IX. THE REIGN OF PHILIP II…

IX. THE REIGN OF PHILIP II

[Sidenote: [1556-1598 A.D.]]

Philip II had received the investiture of Milan and the crown of Naples, previously to his marriage with Mary Tudor. The imperial crown he had been obliged, much against his will, to forego. The archduchy of Austria, with the hereditary German dependencies of his father’s family, had been transferred by the emperor to his brother Ferdinand, on the occasion of the marriage of that prince with Anna, only sister of King Louis of Hungary. Ten years afterwards Ferdinand was elected king of the Romans, and steadily refused all the entreaties afterwards made to him in behalf of Philip to resign his crown, and his succession to the empire, in favour of his nephew. With these diminutions, Philip had now received all the dominions of his father. He was king of all the Spanish kingdoms and of both the Sicilies. He was titular king of England, France, and Jerusalem. He was “absolute dominator” in Asia, Africa, and America; he was duke of Milan and of both Burgundies, and hereditary sovereign of the seventeen Netherlands.

Thus the provinces had received a new master. A man of foreign birth and breeding, not speaking a word of their language, nor of any language which the mass of the inhabitants understood, was now placed in supreme authority over them, because he represented, through the females, the “good” Philip of Burgundy, who a century before had possessed himself, by inheritance, purchase, force, or fraud, of the sovereignty in most of those provinces. It is necessary to say an introductory word or two concerning the previous history of the man to whose hands the destiny of so many millions was now entrusted.

He was born in May, 1527, and was now, therefore, twenty-eight years of age. At the age of sixteen he had been united to his cousin Maria of Portugal, daughter of João III and of the emperor’s sister, Doña Catalina. Within two years (1545) he became father of the celebrated and ill-starred Don Carlos, and a widower. In 1548, he had made his first appearance in the Netherlands. He came thither to receive homage in the various provinces as their future sovereign, and to exchange oaths of mutual fidelity with them all. Andrea Doria, with a fleet of fifty ships, had brought him to Genoa, whence he had passed to Milan, where he was received with great rejoicing. At Trent he was met by Duke Maurice of Saxony, who warmly begged his intercession with the emperor in behalf of the imprisoned landgraf of Hesse. This boon Philip was graciously pleased to promise, and to keep the pledge as sacredly as most of the vows plighted by him during this memorable year. The duke of Aerschot met him in Germany with a regiment of cavalry and escorted him to Brussels. A summer was spent in great festivities, the cities of the Netherlands vying with each other in magnificent celebrations of the ceremonies, by which Philip successively swore allegiance to the various constitutions and charters of the provinces, and received their oaths of future fealty in return.

His oath to support all the constitutions and privileges was without reservation, while his father and grandfather had only sworn to maintain the charters granted or confirmed by Philip and Charles of Burgundy. Suspicion was disarmed by these indiscriminate concessions, which had been resolved upon by the unscrupulous Charles to conciliate the good will of the people. The light-hearted Flemings, Brabantines, and Walloons received him with open arms. Yet icy was the deportment with which Philip received these demonstrations of affection, and haughty the glance with which he looked down upon these exhibitions of civic hilarity, as from the height of a grim and inaccessible tower. The impression made upon the Netherlanders was anything but favourable, and when he had fully learned the futility of the projects on the empire which it was so difficult both for his father and himself to resign, he returned to the more congenial soil of Spain.

PHILIP’S MARRIAGE WITH MARY TUDOR

[Sidenote: [1544-1554 A.D.]]

In 1554 he had again issued from the peninsula to marry the queen of England, a privilege which his father had graciously resigned to him. He was united to Mary Tudor at Winchester, on the 25th of July of that year, and if congeniality of tastes could have made a marriage happy, that union should have been thrice blessed. To maintain the supremacy of the church seemed to both the main object of existence, to execute unbelievers the most sacred duty imposed by the Deity upon anointed princes, to convert their kingdoms into a hell the surest means of winning heaven for themselves. It was not strange that the conjunction of two such wonders of superstition in one sphere should seem portentous in the eyes of the English nation. Philip’s mock efforts in favour of certain condemned reformers, and his pretended intercessions in favour of the princess Elizabeth, failed entirely of their object. The parliament refused to confer upon him more than a nominal authority in England. His children, should they be born, might be sovereigns; he was but husband of the queen--of a woman who could not atone by her abject but peevish fondness for himself, and by her congenial blood-thirstiness towards her subjects, for her eleven years’ seniority, her deficiency in attractions, and her incapacity to make him the father of a line of English monarchs.

It almost excites compassion even for Mary Tudor, when her passionate efforts to inspire him with affection are contrasted with his impassiveness. Tyrant, bigot, murderess though she was, she was still woman, and she lavished upon her husband all that was not ferocious in her nature. Forbidding prayers to be said for the soul of her father, hating her sister and her people, burning bishops, bathing herself in the blood of heretics, to Philip she was all submissiveness and feminine devotion. It was a most singular contrast--Mary the queen of England, and Mary the wife of Philip. Small, lean, and sickly, painfully near-sighted, yet with an eye of fierceness and fire; her face wrinkled by care and evil passions still more than by time, with a big man’s voice, whose harshness made those in the next room tremble; yet feminine in her tastes, skilful with her needle, fond of embroidery work, striking the lute with a touch remarkable for its science and feeling, speaking many languages, including Latin, with fluency and grace; most feminine, too, in her constitutional sufferings, hysterical of habit, shedding floods of tears daily at Philip’s coldness, undisguised infidelity, and frequent absences from England--she almost awakens compassion and causes a momentary oblivion of her identity.

Her subjects, already half maddened by religious persecution, were exasperated still further by the pecuniary burdens which she imposed upon them to supply the king’s exigencies, and she unhesitatingly confronted their frenzy, in the hope of winning a smile from him. When at last her chronic maladies had assumed the memorable form which caused Philip and Mary to unite in a letter to Cardinal Pole, announcing not the expected but the actual birth of a prince, but judiciously leaving the date in blank, the momentary satisfaction and delusion of the queen was unbounded. The false intelligence was transmitted everywhere. When the futility of the royal hopes could no longer be concealed, Philip left the country, never to return till his war with France made him require troops, subsidies, and a declaration of hostilities from England.

Upon his first journey out of Spain, in 1548, into his various dominions, he had made a most painful impression everywhere. “He was disagreeable,” says Envoy Suriano[b] “to the Italians, detestable to the Flemings, odious to the Germans.” He was thought deficient in manly energy. He was an infirm valetudinarian, and was considered as sluggish in character, as deficient in martial enterprise, as timid of temperament as he was fragile and sickly of frame. It is true that, on account of the disappointment which he occasioned by his contrast to his warlike father, he mingled in some tournaments in Brussels, where he was matched against Count Mansfeld, one of the most distinguished chieftains of the age, and where, says his professed panegyrist, Cabrera,[c] “he broke his lances very much to the satisfaction of his father and aunts.”

PHILIP’S CHARACTER

[Sidenote: [1556-1598 A.D.]]

Those who were most disposed to think favourably of him remembered that there was a time when even Charles V was thought weak and indolent, and were willing to ascribe Philip’s pacific disposition to his habitual cholic and side-ache, and to his father’s inordinate care for him in youth. They even looked forward to the time when he should blaze forth to the world as a conqueror and a hero. These, however, were views entertained by but few; the general and the correct opinion, as it proved, being that Philip hated war, would never certainly acquire any personal distinction in the field, and when engaged in hostilities would be apt to gather his laurels at the hands of his generals, rather than with his own sword. He was believed to be the reverse of the emperor. Charles sought great enterprises; Philip would avoid them. The emperor never recoiled before threats; the son was reserved, cautious, suspicious of all men, and capable of sacrificing a realm from hesitation and timidity. The father had a genius for action, the son a predilection for repose. Charles took “all men’s opinions, but reserved his judgment,” and acted on it, when matured, with irresistible energy; Philip was led by others, was vacillating in forming decisions, and irresolute in executing them when formed.

His talents were, in truth, very much below mediocrity. His mind was incredibly small. A petty passion for contemptible details characterised him from his youth, and, as long as he lived, he could neither learn to generalise, nor understand that one man, however diligent, could not be minutely acquainted with all the public and private affairs of fifty millions of other men. He was a glutton of work. He was born to write despatches, and to scrawl comments[82] upon those which he received. He gave audiences to ambassadors and deputies very willingly, listening attentively to all that was said of him, and answering in monosyllables. He spoke no tongue but Spanish, and was sufficiently sparing of that, but he was indefatigable with his pen. He hated to converse, but he could write a letter eighteen pages long, when his correspondent was in the next room, and when the subject was, perhaps, one which a man of talent could have settled with six words of his tongue. The world, in his opinion, was to move upon protocols and apostilles. Events had no right to be born throughout his dominions, without a preparatory course of his obstetrical pedantry. He could never learn that the earth would not rest on its axis, while he wrote a programme of the way it was to turn. He was prolix with his pen, not from affluence, but from paucity of ideas. He took refuge in a cloud of words, sometimes to conceal his meaning, oftener to conceal the absence of any meaning, thus mystifying not only others but himself.

He appeared on the whole the embodiment of Spanish chivalry and Spanish religious enthusiasm, in its late and corrupted form. He was entirely a Spaniard. The Burgundian and Austrian elements of his blood seemed to have evaporated, and his veins were filled alone with the ancient ardour, which in heroic centuries had animated the Gothic champions of Spain. The fierce enthusiasm for the cross, which in the long internal warfare against the crescent had been the romantic and distinguishing feature of the national character, had degenerated into bigotry. That which had been a nation’s glory now made the monarch’s shame. The Christian heretic was to be regarded with a more intense hatred than even Moor or Jew had excited in the most Christian ages, and Philip was to be the latest and most perfect incarnation of all this traditional enthusiasm, this perpetual hate. Thus he was likely to be single-hearted in his life. It was believed that his ambition would be less to extend his dominions than to vindicate his title of “the most Catholic king.”

His education had been but meagre. In an age when most kings and noblemen possessed many languages, he spoke not a word of any tongue but Spanish, although he had a slender knowledge of French and Italian, which he afterwards learned to read with comparative facility. He had studied a little history and geography, and he had a taste for sculpture, painting, and architecture. Certainly if he had not possessed a feeling for art, he would have been a monster. To have been born in the earlier part of the sixteenth century, to have been a king, to have had Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands as a birthright, and not to have been inspired with a spark of that fire which glowed so intensely in those favoured lands and in that golden age, had indeed been difficult.

The king’s personal habits were regular. He was most strict in religious observances, as regular at mass, sermons, and vespers as a monk; much more it was thought by many good Catholics, than was becoming to his rank and age. Besides several friars who preached regularly for his instruction, he had daily discussions with others on abstruse theological points. He consulted his confessor most minutely as to all the actions of life, inquiring anxiously whether this proceeding or that were likely to burden his conscience. He was grossly licentious. It was his chief amusement to issue forth at night disguised, that he might indulge himself in the common haunts of vice. This was his solace at Brussels in the midst of the gravest affairs of state.[83] He was not illiberal; but, on the contrary, it was thought that he would have been even generous had he not been straitened for money at the outset of his career. During a cold winter, he distributed alms to the poor of Brussels with an open hand. He was fond of jests in private, and would laugh immoderately, when with a few intimate associates, at buffooneries which he checked in public by the icy gravity of his deportment.

The court was organised during his residence at Brussels on the Burgundian, not the Spanish model, but of the 150 persons who composed it, nine-tenths of the whole were Spaniards; the other fifteen or sixteen being of various nations, Flemings, Burgundians, Italians, English, and Germans. Thus it is obvious how soon he disregarded his father’s precept and practice in this respect, and began to lay the foundation of that renewed hatred to Spaniards which was soon to become so intense, exuberant, and fatal throughout every class of Netherlanders. He esteemed no nation but the Spanish; with Spaniards he consorted, with Spaniards he counselled, through Spaniards he governed.

His council consisted of five or six Spanish grandees, the famous Ruy Gomez, then count of Melito, afterwards prince of Eboli; the duke of Alva, the count de Feria, the duke of Franca Villa, Don Antonio Toledo, and Don Juan Manrique de Lara. The “two columns,” said Suriano,[b] “which sustain this great machine are Ruy Gomez and Alva, and from their councils depends the government of half the world.” The two were ever bitterly opposed to each other. Alva represented the war party, Ruy Gomez the pacific policy more congenial to the heart of Philip. The bishop of Arras, who in the opinion of the envoys was worth them all for his capacity and his experience, was then entirely in the background, rarely entering the council except when summoned to give advice in affairs of extraordinary delicacy or gravity. He was, however, to reappear most signally in course of the events already preparing. The duke of Alva, also to play so tremendous a part in the yet unborn history of the Netherlands, was not beloved by Philip. He was eclipsed at this period by the superior influence of the favourite, and his sword, moreover, became necessary in the Italian campaign which was impending. It is remarkable that it was a common opinion even at that day that the duke was naturally hesitating and timid. One would have thought that his previous victories might have earned for him the reputation for courage and skill which he most unquestionably deserved. The future was to develop those other characteristics which were to make his name the terror and wonder of the world.[f]

[Sidenote: [1555-1557 A.D.]]

To acquire a clear understanding of the interminable and complex events of this remarkable reign, it will be necessary to class them under general heads, without much regard to the chronological order. Unlike the reign of the preceding monarch, some brief space must be devoted to foreign transactions; but such only will be noticed as have an inseparable connection with Spain, and are absolutely necessary to explain its condition.

Immediately after the resignation by the emperor of Naples and Sicily in favour of Philip, the duke of Alva was sent to protect that kingdom and the honour of Spain, against the secret enmity of the pope and the open hostility of the French. Paul IV, who was bound with the tiara in 1555, was as favourable to France as he was hostile to her rival. The papal displeasure was signalised by the arrest of the Spanish ambassador, and by the citation of Philip, whom, as king of Naples, Rome considered as its vassal.

[Sidenote: [1557-1574 A.D.]]

Confiding in the promises of France, Paul in full consistory declared Philip deprived of the Neapolitan throne. The latter, having consulted the most celebrated theologians, whether, as a dutiful son of the church, he could arm against its chief; and having, as was to be expected, received an answer in the affirmative, prepared to defend his rights. The duke of Alva entered the papal states, and seized on several fortresses. The eternal city began to tremble for its security, and was forcing Paul to negotiate with the victor, when, notwithstanding the truce concluded by the emperor, a French army under the duke of Guise advanced, and hostilities were continued. On another part of the frontier, the truce was broken at the same time by the admiral Coligny, governor of Picardy, who made an unsuccessful attempt on Douay. Philip himself inflicted so severe a blow on the French at St. Quentin that Henry in great consternation recalled the duke. The pope was accordingly left at the mercy of the duke of Alva,[84] who advanced on Rome, and forced him to purchase peace by withdrawing from the French alliance. As Turkey was banded with the unscrupulous French, that alliance was little honourable to the head of the church. At this very time the Ottoman fleet was ravaging the coast of Calabria, whence it retired with great booty and many captives. The duke of Alva, whose presence was required in Flanders, was for a season replaced in the viceroyalty of Naples by the marquis of Santa Cruz. In 1559, peace was made with France.

WAR WITH THE TURKS (1560-1574 A.D.)

