable’. Morral killed himself after a gun battle with police. Alfonso and his bride Ena, whose wedding gown was splattered with the victims’ blood, were put into another carriage, but before that, according to eyewitness accounts, the king did what he could to calm the crowd of horrified spectators. Madrid’s anarchists had more success with later attempts on the lives of public figures. In 1912 the Partido Liberal (Liberal Party) prime minister José Canalejas was gunned down while browsing at a bookshop window in the Puerta del Sol. Nor did the anarchists make any distinction of party affiliation when targeting their victims. Nine years later the Partido Liberal–Conservador (Liberal–Conservative Party) prime minister Eduardo Dato was shot by motorbike assailants as he was driven past the Puerta de Alcalá. Alfonso had another lucky escape between the murders of these two political leaders. On 13 April 1913, the king was returning on horseback from a military review in the Paseo de la Castellana. As he reached the Calle de Alcalá, next to the Banco de España, an assailant fired two shots at close range, and missed. With a display of regal composure, the king continued his ride to the palace. Alfonso’s royal duty, as he interpreted it, went beyond managing politicians and entertaining foreign dignitaries. At the time of his wedding, the king became aware of Madrid’s shortage of hotel accommodation. The streets of old Madrid offered a plethora of inns and taverns, in most of which a guest would do well to sleep with his shoes tied round his neck. But finding suitable lodgings for the hundreds of wedding guests had proved a real challenge for the palace chamberlain and his staff. Alfonso wanted Madrid to have a showpiece to rival the Ritz hotels he knew from his Paris and London days. Royal pressure was applied on the Ayuntamiento and property developers and, consequently, in 1910 the king inaugurated the Hotel Ritz, and two years later the Hotel Palace, both in the vicinity of the Museo del Prado and Cortes. Around the time Alfonso was voicing support for the Metro de Madrid, which was in its initial planning stages with a large question mark hanging over the project’s financial viability, the government 143

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put together a working group to plan and build a network of hotels, with the aim of providing accommodation for Spanish tourists and to raise the country’s international profile. The Comisaría Regia de Turismo (Royal Tourism Commission) was set up in 1911 to start work on the first state-run hotel, in reality a hunting lodge, which was a day’s journey west of Madrid in the foothills of the Gredos range. The site for this hotel was chosen by Alfonso, who in 1928 inaugurated Spain’s first parador. The collapse of empire, or what was the illusion of an imperial presence in the world, gave birth to the Generación del 98 (Generation of ’98),15 the greatest surge of literary creativity Madrid had known since the Siglo de Oro of Cervantes and Lope de Vega. This collection of writers and intellectuals, in contrast to London’s Bloomsbury Set, never coalesced as a group or held formal meetings, but they shared a common sense of despair and moral crisis precipitated by the final disintegration of Spanish grandeur. The poets, novelists, philosophers and dramatists who were lumped together in this movement were all born between 1857 and 1872, and unsurprisingly none was a Madrileño by birth, all having been drawn to the capital from the Spanish periphery. The dramatist Ramón María del Valle-Inclán came from his native Galicia to depict the life of Madrid’s nocturnal underworld, creating in the process a genre known as esperpento, loosely defined as the theatre of the absurd. Pío Baroja, a Basque by birth, plunged his acerbic pen deep into the hearts of bourgeoisie complacency in his novels by exposing the miserable lives of the capital’s poor and disinherited. Miguel de Unamuno, a fellow Basque, produced novels, poems and essays reflecting on the crisis of religion and Spain’s fate. José Martínez Ruíz, who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Azorín’, was from Alicante but experienced the powerful attraction of the Spanish heartland. He was haunted by the stark and barren Castilian landscape that lay just beyond the Plaza de Castilla on the city’s northern boundary. Antonio Machado, recognised as the greatest poet of the Generación del 98, was Andalucían, but educated at Madrid’s freethinking Institución Libre de Enseñanza. 144

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This school deserves a mention, since it represents the most ambitious intellectual initiative to be undertaken in Madrid’s history. It was inspired by the German philosopher Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, whose views on the nature of God had considerable influence on Spain’s intellectual classes. The Institución was founded in 1876 by a group of university professors who broke with the Universidad Complutense de Madrid over the constraints imposed by the government on academic freedom. They refused to allow their teachings to be restricted by the university’s almost medieval dogmas on religious matters, politics and morals. Freedom to expound personal views in education, specifically in religious teachings, was prohibited in 1875 by Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, who served seven terms of office as prime minister under Alfonso XII. The Institución produced some of the most influential Spanish thinkers of the day, among them the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, the historian Américo Castro and the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Gregorio Marañón. The Residencia de Estudiantes de Madrid (Student Residence of Madrid), an offshoot of the Institución, was founded in 1910 as a centre for higher studies and a forum for debating new artistic and cultural trends that were filtering into Spain from across the Pyrenees. Its roll of distinguished alumni includes the filmmaker Luis Buñuel, the composer Manuel de Falla, the poet Federico García Lorca and the painter Salvador Dalí. In 2011 the Residencia de Estudiantes was declared a European Heritage Site. The Generación del 98 brought new life to the stage, to the unmitigated joy of Madrileños who seem incapable of sating their appetite for the theatre. The British writer Harold Acton took note of this in the 1920s when, in Madrid on a holiday from Oxford University, he went to see a performance by the dancer and torch singer Dolores Castro Ruíz, known as ‘La Cordobesita’. There was no shouting or wild applause from the audience, Acton remarked, but when their enthusiasm overleaped itself, they gave forth a concerted sigh which had the effect of a roar: it was as if a lion could bellow sotto voce. This was also noticeable when Andrés Segovia played the guitar, which he could convert into a 145

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harpsichord for Bach and Haydn and into a gitano [Gypsy] voice for Albéniz and Granados. During the seguidillas [Castilian dance form], one feared that the audience would have a mass apoplectic fit from their pent-up longing to cry out: olé! 16 With a cheerful disregard for the sombre picture of Spain painted in the novels of Baroja, or the tortured philosophical musings of Unamuno, musical comedies drew in the crowds, in particular ‘in the so-called género chico, the one-act sainete [comic operetta], usually part-spoken, part-sung, which had reached great heights of popularity towards the end of the nineteenth century, with such works as La Gran Vía (1894) and the even more famous La verbena de la Paloma of the same year’.17 Those years saw a plethora of popular stage productions, the most castizo variety being the zarzuela, a more extravagant full-length lyric drama version of the género chico. Literally dozens of these light comic operettas, in the manner of Gilbert and Sullivan, were produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and they were quickly absorbed into the fabric of popular Madrid culture. As for collective culture of the most castizo description, it was Alfonso XIII who in 1920 gave the capital’s iconic football team its modern name of Real (Royal) Madrid. However, the team’s origins go back almost a quarter of a century before its official name was adopted. The Institución Libre de Enseñanza attracted academics and students from abroad as well as Madrid, among them a number of Oxbridge graduates who brought a game that had been played in Britain with established rules for many decades.18 The British students’ Spanish colleagues swiftly became football addicts and by 1897, Football Club Sky began holding Sunday morning matches in Madrid’s Moncloa district near the university. Madrid Football Club was founded five years later and in 1905 the team won its first title after defeating Athletic Bilbao in the Spanish cup final. Fifteen years on, the club was granted its royal charter and by 1931 Real Madrid had won its first league title. The team’s social and political role, especially under the Franco dictatorship, cannot be overestimated. * 146

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Alfonso XIII unquestionably deserves plaudits for his work to modernise his country, which for most of the nineteenth century had resembled a neo-feudal, navel-gazing society lagging woefully behind the newly industrialising powers of Britain and France. The king played a role in pushing for modern transport and housing and, as we have seen, even in providing his capital with luxury hotels on a par with those of London or Paris, not to mention a world-class football team. Alfonso’s personal courage was beyond reproach, his personal morals perhaps more censurable, but it was in the political arena that he met his nemesis, and this was to be his undoing. The First World War (in which Spain remained neutral) and the Russian Revolution furnished a great boost for the Spanish anarcho-syndicalism movement, sparking waves of strikes across the country and encouraging the growth of a terrorist fringe. In 1919, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (National Workers’ Confederation, CNT), an anarchist union, held a conference in Madrid in which it was announced that its ranks had swollen to an unprecedented 755,000 members. Later that year the CNT flexed its muscles by calling a general strike in Barcelona to protest against the dismissal of eight factory workers. The stoppage involved 100,000 labourers and became the most successful industrial action in Spanish labour history. The government declared martial law in Barcelona and the Cortes were later forced to pass a law limiting to eight the number of working hours, the first country in the world to do so. In 1921, Alfonso took the disastrous decision to give his backing to the ill-placed optimism of his generals fighting the Rif War in Morocco, an action that led to the greatest military blunder since the charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War. This was the terrible massacre of a column of Spanish troops, which in error walked straight into an ambush laid by Berber tribesmen at Annual. These two events left Alfonso in bad odour with both the military and the outraged and frightened business community. The leader of the Partido Liberal, Manuel García Prieto, was serving his fifth and last term of office as prime minister, seemingly powerless to put a stop to a wave of assassinations by gangsters hired by the anarchists, and retaliatory killings by employers. Alfonso knew he was 147

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in a tight spot, coming under attack in his capacity as commanderin-chief of the armed forces for putting a badly led army in the field and in his capacity as national leader for failing to halt the spread of social unrest. ‘By 1923, the Spanish parliamentary system was bruised almost to death… the permanent threat presented by the anarchist CNT was too much for the politicians or the king.’19 On 13 September, four days before a parliamentary investigation into Alfonso’s role in the Moroccan disaster was meant to be submitted to the Cortes, a flamboyant Andalucían general, Miguel Primo de Rivera, issued a pronunciamiento in the form of an ultimatum to the king.20 The general read his proclamation in front of the Cortes, astride a white charger and surrounded by a rapturous throng of Madrileños, on the same spot and exactly 50 years after the Republic had been declared. Alfonso was in no position to defy the rebel general, as Primo de Rivera had with him not only the army, but also the conservative classes who were increasingly fearful for social order. The general announced in no uncertain terms his intention to establish a military dictatorship, albeit one of a benign temperament that never resorted to violence to silence opposition voices. But as a pragmatist he also declared his support for Alfonso, who was to be allowed to retain his crown. In return, the king took steps to legitimise the coup by appointing the general his ‘prime minister’. Alfonso in fact had welcomed the takeover by Primo de Rivera, who offered more promise than his tired politicians of restoring effective government. The coup effectively broke the back of the anarcho-syndicalism movement in its heartland of Cataluña and Andalucía, while in Madrid the military regime was welcomed with robust applause. Madrileños were fed up with top-heavy government of mediocre and inept politicians, anarchist assassins roaming the streets at their pleasure, wasteful industrial unrest and the harm these years of turmoil were doing to Spain’s international reputation. By 1919, Madrid was engulfed in a wave of industrial action. There were 26 strikes in the city the year of the military debacle in Morocco, double the number of the previous five years. This rose to 32 in 1920 and 36 the following year, mostly in sectors like public transport, which had a direct impact on the lives of most Madrileños. The dictatorship 148

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had the desired effect of putting order back into society, at least in its first years. The economy went through a phase of strong growth, unfettered by militant trade unions whom Primo de Rivera effectively rendered impotent. Great new urban-regeneration projects got underway, such as the sprawling Ciudad Universitaria (University City) adjacent to the Moncloa district and built on land ceded by Alfonso XIII. The campus was to become a ferocious battleground during the three years of the Civil War. Foreign investors began to look at Madrid as a haven of stability in which to set up shop and serve an increasingly affluent population. US giants General Motors, Standard Electric, ITT and General Electric opened headquarters in Madrid in those years. The only people who strove to make life difficult for Primo de Rivera were to be found in the tertulias, the writers and intellectuals of the Generación del 98 who vigorously spoke out against the military regime. But the chattering classes were easily ignored, at least until Spain was hit by a severe economic slump brought on by the 1929 Wall Street crash. Madrid’s students rallied to protest at what intellectuals like Miguel de Unamuno condemned as an unjust regime, and their protests were seconded by the freshly emboldened unions. The same army that in 1923 had acclaimed Primo de Rivera as Spain’s saviour now launched a bitter attack on the dictator, giving Alfonso grounds to dismiss him from office. It seemed a minor issue – a dispute over promotions – but this disguised a deeper discontent in a sector of society that, like the working classes and the bourgeoisie, was feeling the pinch of recession and the peseta’s collapse in the international currency markets. ‘Primo de Rivera moved to Paris, where he divided his time between the local church and brothels, and died within a few months.’21 The dictator’s departure brought jubilation to the streets of Madrid, highlighted by a pot-clanging demonstration organised by several thousand women. But the king had unfortunately acted too late to disassociate himself from the dictatorship. Alfonso’s next two prime ministers could barely keep order, hence six months after Primo de Rivera’s departure a group of liberals, republicans and anti-monarchist army officers hatched a plot to oust the monarch. 149

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The municipal elections of 12 April 1931 pre-empted the conspirators’ need to move against the king, however. Madrid, like the other great cities, came out overwhelmingly in favour of a republic. The voting was heavily influenced by the government’s rather tactless move in imprisoning a group of intellectuals and politicians who had signed a petition demanding the abolition of the monarchy. Rather than face civil war and street demonstrations in Madrid (as the king himself stated self-importantly) Alfonso XIII went into voluntary exile and once again the Puerta del Sol was bursting with cheering crowds. Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros, the Basque aristocrat who joined the Partido Comunista de España (Spanish Communist Party, PCE) and commanded the Republic’s air force during the Civil War, described the scene he witnessed from his hotel room: I woke to the shouts and songs of a demonstration… I went to the balcony and saw a large crowd of people waving Republican flags, with many soldiers among them, arm-in-arm with the demonstrators, singing and shouting vivas to the Republic. Although those marches were frequent at the time, it made a deep impression on me since it was the first time that I saw this fraternisation between the army and the people. The arrival of the Republic had been so unexpected it struck me that the demonstrators were doing something illegal.22 As for Alfonso, being a man with a penchant for luxury hotels he eventually settled in Rome’s Grand Hotel. His bid to come back to Spain as monarch was rejected by the leaders of the military uprising of 1936. In January 1941, Alfonso abdicated his rights to the Spanish throne in favour of his son Juan, father of the current king, Juan Carlos I. He died in Rome a month and a half later and in 1980 his remains were transferred to El Escorial, where they were laid to rest in the Panteón de los Reyes. Three days after the 1931 election, on 15 April, the Second Republic was declared, with the conservative republican lawyer Niceto AlcaláZamora as interim prime minister. The government in Madrid moved 150

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swiftly to introduce a progressive constitution that empowered local municipalities to run their own affairs and hold elections through universal suffrage. In Madrid, the royal parkland known as the Casa de Campo was turned over to the Ayuntamiento for free public use. Madrid as the capital was granted special legal status, under which the Cortes approved a subsidy to fund a programme of regeneration and improvement works, one that would be abruptly cut short by the outbreak of civil war in 1936. The Ayuntamiento embarked on an ambitious public-works programme which was best symbolised by the Nuevos Ministerios (New Ministries) office building, a gargantuan complex of marble colonnades, fountains and squares resembling something Mussolini might have ordered in a spare moment, and which has rightly been called a twentieth-century version of El Escorial. The plan called for a push northwards, with the construction of the Chamartín railway station at the northernmost end linked to Atocha at the southern end by a five-mile tunnel running under the Paseo de la Castellana. Despite opposition from some sectors of government and the press, which nicknamed it the ‘tunnel of laughter’, work got underway before the war, though it was not completed until 1967. Generals, like Nature, abhor a vacuum. If this vacuum is created by political instability, generals, particularly power-hungry ones who see themselves as the receivers of a messianic mission, will be tempted to take action. One such general was Francisco Franco, a crafty though unintelligent, pudgy little man who, when instability began to undermine the government, fixed Madrid in his sights. The state of almost perpetual political chaos brought on by 17 changes of prime minister within the space of five years was enough to set any Spanish military leader’s teeth on edge. There had not been much cause for alarm at the outset, for the government of 1931–33, a coalition that included the left-wing Acción Republicana (Republican Action) and the socialist PSOE, concerned itself mostly with the aforementioned modernisation of Madrid, as well as infrastructure improvements elsewhere in Spain. The election of November 1933 brought in a government led by the Partido 151

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Republicano Radical (Radical Republican Party) and supporters of the Roman Catholic right, a coalition that lasted a little over three years until the left-wing Frente Popular (Popular Front) scored a narrow victory in February 1936. Tensions between rival left- and right-wing factions had been running high almost from the day the Second Republic was proclaimed. On 10 May 1931, with the Republic less than a month old, the playing of the monarchist hymn at a royalist club in Madrid provoked an attack by government supporters which later that week turned into three days of violence, directed primarily against the Church. Mobs began to attack churches, monasteries and convents in Madrid, with the result that by the time the government half-heartedly put a stop to the disorder, which by now had spread to other cities, more than 100 religious edifices had gone up in flames. The Republic shifted to right-of-centre in 1933 with the appointment of Alejandro Lerroux, a conservative politician with few sympathies for regional autonomy or working-class agitation, two issues of grave concern for Spain’s officer class. In October of that year, the PSOE attempted to seize control of the government. The fear was that the extreme right, led by the fascist Falange founded by the late dictator’s son José Antonio Primo de Rivera, was about to make a grab for power, though the Spanish fascist movement lacked organisation and a strong enough militant base to attempt to overthrow the government. The socialist-inspired revolt broke out when members of Acción Popular (Popular Action), a Church-inspired right-wing party, were brought into Lerroux’s cabinet. There were riots in Madrid and revolutionary councils were set up by the PSOE and their allies across Spain, but the government quickly dealt with most of these pockets of insurgency. Only in the mountainous, coal-mining region of Asturias did the uprising meet with success, when socialists, anarchists and communists joined forces in a front led by radicalised colliers. General Franco was called in to suppress the revolt, a task he carried out with the ruthlessness distinctive of a founder of the Tercio de Extranjeros (Foreigners’ Regiment, later the Legión Española, the Spanish Foreign Legion) and veteran of the brutal Rif campaign in Morocco. The government 152

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was fearful that conscripts would be incapable of dealing with what had turned into a full-scale revolution, hence Franco’s legionnaires and Moroccan regulars were brought over from Africa to do the job. The future Caudillo23 of Spain failed to see the irony in employing Moroccan soldiers to crush a rebellion by Spanish Catholics in a part of Spain that had never been conquered by the Moors. The Asturias action resulted in the death of nearly 2,000 miners. Franco’s reward was to be appointed commander-in-chief in Morocco, which became the staging ground for the military rebellion that was to take place in less than two years’ time. The Frente Popular had its roots in the Asturian miner’s uprising, or more precisely the vicious military repression of the miners and their allies that created a climate of fear that Spain might be going the way of Germany and Austria. In Madrid, the build-up to the February 1936 election offered a distorted view of events that lay ahead. The week before the voting, 16 theatres, cinemas and other large halls in Madrid were hired for political meetings, six for the Frente Popular and ten for the Frente Nacional (National Front) coalition opposition. The government’s apprehensions that the meetings would lead to provocations and street clashes fell wide of the mark: the gatherings went off without a hitch. Even the Times concluded with misplaced optimism that ‘a new spirit of responsibility exists that augurs well for the general election’.24 The Times called it right insofar as the voting itself transpired in a largely peaceful climate. However, it was not long before extremists on both sides began resorting to guns to resolve their ideological differences. Madrid was thrust into a spring of minor warfare which continued unchecked through July. Murders for political reasons were reported almost daily from the start of the month. ‘On 2 July two Falangists sitting at a café table in Madrid were killed by shots from a passing motor car. Later the same day, two men leaving the Madrid Casa del Pueblo [Socialist club] were killed by a gang of men armed with sub-machine guns.’25 This deadly tit-for-tat game reached boiling point on 12 July, when an anti-fascist police officer of the Guardia de Asalto (Assault Guard), Lieutenant José Castillo, was 153

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shot dead by Falangist gunmen as he returned to his home in central Madrid. The attack came as revenge for Castillo’s shooting in April of a first cousin of José Antonio Primo de Rivera. This had taken place in a running battle at a funeral for a Guardia Civil officer who was believed to have been part of a botched bombing of the presidential tribunal at a parade in the Paseo de la Castellana. The next day it was the left’s turn to take retaliatory action. Several of Castillo’s fellow officers drove to the Madrid home of the royalist leader José Calvo Sotelo, a deputy in the Cortes whose house was under police protection. The carload of uniformed and heavily armed men had little difficultly in persuading the two guards to release Calvo Sotelo into their custody. He was taken to a cemetery in Madrid’s eastern suburbs and summarily shot. The government’s inability to control the spiralling violence was exposed on 14 July, the day marked for the funerals of the two latest high-profile victims of political assassinations. It beggars belief that nothing was done to prevent both factions burying their ‘martyrs’ in the same cemetery and on the same day. Castillo’s body was saluted with the clenched fist by republicans, socialist militias and police as it was lowered into the grave that morning. The coffin was draped in a red flag and the mourners then paraded past the grave, casting a menacing look at the group of well-heeled monarchists, clerics and Falangists gathered nearby. Calvo Sotelo’s remains were laid to rest shortly afterwards in the presence of enormous crowds, who gave the fascist salute and vowed to avenge their leader’s death. The vice-president and the permanent secretary of the Cortes, who were both present at Calvo Sotelo’s funeral, were mobbed by the crowd, including women who hurled abuse at the government. This widespread unrest was swiftly moving towards its inevitable climax, fears of which had been mooted by top army officers as far back as the February general election. Unbeknown to Madrileños who queued to cast their vote on 16 February, General Franco had that morning called on prime minister Manuel Portela at the Cortes. In a tense meeting, Franco blatantly urged the government to declare a state of war to prevent the Frente Popular coming to power. The general tried to persuade Portela, who was to serve less than two 154

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months in office, that the army was equipped to suppress the left-wing uprising that such a measure would almost inevitably provoke. Portela prevaricated just long enough to hand over power to the president of the triumphant Frente Popular, Manuel Azaña, and then quietly retire from the political scene, and Spain, to take up residence in Nice. Franco and his fellow army malcontents now began thinking along different lines: despite their entreaties, the government had refused to stand firm against a Frente Popular victory, therefore Spain’s only hope of salvation from the godless red hordes rested with the military.

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In an early-morning special bulletin of 18 July 1936, Madrid radio broadcast a government statement assuring its listeners that no one on the Spanish mainland had taken part in the military rebellion. For Madrileños, this was the first confirmed report that an army revolt was in progress. The capital had been holding its breath for weeks in anticipation of a military uprising. Right-wing deputies were calling for it to happen, the Church had made no secret of its desire for a clampdown on the radical anti-clericalists, a large sector of the middle classes were wringing their hands over a wave of industrial action and Spain’s faltering economy, and there was no shortage of army officers to add their voices to the general clamour for a restoration of order. It was well known that seditious elements were embedded in the highest ranks of the army, and the government was aware of these likely plotters. Consequently, several commanders had been removed from exerting direct influence in Madrid, to places where it was thought they would be least likely to do the Republic any harm. General Emilio Mola had been dispatched to the backwater of Pamplona, Franco himself was posted to the remote Canary Islands, and General José Sanjurjo – banished in 1932 for plotting a rebellion with the Carlists – was exiled to Portugal. General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, a suave loudmouth from Sevilla, was at large on the mainland, having duped the government into believing his Republican sympathies. He became the organiser of the crucial Andalucían rising. 157

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What the government failed to take into account was that an army revolt was far more likely to find adherents in Spanish Morocco and other provincial garrisons than in Madrid, where the Republic enjoyed overwhelming support from the armed forces and trade unions. General Mola was the principal conspirator at this stage of the planned rebellion. He sent a directive by coded telegram to numerous members of the officers’ corps calling for the uprising to commence in Morocco on 17 July. But the details were betrayed to the commander of the Spanish forces in Melilla1 and the leader of the rebel forces there, Colonel José Seguí Almuzara, had to move quickly. He arrested his commanding officer, General Romerales Quintana, and with his pistol aimed point blank at the general’s head, he obtained his resignation. Seguí then ordered his legionnaires and Moroccan troops into the streets to take control of the garrison and town in the name of what was to become known as the Cruzada Nacional (National Crusade). The uprising had begun. In Madrid, the government found itself between the proverbial rock and hard place. Should arms be distributed to the workers to resist the rebel generals, or was this inviting a proletariat revolution on top of a military uprising? For the moment, the Madrid militia was mobilised, but as a precautionary measure regular troops were confined to barracks. The trade unions lost no time in issuing a broadcast on Madrid radio to assure the people of the workers representatives’ loyalty to the Republic. The Times’s correspondent observed that the union militias were patrolling the streets of the capital ‘in lorries, taxis or afoot, accompanied by girls who stop and searched ladies with scrupulous politeness’.2 President Azaña, a lawyer by profession whose scholarly temperament rendered him ill-suited for the job, accepted the cabinet’s resignation on the night of 18 July and called on Diego Martínez Barrio to accept the post of prime minister and form a government.3 Barrio’s predecessor Santiago Casares, who also held the portfolio of minister for war, was incapable of confronting the crisis. When he received a telegram informing him of the rising in Melilla, he tucked the message in his pocket and went to the cabinet room for a threehour session, after which he read it out to his fellow ministers, not 158

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giving too much importance to the event. Barrio’s first act was to put through a rather quixotic call to General Mola to offer him the post of minister of war in his government. Not surprisingly, Mola turned him down. When Azaña realised that the Nacionales (Nationalists), as they were now styled, were unwilling to compromise, he sacked Martínez Barrio that same night and replaced him with José Giral, a former chemistry professor and leading figure in Barrio’s moderate Unión Republicana (Republican Union) party. The following day, 20 July, the Nationalist cause lost a leading contender for the position of generalísimo of the rebel forces. General José Sanjurjo was en route from Portugal to Spain when his biplane crashed shortly after takeoff from Estoril, killing him and badly injuring his pilot. Sanjurjo had been cautioned that the combination of his considerable bulk and the huge amount of baggage he insisted on carrying made the flight in the small De Havilland Dragon Rapide a risky undertaking. But he retorted that as the new Caudillo of Spain, he needed proper clothes. Oddly enough, Mola was also killed in an air crash the following year, and it has not gone unnoticed by conspiracy theorists that these air crashes left Franco with no serious challengers to his leadership. Franco himself had managed to fly safely from the Canary Islands to Morocco on 19 July, in the same type of aircraft used by Sanjurjo. On 1 October Franco was proclaimed Generalísimo (Commander-in-Chief) and head of state in Burgos, the Nationalists’ provisional capital. In a matter of days, the battle lines had been defined, the Republic having lost significant territory to the rebel forces. The Spanish Sahara was the first region to fall into rebel hands, followed by the Canary Islands, Galicia, Navarra, Aragón and much of Castilla la Vieja. There was heavy fighting in the cities, where poorly equipped worker militias put up a fierce defence and often suffered terrible reprisals by Nationalist troops. Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Bilbao were among the key cities to hold firm against the rebel offensive, thanks in no small measure to a determined resistance by small units of armed workers. The Republic had beaten off an attempted coup and now found itself fighting a civil war. * 159

