Philip II. of Spain 21

Philip II. of Spain 21

Montigny was executed on October 16, whilst Anne was on her way to Segovia. The first

favour she asked of her husband was to spare the life of Montigny.

Philip replied that he could not have refused to grant her request, but

unfortunately the prisoner had died of sickness. Couriers, swifter than

the queen, had long ago brought to Philip the tidings of the promise

made to Montigny’s mother. Forewarned, forearmed, he doubtless thought,

and the hapless Montmorenci’s fate was sealed by his mother’s apparently

successful intercession with the queen.

 

Philip’s fourth wife was a devout, homely, prolific creature, intensely

devoted to her husband and children, of whom she bore many, though most

of them died in early childhood. “She never leaves her rooms, and her

court is like a nunnery,” wrote the French ambassador. All around her

was frigid, gloomy etiquette and funereal devotion. As years and

disappointments gathered on Philip’s head his religious mysticism

deepened. “For God and your Majesty,” was now the current phrase in all

addresses to him. He never gave an order--hardly an opinion--without

protesting that he had no worldly end in all his acts. It was all for

the sake of God, whose instrument he was. For his own part, his life

was a constant round of drudgery and devotion. The smallest details of

government went through his hands, besides the most trivial regulations

with regard to the lives and habits of his subjects. Their dress and

furniture were prescribed with closest minuteness, their styles of

address, number of servants and horses, their amusements, their

funerals, their weddings, their devotions were settled for them by the

gloomy recluse whom they rarely saw. Whilst he was busy with such

puerilities, affairs of great moment were set aside and delayed, his

ambassadors in vain praying for answers to important despatches, his

armies turning mutinous for want of money, and his executive ministers

through his wide domains alternately despairing and indignant at the

tardiness of action which they saw was ruining the cause he championed.

 

The king’s only relaxations now were the few hours he could spare in the

bosom of his family, to which he was devotedly attached, especially to

his elder daughter, Isabel. But even in his home life his care for

detail was as minute as it was in public affairs. The most unimportant

trifle in the dress, management, studies, or play of his children came

within his purview. The minutiae of the management of his

flower-gardens, the little maladies of his servants, the good-or

ill-temper of his dwarfs and jesters did not escape his vigilance. The

private and financial affairs of his nobles came as much within his

province, almost, as his personal concerns, the furnishing and

decoration of his rooms had to be done under his personal supervision,

and the vast task of building the stupendous pile of the Escorial on an

arid mountain-side, and adorning it with triumphs of art from the

master hands of all Christendom, was performed down to the smallest

particular under his unwearied guidance. With all his prodigious

industry and devotion to duty, it is no wonder that this want of

proportion in the importance of things clogged the wheels of the great

machine of which he was mainspring, and that the nimble wit of Elizabeth

of England and Catharine de Medici foresaw, in ample time to frustrate

them, the deep-laid ponderous plans against them which he discussed _ad

infinitum_ before adopting. His favourite place for work was at the

Escorial, where, said the prior, four times as many despatches were

written as in Madrid. As soon as a portion of the edifice could be

temporarily roofed in, the monks were installed, and thenceforward

Philip passed his happiest moments in the keen, pure air of the

Guadarramas, superintending the erection of the mighty monument which

forms a fitting emblem of his genius--stupendous in its ambition,

gloomy, rigid, and overweighted in its consummation. Here he loved to

wander with his wife and children, overlooking the army of workmen who

for twenty years were busy at their tasks, to watch the deft hands of

the painters and sculptors--Sanchez Coello, the Carducci, Juan de

Juanes, the Mudo, Giacomo Trezzo, and a host of others--whom he

delighted to honour. As a patron of art in all its forms Philip was a

very Mæcenas. He followed his great father in his friendship for Titian,

but he went far beyond the emperor in his protection of other artists.

Illuminators, miniaturists, and portrait painters were liberally paid

and splendidly entertained. The masterpieces of religious art, the

cunning workmanship of the Florentine goldsmiths and lapidaries, the

marvels of penmanship of the medieval monks, the sculptures of the

ancients, were all prized and understood by Philip, as they were by few

men of his time. This sad, self-concentrated man, bowed down by his

overwhelming mission, tied to the stake of his duty, indeed loved all

things beautiful: flowers, and song-birds, sacred music, pictures, and

the prattle of little children, a seeming contradiction to his career,

but profoundly consistent really, for in the fulfilment of his task he

considered himself in some sort divine, and forced to lay aside as an

unworthy garment all personal desires and convenience, to suppress all

human inclinations. He was a naturally good man, cursed with mental

obliquity and a lack of due sense of proportion.

 

Whilst Alba was pursuing his campaign of blood in the Netherlands,

Philip found it necessary once more to struggle for the supremacy of

Christianity in the Mediterranean. It has been related how, after the

heroic defence of Malta, the Turks and Algerines had been finally driven

off with the death of Dragut in 1565. A new sultan, Selim II., had

arisen in the following year, and he had determined to leave Spanish

interests alone and to concentrate his attacks upon the Venetians,

through whom most of the Eastern trade of the Levant passed. Philip’s

interests and those of Venice had not usually been identical, as Spain

aspired to obtain a share of the oriental commerce, and France and the

Venetians had made common cause, more or less openly, with the Turk

against Spain. When the republic saw its great colony of Cyprus attacked

by the Turks, it consequently appealed in the first place to Pius V.