But if this peace freed Naples from the hostilities of the French, it could not arrest the frequent depredations of the Turks. In general, however, these depredations led to no result, the Mohammedans retiring before the Spanish forces. But, in 1565, the sultan Suleiman equipped a powerful armament, both for the conquest of Malta, which the emperor Charles had conferred on the knights of St. John, and for the invasion of the Spanish possessions on the continent. It is not easy to account for the apathy apparently shown by Philip towards their cause, especially after ordering the viceroy of Sicily to defend them. In vain did Don John of Austria, his natural brother, to whom, very honourably for himself, he had granted a splendid household, flee from the court with the intention of embarking at Barcelona, in aid of the knights; the prince was constrained to return. After one of the most gallant defences on record, when nearly two-thirds of the assailants, and most of the defenders, were cut off, about ten thousand Spaniards were landed on the island, and the siege was raised.

In 1570, the war between the Venetian Republic and the porte again brought the Spaniards into collision with the latter power; Rome, Venice, and Spain having confederated for the common defence of Christendom. The combined fleet assembled at Messina, and resolved to assail the formidable armament of the sultan. In the celebrated battle which followed [that of Lepanto in 1571], the papal galleys being headed by Marco Antonio Colonna, the Venetians by Doria, and the Spaniards by Don John of Austria, a splendid victory declared for the Christians [see the history of Italy]. But this advantage was not improved, and the vanquished were soon able to resume. The isle of Jerba, Peñon de Velez a strong fortress on the African coast, and subsequently Tunis were reduced; and in various isolated engagements the advantage rested with the Christians. Such conquests, however, were more easily made than retained. Jerba and Tunis were retaken by storm; the fortress of Oran was abandoned, after most of its defenders had perished either by the climate or the harassing warfare.

WARS WITH FRANCE (1557-1597 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [1557-1585 A.D.]]

The jealousy which had actuated the emperor and Francis was transmitted to their heirs. Philip, however, had no intention to break the truce which it had been one of his father’s latest acts to procure; but, as before observed, the hatred of the pope, and the faithlessness of Henry, forced him into the war. Assisted by the troops of his consort, Mary of England, Philip invaded France; and his generals laid siege to St. Quentin, while the duke of Alva, as before related, vigorously defended Italy against a French army under the duke of Guise. The constable, accompanied by the martial chivalry of the country, hastened to relieve St. Quentin; but under the walls of that fortress he sustained a disastrous defeat, which was followed by the surrender of the place. Mary had little reason to congratulate herself on her impolitic quarrel with Henry; she lost Calais, and two smaller forts,--all that remained of the English possessions in the country,--and died before the conclusion of the war. So far was Philip from indemnifying his ally for the loss sustained, that, four months after her decease, he made peace with France, and confirmed it by a new marriage with Elizabeth [Isabella in Spanish] daughter of the king of France.

For many years after this event (1559-1585), the two monarchs remained outwardly in peace, but inwardly agitated by jealousy or ill will: France had reason to dread the ambitious views of the Castilian; and the latter was far from satisfied with the secret encouragement afforded by the French Protestants, with the full connivance of the court, to their brethren of the Low Countries, who were striving to shake off the Spanish yoke. The troubles which distracted the Gallic kingdom during the wars of the league afforded Philip an opportunity, which he had long coveted, of interfering in the affairs of that kingdom, ostensibly in support of the Roman Catholic faith, but quite as much for his own advantage. As the protector of the league, he at first furnished the rebels with money, and subsequently ordered the governor of the Netherlands, the prince of Parma, to invade the country, and to effect a junction with them. But the abilities of Henry IV, and the valour of his Protestant adherents, the assistance of Elizabeth, queen of England, and, above all, his conversion to the established faith, rendered the combined efforts of Spaniards and leaguers of no ultimate avail. His subsequent absolution by the pope destroyed the unnatural coalition which had been formed against him, and enabled him, with the pontiff’s mediation, to obtain an honourable peace. Into the interminable transactions of this period--transactions which are more intimately connected with the history of France than that of Spain--we cannot enter here.

THE NETHERLANDS

The most important of the wars of Philip were with his revolted subjects of the Low Countries. Soon after his accession, he learned that the Reformation had made alarming progress in these provinces, and he resolved to extirpate it. His bigotry to the ancient religion, his stern, cruel character, caused him to prefer violent to persuasive measures. A little reflection might have convinced him that he could never succeed in his object, and that by the bare attempt he would risk the security of his government. His repulsive manners, his arbitrary measures, and the manifest preference which he gave to his Spanish subjects, soon estranged both Flemings and Dutch from his person. To his father, whose demeanour was marked by unwonted condescension, and who really loved them, they had been devotedly attached.

Though the emperor was no less a bigot than the son,--though from 1521 to 1555 no fewer than fifty thousand Protestants are said to have perished by fire or sword,--the Roman Catholics were by far the more numerous party, and ready to support him in his bloody proscriptions. But now the new opinions had seized on all classes of men, and their professors were approaching to a numerical level with the rest. This fact, however, was unknown to the government: many of the converts were so only in secret; and the few who in despite of the penal decrees attended the public profession of the reformed doctrines were regarded, not indeed as all, but as the chief portion of Protestants. In his resolution of extirpating them, the king commenced by giving new vigour to those decrees; and, to insure their execution, he created a new tribunal, with powers similar to those of the ancient Spanish Inquisition, to take cognisance of heresy. These measures were obnoxious to the people, not merely to the secret Protestants, but to the Catholics, who were subjected to new impositions to defray the expense. The latter, too, joined with the former in exclaiming against the presence of the Spanish troops, which they justly characterised as an infraction of a fundamental law, that prohibited the sojourn in these provinces of armed foreigners. Philip, who had extravagant notions of the royal power, paid no regard to murmurs which he was resolved to stifle by force. As Spain demanded his presence, he intrusted the regency to his natural sister, Margaret duchess of Parma, a princess devoted to his will.

[Sidenote: [1556-1567 A.D.]]

After the king’s departure, the regent put the obnoxious edicts into execution, and the blood of martyrs moistened the soil of the Low Countries. Her natural disposition was doubtless averse to cruelty; but she was governed by Cardinal Granvella, a furious zealot, to whose suggestions, as they were strictly in conformity with the instructions of Philip, she was almost compelled to defer. The native nobles, who formed the council of regency, were not a little chagrined to find their voices powerless--that measures were framed not only without their consent, but without their knowledge; and they resolved to remove the odious churchman. Among these were two of more than ordinary consideration--William prince of Orange, and Count Egmont; the former governor of Holland, Zealand, and Utrecht, the latter of Artois and Flanders. They were soon joined by Count Horn, a nobleman of equal ambition, and equally jealous of Granvella’s ascendency. The cardinal, perceiving the execration in which he was held, applied for a release from his unenviable post. It was reluctantly granted by the king, who never forgave the men that had occasioned it. But it produced no relief for the dissenters.

The decrees of the Council of Trent--decrees written in blood--were ordered to be executed with even increased severity by some bigoted counsellors. A confederacy was now formed, professed to prevent the dreaded introduction of the Inquisition, but in reality to procure uncontrolled liberty of conscience, or to throw off the Spanish yoke. It was headed by Philip de Marnix, lord of St. Aldegonde; but though the three nobles before mentioned were not members, they were the soul of its proceedings. Emboldened by their numbers, the lower class of Protestants rose in several of the towns to inflict on the Roman Catholics what they themselves had suffered; perhaps more still were incited by the hope of plunder. This was but the beginning of horrors: a furious organised band, amplified as it went along, hastened to the neighbouring towns; and, if the relations of Catholic writers are to be believed, soon laid waste four hundred sacred edifices.

When Philip received intelligence of these events,[85] he called a council, which, after some deliberation, resolved that an army should be sent to extirpate heresy by open force. Its command was intrusted to the duke of Alva, whose relentless disposition seemed well adapted for the task. His powers were much more ample than those of a general-in-chief: they went so far as to control the authority of the regent. His arrival spread great consternation in the provinces; the more so, when counts Egmont and Horn were arrested (Prince William, too wise to await him, had fled into Germany); and the regent, finding that she was in fact superseded, resigned her authority, and returned to Italy. Many thousands, in dread of the approaching persecution, fled into the Protestant states of Europe; to no country more readily than to England.

[Sidenote: [1567-1573 A.D.]]

A new tribunal, called the Council of Tumults, was formed: its name implied that it was to take cognisance of the late disorders; but, in reality, it was to be an inquisition. Its fatal activity was soon manifest: confiscations, imprisonment, executions were of hourly occurrence. The number of victims is impossible to be estimated: the Protestants say it amounted to thousands; the Catholics, that the ringleaders only suffered the last penalty. It was, however, severe enough to fill all the Protestant states of Europe with concern, and even to draw forth expostulation from several Catholic. How little such remonstrance availed with either the king or his viceroy, appeared from the execution of the counts Egmont and Horn. Their death made a deep impression on the people, who began to turn their eyes towards the prince of Orange, whom they requested to arm in behalf of his suffering country. William was sufficiently inclined, both by love of liberty and personal ambition, to make the attempt. He and his brothers had for some time been making preparations--raising money and troops in the Protestant states of Germany, and collecting the exiles who had fled from the scaffold. To enter into the details of the interminable wars which followed, from 1568 to 1598, would little accord either with the limits or the design of this chapter. They will be found in the history of the Netherlands. In an assembly of the Dutch states, held at Dordrecht, they openly recognised William as their governor, and voted him supplies to carry on the war. By their invitation he arrived among them, and the reformed religion was declared that of the state. Alva and his son took the field, to recover the places which had rebelled; and wherever their arms were successful, the cruelties inflicted by them on the inhabitants were certainly horrible. It may, however, be doubted whether they were not fully equalled by the atrocities of the count de la Marek, and other Protestant leaders--atrocities which William, with laudable humanity, endeavoured to end. Philip was at length convinced that a wrong policy had been adopted; and Alva was either recalled, or permitted to retire. He was succeeded by Requesens, a nobleman of equal talents and moderation. The fortune of his administration was varied. He soon lost Middelburg; but he defeated and slew Count Louis of Nassau. He failed before Leyden, the inhabitants of which defended themselves with a heroism and a constancy never surpassed; but, on the other hand, he gained some fortresses in North Zealand. On the whole, however, he was so dissatisfied with his success that anxiety brought him to his grave.

[Sidenote: [1573-1592 A.D.]]

Under the council of state which next governed the Netherlands, Spanish affairs wore a much worse aspect. Sometimes the troops mutinied for their arrears of pay, which Philip’s coffers could not often satisfy. They seized Alost, and plundered Antwerp, which had shown more attachment to the prince’s cause. To restore the fortune of the war, in 1576, Don John of Austria, the king’s brother, was appointed to the regency. After some warlike operations, in which assistance was furnished by Elizabeth, and which were to the advantage of the confederates, the duke of Anjou, who could muster an army, was invited by the Catholics to take possession of the government. Before the negotiations with this prince were concluded, Don John died; and Farnese, the prince of Parma, by far the ablest officer in the Spanish service, arrived, took command of the king’s forces, and by his valour no less than his policy changed the position of affairs. He gained possession of Flanders, Artois, and Hainault; but William of Orange had address enough to maintain all Holland, Gelderland, and Friesland, with a proportion of Brabant, in his interests.

These states he formed into a confederacy, called the Union of Utrecht, from the place where it was held. The apparent object was to secure the common weal; the real one, to subvert the Spanish sway. This confederacy was the foundation of the Seven United Provinces. The election of the duke of Anjou threatened forever to destroy the expiring domination of Spain, which the same states (in 1581) declared to be at an end. But Anjou was weak and faithless, and was soon expelled by his new subjects. Subsequently, indeed, they showed a disposition to be reconciled with him; but his death intervened, and again left the prince of Parma a theatre for the exercise of his talents. It was immediately followed by that of the prince of Orange, who was assassinated by the fanatic Balthasar Gerard, at the instigation of the Spanish general, if not of a higher personage. The death of this justly celebrated man did not produce any advantage for Spain: though his eldest son, the count of Buren, was a hostage in the hands of Philip, the second, Prince Maurice, soon showed that he was able to tread in his steps. The southern provinces, indeed, as far as the Schelde, were persuaded or compelled by Farnese to swear anew allegiance to the Spaniard: from community of religious feeling and from hereditary attachment his path here was smoothed; but in the northern, where the principles of the Reformation had struck so deeply into the soil, the house of Orange had laid the sure foundation of its future sway. The latter, after the loss of Antwerp, which was reduced by Farnese in 1585, were strengthened by the accession of Protestants from the Spanish provinces, and by the arrival of exiles from Germany and Britain.

[Sidenote: [1587-1598 A.D.]]

The impolitic war of Philip with France drew the prince of Parma from the Low Countries. The confederates had not only time to consolidate their powers north of the Schelde, but to make even destructive irruptions into Brabant and Flanders. The extraordinary military talents of Prince Maurice rendered him no mean antagonist for even the able Farnese. In 1592, the latter died, and with him ended the hope of subduing the northern provinces. The administration of Count Mansfeld, of Ernest archduke of Austria, of the count de Fuentes, led to little advantage, though the last was an able man. In 1596, the archduke Albert was appointed to the government, but it was disastrous; under it Maurice reduced not a few of the northern fortresses. Philip now opened his eyes to the impossibility of maintaining the Netherlands in obedience: he found that, even in the Catholic states, the name of Spaniard was odious; and, as he was approaching the end of his days, he was naturally anxious to settle the affairs of the country. These considerations, added to the affection which he bore for his daughter, the infanta Isabella, and the esteem which he entertained for Albert, made him resolve to marry the two, and resign the government to them and their heirs. This was one of his most prudent measures: if it could not recall Holland and the other Protestant provinces to obedience, it seemed likely at least to preserve those which were still left. The deed of abdication was executed in May, 1598, about four months before the monarch’s death.

ENGLISH AFFAIRS AND THE ARMADA

The succours which Elizabeth had from time to time afforded the insurgents of the Netherlands was not the only cause of Philip’s resentment and of his desire for revenge. She had fomented the disturbances in Portugal, consequent on the death of Cardinal Henry; and her captains, among whom Sir Francis Drake was the most active, had for many years committed unjustifiable depredations on the Spanish possessions of South America, and more than once on the coasts of the peninsula itself. By the Spanish historians these hostilities are represented as unprovoked in their origin, and as barbarous in their execution; and candour must allow that there is but too much justice in the complaint. When Philip’s patience was exhausted, and his affairs in the Netherlands allowed him a few months’ respite to avenge the insults he had so long sustained, he diligently began to prepare a mighty armament, which, though its destination was secret, was suspected by all to be intended against England.

In 1587, Elizabeth despatched Sir Francis to reconnoitre the coasts of the peninsula, and if possible to annihilate the preparations which were proceeding with so much rapidity. In April, that admiral, accompanied by twenty-five vessels, appeared before Cadiz, and, by hoisting French and Flemish colours, entered the bay. But he found the troops aware at length of his country, and drawn up to receive him: he therefore made no attempt to land; but having set fire to many merchant vessels, he returned. This aggression was not likely to cool the animosity of Philip: the preparations were hastened; all the seaports of Spain, the viceroys of Naples and Sicily, the governor of Milan and the Netherlands furnished vessels, troops, or money. The general rendezvous was Lisbon, and the command of the fleet confided to the duke of Medina Sidonia, while the prince of Parma was to conduct the land-forces. After some fruitless attempts at negotiation, in which neither party was sincere, and in which both merely sought to gain time,--how would such conduct be deprecated in private life?--a fleet of 131 ships, some the largest that ever ploughed the deep, carrying, exclusive of seven thousand sailors, no less than seventeen thousand of the bravest troops in the Spanish armies, and the flower of the Spanish chivalry, in May, 1588, left the harbour of Lisbon.