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The Templo de Debod (Temple of Debod) is an ancient-Egyptian shrine that was brought to Madrid in 1968 and rebuilt in the west of the city, on the Príncipe Pío hill, which was chosen because it was the site of the ruins of the Cuartel de la Montaña barracks, where the rebels had been executed on the morning of 3 May 1808. In 1936 it was the scene of another uprising, though hardly one that was in the defence of liberty. General Joaquín Fanjul, a dour, bearded man who was known to be supportive of the rising, had been relieved of his command of any army units in the Madrid garrison. But he was the Nationalists’ chief conspirator in the capital, or ‘quinto columnista’ (‘fifth columnist’), as the network of secret insurgent sympathisers came to be known.4 On the morning of 19 July Fanjul, alone and in civilian dress, walked into the Montaña barracks and proceeded to declare a state of war in Madrid. The general exhorted the fortress’s 1,500 troops to march on the city. He promised reinforcements from three other army posts in Madrid’s outlying districts, which, fortunately for the Republic, were soon to be secured by loyal forces. The government could not allow the Montaña barracks to fall into the insurgents’ hands, for its armoury held 55,000 rifle bolts, without which many of the rifles distributed to the workers would be useless. That afternoon, the garrison was surrounded by loyalist Guardia Civil, assault police and workers’ militias, backed by 105mm and 155mm cannon. Hidalgo de Cisneros was ordered to the Getafe aerodrome on the southern edge of the city, where rebel forces in the nearby artillery barracks had mobilised several units. The air-force chief put together three columns of loyal troops and socialist and communist militias to assault the rebel garrison. Smashing the insurgents was crucial to safeguarding Getafe, where the bulk of the Republican air force was based. The day was won by aerial bombardment, which left most of the mutineers dead or captured. ‘It was the first time, in our war, that regular officer-led units fought side-by-side with the heroic people of Madrid, who with such self-denial defended the Republic.’5 The Montaña-barracks action was a harder fought battle, and a good deal more savage. As dawn broke on 20 July, the government forces opened up with an artillery barrage that quickly reduced large 160

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sections of the brick and granite structure to rubble. The defenders crouched behind piles of masonry strewn about the building, putting up a spirited resistance against the overwhelming strength of the highly disciplined Guardia Civil and fanatical workers. They knew their position was hopeless: no reinforcements were to be seen, the rebels were cut off and it was only a matter of time before they would be flushed out of the crumbling building. That day Madrid’s one million inhabitants were coping with the highest temperatures ever recorded in Spain. The ferocious heat sapped the strength and will to resist of the troops holed up in the barracks. Inside, all was confusion: some of the men raised the white flag, others desperately continued to return the attackers’ fire, determined to sell their lives dearly. Air power again became the deciding factor of the day. A series of bombing raids threw the garrison into disarray, opening up breaches in the walls that allowed the Guardia Civil to storm into the compound. For the troops in uniform the purpose of the attack was to reduce the rebels to surrender. The militias took a radically different line of action, and this led to the cold-blooded slaughter on the spot of between 500 and 900 men. A chilling portent of a three-year orgy of summary executions, assassinations and reprisals on both sides had just got underway. While the bodies were still being collected from the barracks courtyard and corridors inside the building, the Madrid fire brigade was struggling with the smoking remains of 50 churches, which rampaging anti-clerical mobs had put to the torch the previous night. General Fanjul was captured and shown no mercy. He was tried and convicted of treason and put in front of a firing squad a few weeks after the battle, alongside his son who was serving in the barracks on the day of the attack. From the storming of the Montaña barracks on 20 July to the first week in November 1936, Madrid experienced a ‘phoney war’, with an absence of any major military operations. The conquest of Madrid was, on paper, the Nationalists’ major military objective. This was made clear in General Mola’s early directives, formulated two months before the uprising. Madrid was cited as the priority target in a memorandum passed on to the chief conspirators on 25 May 1936. But for the time being, the defenders of Madrid and the Nationalist 161

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generals who were making preparations to launch an assault on the capital devoted their time to consolidating their positions, stockpiling their arsenals and mapping out their strategies. It was during this interval that the rebels began receiving troops and military assistance from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, while aid was being shipped to the Republic by Mexico, France and the Soviet Union.6 The Nationalists launched their offensive on Madrid in the first week of October, with columns closing in on the capital from the north, west and, most menacingly, from Franco’s Ejército de África (Army of Africa) advancing from the south. The southern column was made up of battle-hardened though exhausted legionnaires and Moroccans, who were known to give no quarter.7 The insurgents marched in high spirits, their commanders assuring them of an easy victory over the poorly defended capital, and thus a speedy conclusion to the war. The Morocco column began its advance on Madrid on 2 August and moved quickly. However, on his way north from Sevilla, Franco made an astonishing decision ‘that would affect the entire subsequent course of the Spanish Civil War… Madrid was at his mercy, yet Franco did not let his troops race onwards to an easy victory but decided instead to divert them south-eastwards to relieve the besieged Alcázar of Toledo.’8 Madrid, a city totally unprepared to hold off an attack by large numbers of regular troops, had won a temporary reprieve, allowing the defending forces time to organise an effective resistance. The scene for the coming assault was set by an historic and ominous episode in the history of European warfare. On the night of 26 August, without warning, insurgent aircraft flew over the city and dropped bombs on the Ministry of War, the railway station and the Barajas aerodrome, all populated areas. Two bombs fell in Cibeles, the square round which stood the War Office, central post office and Banco de España. The summer sky was lit up by flares dropped on parachutes, which sent panic-stricken people rushing into Metro stations and cellars. Fortunately the streets were nearly deserted and only a few people were wounded in the attack. Worse was to come, as the Nationalists stepped up their campaign of air raids on Madrid. The August raid 162

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marked the first time air power had been deliberately used against a civilian target, a terror tactic that was to become routine in the threeyear conflict, most notoriously in the bombing of the Basque market town of Guernica by the German Luftwaffe in April 1937.9 Rightly it has been said that the Spanish Civil War was a dress rehearsal for the Second World War. A far deadlier attack came on the afternoon of 30 October. At 4.45 p.m., when Madrileños were returning to work from their traditional late lunch, a Nationalist plane flew over the capital from north to south and dropped half a dozen bombs on a populous quarter towards the city centre. At least 15 people were killed and more than 60 wounded in the attack, including women and children, some of whom were standing in food queues when the bombs fell. The bombardment of Madrid’s city centre occurred almost simultaneously with a raid on Getafe, a village near the Republican aerodrome a few miles south of Madrid. The death toll in that attack exceeded 40, with 100 wounded. Many of the dead and injured were children playing outside, and many more were to die in the streets and under the rubble of shattered homes in the months to come. On 10 October, prime minister Francisco Largo Caballero began in earnest to prepare to combat the insurgents by officially raising the Ejército Popular de la República (Republican Popular Army) to replace the regular forces that had been disbanded at the outbreak of the rising. Professional officers were placed at the head of an uneasy assemblage of anarchist militias, socialists and communists. The challenge was to persuade this ragtag army to aim their weapons at the insurgents instead of one another. The men of the socialist and anarchist brigades had been indoctrinated with revolutionary rhetoric by their powerful unions, the Unión General de Trabajadores (General Union of Workers, UGT) and Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (National Confederation of Labour, CNT) respectively, with little mention made of the need to lay aside their ideological differences. The communists fielded by far the best organised fighting units and they were also the only ones with a grasp of the crucial reality of the situation: that to save Madrid and ultimately win the war it was necessary to defeat the enemy. 163

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Less than a month later, at eight in the evening of 6 November, Largo Caballero summoned to the cabinet office his two chief army commanders in Madrid, generals José Miaja and Sebastián Pozas. Each was handed an envelope on which was handwritten ‘Not to be opened before 0700 hours on 7 November 1936’. Largo Caballero made a hasty departure, for he had urgent affairs to attend to. The two generals were left alone in the antechamber, staring at their respective envelopes. Pozas turned to Miaja and asked him what he planned to do with his. ‘I shall open it straightaway,’ he replied. ‘It would be criminal to wait until the morning.’10 The prime minister had been in such a state of agitation that he had mixed up the letters. Miaja’s letter contained orders for Pozas to retreat with his army to Tarancón, 50 miles south-east of Madrid, if the capital came into imminent danger of falling to the insurgents. Pozas handed his envelope to Miaja who laughed, but the smile faded from his face when he read the letter. The government, Miaja was told, in order to fulfil its duty to uphold the Republican cause, had decided to abandon Madrid and move its headquarters to Valencia. Miaja was given responsibility for a newly created Junta de Defensa (Defence Committee), set up to coordinate resistance and, if necessary, to organise a retreat from Madrid and set up a new line of defence at Cuenca, a few miles beyond Tarancón, at a point designated by Pozas, the Commander of the Ejército del Centro (Army of the Centre). Miaja was to head the Junta, which was composed of several government delegates and 16 trade-union representatives. Members of the communist PCE, who, needless to say, welcomed with enthusiasm the creation of the Junta, were given the key military posts of Delegates for War. The communist army commander Enrique Líster declared that a ‘government’ closer to the people would help to allay despair over the cabinet’s move to Valencia, while reinforcing Madrileños’ will to resist. The entire population, from one end of the city to the other, raised their voices as one to cry out, ‘¡No pasarán! ’ (‘They shall not pass!’)11 That same evening, Líster went to Pozas’s office where he learnt that the government had fled. Anticipating the inevitable fall of Madrid, Pozas ordered Líster to evacuate his forces from their forward line 164

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of defence in the Guadarrama range north of the city, and deploy to Tarancón, as outlined in Largo Caballero’s letter. ‘As far as my units were concerned, the Politburo [of the PCE] approved my proposal to withdraw the troops from their positions, but to Madrid, not to Tarancón,’ Líster wrote.12 He was put in command of all those units that were able to retire to the town of Villaverde, a short distance due south of the city centre. The battle that ensued halted the Nationalist advance from that direction. The first step was to rout the insurgents who were holding out around Villaverde itself. The savage fighting that took place on 7 November was of a type to be replicated many times over during the siege of Madrid. The insurgents were intoxicated with their victorious advance from Sevilla to the outskirts of Madrid. The Republican forces displayed the determination of men knowing that defeat almost certainly meant death at the hands of the African troops. ‘It was a battle fought with bayonets and hand grenades, street by street, house by house, room by room, and no one could tell for certain if those who fell were one’s comrades or the enemy.’13 Terrified villagers from Villaverde and other outlying districts came pouring into the capital to escape the fighting, which could be watched from the city’s rooftops. Long columns of wagons, mules and handcarts piled high with personal belongings moved slowly towards the centre, some along shell-pocked roads, others taking their chances on the six bridges across the Manzanares that had been mined when the government left for Valencia. The embassies of Madrid began filling up with foreign nationals who had stayed behind when the fighting erupted. About 100 people, including ambulance and nursing personnel, were crowded into the British embassy. Others, a multitude of fifth columnists for the Nationalists among them, sought refuge in various legations. The embassy of the Principality of Monaco alone harboured some 600 refugees. The police staged a raid one night on the Finnish embassy behind the Paseo de la Castellana, to find that its personnel had all fled to Valencia. Shots were fired during the raid, when ‘the police disclosed 535 quivering Spanish bourgeois within’.14 The police later set up a false embassy under the flag of Siam, with bugging devices installed throughout the building. ‘Various persons… came to seek their refuge. Their 165

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conversations were listened to by secret microphones, and they were later murdered.’15 Anti-fascist militiamen patrolled the streets and collaborators were aware of the fate that awaited those who were caught. Any doubts about how these gangs dealt with their enemies were easily dispelled by the bullet-riddled bodies that almost every morning could be found sprawled in Madrid’s parks and alleyways. Mutual hatred was at its fiercest between the supposedly allied communists and anarchists and Líster himself, on more than one occasion, came within a hair’s breadth of falling victim to gangland-style violence. While driving one night to the outskirts, the car carrying his bodyguards broke down and Líster carried on with his driver and aide-de-camp. A mile or so further on his car was stopped by six armed men and Líster was ordered out with his hands in the air. The gunmen informed him he was to be executed on the spot for having threatened anarchist militiamen, who Líster claimed were attempting to flee the battlefield. Líster kept the exchange of words going to gain time, looking for a chance to draw the revolver that his captors had neglected to take from him. At the last moment his back-up car screeched to a halt next to the gunmen and the five bodyguards leapt out with automatic weapons drawn. The incident came to a speedy end when the anarchists found themselves cornered. Not long after that, Líster was attacked and dragged into the Cinema Europa in the northern sector of the city, which served as an unofficial anarchist police station. This time the assailants relieved Líster of his service revolver, but they were unaware of another gun hidden under his uniform. Líster managed to draw his pistol and keep the attackers at bay long enough for his men to discover what had happened and throw a cordon of troops around the cinema, at which point the anarchists threw in the towel and fled. Líster’s close calls highlight the horror of this ‘turf war’ within the Republican camp, but one can hardly whitewash the communists’ role in carrying out assassinations and summary executions of their political enemies. It is impossible to substantiate with any accuracy the number of atrocities perpetrated on both sides, but estimates of the victims of the so-called ‘Terror Rojo’ (‘Red Terror’) during the war years range from 38,000 to 110,000. A good deal 166

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of the butchery committed by the Nationalists was carried out in post-war reprisals, but there is a consensus among historians that Franco’s forces liquidated at least 200,000 of his enemies during and after the war. The Nationalists’ bloodthirstiness was described by the Times’s correspondent in Madrid, who in August 1936 feared the Republican defenders would be powerless to stop the rebel army. ‘Should the insurgent generals succeed in breaking through the 80-mile front on the Guadarrama, or in advancing on Madrid from the east or south-west, the easiest avenues of approach, a butchery of Popular Front elements is likely to ensue.’16 Madrid was meanwhile assisting at a slaughter of its own. Militia gangs were picking up suspects on a daily basis and if the ‘evidence’ against them as enemies of the working classes was considered sufficient, retribution followed in the form of a paseíto, or ‘little stroll’ to some inconspicuous spot. Gruesome sights confronted those crossing the Parque del Oeste in the morning, and anyone walking in the vicinity of Moncloa near the university was likely to come across the corpses of those hapless souls who had been abducted the night before. Passers-by reported seeing bodies flung out of speeding cars in broad daylight and the walls of the Retiro park were splattered with blood. People living on the city’s outskirts complained about being woken at night by the cries for mercy of those being taken for a ‘little stroll’. The government tried to put a stop to this orgy of lawlessness by setting up a people’s tribunal, the Tribunal de Seguridad Pública (Tribunal of Public Safety), which within days of its debut in late August had imposed five death sentences on alleged ‘traitors to the nation’. The tribunal was composed of three magistrates, whose powers to interpret the law were undermined by a 14-member jury representing the same political parties that were carrying out the extra-judicial murders. The situation was so far out of control that at the end of August the Argentine ambassador in Madrid was appointed to chair an international commission to secure more merciful treatment of prisoners and hostages on both sides. Britain, France and several other countries sent their ambassadors to talks in the French border towns of Hendaye and Saint-Jean-de-Luz, but their efforts made no 167

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impact on the continued ill treatment and killing of prisoners of war and suspected enemy agents. There was something painfully absurd about having to grapple with infighting between rival factions in a city on the verge of being overrun by an enemy who would show no quarter to any of its opponents, communist, socialist or anarchist. The forces along the Guadarrama range were at a standstill, with Republican militias holding the northern approaches to the city. In early November, Franco’s troops were at the Cerro de los Ángeles, a few miles to the south of the capital, poised to launch an all-out assault on the city centre. Madrid appeared certain to succumb, if not to the Nationalist onslaught, to panic spread by wild rumours: militiamen had arrested several ministers in the government’s withdrawal to Valencia; anarchists had forced the communist ministers to return to Madrid; the Soviet ambassador Marcel Rosenberg had fled the capital under heavy guard, taking the communist deputy Dolores Ibárruri, known as ‘La Pasionaria’ (‘The Passion Flower’) with him. There was no truth in any of these scare stories, but equally people had little doubt that Foreign Legionnaires and Moroccan regulars would be patrolling the streets of Madrid before dawn. The interior ministry’s undersecretary Wenceslao Carrillo (whose son Santiago later became leader of the communist PCE) ordered machine guns to be positioned on the balconies of his department’s headquarters in the Puerta del Sol. In this midst of this havoc, General Miaja issued his first set of instructions as head of the Junta de Defensa: all brigade commandants were to report to his office within the hour. Miaja then called for a general mobilisation of trade unionists, regardless of political affiliation. The men were to be sent to the southern front, where Franco’s troops were massing for an attack. The meeting was interrupted by the constant jangling of the telephones on Miaja’s desk, calls coming in from commanders at the front pleading for ammunition and reinforcements. Miaja knew the UGT and CNT had arsenals stockpiled with munitions intended for use against one another – these were to be opened and all weapons dispatched to the frontline within two hours. Madrileños began erecting barricades with paving stones and 168

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earth-filled sacks piled across the roads. Tank traps were improvised by digging trenches in the main avenues and boulevards. Instructions for the city’s defence were distributed in each barrio, recommending that people assemble Molotov cocktails with any available inflammable liquid and make use of their balconies to drop them on the fascist invaders. While Madrid held its breath, an almost surreal semblance of normal life carried on in the city. As well as patriotic documentaries, the cinemas were showing Buster Keaton and Marx Brothers films, in an attempt to bolster the public’s spirits. More than 20 Madrid cinemas remained open throughout the war, though screenings were limited to afternoon hours to avoid having people in the streets during curfew. People tended their gardens and the trams continued to run. ‘In a world first, Madrid’s militiamen were being ferried to war by tram, the last stop being the frontline itself.’17 To everyone’s amazement, the morning of 8 November dawned with not a sign of enemy forces in Madrid. Franco had blundered yet again, just like when he had diverted his column on the road to Madrid to relieve the besieged Toledo garrison. If Franco had really been a great leader, his troops would have entered Madrid that morning. He lacked the intuition, the iron determination, the foresight of a true caudillo. Napoleon’s grenadiers would have been in the Puerta del Sol before dawn. Franco contented himself with giving his frontline forces a rest on the outskirts, and sending out invitations to heads of state to attend the fall of Madrid.18 The president of Guatemala was the first to respond, with a telegram of congratulations addressed to ‘General Francisco Franco, Ministry for War, Madrid’. Miaja handed the telegram back to his aide-de-camp, remarking laconically that it was not for him. In early November 1936 there occurred one of those incidents that could have been lifted from a Hollywood screenplay. A Republican major in command of a battalion holding the Extremadura road south-west of the Casa de Campo rushed back from the front to 169

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Madrid and burst into Miaja’s office brandishing a fistful of documents. It emerged that an Italian tank crew of Mussolini’s Fascist ‘volunteers’ had lost their way trying to get through the wooded Casa de Campo. The tank was destroyed by militiamen, who found a battle plan in the tunic pocket of a Spanish major trapped inside. The officer happened to be in command of the Nationalist tank brigade. This lucky find provided Madrid with a reprieve. Franco planned to dispatch two columns on a diversionary manoeuvre from the south-east towards the Segovia and Toledo bridges. While the Republican forces were drawn to this area, the bulk of the Nationalist army, three columns in strength, was rapidly to deploy north-west to launch a surprise attack on the Casa de Campo and break through to the Ciudad Universitaria, forcing their way from there to the heart of Madrid, which lay less than a mile away. Two more columns, composed of Moroccans, Carlists, volunteers from Sevilla and the Canaries, along with a contingent of Guardia Civil, were to be held in reserve for the final assault. Miaja acknowledged it was a clever ploy, and that there was every likelihood that the Republican forces would have fallen into the trap. But there was also good reason to expect the enemy to change their strategy once the loss was discovered. Miaja knew his adversaries well: many had been his brother officers before turning against the Republic. He decided to take a chance. The battle for the Ciudad Universitaria, the most vulnerable gateway to central Madrid, got underway in earnest in the second week of November, with a tank and infantry advance under the command of General José Enrique Varela. This dapper veteran of the Moroccan campaign, who was decorated for valour by Alfonso XIII, had travelled disguised as a priest in villages of Navarra to recruit Carlist Requetés19 for the Nationalist cause. The opposing lines were drawn roughly along hillsides on a meandering north–west axis, and at several points the trenches almost touched the streets of Madrid. Thousands of fighters – legionnaires and Moroccan regulars on one side, a poorly armed mass of militiamen on the other – confronted each other with the support of tanks and aircraft supplied for Franco by Germany and Italy, and Russian armaments for the Republic. On 9 November the first units of the newly arrived Brigadas Internacionales (International 170

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Brigades) marched up the Gran Vía as bystanders cheered them with cries of ‘Long live Russia!’ This was the XI Brigada Internacional under the command of Manfred Stern, a Soviet military-intelligence officer who went by four different noms de guerre and had served variously as a Soviet spy in the US and military adviser in China. Stern’s role as a Stalinist agent raised hackles in the anarchist and communist ranks, but the appearance of foreign volunteers was a great morale booster for the ordinary citizen, for it demonstrated the concern of other nations in Madrid’s fight to survive. French and Polish volunteers, together with a British machine-gun company, were in combat almost as soon as they arrived in Madrid. Taking up positions at the Casa de Campo, General Kléber, the name Stern used in Spain, launched an all-night assault on the Nationalist positions. The rebels were forced to retreat by morning. The Casa de Campo was secured and that front ceased to pose an immediate threat to Madrid, but at the cost of high casualties on the Republican side, with the XI Brigada having lost a third of its fighting strength. A week later Varela opened up an all-out offensive at the Ciudad Universitaria, supported by tanks and artillery. The shelling caused widespread devastation in the Argüelles quarter, adjacent to the campus. The Palacio de Liria, home of the Duke of Alba, was reduced to ruins. So too was the Palacio Quintana, once owned by Alfonso XIII’s aunt the Infanta Isabel. Another fine building destroyed was the church of Nuestra Señora del Buen Suceso (Our Lady of Good Fortune), where the venerated statue of Nuestra Señora de Atocha reposed following the destruction of the Atocha basilica by the occupying French forces in 1808. Roughly a third of Madrileños were forced to flee their homes during the continual air raids and artillery bombardments that hammered Madrid in the first year of war. Those barrios more removed from the fighting became so congested that the Junta de Defensa called on the socialist and anarchist unions each to give up 500 cars for evacuation work. The expropriated vehicles were used to carry refugees out of Madrid – by the end of December 50,000 children had been sent away – and return with badly needed food supplies. Madrid had been suffering from shortages of most foodstuffs since the start of the fighting. Geoffrey Cox, a New Zealand-born 171

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journalist who covered the siege of Madrid for the News Chronicle, considered this perhaps the most critical problem facing the city in the early months of the war. ‘Food grew more scarce and hunger more intense in Madrid. Thousands of people were being evacuated, but not enough to lessen pressure on the food supply.’20 The Republic controlled the major industrial cities, but the agricultural regions had mostly fallen into Nationalist hands. Almost everything was in short supply and women took great risks to queue for food, never knowing when and where the Nationalists’ bombs were likely to drop. With the shortage of tobacco, people took to smoking potato peel, they made soap from bread and ate vermin-infested lentils. Later, in the final months of the siege, Franco’s aircraft bombarded the city with loaves of bread and propaganda leaflets. The government put out warnings that the bread might be poisoned, but people devoured it eagerly nonetheless. There were no reported cases of ill effects. Shopkeepers began shutting their businesses, to hoard food and other goods, with the fear that currency issued by the Republic might become worthless overnight. General Miaja’s intuition had not let him down: the enemy either was not aware that their battle plans had gone missing, or had decided to proceed with their initial strategy anyway, assuming that the Nationalists’ superior firepower would score a swift breach through the militia-held lines. But the Republican lines did hold, though it was perilously touch-and-go in the first days of fighting. There were scenes of wild panic along the Gran Vía when on 17 November a small contingent of the feared African troops broke through into the Plaza de España, in the city proper, before being repulsed by militiamen behind the barricades. Miaja dispatched 77mm artillery pieces for the first time to the Ciudad Universitaria front, along with the Segunda Brigada Mixta (Second Mixed Brigade), made up of a machine-gun company and three companies of infantry. The Hungarian writer Máté Zalka, known as General Pavol Lukács, who was later killed in the Huesca offensive, transferred the seven battalions of his Brigada Garibaldi (Garibaldi Brigade) from Chamartín in the northern sector to reinforce the Ciudad Universitaria line. A savage hand-to-hand engagement took place in the Casa de Velázquez, the research institute 172

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at the very edge of the university campus. It was taken by Polish troops and completely destroyed in the course of the fighting. This and the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (Faculty of Philosophy and Letters) were the two critical buildings that had to be held at all costs to prevent an enemy surge into the Moncloa quarter. And they were. In some faculty buildings close-quarter fighting was punctuated by an exchange of insults between floors, with hand grenades tossed out of windows and down lift shafts. The large number of bodies taken into the city prompted the mayor to request permission of the Junta de Defensa to dig a common grave for the victims of the Ciudad Universitaria battle. Day by day, the university complex deteriorated under the relentless bombardment from both sides. On 19 November, the day the charismatic anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti fell mortally wounded, the German Condor Legion provided sufficient cover for the Nationalists to establish a strong foothold on the campus. Four days later, although three-quarters of the area were under rebel control, the battle had ground to a stalemate. Against all the odds, the Republic had stopped the enemy advance. Now both sides realised that further fighting was futile, and began digging in for the bitter winter months ahead in the trenches. The battle for Madrid had now become a war of attrition. The aura of ‘romanticism’ that surrounded the Republican cause and those who fought under its banner acted like a magnet on a multitude of politicians, newspaper correspondents and left-wing intellectuals, who mustered in Madrid to witness the courageous battle against fascism. The Labour MP Emanuel Shinwell was one of many British visitors to the city who came to witness Madrid’s defiance of an enemy whose totalitarian allies represented a threat to British and Spanish democracy alike. The capital was suffering badly from war wounds. The University City had been almost destroyed by shellfire during the earlier and most bitter fighting of the war. We walked along the miles of trenches which surrounded the city. At the end of 173

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the communicating trenches came the actual defence lines, dug within a few feet of the enemy’s trenches. We could hear the conversation of the fascist troops crouching down in their trench across the narrow street. Desultory firing continued everywhere, with snipers on both sides trying to pick off the enemy as he crossed exposed areas. We had little need to obey the orders to duck when we had to traverse the same areas. At night the fascist artillery would open up, and what with the physical effects of the food and the expectation of a shell exploding in the bedroom I did not find my nights in Madrid particularly pleasant.21 The highly eclectic mix of foreigners who turned up in Madrid to lend their support to the fight, to report on the war or simply in search of adventure, contained such characters as Hugh Slater, a British communist and artist, who arrived in a vintage Rolls-Royce and became chief of operations of the Brigadas Internacionales, and the French aristocrat and author of The Little Prince Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Although he was only a casual visitor, Errol Flynn is alleged to have capitalised later on an erroneous report of his injuries at the battlefront in Madrid to promote his films.22 Other well-known names included André Malraux, the French novelist, who helped to organise the Republican air force, Louis Delaprée of Paris-Soir, Herbert Matthews of the New York Times, Louis Fischer of the liberal US journal the Nation, John Dos Passos, the leftist US novelist who in later life switched sides and became a writer for William F. Buckley Jr’s right-wing weekly National Review, and Martha Gellhorn, war correspondent and Ernest Hemingway’s third wife. Hemingway donned the laurel wreath as doyen of the foreign delegation, and later wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls based on his wartime experiences. The British novelist Laurie Lee’s autobiographical A Moment of War also drew from his time in Spain. George Orwell, though he did not see action around Madrid, produced one of the most powerful accounts of the war in his Homage to Catalonia. Hemingway arrived in Madrid in 1937 and spent eight months in the city as a reporter for the North American Newspaper 174

