Philip II. of Spain

by Martin A. S. Hume

Things in the meanwhile were going badly for the Spaniards in the mountains. The king, Aben Humeya, gained a victory at Seron, and the main body of Spaniards, under the Marquis de los Velez, got out of hand, provisions and pay were short, and the men deserted in shoals, until at last Los Velez was left only with the veteran regiment of Naples. Then Philip and the churchmen saw that they must let Don Juan have his way and give him active command, whilst the king himself, to be nearer, came to Cordova.

But Aben Humeya’s power was slipping away. Dissensions had broken out in his own family. He had exercised his royal authority with as much harshness and arrogance as if it had been founded on a rock instead of on the desert sand, and soon a revolution of his people broke out. The young king, already sunk in lascivious indulgence, was strangled in his bed, and his cousin, Ben Abó, was proclaimed King of Granada.

The juncture was a favourable one for Don Juan, and he lost no time. With marvellous activity he collected the Spanish forces again around the Naples regiment; he brought men from all parts of Spain, and by the end of January 1570 he was besieging the fortress of Galera with 13,000 soldiers. For a month the siege lasted, and hardly a day passed without some act of daring heroism on one side or the other. At last by February 16 the place was taken by assault, and the defenders to the number of 3000 killed. Massacre, pillage, and lust again threw the Spanish troops into a state of demoralisation, and a few days later, in attempting to recover Seron, an uncontrollable panic seized them, and the seasoned warriors fled like hares before an insignificant gang of Moors, with a loss of 600 men. All discipline and order were thrown to the winds; desertion, anarchy, and murder were all that could be got from Don Juan’s army, now a mere blood-thirsty rabble.

The Moorish king would fain make terms, and Don Juan was in favour of entertaining his approaches. Philip was at his wits’ end with two wars on his hands, both the result of his blind, rigid policy; his treasury, as usual, was well-nigh exhausted. Elizabeth of England had recently seized all the ready money he could borrow for the payment of Alba’s army, and the Turk was busy in the Mediterranean, with the more or less overt encouragement of Catharine de Medici. But though Don Juan begged for clemency for the submissive Moors, the fanatics Deza and Espinosa would have none of it, and Philip’s zeal was aroused again in the name of religion to strike and spare not for the interests of “God and your Majesty.”

Deza and one of his officials of the Inquisition managed to bribe a Moor to betray and kill the king, Ben Abó. The body of the dead king was brought into Granada, and Deza, churchman though he was, struck off the head and had it nailed to the gate of what was once the Moorish quarter, with a threat of death to the citizen who should dare to touch it.

There was to be no mercy to the vanquished, said the churchmen, and Philip obeyed them, in spite of Don Juan’s protests against their interference with the clemency of a magnanimous victor. Death or slavery were the only alternatives, and no mercy was shown. From the fair plains they and theirs had tilled for eight centuries, from the frowning Alpujarras, which their tireless industry had forced to yield a grudging harvest; from the white cities, which had kept alive the culture of the east when the barbarians had trampled down the civilisation of the west, all those who bore the taint of Moorish blood were cast. Bound in gangs by heavy gyves, they were driven through the winter snow into the inhospitable north. Don Juan, soldier though he was, was pierced with pity at the sight. “They went,” he wrote to Ruy Gomez, “with the greatest sorrow in the world, for at the time they left, the rain, snow, and wind were so heavy that the daughter will be forced to leave the mother, the husband the wife, and the widow her baby by the wayside. It cannot be denied that it is the saddest sight imaginable to see the depopulation of a whole kingdom. But, sir, that is what has been done!”

By the end of November 1570 Andalucia was cleared of the Moriscos, and at the same time cleared of its industry, its prosperity, and its enlightenment. The fanatic churchmen had had their foolish way, and Philip went back to his desk, certain in his narrow soul that he had served the cause of God and the welfare of his country.

CHAPTER XI

Philip and England—Elizabeth seizes his treasure—Spanish plots against her—Philip and the northern rebellion—The excommunication of Elizabeth—Ridolfi’s plot—Philip’s hesitancy—Prohibition of English trade with Spain—Its futility—Alba’s retirement from Flanders—Philip’s responsibility for Alba’s proceedings—The tenth penny—Philip’s disapproval—Orange’s approaches to the French.

THE persistent plotting of Cardinal Lorraine and the Monlucs to bring about a union of Spain, France, and the pope, with the object of fighting Protestantism and placing Mary Stuart on the throne of a Catholic united kingdom, had failed. Catharine de Medici hated Mary Stuart and the Guises, and Philip had no wish, if even he had the power, to fight England for the purpose of making Mary’s French uncles paramount. Religion apart, it was better for Philip’s policy that England should remain Protestant than that this should happen, always provided that he could keep Elizabeth friendly, and either frighten or cajole her into a position of neutrality towards his rebellious Protestant subjects in the Netherlands. He could no longer attempt to dictate to her, as he had sought to do at the beginning of her reign, but only strove now to gain her goodwill; and both parties were fully cognisant of their changed position towards each other.