[Sidenote: [1588 A.D.]]

The pompous epithet of “the invincible,” which self-confidence had applied to this mighty armament, the approbation of the pope, and the great reinforcement which the prince of Parma had prepared in Flanders, might well inspire the enemy with hope of success.[i]

The fate of the Armada is too well known to need discussion here, especially as it finds full treatment in the history of England. It is well, however, to emphasise the opposition of the Spanish officers to the rash project, and to remember the large part played in the result by the remarkable series of storms against which the Spanish hulks were from their shape peculiarly helpless.

The Spanish historian Mariana,[p] who dedicated his monumental work to Philip II, wrote thus calmly of the failure of the Armada:

“King Philip had in readiness a mighty fleet at Lisbon to revenge the death of the innocent queen of Scots, and the many wrongs done to himself. The marquis of Santa Cruz was appointed admiral; but he dying in the midst of these preparations, the duke of Medina Sidonia was substituted in his place. He set sail in June with fair weather; and having turned Cape Finisterre, off Corunna, a violent storm so scattered and disabled the fleet that they could not put to sea again till September.[86] At length it came to the coast of Flanders, the English fleet always hovering upon their skirts, whose cannon and the many sand-banks much endangered our fleet. Some ships were taken by the enemy, and many sore battered by their shot. For which reason, endeavouring to return home round the north of Scotland, many ships perished in that stormy season and long voyage. Besides, the extremity of the cold and want of provisions consumed most of the men, so that very few ships, and a small number of mariners and soldiers, returned to several ports of Spain. Thus human designs are disappointed by a superior power. Doubtless the flower of all the Spanish soldiers was lost in this expedition, and God by this disaster punished the many sins of this nation.”

The same pious resignation was shown by Philip himself.[a]

Had the English admiral been well supplied with stores, instead of being compelled to return in search of them, not a vessel would ever have revisited Spain. How many actually perished has been disputed; but the Spaniards fix the number at thirty-two. They must, however, have been the largest, since half the soldiers returned no more, and most of the noble families had to mourn a lost member.

On this trying occasion Philip acted with great moderation: he ordered extraordinary care to be taken of the survivors; received the duke of Medina Sidonia with kindness; observed that no human prudence or valour could avail against the elements, and caused thanksgiving to be made that any of his subjects had returned. The following year an English fleet landed, first in Galicia, where, according to the Spanish accounts, the loss of the invaders was one thousand,[87] and next in Portugal, to support the pretensions of the prior of Crato; but with as little effect. This expedition was injudiciously planned: at this time the authority of Philip in Portugal was too firm to be shaken. The satisfaction which he felt was subsequently alloyed by the hostilities of his enemy in South America, and at Cadiz. In the former, indeed, his fleet triumphed; but in 1596, that flourishing seaport was taken and pillaged. The excesses committed on this occasion by the English troops under the earl of Essex are strongly reprobated by the Spanish historians, while their existence is denied by the English; here we prefer the evidence of the natives. Both admit that the plunder was immense. The insult so enraged the king that he resolved to equip an expedition for the invasion of Ireland, where he would certainly have been joined by the disaffected Romanists. This new fleet, however, was even more disastrous than the famous one of 1588; it was assailed by so furious a tempest that forty of the vessels were lost, and the rest disabled. The severity of this second blow deterred Philip from any future attempts on the most hated of his enemies.

ACQUISITION OF PORTUGAL

[Sidenote: [1580-1588 A.D.]]

The transactions of Philip with Portugal will be best related in the chapters devoted to the modern history of that kingdom. It is here sufficient to observe that, on the death of Cardinal Henry without issue (1580), the crown was claimed by the Castilian monarch in right of his mother; that though there were other competitors, of whom one was supported by England, and though the Portuguese themselves, from hatred to their neighbours, armed to oppose him, his forces placed him on the throne of that country; and that he continued to fill it unto his death. This acquisition, added to the other extensive dominions of Philip, rendered him by far the most powerful monarch in Europe.

So far with respect to the foreign transactions of Spain under the eventful reign of this monarch; its domestic history must now be noticed.

MORISCOS REVOLT

[Sidenote: [1567-1580 A.D.]]

The revolt of the Moriscos occupies a remarkable place in the native annals of the sixteenth century. These christianised Moors still remained Mohammedans at heart; and though they attended at mass, they made amends in secret for this compulsory apostasy, by celebrating the rites of their own religion. Early in 1567 a decree was published, that the children of the Moriscos should frequent the Christian church; that the Arabic should cease to be used in writing; that both men and women should wear the Spanish costume; that they should discontinue their ablutions; that they should no longer receive Mohammedan names; and that they should neither marry, nor remove from one place to another, without permission from the proper authorities.

The tenacity with which men adhere to ancient forms, even where there is not the slightest compromise of principle, appears from the opposition raised to the edict. The Moriscos contended, with great reason, that no particular mode of dress involved religious considerations, since, in every country, even where the same religion prevailed, it was found to vary; that if their women continued to use the veil, modesty only was the cause; that their musical instruments were equally harmless; that the use of the Arabic language could not surely be a sin, since it was the mother-tongue of many oriental Christians; and that their baths were used, not from religion, but from cleanliness. The marquis of Mondejar, captain-general of Granada, who had strongly disapproved the royal ordinance, was persuaded to lay these representations before the king. They had no effect--a result which so irritated this people that a general revolt was planned. Its chief authors were Ferag ben Ferag, descended from the royal house of Granada, and Diego Lopez ben Abu. The evening of Christmas Day was fixed for the general rising. With the romantic view of restoring their ancient kingdom, they secretly elected in Granada a sovereign, Ferdinand de Valor, whom they named Muhammed ben Humeya, and whose family was of royal extraction.

This bold step was followed by other measures equally secret and vigilant. Officers were nominated; the mountaineers and inhabitants of the plain armed, and ordered to rise on the night appointed--when alarm guns should be fired by the Christians from the fortress of the Alhambra. When the day arrived, eight thousand men lay in the mountains which overlook the towers of Granada, and two thousand more in a different direction, waiting for the signal. They had agreed to assail three of the gates, while another party should scale the walls: the Mohammedans who had been committed to the prisons of the Inquisition, or to those of the state, were immediately to be released, and every Christian in the place to be massacred. Fortunately for the city, several accidents conspired to avert the catastrophe. The night was dark; a heavy snow fell in the mountains; it was followed by a still heavier rain, which rendered them impassable, and compelled the eight thousand in ambush to retire. Ignorant of this disaster, in accordance with a preconcerted plan, Ibn Ferag, accompanied by 180 resolute Moriscos, advanced to the walls of the Albaycin, which they soon scaled, and with loud voices called on their brethren of that quarter to join them. The call, which, as it was issued by trumpets, amidst the silence of night, was heard by all, was applied to deaf ears; none obeyed it.

MOORISH ATROCITIES

[Sidenote: [1568 A.D.]]

But if no impression was made on the capital, the case was far different with respect to the towns and villages in the province, the Moorish inhabitants of which rose simultaneously with this attempt. From Granada Ibn Ferag led his followers into the Alpujarras, where being joined by the monfis, or banditti of these mountains, he passed from place to place to sustain the insurrection.

At the same time orders were given by Ibn Humeya to massacre all Christians above the age of ten years. The vengeance of these ferocious apostates fell chiefly upon the priests who had forced them to mass, on the altars and images which they had been compelled to venerate, on collectors of the taxes, and on the officers of justice.

At Ragol, in the district of Marchena, the priest was dragged from the altar where he was celebrating mass, and was hung from a pillar: when dead, he was flayed, and his skin nailed to the wall. At Pitres, after the church and private houses had been plundered, the prisoners were brought out to suffer; but for the priest, who, with his aged mother, exhorted them not to flinch in the trial before them, a more lingering death was reserved. He was first drawn up by a pulley to the top of the steeple, and suffered to fall; but though his legs and arms were broken, he was not dead: he was then heavily cudgelled; still he breathed: a cord was thrown over his neck, and the end first given to some Morisco women, who dragged him through the mire, plunging needles, scissors, and knives into his body, until he perished. These demons of women next destroyed the venerable matron in the same manner. In some places the executions were conducted with whimsical caprice. In one, the rebels first shaved both the head and beard of the curate, but not so dexterously as to avoid inflicting some severe wounds; they next put him to death. In another, the priest and several of his flock having taken refuge in the church, and knelt, to prepare for their inevitable fate, before the high altar, they were seized by the Moorish alguazil; who, in delivering them into the hands of the bloodhounds outside, observed, “Kill these dogs! Let the priest have the first blow, in reward for the anxiety he showed about our souls; let the sacristan have the second, in return for the chastisement he inflicted on us when we either failed to attend mass or arrived too late!”

They seized an image of the Virgin, which, after buffeting and kicking and dragging through the mud, they rolled down a steep eminence, calling on the idol, with ludicrous jeers, to save itself if it had any virtue in it. In another, as a Moorish wag was dragging a large crucifix through a sewer, he perceived a Christian physician, to whom he cried out, “Dog, here is thy Creator! canst thou not cure him?” The horrified Christian immediately knelt, kissed the log, which he declared was indeed his Creator, and was immediately transfixed by the contemptuous bystanders. A magistrate of Santa Cruz was stripped before his three daughters and one of his grandsons; his nose was cut off and nailed to his forehead; and in this state all were led out. On the way to the place of execution, with hands tied behind them, he forgot his own sufferings to strengthen their constancy by his exhortations: and his discourse so incensed the Moriscos that one cut off his ears, and crammed them into his mouth; another, improving on the barbarity, cut open his belly, and thrust into the cavity, ears, nose, tongue, hands, and feet; and in this state the poor sufferer was thrown into the flames. The daughters were spared--probably to satiate the brutal lust of the misbelievers. The priest of Andarax was roasted over a brazier; and while sustaining the agony with devout constancy, his mouth was gagged, that he might not invoke the divine mercy; the women, tired of waiting for his death, at length despatched him with their knives and needles. At one place, with the view of ridiculing the sacrifice of the mass, the rebels killed a pig on the high altar. At another, where, under the assurance of safety, about one hundred prisoners who had sought refuge in the fortress surrendered and were immediately butchered, two priests rendered themselves peculiarly obnoxious by their zealous exhortations to the martyrs. One of them was suspended with the head downwards, and with a noose round his neck; at the other end of the cord a second noose was made, and thrown over the neck of the other priest, who was similarly suspended: in their agony they strangled each other, amidst the shouts of the spectators. At Oanez, twenty-five Christian maidens of surpassing beauty were reserved as a present to the African princes whose aid had been solicited. As usual, endeavours were made to convert them, but without effect. Policy yielding to religious fury, they were stripped naked, conducted into the fields, tied to trees, pricked from head to foot with briers and thorns, and a rope being passed round them as they stood in a circle, was drawn so tight as to produce excruciating agony: in the end they were shot. Such are a few of the horrors perpetrated by the Moriscos on this occasion. The number of victims cannot be estimated; it probably amounted to thousands.

CHRISTIAN ATROCITIES

[Sidenote: [1568-1570 A.D.]]

When intelligence of these events reached the marquis of Mondejar, after providing for the defence of Granada, he took the field. Ibn Humeya, confiding in the defiles of the Alpujarras, prepared to receive him; while another band of the rebels placed themselves in opposition to the marquis de los Velez, on the southern frontier of this mountainous district. In some isolated actions, the Moriscos had the advantage; but this was only when the Christians went in scattered detachments, and were consequently subject to surprise. The former were too weak, even with the succours they derived from Africa, to risk a general engagement. Fortress after fortress fell into the power of the royal generals, who vigorously pursued the enemy.

The marquis de Mondejar continued the desultory warfare with more or less success. That success would have been much more decisive, but for the opposition between him and the marquis de los Velez: the former was for tempering mercy with justice; the latter for extermination. Horrors now were as much the work of the Christians as of the Moriscos. An event, which happened in the fortress of Jubiles made a deep impression on the rebels, and contributed more than any other cause to feed the flame of civil strife. That fortress being invested by the marquis, three aged Moriscos issued from it with the banner of peace, and agreed to its surrender, on the condition that the lives of the garrison, consisting of three hundred men and fifteen hundred women, should be respected. It was accordingly entered by the royal troops, to whom the plunder was abandoned. The men were lodged with the inhabitants of the town; the women were ordered to be accommodated in the church. As that edifice, however, would contain no more than five hundred, the remaining thousand were compelled to pass the night in the square before it. Guards were posted to protect them.

About the middle of the night, one of the soldiers, being enamoured with a young Morisca, wished to detach her from her companions. She resisted; he pulled her away by force; when one of the persons by her side--her husband or brother, in the disguise of a woman--took her part, engaged, and disarmed the soldier. The confusion produced by this struggle led to a tumult; the soldiers rushed from their camp; it was proclaimed that many armed Moriscos were disguised among the prisoners; and, in the fury of the moment, the whole number were pitilessly massacred. In vain did the marquis endeavour to stay the carnage: the authority of the officers was disregarded. At break of day their fury cooled, and gave way to remorse on perceiving the bloody corpses of one thousand helpless, unarmed women. This bloody crime will never be blotted from the minds of men.[88]

The tyranny of Ibn Humeya somewhat counterbalanced the effect which this terrific tragedy was so well calculated to produce. He assassinated his father-in-law, repudiated his wife, put to death several of her relatives, and threatened the same fate for her brother, Diego de Rojas, one of his ablest adherents. By this hasty vengeance he naturally estranged many of his followers. As the Christian army advanced into the mountains, he was compelled to flee from one position to another; but not without loss to his pursuers.

Mondejar considered that the war was at an end, and that the fugitive would infallibly be captured. He did not know that, notwithstanding the heavy losses sustained by the enemy, they were still six thousand in number; many of them determined to resist to the last extremity. In a few days, however, on the heights of the Sierra Nevada, one thousand were exterminated by the marquis de los Velez.

But such were the excesses of the Christian soldiers, the want of faith which characterised some of their leaders, and the rapacity of all, that no reverses could make the rebels lay down their arms; and on several occasions they were enabled to inflict a suitable revenge. The Moriscos had learned, to their cost, that even when conditions of capitulation had been proposed and accepted, in violation of their terms the prisoners were plundered or massacred. It was asserted that no faith could be placed in a Christian’s word or bond; and the report naturally strengthened the bands of Ibn Humeya. Philip saw that the two marquises would never cordially co-operate so long as each led an independent power; and he subjected both to the authority of his bastard brother, Don John of Austria.

Several districts which had submitted rebelled anew, and Ibn Humeya was at the head of a far more numerous force than had ever yet taken the field.

At Valor, whither the marquis de los Velez penetrated, Ibn Humeya made a vigorous stand; but notwithstanding his valour, which was never perhaps surpassed, and his abilities, which were of a high order, he was signally defeated and compelled to flee almost alone. This disaster was partially repaired by a reinforcement from Africa, and by the spirit of desertion which prevailed in the camp of the marquis. His own conduct, however, continually increased the number of his enemies. One night he was strangled, and Ibn Abu was proclaimed under the name of Mulei Abdallah.

