Philip II. of Spain 29

Philip II. of Spain 29

There was no defeat for such a man as this; and he could afford to be

generous and magnanimous, as he was, to the men whose shortcomings were

the immediate cause of the great catastrophe which ruined the power of a

nation, but could not break the faith or spirit of a man who regarded

himself as the fly-wheel of the machine by which the Almighty worked the

earth.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER XVI

 

Don Antonio in England--Catharine’s support of him--Strozzi’s

defeat at St. Michaels--Philip’s patronage of assassination--Philip

and the League--Renewal of the war of religion in France--The

murder of Guise--Imprisonment of Antonio Perez and the Princess of

Eboli--Perez’s treachery--His escape to Aragon--The _fueros_ of

Aragon--Philip proceeds against Perez--Perez arrested by the

Inquisition of Aragon--Rising in Zaragoza--Perez’s

escape--Suppression of the Aragonese.

 

 

When Don Antonio fled from Portugal in 1581, Elizabeth and Catharine de

Medici vied with each other in the welcome they extended to him. The

English queen gave him a pension, and he was splendidly lodged at Eton

College, Somerset House, and elsewhere at her expense. Hopes were held

out to him that a fleet should be raised in England for him to hold

those isles of the Azores which continued favourable to him and capture

the rest. He was encouraged to pledge his priceless jewels, the finest

in the world, and whilst his money lasted, privateers and ships were

busily fitted out in his name. But though most of the gems were

ultimately juggled into the hands of Elizabeth and Leicester, the queen

had always stopped short of allowing a hostile fleet openly to leave her

shores to attack Philip in the pretender’s interest.

 

Antonio at last got tired of this, and with some difficulty fled to

France. There he found Catharine more ready. He promised her the great

empire of Brazil in exchange for aid, and in 1582 a fleet was got

together under her auspices, commanded by her cousin, Philip Strozzi. In

August the small Spanish garrison at St. Michaels was surrounded by 1500

Frenchmen on shore, and Strozzi’s fleet of about 40 ships lay off to

blockade the island. Suddenly Santa Cruz’s squadron appeared, somewhat

stronger than Strozzi’s. Antonio seems to have lost heart and fled in

the night with some of the ships; the English privateers which were

expected to join Strozzi did not put in an appearance; Santa Cruz fell

upon the French fleet and utterly destroyed it, Strozzi being killed;

and every prisoner who fell into the hands of the Spaniards instantly

slaughtered. They had no commission from the King of France, and were

treated as pirates. But Catharine was bent upon troubling her late

son-in-law to the utmost, and Antonio still had jewels to pledge, so in

the following year another fleet was got together in France, under Aymar

de Chaste, to hold Terceira. The French were received with open arms by

the islanders who were firm for Antonio, but Santa Cruz swooped upon

this fleet, as he had done on the previous one, with a similar result,

and Catharine became convinced that the Azores, the key as they were to

Philip’s western empire, were his least vulnerable point whilst his

fleets held the sea. But this attitude of the French queen and her son,

and the open patronage and aid she gave to her younger son, Alençon, in

his attempts with Huguenot help to seize the sovereignty of the

Netherlands, convinced Philip that, unless something was done to

withstand the advance of the Protestant power in France, he would in

time find himself surrounded by opponents on all sides. He did his best

to dispose of some of his personal enemies. He approved of Babington’s

plot to kill Elizabeth, he subsidised many unsuccessful attempts to

murder Don Antonio, and certainly two to assassinate the Prince of

Orange, one nearly successful, before the final foul blow was struck by

Gérard in 1584. It is evident, however, from the manner in which he

usually received such proposals, that he did not deceive himself as to

the inefficacy of murder as a political method. He treated it merely as

a palliative, to be used in conjunction with broader action. From the

time when it became evident that Catharine and her son mainly leant to

the side of the Huguenots and the politicians, and that Henry of

Navarre, the head of the reformers in France and the hereditary enemy of

the House of Aragon, would probably succeed to the crown of France, some

bolder action than assassination was necessary for Philip.

 

