Philip II. of Spain

by Martin A. S. Hume

“Neither ship, nor fleet, nor Cadiz remains,” wrote Medina Sidonia to Philip. The fighting, such as it was, had only lasted three hours, and there had been destroyed, mostly by the Spaniards, 13 Spanish men-of-war, all the war galleys, and 40 of the best merchantmen in Spain, with merchandise worth 11,000,000 ducats. The fortresses and defences were razed to the ground, the first maritime city in the country was destroyed, and the seal stamped deep on the final decadence of Spain.

Philip’s system had brought him to this. He could not defend his own harbours, much less avenge the injuries done to him. Henry IV. had beaten him in France, the Nassaus had beaten him in Holland, the English had beaten him on the sea. He was utterly bankrupt, his country ruined, his dream of the universal predominance of Catholicism, and the omnipotence of Spain proved to be a chimera. He was old and weary, suffering incessant bodily agony, and yet with all this he never lost his faith in his divine mission and the final success of his cause. “Thy will, God, be done, not mine,” says an eye-witness of his last days, were the words constantly on his lips.

During the spring of 1598 the king was almost unable to move from gout, but still continued his work at his papers. At the end of June he was carried to the Escorial in a litter, and soon afterwards malignant tumours broke out in various parts of his limbs. The pain of his malady was so intense that he could not even endure a cloth to touch the parts, and he lay slowly rotting to death for fifty-three dreadful days, without a change of garments or the proper cleansing of his sores.

Through all the repulsive and pitiful circumstances that accompanied his last illness his patience and serenity never left him. His awful sufferings were borne without a plaint, and his constant words were those of resignation and assurance of divine forgiveness for his sins. Night and day, ceaselessly around him, went on the propitiatory offices of his Church; through the weary hours of pain the eyes of the dying king were fixed in ecstasy on the holy emblems, and often in his anguish of devotion he would bite and worry the coarse crucifix which never left him, the same crucifix that had been grasped by the dying hands of the emperor. On August 16 the nuncio brought him the papal blessing and plenary absolution. Philip by this time was incapable of moving, a mere mass of vermin and repulsive wounds, but his spirit conquered the frailty of the flesh, and he fervently repeated his immovable faith in the Church and the cause to which he had devoted his life. On September 1, in the presence of his son and daughter Isabel, the extreme unction for the dying was administered, and although he had hitherto been so weak as to be inaudible, he suddenly surprised the priests by himself reading in a loud voice the last office of the Church. When the administrant, fearing to tire him, said that it was unnecessary to repeat the office when the sacrament was administered, the dying man objected: “Oh yes, say it again and again, for it is very good.”

Then all the attendants were sent from the room, and Philip was left alone with his son. “I meant to save you this scene,” he said, “but I wish you to see how the monarchies of the earth end. You see that God has denuded me of all the glory and majesty of a monarch in order to hand them to you. In a very few hours I shall be covered only with a poor shroud and girded with a coarse rope. The king’s crown is already falling from my brows, and death will place it on yours. Two things I especially commend to you: one is that you keep always faithful to the Holy Catholic Church, and the other is that you treat your subjects justly. This crown will some day fall away from your head, as it now falls from mine. You are young, as I was once. My days are numbered and draw to a close; the tale of yours God alone knows, but they too must end.”

This was Philip’s farewell to his royal state, for he concerned himself no more with mundane affairs. Patient, kindly solicitous for those around him, in gentle faith and serene resignation, he waited for his release. On September 11, two days before he died, he took a last farewell of his son, and of his beloved daughter, the Infanta Isabel, who for years had been his chief solace and constant companion, even in his hours of labour. He was leaving her the sovereignty of the Netherlands, in union with the Archduke Albert, whom she was to marry, and he urged her to uphold inviolate the Catholic faith in her dominions. The farewell was an affecting one for the Infanta, but the father was serene through it all. When it was ended he gave to his confessor, Father Yepes, his political testament for his son, copied from the exhortations of St. Louis. He would fain have taken the sacrament again, but Moura was obliged to tell him that the physicians feared he was too weak to swallow the host. Towards the next night Moura warned him that his hour had nearly come, and he smiled gratefully when he heard it. All through the dragging night in the small gloomy chamber the prayers and dirges for the dying went on. When for a moment they ceased, the dying king would urge their continuance. “Fathers,” he said, “go on. The nearer I draw to the fountain, the greater grows my thirst.” During the night the watchers thought the great change had come, and hastily placed in the king’s hand a blessed candle he had kept for many years to illumine his last moments upon earth. But he was still collected. “No,” he said, “not yet. The time has not come.”

