Philip II. of Spain 7

Philip II. of Spain 7

Philip’s Spanish chaplains had been extremely unpopular. Such insults

indeed had been offered to them, that they dared not appear in the

streets in priestly garb. But they were really mild and conciliating,

and when the fierce zeal of the English bishops led them to burn the

Protestants, Philip’s principal confessor openly denounced them from the

pulpit, doubtless at his master’s instance--certainly with his approval.

The cruel persecution of the Protestants, indeed, was dead against the

realisation of Spanish aims. Philip and Renard clearly saw that it would

bring about reaction and hatred, and used their influence to stay it.

Charles himself was appealed to by Renard. “If,” he said, “this

precipitancy be not moderated, affairs will assume a dangerous

appearance.” For nearly six months Philip’s efforts stayed the storm of

persecution, and his active intercession saved many condemned to the

stake.

 

But Charles was impatient for his presence in Flanders. The deadly

torpor had already seized upon the great emperor. The man who had been

indefatigable in his youth and prime had now sunk into indifference to

the world. For weeks together no word could be got from him, and of

action he was almost incapable. He had begged Philip to come to him

before his honeymoon was over, and had continued to do so ever since.

The king had waited and waited on, in the ever-deluded hope that Mary’s

promise of issue would be fulfilled, but at last even she had become

incredulous, and her husband could delay his departure no longer. By

August 1555 the rogations and intercessions to the Almighty for the safe

birth of a prince were discontinued, and the splendid plot was seen to

be a failure.

 

Consider what this meant for Philip and for the Spanish power. An

Anglo-Spanish dynasty ruling England, Spain, and Flanders, supreme over

Italy and the Mediterranean, with the riches of the Indies in its hands,

would have dominated the world. The German Protestant princes, without

effective seaboard, must remain a negligeable quantity outside of their

own country. France, shut in on every side by land and sea, could have

progressed no more, and Spain would have become paramount more

completely than if Charles’s first dream of the universal spread of the

power of the Roman-Austrian empire had been realised.

 

But it was not to be, and Philip made the best of it without exhibiting

disappointment. In vain Renard wrote to the emperor that as soon as

Philip’s back was turned the fires of persecution would recommence in

England; Charles would wait no longer, and peremptorily ordered his son

to come to Flanders. On August 26 Mary accompanied her husband to

Greenwich, where he took leave of her three days later. The queen was in

deep affliction, but she bore up before the spectators of the scene.

With one close embrace she bade the king farewell, but so long as the

boat in which he went to Gravesend remained in sight from the windows of

the palace, the unhappy queen, her eyes overflowing with tears, watched

the receding form of her husband, who on his part continued to wave his

hand as a signal of adieu, a quiet, courteous gentleman to the last,

though his heart must have been heavy with disappointment, and his

crafty brain full of plans for remedying it.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER IV

 

Philip in favour of a moderate policy in England--His attitude

towards religion generally--He requests armed aid from England

against the French--The emperor’s embarrassments in Italy--Alba

made Philip’s viceroy in Italy--Factions in Philip’s court--Ruy

Gomez and Alba--The emperor’s abdication--Philip’s changed

position--His attitude towards the papacy--The Spanish Church--Pope

Paul IV. and the Spaniards in Italy--Excommunication of

Philip--Invasion of Rome by Alba--Philip’s second visit to England.

 

 

Before Philip left England he drew up for the guidance of the queen and

council full instructions for the administration of affairs. Minutes

were sent to him of the proceedings of the meetings of the council, upon

which, as was his custom during the rest of his life, he made exhaustive

notes and comments.

 

The month after his departure he was informed by the council that the

bull had been promulgated surrendering the claim to Church property

alienated to private persons, and against this information the king

emphatically notes that it is “well done,” but in the same document an

indication is given that the zeal of the Catholic council in England is

outrunning discretion, and Philip’s hand is brought down heavily in

favour of cautious moderation. The proposal was that the first-fruits

and tenths, and ecclesiastical revenues which had been suspended or

alienated, should be brought back to their original uses. Here the king

has no approving word to say. He recommends that the question should be

considered by a committee of eight councillors, who should report to him

for decision. He then goes on to urge caution, and to direct that the

Government should not propose any measure to Parliament until it had

been submitted to him. He evidently dreaded the rash zeal of the

Catholic party in England, and did his best to hold it in check; but

before he had been gone from England six months Renard’s prophecy came

true, and the flames of persecution burst out, to be extinguished no

more until the death of the queen. Philip was certainly not responsible

for this; his influence was exerted in the contrary direction.

