Philip II. of Spain 23

Philip II. of Spain 23

Don Juan had posted through France in the guise of a Moorish slave to

prevent delay and discovery, but when he reached Luxembourg he was given

to understand by the States that he could only be received as Philip’s

governor now, on certain terms to be dictated to him. This was gall and

wormwood to the proud young prince. Orange knew all about the fine plans

for the invasion of England, secret though they were thought to be, and

at his instance the States insisted upon the Spanish troops being

withdrawn overland, and not by sea. During the winter of 1576 and early

spring of 1577 Don Juan was kept haggling over the terms upon which he

was to be allowed by the Flemings to assume his governorship. The

States-General were assembled at Ghent, and consulted Orange at every

turn. They said that they had bought their liberty now with their blood,

and were not going to sell it again to a new master. Passionate prayers

from Don Juan and his secretary came to Philip by every post that they

should be allowed to fight it out; imploring requests for money and arms

to beat into “these drunken wineskins of Flemings” a sense of their

duty; often wild, incoherent, half-threatening __EXPRESSION__s of disgust

and annoyance at the uncongenial task committed to the victor of

Lepanto. He was a soldier, he said, and could not do it; the more he

gave way the more insolent the Flemings became; a woman or a child could

do the work better than he. Escobedo’s letters to Perez, which of course

were shown to the king, were more desperate still. On February 7, 1577,

he wrote: “Oh, I am ready to hang myself, if I were not hoping to hang

those who injure us so. O Master Perez! how stubborn and hateful these

devils have been in hindering our plan. Hell itself must have spewed

forth this gang to thwart us so.” Don Juan himself was just as violent

in his letters. “O Antonio!” he wrote, “how certain for my sorrow and

misfortune is the frustration of our plans, just as they were so well

thought out and arranged.” Herein, it is clear, was the grievance; and

Philip’s grim face must have darkened as he saw the deceit his brother

sought to practise upon him, and how he was to be dragged by the

ambition of a bastard into a struggle with England, at a time when his

treasury was empty, his own states of Flanders in rebellion, and his

mind bent upon far-reaching combinations, which would all be frustrated

if his hand had thus been forced. Humiliating reconciliation with the

Catholic Flemings was nothing to this; and to his brother’s wild

remonstrance and protest he had but one answer, cold and precise--peace

must be made with any sacrifice, consistent only with his continued

sovereignty. At last by pledging his own honour and credit--for he

insolently told the king that no money could be obtained on

_his_--Escobedo borrowed means sufficient to persuade the troops to

march, and the mutinous rascals who had disgraced the name of soldiers

crossed the frontier to Italy amidst the curses of all Flanders. Then

Don Juan entered Brussels at last with the frantic rejoicing of a people

who had emancipated their country by their firmness. But his own face

was lowering, and rage and disappointment were at his heart. He had been

threatening for months to come back to Spain whether the king liked it

or not, and Perez ceaselessly whispered to Philip that now that the

prince’s ambition had been thwarted in one direction, it would strike

higher in another. We now know that Perez garbled and misrepresented Don

Juan’s words, suppressed portions of his letters, and persuaded Philip

that his brother designed treachery to him in Spain. The reason for this

is obvious. Don Juan and Escobedo had definitely drifted away from the

old party of Ruy Gomez, and his return to Spain would have secured a

preponderance to the Duke of Alba, and probably caused Perez’s

downfall. The principal members of the camarilla now were Perez’s

friends, the Marquis de los Velez and Cardinal Quiroga, both of whom

where in favour of peace; but with Don Juan and Alba present they would

be overruled, especially as Zayas, the other secretary of state, was a

creature of Alba.

 

When therefore Escobedo rushed over to Spain in July 1577 to arrange

about the payment of the loan he had guaranteed, Perez, after making two

unsuccessful attempts to poison him, had him stabbed one night (March

31, 1578) in the streets of Madrid. Perez asserted that the king had

authorised him to have the deed done six months before, and in this, no

doubt, he told the truth. In any case, great events followed upon this

apparently unimportant crime, as will be related in the proper place.

The Spanish troops had marched out of Flanders in the spring of 1577,

and before many weeks had passed Don Juan again found his position

intolerable. The tone of the Catholic Flemings had quite changed now.

They were loyal and cordial to him, but they let him see that they had

the whip hand, and meant to keep it. His plans had all miscarried; his

brother was cold and irresponsive and kept him without money; he was

isolated, powerless, and heartsick, and determined to end it. Margaret

de Valois, Catharine de Medici’s daughter, had gone to Hainhault on a

pretended visit to the waters of Spa, but really to sound the Catholic

Flemings about their accepting her brother Alençon for their sovereign.

Don Juan feigned the need to receive her, but he had plotted with

Barlemont to get together a force of Walloons upon whom he could depend.

They were hidden in a monastery, and after the prince had hastily

greeted Margaret, he suddenly collected his men, threw himself into the

fortress of Namur, and defied the States. Then began a fresh war, in

which Orange himself for the first time since his rebellion became the

arbiter of the Catholic Flemish States. Here was a fresh blow to Philip.

