Crisis in the Royal Rotting Room

There is a looming royal crisis in Spain, for which there are—at least at this writing—no present solutions currently being offered.  They are running out of space in the Royal Rotting Room—or at least the crypts connected to them.  It is tough to be the king (or, more strictly speaking, the king’s corpse).

 

This crisis started in the sixteenth century, when King Philip II was really messed up on the idea of death and dying.  A royal obsession with funeral monuments is fairly common among royalty and compared to the builders of the Great Pyramid of Giza or the Taj Mahal, Philip still had a peculiar obsession with death.  Just look at the Escorial, or as it is properly called, the Royal Site of San Lorenzo de El Escorial.

 

Philip II built the royal complex of the Escorial as a combination castle, library, museum, monastery, hospital, school, and university.  All of which are built on top of a strange pantheon containing the dried, desiccated bones of the royal dead of the last five centuries.  The king meant for the edifice to stand as his own personal proof of the grandeur of God, of Spain, and of his royal family, the Hapsburgs (though probably not in that order). 

 

Yes, Philip was a little hung up on death, as evidenced by his designing the major building to resemble the medieval rack that was used to execute Saint Lawrence.  As far as I can tell, this is unique among royal buildings.

 

Under the Basilica, Philip created two large pantheons to serve as places of burial for his parents, and the future remains of the royal family of Spain.  There are two crypts—The Hall of Kings (for the remains of the deceased Kings and Queens of Spain) and the Hall of Princes (for musicians obsessed with the color purple).  The Hapsburg line ended with King Charles II in 1700, and since then, the crypts have contained the remains of the currently reigning Bourbon family. 

 

Philip, or Felipe II, was really serious about this project.  He had his father, Charles V disinterred along with all of his wives, and reinterred here.  He included all of his sisters with the sole exception of Mary Tudor of England, who is buried at Westminster Abbey in London.

 

This macabre family reunion had a few bizarre moments.  Don John of Austria, Philip’s half-brother who was the illegitimate son of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, had died in the Netherlands in 1578.  Hated by the Dutch, his body could have been used as a bargaining chip by Spain’s enemies, so to keep it safe…. Don John’s body was dismembered and the pieces were carefully sewn into the leather saddle bags of multiple riders who separately made their way to Spain.  If the King’s enemies had come into the possession of a single bag—say an elbow—this wouldn’t have been considered much of a bargaining chip.

 

Luckily, for Don John and Philip’s strange obsession, all of the riders reached safety with their cargo and the body was reassembled like a jigsaw puzzle, with all of the pieces carefully sewn back together.

 

The crypt does not actually contain the bodies of the royal deceased, since the beautiful gold chambers in the crypt are a little on the small side—they contain the desiccated, rotted remains of the deceased.  When it comes to the tiny little chambers, one size fits all, so each deceased has to keep on rotting until it fits into the appropriate little space...kind of the way your carryon suitcase has to fit into the little wooden box before you can board your flight.

 

After death, the bodies are placed inside coffins and placed in El Pudridero, more colloquially known as the Royal Rotting Room.  Actually, there are two such rooms—one for Kings and Queens and one for Princes.  The process takes between 30 and 50 years to complete—the time probably depending on the body mass of the deceased—till the bones are removed from the coffins and placed inside marble urns that fit inside the golden chambers in the appropriate pantheon.

 

Obviously, there are no tours of the Rotting Rooms—only special monks can enter (perhaps the ones with no sense of smell?).  As far as is known, the picture at right is the only photo ever released of the rotting room.

In the case of Don John, this means that he died and was buried in the Netherlands, then he was dug up and dismembered.  The various pieces of his body made their way independently across France to Spain, where the body was sewn back together and placed inside a coffin in the Rotting Room.  After a few decades, the decayed remains were placed in an urn and secured in a golden crypt, where several times a day tourists can view his “resting” place.

Although there are currently only two occupants in the Rotting Room—the grandparents of current King Felipe VI (who each have a few more decades to wait before they move into the pantheon)—there is a problem:  When Philip II had the pantheons created, he built in 25 chambers in the Hall of Kings and left little room for additions.  While there is plenty of room remaining in the Rotting Room, there are only two empty chambers left in that Pantheon, and no room to create more.

 

Still living, and lacking confirmed reservations in the crypt, are the recently retired King Juan Carlos and Queen Sophia and the current King Felipe and Queen Letizia.  Since the retired monarchs are both octogenarians, a solution will have to be found sometime in the next fifty or so years.