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Alliance (NANA). He wrote his only play, appropriately entitled The Fifth Column, while the city was under bombardment. Hemingway was not an armchair war correspondent and he was present when the Republicans made their last major stand at the Battle of the Ebro, being one of the last to leave the field. In Madrid, he was noted for hospitality in his room at the Hotel Florida, which was stocked with an ‘inexhaustible store of bacon, eggs, coffee and marmalade and drink, whisky and gin’.23 It seems, however, that his reputation as a man’s man who could hold a prodigious quantity of drink has been somewhat overstated. The celebrated barman Perico Chicote, whose establishment is still serving exotic cocktails in the Gran Vía, once pointed to a stool near the door and remarked, ‘Hemingway would sit there drinking most of the afternoon or evening, mixing his drinks, and on more than one occasion he would end up on the floor.’24 There was also a sprinkling of artists and celebrities who were avowed sympathisers of the Nationalists, among them Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dalí, Wyndham Lewis, Robert Brasillach and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. One of the most unlikely of Franco’s supporters, a man highly esteemed by his fellow American Hemingway, was Sidney Franklin, the son of an Orthodox Jewish family from Brooklyn, who went to Spain and became a reasonably successful bullfighter. Franco’s strategy now shifted to the south of Madrid, in an attempt to cut off communications and supply lines with Valencia. To achieve his objective, Nationalist forces were concentrated in the Jarama River valley, which stretches to the south-east of the capital. These forces were under the command of General Luis Orgaz, who failed miserably in the campaign and was later rewarded with the post of Spanish Chief of the Defence Staff. By the end of 1936, close to half a million people had been evacuated from Madrid. For those who remained behind, there was little to take their minds off the prospect of sudden violent death, apart from the Laurel and Hardy and Charlie Chaplin films being shown in the cinemas along the Gran Vía. The Junta de Defensa tried to maintain a semblance of business as usual by placing placards around 175

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the city urging people to look after their children’s well-being and issuing decrees concerning the cinema industry and the protection of historic monuments. There were proposals to provide literacy classes for soldiers in the trenches and requests went out for foreign-language books to keep the Brigada Internacional volunteers entertained. Loudspeaker systems were installed on the front exhorting the enemy to desert, with promises of 50 pesetas (£2.00 in the money of the time) for every deserter who brought his arms with him. Those who joined the Republican forces were given a week’s leave and paid journey to their homes. After several days of heavy rain, the Nationalists launched their Jarama offensive on 6 February 1937, advancing from the village of Pinto, a few miles due south of Madrid. The objective was to take control of the Valencia road. The attack was stopped in its tracks by another outbreak of rain that made the river impassable, and when the weather cleared, both sides spent the better part of a week in desperate fighting that cost thousands of lives, leaving both armies locked in a bloody stalemate. General Miaja stepped in to take personal command of his troops and, on 15 February, when the fighting finally ended, the Nationalists had gained some territory but failed to cut off Madrid from the rest of the Republic. An extraordinary personal account of this part of the battle for Madrid comes from Peter Kemp, a graduate of Cambridge and a devout Catholic who went to Spain to combat what was in his view the communist menace to Christian civilisation.25 He was with the Carlist Requetés at Jarama, low on ammunition and watching Republican forces 300 yards away preparing for their final attack. At the decisive moment, a column of panzer tanks appeared behind the militiamen and Brigada Internacional troops, and began shooting them down in swathes. Kemp was crouched next to the battalion padre, Father Vicente, a fanatical priest from Navarra who was bent on preventing a single communist escaping the deadly crossfire from the tanks and Requetés. I was conscious of Father Vicente beside me… He kept on pointing out targets to me, urging me shrilly to shoot them 176

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down and effectively putting me off my aim. It seemed to me that he could barely restrain himself from snatching my rifle and loosing off… Whenever some wretched militiaman bolted from cover to run madly for safety, I would hear the good father’s voice raised in a frenzy of excitement: ‘Don’t let him get away! Shoot, man, shoot!’26 Military activity in Madrid from 1937 onwards was conspicuous by its absence following the pitched battles that took place in the Ciudad Universitaria and on other areas around the capital. The war, as far as troop movements were concerned, was at a standstill, apart from sporadic sniping in the trenches. Life in the city, however, could hardly be described as uneventful. More than 5,000 artillery shells fell on the capital in the first seven months of 1937 – the Museo del Prado was hit by nine incendiary bombs in an air raid27 – many in the Puerta del Sol and along the Gran Vía, leaving more than 4,000 dead and wounded. The only conceivable objective of these artillery bombardments and the constant air attacks on non-military targets was to spread terror and demoralise the population. Madrid was slowly being bled to death, now more isolated than ever from a shrinking Republican Spain, after the government moved its headquarters for a second time in November 1937, this time to Barcelona. Pablo Picasso, who spent the Civil War in Paris, summed up Madrid’s plight at that moment: ‘In Madrid there is no will to be victorious, only to resist.’28 To that might be added ‘to survive’, for in the final months of the siege, many Madrileños longed for a swift end to the bloodshed, with waning concern for which side emerged victorious. By now, people were starting to take it for granted that the Republic was a lost cause. Many had adopted the precaution of storing a Nationalist flag in the back of their cupboards, to be unfurled and draped over a balcony as an insignia of loyalty when Franco’s troops marched through the city. The writer George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman books, once remarked that war was ‘horrific and ghastly, but it can also be funny’.29 An illustration of war’s more amusing side was the incident that took place in the Madrid home of a family of Franco sympathisers, who had their flag ready to display on 177

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the day of the victory parade. At least, that is what the father believed, until he discovered to his horror that with widespread shortages of almost all consumer goods, his wife had cut the flag into strips to fashion nappies for her babies.30 With Madrid nearly encircled and unable to dislodge the Nationalist besiegers, Franco now directed his armies to other theatres of war. Bilbao fell on 18 June 1937, bringing down with it the Republic’s entire northern front. In early 1938, the insurgents took Teruel and embarked on the Aragón offensive that cut the Republican zone in half. The fall of Barcelona on 26 January 1939, and the loss of the government’s industrial base, left little doubt that the Republican cause was all but lost. Further dismay came on 27 February, when Britain and France granted Franco’s government diplomatic recognition. In Madrid, the Junta refused to give up hope. Resistance became the rallying cry. Food and medical supplies were almost depleted. Daily bread rations were limited to 3.5 ounces per person. The bombs continued to fall at the rate of 300 to 600 every day. Madrileños picked their way through the rubble-strewn streets in search of firewood or a scrap of anything edible. The Junta had great difficulty in providing daily breakfasts for some 2,000 orphans. Madrid reverted to the seat of national government on 28 February 1939, when Manuel Azaña stepped down as president in Barcelona. It was a gesture reminiscent in its futility of that of the man found selling anti-earthquake pills in the streets of Lisbon in 1755. This was the prelude to the last thing Madrid needed in these desperate moments, an outbreak of internecine violence that cast a pall of disgrace on the city’s final hours of resistance. The prime minister Juan Negrín and the communists were calling for the army to hold out to the very end. Colonel Segismundo Casado, who commanded the Ejército del Centro, was a firm opponent of the communists. Negrín denounced Casado as a defeatist and traitor, and tried to have him stripped of his command, triggering a fight between Republican factions and a revolt by some army units under Casado’s command. On 5 March, Casado abolished the Junta and set up in its place a Consejo de Defensa Nacional (National Defence Council), which assumed the role of provisional government of the Republic. Miaja 178

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was confirmed as president, at the head of a cabinet of nine ministers representing all the parties with the exception of the communists. Shortly thereafter the Consejo put out a statement denouncing Negrín as a traitor. The new government came under attack on 6 and 7 March, while anarchist battalions marched on Madrid to fight the communist insurgents. The PCE’s Soviet advisers, giving up the Republic as a lost cause, fled the capital on the day fighting broke out in the city. Only on 10 March did the violence come to an end, and two days later the Consejo condemned to death the leaders of the communist rebels. What both sides appeared to have overlooked in their bitter infighting was that a common foe lay in waiting to pick up the spoils of a civil war within a civil war. The Consejo understood there was no point in wasting more lives in a hopeless attempt to stop Franco and his powerful armies. The Republican forces were allowed to disband and instructions were given for the evacuation of soldiers and civilians who chose to leave Madrid. Casado sent emissaries under a flag of truce to open peace negotiations with the Nationalist commanders. On 23 March Franco gave his reply: he would accept no terms other than unconditional surrender. The Consejo departed Madrid for Valencia on 27 March, and on that day Casado instructed his forces to lay down their arms and offer no resistance to the victors. The streets of Madrid were now safe for fifth columnists to emerge from hiding to greet the Nationalist conquerors with shouts of ‘¡Han pasado!’ (‘They have passed!’). When the first of Franco’s troops entered the city, soldiers on both sides embraced one another as brothers, which, in some cases, they were. On 1 April 1939, Franco went on the radio to announce in his squeaky voice that the war had ended, while in the streets and homes of Madrid the victims of Franco’s anti-communist crusade were being herded off, in what was to be the first round of reprisals.

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Until February 1939, the date when Britain’s Neville Chamberlain and France’s Édouard Deladier recognised Franco’s government in Burgos, the Junta de Defensa kept alive a vain hope that by holding out against Franco until the start of the much-heralded European war, the Allies would come to Spain’s rescue and attack the pro-Axis dictator. This would have required another six months of resistance, but by March the Junta, or what remained of it, had nothing left but the will to carry on fighting. Franco felt ill at ease in Madrid, the city that for nearly three years had frustrated his every effort to crush its defiance. For this reason, as well as for security considerations, the Caudillo took up residence in Palacio Real de El Pardo, Carlos I’s sixteenth-century hunting lodge set in 40,000 acres of woodland in Madrid’s northern suburbs. It was an idyllic place for the dictator to conduct lively discussions on such subjects as the three degrees of Freemasonry – Franco’s other bugbear, along with communism – with his aides over lunch. It is said that after the midday meal Franco would retire to his study to sift through the pile of death sentences that awaited signature on his desk, confirming some, reprieving others, all in accordance with the severity of the crime committed against the Cruzada Nacional (National Crusade), as it was baptised in the press. At least 50,000 people were executed on both sides between 1936 and 1939, but that was in a time of armed conflict, when the Geneva Convention is often disregarded.1 Franco’s ‘peace’ saw at least half that many prisoners shot or hanged, or pressed 181

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into forced-labour gangs to die of exhaustion and hunger. Thousands were sent to build the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen) basilica north of Madrid, a gargantuan if tasteless and politically insensitive monument erected to honour the Nationalist dead. Shortly before the end of the Civil War, the Tribunal Nacional de Responsabilidades Políticas (National Tribunal for Political Responsibility) was set up to deal with political-party and tradeunion members, numbering in their millions, who fought for the Republic and who would be called to give an account of their wartime activities. The first court martial held in Madrid under this tribunal condemned to death a butcher, who was said to have admitted to cutting off the head of General Eduardo López Ochoa. The general, a Republican prisoner since the start of the war, was despised for his repression of the 1934 miners’ uprising and was known, with gruesome coincidence, as ‘the Butcher of Asturias’. Even more sinister was the Tribunal Especial para la Represión de la Masonería y el Comunismo (Tribunal for the Repression of Freemasonry and Communism), whose title, as well as role, conjured up an image of the Inquisition. The identity of the judges and witnesses was shrouded in secrecy, and defendants had no right to a legal defence. When the Franco regime took power, the entire penal code was systematically revised to bring it into line with the new regime’s interpretation of justice. The government’s thirst for revenge was clearly reflected in an edict issued on 30 March: All civil servants of Madrid… must appear before a military tribunal within 15 days and explain their actions since the civil war began. All members of the Republican Army must also report to a military tribunal within ten days. The two oldest male tenants in every block of flats where persons have been murdered during the war must present themselves before a military tribunal. All the serenos [nightwatchmen] will likewise report all they have seen. Any person knowing of crimes committed under the Republican rule is enjoined to come forward and testify before the competent authority.2

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Several members of Franco’s first cabinet spoke in favour of moving the capital to Sevilla, which was one of the first cities to fall into Nationalist hands and had proven itself to be a reliable supporter of the insurgents. ‘Some of the most fanatical even proposed putting Madrid to the torch, to destroy it as a symbol of Marxism.’3 Rather than raze the city, however, Franco would recreate it in his own image, starting with street signs, including those that bore no political significance. Thus the charmingly named Paseo de la Castellana (Castilian Promenade) was given the dreadful title of Avenida del Generalísimo. The Gran Vía, the pride of Madrid’s finest years of intellectual and social effervescence, now became the Avenida de José Antonio, after the executed fascist demagogue. It goes without saying that the Avenida Carlos Marx was among the first to disappear, now to be called Avenida de Alfonso XIII, while the Plaza de la República facing the Palacio Real was renamed Plaza de Oriente. The latter two have retained their apolitical post-war names, while happily the Paseo de la Castellana and Gran Vía were put back on the street signs a few years after Franco’s death. All statues of political figures associated with liberal thought were removed from public view, and schools and other institutions took on the names of trustworthy politicians, saints and generals. On 1 April Madrid was placed under martial law. That same night, the Nationalist government went on the radio to issue the final military communiqué of the war, declaring an official end to hostilities. The message was drilled into the heads of schoolchildren who were expected to recite it from memory: ‘Today the Red Army is captive and disarmed, and the Nationalist troops have achieved their final military objectives. The war is over.’ With those callous words ringing in their ears, Madrileños had to give thanks for their survival and also for the end of a long winter spent in fear and hunger, with emphasis on the latter. Food supplies were desperately low, hovering on a level with wartime conditions in which people were obliged to survive on weekly rations of 3.5 ounces of sugar, 1.7 ounces of lentils, 1 ounce of coffee, and 2.6 ounces of salt cod. Tuberculosis, brought on by malnutrition and appalling living conditions, was reaching epidemic proportions. Yet complaining about injustices such as the almost total collapse of 183

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public services, notably healthcare, was to invite a visit from Falangist vigilantes. Madrid had become a carbon copy of Nazi Berlin, or perhaps an even more sinister version. The Falange assigned an ‘agent’ to look after the affairs of each barrio, as well as one for every street and another for every house. It proved an extremely effective control system, thanks to which by June 1939 Madrid’s prison population had swollen to 30,000, relieved only by regular executions, which had already eliminated 1,500 suspected subversives. Falangist terror was brutal enough to smother all but the most radically determined opposition. Isolated cells of anarchists, socialists and communists, living clandestinely, planted bombs at government targets or gunned down policemen and Falangist blue-shirted thugs. Those who were caught could expect to pay a terrible price for their acts, in lengthy torture sessions followed by firing squad. On 5 August 1939, 64 members of the outlawed Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas (Socialist Youth Organisation, JSU) were rounded up and shot in reprisal for the murders of a Guardia Civil major and a military-police inspector. Madrileños displayed their talent for guerrilla tactics, something that had remained in their blood since 1808. Falange party offices, Francoist officials, government dependencies and police were the victims of regular attacks. Then in 1948 the PCE ordered a halt to random assassinations, turning instead to mass actions organised by the party’s illegal workers’ organisations. The vast majority of Madrileños, who went about their lives under the vigilant gaze of the neighbourhood Falangist spies, quite understandably preferred to keep their heads down in the hope of finding a source of income to feed and clothe their families. The dictatorship recruited informers, separate from the Falange’s neighbourhood agents, who carried out their villainous task with gusto, for this went beyond grovelling to a political apparatus in the hope of obtaining rank – it was a means of settling scores with neighbours, sometimes for such trivial offences as jumping a food queue or refusing to share a packet of black-market coffee. The concierges who looked after blocks of flats, many of whom were retired police or disabled war veterans, were in fact a notorious cadre of freelance spies. They lodged in dank hovels next to the stairwell, 184

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an ideal lookout for observing strangers who might be attending a clandestine communist meeting.4 After-dark street surveillance belonged to the serenos, the band of nightwatchmen raised in 1797 under Carlos IV whose remit was to light the street lamps of Madrid. They also walked the streets yelling out hourly weather reports to the annoyance of anyone trying to sleep: cries of ‘rain’, ‘cloud’, ‘fog’ or ‘sereno’ (‘clear’) would be heard echoing in the night. The first corps of professional serenos was brought to Madrid from Asturias in the nineteenth century by the president of the Cortes, the Count of Toreno, a native of the Asturian town of Oviedo. The profession was handed down from father to son and by the time of their disbandment in 1977 more than 1,300 serenos were employed by the Ayuntamiento to patrol the streets of Madrid. They were also responsible for opening front doors for local residents who had forgotten or not bothered to take their keys when going out for the evening. The serenos wore a peaked cap and ankle-length grey greatcoat, and carried a large brass ring that jangled with keys belonging to the houses of their district. The routine consisted in a clapping of hands and a shout of ‘Sereno! ’ at the front door. A loud ‘Voy! ’ (‘Coming!’) would then be heard from around the corner or even a few streets distant. The sereno would come at a trot, keys clattering on his belt, to open the gate with a ‘Buenas noches’ and a palm extended for a few pesetas’ tip. Working hours were ten p.m. to seven a.m. in winter and six a.m. in summer, and most serenos held daytime jobs as well, usually unloading food lorries in the market at dawn. There was a less picturesque side to this vestige of Madrid history, however. The serenos were the best placed of all Franco’s shadowy espionage apparatus to supplement their meagre income with the occasional report on suspicious nocturnal goings-on in the neighbourhood: someone coming home with a few friends, perhaps, a light burning late in the flat, his guests leaving the building in the early hours before dawn. The serenos weren’t the only people in Madrid holding down more than one job. The daily struggle for survival gave rise to the institution of ‘pluriempleo’ (literally ‘multiple jobs’), made possible because at the time Madrileños still took their traditional afternoon siestas and 185

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were therefore able to create two days out of one by taking a brief nap between jobs. Rarely could the head of a family of six make ends meet on a civil servant’s or office worker’s salary. Moreover, a family incapable of providing Franco’s Spain with more than four children was held in utmost contempt. Families were encouraged to breed with vigour, to replenish a population depleted by war and produce a generation of properly indoctrinated youth. The government gave an annual cash award to the family with the greatest number of children. Given the constraints on reporting news, the newspapers would give this event front-page coverage, accompanied by a photo of a wizened but gamely smiling woman surrounded by as many as 18 children. The rationale for this initiative was spelled out in a 1941 law: ‘Only a society of fertile families can spread the race across the world and build and maintain empires. Demographic vitality raises a people’s international profile and their military prowess.’ In recent years, Spain’s declining birth rate has revived the tradition of official encouragement for spirited procreation. In 2011 Pozuelo, a township in the Madrid suburbs, presented a similar yearly prize to a couple with eight children. The previous year, Prince Felipe and Princess Letizia presided over the annual award ceremony of the Federación Española de Familias Numerosas (Spanish Association of Large Families), in which the prize went to the national football team’s manager Vicente del Bosque for ‘representing and defending the values of large families’. If many thousands of Madrid families were facing dire hardship in the post-war months, General Franco had little time to occupy his thoughts with such minutiae. On 18 May 1939 the dictator held a victory parade along the rechristened Avenida del Generalísimo. This comic display of goose-stepping regiments became an annual event for the next 36 years. In this first parade, which stretched for 16 miles, a forest of bayonets brandished by Italian infantry tramped up the avenue in the vanguard, followed by units of black-shirted Italian Fascists, marching with daggers raised in the Roman salute. Next came the Requetés in their red berets, the Legión Española carrying their battle-tattered flags, Moroccan troops in khaki shirts 186

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and baggy trousers, and Spanish infantry marching 18 abreast. The weather forecast was unusually threatening for May, and shortly after midday the rain began coming down in buckets. But spectators who hurriedly left their seats were warned to return to them, and they were forced to remain under a steady downpour for another hour. The weather cleared just before the arrival of the German Condor Legion, which passed Franco’s reviewing stand in an assortment of jeeps, armoured vehicles and tanks. Shortly before midnight, Franco broadcast a short speech to the nation, appealing for unity. Franco’s dictatorship, although politically and culturally repressive, brought years of slow material progress, albeit starting from a rock-bottom base. The dictator maintained an undisguised pro-Axis neutrality in the Second World War, leaving Spain mistrusted by the victorious Allies. After 1945, the Pyrenees became an insurmountable barrier to the intellectual trends of post-war Europe, which emerged from the fight against fascism eager to recreate its cultural traditions. The Spanish regime imposed on its people a strict censorship under the aegis of the Catholic Church, which covered all cultural activities not deemed to reflect Spain’s core spiritual values. The government was happy to see crowds throng Madrid’s bullring and flamenco clubs – after all, bullfighters and flamenco artists, for the most part a reactionary lot, had overwhelmingly sided with the Nationalist cause. Those cinemas in the Gran Vía and the barrios that had escaped the bombings were allowed to open, with strict protectionist quotas on foreign films, all requiring the censors’ stamp of approval. One of the few businesses that began to flourish in Madrid was the dubbing industry. Dubbing of foreign films was obligatory, and highly effective for exercising control over cinema dialogue that might infringe on political boundaries. Professional dubbers would take on the roles of multiple Hollywood stars, so that Cary Grant, Alan Ladd and Clark Gable would all be heard in the same voice. As late as 1972, the dictatorship saw fit to ban Last Tango in Paris, which depicted Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider in love scenes that would not have raised an eyebrow among French audiences. Ever resourceful Madrileños were not to be deterred: weekend coach 187

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excursions were organised to Perpignan across the French border, inclusive of hotel and cinema tickets. Spanish cinemas did not show the film until 1977, two years after Franco’s death, and Spaniards had to wait another 11 years to watch it on television. The Madrid daily Diario 16 commented in 1988, ‘If exiles came back to Spain with the first democratic elections of 1977, the fantasies of the Spanish are returning now from their exile in Perpignan.’5 Dubbed films are still the norm on Spanish television and in most cinemas in provincial towns, something that has contributed to Spaniards’ reputation for poor language skills.6 Newspaper censorship was carried out in an amusingly inept fashion. From the 1960s, papers like the Guardian and Le Monde were displayed on Madrid kiosks that stocked foreign publications. If the censors in the Ministry of Information and Tourism (now no longer in existence) discovered an article about industrial action or student protests, for instance, they simply took scissors to the offensive story and dispatched the mutilated papers to the distributors. Anti-Franco books were of course proscribed and Guardia Civil customs officials at Madrid’s Barajas airport kept a vigilant lookout for Spaniards returning from a weekend breath of fresh air in London or Paris with subversive books stowed in their luggage. The Buchholz bookshop near Cibeles was a haven for those courageous souls who were willing to risk a purchase of under-the-counter literature. The shop, owned by a German couple, quietly kept a supply of these little treasures, like Hugh Thomas’s 1961 seminal work on the Spanish Civil War, for trusted customers. The dictatorship maintained an iron control of its citizens’ movements, something that sometimes bordered on the imbecilic. For years, a family could not simply move from, say, Valencia to Burgos without a government permit that authorised relocation between provinces. Spain needed to rebuild its shattered infrastructure, yet it did not allow free movement of labour. Divorce was illegal, as were abortion and contraceptives. There were, of course, ways round these restrictions. After 1967, when the United Kingdom decriminalised abortion, Spanish women on Thursday-to-Sunday package holidays 188

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to London would book a hotel with their tour operator and a clinic through friends. A well-known character in El Rastro, Madrid’s Sunday flea market, could be found on a corner selling packets of tablets that were advertised as ‘anti-flu’ pills. Franco adhered to the letter of José Antonio’s ideal of family life: a woman’s role was to look after her children, be faithful to her husband and live in the conjugal home, whatever the circumstances. If a marriage went on the skids, it remained the duty of a Christian wife to soldier on in stoical silence, for the sake of her children who were the future of Spain. Education suffered terribly under the dictatorship, right up to Franco’s death. The Church was in charge of all primary and secondary schools, which were staffed by priests and nuns whose welfare was dependent on the Movimiento Nacional (National Movement), Franco’s clever corporatist amalgamation of the Falange, Carlists, monarchists and other rival factions, bundled together under the regime’s totalitarian umbrella. These fanatical and generally poorly educated clerics and bureaucrats were indifferent to children’s intellectual development. What mattered was ensuring that their pupils had a respect for the Church and a reverence for Franco, and that they always bore in mind that they were descendants of the conquistadores who had carved out the Spanish Empire. The Universidad Complutense de Madrid presented a similarly desolate picture, with an added touch of irony. Most of Spain’s freethinking academics had sided with the Republic and fled to France, South America or the US once it became obvious that the war was lost. That is not to say the brain drain had sapped the country of all its great thinkers. Some chose to stay, hoping they would not become victims of the dictatorship’s contempt for enlightened thought. Enrique Tierno Galván, José Luis Aranguren, Rafael Lapesa and Julián Marías were outstanding figures in the world of philosophy and letters, and they were all university faculty members under Franco. When Aranguren and Tierno Galván spoke out against the dictatorship by taking part in a student protest march in 1965, they were instantly dismissed and subsequently left Spain to take up teaching posts at Berkeley and Princeton, respectively. * 189

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A decade or so after Franco’s rise to power, the dictatorship began to mutate into a milder form of authoritarianism, one which could hardly be called benevolent, but which nevertheless showed signs of emerging from the dreadful years of hard-line fascist rule. The papers carried fewer reports of executions of ‘enemies of the state’ or ‘Red terrorists’. A dwindling number of people were being whisked off to the notorious state security headquarters in the Puerta del Sol for interrogation, a disagreeable experience of which I had personal knowledge, having been arrested in 1976, when I was in Madrid as a journalist, for wandering too close to a street demonstration organised by the wives of imprisoned factory workers. I was fortunate to get off with a few jabs in the neck with an electric cattle prod and a reprimand by a plain-clothes functionary with a pencil-line moustache, pinstriped double-breasted suit and Brylcreemed hair, who could have walked off the set of a 1950s gangster film. This comical individual told me to bear in mind that Spain was a country at peace, that its image was being distorted by scaremongering foreign journalists, and that I was free to go. I walked out of security headquarters that night straight into a pandemonium of tear gas, rubber bullets and baton charges directed at a crowd of protestors in front of the finance ministry. The Cold War not only played into Franco’s hands, it saved his skin. Had it not been for Washington’s anti-Soviet paranoia and its consequent propping up of Franco politically and economically, the Spanish regime would have faced the real threat of being overwhelmed by mounting pressure at home and from its European neighbours. Spaniards on business or official trips (private travel abroad for all but the affluent and influential was nearly unimaginable in the 1950s) to Paris, London or Rome were likely to encounter anti-Franco protests at diplomatic legations, the Iberia airlines office or any other institution connected with the dictatorship. The spring of 1951 caught the dictatorship unawares, as thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Madrid and other large cities. The protests were not so much about political repression as outrage over a steep decline in real wages, brought on by inflation that was nudging the 15-per-cent mark. 190

