“God rules above us!
I sent you to contend with men and not
With rocks and storms. You’re welcome to Madrid.”—Schiller.
did the great King see then either the causes or the consequences of the vincibility of his Invincible Armada!
The character of Philip II. is portrayed upon the historic page in colors of sharp contrast. To the Spaniards he was their Solomon, their “prudent king”; to Motley and the Netherlands he was “the demon of the South.”
Philip II. was the finished product of his age and nation. Pride, intolerance, absolutism combined with excellent administrative ability, deep tho’ narrow religious convictions, and rigorous sincerity, characterized both the man and the monarch. To a victim of an Auto da Fe he said with stern truthfulness, “If my own son were guilty like you I should lead him with my own hands to the stake.”
As to Philip’s really having delivered his son, Don Carlos, into the hands of the Grand Inquisitor as tragically told in Schiller’s “Don Carlos”, well that is drama, not history. But when a noted name and its suggested personality—for good or for evil and unfortunately less frequently for good than for evil—are once fascinatingly fixed in drama or story or song, not all the tomes of contradictory evidence, not all the living archives of dead centuries, not Truth itself, can shatter the crystal charm or make it cease shining. Alexander the Great, world conqueror; Socrates, the Wise; Plato, poet-philosopher; Aristotle, master of them that know; Julius Cæsar, deplored of all nations; Mark Anthony, Cleopatra’s lover; Nero, monster; Caligula-Commodus-Heliogabalus, crowned madmen; Marcus Aurelius, Emperor-philosopher; Charlemagne, the Good; Louis IX., the Saint; Louis XI., hypocrite; John of England, child murderer; Richard III., deformed devil; Henry VIII., wife-killer; Machiavelli, serpent-sophist; Louis XIV., despot, Arbiter Elegantiarum; Elizabeth, Good Queen Bess; Mary, Queen of Scots, the lovely unfortunate; Philip II. of Spain, bigot: thus are they fixed in the charmed circle of literature and thus shall they glitter forever.
Is history itself any more reliable than drama? As to facts, Yes; as to motives, intentions, cumulative causes, results, all round truth, No. “Histories are as perfect as the historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul,” says the astute Carlyle; and every honest author feels at deepest heart the truth of these words. The soft art of omission is known to every artist of the pen. And condemnation euphemistically balanced by excusing comment may, in one artistic sentence, satisfy at once a writer’s conscience, his subjectivity, and the claims of his peculiar environment. Can any one doubt that it was thus Macaulay wrote his brilliant history of England? And even granted almost the impossible—that an historian be ruggedly truthful and fearlessly sincere; he is not thereby rendered wise, nor is he necessarily gifted with an eye and a soul.
So in colors of sharp contrast upon the historic page will Philip II. ever be portrayed; but both can’t be right. Perhaps tho’ they may be as sundered extremes of a prismatic ray which, when complementary coloring shall have been added, will become white light.