 

In view of the fact that only 37 of the 60 niches in the Hall of Princes are occupied, I suppose that a few kings and queens could be persuaded to move in with the princes in the other pantheon.

Insecurity Guards

Many years ago, I worked nights at a very large hotel while going to college in the day.  As far as I can remember, I gave up sleeping.  In any case, I was a security guard for the hotel and my job was to guard the alley behind the hotel.  I did this job so well, that even now, decades after the hotel has been torn down, that alley is still there.

 

For whatever reason, I was issued a blue sport coat as well as a small pistol of the sort that would normally be found almost exclusively either cowering in a lady’s handbag or equipping the French Army.  As the coat was too heavy for Houston’s swamp-like summers and far too thin for the winter, I seldom wore it unless I was called to come inside the hotel for a problem that couldn’t be handled by the two inside security guards—something that rarely happened.  Since the rear of the hotel was completely fenced and my guard shack was both air conditioned in the summer and heated in the winter—the tiny little automatic stayed safely inside my desk.

 

Even though I was not exactly Rambo, I was still an armed security guard also equipped with an anemic flashlight and a walkie-talkie that occasionally worked.  I relate all of this so as to establish my bona fides: clearly, I am an expert on all matters involving armed security. 

 

Lately, there is a general trend to disarm security guards, that is accompanied by demands to de-fund and even replace the police, apparently attempting to move to less threatening forms of…. well, I don’t know what to call them.  Walmart greeters?  Insecurity Guards?  I’ve noticed, however, that the politicians calling for these changes have not given up their own protection.  In fact, in many cases—such as that of the city council in Minneapolis—they have increased the size of their personal security details.

 

Just yesterday, I was at the local grocery store and spotted the “security guard”, but it would have been hard to miss him:  the back of his shirt proclaimed “SECURITY” in large letters and he had a Sam Browne belt that rivaled Batman’s for pouches and attached gadgets—none of which was more dangerous than a fly swatter. 

 

To me, this is incredible foolishness:  if you are a security guard, the last thing you want people to think is that you are carrying a gun when you aren’t—that’s how people get shot.  In the unlikely event that anyone ever hires me to be a security guard again, I either want to look like I’m ready to take on an alien invasion, or (if I’m unarmed) I want to look like the Easter Bunny.

I prefer the former, because ‘Unarmed security guard’ is an oxymoron.  To be effective, security guards and police need to be highly trained, properly armed, and carefully supervised.  Unfortunately, I have a horrifically grim experience that emphasizes just this point.  It’s been forty-five years, but unfortunately, it’s impossible to forget the details.

 

Back in 1975, while The Doc was in medical school, the campus was located adjacent to the San Antonio Veteran’s Hospital, where there was a similar moronic movement to disarm the security guards.  The hospital administration believed that the sight of a security guard’s sidearm might prove distressful for veterans suffering from PTSD.  That the hospital was named "The Audie L. Murphy Memorial VA Hospital" and was thus decorated with a twice-life-size statue of Audie carrying both a Colt .45 and a Garand rifle (located directly in front of the hospital), and that the hospital lobby had a museum that featured several weapons (including a Thompson SMG and a Browning .30 MG) were evidently irrelevant. The security guards were disarmed and given golf carts to patrol the parking lot.

Almost immediately, Peggy Moran, a 27-year-old nurse, was assaulted in the parking lot and abducted at knifepoint.  Though she was in full view of a security guard and several other people, no one could stop the assault. All they were able to do was copy down the license plate as the assailant escaped with his hostage.

 

Within hours, Donald Gene Franklin, who was already on parole for a previous rape, was arrested at his apartment in possession of the nurse’s bloody clothing, but he cruelly refused to reveal the whereabouts of the nurse.  The city quickly organized a massive search effort that scoured the Texas hill country and the city for days, in vain.  I was among the multitude of people who volunteered to search for the missing woman.

 

After five days, Peggy was found nude, with a collapsed lung, suffering from seven severe stab wounds, and having lost more than half of her blood.  Though she lived long enough to tell the ambulance crew that she did not want to be taken to the hospital where she worked, she died within hours of being rescued.  She had endured five days of July heat in a Texas field and among her injuries were wounds inflicted by small animals and insects.

 

Shortly afterward, the hospital security guards went back to carrying guns.  A close friend, an emergency room physician, once told me that the administrative price of a stop sign at a busy intersection was one dead child.  The parking lot that my wife crossed daily going to and from her classrooms was guarded by armed security guards purchased with one dead nurse.