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Between 1945 and 1951, there was a sharp widening in the gap between nominal wages and prices. In 1947, the daily living cost for a Madrid family of two was approximately 12.5 pesetas, while by 1951 the cost had doubled. Salaries had fallen well behind this rate of increase. The daily wage of a construction foreman in 1947 was 27.5 pesetas, but in a 1951 it had risen only to 34.5 pesetas. Any other sector would show similar wage increases.7 This state of affairs was the result of a hopeless attempt to subsist on a policy of economic self-sufficiency. Franco ignored the impending collapse of his country’s economy, preferring instead to make political hay of his anti-communist credentials by reassuring anyone beyond the Pyrenees who was willing to listen that Spain remained ‘la reserva espiritual de Occidente’ (‘the West’s spiritual repository’). His bid for international legitimacy was answered in 1951 when the US, followed by Britain, sent ambassadors to Madrid. Two years later the dictator had no choice but to accede to a US request to install three air-force facilities and a Polaris submarine base on Spanish territory, for which Madrid was rewarded with more than $1 billion in economic assistance and, in 1955, a seat in the United Nations. But the best Christmas present Franco could have hoped for came on the afternoon of 21 December 1959, when Dwight Eisenhower alighted from Air Force One at the US Torrejón air base outside Madrid, to become the first American president to visit Spain. Eisenhower was also the first leader of a major Western power to hold talks with Franco since the Civil War. Eisenhower’s reception in Madrid was an event to rival the Second Coming. More than 500 Spanish and foreign journalists were deployed to cover the visit, along with dozens of television and cinema camera crews. One and a half million people waving Spanish and American flags lined the Avenida del Generalísimo to be witness to the legitimisation of the dictatorship that had ruled Spain for the past 20 years. An unparalleled display was prepared along the route, which was decorated with eight huge metal triumphal arches adorned with photographs and carnations, thousands of flags, pictures of Eisenhower and Franco, and more than a million coloured electric 191

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lights. It was enough to make Felipe II turn over in his grave with envy. That night, Eisenhower was entertained at a gala banquet in the Palacio Real. A concert was performed by a quintet playing the five Stradivarius violins kept in the palace’s treasure vault and, to conclude the affair, the guests were serenaded by the guitar of Andrés Segovia. The cost of this jamboree was put at 18 million pesetas, roughly £1 million in today’s money, but it was of incalculable value for what it achieved in consolidating Franco’s rule. Thanks to the generosity of Washington, Spain’s dictatorship could tout its credentials as an established member of the so-called ‘free world’ alliance, as distinguished from the communist dictatorships behind the Iron Curtain. Now it was time to address the country’s economy, which lagged woefully behind those of other Western European nations. The turning point came in February 1957. Franco was persuaded to purge his cabinet of the Falangist stalwarts, who had stood by his side throughout and after the Civil War. This gaggle of bumbling autocrats was shown the door, making way for a new breed whose task was to revamp Spain’s collapsing autarkic system. Alberto Ullastres was appointed trade minister, Mariano Rubio went to the finance ministry and Laureano López Rodó was brought in to put together what became the 1959 Plan Nacional de Estabilización Económica (National Economic Stabilisation Plan). What these workaholic technocrats had in common, apart from a refreshing ability to hold a conversation in English, was their membership in the semi-secret Catholic lay organisation Opus Dei whose teachings, as well as devout obedience, encouraged modern business practices. With a nudge and some guidance from the International Monetary Fund, the dictatorship embarked on a three-pronged development programme based on devaluation of the peseta to stimulate exports, massive public investment in infrastructure and the creation of a sun-and-sand tourism industry. Throughout the 1960s boom years Spain enjoyed an average annual growth rate of 7.3 per cent, second only to Japan in the developed world. By 1974, Spanish per capita income had reached 79 per cent of the European average. * 192

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The Madrid journalist Almudena Grandes recalls being taught at school that Napoleon exclaimed on 19 July 1808, after the Battle of Bailén, his first defeat in open combat, ‘L’Espagne est différent’ [‘Spain is Different’]. In the early 1960s Manuel Fraga Iribarne, minister of information and tourism, translated it into English. This was the slogan dreamt up to attract tourists to a country where nothing seemed to exist except sun and oranges, flamenco clubs and heavenly beaches.8 In the early years of the tourism bonanza Madrid drew but a fraction of the foreigners who swarmed to the hastily knocked-up Mediterranean resorts that succeeded in obliterating what were once sleepy fishing villages like Torremolinos and Benidorm. Madrid was a destination for what the authorities quietly defined as ‘quality tourism’. This was a more affluent and cultured class of visitors, who were attracted by the Museo del Prado and who used Madrid as a base of operations for easy day trips to the historic cities of Toledo and Segovia. Since those early days, Madrid’s position in the tourist ranking has radically altered: in 2011 the capital received a record 8.3 million visitors, well ahead of any other Spanish city, including Barcelona’s 6.9 million. Judging by the 32 new hotels that opened in the capital that year, the tourism sector is pinning its hopes on continued strong growth. It may have taken years for Madrid’s tourism sector to get off the ground, but industrial growth presented quite a different picture. ‘In 1940 the city’s economy was concentrated in services, which accounted for 67.8 per cent of the workforce compared with 30.5 per cent for industry and 1.7 per cent for agriculture.’9 Madrid possessed several distinct advantages over Spain’s traditional industrial cities like Barcelona or Bilbao. Its location in the middle of the Castilian plateau offered companies almost boundless space for building factories. The same cannot be said for the congested land surrounding the two northern ports. Investors were aware of the resurgence in Catalán and especially Basque nationalism, and the potential for terrorist activity and labour unrest. Madrid’s central position also made it Spain’s 193

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transport hub and distribution centre for manufactured goods. Being the seat of power in a pre-Internet age, Madrid provided easy access to officialdom, the bureaucrats whose palms almost invariably needed to be greased in order to obtain licences, permits, subsidies or tax incentives. Industry’s share of Madrid’s GDP rose to 34.3 per cent by 1960, one year after the Plan de Estabilización took effect. Of greater significance was the large increase in the industrial workforce, which in 20 years more than doubled to 242,000 people. Many workers were employed at newly created companies that were head­quartered in Madrid, like the car manufacturer Sociedad Española de Automóviles de Turismo (Spanish Touring Car Company, SEAT), the industrialvehicle maker Empresa Nacional de Autocamiones, S.A. (National Lorry Company, ENASA) and the state industrial holding Instituto Nacional de Industria (National Institute of Industry, INI), which included Iberia Airlines. In 1972, of Spain’s top 500 companies by annual turnover, 216 had their headquarters in Madrid and 133 in Barcelona.10 This included multinationals like Westinghouse, John Deere and Chrysler, which invested heavily in bricks-and-mortar facilities in Madrid’s industrial estates. This shift in the structure of the labour force had political ramifications: by fomenting the growth of industry, Franco had produced a monster that would eventually turn on its creator. The socialist and anarchist trade unions were banned under the dictatorship, but continued to function clandestinely, above all the socialist UGT. Then, in 1964, a new secret labour organisation, affiliated to the illegal PCE, was set up and began to organise in factories. This was the Comisiones Obreras (Workers’ Commissions, CC.OO.). The first secret meeting of CC.OO. leaders took place in Madrid in 1967. When the dictatorship discovered that a communist-inspired union was rapidly gaining adherents on the shop floor, it began to unleash a brutal wave of repression. Thousands of suspected CC.OO. members were tried and convicted of subversive activities between 1964 and Franco’s death in 1975. However, now that the workers were organising outside the officially sanctioned Falangist ‘vertical’ trade union, the movement was unstoppable. The regime reacted like a cornered tiger, responding to an outbreak of industrial action by 194

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declaring ‘states of exception’, in which the armed forces took control of public order, in 1969 and 1970. By the 1960s it was apparent that Franco’s dictatorship was cursed with several built-in flaws. The most fatal of these was the absence of any flexibility at the top. The Opus Dei modernisers and a handful of sensible politicians strove to take Spain out of isolation. But this could only be achieved in a meaningful way by a genuine apertura (opening up) of the system. Neither Franco nor his henchman and vice-president of the all-powerful Consejo de Estado (and later prime minister) Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, were prepared to consider such a move. The ageing dictator always boasted of his intention to leave the affairs of Spain ‘atado y bien atado’ (‘well and truly tied up’), meaning left in trusted hands and with the country’s political institutions intact. The popular outcry against Franco began to gather pace in the mid 1960s. Illegal trade unions organised strikes, which drew widespread support and were severely repressed by the police. Students marched in protest, and they too suffered baton charges by mounted riot police and university shutdowns. Politicians concerned about their post-Franco careers made tepid statements in public about the need to open up the system and prepare for change. Even the comfortable middle class, returning humiliated and angry from eye-opening weekend breaks in London or Paris, was beginning to express the view that perhaps it was time for this obsolescent regime to step aside. The Movimiento Nacional had few tricks up its sleeve with which to appease people’s demands for political freedom, the one thing they were not prepared to concede: bullfighting was falling out of fashion, Madrileños’ passion for the theatre was deadened by stage censorship, and even the opiate of football failed to stem the rising tide of outrage. Franco was himself a football fan and he was canny enough to envisage Real Madrid’s potential as a propaganda weapon. After the Civil War the title ‘Real’, which had been expunged by the Republican government, was reinstated. Franco was keen to exploit the club as a platform for projecting an international image of a nation of ‘stylish achievers worthy of being let back into the fold’.11 195

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Franco’s henchman in this sporting enterprise was Santiago Bernabéu, whose name was given to the 85,454-seat stadium that on Sunday afternoons brings traffic to a standstill in the Paseo de la Castellana. Bernabéu was an unswerving supporter of the dictatorship and had served in the Nationalist army during the Civil War. In 1943, he was selected to run the club. His predecessor during the Republic, the communist Colonel Antonio Ortega, is believed to have been executed after the war. The attempt to capitalise on the club’s international success fell flat on its face. While there is in fact little evidence linking Real Madrid’s subsequent successes [between 1956 and 1960 the club won the European Cup five years in a row, an unrivalled feat] to any major alteration in Franco’s diplomatic standing in the world, there is no doubt that Real Madrid helped promote an image of Spanish success overseas, in effect converting itself, together with emigration, into Franco’s most important export to the world.12 The middle-class protest movements that in 1968 began to gather pace on campuses from Berkeley to the Sorbonne could not fail to inspire Franco’s enemies. It was shaping up as a bad year for the dictatorship. Spain’s image as a peaceful haven for investment and tourists from abroad stood in danger of being wrecked by leftist students, workers, an increasingly hostile press – and now terrorists as well. The Universidad Complutense de Madrid was partly shut down in January and students were told they would need to reapply for admission, after the campus was rocked by violent clashes between demonstrators and the security forces. Buses were overturned in central Madrid and masked students pelted firefighters with stones and fireworks. At the university, students hurled chairs and desks out of windows at the police. Lecturers at the school of law walked out in solidarity with the protestors. In February eight men, including four priests, were jailed for taking part in an illegal workers’ demonstration. Rioting continued to spread across the university, bringing the arrest of many students and faculty members. The Tribunal de Orden Público (Public Order 196

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Tribunal) staged a mass trial of regime opponents in early March. The ultimate horror came on 13 March in the form of a terrorist strike aimed at the dictatorship’s most vulnerable spot – its relationship with Washington – when a large bomb rocked the US embassy in Madrid. In response, the university was shut down indefinitely, though this did not deter students marching with banners demanding ‘Yankee bases out of Spain!’ In April, riots broke out at the court where the charismatic CC.OO. leaders Julián Ariza and Marcelino Camacho were on trial for their part in staging industrial action. Both were convicted and imprisoned. That same month, Madrid’s main newspapers defied the censors with leaders attacking Franco for police brutality during the student demonstrations. But it turned out that the bombing of the US embassy was after all not the ultimate horror. The regime had been keeping an anxious watch on the Basque separatist group ETA since the movement became active in 1959. The police and Guardia Civil managed to keep the guerrillas on the run for more than a decade, but that changed dramatically in 1968 when Melitón Manzanas, a secret-police officer, was gunned down in at his home in Oyarzun, near the French border.13 Was there nothing that could strike back at the damaging headlines in the world press, to reassure the world at large that Spain remained a good citizen of modern Europe? There was, and her name was María de los Ángeles Felisa Santamaría Espinosa, the daughter of a middleclass Madrid family. Massiel, as she was known professionally, was to become Franco’s Manuela Malasaña, the heroine of Madrid’s 1808 uprising against Napoleon. In 1968, the Catalán crooner Joan (‘Juan’ in Spanish) Manuel Serrat was selected as Spain’s representative at the Eurovision Song Contest. His name was withdrawn at the last moment when it became known that he intended to sing in his native Catalán instead of Castilian (that is, standard Spanish), the only language the regime would tolerate. The 21-year-old pop singer Massiel was sent to London as a replacement and, on the night of 6 April, she appeared on stage, flanked by a chorus of three beehived, miniskirted teeny boppers, to give a rendition of ‘La, La, La’, an outstandingly uninspired though bouncy tune. Few would have given odds on this 197

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almost unknown Spanish girl beating the favourite, Cliff Richard, with his equally anodyne ‘Congratulations’. But she won, and Spain went wild with celebration. Massiel’s victory was treated as nothing short of an apotheosis: Franco sent a royal coach and horses, usually reserved for ambassadors presenting credentials and state occasions, to Barajas airport to meet Spain’s returning heroine. The newspapers needed little encouragement from the Ministry of Information and Tourism to splash Massiel’s face under banner headlines across every front page. She was awarded one of Spain’s highest honours, La Gran Cruz de Isabel la Católica (the Grand Cross of Isabel the Catholic), equivalent in rank to a British OBE. Massiel was ecstatic and poured out her joy in a telegram from London to the Spanish foreign minister. But she was also an astute young woman who studiously avoided having her photo taken with Franco who, like most tyrants, was one of the few unable or unwilling to read the writing on the wall. By winning Eurovision, Spain had at last shown itself the better of giants like Britain, Germany and France. All was well, the tourists would continue to flock to the beaches, and cinema-goers were queuing in the Gran Vía to see that year’s hit film, the slapstick comedy El turismo es un gran invento (Tourism Is a Great Invention). The frail, 76-year-old dictator, stricken with Parkinson’s disease, whose feeble voice was barely intelligible in his New Year’s message to the nation, could derive comfort from the fact that whatever disturbances might be taking place at the universities, in the factories, in the Basque Country – these were but passing affairs. What really mattered was that everything was atado y bien atado. Only it wasn’t.

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Breakfast at my home in Madrid’s Salamanca quarter was interrupted by a mighty thud in the street six storeys below. It was the morning of 20 December 1973 and ETA had just detonated a bomb packed with 220 pounds of high explosives under the Dodge 3700 saloon carrying prime minister Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco to his office. A few streets away, in Calle Claudio Coello, four Basque guerrillas were making a hasty getaway from the basement flat in which they had spent the past few weeks tunnelling under the street. Carrero Blanco, known as ‘el Ogro’ (‘the Ogre’) to anti-Francoists, had violated a basic security rule by following the same route to work every morning after attending Mass at the Jesuit church in Calle Serrano, across the road from the US embassy. The car was catapulted 100 feet into the air to land upright on the roof of a building next to the church. The remains of Carrero’s bodyguard and driver were mutilated almost beyond recognition, while, strangely enough, the bomb’s effect on Carrero was to jellify his organs without significantly disfiguring his body. The attack, code-named ‘Operación Ogro’, was carried out at 8.45 a.m., quarter of an hour before the entire CC.OO. executive committee was to be tried by the Tribunal de Orden Público half a mile away. The labour leaders, including one priest, had been surprised the year before at a secret meeting in a Madrid suburb. They were convicted of belonging to an illegal organisation linked to the PCE (which was true), and were given prison terms ranging from 12 to 20 years. 199

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The first news bulletin on state media that morning spoke of a suspected gas-main explosion in central Madrid, with unconfirmed reports that the blast may have involved the prime minister’s car. I raced across the Retiro park to my office at the United Press International (UPI) bureau next to the Cortes. The bureau chief was on a call to the US embassy’s press office, an astute gambit since the bomb had gone off close to the embassy and their intelligence services were certain to be among the first to known what had happened. ‘Can you confirm at what time the bomb killed Carrero Blanco?’ the UPI bureau chief coyly asked. ‘Just before nine,’ said the head of press. ‘But that’s definitely not for attribution.’ The agency’s urgent bulletin attributed the confirmation of Carrero Blanco’s death to ‘foreign diplomatic sources’. That night many wine shops in the Basque Country were reported to have sold out of cava, and people quietly sang a tune that was starting to make the rounds of Nationalist circles. It began ‘Voló, voló, Carrero voló’ (‘He flew, he flew, Carrero flew’). Nothing can justify terrorist violence, yet it happened. And as Franco, weeping in public for the first time, remarked enigmatically at his prime minister’s memorial service, ‘No hay mal que por bien no venga’ (‘It’s an ill wind that blows no good’). Many in Spain argue that Carrero’s death, albeit in horrible circumstances, facilitated the country’s peaceful transition to democracy. Carrero was an unreconstructed hardliner, Franco’s closest collaborator, a man who would have been incapable of dealing with the period of political instability that was to follow in the wake of the dictatorship’s demise. The date traditionally given for the start of Spain’s transformation into a democratic state is 20 November 1975, the day of Franco’s death. Many claim that a more accurate date would be 20 December 1973. The political succession now fell to the former mayor of Madrid, Carlos Arias Navarro, with the young and untested future King Juan Carlos having only recently been chosen to rule as head of state. Arias Navarro, a native of Madrid, was no less an opponent of liberalisation than Carrero, but he was a weakling compared with the thuggish admiral. On 2 March 1974, Spain once again earned the garland of political pariah of Europe. A hush fell over the Metro carriage in which I was 200

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travelling as people stared in stunned disbelief at the evening papers’ headlines: Salvador Puig Antich, a 25-year-old anarchist convicted of killing a Guardia Civil officer in a shootout, had been executed that morning by garrotte. In the days leading up to the execution, demonstrators had taken to the streets in almost every European capital and as far away as Buenos Aires to demand clemency. But their protests fell on deaf ears. At 82, Franco showed no signs of relaxing his iron grip, much less of giving any thought to the damage to Spain’s image abroad. In September of that year, another blow was struck at Franco’s police state, this time in the heart of Madrid. A bomb loaded with 70 pounds of dynamite and shrapnel exploded on the morning of the 13th in the Cafetería Rolando, adjacent to police headquarters in the Puerta del Sol. This was a favourite breakfast rendezvous for the police, but strangely enough on that particular day only a handful of officers were to be found in the café, the rest being customers and employees. The blast killed 12 people and wounded another 80. The regime was quick to pin the blame on ETA, but the Basque guerrillas denied any responsibility for the attack, instead accusing extreme right-wing terrorists of attempting to provoke a crackdown on antiFrancoist dissidents. Over the next few days, the police swept through Madrid arresting well-known artists and intellectuals, all of whom were outspoken critics of the regime or known to be sympathetic to ETA. In 1976 the courts dismissed the cases, and the following year King Juan Carlos declared a general amnesty for all political prisoners. By that time only two of the suspects remained in prison. But the identity of the Cafetería Rolando bombers was never discovered. Unconfirmed reports of a circular sent to officers advising them not to go to the café that day added to the obscurity surrounding the attack. Franco failed to mellow in his dotage, but the ravages of old age were now starting to take their toll. Four months after Puig Antich’s execution, on 9 July 1974, Madrileños opened their newspapers to find a hitherto unimaginable photograph of their Caudillo. Here was the dictator, who usually appeared in naval uniform (which he had no right to wear) at the helm of his yacht in or in puttees and trilby, a shotgun under his arm, displaying a brace of partridges, now 201

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shuffling along in slippers as he was led into his namesake Francisco Franco Hospital by his surgeons. Franco was suffering from an acute attack of phlebitis, the swelling of a vein in his leg, and the pain was visibly etched into his sagging face. That afternoon, women in fur coats and their expensively clad offspring knelt in the Parroquia de la Concepción de Nuestra Señora, an insipid wedding cake of a church in the Salamanca district, to offer prayers for the dictator’s speedy recovery. Their husbands and most other Madrileños went about the business of earning a day’s wage, without fussing much over what tomorrow might bring – a classic Castilian character trait. Regime opponents met at cafés to speculate quietly on whether the end was finally at hand. For the majority, there was far greater interest in the films making an appearance in Madrid cinemas. Carlos Saura’s Civil War drama La prima Angélica (Cousin Angelica) had just been released, one of the first of an inexhaustible outpouring of films on a subject that, even today, Spaniards find difficult. Basilio Martín Patino’s Caudillo, a documentary on Franco’s life that narrowly slipped through the censors’ net, was another crowd-puller that summer season. His previous Civil War documentary, Canciones para después de una guerra (Songs for after a War) was banned until a year after Franco’s death. Spain held its breath when on 19 July Franco, from his hospital bed, temporarily handed over power to Juan Carlos. As it turned out, this was merely a test run to acquaint the prince with the power mechanism he would inherit – one day, but not yet. Contrary to expectations, on 30 July a smiling Caudillo, his haggard eyes hidden behind sunglasses, was photographed at the hospital entrance, bidding farewell to his medical staff. He then climbed into his armoured Rolls-Royce Phantom IV1 for the journey to the Palacio Real, to resume his daily work routine. Spaniards were astonished by Franco’s ability to survive and they were no less surprised, or indeed horrified, to learn that there was still plenty of kick left in the Generalísimo’s killing machine. In September 1975 the Caudillo, with customary dispassion, signed the death warrants of five young men convicted of terrorism. The verdicts by a military tribunal had brought an international outcry of protest, 202

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all for nought. Spain’s ambassador to the Vatican, the Madrid lawyer Joaquín Ruíz-Giménez, appealed to Pope Paul VI to intercede on behalf of the condemned men. Even Franco’s own brother, Ramón, wrote to the dictator pleading with him to reconsider his decision. Sweden’s prime minister Olof Palme and Mexican president Luis Echeverría Álvarez added their voices to the pleas for clemency. Twelve Western nations recalled their ambassadors from Madrid and in Lisbon, the year after democracy was restored to that country, the Spanish embassy was put to the torch. Franco’s response was to organise a mass rally in the Plaza de Oriente where, from the balcony of the Palacio Real, he delivered in a faint, trembling voice a piece of rhetoric worthy of Albania’s late dictator Enver Hoxha: ‘Everything that has happened [the protests] in Spain and in Europe is part of a Masonic–leftist conspiracy in connivance with communist–terrorist subversion… if we are honoured, it is they who are vilified.’2 There was to be no clemency. The Spanish press, however, was instructed to run stories of an Orwellian nature stating precisely the contrary, since only 5 of 11 death sentences confirmed by the military tribunal were carried out. ‘Hubo clemencia’ (‘There was clemency’), was a standard headline. Two of the victims were executed in Burgos and Barcelona. Three others, members of ETA and the Marxist– Leninist guerrilla movement Frente Revolucionario Antifascista y Patriota (Revolutionary Antifascist Patriotic Front, FRAP), were shot outside Madrid by ten-man firing squads composed of police and Guardia Civil volunteers. Several police vans arrived at the execution ground that morning to witness the spectacle. They were filled with jeering officers, many of them drunk. The five executions carried out in defiance of world opinion were Franco’s swansong. On 12 October 1975 the dictator complained of flu symptoms and in a routine examination his doctors discovered that he had suffered a mild heart attack. Madrid’s top cardiologists were rushed to the Palacio Real, but, against their advice, five days later Franco insisted on presiding over his weekly cabinet meeting, refusing the aid of a wheelchair to ease the combined pain of his recent phlebitis and heart attack. Not a word of the drama unfolding 203

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behind the great neoclassical façade of the palace was made known to the public, who were following the confrontation with Morocco over the Spanish Sahara, Spain’s North African colony. This was an aggravating factor in Franco’s deteriorating health, for a conflict was brewing with the very people who had helped him to win the Civil War. Small wonder that on 21 October, when Franco was told that 20,000 troops were massed in a stand-off on either side of the border, the dictator was rushed to his bed with a severe attack of angina. Prince Juan Carlos again assumed temporary command, with the difference that this time the heir to the throne, along with Franco’s physicians, had no doubt that the dictator’s demise was irreversible. A fortnight later the Caudillo began to haemorrhage. The medical team decided there was no time to take him to hospital: the security guards’ first-aid room would have to serve as an operating theatre. It now looked like everything, including the palace power supply, was conspiring to take revenge on the dying tyrant. The lights went out during the operation, requiring palace staff to rush to the local village of El Pardo to rouse the electrician from his bed. But then, on 5 November, the truth of Franco’s condition could no longer be concealed. He was taken to the Hospital de la Paz in Madrid for what in journalist circles became known as the ‘Franco Deathwatch’. The Generalísimo was unaware that on 14 November the government had, behind his back, relinquished control of the Spanish Sahara to Morocco, the first political decision not taken by Franco for nearly 40 years. The twice-daily medical bulletins read out at the hospital’s lecture theatre became a monotonous recital of the patient’s progress, which everybody knew had little to do with what was transpiring in the dictator’s room on the fourth floor. There was only conjecture about what was taking place in strained gatherings of the regime’s entourage, who had to make swift decisions about their personal political futures. ‘Resting peacefully’ and ‘stable condition’ were meaningless terms, pronounced with monotonous regularity by Franco’s chief physician Vicente Gil. Shortly before dawn on 20 November I was woken by a call from a friend at the UPI bureau: ‘He’s dead. Got to rush.’ I muttered ‘Thanks’ to a silent phone line, got hastily dressed and crossed the park to my 204

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office. The bureau’s local corner café was across the road from a police station. At that hour of the day, several grey-uniformed policemen stood at the bar having coffee before starting their morning shift. I was curious to know how the most visible and feared representatives of the dictatorship were taking the news. ‘You’ve heard, haven’t you? The Caudillo died this morning,’ I said to one officer. He gave me a sideways glance, shrugged his shoulders and dunked a churro into his coffee. There, I thought, was the first encouraging sign. Franco had been on a life-support machine for the better part of three weeks. Why did they prolong the dictator’s agony when there was absolutely no hope of recovery? There were obviously questions of state that needed to be addressed and procedures to be put in place for the transition of power. Dismantling almost four decades of a dictatorship by peaceful means requires time. There was also the uncomfortable question of who would take responsibility for pulling the plug. In the event, it was announced after the death that this had been a collegiate decision by the medical team. There was no shortage of rumours during the deathwatch about the Franco family whisking off as much as they could gather of their fortune to a safe haven abroad – Franco’s widow Carmen Polo (whose state pension until her death in 1988 exceeded the prime minister’s salary) was caught at Madrid airport carrying a cache of gold coins and medals on a flight to Switzerland. She was cleared of smuggling charges and later stated in a press conference that she had intended to use the money to purchase a clock. In the end, the decision to switch off Franco’s life-support machine in the early hours of 20 November, rather than prolong the agony, could have been a practical one, since that day was also the anniversary of the execution of the Falangist leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera. It made sense, therefore, to arrange for both commemorations to be held on the same day. The last medical bulletin was read at 4.00 a.m., minutes after the dictator’s death. Franco’s embalmed corpse was placed on public view at the Palacio Real. Hundreds of thousands of Madrileños queued for an average of eight hours in freezing temperatures to file past the open coffin, many undoubtedly to pay their last respects, others to reassure themselves that he was well and truly dead. No Western heads of state were at the 205

