Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE EVIL GENIUS OF SPAIN Important reforms were gradually and cautiously introduced into the Court. One of these was the reduction of the royal household, which had been very large under the Austrian kings. It was a custom in Spain for both king and nobles to take over, together with their inheritance, all the retinue, including slaves and pensioners, of their predecessor, without dismissing any of their own followers; so that the households, with their dependencies, kept on increasing in numbers. A visitor at the Court of Charles II. writes: I am told that the King provides daily food in Madrid alone for ten thousand persons. Probably this was no exaggeration, for we learn from the same writer that some of the wives of the richergrandees had as many as five hundred female attendants. In reducing the King’s household an example of economy was set which it was hoped the nobility would follow. A small reform of a more delicate and personal nature was attempted by the young Queen. Spanish Court etiquette, which perpetuated many a Moorish custom, had decreed that women’s feet must never be visible. Even the doors and steps of carriages were so constructed as to conceal them. The ladies for this reason wore a long and cumbersome over- skirt called the
tantillo.

The Queen Marie of Savoy, writes the Duc de Noailles, wished the ladies of the palace to follow her example by discarding the tantillo. This proposed innovation was actually regarded as an affair of State! Some gentlemen went so far as to declare that they would rather see their wives lying dead before them than that their feet should be seen! The Ambassador Blecourt wrote gravely (to his Court) that a descent of the English upon all the coasts of Spain wouldA CRY FOR WAR 29 have caused less …