It was evident that his brother was one of those flighty, vaguely

ambitious, turbulent people, who are the worst possible instruments of

an absolute ruler. For over three months no letter reached Don Juan from

the king, whilst he chafed in Namur. “If,” he wrote to a friend, “God in

His goodness does not protect me, I do not know what I shall do, or what

will become of me. I wish to God I could, without offending my

conscience or my king, dash my brains out against a wall, or cast myself

over a precipice. They neglect me even to the extent of not answering my

letters.” In the meanwhile Orange entered Brussels in triumph, and

Catholics and Protestants made common cause for a time. But not for

long. The extreme Catholic party, under the Duke of Arschot, invited

secretly Philip’s young nephew and brother-in-law, the Archduke Mathias,

to assume the sovereignty of Flanders. The young prince--he was only

twenty, and a fool--escaped from Vienna and arrived at Brussels on

October 26, 1577. This was a blow to Don Juan in Namur, to Orange in

Brussels, and to Philip in Madrid. Philip met the danger at first by

masterly inactivity--in fact the solution might have been made not

altogether distasteful to him; Orange cleverly took the young archduke

under his wing, patronised, adopted, and disarmed him; and Don Juan

busied himself in his fortress settling with his friends outside the

recruiting of a Catholic force, whilst he was still quarrelling with the

States by letter. But by the end of October the Protestants in the

south, encouraged by the turn of affairs and the presence of Orange in

Brussels, turned upon their Catholic fellow-townsmen in Ghent, Bruges,

and elsewhere, and sought to avenge the cruelties perpetrated upon them

in the past by the Catholic Church. The Duke of Arschot and the

representatives of the Catholic States were seized and imprisoned whilst

in session at Ghent, and everywhere the Protestants and Orange seemed to

be sweeping the board. This was too much for Philip. The Archduke

Mathias as tributary sovereign under him of a Catholic Flanders, he

might have accepted, but the Prince of Orange and the Lutherans

paramount from Zeeland to the French frontier he could not stomach. So

the veteran Spanish and Italian infantry who had scourged Flanders

before, were recalled, under Alexander Farnese, the son of Margaret, who

had been the ruler of Flanders when the dissensions began, to the help

of Don Juan and to crush the Protestants. When Alexander and his troops

approached Namur, Orange and Mathias, side by side, were entering

Brussels in state. Elizabeth had insisted upon Orange being made

lieutenant-general with the real power, as a condition of her continued

aid to the States, for she was quite determined upon two points--first,

that no matter what union was effected between the States, the Catholic

party should never be paramount; and secondly, that the French should

not gain a footing there except under her patronage. She had some fear

on this latter point, for Catharine de Medici had long been intriguing

to obtain the sovereignty for her young son Alençon, who was already on

the frontier with a force of Huguenots, whilst the Guises had been

actively helping Don Juan in his recruiting of Catholics. When Parma had

arrived, and Don Juan’s new levies were ready, he marched out of Namur

on the last day of January 1578. The States troops, mostly Netherlanders

and German mercenaries, mustered 20,000 men, and Don Juan’s forces about

the same number. The prince, with Parma, led the centre of the latter

with the pope’s sacred banner floating over their heads. The same spirit

that had led him against the infidel inspired him now, and the banner

testified to it, for it bore the words under a crucifix: “Under this

emblem I vanquished the Turks; under the same will I conquer the

heretics.” And he did so, for on the plain of Gemblours the States

troops under De Goigny, with Egmont, Bossu, Champigny, La Marck, and

Arschot’s brother Havré, were routed completely, without loss on the

Spanish side. The honour of the day belongs to Alexander Farnese, who

with a dashing cavalry charge broke the enemy at a critical moment, the

only men who made any real resistance being the Scottish levies, 600

strong, under Colonel Balfour. These were saved from the carnage by Don

Juan’s intercession, but of the rest 6000 men were killed in fight, and

the prisoners hanged to a man.

 

Philip had had enough of his turbulent brother. He had promised the

envoys from the Catholic States that he should be withdrawn, and it was

privately understood when Alexander Farnese was appointed to go thither

that he should succeed the prince. But the latter for the present still

continued in command, reducing the towns of South Flanders one after the

other, and again issuing a proclamation in Philip’s name offering peace

to the States, on condition of the recognition of the Spanish

sovereignty and the predominance of the Catholic religion. The latter

condition meant the extermination of the Protestants by fire and sword,

and Orange could never accept it.

 

By the pacification of Ghent, which Don Juan had in principle confirmed,

religious toleration had been secured, and the States refused to go back

from that position, and again demanded the withdrawal of the

impracticable governor. Philip was, in fact, at his wits’ end what to do

with his brother. Perez had succeeded in persuading the king that Don

Juan’s object was to raise a revolution in Spain and try to grasp the

crown. He could not, therefore, be allowed to come back freely, nor

would the States endure him longer on any terms. He himself felt the

position to be an impossible one, and his letters to his private friends

in Madrid constantly hint at suicide as the only way out of the

difficulty, for he knew now that his faithful secretary Escobedo had

been assassinated in Madrid, and anticipated a similar shameful end for

himself. War to the knife against the States was his only resource, for

he was no diplomatist, but Philip, over his head, left no stone unturned

to try to tempt Orange to abandon his cause. Orange had a restive team

to drive, what with the Catholic majority and nobles, the Protestant

Dutchmen, the extreme Puritans, like Saint Aldegonde; Elizabeth of

England, the French Huguenots, the German mercenaries, and poor Mathias,

now an acknowledged failure