The war now raged with various success; to each party the loss of one day was counterbalanced by the gain of the next, until Don John of Austria, who had assembled troops on every side, again took the field in person. He proceeded to reduce the mountain fortresses. One after another fell into his hands. To prevent another insurrection after submission, the inhabitants of the newly subdued towns were transplanted to other parts, generally to the towns of Andalusia; a few into New Castile. This measure contributed more than any other to weaken the rebels, and to hasten the conclusion of the war. In almost every partial action--the enemy could no longer dream of a general one--the advantage lay with the Christians; nor was the success less rapid than decided.

As the whole range of mountains was now almost depopulated, the Moriscos being uniformly transferred to other parts, and as but a handful of desperate adventurers, most of whom had been professed banditti, remained, the chiefs who still adhered to Mulei now advised him to submit. He refused and was killed. With Mulei was extinguished the last spark of the rebellion.

THE MISFORTUNES OF DON CARLOS

[Sidenote: [1562-1570 A.D.]]

The next important feature in the domestic administration of Philip is the fate of his first-born son, Don Carlos. This prince, who was born in 1545, was by nature of fiery temperament and of irregular manners. In his seventeenth year he sustained an accident, which was, doubtless, the chief cause of all his misfortunes. One day, while at the university of Alcalá, he fell headlong down the staircase, and was for some time stunned by the blow. As no external injury was visible, his medical attendants hoped that he would soon be restored; but in a few days he was seized with an alarming fever, and they were painfully convinced that a serious internal one had been sustained. The fever increased, delirium approached, the king was sent for, and all hope of cure abandoned (1562).

In this extremity, when human aid was evidently unavailing, recourse was had to the merits of San Diego of Alcalá, who had always been the peculiar object of the prince’s veneration. The holy corpse was exhumed and brought into the bedchamber of Carlos, whose hands were devoutly placed on it, and whose lips implored the intercession of the saint; at the same time a part of the shroud was laid on his burning face. While a procession of monks removed the corpse to the tomb, the prince, we are gravely informed, fell into a sweet sleep, in which San Diego appeared to him, and assured him of a speedy recovery. The prediction, we need scarcely add, was immediately verified! Unfortunately, however, the saint could only restore the body; from this moment must be dated the periodical insanity of the patient, and that invariable eccentricity of manner which is inconsistent with soundness of intellect.[89] As he grew in years he exhibited his wayward humour; sometimes the most extravagant freaks. Nothing can more clearly show his unfortunate state of mind than his behaviour to the duke of Alva, when that nobleman, on being appointed to the government of the Netherlands, called to take leave of him. He told the duke that to him alone belonged the dignity, and that he would take the life of anyone who usurped it from him. Alva, with great mildness, endeavoured to pacify him, but in vain: in his fury he drew forth a dagger, and would assuredly have buried it in the governor’s heart, had not the latter seized his hands and held him until some gentlemen of the household hastened to the scene. One of his favourite diversions was to walk the streets by night, sometimes indecently exposing his person. On one occasion a pair of new boots were brought, which the prince, finding too tight, immediately cut into pieces, and made the poor workman swallow several. One day his chamberlain, Don Alfonso de Cordova, brother of the marquis de las Navas, being summoned by the bell, was unable to arrive in time for his impatience: he took the chamberlain in his arms, swore he would throw him out at the window, and advanced to one for the purpose, when the cries of Don Alfonso brought the domestics to his aid. Being one day in a forest with his governor, Don Garcia de Toledo, whom he hated for attempting to restrain his desperate excesses, he proceeded to stab that nobleman; but the intended victim escaped and reported him to the king. In short, his conduct to all his servants was intolerable, alike for its cruelty and caprice: several he beat, a few he maimed; nor could the exhortations of his father or his confessor make any impression on him. To the former he bore a bitter hatred: the cause was that Philip, who knew his fatal infirmity, would not allow him to interfere with public affairs.

At length, being discovered in an attempt to flee into the Netherlands, to place himself at the head of the insurgents, the king felt that he should be compelled to place a guard over his frenzied son. On the night of January 19th, 1568, accompanied by four of his nobles and some armed guards, he proceeded to the prince’s apartment, took away his papers, his sword, knives, and everything that could be hurtful to him; assuring him at the same time that he had no end in view beyond his good.

He confided the care of the prince to six gentlemen of the noblest families of Spain, two of whom were always to be with him night and day; and he placed over all the duke of Feria and the prince of Eboli. This measure, however well intended, did no good: Carlos grew sullen and obstinate; his freaks more frequent and capricious. To walk in a state of nudity through his apartments; to refrain from food two days together, and then to eat voraciously; to drink immoderate quantities of the coldest water; to steal ice and convey it into his bed;[90] to devour the sourest fruits, were his constant occupation. The infallible consequences soon appeared: his stomach refused to retain the most wholesome food, much more the medicines that were administered to him; a malignant fever assailed him; and he was told to prepare for death. At this period his better feelings returned; he asked for his father, whose pardon he humbly demanded, and whose blessing he received; he received the last sacraments, commended his soul to God, and died at midnight, July 24th, 1568.

The fate of this maniac prince has called forth much affected commiseration, inasmuch as it has enabled malignity to assail the memory of the father. It has been stated that Philip was the rival of his son in the affections of a French princess [Elizabeth (Isabella), daughter of King Henry II]; that after she became queen of Spain, she loved the latter, and detested the former; that jealousy forced the king to the most tyrannical treatment of the youth; that Carlos was persecuted by the Inquisition, and at length poisoned, by order of the father.[91] The truth is that Philip behaved with much moderation to a son who was fit only for a receptacle for lunatics.

FATE OF THE KING’S SECRETARY, PEREZ

[Sidenote: [1568-1579 A.D.]]

But if impartial justice acquit Philip of guilt, or even of undue severity in regard to his son, the same favourable verdict cannot be given in regard to two other affairs, which have been studiously wrapped in great darkness: they were the assassination of Juan de Escovedo, secretary to Don John of Austria, and the subsequent persecution of Antonio Perez, Philip’s secretary of state. The former, who had been sent to Spain on business of his master, was murdered at Madrid, in March, 1578. The assassins were not unknown; but they were suffered to escape into Italy, and were afterwards employed in the service of the Neapolitan viceroy. That they were hired by Antonio Perez is undoubted, from his own confession; but what interest had he, what revenge to gratify, in such a crime? The same confession--published many years after the tragedy--throws the entire blame on the king; nor is there any reason to doubt its truth.[92]

The most probable hypothesis is that Escovedo was the prime intriguer in the ambitious schemes which Don John is known to have formed: that he had persuaded his master to aspire to the hand of Elizabeth, queen of England, was seriously affirmed by letters from the Low Countries; and that he had passed two months in England in trying to open negotiations for that end was said to rest on the authority of the Spanish ambassador at Rome.[i]

The sons of the murdered Escovedo had, soon after their father’s death, instituted a prosecution against the secretary, Antonio Perez, as the author of the foul deed. Through the king’s intervention, and under his sanction, a compromise was effected between the parties. Perez paid a large sum of money to Escovedo’s family, whereupon he was set at liberty, and, though forbidden to appear at court, continued to conduct the business of his office. But either the alleged intimacy with the princess of Eboli still rankled in Philip’s mind, or he dreaded the disgraced secretary’s revealing his own share in Escovedo’s assassination. In 1591 Perez was accused of boasting of the murder, of betraying state secrets to the princess of Eboli, of falsifying the letters he deciphered, and of taking bribes. Upon these charges he was thrown into prison, where, whilst he was offered his liberty as the price of giving up the king’s letters touching Escovedo’s death, he was treated with extraordinary severity. Perez accepted the terms, and was released: but he managed to keep back one note, which Philip, it seems, had forgotten.

[Sidenote: [1579-1591 A.D.]]

The liberty thus purchased. Perez was not, however, long permitted to enjoy. The prosecution for the murder was revived; the accused was again thrown into prison, where he was tortured to extort a confession, which he had no desire to withhold. He is said to have revealed all, giving the reserved royal letter as evidence of his truth; and thus Philip, whose only object in this strange tissue of artifice appears to have been the clearing himself by a judicial sentence from any participation in the murder, was caught in his own toils. But the situation and prospects of the prisoner were not improved by the exposure of his royal accomplice; and he saw that in flight lay his only chance of life. His escape was happily managed by the address of his wife. Perez fled to his native Aragon; and there, though he was again seized by the king’s orders, his condition was far different. He appealed to the yet inviolate laws and privileges of Aragon. The justiciero mayor, Juan de Lanuza, evoked the cause before his own tribunal at Saragossa, where the proceedings were public; and he lodged the accused in the prison called the Manifestacion, under his own sole and especial jurisdiction.

This was not the tribunal before which it suited Philip that Perez should be tried. The Inquisition, therefore, accused the ex-secretary of heretical opinions; and as the justiciero mayor would not surrender his prisoner, the inquisitors, with the assistance of the marquis of Almenara, a minister of the king, broke open the prison, and removed him to their own dungeons. Such an infraction of the Aragonese constitution roused the spirit of the people, and a regular contest ensued between them and the king’s officers, in the course of which the marquis of Almenara was so ill-used as to occasion his death. Perez was recovered from the inquisitors and replaced in the justiciero’s custody; again seized by the inquisitors, and again torn from them by the populace, who, upon this second occasion, favoured his flight, when Perez, by the aid of his friends, escaped into France, where he was kindly received and protected by Henry IV.

Philip sent an army into Aragon, to quell and chastise these disorders. Prudence and submission upon negotiation might still, perhaps, have effected a compromise: but the justiciero had died during the tumults, and his son, who had succeeded to his office, rashly attempted to resist by force this second act of unconstitutional violence; for no foreign troops might enter Aragon without the consent of the cortes or the justiciero; and each of the several kingdoms united under the name of Spain still considered the natives of the others as foreigners. The attempt was unsuccessful, and again the fatal consequences of unsuccessful rebellion followed. The justiciero, together with the duke of Villa Hermosa, and some other leaders of the insurgents, were put to death; and the liberties of Aragon were very greatly diminished, though not so completely crushed as those of Castile had long been.[n]

DE CASTRO’S ESTIMATE OF ANTONIO PEREZ

[Sidenote: [1591-1611 A.D.]]

Hated by the people while his influence with Philip II lasted, Antonio Perez became eminently popular as soon as his sufferings began. The secretary of state had commenced his brilliant career with a careful education, a vast knowledge, and an experience superior to his years. His handsome appearance won him the attention and favour of high-born women; his easy and agreeable manner gave him the highest place at the splendid court; his great ability, intelligence, and skill in business, his courtier-like cleverness had promptly won him his king’s affection.

The highest offices were heaped upon him, country-seats, palaces, carriages, horses, banquets, magnificent furniture, gold, and precious stones, all that his century could bestow, the delights of luxury, the pleasures of riches, the adulation of a high position--all was within his reach, and he abused all without limit or restraint. What could he not promise himself? What could he not hope for? Nevertheless the scene completely changed for the dazzled favourite; the hour of misfortune roused him from the soft sleep of his sybaritic delights, of his ambitious hopes, and imprisonment, tortures, the most violent and painful sufferings put his rich nature to the proof, exhausted the resources of his character, humbled his pride, and effacing the grievous errors of his prosperity, repeatedly poured into his ardent and pleasure-loving soul the balsam of resignation and the consolations of melancholy.

Having taken refuge in Paris by the side of Henry IV, he employed the rest of his life in defending the acts of his administration, and in vindicating his name from the grave accusations weighing on him. It was then he wrote his voluminous work entitled Memoirs and Letters of Antonio Perez, a book now well-nigh forgotten, but which in its time won the highest fame for its author. And this fame was just. All his writings in France, all his labours in England, had but the one exclusive aim--his defence; while he excited the interest of powerful foreigners won by the attraction of his cultured conversation, his graceful manners, and his flowery and witty letters. By this means his life and defence gained the highest popularity, his book made the greatest sensation in Paris, and numerous editions, translations, and extracts followed in quick succession to satisfy the public eagerness. The attentions of interest, the praise of admiration everywhere followed Perez, and while people believed his word and compassionated his dramatic misfortunes, they anathematised with horror the memory of his persecutor, the son of the victorious emperor, the eternal enemy of French influence.

An extraordinary coincidence kept the memory of his misfortunes ripe in Spain. His last persecution is intimately connected with the abolition of Aragonese fueros, when, a fugitive from prison, Antonio Perez presented himself in Saragossa, imploring the aid of the country’s laws, and appealed to the magistrates of the town, and his personal friends watched that no harm should come to his person. Provocations on one side, excesses and disorders on the other, brought about a revolution; and when the king’s troops presented themselves before the gates of Saragossa, the people neither knew how to calm down nor to resist them, and Aragonese liberty came to perish on the scaffold of Lanuza. The remembrance of their lost privileges, the memory of their sufferings, lasted many years in Aragon, and the natives of the country loved and defended the person of the luckless being who was the occasion rather than the motive of their rising. The name of Antonio Perez has become therefore strangely involved with the fueros of his native land, and both causes have been handed down to posterity united in a common misfortune and a common love.

But it is unworthy of the learning of the age to judge the first of Spanish kings by the light of the deceptive rays reflecting from his political and religious enemies, from the point of view of the philosophical prejudices of the eighteenth century. By the blunders of his administration, the violence of his passions, the exaggeration of his character the son of Charles V has given sufficient food for censure, without heaping on his head false crimes and imaginary faults. When, trusting to appearances or to partisan reports, one judges Philip II in his dealings with Antonio Perez, one’s natural feeling is to absolve the favourite and condemn the king, but if one has the curiosity to examine contemporary documents, if one investigates the private or public interests which suddenly changed the condescending friendship of the king into hatred and persecution, one certainly deplores the misfortune of the fallen minister and the inexorable anger of his sovereign, but the extravagant admiration for the victim will slightly decrease, and the abhorrence for the man who abandoned him to the implacable hatred of his enemies will be less intense.

His life is a lasting example to proud courtiers that the favour of princes is inconstant as the calmness of the sea; speedily the tempest comes and lashes the waves. As the famous duke of Alva said to the prince of Eboli: “Kings are wont to prove men like children with personal favours, and bait them like fishes.”

The life of Antonio Perez is an example of the inconstancy of fortune and the vanity of worldly desires; and there is a warning in the fate of the magnate who, having drained all the pleasures of riches and seductions of vanity, dazzled by the height of his position fell into such affliction and misery that his contemporaries considered him worthy of the title--“fortune’s freak.”[m]

THE DEATH OF PHILIP

[Sidenote: [1597-1598 A.D.]]

Philip now felt his latter end approaching; and, from a natural desire to leave his wide-spreading dominions in a tranquil state to his son, he gladly accepted Pope Clement VIII’s proposal to mediate a peace between France and Spain. The negotiation was procrastinated by the archduke’s surprise and capture of Amiens, which Henry thought it indispensable to recover, before he would even listen to terms. The Spanish garrison in that town capitulated in the autumn of 1597; and in the following summer, notwithstanding the opposition of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Maurice, the Peace of Vervins was concluded upon equitable conditions--all conquests being mutually restored, and all pretensions to any part of each other’s dominions mutually relinquished.

