CHAPTER I

 

 

Philip’s failure, and the reasons for it—His birth and infancy—His appearance and character—His education by Siliceo and Zuñiga—The emperor meets his son—The consolidation of authority in Spain—Suggestions for marriage with Jeanne d’Albret—Philip made Regent of Spain—The emperor’s instructions to his son—His system of government—Character of his councillors—Philip’s marriage with Maria of Portugal—Birth of Don Carlos and death of the princess—Doña Isabel de Osorio—Philip in his domestic relations—Project for securing to Philip the imperial crown—The suzerainty of Spain over Italy—Philip’s voyage through Germany.

 

 

FOR three hundred years a bitter controversy has raged around the actions of Philip II. of Spain. Until our own times no attempt even had been made to write his life-history from an impartial point of view. He had been alternately deified and execrated, until through the mists of time and prejudice he loomed rather as the permanent embodiment of a system than as an individual man swayed by changing circumstances and controlled by human frailties.

The more recent histories of his reign—the works of English, American, German, and French scholars—have treated their subject with fuller knowledge and broader sympathies, but they have necessarily been to a large extent histories of the great events which convulsed Europe for fifty years at the most critical period of modern times. The space to be occupied by the present work will not admit of this treatment of the subject. The purpose is therefore to consider Philip mainly as a statesman, in relation to the important problems with which he had to deal, rather than to write a connected account of the occurrences of a long reign. It will be necessary for us to try to penetrate the objects he aimed at and the influences, personal and exterior, which ruled him, and to seek the reasons for his failure. For he did fail utterly. In spite of very considerable powers of mind, of a long lifetime of incessant toil, of deep-laid plans, and vast ambitions, his record is one continued series of defeats and disappointments; and in exchange for the greatest heritage that Christendom had ever seen, with the apparently assured prospect of universal domination which opened before him at his birth, he closed his dying eyes upon dominions distracted and ruined beyond all recovery, a bankrupt State, a dwindled prestige, and a defeated cause. He had devoted his life to the task of establishing the universal supremacy of Catholicism in the political interests of Spain, and he was hopelessly beaten.

The reasons for his defeat will be seen in the course of the present work to have been partly personal and partly circumstantial. The causes of both these sets of reasons were laid at periods long anterior to Philip’s birth.

The first of the great misfortunes of Spain was an event which at the time looked full of bright promise, namely, the marriage of Juana, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabel, to Philip of Austria, son of the Emperor Maximilian. This marriage eventually burdened the King of Spain with the German dominions of the House of Austria, the imperial crown, with its suzerainty over Italy, the duchy of Milan, and, above all, the rich inheritance of the House of Burgundy, the Franche Comté, Holland, and the Netherlands. Even before this the crown of Aragon had been weakened rather than strengthened by the possession of Sicily and Naples, which latter brought it into inimical contact with France, and also necessitated the assertion and defence of its rights as a Mediterranean Power in constant rivalry with Turks and Algerians. This had been bad, but the vast and scattered territories of Charles V. cursed Spain with a foreign policy in every corner of Europe. In his Austrian dominions the emperor was the outpost of Christianity against the Turk, the bulwark which restrained the Moslem flood from swamping eastern Europe. His galleys were those which were to keep the Mediterranean a Christian sea. Flanders and the Franche Comté gave him a long flat frontier conterminous with France, whose jealous eyes had been fixed covetously for centuries on the fine harbours and flourishing towns of the Low Countries.

