Philip II. of Spain 10

Philip II. of Spain 10

Philip was still in Belgium, immersed in anxiety and trouble. Already

the want of sympathy between himself and his Flemish subjects was

bearing its natural fruit. Heresy was raising its head there as

elsewhere. The Netherlands had on more than one occasion felt the heavy

hand of the emperor both in matters of religion and in the autonomous

privileges of the various states which constituted the dominions of the

House of Burgundy. But Charles was one of themselves, and from him they

would suffer much. With Philip, ostentatiously a foreigner, it was a

very different matter, and all attempts from him, however innocent,

towards the centralisation of power, which was the kernel of his system,

were tacitly resented by them. The commercial and geographical position

of the Netherlands, in constant touch with England and Germany--the

highway between them indeed--especially exposed the country to the

influence of the new religious ideas; and in Holland, at least, the

Protestant doctrines had before Philip’s accession obtained firm root.

The person of the new monarch was not popular with the Flemings. His

dislike of noisy enthusiasm, his coldness and reserve, his preference

for Spaniards, had already widened the breach that his first appearance

had occasioned, and his people were almost eager to place a bad

interpretation upon all he did. His first step, if it had been taken by

another sovereign, would have been a popular one, but with him it was

the reverse. The three bishoprics of the Netherlands were unwieldy, and

a considerable portion of the country was under the ecclesiastical

control of German bishops. Philip desired to remedy this by the

re-division of the various dioceses and the creation of fourteen new

bishops and three archbishops, the lands of the monasteries being

appropriated for the support of the new prelates. Philip had endeavoured

to keep his plans secret, but they leaked out, and at Philip’s farewell

visit to the States-General at Ghent, on the eve of his departure for

Spain, the members of the assembly denounced in no uncertain terms the

implied policy of Philip to rule them according to Spanish instead of

Flemish ideas. The severe edicts of the emperor against heresy had been

only partially enforced, and in most of the states had been controlled

by the native civil tribunals; but it was concluded that Philip would

inaugurate a new era of rigour, especially as he was retaining under

arms in the Netherlands some 4000 Spanish infantry. Philip had to listen

to some bold talk from the burghers. With him heresy had always been

synonymous with resistance to authority--in his case, he thought, allied

with divinity; and as he left the assembly of the States he must have

made up his mind that here, in his own dominion, the hydra must be

crushed at any cost. As was his wont, however, he dissembled, promised

that the Spanish troops should be withdrawn, and took leave of the

States with fair words. The country was to be governed in his absence by

the Duchess of Parma, daughter of the emperor by a Flemish lady, and now

married to that Ottavio Farnese whose dukedoms had been taken and

subsequently restored to him by the Spaniards. Her principal adviser was

to be the Bishop of Arras (De Granvelle). He was the third son of

Charles’s favourite minister, Secretary Perrennot, a Franche-Comtois,

and consequently a foreigner in Flanders. Upon him the principal brunt

of his master’s unpopularity fell. His appointment as prime minister, he

being a foreigner, was, said the Flemings, a violation of their rights.

But Philip was immovable. He knew by the signatories of the petition for

the removal of the Spanish troops that many of the principal men in the

Netherlands were disaffected, and his suspicions had been aroused

against those prime favourites of his father, the young Prince of Orange

and Count Egmont. But he was, as usual, careful to dissemble his

distrust, and left Egmont as governor of the counties of Flanders and

Artois, and Orange of those of Holland, Zeeland, etc.

 

The atmosphere in Philip’s Netherlands dominions was thus full of

gathering storm when he turned his back upon them for the last time to

sail for Spain (August 1559). At the last moment, as he was about to

embark, his indignation at the resistance to his authority seems to have

overridden his reticence. He turned to Orange and told him that he knew

that he was at the bottom of the opposition he had encountered in the

States-General. Orange began by laying the responsibility upon the

States themselves. “No,” said Philip, “not the States, but you! you!

you!” This was Orange’s first warning. In his heart he must have known

now that in future it was to be war to the knife between his sovereign

and himself. In any case he was prudent enough to stay on shore, and

declined to accompany the other Flemish nobles on board the Spanish

fleet.