This peace and the investing of the infanta with the sovereignty of the Netherlands were the last acts of Philip. He did not live to see the celebration of her marriage, or of his son’s with Margaret, daughter of the archduke Charles of Austria, which he had concluded. He had for years been, like his father, a martyr to the gout, but had never permitted his sufferings to interfere with his regal duties. During the severest paroxysms, he regulated everything, and frequently, when urged to spare himself, said that the pains in his joints did not lame his brain. His last illness was dreadful, his limbs being covered with ulcers that generated swarms of the most loathsome vermin. In that condition he lay for fifty days, and is said to have exhibited during the whole time a wonderful example of Christian patience and resignation. He died on the 13th of September, 1598. Of his numerous children, two only survived him--his son Philip, and the infanta Isabella. A second daughter, Catherine, had married the duke of Savoy, but died before her father, leaving a large family.

In America the limits of the Spanish empire were extended during this reign, but not so as sensibly to affect the power or the greatness of the mother-country. One fact, however, deserves notice. Whilst all surrounding Indians bowed beneath the yoke, and were rapidly swept away by the unaccustomed toils their new masters required, one bold and warlike tribe in the province of Chile, named the Araucans, after submitting like the rest, rose against their oppressors, and for years defied all the troops the Chilian and the Peruvian Spaniards could send against them. The war was ended only by a treaty recognising their independence. In the East Indian seas the Philippines were named and colonised.

[Sidenote: [1556-1598 A.D.]]

Philip II had received Spain from his father in a state of brilliant prosperity. Her agriculture and manufactures were flourishing, and were competent to supply her large exports to her American colonies. That from this happy condition Spain began, during his long reign, to decline, is admitted by those Spanish writers who most warmly eulogise Philip; nor is the great pecuniary distress denied to which the lord of America and her mines was latterly reduced. The two facts form a curious comment upon the extraordinary prudence considered by them as his peculiar characteristic.

For this decline various causes have been assigned by philosophical historians, as, the numerous colonies that drained the population of the mother-country; the disgust which men, who saw immense fortunes easily and rapidly accumulated, in the plunder or the mines of the New World, conceived for the toils and the slow profits of trade and husbandry; the enormous waste of men and money occasioned by the various and simultaneous wars into which Philip was hurried, by either an extravagant ambition or an uncalculating bigotry. Experience and a maturer philosophy teach us that whatever ills may be thus occasioned, they are in their nature temporary, requiring only time to correct themselves; and direct us to seek the true cause of the gradual downfall of Spain in her loss of liberty.

The union of Spain into one monarchy, under Ferdinand and Isabella, had lessened the long-existing intimate connection between king and people, and the dependence of the former upon the latter: the natural consequence was a diminished respect on the part of the crown for popular rights. The splendour of Charles’ reign, his clemency, conciliating manners, and good government, perhaps, blinded the nation to his gradual invasion of their privileges, and neglect of the forms of a free constitution. Under the sterner sway of Philip, a complete despotism was established, and it seemed to give him a boundless power, alarming Europe, at the moment his authority began to decline. Since the cortes had fallen into contempt, the cities had lost their importance, and an arbitrary system of taxation had shaken the security of property.

Under such circumstances, commerce languished, and had no energy to resist the blow when the English and Dutch fleets intercepted the vessels bearing Spanish merchandise to America, or bringing back an ample return. Agriculture, like manufactures, must always suffer from the impoverishment of any portion of the community; but in Spain it now laboured under peculiar additional evils. When the nobles were lured from their rural homes to court, for the purpose of weakening their feudal power, the peasantry, divided from their natural protectors, robbed of the encouragement and support of almost princely establishments in every part of the country, sank into a degraded class; whilst the mighty lords themselves became mere intriguing courtiers, rapacious for money, in order to rival each other in splendour, and tyrants of those dependent peasants to whom their ancestors were as fathers. In this state, the vital spirit that should have reacted against every disaster was no more; and calamities, in their nature temporary, became permanent.

Philip II adorned Spain with many useful and some ornamental works. He erected the Escorial, which has ever since been a favourite royal residence. The Escorial is an immense pile of building, uniting a monastery, a cemetery, and a palace, dedicated to St. Lawrence in gratitude for the great victory of St. Quentin, gained upon the day on which his festival is celebrated; and to stamp it yet more manifestly his, is built in the form of a gridiron, the instrument of that saint’s martyrdom. The expense of the Escorial is reckoned as one cause of the exhaustion of Philip’s exchequer.

Philip was, or in emulation of his father and of his great-grandmother Isabella desired to be, esteemed a patron of literature, and of learning in general: in token of which he sent his eldest son Don Carlos, his brother Don John, and his nephew, the prince of Parma, to be educated at the University of Alcalá; and during his reign flourished most of the great Spanish authors. But the privilege of proscribing whatever books they should judge dangerous to Catholicism, which he committed to the Inquisition, more than counterbalanced his patronising exertions.[n]

“When he succeeded to his father,” says Hume,[k] “Spain was already well-nigh ruined by the drain of the emperor’s wars, imposed upon him by the inheritance of Flanders and the empire. It would be unfair to blame the monarch for the folly of his financial measures, as the science of political economy was yet unknown; but their persistent perversity seems almost systematic. When no further supplies could be wrung from the cortes, funds were raised by the seizure of the money which came to merchants from the Indies in payment for goods, by forced loans from nobles, prelates, or wealthy burgesses, by the sale of seigniorial rights over villages and towns, and of the royal patrimony, by repudiating debts, reducing interest, and hampering commerce and industry.

“The maladministration arising from the evil system of pledging and farming future resources was never reformed, the squalid lavishness of the court expenditure was never reduced, a conciliatory policy in order to avoid the cost of war was never adopted: the only steps which appear to have occurred to the financial advisers of Philip were those which undermined public confidence and security, which blighted the national industries, and which killed future resources for the sake of present advantage. The continued aggregation of land in the hands of the church and tied up in perpetual entail, and the expulsion of the Moriscos from Andalusia had well-nigh ruined agriculture. To prevent whole provinces from starving in the finest grain country in the world, immense quantities of wheat had to be introduced from abroad, and the alcabala suspended on bread-stuffs imported into Seville. Constant wars and emigration, the association of the Moriscos with industry, and the immense number of church holidays, moreover, made the ordinary Spaniard contemptuous of work, and scanty in his aggregate production. And so the vicious circle went on, and the curse of far-reaching dominions in the possession of an imperfectly unified and organised country had in seventy years reduced Spain to the last depth of misery and penury. To some extent this may, of course, be attributed to Philip’s qualities and limitations; but it was mainly owing to a system and to circumstances which were originated before his birth and which neither his training nor his character enabled him to vary.”

DUNHAM’S ESTIMATE OF PHILIP II

His character must be sufficiently clear from his actions: that it was gloomy, stern, and cruel; that he allowed neither civil freedom, nor religious toleration, but was on all occasions the consistent enemy of both; that he was suspicious, dark, and vindictive, are truths too evident to be denied. On his return to Spain, immediately after his father’s resignation, a characteristic scene occurred in Valladolid, at an auto-da-fé, which he attended with much devotion. When the condemned arrived at the place where the fire and fagot awaited them, one of them, an officer of distinction, asked the king how he could have the heart to behold the exquisite torments of his people. “Were my own son,” replied the bigoted tyrant, “such a wretch as thou, he should suffer the same fate!”

And when the archbishop of Toledo, Don Bartolomeo de Carranza, was arrested on suspicion of heresy by the office blasphemously called holy, the king wrote to the inquisitors commanding them to show no respect for persons, however exalted, but to proceed even against his own son, should the latter ever dare to doubt the infallibility of the church. All this is bad enough; yet, by the French writers as well as by our own historians, he has been treated with injustice. His ambition was certainly subservient to his zeal for religion; his talents were considerable; for prudence he was almost unrivalled; his attention to public affairs and to the best interests of his country has been surpassed by few monarchs; his habits were regular, his temperance proverbial; his fortitude of mind, a virtue which he had often occasion to exercise, was admirable; and, in general, he was swayed by the strictest sense of justice. Even his religious bigotry, odious as it was, was founded on conscientious principles, and his arbitrary acts on high notions of the regal authority. By many of his subjects he was esteemed, by many feared, by some hated, by none loved.[i]

WATSON ON PHILIP’S IMPRUDENCES

Some historians have distinguished this prince by the title of Philip the Prudent, and have represented him as the wisest as well as the most religious prince that ever filled the Spanish throne. But it is questionable whether he be entitled to praise on account of his prudence, any more than on account of his religion. In the beginning of his reign he discovered great caution in his military enterprises; and, on some occasions, made even greater preparations than were necessary to insure success. But his ambition, his resentment, and his abhorrence of the Protestants were too violent to suffer him to act conformably to the dictates of sound policy and prudence.

He might have prevented the revolt of his Dutch and Flemish subjects if, after the reformation in the Netherlands was suppressed by the duchess of Parma, he had left the reins of government in the hands of that wise princess, and had not sent so odious a tyrant as the duke of Alva to enslave them. He might, after the defeat of the prince of Orange, have riveted the chains of slavery about their necks, and gradually accustomed them to the yoke, if, by engaging in too many expensive enterprises, he had not exhausted his exchequer, and made it in some measure necessary for Alva to impose the taxes of the tenth and twentieth pennies, for the maintenance of his troops. He might, through the great abilities of the duke of Parma, have again reduced the revolted provinces to obedience, if he had not conceived the wild ambition of subduing England and acquiring the sovereignty of France. His armies, in the latter part of his reign, were never sufficiently numerous to execute the various enterprises which he undertook; yet they were much more numerous than he was able to support. Few years passed in which they did not mutiny for want of pay. And Philip suffered greater prejudice from the disorders and devastation which his own troops committed, than he received from the arms of his enemies. Against his attempts on England and France, the wisest counsellors remonstrated in the strongest terms. And prudence certainly required that, previously to any attack upon the dominions of others, he should have secured possession of his own. Yet so great was his illusion that, rather than delay the execution of those schemes which his resentment and ambition had suggested, he chose to run the risk of losing the fruits of all the victories which the duke of Parma had obtained; and, having left defenceless the provinces which had submitted to his authority, he thereby afforded an opportunity to the revolted provinces of establishing their power on so firm a foundation that it could not be shaken by the whole strength of the Spanish monarchy exerted against it for more than fifty years.[h]

FOOTNOTES

[82] The character of these apostilles, always confused, wordy, and awkward, was sometimes very ludicrous; nor did it improve after his thirty or forty years’ daily practice in making them. Thus, when he received a letter from France in 1589, narrating the assassination of Henry III, and stating that “the manner in which he had been killed was that a Jacobin monk had given him a pistol-shot in the head” (la façon que l’on dit qu’il a etté tué, sa etté par un Jacobin qui luy a donné d’un cou de pistolle dans la tayte), he scrawled the following luminous comment upon the margin. Underlining the word pistolle, he observed, “this is perhaps some kind of knife; and as for ‘tayte,’ it can be nothing else but head, which is not tayte, but tête, or teyte, as you very well know.”--GACHARD.[d] It is obvious that a person who made such wonderful commentaries as this, and was hard at work eight or nine hours a day for forty years, would leave a prodigious quantity of unpublished matter at his death.

[83] “Nelle piaceri delle donne è incontinente, prendendo dilettatione d’andare in maschera la notte et nei tempi de negotii gravi,” etc.--BADOVARO.[e]

[84] [“Alva on his knees asked pardon for bearing arms against the church.”[g]]

[85] [Watson,[h] like some other Protestant historians, very gently alludes to these scenes. This is highly disingenuous. Nor are the Catholics less to blame; they exaggerate as much as their rivals conceal. The truth is to be gained from neither: it may with difficulty be extracted from both.]

[86] [The dates generally accepted differ by some months from Mariana’s: May 19th, 1588, the Armada sails from Lisbon; soon after dispersed by a storm. July 19th, 1588, enters channel off Cornwall.]

[87] [English historians pass very gently over the failure of this expedition. Some do not even condescend to notice it. According to Hume,[k] the English lost more than six thousand of their eighteen thousand men, a loss of over 30 per cent.]

[88] [Army after army of Christians were hurled upon them with the openly avowed object of massacre--not war. Women and children, as well as men, were slaughtered in cold blood. How many thousands fell in the attacks and inevitable reprisals it is impossible now to say. Six thousand helpless women and children fugitives were sacrificed in one day by the marquis de los Velez, but still the churchmen were not satisfied. In the council chamber and the cathedral they cried for blood, and ever more blood--just as the same men did for the blood of Flemish heretics at the hands of their chief Alva. In vain the civil governors, and even soldiers, advocated some moderation, some mercy. Deza the inquisitor and Espinosa the cardinal in their purple robes knew no mercy for those who denied their sacred right to impose a doctrine upon other men.[j]]

[89] [He was unskilfully treated by the doctors, ghastly superstitions were resorted to instead of proper surgical treatment, and he lay unconscious, blind, and partially paralysed, until an Italian surgeon trepanned him, and he then apparently recovered.[k]]

[90] [But as Prescott[o] points out, Carlos was confined in a stifling prison, suffering from high fever. The ice-water treatment was favoured then by certain physicians as it is now universally.]

[91] [The accusation was made by the arch-liar Antonio Perez, and Prince William of Orange[l] declared that there was proof at Paris that Philip murdered both his son and his wife; but the accusation is now generally counted as pure malice.]

[92] [It seems now that Philip gave Perez written authority to kill Escovedo, but that he neglected to do so till some months later when the king’s hostility had passed and the motive was simply the personal jealousy of Perez himself.]

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X. THE LAST OF THE SPANISH HABSBURGS

[Sidenote: [1598-1700 A.D.]]

The two preceding reigns, being by far the most important in the modern history of Spain, have commanded a corresponding share of our attention. But as with Philip II ends the greatness of the kingdom, which from that period declined with fearful rapidity,--as in the present chapter little remains to be recorded beyond the reign of worthless favourites, the profligacy of courts, and the deplorable weakness of government,--the journey before us will be speedily performed.

The first courtier to whom the destinies of the peninsula were confided, was the duke of Lerma; but as he had no talents either for peace or war, the burden of administration devolved on a needy adventurer, Rodrigo Calderon, one of his pages. In his domestic policy--if profligate imbecility deserve the name--the most signal circumstance is the expulsion of the Moriscos from Valencia, Andalusia, New Castile, and Granada. During and after their late rebellion, those baptised infidels were transported from the last-named kingdom, and dispersed among the Christian inhabitants of the countries adjoining. Tranquillity could scarcely be hoped from so arbitrary a measure; the Moriscos felt that they had been treated with equal perfidy and cruelty, and they thirsted for revenge. They accordingly renewed their correspondence with the African princes and the grand seignior, whom they continually urged to invade the peninsula, and in whose favour they promised to rise on the first signal. Though they were compelled to attend mass, they sought in secret ample amends for the violation of conscience, by observing the rites of their own religion, and by heaping insult on that which they had been constrained to honour with their lips.

The new king, Philip III, observed that he would rather be without subjects than rule over infidels: the foolish saying was applauded by the courtiers; and orders, dated September, 1609, were despatched to the captains-general to force the Moriscos on board the galleys prepared for them, and land them on the African coast. Those of Valencia, 150,000 in number, were first expelled; they were followed, though not without great opposition, nor in some places without open resistance, by their brethren of the other provinces. In the whole, no fewer than 600,000 were thus forcibly driven from their ancient habitations, omitting the mention of such as, by assuming the disguise of Christians, spread over Catalonia and southern France, and of the still greater number of children, who, being born from Moriscos and hereditary Christians, were suffered to remain. Those who disembarked in Africa were treated with characteristic inhumanity.