Most of these interests were of very secondary importance to Spain itself. The country had only quite recently been unified; the vast new dominions which had fallen under its sway in America might well have monopolised its activity for centuries to come. The geographical position of the Iberian peninsula itself practically isolated it from the other countries of Europe, and rendered it unnecessary for it to take any part in the discords that prevailed over the rest of the continent; whilst the recent religious struggles with the Moors in Spain had consolidated Catholic Christianity in the country, and prevented the reformed doctrines from obtaining any footing there. Spain indeed, alone and aloof, with a fertile soil, fine harbours, and a well-disposed population, seemed destined to enjoy a career of activity, prosperity, and peace. But the possession of Flanders brought it into constant rivalry with France, and necessitated a close alliance with England, whilst the imperial connection dragged it into ceaseless wars with the Turks, and, above all, with the rising power of Protestantism, which ultimately proved its ruin. Philip, who succeeded to this thorny inheritance, was, on the other hand, bounded and isolated by mental limitations as irremovable as the Pyrenees which shut in his native land. As King of Spain alone, having only local problems to deal with, modest, cautious, painstaking, and just, he might have been a happy and successful—even a great—monarch, but as leader of the conservative forces of Christendom he was in a position for which his gifts unfitted him.

He was the offspring of the marriage of first cousins, both his parents being grandchildren of cunning, avaricious Ferdinand, and of Isabel the Catholic, whose undoubted genius was accompanied by high-strung religious exaltation, which would now be considered neurotic. Her daughter, Juana the Mad, Philip’s grandmother, passed a long lifetime in melancholy torpor. In Charles V. the tainted blood was mingled with the gross appetites and heavy frames of the burly Hapsburgs. The strength and power of resistance inherited from them enabled him, until middle age only, to second his vast mental power with his indomitable bodily energy. But no sooner was the elasticity of early manhood gone than he too sank into despairing lethargy and religious mysticism. Philip’s mother, the Empress Isabel, came from the same stock, and was the offspring of several generations of consanguineous marriages. The curse which afflicted Philip’s progenitors, and was transmitted with augmented horror to his descendants, could not be expected to pass over Philip himself; and the explanation of his attitude towards the political events of his time must often be sought in the hereditary gloom which fell upon him, and in the unshakable belief that he was in some sort a junior partner with Providence, specially destined to link his mundane fortunes with the higher interests of religion. His slow laboriousness, his indomitable patience, his marble serenity, all seem to have been imitated, perhaps unconsciously, from the relentless, resistless action of divine forces.

On the other hand, his inherited characteristics were accentuated by his education and training. From the time of his birth his father was continually at war with infidels and heretics, and the earliest ideas that can have been instilled into his infant mind were that he and his were fighting the Almighty’s battles and destroying His enemies. In his first years he was surrounded by the closest and narrowest devotees, for ever beseeching the divine blessing on the arms of the absent emperor; and when the time came for Philip to receive political instruction from his father, at an age when most boys are frank and confiding, he was ceaselessly told that his great destiny imposed upon him, above all, the supreme duty of self-control, and of listening to all counsellors whilst trusting none. No wonder, then, that Philip, lacking his father’s bodily vigour, grew up secret, crafty, and over-cautious. No wonder that his fervid faith in the divinity of his destiny and the sacredness of his duty kept him uncomplaining amidst calamities that would have crushed men of greater gifts and broader views. No wonder that this sad, slow, distrustful man, with his rigid methods and his mind for microscopic detail, firm in his belief that the Almighty was working through him for His great ends, should have been hopelessly beaten in the fight with nimble adversaries burdened with no fixed convictions or conscientious scruples, who shifted their policy as the circumstances of the moment dictated. Philip thought that he was fittingly performing a divine task by nature’s own methods. He forgot that nature can afford to await results indefinitely, whilst men cannot.

Philip was born at the house of Don Bernardino de Pimentel, near the church of St. Paul in Valladolid, on May 21, 1527. His mother was profoundly impressed with the great destiny awaiting her offspring, and thought that any manifestation of pain or weakness during her labour might detract from the dignity of the occasion. One of her Portuguese ladies, fearing that this effort of self-control on the part of the empress would add to her sufferings, begged her to give natural vent to her feelings. “Silence!” said the empress, “die I may, but wail I will not,” and then she ordered that her face should be hidden from the light, that no...