From the earliest days of Madrid’s claim to royal favour, over a hundred years before Charles V. transferred the Court from Valladolid to the present capital, the Kings of Spain have had a residence at El Pardo. Henry III., _El Doliente_, when making some additions to the old town of Madrid about 1461, built a pleasure-house on this site. The attraction of the district was undoubtedly the abundance of boar and bear which found ample cover in the forests which surrounded the capital. Generations of improvident inhabitants have destroyed these woods, but the preserves within the stone wall which surrounds the royal residence are well timbered, and the plantations are full of deer and boar and all kinds of small game. Charles V. transformed the building into a winter palace and left the task of completing it to Philip II., who, one imagines, spared but scant leisure from his colossal building operations at the Escorial to superintend the furnishing of a mere shooting-box. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the original structure was destroyed by fire and the present château was built by Philip III. Charles III. altered and added to the palace in which he found refuge after the famous riots against Squillaci, and here in the reign of Charles IV. were hatched the plot and counterplot of Ferdinand and Godoy which culminated in the revolution of Aranjuez, the fall of the much-abused favourite, and the deposition of Charles and his crafty sons. Philip II. by the prosecution of his religious policy, which was fruitful of ruinous wars, had beggared Spain in money and credit. Philip III. succeeded in 1621 to the crown of a country that the Cortes officially described as ‘completely desolated.’ Agriculture and every form of manufacture was fallen into decay, the land was left desert for want of cultivators, the looms were idle, and the wealth of the Spanish-American possessions was swallowed up by the crowd of avaricious and unscrupulous office-holders and their underlings. But if Philip II. had reduced the nation to these straits by his bigoted zeal and arrogant vainglory, his son aggravated the conditions by his reckless extravagance and riotous splendour. When the country’s resources had been taxed to an extent that made further taxation an impossibility, the king, through the agency of his all-powerful favourite, the luxurious Duke of Lerma, raised funds to gratify his prodigal expenditure by the sale of knighthoods and patents of nobility. When that source failed him, he attempted to wrest from the church its silver plate and ornaments, and being terrified out of this resolve by the threats of the bishops, he made a personal appeal to the people. The king’s officers went from door to door begging in the name of the sovereign for the money required for carrying on the business of the Government.