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funeral and several did not bother to reply to their invitations. On the other hand, the event was attended by a number of high-profile sympathisers, Augusto Pinochet and Imelda Marcos among them, and though the Ku Klux Klan was not represented in person, the Grand Wizard sent the Franco family a message of condolence. It took less than two months to expose Franco’s vision of Spain as being atado y bien atado as a complete chimera. Madrid kick-started a round of industrial action in January 1976 by staging a three-day Metro strike after the collapse of wage negotiations. Franco’s toady prime minister Carlos Arias Navarro found himself overwhelmed by events he had never anticipated. The walkout began on 6 January, Epiphany being the traditional day of the New Year season for exchanging gifts, with tens of thousands of shoppers stranded in the streets of central Madrid. Arias Navarro’s reaction to the chaos this stoppage caused would have earned him a pat on the back from the deceased dictator. He called in the army; the Metro was ‘militarised’, in the official jargon, with squaddies standing guard at station entrances and on empty platforms, wondering exactly what duty they were meant to be performing. Madrid had seen its fair share of strikes during the Franco years, which had generally ended with the organisers, CC.OO. militants like Marcelino Camacho and Simón Sánchez Montero, being sacked and sent to Madrid’s Carabanchel prison. This walkout was ended in quite a different way. For the first time, the still-illegal trade unions exacted a promise of no reprisals, as well as an acceptable wage package, with the threat of more strike action if management failed to keep their word. The Metro de Madrid action was followed by walkouts in the metalworking sector, post office and Telefónica state telephone company, not to mention a strike by 60,000 construction workers. On a national level, the first three months of 1976 saw almost 18,000 strikes, to which the government now responded with far more vigour. In February seven workers were shot dead by the police in separate protests. Industrial workers had a lot to get off their chests, but the transition was starting to resemble a driverless train heading for derailment. Arias Navarro was not the person to take Spain into democracy and hence, with some behind-the-scenes prodding from 206

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the king, he tendered his resignation on 1 July 1976. That was around the time Charlie Chaplin’s anti-fascist spoof The Great Dictator was allowed to be shown for the first time since its release in 1940. The riot police were not the only agents of the rump Franco regime to turn their weapons on those demanding speedier reform. In a session of the Cortes convened in the midst of widespread labour unrest, the far-right deputy Blas Piñar rose to proclaim, ‘Gentlemen, regardless of what you may think, the Civil War has not ended.’ More than any other politician, Piñar was in a position to know what that meant. He was the founder in 1976 of the ultra-rightist party Fuerza Nueva (New Force) and at the time of writing remains active in politics, despite being 94. Fuerza Nueva drew its support from the well-heeled sons (and daughters) of families with economic or ideological links to the Franco dictatorship, most of whom hailed from Madrid’s Salamanca district where the party had installed its headquarters.3 Fuerza Nueva maintained a fraternal relationship, and in some cases shared membership with illegal fascist guerrilla cells like the Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey (Guerrillas of Christ the King), Grupos Armados Españoles (Spanish Armed Groups) and other right-wing terrorist organisations that sprung up after Franco’s death, whose aim was to sabotage the transition to democracy. On the night of 24 January 1977, alarm bells began ringing on the state news agency EFE’s telex in the UPI office. That was the signal for a breaking news story. At 10.30 p.m. nine communist lawyers belonging to the CC.OO. union had been finishing up a meeting in their office in Calle Atocha, near the Plaza Mayor, when a group of masked men burst into the room and shot dead five of them, leaving the others critically wounded. Apart from the horror of the crime, which brought hundreds of thousands of Madrileños into the streets in a mass protest march, there was the persistent anxiety that actions such as this would lead to an army crackdown, for there were many in the military hierarchy who saw Spain’s progress towards modernity as a betrayal of the system they had sworn to uphold. Every step towards a more permissive as well as democratic society since Franco’s death – the legalisation of divorce, abortion and pornography and, of course, 207

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growing labour agitation – brought the threat of tanks rolling down the Paseo de la Castellana. But for now the army stayed in its barracks, keeping an eye on developments. Their moment would come in five years’ time. The Matanza de Atocha (Atocha Massacre), as an attempt to destabilise the government, backfired in the killers’ faces, four of whom were arrested and in 1980 given multiple life sentences. A monument to the victims has been erected in Madrid’s Plaza de Antón Martín, as well as in 23 villages around the capital. The month following the attack marked a milestone in Spain’s political reform process. To the horror of the right-wing extremists, the government of Adolfo Suárez, the centrist prime minister appointed by Juan Carlos in 1976, legalised the socialist PSOE. But this was not the final horror for the Franco diehards. On 9 April 1977, a day that became known as ‘Sábado Santo rojo’ (‘Red Easter Saturday’), the newspapers were covered with screaming headlines announcing the legalisation of the communist PCE. Suárez had chosen a date when most of the top military brass were away on holiday to push through the most daring piece of legislation since the Civil War.4 Right-wing militants poured into the streets of Madrid shouting anti-government slogans, calling for the army to save the fatherland from a communist takeover and depose the traitorous Suárez and his ministers. Crowds of angry, blue-shirted youths assembled outside the California 47 restaurant in Calle Goya, the meeting place for Fuerza Nueva militants, where they chanted Falangist hymns, arms outstretched in the fascist salute. And nothing happened. In May 1979, two years, one constitution and a general election later, the most beloved of all Madrid’s mayors was elected to office. Enrique Tierno Galván, ‘el Viejo Profesor’ (‘the Old Professor’) as he was known, was one of the faculty members expelled from the Universidad Complutense in 1965 for taking part in a student protest march. During the seven years in which this soft-spoken, 61-yearold socialist academic held office, Madrid became a riotous and thoroughly enjoyable non-stop party. Making up for lost time would be a flagrant understatement.

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Tierno Galván set about the modern revitalisation of the city’s popular customs, reinstating the celebrations for Carnaval, instigating a new series of summer arts festivals, the Veranos de la Villa, and generally declaring that the city was indeed a space to have fun… A new youth culture lost no time in taking him at his word, parodying the fake national identity promoted by Franco and experimenting with all previous taboos in a frenzy of hedonism, sexual promiscuity and nocturnal excess.5 The mayor won the devotion of Madrileños for his exemplary administration, his personal warmth and inventiveness and a sense of humour few of Franco’s victims were able to retain. One of Tierno Galván’s first initiatives was to dismantle the dingy flyover at the Atocha railway station, giving one of Madrid’s derelict neighbourhoods a cheerful facelift. He provided decent housing for shanty-town dwellers in the industrial suburbs of Vallecas, Orcasitas and Villaverde. He organised Madrid’s (and Spain’s) first ever Festival de Erótica (Festival of Erotica) and cleaned up the polluted Manzanares River, which was stocked with its first 40 ducks – something that made headlines. And when he died on 19 January 1986, more than one million people, a third of the city’s population, turned out for his funeral. The personality that made Madrileños feel ten feet tall, not that they require much encouragement, was reflected in one of Tierno Galván’s last comments to the press. A reporter visiting him in hospital, where he had been admitted with colon cancer, asked rather tactlessly if, as an atheist, he feared death. ‘Not at all,’ he replied, ‘I know God is merciful with atheists.’ A statue of Tierno Galván was erected in a park that bears his name, near the planetarium and Museo del Ferrocarril (Railway Museum). The Old Professor inspired and presided over a phenomenon of the 1980s that came to be known as ‘La Movida Madrileña’, which translates unsatisfactorily as ‘the Madrilenian Scene’, something akin to Swinging London in the 1960s. Young Madrileños demanded an escape from years of smothering fascist repression, when sex, drugs and rock and roll were just not done. Or if they were, the options 209

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were dismal in the extreme. Developers on some building sites were known to rent out show flats by the hour when no prospective buyers were in sight. Just as London had burst onto the world scene with icons like Twiggy and the Beatles, so Madrid produced pop singers like Joan Manuel Serrat and Raimon, whose cloying lyrics were enthusiastically echoed by tens of thousands of cheering fans at Madrid’s concert venues. In the world of fashion, the frumpiness of the Franco era was shoved aside to make way for Adolfo Domínguez, who debuted his work in Madrid in 1981 and became the first Spanish designer to open his own name-brand shop in the capital, under the slogan ‘La arruga es bella’ (‘The crease is beautiful’). Domínguez’s fame transcended Spain’s borders when in the 1980s his collection was chosen for the cast of the US television series Miami Vice. Those were the years in which Madrid set the country’s trends in pop music, avant-garde art and cinema. The city could not offer music fans a venue to match Andy Warhol’s ‘Factory’ of 1960s New York. But there was an abundance of effervescent discos, notably the defunct Rock Ola, set up in cafés as well as in music venues like La Bobia in El Rastro (the flea market), which was used for the opening scene of Pedro Almodóvar’s Laberinto de pasiones (Labyrinth of Passion). The decibel level in these places was enough to wake the dead, a bedlam unlike anything Madrid had seen in its modern history. ‘Weekends were beyond belief,’ recalled Manuel Muriel, who for 30 years owned a newspaper kiosk outside La Bobia. ‘There were writers, actors, post-modernist types, others selling drugs, and police swooping on the crowds that filled the streets. Everything is a bit greyer now.’6 Remnants of the Movida are to be found in a few music venues that have survived from that era. Places like La Vía Láctea and Sala el Sol are sacred to the Movida generation. Film-maker Pedro Almodóvar, the son of a petrol-station attendant from La Mancha, went to Madrid in 1969 when he was 20 and became the Movida incarnate. His films lay bare, in the most explicit sense of the word, the taboos of the Franco years, from drugs to sex in all its variations and anti-clerical satire. All of this went on in Franco’s Spain, but it was not until well after the dictator’s death 210

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that transvestites dared to walk the streets, X-rated cinemas opened their doors and the Church came under attack in public forums. Almodóvar’s films may shock his audiences with a no-holds-barred exposé of Madrid’s counter-cultural life. But Madrileños take them in their stride, black humour and all, for Madrid in the early 1980s was a city revelling in self-confidence. In Almodóvar’s own words, ‘Madrid is the centre of the universe and everybody comes here to have fun.’7 That self-confidence was badly shaken on the night of 23 February 1981, when the Movida came to an abrupt standstill and Madrid held its breath. In the previous month, ETA had kidnapped two high-profile businessmen, one of whom was murdered. In a separate incident, 10,000 protestors in Madrid marched on the US Air Force base at Torrejón to protest against the American military presence on Spanish soil. Photos had appeared in the papers of a naked couple dancing on a fountain in central Madrid. Almodóvar’s first feature film Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls in the Gang) was a box-office hit. The film consists of themes that were heresy to the Franco loyalists: a woman seeking revenge on a rapist policeman, a lesbian punk-rock singer and a masochistic housewife. This reflected a cultural climate that was under scrutiny by members of the army high command, men who had all served the Franco regime. That February night a moustachioed Guardia Civil officer in black patent-leather hat, Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero, burst into a session of the Cortes at the head of a detachment of paramilitary troops. It was a replay of 1874, when General Manuel Pavía charged into the Cortes on his horse with a contingent of the Guardia Civil to dislodge the government and install General Francisco Serrano in power. That, at least, had been a successful coup. Tejero’s brief was also to overthrow the government, but after letting off a few shots into the ceiling, which sent the deputies ducking under their seats,8 the incident began to take on the appearance of a Buster Keaton skit. Tejero shouted to the chamber that he was waiting for orders from an ‘authority’, though nobody, Tejero included, seemed to know who stood behind the 211

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revolt. Things began to take an ugly turn when General Jaime Milans del Bosch, a veteran of the Civil War who had later fought alongside the Germans at Stalingrad, sent his tanks rolling into the streets of Valencia. From the steps of the Hotel Palace across the road from the Cortes, the situation seemed likely to explode at any moment. Officers of the Guardia Civil wandered nervously in and out of the building, not knowing which way to point their sub-machine guns. One of the unsung heroes of that night, chief of police José Antonio Sáenz de Santamaría, had the presence of mind to throw a cordon of his men around the Cortes, just in case the Guardia Civil got out of hand. The air force remained loyal throughout the night. The squadron at Los Llanos base near the town of Albacete was put on red alert. Phantoms were fuelled and loaded with bombs that night, awaiting orders to strike at the rebel tanks in Valencia. Several army units, including the crack 1st Armoured Brigade of Madrid, were reported to be wavering. Then at a quarter past one in the morning, a grim-faced King Juan Carlos, wearing his commander-in-chief uniform, went on television to announce that any attack on Spain’s democratic institutions would be met with force. The coup was over. In the early hours of the morning, Guardia Civil officers began escaping from the Cortes, some scampering out of windows. The leading plotters – Tejero, Milans del Bosch and General Alfonso Armada, a former close associate of the king and reported to be the Caudillo-in-waiting had the coup succeeded – were each given 30-year jail sentences. The Movida Madrileña’s war cries of ‘Madrid nunca duerme’ (‘Madrid never sleeps’) and ‘Madrid me mata’ (‘Madrid kills me’), by the late 1980s had faded to a distant echo in the clubs of Chueca, Malasaña and other barrios that a few years earlier had been in a state of ferment. The legalisation of left-wing parties and the farcical end to the Tejero caper was followed by a gradual winding down of street clashes between baton-wielding riot police and political protestors. The Movida had run its course, everybody was satisfied that the streets were free and for having fun, and Madrid had overcome its political 212

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growing pains. For the first time in its history, in 1986 Madrid found itself a small part of something a lot bigger, and vaguely ominous – the European Economic Community (EEC). Brussels, once an insignificant town on the periphery of the Spanish Empire, subservient to the monarch who ruled from Madrid’s Alcázar, now threatened to emasculate a way of life based on late hours and a healthy disregard for money. Spain was now part of something much bigger and the country faced demands of competitiveness and productivity it had never known before. As multinational companies began setting up operations and new languages like Swedish and Japanese were heard in the streets, Madrid’s skyline was transformed with astonishing speed. The wrecker ball cleared the way for towering glass-fronted office blocks, accelerating a process that had begun in the 1960s with the destruction of the sumptuous stately homes that once lined the Paseo de la Castellana. Then in the 1980s came the skyscrapers, such as the sixtower AZCA complex that joined other glass-and-steel office edifices along the Castellana. Its tallest building, the 516-foot Torre Picasso (Picasso Tower), is the work of Minoru Yamasaki, who designed Manhattan’s World Trade Centre. The leaning Kuwait Investment Office (KIO) towers, started in 1989, that flank the Paseo de la Castellana’s northern approach to Madrid, were presumptuously christened ‘La Puerta de Europa’ (‘the Gate of Europe’). The best that can be said about these soaring monoliths is that there are not very many of them. They are still to an extent unoppressive, being relatively few and thanks to the great expanse of sky overhead, unlike New York’s unbroken phalanx of skyscrapers, and as such they are tolerable. Ring roads began to encircle the city – M-21, M-30, M-31, M-40, M-45, M-50 – a baffling series of concentric circles, traffic-clogged roads that give access to yet more motorways, taking people home to a proliferation of characterless commuterbelt housing developments. A 20-mile journey to the office from a town like Torrelodones, which once took half an hour on the Coruña road, by the late 1980s had become a two-hour ordeal. Madrid being the home of the picaresque novel, it was inevitable that when a rush-hour priority lane was opened for cars carrying 213

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at least one passenger, a number of crafty and somewhat embarrassed commuters were fined for driving with a mannequin in the passenger seat. Madrid was being ‘Europeanised’, after a fashion, with more rigid working hours, though this did not necessarily translate into greater efficiency. Restaurants began taking bookings for supper at the barbarically early hour of nine o’clock, yet if you were to turn up at that time you would feel very lonely indeed, or find yourself seated next to a table of Swedish venture capitalists. Office lunch breaks were shorter and with less wine, if any, consumed at midday. But after work Madrileños were still to be found three-deep at the bar. Working for a multinational or one of the big Spanish companies like Telefónica or Banco Santander demanded an early start to the day, but giving up late nights was never to be on the agenda, and to accommodate this tradition an hour or two were shaved off a night’s rest. One of the great mysteries of Europe is how Madrileños manage without sleep. Part of the answer is the abundance of energising sunlight, along with a certain mild quality in the air – after all, Madrid is, at 2,100 feet above sea level, the highest capital in Europe. Perhaps the most persuasive explanation for this exceptional level of stamina lies in the fact that Madrid is a happy city. Even now, despite the economic crisis, Madrileños sleep less than most, but those few hours are not spent agonising over what the morning will bring – at least not for those fortunate enough to hold jobs. Theirs is untroubled sleep, in the spirit of John Dryden’s Imitation of Horace: ‘Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have lived today.’ On the face of it, the city has undergone a radical transformation since the 1990s. Yet not so much has really changed. Madrid has never stopped being Madrid. Nor did the Ayuntamiento, in encouraging the arrival of those soulless additions to the Paseo de la Castellana and other main arteries, turn its back on Madrid’s architectural heritage. The city authorities had the means to promote the renovation of the city’s residential centre. As early as 1982, Mayor Tierno Galván had authorised official subsidies of up to 20 per cent to residents of the Barrio de las Letras, Chueca, Malasaña and other quarters to revamp their homes. This was a first, not only for Madrid but for Spain as 214

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a whole, a country that traditionally allows historic buildings in disrepair to remain derelict until they are bulldozed to make way for modern blocks of flats. These neighbourhoods have now been done up to a standard worthy of their residents’ pride, and they have become home to an eclectic mix of traditional lower-middle-class families, arts and media types and young business professionals. The once dilapidated streets around Calle Segovia and Plaza de la Paja, for instance, shine as an example of architectural recovery and civic self-esteem. The cathedral of Santa María la Real de la Almudena was finally completed in 1993 and consecrated by Pope John Paul II. Every year on 9 November, Madrileñas turn out in splendour, in black mantillas draped over their tall peinetas (Spanish combs), to celebrate a Mass in the Plaza Mayor and a procession to the cathedral in honour of the city’s female patron saint. That was also the time when Madrid inaugurated what the Ayuntamiento has hailed the ‘Triángulo de Oro’ (‘Golden Triangle’), making the city home to the world’s foremost ensemble of picture galleries. The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, featuring twentieth-century art, and the Museo ThyssenBornemisza, with some of the best Impressionist, Expressionist, European and American paintings from the second half of the last century, both complement the Prado’s collection of pre-twentiethcentury old masters. All three are within a few minutes’ walk of one another along the Paseo del Prado. Was the newspaper vendor Manuel Muriel right to lament that, since the demise of the Movida, everything has become ‘a bit greyer’ in Madrid? Is Mammon, not Almodóvar, the Madrileños’ new anima? Has idleness replaced the pursuit of leisure as the alternative to work? In May 1808, the people of Madrid took to the streets to vent their outrage over injustices imposed on them by a foreign tyrant. A little over 200 years later, in the same month and in the same Puerta del Sol, Madrileños demonstrated to the world that their spirit of defiance was far from extinct. On 15 May 2011, tens of thousands of people – students, intellectuals, professionals, shopkeepers, the jobless – staged a mass rally that in the ensuing weeks evolved into the worldwide 215

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Indignado movement. The Madrid protest was born of anger at the government’s policy failures in the face of Spain’s deepest economic crisis in decades. The call for justice inspired demonstrations not only across Spain: within weeks, what had started as a spontaneous outcry by activists in Madrid had spread to the streets of New York, London, Tel Aviv, Paris, Dublin and right across the globe. Señor Muriel was mistaken.

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This book is not intended to be a travel guide, but it is hoped that these pages of history will encourage readers to pay a visit to Europe’s most singular city. In this spirit, it seemed appropriate to offer a recommended itinerary for a 48-hour ramble about Madrid. A good starting point for any day is the Café Gijón in the Paseo de Recoletos, a few minutes’ journey north of the Plaza de Cibeles along the broad, tree-lined avenue that bisects Madrid on a north–south axis before it becomes the Paseo de la Castellana. The Gijón has been the rendezvous for tertulias since it opened its doors in 1888 and afternoon literary gatherings are still held on certain days of the week. You will see the tertulianos seated around one of the tables by the street-facing windows, engaged in animated conversation over manuscripts and coffee cups spread before them. You will also notice waiters like José Bárcena, who has been serving customers at the Gijón since 1974, discussing politics and literature on an equal footing with the writers and academics at the tertulia table, for being a waiter in Madrid is not a job, but an honoured profession. A traditional breakfast of café con leche y churros (coffee with milk and fried dough pastry) will set you up for the start of a meander around one of Europe’s most walkable cities. The Gijón is a ten-minute stroll from the start to the ‘Triángulo de Oro’, consisting of the Museo del Prado, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (the permanent home of Picasso’s Guernica). If it happens to be a Monday, you 217

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will find them shut. There is no cause to panic: the exhibits at the CaixaForum and Fundación Mapfre, located nearby in the Paseo del Prado and Paseo de Recoletos respectively, are always worth a look. The three great picture galleries cannot reasonably be taken on in a single day. After seeing, say, the Prado, retrace your steps to Cibeles and head towards the easily discernible façade of Metropolis, the first great building of the Gran Vía. This is where the road bifurcates, with the start of the Gran Vía itself to the right, and the Calle de Alcalá on the left. Taking the Calle de Alcalá route on the first day, it is a five-minute walk to the historic staging post for Madrid’s uprisings, the Puerta del Sol. Crossing the square, the road again divides ahead into Calle Mayor and Calle Arenal. There are several good reasons for choosing the Calle Mayor route. Firstly, the majestic Plaza Mayor is directly off to the left of the street. The tourism office in the Plaza is the place to purchase the MadridCard, which for a fixed price offers free entry to more than 50 museums and monuments, as well as discounts in selected restaurants and shops. Cross the Plaza Mayor diagonally and you will find a staircase, the Arco de Cuchilleros (see jacket image), which leads to the heart of the old town, known as Madrid de los Austrias (Madrid of the Habsburg Dynasty). This is the barrio for discovering the city’s oldest quarter and gaining an appreciation of what can be achieved with a determined programme of urban regeneration. The Plaza de la Villa, the fourteenth-century Gothic-style Torre de los Lujanes, the old Ayuntamiento and the narrow, twisting residential streets have all been restored to their medieval charm. This is a good place to stop off for coffee at the Café del Nuncio, a few steps down the Escalinata del Nuncio, and enjoy the lovely dark interiors, with gently rotating ceiling fans and soft classical music. Returning to the Calle Mayor, the Mercado de San Miguel is an outstanding example of tradition successfully reinventing itself. Formerly a conventional covered market, in 1999 the Ayuntamiento stepped in to rescue the century-old enterprise from financial collapse. The stalls were shabby, the produce was of mediocre quality, and residents were voting with their feet by going to the local 218

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supermarkets. A consortium was put together to revamp the market into a sprawling gastronomic emporium with tapas, wine bars, cafés, patisseries, cheese shops and of course a sprinkling of upmarket butchers, fishmongers and fruit-and-vegetable stalls – the perfect place to stop off for a light lunch. Carrying on from there, the Calle Mayor takes you to the Palacio Real and Almudena cathedral, both open to visitors. Take a stroll back to the Puerta del Sol and carry on up the Carrera de San Jerónimo on the right-hand side of the square, until you come to a timber-fronted café-delicatessen-restaurant with the improbable name of Lhardy. The upstairs restaurant, dating from 1839, when water carriers still walked the streets, is one of Madrid’s oldest, and is located near to the theatres where traditional Spanish operetta was born. This is not fare for the faint-hearted – the classic dish is cocido madrileño, a chickpea-based stew with pork belly, chorizo and beef shank. Custom dictates that this is washed down with a baked Alaska. But Lhardy is also the place to be on a winter’s morning, savouring a plate of fried croquettes and a bowl of consommé at the bar. A bit further along the street is Casa Mira, the most celebrated of Madrid’s pastry makers, specialising since 1842 in turrón, a nougat-based Christmas treat. Just round the corner in Calle Echegaray, facing the Hotel Inglés, is La Venencia,1 a tavern dedicated to the art of serving some of Spain’s finest sherries. The place has mercifully not been redecorated since it opened in the 1920s. A strict code of ethics is in force here: if you ask for anything other than sherry you will be shown the door. The great classic varieties are there to choose from: oloroso, fino, amontillado, manzanilla or palo cortado. You will be served a glass with a plate of olives and your order will be chalked up on the mahogany bar top. There is also a small range of tapas to choose from. Most refreshingly, and this will not fail to amuse visitors from New York, the staff adamantly refuse to accept tips. Photography (along with singing and dancing) is not just frowned upon, it is strictly forbidden. These provisos notwithstanding, La Venencia is Madrid’s holy shrine for sherry lovers and a delightful place to have a pre-dinner drink, or two. 219

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Dinner options are limitless in Madrid. In the street behind La Venencia, Calle Ventura de la Vega, is Restaurante Hylogui, where, if you go for dinner at a civilised ten p.m., you will encounter a large dining room filled with Madrileños. Hylogui is a mid-market restaurant with a superb wine list and a staff of long-serving Madrileño waiters who add to the ambience of tradition. Landlocked Madrid in the middle of the Castilian plateau is one of Spain’s best venues for exquisite seafood and shellfish, for which Madrileños have an incurable passion. The Mercado San Antón, around a 15-minute walk from the Puerta del Sol, after a five-year facelift achieved a metamorphosis in 2011 similar to that of Mercado de San Miguel, but with a twist. The food stalls have been upgraded and it still functions as a traditional neighbourhood market, but a rooftop restaurant has been added. You can order from the menu, or you have the option of buying your meat or seafood from the market stalls downstairs and having it sent up to the kitchen to be cooked to your specifications. Where to go after midnight in Madrid is never a problem, for this is when the worst traffic jams start to build. Two late-night barrios to visit are Malasaña and Chueca, and both neighbourhoods are an easy walk from the Gran Vía, towards the Tribunal and Chueca Metro stations, respectively. The pavements here are gathering places for crowds the size of which have to be seen to be believed. La Vía Láctea of the Movida days is still pumping out the rock, pop, garage, rockabilly and indie, doing its bit to keep Malasaña ticking over until daybreak. In the Plaza de Chueca, the Bodega de Ángel Sierra is a traditional tavern which, since its foundation in 1897, has had new electric lighting installed and not much else. But there is another, newer place just outside these two classic hot spots, where you stand a reasonable chance of finding a seat (or with luck an armchair or sofa) to enjoy an exotic cocktail. Café Pouss, two streets behind the Gran Vía in Calle de las Infantas, is an all-embracing, art deco-meets-1970sstyled bar/café/exhibition-centre/catwalk, which gives definition to the term ‘chill out’, a voluptuous end to your first night in Madrid. If your second day in Madrid happens to be a Sunday or a public holiday, the antiques, bric-a-brac and just-about-anything market known as El Rastro starts south of La Latina Metro station, spilling 220

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down a long hill of stalls from the Plaza de Cascorro to the Ronda de Toledo. It’s a morning venue and traders begin packing up shortly before three p.m. Once upon a time, as late as the early years of the twentieth century, there had been instances of paintings by celebrated artists (including the then unappreciated El Greco) going for a song. This is no longer the case, and even the Gypsy traders keep art catalogues in their shops, but there are still bargains to be had in that pile of decorative tiles rescued from the façade of a demolished tavern, and those dusty shelves of nineteenth-century porcelains. El Rastro in many ways marks the border between Europe and North Africa, and haggling is very much part of the game. After completing the museum visits, Sunday is also an occasion to watch middle-class Madrid at leisure in the Parque del Buen Retiro, which can be accessed by several grand entranceways in Calle de Alcalá. The park is very much a weekend family venue. Though now a distant memory for most Madrileños, it encapsulates the relaxed days of relief of the immediate post-Franco period. The term ‘park’ is somewhat misleading: landscaped garden would be a more accurate description. The Retiro gives off the quality of walking into an Impressionist painting, reflected in the Rosaleda rose garden, the Estanque (artificial pond) with its slow chug-chug tour boat, and the Palacio de Cristal, modelled on London’s Crystal Palace of the 1851 Great Exhibition. The Palacio de Cristal is also one of the Retiro’s three art galleries, along with the Casa de Vacas and Palacio de Velázquez. The lively Plaza Santa Ana area, literally round the corner from La Venencia, is a good place for a light tapas snack, though it must be made clear once and for all that Spaniards do not treat tapas as a replacement for a meal. That notion is a foreign invention, much like chop suey and chicken tikka masala. Head for the Cervecería Alemana, once a favourite watering hole of Madrid devotees Ava Gardner and Ernest Hemingway. The decor is bulls and matadors, the tables are marble-topped and the standard tapas – calamares, tortilla, jamón serrano, manchego cheese – are some of the best you’ll find in the city. Madrid lunchtime, starting anywhere from 2.30 to 3.30 p.m., when traffic is at a lower ebb, gives you a chance to explore the Gran Vía’s 221

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sumptuous architecture, beginning from Cibeles and crossing the length of the avenue down to the Plaza de España, with its monumental statue of Don Quixote and Sancho. The Gran Vía is a true showcase of early-twentieth-century architectural styles, from Vienna Secession and plateresque to neo-Mudéjar and art deco. Several of the intersecting streets, like Calle Fuencarral, have been pedestrianised for shoppers and most of the unique boutiques along the way have broken with Spanish tradition by remaining open at midday. The choice of a dinner venue looms, a time for difficult decisions, with a plethora of new restaurants opening across the city. Let us consider two. La Tienda de Vinos, in Calle Augusto Figueroa facing the Mercado de San Antón, and La Taberna del Alabardero in Calle Felipe V, near the Opera and Palacio Real. The first is a typical Madrid tavern, red-checked tablecloth, budget eatery, which in the 1960s was nicknamed ‘El Comunista’ by university students. If memory serves, the owner (whose wife has been in the kitchen for more than half a century) used to profess views that could be interpreted as vaguely left of centre. It is more a classic Madrid experience than a gastronomic event – lively, closely packed tables, noisy atmosphere, red-and-white gingham curtains, decent fare and very, very Madrid. La Taberna del Alabardero is totally a food event, entirely a different kettle of exquisite fish. The restaurant was founded in 1974 by a former priest, Luis de Lezama, who now owns 21 restaurants in Spain and the United States and runs three cookery schools. This is one of Madrid’s most resplendent restaurants, in decor and cuisine, once a favourite of literary figures like the poet Rafael Alberti and the novelist Julio Cortázar, and legendary bullfighters Paco Camino and Antonio Ordóñez. From the Opera quarter it is a longish stroll through Habsburg Madrid, along the Calle Mayor to the Puerta del Sol, Cibeles and to the Café Gijón, a place as worthy of an ending as the beginning of a 48-hour sojourn in Madrid. If you are there in, say, May or September, two of the finest months for savouring the city’s outdoor life, take a seat at the terrace café set up in the garden outside the front door. By now it may be one o’clock in the morning, but even so, you should not have too much difficulty finding a table. There is a pianist perched 222

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on a raised platform to entertain you with classic show tunes and romantic Latin American ballads. The balmy night air will invite you to enjoy a digestif, perhaps a Pedro Ximénez sherry or Pacharán from Navarra. It is very late and you may have to face an early-morning flight home. But for now you are in Madrid, so tomorrow, do thy worst, for it does not get any better than this.