Piala Pasha, the Italian renegade, was already (1569) besieging Nicosia

with a great fleet, whilst the Moriscos were yet in arms in Andalucia.

The inhabitants of Cyprus were welcoming the infidel, and without prompt

and powerful help Cyprus would be lost to Christianity. The pope, at all

events, acted promptly, and sent his legate to Philip with proposals for

an alliance with the Venetians against the common enemy of their faith.

He arrived in Andalucia at the time when the Moriscos had been finally

subdued, and entered Seville with Philip. Alba for the moment had

crushed out resistance in Flanders, and had not yet aroused the fresh

storm by his financial measures. Philip therefore willingly listened to

the pope’s proposal, backed energetically, as it was, by the young

victor of the Moriscos, Don Juan of Austria, all eager to try his sword

against an enemy worthy of his steel; and after three days of devotion

and intercession before the bones of St. Ferdinand in Seville, Philip

decided to lay aside his unfriendliness with the merchant republic and

join it to beat the infidel (spring of 1570).

 

By the summer Nicosia had fallen, and before Doria’s galleys from Genoa

and Colonna’s galleys from the pope could be ready for service, private

negotiations were in progress between Venice and the Turks for a

separate peace. Here was always the danger for Philip. His Neapolitan

and Sicilian possessions, as well as the Balearics and the African

settlements, were very open to the Turk, and if the Venetians deserted

him, he would have brought upon his own coasts the scourge of Piali and

his three hundred sail with a fierce army of janissaries. It was not

until the end of 1570, therefore, that Philip was satisfied that the

Venetians would stand firm. Philip’s views undoubtedly extended far

beyond the recapture of Cyprus for the Venetians. This was the first

opportunity that had fallen to him of joining together a really powerful

league to crush the strength of Islam in the Mediterranean. Cardinal de

Granvelle was in Rome, and at last, through his persuasions, Pius V.

regranted to the Spanish king the much-desired privilege of selling the

Crusade bulls, and other financial concessions. Pius had also to give

way on another point which was very near Philip’s heart, for the king

never missed an opportunity of gaining a step forward in his policy of

centralisation of power in himself. Undeterred by the ill success of the

Aragonese in their protest against the abuses in the civil jurisdiction

of the Inquisition, the Catalans had proceeded still further, and had

taken the dangerous step of sending an envoy direct to the pope to beg

him to put an end to the oppression of the Holy Office, by virtue of an

old bull which gave to the pontiff the right to decide in all doubtful

cases, and limited the jurisdiction of the Inquisition to matters of

faith. The pope dared not go too far in offending Philip, but he went as

far as he could, and issued a bull reasserting the right of appeal to

Rome in certain cases. Philip did as he had done before, simply

prohibited the promulgation of the bull in Spain, and clapped the

leaders of the Catalans into the dungeons of the Inquisition. Things had

arrived at this stage when Pius had to beg Philip’s aid for the

Venetians. Then he was obliged to cede to the king’s instances, and

promise not to interfere in any way with the prerogatives of the Spanish

crown. The league against Islam was to be a permanent one, and the

urgent prayers of Don Juan obtained for him the supreme command of the

expedition. He was a fortunate and a dashing young officer, but he was

in no sense the great commander that he has often been represented, and

the work of organisation of his force on this occasion must be credited

mainly to the famous seaman Alvaro de Bazan, Marquis of Santa Cruz;

whilst De Granvelle, who had been appointed Viceroy of Naples, was

indefatigable in his efforts to collect the resources and men necessary

for the struggle. By the summer of 1571, when the Spanish fleet was

gathered at Messina, Cyprus had fallen amidst scenes of hellish carnage

which aroused the Christian force to fury. The fleet of Venice had

suffered much, and notwithstanding the reproaches of the pope for his

tardiness in following up the Turks, who were now harrying the Adriatic,

it was September 1571 before Don Juan and his combined fleets left

Messina. He had 208 galleys, 6 galleasses, and 50 small boats, 29,000

men-at-arms, and 50,000 sailors and rowers. The force was a great one,

but it had a great task before it. Piali and Uluch Ali had joined, and

had a fleet which had never yet been beaten at sea in the Mediterranean.

Time after time the Turks had shown that in a sea-fight they were

superior to any power in the world; but this was a holy war. The pope

had sent to Don Juan in Naples a blessed banner of blue damask covered

with sacred emblems; all the pomp and solemnity that the Church could

confer upon an expedition was extended to this; prayers and rogations

for its success were sounding through every church in Catholic

Christendom, and, above all, the hearts of men, and women too, were

aflame with enthusiasm when they saw the fervent zeal of the splendid

young prince who was to lead the hosts of Christ against the infidel.

Dressed in white velvet and gold, with a crimson scarf across his

breast, his fair curls glinting in the sun, he looked, they said in

Naples, like a prince of romance, and men, high and low, upon his fleet

were ready to go whithersoever he might lead them. Every man on the

fleet fasted, confessed, and received remission of his sins, and all

felt that they were engaged in a struggle for the Cross.