In 1618, the duke of Lerma was disgraced, and the real minister, Don Rodrigo Calderon, who had been adorned with numerous titles, was imprisoned. Subsequently he was tortured, tried, and sentenced to death; but, before the sentence could be put into execution, the king died. Philip IV, however, ordered him to the block. The removal of the duke only made way for another as imbecile and worthless as himself. So that the king was not troubled with state business, but allowed to have his women and his diversions, to provide for mistresses and parasites, he cared not who held the post of minister.

The foreign transactions of this reign are too unimportant to be detailed. In revenge for the maritime hostilities of the English, an expedition was sent to Ireland to raise the inhabitants against the government; but it was annihilated at Kinsale. In the Low Countries the war continued with little glory to the archduke Albert until 1609, when the independence of the Seven United Provinces was acknowledged by treaty. With France there was continued peace, which, in 1612, was strengthened by the double marriage of the prince of the Asturias with Isabella de Bourbon, and of Louis XIII with the infanta Anne [Anne of Austria], eldest daughter of the Spanish monarch. With the Venetians, Turks, and Moors of Africa there were some engagements, but nothing decisive was the result. Spain still retained the duchy of Milan, the kingdom of Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia, and the fortresses on the African coast.

Philip died March 31st, 1621. Besides his heir, and Anne, queen of France, he left children--Maria, queen of Hungary, Don Carlos and Don Ferdinand, who entered the church, and attained the dignity of cardinal. His character needs no description: it was chiefly distinguished for helpless imbecility, for dissipation, and idleness.[c]

CAUSES OF SPAIN’S RAPID DECLINE

[Sidenote: [1598-1621 A.D.]]

The rapid conquest of the Palatinate by the Spanish army, under the marquis Spinola, and the decisive battle of Prague, which the emperor gained by means of the treasures of Spain, brightened the last days of Philip III with a transient lustre. But the constitutional melancholy inherent in the Castilian line--the taint of the blood of Juana--predominated over all the excitement of victory and its exhilarating consequences. The gloom which had overcast the mind of the king could not be dispelled by the most brilliant successes; and those triumphs which, towards the close of his reign, diffused universal joy throughout Spain, conveyed no gladness to the breast of its desponding monarch.

At the accession of Philip IV, the Spanish monarchy had much declined from that supremacy which it had so long held among the nations. Its territory indeed was but little diminished, and if power could be measured by extent of dominion, Spain was still the most potent kingdom in Europe. But its energy was in a great measure spent, and its resources were nearly drained.

In every country there is an epoch of exhaustion as well as of excitement; and in the political constitution, not less than in the bodily frame, the period of depression quickly follows on that of excitation. The growth of the Spanish monarchy had been rapid and gigantic--more so, perhaps, than that of any sovereignty, except the Grecian Empire of Alexander. But its sudden increase of power had been somewhat forced and premature. It was produced by the matrimonial alliances of its sovereigns, by accidental discoveries which opened as if by miracle the gates of dominion, and by the pre-eminent talents of a few individuals, who, within a short compass of time, rose in constellation on Spain--Ferdinand the Catholic, with his illustrious queen Isabella, Gonsalvo de Cordova, Cardinal Ximenes, and the emperor Charles. Its progress in power was not accompanied by a corresponding expansion of intellect, or advancement in knowledge. The time of its supremacy was consequently brief, and the decay which it suffered during the short reign of Philip III was more swift than any recorded in the history of the decline or fall of empires.

But though Spain had thus sunk in the space of a few years, the causes of its depression may be traced through a much longer period, and may even be found in the era of its augmentation and prosperity. Spain had not enjoyed but abused her strength; and if the maxim be just, that an immeasurable ambition is the ruin of nations, never was country better entitled to destruction. As early as the reign of Charles V, the kingdom had been emptied both of men and treasure to support foreign wars.

The discovery of America and its mines ought naturally to have given fresh vigour to industry and commerce; and it undoubtedly promoted them for a time. But, borne away by political events, energy was diverted from domestic industry, the truest source of national wealth and greatness, to foreign colonisation and adventure. The discovery of treasures which they believed to be inexhaustible, and the example of immense and rapid fortunes acquired in America and the Indies, produced a contempt of tillage, and even for the manufactures, the profits of which were comparatively inconsiderable and distant. Persons, too, of a certain rank and birth, however poor they might be, were precluded by the prevailing notions from procuring a subsistence by the exercise of the mechanic arts. But in the New World they could, without shame, devote themselves to pursuits which in their own country might not be prosecuted without degradation. Nor did the produce of the mines afford any compensation for the injury they thus occasioned. Expended in chimerical projects of foreign ambition, and schemes to destroy the peace of other nations, the tide of wealth which flowed from the western world into Spain rushed through the land like a torrent, without fertilising it.

The extent, too, of the Spanish empire, and the distance of its various dependencies, was another cause of its decline. In all ages, the ruins of empires have bespoken the evils of overgrown dominion. The improvement of remote possessions is never sufficiently attended to, while on their account the interests of the parent state are frequently neglected. Voiture[e] likens the Spanish monarchy to an enormous and unwieldy vessel, of which the prow was in the Atlantic, and the stern in the Indian Ocean. All the vice-royalties suffered by the inevitable abuses of delegated authority, and were seldom vivified by the presence of their princes. The whole life, indeed, of Charles V had been a continued journey; but the Escorial was the fit habitation of his son, and Philip enjoined to his successors a constant residence in Spain. All the proceedings at Madrid were dilatory, and no provision was ever made for any event which seemed to be at a tolerable distance. Others followed the example of the court, and delay became the sole policy of the prince, the ministry, and the governors of provinces. Whatever institutions were favourable to liberty had been suppressed or undermined in the reign of Charles V, and freedom was at length utterly destroyed by his despotic and bigoted son.

Nothing, however, impresses us more strongly with a conviction of the indolence and torpor of the Spanish race, than that the expulsion of the Moors should have been attended by the fatal consequences which it unquestionably produced. Elsewhere it would have occasioned no loss or disadvantage, or would have been followed only by such temporary inconvenience as ensued in France on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. But even from the time of the ancient Celtiberians, the inhabitants of this peninsula had been disinclined to labour, and indisposed to every species of exertion, except in war. “The peasants,” says Madame d’Aulnoy[d] (who travelled in Spain in the middle of the seventeenth century), “will more willingly endure hunger and all severities of life, than work, as they tell you, like mercenaries and slaves. Thus pride, seconded by sloth, prevents them from tilling and sowing their land, which remains uncultivated, unless some more laborious and worldly-minded strangers undertake the task, and thus carry off the gains, while the sorry peasant sits in his chair, thrumming an ill-tuned guitar, or reading some mouldy romance.”

Voiture,[e] who resided for some time at Madrid, shortly after the accession of Philip IV, and travelled to the south of Spain with letters of recommendation from Olivares, exhibits an amusing and graphic picture of the indolence prevailing among the lower classes of the inhabitants. “If it rains, the villagers who bring the bread to Madrid do not come, though they could get a better price. When wheat is dear in Andalusia, and they have it in Castile, nobody takes the trouble to send it or to get it. It must be brought from France or elsewhere.”

Among all ranks celibacy prevailed in an unusual degree. Besides seclusion in convents and nunneries, many obstacles arose to matrimony from family pride and the disagreements of parents. Marriages were thus contracted from interest, without choice, affection, or desire. From these causes, and from early debauchery, the population was more disproportioned to the means of subsistence than in any other country of Europe; and hence the means for defence and for the acquisition of wealth were diminished. The education of the children, such as they were, of these enforced marriages, was shamefully neglected among the highest classes, and indeed even in the royal family.

The riches of the church were totally disproportioned to those of the rest of the nation, and much wealth was thus locked up in silver images or golden lamps, which, if judiciously brought into commerce, might have rendered many thousands of the population opulent and happy. Equally large were the encroachments which superstition made on the time of the inhabitants, great part of which was withdrawn from useful labour by religious festivals, masses, processions, and purchase of pardons.

It was thus that Spain, which, of all the countries of Europe, possessed the greatest advantages in climate, fertility, and geographical position, became, in spite of these means of national prosperity, the poorest land in Christendom. The gifts of nature were all in profusion still, but human institutions had corrupted its benefits, or perverted them into sources of weakness and decay. When the Spanish government perceived the diminution of coin resulting from these causes, it attempted to supply the deficiency, by imposing higher taxes on manufacturers and artificers. But the burden became intolerable to the few remaining workmen. They fled to Italy and Flanders, or, if they stayed at home, they relinquished their trades, and no longer manufactured the fine wools of Andalusia or the silks of Valencia. The ministry, having no more manufactures to tax, next oppressed the farmers, and the imposts laid on agriculture were as injudicious as they were numerous and excessive. “When once a nation,” says Raynal,[f] “has begun to decline, it seldom stops. The loss of population, of manufactures, of trade, and of agriculture, was attended with the greatest evils. While Europe was daily improving in knowledge, and all nations were animated with a spirit of industry, Spain was falling into inaction and barbarism. The duties on commodities, in their transport from one province to another, were so high that they amounted almost to a prohibition, so that the communication was totally interrupted. Even the transmission of money from one district to another was forbidden. In a short time not a vestige of a road was to be seen. Travellers were stopped at the crossing of rivers, where there were neither boats nor bridges. There was not a single canal, and scarcely a navigable river.”.

The pride of the nation had survived its greatness; its animosities had outlived its power of oppression; but though much of animating health and vigour was gone, the outward form was still nearly the same. The strength of Spain was estimated by numbering its provinces and computing the treasures of the Indies; and to the undiscerning eye of the vulgar, Philip VI may have appeared as great a monarch as his grandsire. It was thus that terror, as Schiller[g] expresses it, still brooded over the lion’s forsaken den; and hence, while the provinces of Spain were depopulated and impoverished, many powerful confederations were formed against her, and the humiliation of the house of Austria was the subject of the vows of politicians in all the states of Christendom. And in fact with every disadvantage under which she laboured, and in spite of the rapid depression she had suffered, Spain might still have regained the lofty station she once held in the rank of kingdoms, if, at the succession of Philip IV, a wise and energetic monarch had ascended the throne, or if the reins of government had been intrusted to a prudent and enlightened minister.

The supremacy of Spain over Italy, her own western mines, and the oriental treasures supplied by the Indian empire of Portugal--all these, which had hitherto proved but elements of decay, might, under able administration, have afforded immense resources. The extensive frontiers of the monarchy were still guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour. That celebrated infantry which was originally formed on the Swiss model, and had been for more than a century the admiration and terror of Europe, was still unbroken. It was encouraged by the remembrance of a thousand triumphs, without one recollection of shame, for no signal defeat had yet withered the laurels of St. Quentin and Pavia. The soldiery still retained that intrepid and enterprising, though somewhat ferocious and mutinous spirit, by which they were marked in the wars of the Low Countries. Their renowned captain, the noble Spinola, still survived, and many officers must yet have served in the veteran army which had combated against Henry the Great, under the prince of Parma.

But Philip IV, though superior to his father in refinement of taste, and in some specious exterior accomplishments, was equally deficient in vigour of mind or solid acquirements, and was far inferior to his predecessor in purity of life. The minister, on whom for more than twenty years he relied with implicit confidence and devolved the uncontrolled management of affairs, was a man of irregular genius and of vast designs, which were but ill suited to the present condition of his country; and to this policy, which was alternately obstinate and capricious, many have attributed the overwhelming misfortunes of Spain.[k]

PHILIP IV “THE GREAT” (1621-1665 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [1621-1622 A.D.]]

When the new king ascended the throne he was only in his seventeenth year, and he began, like his father, by surrendering the reins of government to a worthless favourite. This was the count de Olivares, who had been a gentleman of the bedchamber to the prince of Asturias. This haughty minion commenced his career by removing from the ministry his benefactor, the duke of Uceda, and by recalling the valiant Don Pedro Giron, duke of Osuna, from the viceroyalty of Naples. Whoever had ability, or popular fame or favour with the king, was sure to experience his envy, often his deadly persecution. Every servant of the late government was dismissed or imprisoned, to make way for creatures, if possible, more worthless.

It is, however, certain that by revoking many of the profuse grants made by the two preceding sovereigns by dismissing two-thirds of the locusts in office, by enforcing the residence of many señores, by sumptuary regulations, and other measures, he increased the revenues of the crown. But these reforms were but temporary; the minister was too corrupt to persevere in any line of public advantage; his object was his own emolument, and that of his creatures. How little Spain could flourish under such princes and such administrations may be readily conjectured. In its internal affairs, there was the same gradual decline of agriculture, of commerce, of the mechanical arts, and, consequently, of the national resources; yet, while the mass of the people were thus sinking into hopeless poverty, the court exhibited more splendour than ever. Thus, the reception of Charles, prince of Wales, and of his tutor, the duke of Buckingham,--who, with the view of obtaining the hand of the infanta Maria, sister of the king, had been romantic enough to visit Madrid in disguise,--is a favourite subject of historic description. The English reader need not be told that this prodigal expenditure was thrown away, and that Charles, ultimately, obtained a French princess. Still more expensive were the festivities consequent on the election of the king of Hungary--who had married the infanta Maria, sister of Philip--to be king of the Romans, and, consequently, heir to the imperial crown. If to these fooleries we add the money sent out of the kingdom to assist the German emperor in the wars with Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, we shall not be surprised that the whole nation beheld the conduct of Philip and his minister with discontent. While tens of thousands were famishing, from the stagnation of the usual branches of industry--while plays, pantomimes, entertainments, and other frivolities of the most costly description were succeeding each other in the capital, in contempt of so much misery--it required no ordinary stock of patience to witness the disgraceful contrast. Murmurs and complaints were treated with contempt, until the Catalans openly opposed the flagitious minister and the royal puppet.

THE CATALAN INSURRECTION

[Sidenote: [1621-1641 A.D.]]

The profligate extravagances of the court were not the only cause which led to the Catalan insurrection. At the close of a war with France--a war of which mention will hereafter be made--the Castilian troops, in the fear that hostilities would be recommenced by the enemy, were stationed on the northern frontier, at the expense of the inhabitants, on whom they were billeted. This regulation was as unjust as it was arbitrary, and even odious. The people remonstrated. When the soldiers resisted, lives were lost on both sides. The ringleaders were imprisoned or fined; to release them formidable bands of countrymen hastened to Barcelona, the residence of the viceroy, with the crucifix borne before them, burst open the prisons, committed many excesses throughout the city, ill-treated the royal officers, and ultimately killed the viceroy himself as he was endeavouring to escape by sea.[93] From these scenes, and from the universal hostility of the Catalans to his violent regulations, Olivares might have learned something useful; but he was incapable of profiting by the lessons of experience. The marquis de los Velez was sent with an army to reduce the rebels to obedience. They implored the aid of the French king. That aid was readily promised, but as it did not immediately arrive, the whole principality, except the city of Tortosa, armed.