Between three and four in the morning, as the first pale streaks of coming dawn glimmered beyond the stony peaks of the Guadarramas, Philip turned to Fernando de Toledo, who was at his bedside, and whispered, “Give it to me; it is time now”; and as he took the sacred taper, his face was all irradiated with smiles. His truckle bed almost overlooked the high altar of the cathedral, the building of which had been his pride, and already the shrill voices of the choristers far below were heard singing the early mass which he had endowed long ago for his own spiritual welfare. With this sound in his ears and prayers upon his lips, his last moments ebbed away. When those around him thought that all was over and had fallen to weeping, he suddenly opened his eyes again and fixed them immovably on the crucifix. He shut them no more, and as they glazed into awful stoniness he gave three little gasps, and Philip the Prudent had passed beyond. He died gripping the poor crucifix which still rests upon his breast, and he was buried inclosed in the coffin he had had made from the timbers of the Cinco Chagas, one of the great galleons that had fought the heretics. In the awful jasper charnel-house at the Escorial, which will ever be the most fitting monument of his hard and joyless life, his body has rested through three centuries of detraction and misunderstanding.

Through all the tribulations and calamities that have afflicted his country, the affectionate regard in which Spaniards bear the memory of Philip the Prudent has never waned. His father was an infinitely greater man, but he has no such place in the hearts of his countrymen, for Philip was a true Spaniard to the core, a faithful concentration of the qualities, good and evil, of the nation he loved. If Spaniards were narrow and rigid in their religious views, it was the natural result of centuries of struggle, foot to foot with the infidel; if they were regardless of human suffering in the furtherance of their objects, it was because they lavishly and eagerly gave up their own lives for the same ends, and oriental fatalism had been grafted upon Gothic stubbornness in their national character. But they, like their king, were patient, faithful, dutiful, and religious.

Philip was born to a hopeless battle. Spain, always a poor country of itself, was saddled by the marriage of Philip’s grandparents with a European foreign policy which cursed it with continuous wars for a century. The tradition he had inherited, and his own knowledge, showed him that his only chance of safety was to maintain a close political alliance with England. We have seen how, by fair means and by foul, he strove to this end through a long life, and how from the mere force of circumstances it was unattainable. Spain’s power was imperilled from the moment that Philip the Handsome brought the inheritance of Burgundy to Jane the Mad, and the doom was sealed when Henry Tudor cast his eyes upon Anne Boleyn; for the first event made a fixed alliance with England vital, and the second made it impossible. It may be objected that if a man of nimble mind and easy conscience had been in Philip’s place, and had fought Elizabeth, Catharine, and Orange with their own weapons of tergiversation and religious opportunism, the result might have been different, as it also might have been if he had opened his mind to new ideas and accepted the reformed faith. But apart from his mental qualities, and his monastic training, which made such an attitude impossible for him, his party had been chosen for him before his birth, and he inherited the championship of obscurantism, as he inherited the task which obscurantism was powerless to perform. Burdened thus, as he was, with an inherited work for which neither he, nor his inherited means, was adequate, it was only natural that he should adopt the strange views of the semi-divinity of himself and his mission that so deeply coloured most of the acts of his life. The descendant and the ancestor of a line of religious mystics, he looked upon himself as only an exalted instrument of a higher power. Philip of Austria could not be defeated, because Philip of Austria was not fighting. It was God’s battle, not his; and he might well be calm in the face of reverses that would have broken another man’s heart; for he knew, as he often said, that in the long-run the Almighty would fight for His own hand, and that defeat for Him was impossible. Where his reasoning was weak was in the assumption that the cause of the Almighty and the interests of Philip of Austria were necessarily identical.