 

After arraignment, Franklin was put in solitary while awaiting the first of several trials.  After being visited by a famous Baptist preacher, Franklin announced his religious conversion and pleaded with jail authorities to be returned to the general prison population so he could share his newfound religious conversion.   When he was moved from solitary confinement, he almost immediately severely beat and raped a fellow prisoner.

 

After numerous court cases and an appeal that made it all the way the U.S. Supreme court, Franklin was executed by lethal injection in 1988 after a last meal of a hamburger and French fries.  To the end, he refused to make a statement about Peggy Moran.

 

There are monsters among us who do not respond to the best efforts of social workers and kind-hearted people.  FBI statistics indicate that, as a general rule of thumb, for every thousand police officers in a metropolitan area, the murder rate drops by one.  This current popular trend of defunding the police will, of course, result in an increased crime rate, that in due course, will trigger a political consensus that once again the nation needs “to get tough on crime”, and once again police departments will slowly expand.

 

In the meantime, I wonder whose lives will pay for this experiment.

The Replacement Venus

Yorgos Kentrotas, a poor Greek peasant, was just digging at the ruins of the old city wall in hopes of finding a few bricks to use to wall off his garden.  That the bricks might be two millennia old was immaterial, as there have been few technological improvements in the brick industry.

 

Kentrotas dug along the base of the wall and discovered a niche about four feet wide and five feet deep.  Though the niche was filled with debris, he could see part of a covered marble statue.  His fascination with the buried object caught the eye of a nearby French naval officer, who, along with a pair of sailors, were digging among the ruins in search of artifacts.

 

What Kentrotas had discovered was the top half of a nude statue of a woman that was destined to become one of the most famous pieces of art in the world, the Venus de Milo.

At the urging of the French naval officer, Kentrotas kept digging, eventually discovering the bottom half of the statue, along with pieces of the left arm, a hand and a plinth.  After reporting the find, a higher-ranking French naval officer convinced the French ambassador at the Ottoman Court to purchase the statue. (Milos was in Turkish territory at the time.)

 

Finally, a French naval vessel carefully conveyed the statue to France.  After being officially presented to King Louis XVIII, the statue made its way to the Louvre.  (The statue arrived in France in 1821, but the King was having a small problem with obesity—it actually took him over a year to make the trip to the museum to see it.)

 

With the exceptions of a few wars, a minor revolution, and a tour to Japan—where over 100,000 people turned out just to watch the boat carrying the statue dock, the big lady (she is 6’ 8” and 1,500 pounds) has remained in the museum for almost two hundred years.

 

The Statue was restored without the plinth and pieces of the left arm, and immediately caused a sensation as the only surviving female statue created by Praxiteles, the master classical 6th century BCE Greek sculptor.  As the premiere example of beauty as defined by Classical Greek culture, The Venus de Milo as the objective measure of beauty was the embodiment of all the French Empire was and hoped to be.

 

Of course, in reality, the story is almost all bullshit.

 

France faked almost all of this.  Exactly who found the statue and where will probably never be completely settled, but it probably was a member of the Kentrotas family who first discovered the statue at Milos, and this was probably while he was looking for marble to sell, either as an artifact, or to be burnt to make limestone.

 

France desperately needed a new classical female statue, so it created the myth of the Venus de Milo to satisfy that need.  At the time, western countries considered the classical world to be the embodiment of sophistication and enlightenment.  A nation’s accumulation of great art was a measure of the country’s wealth and the embodiment of an empire’s reach.  In a very real sense, Europeans believed that if a nation possessed works of beauty, the country itself was beautiful.

 

Until very recently, the Louvre had displayed not only the great art of the Western World, but the most famous example of female beauty in existence—the Venus de Medici (left).  (Which, if you haven’t heard of it, shows you the power of French propaganda.)

The Venus de Medici was a 1^st century BCE Greek statue believed to be a copy of an earlier statue by Praxiteles.  Formerly a possession of the Medici family, it had been “forcibly acquired” by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1803.  (And yes, I managed to work Napoleon into another blog post.)

 

The Venus was only part of the art work Napoleon had looted from across Europe, but she was one of the most important pieces in the Louvre.  However, following Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, most of the works the Emperor had stolen were returned to their original countries.  The Venus de Medici was returned to Italy and is now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. 

