Philip II. of Spain

by Martin A. S. Hume

It is difficult to apportion the blame, but one thing is certain, that the germ of the disaster lay in Philip’s rigid, blighting system, by which everything, great and small, had to be worked by one weary, overburdened man from a cell in the Escorial. Spain might curse and clamour for vengeance, but Philip said not a word. He saw the efforts and hopes of years scattered like scudding clouds. He saw his impotence made patent to a scoffing world. He saw his enemies exulting in his downfall, and his rebel Netherlanders at last free from his grasp. He saw his treasury empty and his credit ruined, for the pope himself mocked him, and refused to pay the subsidy he had promised, because the conditions had not been fulfilled. He saw himself an old and ailing man, with only a dull child to succeed him; and yet in the face of all this his marble equanimity never left him. He had, he said, only striven to do God’s work, and if God in His inscrutable wisdom had ordained that he should fail, he could only humbly bow his head to the divine decree and bless Him for all things.

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 1584 all his papers were seized, and Philip learnt how, for his political ends, Perez had poisoned his ears against Don Juan. It was seen that the accusations of intended treason in Spain were Perez’s own interpretation of perfectly innocent passages in Don Juan’s and Escobedo’s excited letters. Philip learnt also that Perez must have divulged to the princess the authority given by the king to Perez for the murder—a state secret. For these offences, and not for murder, Perez was condemned to ten years’ imprisonment, escaped to sanctuary, was taken thence, and kept in a dungeon for three years whilst the case was being completed against him. In 1588 he was put on his trial for murder, and was ordered to confess all. He feared a trap, and refused. He was put to the torture, and promised to tell everything. No one could understand this at the time, but we can see now that, if he had confessed why the king ordered the murder, and when, he must have condemned himself, as it would have shown that the “execution,” as it was euphemistically called, was unnecessary when it was committed and had been done for private revenge. Before his confession could be taken, he therefore escaped from prison and fled to Aragon. This, he well knew, was the course which would distress the king most.

When he had taken his younger daughter, Catharine, to Zaragoza in 1585 to be married to Charles Emmanuel, Duke of Savoy (whom Catharine de Medici had been trying to attract to her side), Philip had taken the opportunity of making a stay of some duration in his kingdom of Aragon and Catalonia, and had summoned the Aragonese Cortes at Monzon to swear allegiance to his young son Philip as heir to the crown. As we have seen in previous chapters, the Aragonese were extremely jealous of their representative institutions, and resented all interference from Castile. Philip had no love for these rough-spoken vassals of his, and their constant assertion of their liberties, and had only recently been obliged to bend to a decision of the Aragonese tribunals with regard to a large semi-independent fief belonging to an illegitimate member of the royal house, the Duke of Villahermosa, which fief Philip wished to re-incorporate with the rest of his Aragonese kingdom. Amongst their other liberties the Aragonese exacted from their sovereign an oath to maintain what was called the “Manifestacion,” which was not unlike the English “Habeas Corpus.” Any person accused of crime who set foot in Aragon could claim to be lodged in the Aragonese prison, in which case he was certain of enjoying the full rights of defence, protection from violence or torture, and the benefit of a most enlightened judicial procedure. The Aragonese had their own judges and laws, the principal judge—the grand justiciary—being appointed by the king; but the latter had no power to remove him, and the office was practically hereditary. When, therefore, Perez reached Aragon he knew he was safe from arbitrary action, and took refuge first in a Dominican monastery at Calatayud. Orders arrived a few hours afterwards that he was to be captured, dead or alive, at any risk or cost, and taken back to Castile. Perez was the depositary of Philip’s secrets for years. He had taken a quantity of important papers with him (some of which are now in the British Museum), and the king was willing to brave the obstinate Aragonese and their liberties, rather than allow so dangerous a man to slip through his fingers. Perez claimed the protection of the “Manifestacion,” and on the news coming to Calatayud of the king’s orders, a rebellious crowd at once arose and swore that their privileges should not be infringed; and even the priests in the monastery where Perez had taken refuge flew to arms to repel any attack by the king’s messengers. Perez was rescued by the Aragonese police and people, and safely lodged in the gaol of the “Manifestacion.” All the king could do then was to prosecute him by law—firstly, for having pretended to possess the royal authority for killing Escobedo; secondly, for having tampered with despatches and betrayed state secrets; and thirdly, for having fled whilst proceedings against him were pending. But Perez did not want to be tried, for upon these charges he could hardly be acquitted by any tribunal. He accordingly begged Philip to let him alone, and threatened, if not, to publish his secret papers; but Philip was resolved to fight it out to the death now. To be thwarted and threatened by such a man was too much, even for his patience. Perez must die. For once, however, the king had to deal with a man even more crafty than himself, who knew every trick in his armoury and was fighting for his life. Perez drew up a most masterly exposition of his case, painting the king in his blackest colours, and presented it to his judges. The tribunal called upon the king for a refutation. “If,” replied Philip, “it were possible for me to give an answer in the same public way that Perez has done, his guilt would be made manifest. My only object in the prosecution has been the public good. I cannot answer him further without betraying secrets which must not be revealed, involving persons whose reputation is of more importance than the punishment of this man, who is a traitor worse than ever before has sinned against his sovereign.” And with this Philip allowed his prosecution before the Aragonese tribunal to lapse. It was a bitter pill for him to swallow. To answer Perez he must have confessed that the lying scoundrel had made him believe that his own brother, Don Juan, was a traitor, and that, under this belief, he had allowed him to die broken-hearted and forsaken in Flanders.