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Al-Ándalus – The Arabic name given to the Iberian territory conquered and ruled by North African tribes from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries. Aljama – Jewish or Muslim ghetto imposed in Madrid by the Reyes Católicos in 1481. Almohads – The Berber Muslim dynasty founded in the twelfth century. They defeated the Almoravids of North Africa and extended their power over Spain, establishing their capital at Sevilla. Almoravids – The Almoravids were a Berber dynasty of North Africa. In 1086 the Almoravids answered a call from the Berber princes of Al-Ándalus to defend them against Alfonso VI, King of León and Castilla. From the eleventh to the twelfth centuries, their empire extended over southern Spain and Portugal, until their defeat by the Almohads. Ayuntamiento – The modern name for a town or city hall. Berbers – The indigenous peoples of North Africa, who inhabit the lands between the Sahara and the Mediterranean, from Egypt to the Atlantic coast. They were the original invaders and conquerors of the Iberian Peninsula. Caudillo – A Spanish word for ‘leader’ derived from the Latin capitellum. It was a title bestowed on military leaders, from the Visigoth king of the Reconquista Don Pelayo, to contemporary 225

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demagogues like Francisco Franco and the South American revolutionary Simón Bolívar. Concejo – The historical name for a town council, or for a meeting of municipal officials. Corregidor – Historically, the monarch’s chief district magistrate, roughly equivalent to the British office of High Sheriff. Fuero – A charter or code of laws that confer special privileges, which in the case of Spain usually refers to Navarra and the Basque Country. Both of these regions, or Comunidades Autónomas (Autonomous Communities), have in modern times recovered part of their ancient fueros, allowing them to raise their own taxes, among other concessions. Mentidero – A street-corner forum for public debate. It bore a close similarity to Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park and was at the heart of Madrid life. Moor – A name generically applied to Berbers, Arabs and Muslim Iberians who invaded the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century. The word is still commonly used by Spaniards to denote Muslims, primarily those of North African origin. Moriscos – Converted Christian inhabitants of Spain and Portugal of Muslim heritage. Over time the term came to be used in a pejorative sense to denote those nominal Catholics who were suspected of secretly practising Islam. La Movida – From the verb mover, ‘to move’. The term refers to the Madrid ‘scene’, or creative rebirth that swept through the city from the late 1970s to the mid 1980s. Mozarabs – Iberian Christians who lived under Islamic rule and remained unconverted. 226

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Mudalies – Muslims of ethnic Iberian descent or of mixed Arab, Berber and European origin, who lived in Al-Ándalus. Mudéjar – Muslims who remained in Christian territory after the Reconquista but were not converted to Christianity. It is also a style of architecture of the twelfth to sixteenth centuries, strongly influenced by Moorish taste and workmanship. Reconquista – The nearly eight centuries of warfare waged by Christian forces to recapture the territory that had been conquered by the Moors after 711, when the first Berber tribes crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to launch their invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. The Reconquista officially ended in 1492 with the capture of Granada and expulsion of the Moors and Jews from Spanish territory. Taifa – An independent emirate or petty kingdom in Moorish Spain, such as the taifas of Toledo, Granada and Córdoba. Tertulia – A gathering of intellectuals and artists who met (and often still meet) in cafés to discuss literature, the arts and political events of the day. A veritable Madrid institution. Umayyad – This dynasty ruled the second of the four major Arab caliphates established after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Their capital was Damascus and, at its greatest extent, the empire covered more than five million square miles. They established the caliphate of Córdoba. Valido – The monarch’s favoured nobleman, who occupied a position of great influence and power at court. Visigoths – A Germanic tribe that separated from the other division of the Goths, the Ostrogoths, in the fourth century. A century later they crossed the Pyrenees to invade Spain, where they ruled until the Moorish invasion of 711.

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Introduction 1

2

By way of contrast, in the commemoration-happy United States a Federal commission has already been set up to coordinate the 450th anniversary of St Augustine, Florida, the oldest European-built city in the country, which was founded in 1565 by the Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilés. Restaurant owners around Europe have sold people the notion that tapas are a replacement for a meal. They are not. Spaniards might have a tapa or two at a bar while waiting to meet friends for dinner. As for sangría, this concoction is widely eschewed by Spaniards and in 20 years in Madrid I do not recall having seen it once on a table.

Chapter One 1

2 3

Gibraltar was named Jebel Tariq after the leader of the Berber invasion, Jebel meaning “mountain” in Arabic, a reference to the Rock of Gibraltar. The territory’s pronunciation over the years was transformed into Gibraltar. Karabell, Zachary, People of the Book (London: John Murray, 2007), p. 63. The impact that 800 years of warfare has made on the Spanish psyche should never be underestimated. As late as the 1970s, before the ascendancy of television, a latecomer to Spain, children in Madrid and other Spanish towns could still be found playing ‘Christians and Moors’ in the street and schoolyard. Yet compared with other Western European countries, Spain has absorbed its immigrant population without excessive friction. That said, it is the Moroccans, who account for the country’s second-largest ethnic minority after the Romanians, who continue to

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generate the most suspicion and resentment. The collective memory of the Moorish invasion has even found its way into common Spanish expressions, such as ‘¡Hay moros en la costa!’ (‘Moors on the coast!’), a phrase to denote a situation of imminent danger. Similarly, ‘A moro muerto, gran lanzada’ (‘A powerful lance thrust at a dead Moor’) signifies that a danger has passed. This mistrust is not reciprocal, however, and a recent survey showed that 83 per cent of Muslim immigrants feel themselves comfortably adapted to the Spanish way of life and customs. Hardly surprising, one might add, since the Muslim heritage is so deeply embedded in the Spanish lifestyle. Likewise, try going to a Madrid restaurant for dinner at nine p.m. and you will come to understand the meaning of loneliness. 4 Revilla, Fidel and Ramos, Rosalía, Historia breve de Madrid (Madrid: Ediciones la Librería, 2007), p. 13. 5 Montoliú, Pedro, Madrid, villa y corte (Madrid: Sílex Ediciones, 1996), pp. 28–29. 6 Montoliú: Madrid, villa y corte, p. 43. 7 Similarly, towns established on the front lines of the Reconquista often took the suffix de la frontera (of the frontier), such as Arcos de la Frontera and Jerez de la Frontera. 8 Saínz de Robles, Federico, Madrid, crónica y guía (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1962), p. 60. 9 Kennedy, Hugh, Muslim Spain and Portugal (New York: Longman, 1996), p. 146. 10 The Jews (along with Spain’s Protestant community) were not officially recognised on a par with Roman Catholics for nearly five centuries thereafter. In 1990 the justice minister Enrique Múgica, coincidentally the only Jew in the Spanish cabinet, signed into law a decree granting Jews entitlement to religious instruction in their own faith and other civil rights. 11 This title was bestowed on Fernando and Isabel in 1496 by Pope Alexander VI, a native of Valencia, in recognition of their efforts to spread the faith throughout the known world, which at the time was overwhelmingly Spanish. It has been accepted as one of the official titles used by every Spanish monarch since the fifteenth century and the present king is known as ‘His Catholic Majesty Don Juan Carlos’. 12 Miguel Rodríguez, Juan Carlos de, ‘Los mudéjares y los moriscos de Madrid’, in Gil Flores, Daniel, ed., De Maŷrīt a Madrid (Madrid: Lunwerg Editores, 2011), p. 74.

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13

Legend has it that as Muhammad XII, or Boabdil as the last Moorish king of Granada was known, rode south towards exile, he reached a rocky prominence that gave a last view of the city. When the dethroned monarch surveyed for the last time the Alhambra and the green valley that spread below, he burst into tears. At this, his mother rounded on him, ‘You weep like a woman for what you could not defend as a man.’ 14 Revilla and Ramos: Historia breve de Madrid, pp. 33–34. 15 Legend has it that this shepherd was none other than Isidro Labrador (Isidore the Farmer), who later became San Isidro, patron saint of Madrid. Isidro de Merlo y Quintana, to give him his full name, was a humble shepherd who lived in Madrid and to whom numerous miracles were attributed. He died in 1130 (82 years before his claimed appearance before the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa) and was buried in a pauper’s grave in the Madrid parish church of San Andrés. When King Alfonso VIII returned to the city after his victory, he had Isidro’s body (which legend has it had miraculously remained incorrupt despite the passage of time) transferred to a magnificent polychrome wooden coffin engraved with scenes from the holy shepherd’s life. In 1619, King Felipe III persuaded Pope Paul V to fulfil the long-awaited dream of the people of Madrid by having Isidro canonised, a ceremony that took place three years later amid scenes of great jubilation in the city’s Plaza Mayor. His body now lies in the cathedral of Nuestra Señora de la Almudena, named for Madrid’s female patron saint. 16 The Concejo wielded authority over a wide range of municipal matters, which included finances, public works, food supplies and even the local militia. It was under the reign of Alfonso X, known as ‘el Sabio’ (‘the Wise’), in the mid twelfth century that large-scale military campaigns against the Moors came to an end. Granada was the only Muslim stronghold of significance left in the Iberian Peninsula, thus standing armies were no longer needed and they were replaced by militias raised from the local citizenry to defend their townships, Madrid included. The Christian army once again took to the field in 1483, when King Fernando launched his campaign to conquer Granada and wipe out the last vestige of Muslim power in Spain. 17 Alfonso VIII was married to Eleanor of England, the daughter of Henry II and his wife the Duchess Eleanor of Aquitaine. This was the first royal union between the emerging Spanish nation and England. It was arranged to secure the Pyrenean border, with Gascony offered

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as Eleanor’s dowry. A Hispano-French connection had for some time existed, in that Alfonso VIII was a direct descendant of Raymond of Burgundy, the first husband of Urraca, the twelfth-century queen regnant of León, Castilla and Galicia. 18 Montoliú: Madrid, villa y corte, p. 63. 19 The church of San Nicolás, Madrid’s oldest parish, is adjacent to the Calle Mayor in the heart of the old city. San Pedro lies nearby, just off the Calle Segovia. 20 Revilla and Ramos: Historia breve de Madrid, pp. 44–46. 21 Castellanos, José Manuel, El Madrid de los Reyes Católicos (Madrid: Ediciones la Librería, 2005), p. 31. 22 The maravedí was a Spanish silver coin minted between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries. The word comes from the Arabic al-Murābitūn, meaning the Almoravids. 23 Castellanos: El Madrid de los Reyes Católicos, p. 34. 24 Montoliú: Madrid, villa y corte, p. 69. 25 Enrique III was the first to take the title of Príncipe de Asturias, modelled after the Prince of Wales, as heir to the throne. Previously the Spanish monarch’s firstborn child was known as the infante mayor. 26 Leo V was not the last of the more peculiar variety of European nobility to take up residence in Madrid. During the Franco dictatorship years, the city played host to such notables as the pretender to the throne of Brazil, Simeon II of Bulgaria and, most amusingly, Crown Prince Leka of Albania. The Albanian pretender stayed on after Franco’s death in 1975, but was later asked to leave when a large arms cache was discovered in his home, which was protected by a retinue of Thai bodyguards. 27 González de Clavijo, Ruy (trans. Markham, Clements), Narrative of the Embassy of Ruy González de Clavijo to the Court of Timour at Samarcand, AD 1403–6 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1859), p. 137. 28 González de Clavijo: Narrative, p. 148. Chapter Two 1 2 3

The Libros de Acuerdos were the official municipal records kept by the Madrid Concejo and many other Spanish townships. Quoted in Thomas, Hugh, Madrid: A Travellers’ Companion (London: Constable & Robinson, 1988), p. 66. Gómez Fernández, Francisco José, Madrid, una ciudad para un imperio

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(Madrid: Ediciones la Librería, 2011), p. 60. Assuming for a moment that the total was 391, and with a population of 80,000 in 1600, this worked out to roughly one tavern for every 200 inhabitants. By the twenty-first century, with the rise in Madrid’s population to some 3.3 million, that had increased to one for every 164 inhabitants. Compare this with London’s 7,000 pubs, yielding one for every 1,000 inhabitants, a statistic that belies the notion that easy access to alcohol is a significant factor behind Britain’s harder drinking culture. 4 Gómez Fernández: Madrid, una ciudad para un imperio, p. 68. 5 Castellanos: El Madrid de los Reyes Católicos, p. 111. 6 Revilla and Ramos: Historia breve de Madrid, p. 67. 7 An arrelde was a unit of mass equivalent to four imperial pounds. 8 Millares Carlo, Agustín and Artiles Rodríguez, Jenaro, eds., Libros de acuerdos del Concejo Madrileño: 1464–1600 (Madrid: Ayuntamiento de Madrid, 1932), p. 298. 9 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Pelican Books, 1969), p. 32. 10 Millares Carlo and Artiles Rodríguez, eds.: Libros de acuerdos, p. 79. 11 Millares Carlo and Artiles Rodríguez, eds.: Libros de acuerdos, p. 137. 12 Millares Carlo and Artiles Rodríguez, eds.: Libros de acuerdos, p. 137. 13 In 1499 the Muslim religious leaders of Granada were forced to hand over more than 5,000 priceless books with ornamental bindings, which were then consigned to the flames. 14 Just three months after entering Granada, Queen Isabel agreed to sponsor Christopher Columbus on an expedition to reach the Indies by sailing west across the Atlantic. Her motive was twofold: to build an empire for the greater glory of Spain, and to create a trading monopoly on the spices and other riches that could be extracted from the conquered lands. 15 Montoliú: Madrid, villa y corte, p. 85. 16 Madrid is also the site of the official geographical centre of the Iberian Peninsula. This is the Cerro de los Ángeles (Hill of the Angels) located on a hilltop six miles south of the capital in the satellite town of Getafe. 17 The name of this church refers to an icon of the Virgin that, in the eighth century, went missing from the chapel that housed it and was later found in some long grass known as tocha. A new chapel was built on this site to house this supposedly miraculous object, until the Real Basílica was constructed to replace it in the 1520s. The church was destroyed in 1808 during the French occupation, but restored in the

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1890s. It was ruined for a second time during the Civil War, but it was once again reconstructed and reopened in 1951. 18 In 1506, at the age of 54, Columbus died in Valladolid. His travels in death rivalled the international voyages he undertook in life. His remains were first interred at Valladolid, then at the monastery of La Cartuja in Sevilla. In 1542 the body was transferred to what is now the Dominican Republic. Forty-three years later, when France took over the entire island of Hispaniola, the remains were moved to Havana. After Cuba became independent following the Spanish–American War in 1898, the remains were moved back to Spain, to the Catedral de Santa María de la Sede in Sevilla. 19 A tercio, whose name means ‘one third’, was an infantry regiment of the Spanish army. 20 It must be added that the Church was equally pleased to see the departure of Felipe II and his domineering court. This left the archbishop a free hand to run the affairs of what he still regarded as the spiritual capital of Spain. Chapter Three 1

From time to time, well-known people, including his illegitimate son Don Juan de Austria, came to visit the retired emperor. A fictitious visit by Carlos, Prince of Asturias and other characters to Carlos’s tomb in the monastery provides the moonlit setting for the last act of Guiseppe Verdi’s opera Don Carlos. 2 El País, 20 November 1986. 3 Elliott, John Huxtable, Imperial Spain: 1469–1716 (London: Penguin, 1963), pp. 254–55. 4 Saínz de Robles: Madrid, crónica y guía, pp. 14–15. 5 Thomas: Madrid, p. 2. 6 Montoliú: Madrid, villa y corte, pp. 88–89. 7 Ford, Richard, Gatherings from Spain (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1927), p. 15. One problem is that Madrileños fail to acknowledge that they live in a cold city. A common greeting in midwinter is ‘¡Uf, qué frío hace!’ (‘What a freezing day!’), as if this were a novelty. Hence people have been quite blasé about home heating and, until quite recently, it was common to find a family huddled around a dining-room table with a lethal electric brazier crackling at their feet and a heavy cotton tablecloth

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pulled over their legs. The more venturesome would purchase strips of vulcanised rubber from Gypsy stalls in El Rastro, Madrid’s Sunday flea market, and use this to insulate their window frames, a kind of primitive double glazing. 8 Quoted in Randall, Sheila, Philip II (London: Collins, 2004), p. 35. 9 London is a curious exception, having attained its status by default, which in many ways was a consequence of historic evolution. Londinium received the title of Augusta in the third century AD, and from the fifth to eighth century declined in importance and size with invasions and warfare that reduced the population to a few thousand inhabitants. When the Normans landed in 1066, they established the court in Westminster because they mistrusted the area now known as the City (the Roman ‘Square Mile’). From that point onwards, London’s position as the capital of the realm has remained unchallenged. 10 Thomas: Madrid, pp. 2–3. 11 A touch ironic, as Madrid is today consistently voted one of the world’s noisiest cities. A Spanish survey found that 70 per cent of the city’s population was exposed to noise above the maximum level recommended by the European Union, while according to World Health Organisation statistics, in the daytime 97 per cent of all areas exceeded a recommended maximum noise level of 55 decibels. 12 More than four centuries later, in a supposedly enlightened age, the team of physicians attending Francisco Franco in Madrid’s Hospital de la Paz sent in despair for the mummified hand of Santa Teresa, which they placed next to the dying general’s bed. This time the miracle cure yielded less felicitous results, at least for the dictator’s supporters, for he died a few days later without regaining consciousness. 13 Gómez Fernández: Madrid, una ciudad para un imperio, p. 57. 14 Gómez Fernández: Madrid, una ciudad para un imperio, p. 58. 15 The phrase is usually associated with Britain’s imperial possessions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it was originally coined in the sixteenth century to describe the Spanish Empire, which extended across the globe so that there was always at least one part of its territory in daylight. 16 Carnival celebrations were prohibited under the Republic during the 1936–39 Civil War, as a symbol of austerity and solidarity with the troops fighting Franco’s insurgents. The ban remained totally or partially in place until 1976.

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17 18

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In fact, the congenial and even-tempered Felipe III died at the age of 43, whereas his tormented father had lived to 71. The term ‘Leyenda Negra’ refers to propaganda aimed at morally disqualifying Spain and its people, and inciting animosity against Spanish rule. It particularly exaggerates the treatment of the indigenous subjects in the territories of the Spanish Empire and non-Catholics such as Protestants and Jews in its European possessions. The term was coined by the Spanish historian Julián Juderías in his 1914 book La leyenda negra y la verdad histórica (The Black Legend and Historical Truth). Of the 130-strong fleet, 60 ships managed to limp back to Spain. Only 18 were destroyed by English fire ships, while the rest were sunk by North Sea storms. It was a defeat from which Spanish naval power never recovered, being dealt the final death blow in the 1898 Spanish–American War. The Duke of Alba carried out a campaign of terror to annihilate all aspirations of religious freedom and self-government in the Netherlands. The special case he set up at Brussels (Belgium was not created as an independent nation until 1830) known as the Court of Blood, spread fear throughout the Low Countries, where Alba’s name is still remembered with loathing. Some 18,000 people were executed and their properties were confiscated in the name of the Spanish Crown. In his Apology, William of Orange, who led the Dutch revolt against the Spanish that resulted in the country’s independence in 1648, says of Felipe’s oppressor: ‘Did he not send here the monster Alba, who swore eternal hatred to this people, and boasted that he had put to death 18,000 persons innocent of everything but differing from him in religion, a man whose tyranny and cruelty surpass anything recorded in ancient or modern history?’ The Spanish monarch was ruler of the Kingdom of Aragón, parts of Italy and the Low Countries, but his authority in these dominions was partially restricted by local institutions. The Catholic League of France was a major player in the French Wars of Religion, a period of civil conflict between French Catholics and Protestants (known as Huguenots) between 1562 and 1598. It was formed by Duke Henri de Guise in 1576. The League intended to eradicate Protestantism in Catholic France during the Reformation. Petrie, Charles, Philip II of Spain (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964), p. 307.

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24 The Battle of Lepanto took place in October 1571, when a fleet of the Holy League, a coalition of Catholic maritime states, defeated the Ottoman Empire in a five-hour sea engagement off western Greece. 25 The French diplomat Antoine de Brunel, who spent several years in Madrid, commented that so great is the Madrileños’ passion for the stage that it is almost impossible to find a seat in the city’s two official theatres. ‘The most distinguished members of society buy their tickets in advance… even in Paris, where plays are not put on every day, the turnout is not so overwhelming.’ Brunel, Antoine de, ‘Voyage d’Espagne’, Revue Hispanique, xxx (1914), p. 120. 26 The street’s original name was Cantarranas which translates intriguingly as ‘Croaking Frogs’. Madrid was a much more pastoral place in those days. 27 Elliott: Imperial Spain, p. 63. 28 Gómez Fernández: Madrid, una ciudad para un imperio, pp. 29–30. 29 Rojas Villandrando, Agustín de, El viaje entretenido (Barcelona: Sebastián de Cormellas, 1624), p. 134. 30 Old traditions die hard in Madrid. At Christmas 2011, some 500 years after the ‘floating prophet’ was arrested in the Puerta del Sol, a bearded and robed man performed a similar trick. Instead of being frogmarched off for heresy by halberdiers in armoured breastplates, this holy man seemed to be taking a decent day’s earnings from the crowd of bemused onlookers. 31 Pérez Bustamante, Ciriaco, Felipe III: semblanza de un monarca y perfiles de una privanza (Pamplona: Urgoiti Editores, 2009), p. 73. 32 Gómez Fernández: Madrid, una ciudad para un imperio, p. 32. Chapter Four 1

The Thirty Years War, which began in 1618, was waged primarily in what is now Germany, and at various points involved most countries in Europe. It was initially a religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics in the Holy Roman Empire, although disputes over the internal politics and balance of power within the empire played a significant part. Spain was interested in the Netherlands in the western part of the empire and the states it controlled within Italy, which were connected by land along the so-called the Spanish Road. 2 Elliott: Imperial Spain, p. 323.

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3

In his 22 years as prime minister (1621–43), Olivares distinguished himself as the architect of an overstretched foreign policy, a failed domestic reform, Spain’s involvement in the Thirty Years War and a brutal attempt to centralise power and increase wartime taxation. It was largely the last of these measures that sparked the revolts in Cataluña and Portugal and brought about the count-duke’s downfall. 4 Herradón, Óscar, ‘Un recorrido por las anéctodas de la monarquía hispana’, Historia de Iberia Vieja, 78 (2011), p. 59. 5 Montoliú: Madrid, villa y corte, p. 111. 6 Montoliú: Madrid, villa y corte, p. 107. 7 Elliott: Imperial Spain, p. 357. 8 Quoted in Elliott: Imperial Spain, p. 366. 9 In 1519, at the court of Moctezuma II, the Aztec ruler of Mexico, Cortés was served xocoatl, a bitter cocoa-bean drink. The beverage remained a Spanish secret for almost 100 years before its introduction to the rest of Europe. It is today served in Madrid cafés as a dark, thickly textured drink in which, theoretically at least, one should be able to stand a spoon upright. Chocolate became a fashionable drink at the court of Louis XIII and by the time it reached England in around 1700, it was served as a lighter brew diluted with milk. 10 Quoted in Gómez Fernández: Madrid, una ciudad para un imperio, p. 210. 11 Saínz de Robles: Madrid, crónica y guía, p. 175. 12 Carlos II was the butt of popular jingles ridiculing him and his futile marital unions. One of the pieces of doggerel making the rounds in Madrid during this period went like this: ‘Madrid has three virgins: Our Lady of the Almudena, Our Lady of Atocha and Our Lady the Queen.’ 13 Gómez Fernández: Madrid, una ciudad para un imperio, p. 243. Chapter Five 1 2 3

Kamen, Henry, Spain’s Road to Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2002), p. 439. Stanhope, James, quoted in Thomas: Madrid, p. 49. Mahon, Lord [Philip Henry Stanhope], History of the War of the Succession in Spain (London: John Murray, 1832), p. 315.