 

Not only was France forced to return the looted art, but in the contest among nations to see which could acquire the most riches from the world, France was losing to Great Britain.  Spain, grateful for England’s assistance in her war with Napoleon had gifted that nation with many works, such as the Rokeby Nude by Velasquez.  England had also acquired the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon, as well as the Rosetta Stone.  (The last had been briefly the property of Napoleon, but the priceless artifact was specifically listed as part of the surrender terms of The Capitulation of Alexandria).

 

Since France had spent years touting their possession of the Venus de Medici, the yardstick by which all beauty was to be judged…. France needed a replacement Venus.  Preferably one what was better, older, more prestigious, and one that could—with the proper publicity—be recognized as even more beautiful.

 

So, in 1821, when the Louvre displayed the statue, the French fudged a little.  First off, she probably should not be called the “Venus de Milo”, since the statue probably is a depiction of Amphitrite, the wife of Poseidon, and the town of Milos is now called Trypiti.  (I guess the Amphitrite of Trypiti doesn’t have the same marketing appeal.)

 

Regretfully, the statue wasn’t created by Praxiteles, either.  The Louvre knew full well that the plinth—which was not put on display—indicated that the statue was created 500 years after the death of Praxiteles by Alexandros of Antioch.  To this day, the Louvre claims that the fate of that portion of the plinth (as well as the fate of the hand) is unknown.

Alas, the credibility of the museum sunk further because an art student had created detailed drawings of the statue, including the plinth.  Slowly, his drawings and other details about the statue leaked out to the art world. 

 

The ruse lasted until 1893, when a German publication, which included the student’s drawings, accurately dated the statue.  The truth did little to diminish the “stature” of the Venus—at least in the minds of the public (and not just her French fans).  To her public, she is the most famous statue in the world.  To the crowds that flock to the Louvre annually, she is only slightly less popular than the Mona Lisa.

A Bridge Too Far... North

In a way, the whole bridge affair was a watered-down precursor of the Civil War—it had some of the same players, it was fought for some of the same reasons, and ultimately, the North won. 

 

Instead of opposing armies, this was a fight between the railroad and the riverboats, and since you know which one is still doing business, you already know who is going to win.  That’s one of the problems with telling stories about the Civil War—everyone already knows how the story ends.  (I wonder if the North had somehow managed to lose that lopsided war, I wonder whose statues we’d be tearing down today.)

 

There were two main issues at stake:  First, where the first transcontinental railroad would be constructed, tying the two halves of the country together.  Naturally, the North wanted a northern route through Chicago, while the South favored a southern route through St. Louis.  Both cities were competing to be the transportation hub of the Midwest and the gateway to the West.  St. Louis had the twin advantages of already being a great center for steamboats and there was the advantage that a southern route would be easier to construct. 

 

The second issue was a fight for the very existence of steamboats against the growing power of railroads.  Today, this may seem a mismatched fight, but steamboats did have some advantages as they could carry greater loads at a cheaper cost, and historically, most of the migration of settlers in the Midwest followed a North/South axis.  Railroads were faster, but cost far more to construct.  In the end, of course, railroads were going to win because they could go places the steamboats couldn’t.  It’s a lot easier to lay track than to dig a river.  (This is a damn shame, since at heart, I suspect I’m a born steamboat man.  Maybe I’ve read too much Mark Twain?  Nah! There’s no such thing as “too much Mark Twain”.)

 

The Government Bridge, the nation’s first bridge across the Mississippi had been built with the express purpose of linking the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad in Illinois with the Mississippi and Missouri railroad in Iowa.  Though the two railroads largely shared common ownership, each was chartered in a different state. 

The site for the bridge was carefully selected linking Rock Island, Illinois (the westernmost point of the C&RI) and Davenport, Iowa (the eastern most point of the M&M line) by way of Rock Island, the largest island on the Mississippi River.  From the very start, the steamboats fought the construction of the bridge on the grounds that it was a hazard to navigation and thus an impediment for an established industry necessary for the economic interests of the country.

 

Note.  One of the few constants in history has been the resistance of established industries to new technology that will swiftly put them out of business.  Today, I suspect that almost no one even remembers the once vital—but now completely defunct—flange industry.

 

Rock Island was the natural location for such a bridge and had been surveyed for just such a construction project in 1837 by Colonel Robert E. Lee.  Ironically, the biggest impediment to building the bridge was Jefferson Davis, the Secretary of War.  Davis, who supported the southern route for the Transcontinental Railroad, could stop the construction since Rock Island had previously been the site of Army outpost.  Though the military fort had been long abandoned, Davis still believed that he controlled the island.

