To-day the Eighth Wonder of the World, the _Octava Maravilla_, which it is calculated cost from first to last some ten millions, is but a shadow of its past glory. It is no longer a royal residence, the number of its monks has become few, its revenues have been wrested from them, and the spirit of the palace-monastery has departed. A fire which broke out here in 1671 was not quenched for fifteen days, and the damage then sustained was repaired in 1676 by the queen-regent, Anne of Austria. Charles III. effected some further restorations, and his son proposed to make the place more habitable by the construction of a bull-ring. Later, this prince, when Charles IV. and fast approaching the close of his ignoble reign, discovered at the Escorial the plot of the Queen Maria Luisa, Prince Fernando, and Godoy to betray Spain to France, and the royal monastery became a royal prison.
The French troops pillaged the monastery in 1807, and during the Carlist war its treasures were depleted by the removal of about a hundred of the choicest paintings to the greater security of Madrid. Other pictures were transferred from the Escorial to the capital after the death of Ferdinand VII., who had done what he could to repair the ravages of La Houssaye’s troopers. But the days of the Escorial’s importance as a centre of political or courtly life were already numbered, and by the summer of 1861, when the first train arrived at the Escorial station from Madrid, the palace had ceased to be a royal residence.
It must be admitted that, at first sight, the Escorial produces a feeling of disappointment; the first impression of the clean granite, the blue slates, and the leaden roofs is not wholly pleasing. But as one approaches this ‘grandest and gloomiest failure of modern times,’ the size and simplicity of the ashy-coloured pile takes possession of the imagination, its sombreness and its austere magnificence stands out more and more clearly from its sombre and magnificent surroundings, and one begins to realise something of the spirit of the place and of the character of the man that called it into being. The edifice is a rectangular parallelogram, having a length of 744 feet from north to south, and a depth of 580 feet. It has been said that the architecture exhibits a series of solecisms which would have shocked the disciples of Vignola and Palladio, but Mr. Fergusson in his _History of the Modern Styles of Architecture_ declares that the whole design shows more of Gothic character than the masterpieces of Wren and Michael Angelo.