This was not all: contending that the king, by violating their ancient privileges, had broken his compact with them, and consequently forfeited all claim to their obedience, they proclaimed a republic. But as the marquis had quickly reduced several important fortresses, and was advancing, breathing revenge on the capital, the new republic was soon destroyed by its authors, and Louis XIII proclaimed count of Barcelona. The French monarch had accepted the dignity, even on conditions--such was the jealous spirit of Catalan freedom--which left him the bare protection of the province, which excluded him from the slightest influence in it, and which in fact transformed it into a republic under the name of a sovereign. Not that he intended to observe those conditions, for it is admitted even by the national writers that with his characteristic duplicity--duplicity to which he was urged by his ambassador Argenton--he had resolved to annul them the first favourable opportunity. After this treaty five thousand French soldiers passed the Pyrenees; Tarragona, which now held for the king, and in which all the royal forces were concentrated, was invested, but after a time relieved; Castilian reinforcements arrived to make head against the enemy; near twelve thousand French came to assist their countrymen, and Louis himself advanced to the frontiers of Roussillon to direct their operations. At this moment, Philip intended to conduct the war in person, and he actually left Madrid for the purpose at the head of a considerable force; but at Aranjuez he halted, under the pretext of waiting the arrival of Olivares, who was in no hurry to join him. In fact, neither king nor minister had courage enough to meet the enemy. Meantime the French armies were actively gaining several important advantages: to counterbalance them, Olivares formed a conspiracy in the very heart of France to assassinate the minister Cardinal Richelieu, and even to dethrone Louis; but it was detected, and its prime instrument was beheaded.

[Sidenote: [1641-1659 A.D.]]

Though a natural death soon called away the cardinal, his successor, Mazarin, who succeeded also to his Macchiavelian principles, continued the war. It lingered for years, with various success, or rather with no decided success, to either part, until the inhabitants themselves grew tired of the French yoke, and joined with their Castilian brethren. Whether this change in the public feeling was owing to the haughtiness of their allies, which is said to have been intolerable, or to the inconsistency of the popular mind, or still more, probably, to both united, fortune at length began to favour the arms of Philip. Still the war with the Netherlands and with the Portuguese, to which allusion will shortly be made, rendered the Spanish court desirous of peace. The wish was shared by Mazarin, whose resources were nearly exhausted by hostilities of so many years’ continuance, and in so many countries. In 1659, the plenipotentiaries of both powers met at St. Jean-de-Luz, and the conditions of peace, after three months’ deliberation, were sanctioned by the respective monarchs.[c]

It may be well here to give a brief review of the larger politics of Spain in Europe during and after the Thirty Years’ War, though fuller details must be looked for in the histories of France and the other countries concerned.[a]

THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR AND THE TREATY OF THE PYRENEES

[Sidenote: [1619-1659 A.D.]]

The incessant efforts of the Austrian princes to cement the union of their families, and secure the reciprocal succession to their respective dominions, had been no less sedulously opposed by France, than their projects of conquest and aggrandisement. In the pursuit of this object, the address and good fortune of the French repeatedly triumphed over the inveterate hostility of the rival house; and by dexterously availing themselves of times and circumstances, they succeeded in forming frequent marriages between the two families of France and Spain. Philip II espoused Isabella, a princess of France; a double match was also concluded between the infanta Anne, daughter of Philip III, and Louis XIII, and between Isabella, sister of the French monarch, and the prince of Asturias, afterwards Philip IV. To obviate, however, the mischiefs likely to ensue from these occasional aberrations of policy, the Austrian sovereigns endeavoured to guard and fortify their respective pretensions to the family inheritance, by renunciations, compacts, and treaties.

These marriages and arrangements formed only temporary suspensions of hostility. In 1619, the long and eventful contest of the Thirty Years’ War commenced. The Spanish monarchy, already weakened by past disasters, was shaken to its foundations. Exactions rendered necessary by the diminished resources of the government, joined with the abuses inseparable from delegated power, excited civil troubles: the progress of its decline was marked by a rebellion in Catalonia; by the temporary insurrection which rendered Masaniello, a simple fisherman, master of Naples; and by the revolution which placed the family of Braganza on the throne of Portugal. The event of this direct conflict was the degradation of the Austrian house in both its branches, and the partial accomplishment of those extensive designs which France had long meditated against the remnant of the Burgundian inheritance, and even against Spain itself. The Peace of Westphalia, in 1648, opened passages into Germany and Italy, reduced the empire to an aristocracy, and destroyed the union of the Germanic body, by the establishment of a religious and political schism.

But even after the emperor Ferdinand III had been forced to withdraw from the contest, and to submit to the reduction of his power and influence, Philip IV was induced to continue the war, from the consciousness of past greatness, the hope of drawing advantage from the civil discords which arose in France during the minority of Louis XIV, and above all from an unwillingness to give his eldest daughter in marriage to the French monarch, which was exacted as the price of peace. During this interval, he not only resolved to affiance his daughter to the archduke Leopold; but having become a widower, he cemented his connection with the German branch by espousing Maria Anna, daughter of Frederick III. At length, his increasing embarrassments; the loss of Jamaica and Dunkirk, wrested from him by the successful hostility of Cromwell; the birth of a son, Philip Prospero; and another pregnancy of his queen, induced him to accept the proposals of France. Accordingly, preliminaries were signed at Paris, November 7th, 1659, and a treaty of peace was arranged by the two prime ministers of France, Cardinal Mazarin and Don Luis de Haro, in the Isle of Pheasants, a small islet in the river Bidassoa, which divides the two kingdoms.

[Sidenote: [1659-1664 A.D.]]

This celebrated act, which has been termed the Treaty of the Pyrenees, sowed the germ of future wars, and produced to France no less important advantages on the side of the peninsula and Flanders, than the Peace of Westphalia had produced to Austria on that of the empire. To France, Spain ceded Roussillon with part of Conflans and Cerdagne, of Flanders and Hainault, and all Artois, except the towns and districts of St. Omer and Aire. The pretensions of France to Navarre were reserved; Dunkirk and Jamaica were yielded to England: and the duke of Lorraine, the last remaining ally of Spain, was reduced to dependence, by dismantling the fortifications of Nancy, and by the compulsory cession of Moyenvic and Bar. Finally, the king of Spain consented to give in marriage his eldest daughter, Maria Theresa, to Louis XIV; but under the express condition that she should, for herself and issue, renounce all right to her paternal inheritance. In return, the king of France restored all his conquests in the Netherlands, Italy, and Catalonia, and agreed not to assist the Portuguese. Accordingly, the signature of the treaty was followed by the celebration of the marriage, June 2nd, 1660, before which the infanta renounced for herself and her posterity all right and title to every part of the Spanish dominions in the strongest terms which ingenuity could devise. Her renunciation was afterwards ratified with equal solemnity by Louis XIV, for himself and his heirs, and confirmed by the cortes then assembled at Madrid. The French court, however, made a mockery of such engagements; and the well-known observation of Mazarin to the plenipotentiaries employed in negotiating the treaty shows at once the most shameless perfidy and the ultimate object of this connection: “Let the match be concluded, and no renunciation can prevent the king from pretending to the succession of Spain.”

As little did the French monarch respect his engagements not to interfere in the affairs of Portugal, the hope of which had been one of the principal inducements with Philip to conclude this disadvantageous treaty. On the contrary, the most glaring prevarication was employed to justify the active support afforded to the Portuguese: their resistance was successfully employed to exhaust the remaining strength of the Spanish monarchy, and to prepare the way for that system of aggression and usurpation which was shortly to be exhibited, to the terror and indignation of Europe.[h]

[Sidenote: [1659-1664 A.D.]]

Commensurate with the origin of the Catalan insurrection was that of Portugal. As this is not the proper place to enter into an examination of the causes which produced, or the circumstances which attended that natural burst of freedom, we defer both to the history of Portugal. Here it is sufficient to observe that the discontented Portuguese, despising the royal puppet at Madrid, and burning with an intolerable thirst for the restoration of their independence, proclaimed the duke of Braganza under the name of João IV; and that in several campaigns they nobly vindicated the step. Assisted by their allies the English, Dutch, and French, they continued the war with indomitable valour, and with general success until 1664, when, in the battle of Villaviciosa, they inflicted so severe a blow on the arms of Philip that he precipitately abandoned hostilities. This was one of the causes which led to the disgrace of Olivares. Nothing can better show the uncontrolled power of this minister, and the criminal negligence of every public duty by the king, than the fact that the latter remained long ignorant of the momentous events in Portugal. At length, fearing to conceal them any longer, the count one day observed, with an air of studied carelessness, “The duke of Braganza has run stark mad; he has proclaimed himself king of Portugal! This folly will bring your majesty twelve millions in confiscations!” The only reply was, “We must put an end to the mischief”; but the remonstrances of his queen, and the rebellion of the minister’s nephew, the duke of Medina Sidonia, for whom the minister wrung a reluctant pardon, determined Philip to exile Olivares from the court. This was actually done; but the kingdom experienced no benefit by a change of favourites.[c] “The unmeasured blame usually lavished upon Olivares,” says Hume,[j] “appears hardly just, notwithstanding the disastrous results of his rule. His great sin was that he tried to insist upon all Spaniards making equal sacrifices to pay for the barren pride which all Spaniards shared.”

DEATH OF PHILIP IV (1665 A.D.)

The character of Philip, who died in 1665, needs no description. Though from a few early successes he was called “the great” and “the planet king,” his reign, next to that of Roderic the Goth, was the most disastrous in the annals of Spain. Omitting the distress which it brought on the people, and the horrors of the Catalan insurrection, the loss of Roussillon, Conflans, a part of Cerdagne, Jamaica, much of the Low Countries, and above all Portugal, and his recognition of the independence of the Seven United Provinces, are melancholy monuments of his imbecility. A still worse effect was produced by the frequent reverses of his arms in Italy and the Low Countries,[94] reverses which encouraged the smallest states to set his power at defiance; thus, both in the East Indies, and on the coast of America, his settlements were plundered or seized by Holland. In private life, his conduct was as little entitled to respect: by his mistresses he had six or seven children,[95] of whom the most famous was Don John, surnamed of Austria, believed to be the son of an actress of Madrid, and born in 1629.

On this son the choicest favours of the crown were conferred; he was made prior of St. John, and was several times at the head of the Spanish armies. In Italy, the Netherlands, Catalonia, and Portugal, he showed that he was not unworthy to bear the name of his great predecessor, the son of the emperor Charles; in the last-named country his success would have been more decided, had not the queen, who hated his popularity and envied his fame, diverted the supplies which were intended for him, and left him no other alternative than that of retiring from the service. Hence the foundation of the dissensions which, as we shall perceive in the ensuing reign, distracted the state. Of Philip’s numerous offspring by his two queens, Isabella, daughter of Henry IV of France, and Maria Anna, daughter of the emperor Ferdinand III, three only survived him. Maria Theresa queen of France, Margaret queen of Hungary, and his successor Don Charles.

KING CHARLES II AND THE FRENCH WAR

[Sidenote: [1665-1669 A.D.]]

If the affairs of this kingdom had been so unfortunate during the reigns of the two Philips, they were not likely to improve under a child who, at his accession, had not attained his fourth year, especially as Don John, the favourite of the nation, was at open hostility with the queen-regent and her confessor the father Nithard [or Nitard], a German Jesuit. This churchman is represented as haughty to the nobles, supple to the queen, and in his general conduct corrupt; but as the representation comes from men always jealous of foreigners, it must be received with caution. An unbiassed mind will easily perceive that his chief fault was the unbounded power he exercised through the queen. The disasters which befell her administration added to the popular discontent.

Though the perfidious Louis XIV had disclaimed, both for himself and his successors, all title to the Spanish possessions, one of his first acts, after his marriage, was to assert, in right of his queen, a monstrous pretension to the Low Countries. In an obscure district of a remote province there was an ancient custom, called devolution, now virtually abrogated by time, that even a daughter of the first wife should inherit in preference to a son by the second: hence, as Maria Theresa, the consort of Louis, was sprung from the first, and Don Charles from the second marriage of Philip, the French monarch poured his legions over the frontier, and with great rapidity reduced most of the fortresses from the Channel to the Schelde. At his instigation the Portuguese made an irruption into Estremadura. The union of Sweden, Holland, and England, to oppose the ambition of the Frenchman, saved the whole Netherlands from subjugation; but, by the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, May 2nd, 1668, he retained the most valuable of his conquests; and by that very union, which thus saved a portion of her northern possessions, Spain was compelled to acknowledge the independence of Portugal.

Of these disastrous circumstances advantage was taken by Don John of Austria, who had been exiled from the court, to load both the queen and her confessor, now a counsellor of state, with increased obloquy. During the flagitious career of the French, the voice of the Spaniards proclaimed him as the only man fit to support the sinking fortunes of the monarchy: to remove him from their attachment, and from his own intrigues, he had been nominated governor of the Low Countries. He refused the dignity. Being retired to Consuegra, a conspiracy was formed or pretended against the life of Nithard, and revealed by one of the accomplices, who asserted that its hidden spring was John.

Whether this conspiracy was, as most men suspected, a stratagem of the queen and her party, or a really meditated deed of blood, it enabled the regent to act with more vigour: she despatched a strong party of cavalry to arrest John, and consign him to the Alcazar of Toledo. He fled into Aragon; and from his refuge assumed a higher tone, insisting that satisfaction should be made him for a suspicion so injurious to his honour, and that the Jesuit should be banished from the kingdom. With seven hundred resolute followers, he advanced towards Madrid. He was met by the papal nuncio, who had been charged with the honourable duty of mediation. To the request that he would remain four days at Torrejon until his demands were satisfied, he replied that Nithard must leave the kingdom without delay. The insolence of this mandate--for such it was--exasperated the queen; but she was constrained to comply with it, and the Jesuit was dismissed.

Father Nithard was certainly a disinterested, he appears to have been a well-meaning man. He would accept no money (a moderate sum excepted, necessary to defray the expense of his journey to Rome), asserting with an honest pride that he entered Spain a poor priest, and a poor priest would leave it: however, he was subsequently raised to the dignity of cardinal.

[Sidenote: [1669-1677 A.D.]]

Don John renewed his intrigues, artfully uniting the cause of the people with his own, and at length compelling the court to invest him with the government of Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearic Isles, and Sardinia. The following years he passed in sovereign state at Saragossa, silently watching the course of events which, as he had anticipated, were of the same adverse character to the nation. France, true to her career of spoliation in all ages, in 1672 invaded Holland, now the ally of Spain, with one hundred thousand men: to such a host resistance was vain, and most of the country was seized by the invaders.

Spain, like England, Germany, and other states who confederated to arrest the daring progress of Louis, flew to the assistance of her prostrate ally, and immediately afterwards declared war against France. As usual, the advantage turned in favour of the stronger party. In Burgundy, Franche-Comté, which Spain had inherited in right of the ancient dukes of that province, was conquered, and some destructive inroads were made into Catalonia; the few fortresses remaining to the Spanish monarch in the Low Countries were threatened, one or two actually reduced; and Messina in Sicily was instigated by the enemy to rebel. In three years the rebellion subsided of itself, the inhabitants of Messina being glad to escape from the yoke of Louis by returning to their obedience. In 1675 Don John was ordered to pass over to that island; but as the royal majority was at hand when the regent’s term of authority would expire, he hoped that he should be called to the ministry; a result for which his friends were actively disposing the king. But through the arts of the queen, Maria Anna, he was suddenly ordered to leave Madrid. There can be no doubt, however, that his own presumption hastened this disgrace, for he had insisted on being acknowledged as infante of Castile, and consequently as collateral heir to the monarchy. The queen triumphed the more as her son was as imbecile in mind as he was sickly in body, and as with her alone would continue the affairs of administration.