It has been seen how close had grown the connection between him and the

Guises, and how cleverly he had worked upon their hopes and fears to

bring them entirely under his thumb. Alternate flattery, bribes, and

veiled threats at length made Guise the humble servant of Spain. It

suited Philip to feed his ambitious dream of grasping all, or part, of

the French realm, to promise and pay him great subsidies, as he did, to

carry on war in his own country, because, in the first place, it

weakened Catharine and the Huguenots; and, secondly, it left Philip a

free hand in England and Scotland. By the aid of Spanish money and his

own dashing popularity, Guise began by completely gaining to his side

the mob of Paris, and then through all France the Catholic party was

gradually drawn into a great organisation, which enabled Guise to treat

with Philip on something like reciprocal terms. By the spring of 1585

the bases of the Holy League had been established. The idea was an

ambitious one, but doubtless many of its principal adherents had no

inkling of how completely the ultimate object of the whole organisation

was designed for the furthering of Philip’s political ends, under cover

of a purely religious movement. The dismemberment of France under his

auspices would have been a master-stroke of policy, and such a

consummation seemed at one time to be almost a certainty. To begin with,

an attempt was made to seduce Henry of Navarre into the League; but he

was wary and would not be caught, and consequently, in Philip’s view,

must be crushed. If he had consented to be satisfied with Béarn and the

south-west, Guise might well have had the east, the Duke of Savoy

Provence, and Philip’s daughter, Isabel, in right of her mother, would

have inherited Brittany, whilst Philip would have had a slice of Picardy

and French Flanders. When it was found that Henry of Navarre would not

be cajoled into abandoning any portion of his rightful claim to the

whole realm, the League and Philip induced Sixtus V. to fulminate his

famous bull (September 1585) excommunicating him, his cousin Condé, “and

the whole of this bastard and detestable race of Bourbon.” They and

theirs were to be deprived of all their principalities for ever, and the

excommunication extended to all their adherents. Henry’s reply was as

violent as the provocation. “The man who calls himself Pope Sixtus is

himself a liar and a heretic.” It only needed this bull again to set

flame to the smouldering ashes of the religious war. Henry III. had

already been forced into signing the infamous treaty of Nemours,

depriving the Huguenots of all toleration, and he became for a time,

with bitter hatred in his heart, the bond-slave of Guise. The poor

wretch tried in his weak, silly way to get free by forming fresh

connections with Elizabeth, with the German Lutherans, with Henry of

Navarre, but no party took much notice of him now, and the war went on,

the king being a fugitive from his own capital, and Philip afar off

smiling at the success of his schemes for setting his neighbours by the

ears and paralysing the arms of France that might help Elizabeth against

the Armada. For one moment it looked possible, after Philip’s weakness

had been demonstrated at sea, that all Frenchmen might band together,

forget their dissensions, and turn upon the common enemy; but Guise was

tied hard and fast to Philip by this time, and his ambitions were high.

The Paris mob was at his bidding, and the clergy throughout France. The

wretched king, Henry III., saw no other way out of his dilemma than to

have Guise and his brother killed (December 23, 1588). They had been

warned by Philip’s agents and others many times that this was intended,

but Guise scorned to show any fear, and he fell. With the murder of

Guise it seemed for a time as if the Spanish king’s intrigues in France

had turned out as fruitless as his efforts against England.

 

Nor was he much happier at home. It has already been related how, on

March 31, 1578, Escobedo, the secretary of Don Juan, had been murdered

by men in Antonio Perez’s pay, by virtue of an order given by Philip six

months before. However desirable it may have been to put this firebrand

out of the way in the autumn of 1577, when Don Juan was ostensibly

friendly with the States, the murder served no useful purpose whatever

when it was committed, for by that time Don Juan and Farnese were at war

openly with the States. Philip doubtless ascribed the assassination at

first to over-zeal on the part of Perez, and was inclined to condone it.

But it was part of his system to promote rivalry amongst the people who

served him, and another of his secretaries, Mateo Vasquez, whose duty it

was to convey to the king the gossip of the capital, continued, with

perhaps unnecessary insistence, to inform the king that all Madrid was

connecting the name of Perez and the widowed Princess of Eboli with the

murder. The princess was the greatest lady in Spain, a haughty,

passionate termagant, who had borne to Ruy Gomez a very numerous family,

and who since her husband’s death had given a great deal of trouble to

the king, by her erratic and impracticable conduct in the care of her

children and the management of her great household and estates. The

supposed amours between her and Philip have been disproved, but there is

no doubt that the vain, immoral Perez had become her lover, and that

Escobedo, who had formerly been a page of her husband’s, had discovered

this and resented it. There is but little doubt that the princess had in

consequence urged Perez to have the man killed under cover of the king’s

authorisation of many months before. The princess, when she heard that

Vasquez had mentioned her name to the king in connection with the

murder, flew into a violent rage and demanded his punishment. Thereupon

began a great feud between Perez and the princess on the one hand, and

Vasquez on the other, which doubtless caused Philip much inconvenience

and annoyance. He tried his hardest to reconcile the parties, keeping

Perez still in high favour. The princess and Perez were, however, so

persistent that the king at last lost patience, and in July 1579 had

them both arrested. The princess never entirely regained her liberty,

but Perez’s confinement was merely nominal, and he was assured by the

king that he would not be seriously inconvenienced. He was more

extravagant and arrogant than ever under his semi-arrest, and the

princess and he continued to press that he might be tried for the

murder. They knew that he could plead the king’s order, as indeed he

ultimately did, and that Philip hated an open scandal.

 

But a great change came when Philip wanted to conquer Portugal, and

restored Alba and his party to favour. For years Perez had been the

bitter enemy of Alba. He had scoffed and mocked at his appearance and

methods; he had been the prime cause of his downfall. Now was the time

for Alba’s revenge. Gradually he surrounded the king with those who took

his view, and the shadows grew deeper and deeper over Perez. For years

the trail was steadily followed, his relations with the princess

unravelled, his own incautious words taken down, until at the end of