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4 Mahon: History of the War of the Succession in Spain, pp. 316–17. 5 Historian Henry Kamen argues persuasively that at Almansa ‘the marshal Duke of Berwick saved the Bourbon succession. Years later, Frederick the Great of Prussia described it as the most impressive battle of the century.’ Kamen: Spain’s Road to Empire, p. 445. 6 Elliott: Imperial Spain, p. 377. 7 The origin of this name is an unresolved question, although for most Madrileños it is taken for granted that the name refers to Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares. 8 Recorded descriptions of the painting say that it showed Felipe III pointing with his baton to a crowd of men and women being led away by soldiers, while the female personification of Spain sits in calm repose. Velázquez was appointed gentleman usher as reward. 9 The current Spanish king, Juan Carlos I, in fact lives in much more modest accommodation in the Palacio de la Zarzuela on the city’s outskirts and only uses the palace for state ceremonies. 10 Corral, José del, El Madrid de los Austrias (Madrid: Ediciones la Librería, 2005), p. 16. 11 The academy, located a short distance from the Puerta del Sol, houses a museum, reopened in 1986, which contains more than 1,400 paintings, 600 sculptures and 15,000 drawings, as well as an outstanding collection of the decorative arts. The permanent collection includes masterpieces of Spanish, Italian and Flemish art. 12 Martínez Ruíz, Enrique, ‘La sociedad madrileña en el siglo XVII’, in Fernández García, Antonio, ed., Historia de Madrid (Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 1993), p. 359. 13 Juan de Villanueva also restored the Plaza Mayor to its former glory after it was devastated by fire in 1790. 14 Montoliú: Madrid, villa y corte, p. 147. Chapter Six 1 2 3

Martínez Canales, Francisco, Madrid 1808–1813 (Madrid: Almena Ediciones, 2008), p. 65. Quoted in Zaragoza, Inmaculada, ed., España 1808–1814 (Madrid: Hemeroteca Municipal de Madrid, 2008), p. 39. José I was his official Spanish title. Unofficially he was known as ‘Pepe Botella’, Pepe being the diminutive of José and botella the Spanish word

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for ‘bottle’. The nickname alludes to his widely rumoured though not proven weakness for drink. 4 Quoted in Hindley, Meredith, ‘The Spanish ulcer: Napoleon, Britain and the siege of Cádiz’, Humanities, xxxi/1 (January–February 2010), p. 3. 5 Martínez Canales: Madrid 1808–1813, p. 75. 6 Not many Spaniards journeyed to Britain in those days, and even fewer travelled merely out of intellectual curiosity. An exception was the celebrated Madrid playwright Leandro Fernández de Moratín, who was an admirer of José I and in 1812 joined the French government’s retreat from Madrid to Valencia. Moratín left a detailed account of his journey to London in 1792, the first cultivated Madrileño to record his experiences in that city. He noted that ‘The English are always in a hurry, aware that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.’ He also informs us that ‘The Prince of Wales [the future George IV] is drunk every night: drunkenness is not a social disgrace in England, and there is nothing more common than to encounter distinguished persons drunk on wine in their homes, bars or at public entertainment venues.’ Moratín also discovered a house in the Strand where for two shillings one could observe a collection of wild beasts, including tigers, panthers, a rhinoceros and a two-headed cow. The animal that most intrigued him of this menagerie was a kangaroo. The visit must have been a tremendous eye-opener for the 32-year-old Spaniard: he even became an enthusiastic observer of Englishwomen’s feet, which he assures us ‘are of an enormous magnitude’. Fernández de Moratín, Leandro, Apuntaciones sueltas de Inglaterra (Madrid: Bruguera, 1984), pp. 46–54. 7 Hindley: ‘The Spanish ulcer’, p. 5. 8 Though more than 70 per cent of Spaniards still identify themselves as Catholics, the 1978 constitution drawn up after General Franco’s death disestablished Roman Catholicism as the country’s official religion. 9 Lucena Giraldo, Manuel, ‘Españoles de ultramar’, La aventura de la historia, 159 (2012), p. 69. 10 Snow, Peter, To War with Wellington (London: John Murray, 2011), p. 169. 11 Oman, Charles, A History of the Peninsular War, Vol. 5 (London: Greenhill Books, 1999), p. 506. 12 His nickname has given the Spanish language the verb empecinarse, meaning to persist in achieving one’s goals.

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13 Martínez Canales: Madrid 1808–1813, pp. 95–96. 14 Quoted in Thomas: Madrid, p. 53. 15 One of the issues that touched off the uprising was the restoration of the Jesuits, who had become identified with repression and absolutism. Twenty-five Jesuit priests were slain in Madrid in 1822, a prelude to far more terrible attacks on the Church that took place in Madrid at the outbreak of the Civil War of 1936. For the rest of the nineteenth century, the expulsion and re-establishment of the Jesuits would continue to be hallmarks of liberal or authoritarian political regimes respectively. 16 Madrid in the nineteenth century was still a walled city with five gates, which shut at ten p.m. in winter and an hour later in summer. 17 Montoliú: Madrid, villa y corte, p. 169. Chapter Seven Borrow, George, The Bible in Spain (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1842), p. 126. 2 Borrow: The Bible in Spain, p. 128. 3 Borrow: The Bible in Spain, p. 133. 4 Borrow: The Bible in Spain, p. 134. This reflection held true into the 1980s, when Spain’s entry into the then European Economic Community began to bring a wave of foreigners, mainly for business, though now the city can boast of receiving more tourists even than Barcelona, long the favoured destination for visitors from abroad. 5 Borrow: The Bible in Spain, p. 134. 6 Borrow: The Bible in Spain, p. 134. 7 Revilla and Ramos: Historia breve de Madrid, p. 169. 8 This was neither the first nor the last cholera epidemic the city suffered during Isabel II’s reign. There were four major outbreaks in the city between 1834 and 1865, causing more than 10,000 deaths in the first two alone. 9 The name Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Complutense University of Madrid) comes from Complutum, the Latin name for Alcalá de Henares. 10 Parsons, Deborah, A Cultural History of Madrid (Oxford: Berg, 2003), p. 21. 11 Suffice it to say that in the years Isabel II sat on the throne, Spain went through 25 changes of government, a military coup that put General 1

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Espartero briefly in power, a series of pitched battles in the streets of Madrid and attacks on the homes of ministers and the nobility by mobs of radicals. 12 Borras, Tomás, Villa de Madrid, Vol. 12, 1962, p. 30. 13 Quoted in Martín, Javier, ‘Cafés con tertulia’, Historia de Iberia Vieja, 75 (2011), p. 46. 14 Martín: ‘Cafés con tertulia’, p. 46. 15 Pérez Galdós, Benito, La fontana de oro (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1951), p. 22. 16 Manuel Fernández y González was the first Spanish novelist to publish his work in weekly magazine instalments. His books were mostly historical novels of questionable authenticity. His vanity made him unpopular with his contemporaries, who, it could be said, were more envious of his success than concerned with historical accuracy. In his later years he dictated his books to his secretaries, one of whom, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, became Spain’s best-known novelist to foreign audiences. 17 Castizo translates as ‘pure’ or ‘genuine’, and is also used to mean ‘characteristic of a place’. 18 A commuter train had been put into service three years earlier covering the 20-mile journey between Barcelona and Mataró, but taking into account its commercial importance, the Madrid–Aranjuez line is given as the start of Spanish railway history. 19 Ford: Gatherings from Spain, p. 58. 20 Revilla and Ramos: Historia breve de Madrid, p. 181. 21 Juliá Díaz, Santos, ‘Pero el caso es que España necesita un Madrid’, Revista de Occidente, 128 (1992), p. 12. 22 Pérez Galdós, Benito (trans. Gullón, Agnes), Fortunata and Jacinta (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 28. 23 Montoliú: Madrid, villa y corte, p. 203. 24 Montoliú: Madrid, villa y corte, p. 172. 25 Carr, Raymond, ‘Liberalism and Reaction, 1833–1931’, in Carr, Raymond, ed., Spain: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 215. 26 Díaz-Plaja, Fernando, Madrid desde (casi) el cielo (Madrid: Maeva Ediciones, 1987), p. 81. 27 Quoted in Ferrer, José María, Visión romántica de Madrid (Madrid: Editorial Viajes Ilustrados, 1997), pp. 121–22. 28 ‘The rising in Spain’, The Times, 25 September 1868, p. 5. 29 Pérez Galdós: Fortunata and Jacinta, p. 35.

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30 Napoleon III vehemently opposed the idea on the grounds that it would result in the expansion of Prussian influence. Tensions grew between Paris and Berlin, eventually leading to the Franco-Prussian War. Chapter Eight 1

This military assault on the seat of government was to be replicated more than a century later in the failed coup attempt of 1981, when Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero marched a squad of the Guardia Civil into the Congreso de los Diputados, only to be arrested the following morning and sentenced to 30 years in jail. 2 In 1880, the Serrano and Martínez de Campos families were joined by marriage, the title of Duque de la Torre passing to the latter. The high rank and historical importance of the two families are acknowledged geographically, in major arteries of Madrid that bear their names. 3 The lyrics were an adaptation of an earlier ballad telling of the lament of a Christian soldier of the Reconquista who returned from the war in Granada to find that his wife had died in his absence. 4 Saínz de Robles: Madrid, crónica y guía, p. 229. 5 Alfonso had two sons, Alfonso and Fernando, by Elena Sanz. He later sent his illegitimate family into exile in Paris, where they were lodged in a magnificent mansion paid for by the king. See ABC, 12 April 2008. 6 Gómez Montejano, Antonio, Las doce en punto y sereno (Madrid: Ediciones la Librería, 1997), p. 103. 7 Coloma, Luis, Ratón Pérez (Madrid: Asociación Española de Amigos del Libro Infantil y Juvenil, 2011), p. 37. 8 Coloma: Ratón Pérez, p. 42. 9 The tale of Ratón Pérez may have inspired Alfonso XIII to show kindness to his subjects, but imbuing in him a sense of moral rectitude was another matter. In addition to the king’s seven legitimate children, he fathered four others: two by a Spanish actress and a further two by a French aristocrat and an Irish nanny respectively. 10 Madrid trams were called tranvías, an amalgamation of ‘tram’ and ‘vía’, as in Spanish ‘tran’ is a more natural pronunciation than ‘tram’. They are now being reintroduced in some suburban areas. 11 Spain retained its African colonies of Equatorial Guinea and the Spanish Sahara until 1968 and 1975 respectively. Unlike the costly and

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humiliating war fought with the United States over Cuba, these two possessions went without a drop of Spanish blood being shed. 12 Montoliú: Madrid, villa y corte, p. 237. 13 Baroja, Pío, La busca (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2011), p. 75. 14 This is not entirely accurate, for while the Madrid €1.50 fare is unmatched anywhere in Western Europe or the US, Moscow’s underground is still cheaper to ride, a one-way ticket costing 28 roubles, or less than 60 euro cents. A ticket on the Delhi Metro can cost as little as eight rupees, or 12 euro cents. 15 This term was coined by the writer José Martínez Ruiz and refers to the year of the disastrous Spanish–American War. 16 Acton, Harold, Memoirs of an Aesthete (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1986), pp. 143–44. Isaac Albéniz (1860–1909) and Enrique Granados (1867–1916) were both pianists and romantic composers. 17 Brown, Gerald Griffiths, A Literary History of Spain: Twentieth Century (London: Ernest Benn Ltd, 1972), p. 119. 18 It is said that the first football games in British history were played in the eighth century by English soldiers, starting after a legendary match that involved kicking around the severed head of a Danish prince who had been defeated in battle. The game was banned in 1331 by Edward III, who was appalled by the sport’s violent nature. Football was legalised in the early seventeenth century and the first set of rules for the game was established at Eton in 1815. 19 Thomas, Hugh, The Spanish Civil War (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode Ltd, 1961), pp. 15–16. 20 Primo de Rivera endeared himself to many Spaniards as the complete opposite in character to the country’s bumbling, stuffy politicians. ‘He would work enormously hard for weeks on end and then disappear for a juerga [binge] of dancing, drinking and love-making with Gypsies. He would be observed almost alone in the streets of Madrid, swathed in an opera cloak, making his way from one café to another, and on returning home would issue a garrulous and sometimes even intoxicated communiqué – which he would often have to cancel in the morning.’ Thomas: The Spanish Civil War, p. 17. 21 Williams, Mark, The Story of Spain (Málaga: Ediciones Santana, 1990), p. 175. 22 Hidalgo de Cisneros, Ignacio, Cambio de rumbo (Vitoria: Ikusager Ediciones, 2001), p. 271.

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23 Caudillo is a Spanish word for ‘leader’ and derives from the Latin . The term originally referred to military power and was bestowed on chieftains like Don Pelayo, the eighth-century Visigoth king from Asturias who led the Reconquista against the Moors. After the Spanish Civil War, Franco was given the title ‘Caudillo de España por la Gracia de Dios’ (‘Leader of Spain by the Grace of God’). 24 ‘Easier day in Spain’, The Times, 19 February 1936. 25 Thomas: The Spanish Civil War, p. 118. Chapter Nine 1

2 3

4

5 6

Melilla and Ceuta have been Spanish enclaves on the Moroccan coast for more than five centuries. They are the only two European Union territories located in mainland Africa. The government of Morocco has repeatedly requested the return of sovereignty over these two small territories, but Madrid’s position is that both Ceuta and Melilla are integral parts of the Spanish state, and were so before Morocco’s independence from France in 1956. ‘Civil war in Spain’, The Times, 20 July 1936. The Spanish prime minister is, somewhat confusingly, referred to as ‘Presidente del Gobierno de España’. During the Second Republic, when Spain had a president as head of state as well as a prime minister, there were therefore two ‘presidents’: the Presidente de la Segunda República Española (i.e. head of state) and the Presidente del Gobierno de España (i.e. prime minister). General Emilio Mola was credited with having coined the phrase ‘quinta columna’. In a radio broadcast, he described the Nationalist sympathisers in Madrid as a ‘fifth column’ that supplemented the four military columns of his northern command. Hidalgo de Cisneros: Cambio de rumbo, p. 428. A deep anti-American streak runs through certain segments of Spanish society, right and left. The left in particular is resentful of the USA’s role in the Civil War, accusing the country of having supplied the Nationalists with military equipment. This is false; in fact, both houses of Congress passed a resolution banning the export of arms to Spain. However, US big business was openly hostile towards the Republic, particularly after Azaña’s government nationalised ITT Corp. US motor manufacturers Ford, Studebaker and General Motors delivered 12,000 lorries to the

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Nationalists, which Spanish sources consider were crucial to their armies. Texas Company and others provided the rebels with petroleum. Franco received 3.5 million tons of oil on credit during the course of the war. ‘American and British business interests were to make a great contribution to the final Nationalist victory, either through active assistance… or through boycotting the Republic, disrupting its trade with legal action and delaying credits in the banking system.’ Beevor, Antony, The Spanish Civil War (London: Cassell, 2003), p. 166. 7 Franco used his North African regulars as shock troops in every sense of the word, aware of their reputation for savage treatment of prisoners and civilians alike. The shortage of Moroccan regulars was revealed when 50 captured soldiers in African uniform turned out to be Spaniards, who had been disguised as Moors to spread terror among the Republican militias. 8 Preston, Paul, We Saw Spain Die (London: Constable, 2009), p. 25. 9 ‘Franco, having remarked… that he would destroy Madrid rather than leave it to the “Marxists”, greatly intensified the aerial bombardment. The German officers of the new Condor Legion were interested to see the reaction of a civilian population to a carefully planned attempt to set fire to the city, quarter by quarter.’ Thomas: The Spanish Civil War, p. 329. 10 Quoted in Chaves Nogales, Manuel, La defensa de Madrid (Sevilla: Ediciones Espuela la Plata, 2011), p. 33. 11 Líster, Enrique, ‘La defensa de Madrid’, Tiempo de historia, 37 (December 1977), p. 14. The phrase ¡No pasarán! was made famous by the firebrand communist leader Dolores Ibárruri, known as ‘La Pasionaria’, in a speech to the Cortes the day after the military rising. It was actually plagiarised from a battle cry attributed to Marshal Philippe Pétain (Ils ne passeront pas!) in the First World War, but was first uttered by Robert Nivelle, who succeeded Pétain in command of the French Second Army at Verdun in May 1916. 12 Líster: ‘La defensa de Madrid’, pp. 12–13. 13 Líster: ‘La defensa de Madrid’, p. 14. 14 Thomas: The Spanish Civil War, p. 344. 15 Thomas: The Spanish Civil War, p. 344. 16 ‘Fighting in Spain’, The Times, 28 August 1936. 17 Chaves Nogales: La defensa de Madrid, p. 60. 18 Chaves Nogales: La defensa de Madrid, p. 40.

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19 ‘Requetés’ was the name given to Carlist volunteers during the First Carlist War. It was adopted by troops from Navarra who joined the Nationalist forces during the 1936–39 Civil War. It is thought to derive from a play on words to describe the pitiful state of Navarra’s volunteers after a skirmish with Isabel II’s troops in 1833. The fighting took place in a thicket of brushwood and brambles, from which the Carlists emerged with their uniforms in tatters, or raquítico in Spanish, which through common usage became requeté. 20 Cox, Geoffrey, Defence of Madrid (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1937), p. 220. 21 Shinwell, Emanuel, Conflict without Malice (London: Odhams Press Ltd, 1955), p. 69. 22 Under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI persecuted Flynn for supporting a communist-led cause. The Bureau put out a report claiming that Flynn, who arrived in Madrid saying he was bringing a large sum of money and the goodwill of Hollywood to the loyalists, had later turned up in Valencia without a scratch on him. 23 Preston: We Saw Spain Die, p. 57. 24 In conversation with the author, a few years before Chicote’s death in 1977. 25 In spite of fighting for the Nationalist cause, however, Kemp was no admirer of fascism, nor of Franco. During the Second World War he served in the British Army in the espionage unit that was to become the Special Operations Executive (SOE), organising resistance against the Nazis. 26 Kemp, Peter, The Thorns of Memory (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990), p. 48. 27 Within days of the outbreak of hostilities, the Prado’s treasures were stored in the basement of the museum and protected against potential bomb damage with sacks of sand. As recommended by the League of Nations, hundreds of paintings were loaded on lorries and sent for safe keeping, first to Valencia and finally to Geneva. Spaniards, foreigners, soldiers and civilians took part in the mammoth and treacherous task of risking Franco’s bombing runs to safeguard the country’s artistic heritage. In addition, 18,000 works of art in private hands – paintings by Goya, El Greco and Tintoretto among them – were stored in bomb shelters. With the advent of the Second World War, the Prado’s paintings were loaded onto night trains and smuggled back into Spain to avoid seizure by the Nazis.

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28 Quoted in Lopezarias, Germán, El Madrid del ¡No pasarán! (Madrid: Ediciones la Librería, 2007), p. 131. 29 George MacDonald Fraser in a talk given in 2007 at the National Army Museum, London. 30 As told to the author by the mother in question. Chapter Ten 1

Peter Kemp told the author that the worst moment of the war for him was the day an Irishman wandered into the Nationalist lines, claiming to have escaped from the Republican militia that had press-ganged him into service when he arrived in Spain intending to fight for the insurgents. Kemp’s commanding officer ignored the story and gave orders for the man to be shot. Kemp had to break the news to the victim, who had fully expected to be welcomed in the Nationalist ranks. Kemp told the Irishman to walk away, and at that moment he had his two Moroccan orderlies shoot him. 2 ‘News in brief ’, The Times, 1 April 1939. 3 Montoliú: Madrid, villa y corte, p. 263. 4 I myself was denounced by one of these concierge spies in 1962, whilst sharing a flat with a woman whose other boyfriend was a Guardia Civil captain who happened to be lying in traction in hospital in Málaga after a motorbike accident. When word was relayed by the concierge that a foreigner was living in his place and enjoying his girlfriend’s favours, I took a cab to the Air France office and purchased a ticket on the next flight to Paris. 5 Diario 16, 10 April 1988. 6 Spaniards can now watch films on television in their original language, but this requires using a button on the remote that deletes the dubbed version, a function too few Spaniards are willing to activate. 7 Bahamonde Magro, Ángel, ‘La evolución política: de la dictadura a la democracia’, in Fernández García, Antonio, ed., Historia de Madrid (Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 1993), p. 628. 8 Grandes, Almudena, ‘España es diferente’, El País, 28 March 2011. 9 Fernández García, ed.: Historia de Madrid, p. 685. 10 By 2004, 45 per cent of Spain’s leading companies had their head office in Madrid, compared with 25 per cent in Barcelona, a city of similar size.

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Ball, Phil, White Storm: 100 Years of Real Madrid (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2002), p. 120. 12 Burns, Jimmy, When Beckham Went to Spain (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 221. As for emigration, the other key export, during the boom years 1961 to 1973 more than a million Spaniards left to work abroad, mainly in France, the former West Germany and Switzerland, with a scattering of a few tens of thousands in Belgium and Britain. Workers’ remittances in those years became a major source of foreign exchange for Spain. 13 ETA selected their first high-profile victim with much thought to the public reaction. Melitón Manzanas was a notorious torturer who collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War, helping the Gestapo to arrest Jews attempting to escape into Spain from occupied France. He was appointed commandant of Franco’s political police division in San Sebastián in 1941 and became a vehement opponent of Basque nationalism. There was a strong element of controversy in former prime minister’s José María Aznar’s decision in 1998 to posthumously award Manzanas the Real Orden de Reconocimiento Civil a las Víctimas del Terrorismo (Royal Order of Civil Recognition of Victims of Terrorism). 11

Chapter Eleven 1 2 3

4

Franco’s three customised Phantom IVs (two limousines and a cabriolet) are still in ceremonial service with King Juan Carlos. El País, 27 September 1985. Bizarrely, when the PCE was legalised in 1977, its first headquarters were also in the fashionable Salamanca quarter, a few minutes’ walk from Fuerza Nueva, whose members considered this posh neighbourhood its sacred turf. Militants of both parties gave one another a wide berth and I do not recall any clashes between them in the years I lived in the neighbourhood. ‘Improvisation’ was the byword of Adolfo Suárez’s government. One night in early January 1977, I was having dinner with the deputy prime minister General Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado. ‘Guti’, as he was popularly known, was a man of honour, a general who had served Franco and later became convinced of Spain’s need to achieve democracy if the country was to be treated as an equal in Europe. But he drew the line with the communists. ‘The PCE will not be legalised by this government and

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certainly not under Santiago Carrillo,’ he flatly stated. Four months later that same government declared the PCE a legal political party, with Carrillo as chairman of the Central Committee. 5 Parsons: A Cultural History of Madrid, p. 106. 6 El País, 27 November 2006. 7 Almodóvar, Pedro, The Patty Diphusa Stories and Other Writings (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 132. 8 Three of the deputies in the Cortes that evening remained defiantly in their seats: Adolfo Suárez, Lieutenant General Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado and the PCE leader Santiago Carrillo – a marked man in the eyes of the right, and one who knew he had nothing to lose. Epilogue 1 A venencia is a device consisting of a small vessel at the end of a long rod, which is used for drawing sherry wines from the cask and then serving them. It requires some skill for the venenciador to pour the wine from above his head and not spill a drop.

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1 . Boo k s

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Bahamonde Magro, Ángel, ‘La evolución política: de la dictadura a la democracia’, in Fernández García, Antonio, ed., Historia de Madrid (Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 1993), pp. 623–45 Brunel, Antoine de, ‘Voyage d’Espagne’, Revue Hispanique, xxx (1914), pp. 119–376 Herradón, Óscar, ‘Un recorrido por las anéctodas de la monarquía hispana’, Historia de Iberia Vieja, 78 (2011), pp. 54–62 Hindley, Meredith, ‘The Spanish ulcer: Napoleon, Britain and the siege of Cádiz’, Humanities, xxxi/1 (January–February 2010), pp. 1–6 Juliá Díaz, Santos, ‘Pero el caso es que España necesita un Madrid’, Revista de Occidente, 128 (1992), pp. 7–20 Líster, Enrique, ‘La defensa de Madrid’, Tiempo de historia, 37 (December 1977), pp. 12–23 Lucena Giraldo, Manuel, ‘Españoles de ultramar’, La aventura de la historia, 159 (2012), pp. 65–69 Martín, Javier, ‘Cafés con tertulia’, Historia de Iberia Vieja, 75 (2011), pp. 46–53 Martínez Ruíz, Enrique, ‘La sociedad madrileña en el siglo XVII’, in Fernández García, Antonio, ed., Historia de Madrid (Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 1993), pp. 479–513 Miguel Rodríguez, Juan Carlos de, ‘Los mudéjares y los moriscos de Madrid’, in Gil Flores, Daniel, ed., De Maŷrīt a Madrid (Madrid: Lunwerg Editores, 2011)

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255

In d e x

Academia del Buen Gusto (Academy of Good Taste) 119 Academia Mantuana 119 Acción Popular (Popular Action) 152 Acción Republicana (Republican Action) 151 Acton, Harold 145–46 Al-Ándalus, emirate of 1, 2, 7, 8, 9, 10, 225 al-Nasir, Caliph 9, 10 Alberoni, Cardinal Giulio 83–84 Alberti, Rafael 222 Alcalá de Henares 50, 117 Alcalá-Zamora, Niceto 150 Alcázar of Madrid, the 3, 14, 16, 17, 20, 31, 33, 40, 45, 51, 56, 59, 61, 67, 68, 72, 75, 77, 79, 81, 213 Alexander VI, Pope 40 Alfonso I, King of Navarra and Aragón 8 Alfonso V of Portugal 20 Alfonso VI, King of León and Castilla 4, 7, 8, 225 Alfonso VII, King of León and Castilla 11 Alfonso VIII, King of Castilla and Toledo 11, 12, 34 Alfonso X, King of León and Castilla 34 Alfonso XI, King of León and Castilla 14, 15, 16 Alfonso XII 122, 130, 131, 134–35, 136–38, 145 Alfonso XIII 138, 140, 142–43, 144, 146, 147–48, 149, 150, 170, 171, 183 Almansa, Battle of (1707) 79

Almodóvar, Pedro 210–11 Almohad empire 7, 9, 10, 11, 19, 225 Almoravid empire 7, 8, 9, 19, 225 Almudena cathedral 66, 135, 136, 215, 219 Álvarez de Argüelles, Antonio 73 Amadeo I 131, 132, 133, 134 Andalucía 1, 8, 9, 10, 100, 123, 129, 134, 148, 157 Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604) 55 Anna of Austria 45, 46, 47 Aragón 8, 10, 19, 26, 41, 49, 52, 77, 80, 113, 120, 159, 178 Archivo General Militar de Madrid (Madrid Military Archives) 97 Argüelles district 125, 140, 171 Arias Navarro, Carlos 200, 206 Armada, General Alfonso 212 Armada, the 41, 47, 49, 50 Asís de Borbón, Francisco de 121, 130 Asturias 2, 5, 21, 32, 43, 80, 99, 120, 136, 152, 153, 182, 185 Atlético Madrid 142 Atocha massacre (1977) 207–208 Atocha railway station xix, 122, 123, 151, 209 Avenida de Alfonso XIII 183 Ayuntamiento de Madrid 14, 15, 16, 106, 116, 126, 141, 143, 151, 185, 214, 215, 218 Azaña, Manuel 155, 158, 159, 178 Aznar, José María xix Bailén, Battle of (1808) 100, 193 Baltasar Carlos, Prince of Asturias 67

