Philip II. of Spain 2

Philip II. of Spain 2

GENEALOGICAL TABLE SHOWING PHILIP’S CLAIM TO THE ENGLISH CROWN.....263

 

APPENDIX.....265

 

 

 

 

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 involuntary sign of pain should be seen.

 

In this spirit of self-control and overpowering majesty the weak, sickly

baby was reared by his devout mother. Two other boy infants who were

born to her died of epilepsy in early childhood, and Philip, her

first-born, remained her only son.

 

In the midst of the rejoicings that heralded his birth news came to

Valladolid that the emperor’s Spanish and German troops had assaulted

and sacked Rome, and that Pope Clement VII. was surrounded by infuriated

soldiery, a prisoner in his own castle of St. Angelo. In the long

rivalry which Charles had sustained with the French king, Francis I.,

who had competed with him for the imperial crown, one of the main

factors was the dread of the entire domination of Italy by Spain, by

virtue of the suzerainty of the empire over the country. The excitable

and unstable pontiff, Clement VII., thought that his own interests were

threatened, and made common cause with Francis. The emperor’s troops

were commanded by Charles de Montpensier, Duke of Bourbon, who had

quarrelled with his own sovereign, and was in arms against him, and he

unquestionably exceeded the emperor’s wishes in the capture and sacking

of the eternal city, the intention having been to have held the pontiff

in check by terror rather than to degrade him in the eyes of the worl