 

If the sky was overcast in the Netherlands, it was almost as lowering in

Spain itself; and this was a matter which lay nearer still to Philip’s

heart. The country had been governed during the king’s absence by his

sister, the widowed Princess Juana of Portugal, as regent. Civil affairs

had shown no decided change. The money that flowed from the Indies had

been mostly seized and squandered upon the foreign wars, and on one

occasion the Seville merchants had ventured to remonstrate. But their

leaders had been loaded with irons and cast into prison, and

henceforward the people patiently bore their burden. Religious matters,

however, were in a less satisfactory condition. It has already been

observed that the policy of Charles and Philip had always been to bring

the Church in Spain under subjection to the monarch, and to weaken the

control of Rome over it. The ecclesiastical benefices were now

practically all at the disposal of the sovereigns, and were distributed

to a large extent with political objects, pensions and payment for

national purposes frequently being charged upon episcopal, and other

revenues, as a condition of presentation of a benefice. The royal

council had assumed the power of reviewing the decisions of

ecclesiastical tribunals, and the same civil power had now claimed the

right of suspending the publication of papal bulls in Spain.

 

For some years a controversy had been in progress with the papacy as to

the right of the crown to insist upon the execution of a decision of the

Council of Trent with regard to the reformation of the Spanish cathedral

chapters, which had become very corrupt. The pope had considered this an

interference with his prerogative, and had summoned to Rome the Spanish

bishops who championed the right of the monarch over the Church. The

royal council suspended the papal bulls and forbade the bishops to obey

the pope’s summons. Paul IV. was furious, and this was one of the

reasons for his attempts to ruin the Spanish power. When he fulminated

his famous excommunication of Philip already mentioned, the king

retorted by ordering through the Regent Juana that all the pope’s

messengers bearing the bulls into Spain should be captured and punished.

The council next recommended that Philip should insist upon all papal

nuncios to Spain being Spanish prelates, and that they should be paid by

the pope and not by the king. It did not, however, suit Philip to

proceed too violently against the Church, upon which he knew he must

depend largely as an instrument of his policy. When in 1557 he consented

to the undignified peace with Paul IV., who had been so bitter an enemy

to him, proud Alba said that, if he had had his way, he would have made

Caraffa go to Brussels to sue the king for peace instead of Philip’s

general having to humble himself before the churchman.

 

Matters were still extremely strained between Philip and the pope, Paul

IV., when, almost simultaneously with the king’s departure from

Flanders, the pontiff died (August 15, 1559), and during most of the

rule of his successor, Pius IV. (Angelo de Medici), Philip had a ready

and pliant instrument in the chair of St. Peter.

 

The gradual slackening of the bonds which bound the Spanish Church to

the papacy, and the laxity of the ecclesiastical control which was a

consequence, had brought about scandalous corruption amongst the higher

and cloistered clergy. The general tone of religion, indeed, at the time

seems to have been one of extreme looseness and cynicism, accompanied by

a slavish adherence to ritual and form. The terms in which the king and

his ambassadors in their correspondence refer to the pontiffs and to the

government of the Church in Rome, are often contemptuous in the last

degree. They are always regarded as simple instruments for forwarding

the interests of “God and your Majesty,” the invariable formula which

well embodies Philip’s own conception of his place in the universe.

Nothing is more curious than the free way in which religious matters

were spoken of and discussed with impunity, so long as the speakers

professed profound and abject submission to the Church, which in this

case really meant the semi-political institution in Spain.

 

The Inquisition had from the first been jealously guarded from any real

effective interference on the part of the pope, and by the time of

Philip’s return to Spain had already begun to assume its subsequent

character as a great political instrument in the hands of the monarch,

working on ecclesiastical lines. So far as Philip’s personal experience

extended, nearly all resistance to authority had begun with heresy, and,

with his views as to the identity of his interests with those of the

Almighty, it was evidently a duty to crush out ruthlessly any

manifestation of a spirit which tended to his prejudice.

 

There had gone with Philip to England as one of his confessors a learned

and eloquent friar named Bartolomé de Carranza, of the Order of

Preachers. He had been active in his efforts to bring England into the

Catholic fold, and had especially devoted himself to refuting the

arguments upon which the reformers depended. By his zeal and ability he

had gained the good-will of Philip, who had, after his return to

Brussels, raised him to the archbishopric of Toledo and the primacy of

Spain. He shortly afterwards left for his diocese, with instructions to

visit the emperor at Yuste on his way thither. He found Charles dying,

and administered the last consolations to him, whilst another monk, a

spy of the Inquisition, knelt close by, storing up in his mind for

future use against him the words of hope and comfort he whispered to the

dying man. It was afterwards alleged that he had dared to say that we

might hope for salvation and justification by faith alone. Previous to

this (1558) he had published in Antwerp a work called _Commentaries on

the Christian Catechism_, in the preface of which certain words of a

somewhat imprudent tendency were employed. “He wished,” he said, “to

resuscitate the antiquity of the primitive church because that was the

most sound and pure”; and in the body of the book certain propositions

were cautiously advanced, which, however, nothing but the keenest sophistry could twist into heresy.