 

Originally, Davis allowed the bridge construction to proceed, secure in the belief that the Southern route would still be constructed, first, because of the better building conditions that route offered.  However, when political tensions worsened in the Kansas/Nebraska territories, Davis realized that the Northern route might be constructed first.  

Although Davis had ordered the construction on Rock Island halted, for reasons unknown, it was allowed to continue by the Federal marshal who’d been sent to shut it down.  Was the marshal bribed?  Was he a passionate supporter of the North?  No one knows for sure, but the managing director of the M&M Railroad and the co-owner of the bridge construction company was Dr. Thomas Durant, a man infamous for bribes and far less than ethical business dealings.  Later, Durant would become infamous as one of the men responsible for the Crédit Mobilier scandal.  (If you watched the AMC television series, Hell on Wheels, Durant was played by Colm Meaney.)

 

There was little Davis could do about a bridge that was already operational, so the matter was dropped (at least temporarily).  The finished bridge was 1,581 feet long, crossing six spans. The single-track bridge included a swing draw span placed directly over the channel normally used by steamboats.  The bridge had two fixed spans on the Illinois side and three, on the Iowa side, with the draw span rotating on a massive center pier 32 feet wide resting on a turntable bearing arrangement with twenty wheels on a twenty-eight-foot diameter track. 

On April 22, 1856, people on shore cheered as three locomotives pulled eight passenger cars across the bridge.  The ‘Father of Rivers’, the Mississippi had been successfully spanned, opening up the way west by rail.  But...only for a short time.

 

Just fifteen days after completion, the steamboat Effie Afton passed through the channel heading upriver, when she suddenly lost power in her starboard engine.  Drifting backwards, the vessel swung sideways and struck a bridge piling, causing great damage to both the ship and the piling.  A cabin stove aboard the vessel tumbled, setting the ship afire, burning the ship to the waterline and destroying the bridge spans between the pilings.  All of the ship’s passengers were rescued and there were no injuries.

 

Almost immediately, there were claims of deliberate sabotage.  Witnesses said that the ship burned too quickly, and that the ship wouldn’t have swung sideways if the captain had not increased power to the port engine.  No record of the ship’s cargo survives, but the records that do exist prove that this was the first time the ship had operated above St. Louis.

 

Captain John Hurd, owner of the Effie Afton, filed suit in the U.S. District Court at Chicago, claiming that the bridge was constructed in such a way that eddies and currents around the pilings endangered shipping.  Hurd wanted to be reimbursed for the ship and cargo, further demanding that the railroad be prohibited from rebuilding the bridge.

 

The railroads countered, claiming that the “accident” was an intentional and deliberate attack on the bridge, by an industry trying to delay their inevitable demise.  The case, Hurd v. Rock Island Railroad Company, was to be the “trial of the century”.  (Yes, even back then they used the phrase, and even back then, they used it far too often.) Of course, it didn’t help the steamboats’ protestations of innocence that all the boats on the Mississippi, from one end to the other, blew their whistles rejoicing at news of the bridge’s destruction.

 

This was an important case, since the results could potentially dictate whether any bridge could ever be constructed across the upper Mississippi.  (And since a district court ruling would only be valid in that district, it would allow another district—one further south, for example—to successfully complete the Transcontinental Railroad, perhaps extending slavery westward). 

 

The railroad lawyer defending the case traveled to the site of the bridge, which was already being repaired.  He hired a small boat in which he rowed out onto the river, personally investigating the currents, the eddies, and noting exactly where the shifting flows took floating objects.  In particular, he studied the topography report created by Colonel Robert E. Lee.

 

The trial lasted fourteen days—two of which were used just for the railroad lawyer’s lengthy summation.  Finally, though a victory for the steamboats had been predicted, the jury announced it was split and could not reach a unanimous decision. 

 

The case wasn’t actually over, as it was argued in various courts for years, and became the topic of an investigation for the House of Representatives which, predictably, was split along North/South lines.  Eventually, a federal court ruled that the bridge was a threat to navigation and had to be destroyed—a decision that was immediately appealed to the Supreme Court.  However, by then, the railroads had friends in high places. 

 

Because of the Civil War, Rock Island was once again an active military post that was being used to house Confederate prisoners of war.  The Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, was in favor of the bridge, as was the majority of the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the railroads in January 1863. 

 

The riverboat companies screamed, “Foul!” because they believed that the President of the United States had influenced the decision.  And they just might have been right, for the lawyer who had represented the railroads in that first trial had been none other than Abraham Lincoln.