257

m a d r i d : t h e h i s to ry

Barajas airport 162, 188, 198 Barbaça, Juçaf 28 Barcelona 31, 50, 57, 79, 123, 124, 147, 159, 177, 178, 193, 194, 203 Baroja, Pío 141, 144, 146 Basque Country 46, 113, 114, 120, 136, 144, 150, 163, 198, 199, 200, 226 separatism xix, 193, 197, 201 Bayonne, France 93, 94, 111 Benedict XIV, Pope 69 Berber people 1, 8, 9, 10, 147, 225 Bernabéu, Santiago 196 Bible Society, the 134, 135 Biblioteca Nacional de España (National Library of Spain) 82 Biblioteca Pública de Palacio (Palace Public Library) 82 Bilbao 123, 124, 159, 178, 193 Bodega de Ángel Sierra, Plaza de Chueca 220 Bonaparte, Joseph (José I) 99, 103, 104, 116, 117 Bonaparte, Louis 93 Bonaparte, Napoleon xx, 46, 47, 50, 88, 89, 91–94, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101–105, 107, 108, 128, 169, 193, 197 Borghese, Camillo 22 Borrow, George 114–15 Bosque, Vicente del 186 Bourbon dynasty, the 75–78, 79, 80, 82, 84, 85, 87, 89, 92, 128, 134 Restauración Borbónica (Bourbon Restoration) 137 Bravo Murillo, Juan 116, 120 Brenan, Gerald 47 Brigadas Internacionales (International Brigades) 170–71, 172, 174, 176 Brihuega, Battle of (1710) 79 Buchholz bookshop 188 Buen Retiro palace 65, 66, 71, 81 Retiro park 65, 94, 100, 101, 111, 126, 131, 142, 167, 200, 221 Buñuel, Luis xvi, 145 Burgos 92, 107, 159, 181, 188, 203

Café del Ángel 120 Café del Círculo de Bellas Artes xviii Café Comercial 120 Café Gijón 120, 217, 222 Café de Levante 118, 120–21 Café del Nuncio 218 Café Pouss 220 Café del Príncipe 120 Café San Luis 120 Cafetería Rolando 201 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 51, 60 Calderón, María 63 Calle de Alcalá xvii, 102, 143, 218, 221 Calle Arenal 218 Calle Atocha 207 Calle Augusto Figueroa 222 Calle de la Fe 28 Calle Mayor 14, 21, 136, 139, 142, 218, 219, 222 Calle de la Morería 6 Calle de Segovia 11, 15, 28, 215 Calle Serrano xv, 199 Calvo Sotelo, José 154 Camacho, Marcelino 197, 206 Campo del Moro 8 Canal de Isabel II 116 Candelas, Luis 121 Cánovas del Castillo, Antonio 145 Carabanchel prison 206 Carlism 114, 115, 118, 122, 131, 157 Carlist wars, the 110, 113–15, 118, 125, 133–34, 136 Carlos I xv, 26, 30–34, 37, 38, 39, 56, 67, 76, 131, 181 Carlos II 67–68, 70–74, 75, 100 Carlos III 82, 84, 85–88, 96 Carlos IV 91, 92, 94, 95, 108, 110, 185 Carlos, Don (Carlos V) 109, 110, 113, 114 Carlos, Don (son of Felipe II) 43–44, 45, 47, 48, 51 Carrera de San Jerónimo 61, 117 Carrero Blanco, Luis 195, 199, 200 Carrillo, Santiago 168 Casa de Campo 151, 169, 170, 171 Casa de Velázquez 172–73 Casado, Colonel Segismundo 178, 179 Casares Quiroga, Santiago 158

Cabrera, Colonel Ramón 114 Cádiz, constitution of 106, 108

258

index

Castaños, General Francisco Javier 100, 101 Castelar, Emilio 127, 133, 134 Castilla 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19–20, 21, 26, 31, 32, 33, 34, 52, 65, 68, 76, 104, 144, 159, 225 Castillo, José 153–54 Castro Ruíz, Dolores (‘La Cordobesita’) 145 Castro, Américo 145 Cataluña 19, 59, 63, 68, 77, 79, 80, 113, 148 Catholic League, the 49 Cerro de los Ángeles 168 Cervantes, Miguel de 15, 23, 39, 50, 51, 124, 144 Cervecería Alemana 221 Chamartín railway station 101, 151 Charles I, King of England 60–63 Charles of Austria, Archduke 77, 79, 99 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (see Carlos I) Charles VI of France 17 Chueca, Fernando 135 Churriguera, José Benito de 80 Cisneros, Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de 30 Ciudad Universitaria (University City) 149, 177 battle of (1936) 170–71, 172, 173, 149 Civil War (1936–39) xvi, xvii, xx, 57, 135, 149, 150, 151, 157–179, 182, 183, 188, 191, 192, 195, 196, 202, 204, 207, 208, 212 Clavijo, Ruy González de 17, 18 Colegiata de San Isidro 66 Comisiones Obreras (Workers’ Commissions, CC.OO.) 194, 197, 199, 206, 207 Comuneros rebellion (1520–21) 31–32 Concejo, the 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 40, 45, 46, 51, 55, 57, 71, 81, 84 Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (National Workers’ Confederation, CNT) 147, 148, 163, 168

Consejo de Defensa Nacional (National Defence Council) 178–79 Consejo de Estado (Council of State) 43, 44, 62, 75, 195 Consejo de Ministros (Council of Ministers) 113 Consejo de Regencia (Council of Regency) 130–31 Córdoba 1–2, 7, 9, 10, 13, 51, 129, 227 Cortés, Hernán 69 Cortes, the 16, 20, 31, 32, 46, 80, 104, 105, 110, 117, 125, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 137, 143, 147, 148, 151, 154, 185, 200, 207, 211, 212 Cosimo de’ Medici 69 Cruzada Nacional (National Crusade) 158, 181 Cuartel de la Montaña barracks 160–61 Cuartel del Conde-Duque (the CountDuke’s Barracks) 81 Cueva, Beltrán de la 20 Curiel, Mair de 28 Dalí, Salvador 145, 175 Daoíz, Captain Luis 96, 97 Dato, Eduardo 143 Decreto de la Alhambra (Alhambra Decree) 29 Desamortización Eclesiástica (Ecclesiastical Confiscation) 34, 115–17, 124 Descalzas Reales, Las, convent of 34, 57, 65 Digby, Earl of Bristol, John 60–61 Domínguez, Adolfo 210 Dominican Order, the 13, 26, 34, 70, 72 Dos de Mayo uprising (1808) 47, 88, 95–99, 102, 104, 118, 215 Duero River 9 Dumas, General Matthieu 101 Dupont, General Pierre 93, 94, 100 Durruti, Buenaventura 173 Ebro River 100 Ebro, Battle of the (1938) 175 Echeverría Álvarez, Luis 203

259

m a d r i d : t h e h i s to ry

Eisenhower, Dwight 191–92 Ejército de África (Army of Africa) 162 Ejército del Centro (Army of the Centre) 164, 178 Ejército Popular de la República (Republican Popular Army) 163 El Escorial monastery 37–38, 41, 44, 46, 49, 71, 135, 150, 151 El Pardo district 11, 78, 204 El Pardo palace 181 Élisabeth of France (wife of Felipe IV) 67 Enrique III, King of Castilla 16, 17 Enrique IV, King of Castilla 20, 21, 29 Escobedo, Juan de 48–49 España, Banco de 84, 139, 143, 162 Espartero, Baldomero 113, 114, 125, 126, 129, 131 Espíritu Santo convent 117 Esquilache, Marquis of 88–89, 99, 128 Estatuto Real (Royal Statute) (1834) 113 ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, Basque Homeland and Liberty) xix, 197, 199, 201, 203, 211 Extremadura 37, 91, 102, 120, 169

First Republic, the (1873–74) 132, 133–34 First World War, the 147 FitzJames, first Duke of Berwick, James 78 Fonda de San Sebastián (tertulia) 119 Fontainebleau, Treaty of (1807) 91–92 Fontana de Oro (tertulia) 119–20 Ford, Richard 40, 122 Fraga Iribarne, Manuel 193 Franciscan Order, the 13, 14, 43, 86 Franco, Francisco xvii, xx, 146, 151, 152, 153, 154–55, 157, 159, 162, 167, 168, 169, 170, 172, 175, 177, 178, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 200, 201–202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 209, 210, 211, 221 François I, King of France 32 Frente Nacional (National Front) 153 Frente Popular (Popular Front) 152, 153, 154, 155 Frente Revolucionario Antifascista y Patriota (Revolutionary Antifascist Patriotic Front, FRAP) 203 Fuero of Toledo, the 12–13 Fuero Real (Royal Code) 15, 25 Fuerza Nueva (New Force) 207, 208

Falange, the 152, 184, 189 Fanjul, General Joaquín 160, 161 Farnese, Elisabetta 83 Felipe II xv, 32, 33, 34, 37–42, 43, 44–50, 52, 53, 80, 83, 192 Felipe III 6, 24, 30, 41, 47, 51–55, 56, 57, 59 Felipe IV 56, 59–61, 62, 63–68, 82 Felipe V 75–78, 79–80, 81–84, 86, 110 Felipe, Prince of Asturias 136, 186 Ferdinand III, Holy Roman Emperor 67 Fernández de Portocarrero, Luis Manuels 75–76 Fernández y González, Manuel 121 Fernando II, King of Aragón 6, 13, 18, 19, 20–21, 25–27, 29, 30, 34, 41 Fernando III, King of Castilla 10, 13 Fernando of Saxe-Coburg 131 Fernando VI 84, 87 Fernando VII 86, 87, 92, 93, 94, 100, 104–105, 106, 107, 108–10, 111–12, 113, 114, 119, 127, 129, 138

Galicia 8, 129, 144, 159 García Lorca, Federico 145 García Prieto, Manuel 147 Garde Impériale (Imperial Guard) 94, 96, 100 Generación del 98 (Generation of ’98) 144, 145, 149 George III, King of the United Kingdom 99, 103 Getafe aerodrome 160, 163 Gil, Vicente 204 Giral, José 159 Gloriosa, La (1868) 127–30 Godoy, Manuel de 91–94, 108 Gómez de Sandoval, Francisco (see Lerma, Duke of) Góngora, Luis de 51

260

index

González Bravo, Luis 125 Goya, Francisco xvi, 86, 87–88, 98, 106–107, 119, 120 Gran Vía 60, 98, 140, 146, 171, 172, 175, 177, 183, 187, 198, 218, 220, 221–22 Granada 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 13, 19, 29, 30, 34, 52, 123, 129, 227 Granada, Treaty of (1491) 29 Grandes, Almudena 193 Gregory XV, Pope 62 Grupos Armados Españoles (Spanish Armed Groups) 207 Guadalajara 5 Guardia Civil (Civil Guard), the xvi, 125, 127, 134, 154, 160, 161, 170, 184, 188, 197, 201, 203, 211, 212 Guardia de Asalto (Assault Guard) 153 Guardia Real (Royal Guard) 81, 129 Guernica 163 Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey (Guerrillas of Christ the King) 207 Guzmán, Gaspar de (see Olivares, Count-Duke of) Guzmán, Juan de 27

Institución Libre de Enseñanza 144–45, 146 Instituto Nacional de Industria (National Institute of Industry, INI) 194 Isabel de Valois (wife of Felipe II) 42, 44, 45 Isabel I of Castilla 6, 13, 18, 19–21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 34 Isabel II 110, 113, 116, 118, 121–22, 126, 127, 129, 130, 131, 134, 138, 140 Isabel of Portugal (wife of Carlos I) 33 James I, King of England 49 James II, King of England 63, 78 Jarama, Battle of (1937) 195, 196 Jerónimos monastery, Los 21, 45, 65, 142 John Paul II, Pope 135, 215 Juan Carlos I 142, 150, 200, 201, 202, 204, 208, 212 Juan de Austria, Don 48 Juan I, King of Castille 16, 17 Juan II, King of Aragón 19 Juan José of Austria, Don 63, 68 Juana la Beltraneja 19, 20 Juana of Castille (‘Juana la Loca’) 30–31, 67 Juana of Portugal, Princess 34 Judería quarter 28 Junta (Peninsular War) 94, 95, 96, 99, 101, 102, 104, 110 Junta de Defensa (Civil War) 164, 168, 171, 173, 175, 178, 181 Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas (Socialist Youth Organisation, JSU) 184

Habsburg dynasty, the 30, 37, 41, 48, 49, 54, 59, 62, 63, 67, 72, 75, 76, 77, 82, 136, 218 Hemingway, Ernest 174–75, 221 Henri IV, King of France 49 Hermandad del Pecado Mortal (Brotherhood of Mortal Sin) 83 Hidalgo de Cisneros, Ignacio 150, 160 Holy Roman Empire 30, 37, 45, 56, 62, 67, 71, 79 Huesca offensive (1937) 172 Hugo, General Louis Joseph 106 Hundred Thousand Sons of St Louis, the 109, 119

Kemp, Peter 176–77 Kilómetro Cero 32 Lagrange, General Joseph 97 Lapesa, Rafael 189 Largo Caballero, Francisco 163, 164, 165 Larra, Mariano José de 120 Las Navas de Tolosa, Battle of (1212) 10, 11 Latina district, La 6, 220 Lavapiés district 28, 70, 121, 124

Ibárruri, Dolores (‘La Pasionaria’) 168 Iberia Airlines 190, 194 Indignado movement xx, 215–16 Inquisition, the 13, 20, 26–27, 29, 30, 39, 40, 46, 48, 49, 56, 70, 72, 73, 83, 102, 105, 109, 182

261

m a d r i d : t h e h i s to ry

Legión Española 152, 186 Leo V, King of Armenia 17 Leo XIII, Pope 66 León 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 16, 19, 26, 56, 225 Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, Prince 131 Lepanto, Battle of (1571) 50 Lerma, Duke of 53–54, 55, 56, 57 Lerroux, Alejandro 152 Letizia, Princess of Asturias 136, 186 Letras, Barrio de las 56, 214 Leyenda Negra, La’ (‘the Black Legend’) 47–48, 49 Lisbon 39, 92, 104, 178 Líster, Enrique 164–65, 166 London, Treaty of (1604) 55 Lope de Vega, Félix 39, 50, 51, 60, 119, 125, 144 López de Haro, Diego 10 López de Hoyos, Juan 15 López Ochoa, General Eduardo 182 López Rodó, Laureano 192 Louis Joseph, Duke of Vendôme 79 Louis Philippe, King of France 121 Louis XIV, King of France 75, 77 Loyola, St Ignatius of 24 Luis Aranguren, José 189 Luisa Fernanda de Borbón 121, 134 Lukács, General Pavol 172

María Bárbara de Bragança (wife of Fernando VI) 84 María Cristina de Borbón-Dos Sicilias (wife of Fernando VII) 109, 110, 113, 121, 125 María Cristina de Habsburgo-Lorena (wife of Alfonso XII) 136, 137–38, 142 María Luisa de Parma (wife of Carlos IV) 91, 94, 108 María Luisa of Savoy (wife of Felipe V) 78, 83, 84 María de las Mercedes (wife of Alfonso XII) 134–36, 138 Maria of Portugal (wife of Felipe II) 38, 43 Marías, Julián 189 Marie Anne de la Trémoille, Princess des Ursins 84 Marie Louise d’Orléans (wife of Carlos II) 71 Martín Patino, Basilio 202 Martín, Juan 106 Martínez Barrio, Diego 158–59 Martínez de Campos, Arsenio 134, 137 Mary I, Queen of England 37 Mary, Queen of Scots 42 Massiel 197–98 Matadero arts centre 81 Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor 45, 56 Melchor de Jovellanos, Gaspar 119 Meléndez Valdés, Juan 119, 120 Mendizábal, Juan Álvarez 34, 114–15, 116–17, 118, 124 Mendoza, Baltasar de 73 mentideros 56, 61, 66, 67, 69, 113, 119, 226 Mercado, Rodrigo de 25 Mercado San Antón 222 Mercado de San Miguel 218, 220 Miaja, General José 164, 168, 169, 170, 172, 176, 178–79 Milans del Bosch, General Jaime 212 Mola, General Emilio 157, 158, 159, 161 Moncloa district 146, 149, 167, 173 Monteleón artillery park 96, 97, 98

Machado, Antonio 144 Madrid de los Austrias quarter 218 Madrid, Treaty of (1526) 32 Malasaña, Manuela 97–98, 197 Malraux, André 174 Manzanares River xv, 9, 21, 28, 80, 141, 165, 209 Manzanares, Manifesto de (1854) 126 Marañón, Gregorio 145 María de Ágreda 64 María Ana, Infanta 61, 62 Maria Anna of Austria (wife of Felipe IV) 67, 68 Maria Anna von Neuburg (wife of Carlos II) 71, 72, 73 Maria of Austria, Archduchess 56–57

262

index

Moors, the 1–2, 4, 5–10, 13, 14, 19, 26–28, 29–30, 82, 153, 226, 227 Morería district, La 6, 9 Moriscos, the 6, 30, 51, 52, 53, 54, 226 Morla, General Tomás de 102 Morocco 1, 8, 125, 147, 148, 152, 153, 158, 159, 162, 204 Morral, Mateo 142–43 Movida Madrileña, La 209, 210, 211, 212, 215, 220, 226 Movimiento Nacional (National Movement) 189, 195 Mozarabs, the 2, 4, 226 Mudalies, the 2, 227 Mudéjars, the 6, 7, 9, 13, 21, 140, 222, 227 Muhammad I 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 14 Muñoz, Agustín Fernando 113

Parque del Oeste 167 Partido Comunista de España (Spanish Communist Party, PCE) 150, 164, 165, 168, 179, 184, 194, 199, 208 Partido Liberal (Liberal Party) 143, 147 Partido Liberal–Conservador (Liberal– Conservative Party) 143 Partido Moderado (Moderate Party) 113, 126, 137 Partido Popular (People’s Party, PP) xix, xx Partido Progresista (Progressive Party) 113, 126, 131, 137 Partido Republicano Radical (Radical Republican Party) 151–52 Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, PSOE) xx, 123, 151, 152, 208 Paseo de la Castellana 123, 143, 151, 154, 165, 183, 196, 208, 213, 214, 217 Paseo de Recoletos 217, 218 Pavia, Battle of (1525) 32 Pavía, General Manuel 133–34, 211 Pedro V, King of Portugal 131 Pelayo, Don 2, 5, 225 Peninsular War (1808–14) 86, 87, 88, 91–108 Pérez Galdós, Benito 119–20, 124 Pérez, Antonio 44, 48–49 Philippe I, King of France 71 Picasso, Pablo 88, 177, 217 Piñar, Blas 207 Pinochet, Augusto 206 Pius IX, Pope 137 Plan Nacional de Estabilización Económica (National Economic Stabilisation Plan) (1959) 192, 194 Plaza Antón Martín 24, 89, 208 Plaza del Arrabal 24 Plaza de Cascorro 221 Plaza de Castilla 144 Plaza de la Cebada 109, 126 Plaza de Chueca 220 Plaza de Cibeles xvi, xvii, 162, 188, 217, 218, 222 fountain xv, 86, 94, 139

Narváez, Ramón 125, 127 Navarra 5, 8, 9, 10, 19, 159, 170, 176, 223, 226 Negrín, Juan 178, 179 Netherlands, the 30, 43, 45, 48, 49, 59, 77 Nuestra Señora de la Almudena, patron saint of Madrid 4, 47 Nuestra Señora de Atocha basilica 34, 73, 79, 134, 136, 171 Nuestra Señora del Buen Suceso, church of 171 Nueva Planta decrees 79 O’Donnell, General Leopoldo 126, 127, 129 Olivares, Count-Duke of 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 67 Ordoño I, King of Asturias 2 Orgaz, General Luis 175 Ortega y Gasset, José 145 Ortega, Colonel Antonio 196 Orwell, George 174 Palacio de Liria 86, 171 Palacio Real 8, 81, 86, 87, 91, 95, 100, 109, 113, 117, 125, 127, 131, 135, 136, 137, 181, 183, 192, 202, 203, 205, 219 Panteón de los Reyes, El Escorial 44, 135, 150

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Plaza Dos de Mayo 96, 97 Plaza de España 81, 172, 222 Plaza de la Marina Española xvi, 117 Plaza Mayor 24, 28, 41, 42, 64, 65, 66, 70, 83, 96, 207, 215, 218 Plaza de Oriente 136, 183, 203 Plaza de Puerta de Moros 6 Plaza Santa Ana 24, 103, 117, 221 Plaza Tirso de Molina 117 Plaza Vázquez de Mella 117 Plaza de la Villa 218 Portela, Manuel 154–55 Portugal 8, 9, 19, 20, 34, 38, 39, 59, 63, 72, 77, 91–92, 93, 94, 104, 131, 157, 159, 225 Pradilla Ortiz, Francisco 31 Prado museum 21, 31, 46, 66, 86, 88, 98, 111, 128, 143, 177, 193, 215, 217, 218 Prim, General Juan 127, 129, 130, 131 Primo de Rivera, General Miguel 137, 148, 149 Primo de Rivera, José Antonio 152, 154, 205 Príncipe Pío, Montaña de 98, 160 Puente de Toledo 80 Puerta Cerrada 3, 21, 64 Puerta de Alcalá 86, 96, 99, 106, 127, 134, 143 Puerta de Guadalajara 20 Puerta del Sol xv, 32, 34, 56, 61, 96, 99, 114, 119, 120, 123, 127, 128, 129, 139, 142, 143, 150, 168, 169, 177, 190, 201, 215, 218, 219, 220, 222 Puig Antich, Salvador 201

Real Academia Española (Royal Spanish Aacdemy) 82, 139 Real Fábrica de Porcelana (Royal Porcelain Factory) 86, 87 Real Fábrica de Tapices (Royal Tapestry Factory) 86 Real Madrid 146, 195–96 Real Sociedad de San Sebastián 142 Reconquista, the 2, 4–13, 15, 19, 34, 39, 225, 227 Reina Sofía museum 81, 215, 217 Requetés, the 170, 176, 186 Rey, Clara del 98 Ribera, Juan de 52 Ribera, Pedro de 80, 81 Riego, Colonel Rafael del 109, 127 Rodríguez, Ventura 82, 86 Rojas Villandrando, Agustín de 55 Ronda de Toledo 221 Ruíz-Giménez, Joaquín 203 Sabatini, Francesco 82, 86 Sachetti, Juan Bautista 82 Sáenz de Santamaría, José Antonio 212 Sagrajas, Battle of (1086) 8 Salamanca district 125, 140, 199, 202, 207 Salamanca, Battle of (1812) 105 Salamanca, José de 123, 126, 140 Samaniego, Félix de 119 San Felipe el Real, monastery of 34 San Francisco el Grande, church of 14, 86 San Gil barracks 127 San Isidro 24, 33, 47, 87 San Juan Bautista, church of 103 San Lorenzo, church of 28 San Luis Obispo, church of 34 San Nicolás, church of 13 San Pedro, church of 13 San Salvador, church of 14 Sánchez Coello, Alonso 46 Sánchez Montero, Simón 206 Sanjurjo, General José 157, 159 Santa Cruz, church of 102 Santo Domingo, church of 44 Sarmiento, Martín 82

Queipo de Llano, General Gonzalo 157 Quevedo, Francisco de 23, 50–51 Quintana, General Romerales 158 Rajoy, Mariano xix Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (Royal Academy of San Fernando for the Fine Arts) 84, 86, 116–17

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Saura, Carlos 202 SEAT (Sociedad Española de Automóviles de Turismo, Spanish Touring Car Company) 194 Second World War, the 163, 187 Segovia 12, 21, 31, 73, 76, 94, 106, 170, 193 Segovia, Andrés 145, 192 Seguí Almuzara, Colonel José 158 Sergeants’ Revolt, the (1866) 147, 148 Serrano, General Francisco 126, 127, 129, 130, 134, 211 Seven Years War (1756–63) 89 Siglo de Oro 50–51, 60, 119, 144 Sorolla, Joaquín 96 Spanish Empire 24, 25, 30, 37, 39, 41, 43, 45, 47–48, 52, 59, 65, 77, 189, 213 decline of 41, 50, 124, 140, 144 Spanish Sahara 159, 204 Spanish Succession, War of the (1701–14) 77–79, 89, 110 Spanish–Portuguese War (1761–63) 89 St James the Apostle, patron saint of Spain 2, 10 Strait of Gibraltar 1, 10, 227 Suárez, Adolfo 208

Toledo, Juan Bautista de 38 Torre de los Lujanes 218 Torrelodones 3 Trafalgar, Battle of (1805) 91, 93 Trastámara, house of 30 Trent, Council of 33 ‘Triángulo de Oro’ (‘Golden Triangle’) 215, 217 Tribunal Especial para la Represión de la Masonería y el Comunismo (Tribunal for the Repression of Freemasonry and Communism) 182 Tribunal Nacional de Responsabilidades Políticas (National Tribunal for Political Responsibility) 182 Tribunal de Orden Público (Public Order Tribunal) 196–97, 199 Tribunal de Seguridad Pública (Tribunal of Public Safety) 167 Trienio Liberal 109, 119 Trocadero, Battle of (1823) 109 Ullastres, Alberto 192 Umayyad dynasty 2, 13, 227 Unamuno, Miguel de 144, 146, 149 Unión General de Trabajadores (General Union of Workers, UGT) 163, 168, 194 Unión Liberal 126 Unión Republicana (Republican Union) 159 United Press International (UPI) 200, 204, 207 Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Complutense University of Madrid) 43, 117, 127, 145, 146, 149, 167, 170–71, 172–73, 189, 196, 197, 208 Utrecht, Treaty of (1713) 77, 79, 84

Tajo River 7, 9 Talavera, Battle of (1809) 104 Tarancón 164, 165 Tariq ibn Ziyad 1 Teatro Español 82 Teatro Real 82 Tejero, Lieutenant Colonel Antonio 211, 212 Templo de Debod (Temple of Debod) 160 tertulias 118–21, 126, 129, 149, 217, 227 Texeira, Pedro 65 Thirty Years War, the 59 Thomas, Hugh 188 Thyssen-Bornemisza museum 81, 217 Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista 82 Tierno Galván, Enrique 189, 208–209, 214 Toledo xv, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 12, 16, 17, 21, 24, 31, 32, 33, 34–35, 37, 39, 40, 42, 46, 53, 75, 76, 122, 123, 162, 169, 193, 221, 227

Valencia 10, 29, 52, 57, 77, 80, 96, 113, 124, 129, 159, 164, 165, 168, 175, 176, 179, 188, 212 Valladolid xv, 20, 24, 31, 32, 33, 34, 39, 46, 51, 53, 54, 55, 57, 59, 78, 92, 94, 120, 122 Valle de los Caídos basilica 182

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Valle-Inclán, Ramón María del 118, 144 Varela, General José Enrique 170, 171 Vargas, Diego de 31 Velarde, Captain Pedro 96, 97 Velázquez, Diego 39, 54, 60, 67, 82, 88, 103 Venencia tavern, La 219, 220, 221 Veranos de la Villa festival 209 Verdi, Giuseppe 43 Vervins, Treaty of (1598) 49 Vicálvaro district 126 Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg, Princess 142 Villanueva, Juan de 86 Villaverde 165, 209 Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, Charles 60, 62 Villiers, George 114 Visigoths, the 2, 4, 227 Vitoria, Battle of (1813) 107 Vittorio Emanuele, King of Italy 131 Vizcaíno, Joaquín 117–18 Wellington, Duke of 104, 105–107 Yusuf bin Ali 8, 9 Zalka, Máté (see Lukács, General Pavol) Zaragoza 31, 124 zarzuela theatre 125, 146 Zorrilla, José 120, 125 Zúñiga, Countess of Lemos, Josefa de 119

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