 

Religious persecution was with him simply a matter of political

expediency, and in the existing state of affairs it was the most

injudicious thing in the world for the Catholic party in England to run

to extremes. Philip was a cold-blooded statesman, and was never really

blinded by religious zeal. That he was a deeply religious man, according

to his narrow view, with an all-consuming belief in the identity of

interests between himself and the Almighty, is certain; but his motive

was never the exaltation of the Church itself, or even of Catholicism,

except as the most convenient instrument for establishing the political

predominance of Spain over the rest of the world.

 

What Philip wanted of the English councillors was not the hellish

bonfires of Smithfield, but ships and men with which to fight the

French. Here the fervid churchmen were not so ready. The English navy,

the council told Philip, was unfit for sea; but the best of the ships,

with the pick of the sailors and soldiers on board, should as soon as

possible be sent to guard the Channel. This was not enough for the king,

who wrote (September 1555) a vigorous marginal note on the minute,

saying that “England’s chief defence depends upon its navy being always

in good order to serve for the defence of the kingdom against all

invasion. It is right that the ships should not only be fit for sea, but

instantly available.” He wishes the fleet to be put in order, and sent,

not to Dover but to Portsmouth, as the emperor is going to Spain in

November, and wishes twelve or fourteen ships to accompany him beyond

Ushant. This was, of course, the thin end of the wedge. What Philip

really wanted, as will be seen, was to employ the English fleet against

France.

 

On the much-desired arrival of Philip in Brussels he found the great

emperor a prey to the last extreme of mental and bodily senile

depression. Things had been going from bad to worse with Charles almost

uninterruptedly since the defection of Maurice of Saxony in 1552.

“Fortune is a strumpet,” he cried at his disaster before Metz, “and

reserves her favours for the young.” And so to the young Philip he had

determined to shift the burden he himself could bear no longer.

 

The emperor’s principal embarrassments had occurred in Italy. It will be

recollected that Naples and Sicily belonged to the crown of Spain by

conquest, and that the dukedom of Milan, a vacant fief of the empire,

had been conferred upon Philip. Charles’s warlike and turbulent

representatives in these states had plunged him into endless troubles,

first by their encroachment on the principalities of Parma and Piacenza,

belonging to the papal Farneses, and, secondly, by the seizure of the

republic of Siena. The discontent caused by these encroachments was

taken advantage of by the French king to side with the Italians against

their suzerain, the emperor. The French already held Piedmont, one of

the fiefs of the empire, and now expelled the imperialists from Siena.

The Pope and the Duke of Florence, who had hitherto been neutral, then

sided with the French; the populations of Milan and Naples cried aloud

against the oppression they suffered from the Spanish governors, and the

Spanish imperial domination of Italy seemed tottering to its fall. The

Spanish governors were hastily changed, and an arrangement patched up

with the Medicis. Thenceforward the war was carried on against the

French in Italy with varying success, the Turks frequently making

diversions on the coast in the interest of France. The imperial and

Spanish officials in the various states of Italy were quarrelling with

each other in face of the common enemy, and all was in confusion when

Philip made his marriage journey to England. It was then decided by the

emperor to transfer to his son the crowns of Naples and Sicily, and the

dukedom of Milan, with which he had been nominally invested in 1546, and

the act of abdication of these dominions was read in Winchester

Cathedral before the marriage ceremony. This was doubtless intended as a

first step towards the old project of transferring to Spain the

suzerainty of the empire over Italy, as Philip bad also received a

transference of the rights of the emperor over Siena as soon as the

republic had been recaptured from the French. It will thus be seen how

anomalous was Philip’s position in Italy. He was independent King of

Naples, a tributary prince of the empire in Milan, and a substitute for

the emperor in his suzerainty over Siena. The imperial troops in Milan

had hitherto been a coercive power over the other imperial fiefs, but

they could no longer be so regarded, as they were the forces of a

Spanish prince, who in Milan was himself a tributary prince of the

empire, with no rights over the rest. Philip soon found that it was

practically impossible to govern from England his Italian states in this

complicated condition of affairs, and in November 1554 appointed Alba

with very full powers to exercise all his sovereignties in Italy, with

supreme command of the army. The emperor did not like the idea. We have

seen the opinion he held of Alba and how he dreaded making so great a

noble too powerful, and it was only with great difficulty that he

consented. Alba had been Philip’s principal mentor in England, chafing

at being kept away from the wars, and condemned to humiliating

subordination in a country he hated; but it may safely be assumed that

this was not the only reason why Philip decided to remove him from his

side.

 

Already the two political parties which were in after years alternately

to influence Philip were being developed. Ruy Gomez de Silva, his bosom

friend, upon whom he had bestowed the hand of the greatest heiress of

Spain, and whom soon afterwards he was to load with titles, was an

hidalgo of Portuguese birth, ten years older than his master. According