A new, and, if scandal is to be believed, a less innocent favourite than Father Nithard, was found in Ferdinand de Valenzuela, who had been page of the duke del Infantado, and who to specious manners and some knowledge added an agreeable person. But the queen’s triumph was transient: the creatures of Don John became more numerous and clamorous. The leading grandees, who detested the new favourite for his vanity, and still more for his meanness of birth, joined in the cry. The torrent became too strong to be stemmed even by her. She resolved to derive merit from necessity; for knowing that Don John was preparing to leave Saragossa for Madrid, she not only suffered her son to command his immediate presence, but she herself wrote in the same strain. At his approach Charles II retired to another palace, ordering his mother not to leave the one she inhabited; and despatched the archbishop of Toledo to Hita to welcome his brother. The power of John was now unbounded, while Maria Anna, notwithstanding her efforts to recover the royal favour, was circumscribed to her own household. John was affectionately received by the king, and was declared prime minister. The first decree which he signed was for the arrest of Valenzuela, now degraded from the class of nobles to which the favour of Maria Anna had unworthily raised him. He was conveyed to the castle of Consuegra, forced to disgorge his ill-gotten wealth, and banished to the Philippine Islands. He died in Mexico.

[Sidenote: [1677-1679 A.D.]]

The administration of Don John was no less deplorable than that of the regent whom he had so criminally supplanted. Occupied in the cares of vengeance, or in providing for his creatures, he feebly opposed the victorious progress of Louis. Valenciennes, Cambray, St. Omer, and other places were speedily reduced: Ypres and Ghent were assailed with equal success; and Puycerda, on the Catalan frontier, yielded about the same time to another French army. Most of these places, however, were restored at the Peace of Nimeguen, September, 1678, of which the most unpopular condition was that Charles should receive the hand of the princess Marie Louise, niece of the French king. That nation had always been regarded with jealousy, it was now hated by the Spaniards. John did not live to witness the solemnisation of the nuptials. The ill success of his government, his haughty behaviour towards the grandees, his persecution of such as belonged rather to their country than to his party, and his tyranny even over the king, rendered him not merely unpopular, but odious. In this state mental anxiety put an end to his life (September 17th, 1679) at the moment his enemies were preparing to hasten his downfall.[96] The queen-dowager returned to court, not indeed to resume her ancient influence, but to assist in the multiplication of intrigues, and, consequently, the perplexities of her imbecile son.[c]

THE FATE OF THE YOUNG QUEEN

[Sidenote: [1679-1691 A.D.]]

Marriage had come to be one of the political resources of Louis XIV. Another matrimonial alliance, still more important, had been concluded a few months previously. It has been said that Don John of Austria, the uncle and minister of the king of Spain, hoped to find in France a support against his rival, the king’s mother, who was upheld by the court at Vienna. Don John had caused the negotiations undertaken by the queen-mother for uniting the Catholic king with a daughter of the emperor to be broken off, and had solicited for Charles II the hand of Marie Louise of Orléans, a niece of Louis XIV and daughter of the duke of Orléans by his first wife Henrietta of England. It can be imagined with what eagerness this proposition was received, since it was supposed that it would establish the diplomatic preponderance of France at Madrid.

The contract was signed on the 30th of August, 1679, to the great joy of Louis XIV, but to the still greater sorrow of the bride. It was only with despair that the poor young girl left the paradise of Versailles to bury herself in the tomb of the Escorial, at the side of that strange husband who was only the shadow of a king, only the shadow of a man. For a whole month she saddened the court and wounded the national susceptibilities of the Spanish ambassadors by the violence of her grief. She seemed to have a presentiment of her sad fate. She had not yet started when the protector she was to meet on the other side of the mountains expired and her natural enemy the queen-mother seized again from the dying hands of Don John the power she had lost. Marie Louise found on foreign soil only long hours of weariness, and implacable persecutions which were terminated by a prolonged agony and perhaps by a crime. She was one of the most pathetic victims of the cruel policy of dynasties. The sacrifice, however, was useless; the young queen acquired no influence at Madrid and, the anti-French policy having gotten the upper hand together with the queen-mother, by the intervention of the prince of Orange, a rapprochement was brought about between Spain and England, the effects of which Louis XIV fought with greater success at Windsor than at the Escorial.[l]

Dunlop[k] gives many details of the journey of the young bride to her imbecile husband. To the natural homesickness so peculiarly characteristic of the French, she added a complete ignorance of the Spanish language and a nature rebellious to the unusual formality of Spanish court etiquette. The royal bridegroom into whose arms she was driven was, as a result of the Austrian marriages, not only weak-minded but also repulsive physically; his chin was so huge that he could not masticate and his tongue so large that his speech could hardly be understood. He was treated as a baby till he was ten and was almost illiterate; his amusements were those of a lascivious boy and he died in the decay of old age when he was not yet forty.

An incident of Charles II’s reign was the renewal of the inquisitional fury, and one of the fêtes of the young queen was the privilege of watching fifty wretches led out to torture and execution; one beautiful Jewess appealed to the queen who was helpless to save her.

The queen was very charitable and yet was left on a stinted allowance irregularly paid. Her reputation suffered slander--as what queen’s has not?--and Hume[j] calls her a pagan; but Dunlop says that her character was untainted. She found congenial friends naturally among the people of her own country, but these were eventually forbidden her presence. Sunny as her nature was, it is small wonder that she pined and did not make headway against the thick plots against her. She died in February, 1689--of cholera morbus it was claimed, though poison was of course alleged.

Dunlop[k] well says, “Of all political queens, the fate of Louise d’Orléans is perhaps the most to be pitied.” Her life had been vain; she had not satisfied her uncle Louis XIV by fastening French influence on the court; she had not satisfied Spanish hopes by bearing an heir to the monstrosity she had been forced to wed; and she had not even been happy.[a]

LAST YEARS OF CHARLES II

[Sidenote: [1691-1700 A.D.]]

Omitting the detail of obscure wars--obscure at least to the Spaniards--which almost uniformly turned to their prejudice, on the death of Marie Louise, in 1689, the French monarch again poured the storm of war over the frontier of Catalonia. What most heightened his resentment was the immediate marriage of the widowed Charles with a princess of the house of Austria; to that house he had always been a mortal enemy, and he feared lest the king, who was hitherto childless, should at length have an heir. For some time, indeed, the efforts of the invaders, owing to their insignificant numbers, were often repulsed, or neutralised by subsequent reverses; but, in 1691, Urgel was taken by the duke of Noailles; Barcelona and Alicante were severely bombarded by sea. Two years afterwards Palemos and Rosas capitulated; the following year the Spaniards were defeated in a considerable battle; the victors took Gerona; Hostalric, and other places, followed the example, and Barcelona itself was threatened. Destitute of money and of troops, the efforts of the cabinet to raise both were but partially successful, and the time which should have been spent in vigorous hostilities was thus wasted in almost useless preparation. After a short suspension of hostilities, Barcelona fell into the power of Vendôme.

Spain trembled to her most distant extremities; and she could scarcely believe in the reality of her good fortune when, at the Peace of Ryswick, in 1697, Louis restored all his conquests. She was too much confounded by this display of magnanimity to divine the cause; yet that cause was not insufficient. From his niece, Marie Louise, the French monarch had learned to suspect the impotency of Charles; the sterility of the recent marriage confirmed the suspicion; and as he aspired in consequence to place a prince of his family on the throne of Castile, he did not wish to diminish the value of the inheritance by its dismemberment.

In 1698 the health of Charles, which had always been indifferent, began so visibly to decline that all hope of issue was abandoned. On his demise three chief claimants could aspire to his throne: first, the dauphin of France, as the eldest son of Maria Theresa, eldest daughter of Philip IV; secondly, the emperor Leopold, who not only descended from Ferdinand, brother of Charles V, but whose mother was the daughter of Philip III; thirdly, the electoral prince of Bavaria, whose mother was the only daughter of the infanta Margarita, a young daughter of Philip IV. Of these claims, that of the dauphin was evidently the strongest, since his mother was the eldest sister of Charles. It is true that she had renounced for her issue all claim to the crown of Spain; but this renunciation had been demanded by the Spaniards, from a fear lest the two crowns should fall on the same brow. To such a union Europe would never have consented; and the objection was almost equally strong to the union of Spain with Germany. Hence the hostility to the pretensions both of the dauphin, as heir of the French monarchy, and of the emperor Leopold. Hence, too, the celebrated, and infamous as celebrated, treaty of partition, which, in October, 1698, was signed at the Hague by the plenipotentiaries of England, Holland, and France. By it Naples and Sicily, with Guipuzcoa, San Sebastian, and Fuenterrabia were ceded to the dauphin; Spain and the Indies to the Prince of Bavaria; while, for the third party, Charles, second son of Leopold, and the representative of his rights, Milan only was reserved. The death of the Bavarian prince destroyed this beautiful scheme of spoliation; but its authors did not long delay in framing another, which gave Spain, the Indies, and Netherlands to Charles, and which amplified the original portion of the dauphin.

But Louis XIV had no intention to renounce the splendid inheritance; if he could not procure it for the dauphin, or, which would ultimately be the same, for the eldest son of the dauphin, there was a second son, Philip, duke of Anjou, who would be less the object of jealousy to the European powers. With the same view, Leopold was willing that his own rights, and those of his eldest son, should devolve on the archduke Charles the youngest. Both princes sent their emissaries to the court of Charles II, to besiege his sick-bed, and to procure a testamentary declaration in favour of their respective pretensions. The intrigues which continued for so many months to distract the court and kingdom, to embitter rival animosity, and to disturb the last hours of the king, are too endless to be detailed.

The duke of Anjou’s ablest support was Cardinal Portocarrero, archbishop of Toledo. The cardinal terrified Charles’ conscience by a representation of the civil wars which must inevitably follow the uncertainty of succession, and, above all, by frightening him with the responsibility of the consequent bloodshed. On a mind so religious as the king’s, these representations made a deep effect; he observed that, however near the ties of blood, his salvation was still nearer; and after a long, a bitter struggle, he signed the testament which called the duke d’Anjou to the undivided sovereignty of the Spanish dominions. As he subscribed the momentous instrument, his heart still clung to his family, the tears ran from his eyes, while, with a faltering voice, he sorrowfully exclaimed, “God is the disposer of kingdoms!”

Before the signature of this important act, the health and strength of the king had visibly declined; in fact he exhibited in himself a mere shadow of existence. His deplorable, and as it appeared, extraordinary state, one alike of pain, of mental vacuity, and even of half consciousness, gave rise to a report that he was bewitched. He prepared for his end; appointed a council of regency, headed by Cardinal Portocarrero, until the duke of d’Anjou should arrive in Spain; and on the morning of November 1st, 1700, bade adieu to his worldly sorrows, after one of the most disastrous reigns on record.[c]

THE DISTRESSES OF SPAIN

[Sidenote: [1665-1700 A.D.]]

Thus, at length, terminated the long but inglorious sway of Charles II, in the thirty-ninth year of his age, and the thirty-sixth of his unfortunate reign. His character is written in the events of his clouded life. He was mild and conscientious; suspicious and distrustful from diffidence in his own powers and talents; timid, inconstant, and irresolute, from the influence of hypochondriac affections; chaste from temperament; ignorant from total want of instruction; superstitious from habit and education; he was utterly destitute of discernment, energy, or skill; he was but a ghost even of his grandsire Philip III, and in his premature decay formed no unfit emblem of the declining kingdom over which he reigned.

Charles, indeed, was not wholly responsible for the state of degradation to which Spain was reduced when he closed his fatal career. The administrations of Lerma and Olivares had prepared the way for a long train of losses, humiliations, and disasters; but the wavering and fluctuating counsels of Charles completed the ruin of his country. Spain, which contained twenty millions of inhabitants in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, had only eight millions at the close of the reign of Charles II. Moncada, an author of the beginning of the seventeenth century, estimated the population of its capital at 400,000; and Uztariz, who wrote immediately after the accession of the Bourbons, calculated it at only 180,000, so that it may be rated that it had diminished by one-half during the reigns of Philip IV and his son. Except, indeed, from courtesy and custom, and the extreme interest excited by the question of the succession, Spain, at the end of the reign of Charles, would scarcely have been reckoned among the powers of Europe.

Her finances were in a state of most frightful disorder. The revenues of the crown were absorbed by those agents or farmers, on whom the urgent necessities of government reduced it to depend for supplies; and, at the same time, the people, both in the capital and provinces, were loaded with every species of extortion and monopoly. The ample treasures of the New World were still worse administered; the viceroys, after defrauding the crown and oppressing the subject, were suffered to return from their governments and to enjoy, with impunity, the produce of peculation. The harbours of Spain contained but ten or twelve rotten frigates; the arsenals for the navy were neglected, and even the art of shipbuilding had fallen into oblivion. Her army amounted to not more than twenty thousand men, without discipline, pay, or clothing. Her forts and citadels had crumbled into ruins. Even the breaches made into the walls of Barcelona during the Catalan insurrection continued open, and at the other chief fortresses there were neither guns mounted nor garrisons maintained. Such was the want of vigour in the laws, and remissness in the officers of justice, that reins had been given to every species of licentiousness. The slightest rise in the price of provisions excited tumult and alarm. Madrid had become the rendezvous of robbers and the asylum of assassins, who haunted even the palaces of the grandees or the churches, unmolested and unpunished. Its squares and streets were filled with discarded domestics and famishing artisans, without occupation or the means of subsistence. Those establishments destined to maintain the respect due to royalty had sunk into empty form, and were insufficient to protect the king from mortifying insults, both to his authority and person. The responsible ministry were without intelligence or skill in the science of government: the real influence was in the officers of the household--the king’s confessor, the prelates, and the inquisitors of the realm. The private and bitter jealousies of the grandees, the enmity of the provinces towards each other, and the rigid adherence to ancient forms and usages, however inapplicable to modern circumstances, all conspired to prevent a cordial co-operation in any useful or national object, and completed, in the last year of the seventeenth century and at the end of the Austrian dynasty, the picture of Spain.

Yet the sway, no doubt, of the imbecile Charles may have appeared more feeble from the contrast it presented to the energy and skill of the other governments of Europe, which, at the close of this century, were ruled by the ablest monarchs who had ever appeared, at one era, since the first rise of its states on the wreck of the Western Empire. The energies both of Holland and England were wielded by William III; Louis XIV reigned in France, the prudent Pedro in Portugal, John Sobieski in Poland, Charles XII in Sweden, and in Muscovy Peter the Great--the immortal czar.[k]

FOOTNOTES

[93] [Catalan writers, witnesses of these scenes, describe with enthusiasm the patriotic ardour shown by all classes in the town, the courage, daring, and diligence displayed even by women and children in bringing provisions, ropes, ammunition, medicine, and all kinds of assistance to the defenders on the walls, those who had nothing themselves going to the houses and through the streets asking for help. Even the nuns in their convents sent biscuits and preserves, while others prayed to God for the triumph of the Catalan cause; some women dressed as soldiers and went about with swords and daggers.[b]]

[94] The troubles in Naples included the famous insurrection led by the fisherman Masaniello.

[95] According to the Venetian ambassador Zanetornato[i] he had thirty-two illegitimate children.

[96] [Hume[j] says he died of fever and ague, though poison was of course hinted and Maria Anna blamed.]

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