The greatest of the emperor’s Spanish subjects was the Duke of Alba, yet this is how he is sketched for the benefit of Philip. “The Duke of Alba would have liked to be associated with them (i.e. Cardinal Tavara and Cobos), and I do not think that he would have followed either party, but that which best suited his interests. But as it concerns the interior government of the kingdom, in which it is not advisable that grandees should be employed, I would not appoint him, whereat he is much aggrieved. Since he has been near me I have noticed that he aims at great things and is very ambitious, although at first he was so sanctimonious, humble, and modest. Look, my son, how he will act with you, who are younger than I. You must avoid placing him or other grandees very intimately in the interior government, because he and others will exert every means to gain your goodwill, which will afterwards cost you dear. I believe that he will not hesitate to endeavour to tempt you even by means of women, and I beg you most especially to avoid this. In foreign affairs and war make use of him, and respect him, as he is in this the best man we now have in the kingdom.” And so, one by one, the bishops and ministers who were to be Philip’s advisers are dissected for his benefit. The prince was ready enough to learn lessons of distrust, and it afterwards became one of the main principles of his system that only creatures of his own making should be his instruments for the political government of Spain.
Quite as extraordinary as the political instructions were the minute rules of conduct given by the emperor to his son for the regulation of his married life and the continuance of his studies. He is not to consider that he is a man with nothing to learn because he married early, and is left in so great a position, but is to study harder than ever. “If this, my son, be necessary for others, consider how much more necessary is it for you, seeing how many lands you will have to govern, so distant and far apart.... If you wish to enjoy them you must necessarily understand and be understood in them; and nothing is so important for this as the study of languages.” The coming marital relations of the young prince were in somewhat curious terms, left entirely to the guidance of Don Juan de Zuñiga, and the lessons enforced all through the proud and anxious father’s instructions, were piety, patience, modesty, and distrust. These were Philip’s guiding principles for the rest of his long life. The prince fully answered the expectations of his father. During the next few years, full of stress and storm for the wearying emperor, a close correspondence was kept up between them, and the plans and principles of the father were gradually assimilated by the son.
In November 1543 the Portuguese princess crossed the frontier to marry Philip. She was of the same height and age as her bridegroom, a plump bright little creature; but he was already grave and reserved, short and dapper, but erect and well made, of graceful and pleasant mien. But for all his gravity he was still a boy, and could not resist the temptation of going out in disguise to meet her, and mixing in her train. His coming was probably an open secret, for the princess on the day of his arrival took care to look especially charming in her dress of crimson velvet, and with white feathers in her jaunty satin hat. The meeting took place in a beautiful country house of the Duke of Alba near Salamanca, and on November 15 the wedding procession entered the city itself. All that pomp and popular enthusiasm could do was done to make the marriage feast a merry one. Bulls and cane tourneys, dancing and buffooning, fine garments and fair faces, seemed to presage a happy future for the wedded pair. The bride was Philip’s own choice, for his father had at one time suggested to him Margaret, the daughter of his old enemy Francis, but the prince begged to be allowed to marry one of his own kin and tongue, rather than the daughter of a foe, and the emperor let him have his way.
Little is known of the short married life of the young couple. It only lasted seventeen months, and then, after the birth of the unfortunate Don Carlos, the poor little princess herself died, it was said at the time from imprudently eating a lemon soon after her delivery. The birth of the heir had been hailed with rejoicing by the Spanish people, and the news of the death of the mother caused redoubled sorrow. Philip was already extremely popular with his people. His gravity was truly Spanish; his preference for the Spanish tongue, and his reluctance to marry the French princess, as well as his piety and moderation, had even now gained for him the affection of Spaniards, which for the rest of his life he never lost. His early bereavement was therefore looked upon as a national affliction. For three weeks after the death of his wife the young widower shut himself up in a monastery and gave way to his grief, until his public duties forced him into the world again. The Prince of Orange in his Apology, published in 1581, said that even before Philip had married Maria he had conferred the title of wife upon Doña Isabel de Osorio, the sister of the Marquis of Astorga. This has been frequently repeated, and much ungenerous comment founded upon it, strengthened, it is true, to some extent by the fact that subsequently for some years marital relations certainly existed between them. It is, however, in the highest degree improbable that Orange’s assertion was true. In the first place no Spanish churchman would have dared to marry the prince-regent before he was out of his boyhood without the knowledge of the emperor, and the matter is now almost placed beyond doubt by the already-mentioned document, which proves that Philip had pledged his word of honour to his father that he had hitherto kept free of all such entanglements, and would do so in future. Whatever may have been Philip’s faults, he was a good and dutiful son, with a high sense of honour, and it is incredible that he would thus early have been guilty of deceit upon such a subject as this.
Founded upon the statements of so bitter an enemy of Philip’s as Orange, and upon the remarks of the Venetian ambassadors that he was incontinent “nelli piacere delle donne”; that, above all things, he delighted, “nelle donne; delle quali mirabilmente si diletta”; and that “molto ama le donne con le quali spesso si trattiene”—it has been usual to represent Philip as quite a libertine in this respect, and the lies and innuendoes of Antonio Perez have strengthened this view. That Philip was perfectly blameless in his domestic relations it would be folly to assert, but he was an angel in comparison with most of the contemporary monarchs, including his father; and probably few husbands of four successive wives have been more beloved by them than he was, in spite of his cold reserved demeanour. Behind the icy mask indeed there must have been much that was gentle and loving, for those who were nearest to him loved him best; his wives, children, old friends, and servants were devotedly attached to him, even when they disagreed with his actions; and in the rare intervals of his almost incessant toil at the desk no society delighted him so much as that of his children. Charles had on April 24, 1547, won the battle of Mühlberg, and had for the time utterly crushed the leaders of the Reformation in Germany. The Diet of Augsburg was summoned, and the Declaration of Faith, which it was hoped would reconcile all difficulties, was drawn up. This perhaps was the highest point reached in Charles’s power. Now, if ever, was the time for carrying into effect his dream for assuring to his son the succession to almost universal domination. It had been the intention of Ferdinand the Catholic that Charles, his elder grandson, should succeed to the paternal dominions, the empire and Flanders, whilst Ferdinand the younger should inherit Spain and Naples. Charles, however, arranged otherwise, and made his brother King of the Romans, with the implied succession to the imperial crown on his elder brother’s death. But as Philip’s aptitude for government became more and more apparent to his father, the ambition of the latter to augment the heritage of his son increased. Ferdinand and his son Maximilian clung naturally to the arrangement by which the imperial crown should be secured to them and their descendants, but the emperor determined that as little power and territory as possible should go with it. Upon Philip accordingly the vacant dukedom of Milan was conferred in 1546 by special agreement with Ferdinand, who doubtless thought that it would not be bad for him to have his powerful nephew as prince of a fief of the empire, and so, to a certain extent, subordinate to him. But this was no part of Charles’s plan. Sicily had long been attached to the crown of Aragon, Naples had been added thereto by Ferdinand the Catholic, and now Milan was to be held by the King of Spain. Parma and Piacenza also had just been captured from the papal Farneses by the emperor’s troops (1547), and now Charles conceived an arrangement by which the suzerainty of the empire over Italy should be transferred to Spain, the states of Flanders and Holland secured to the possessor of the Spanish crown, and the emperor consequently left only with his Austrian dominions, poor and isolated, with the great religious question rending them in twain. The transfer of the Italian suzerainty was to be announced later, but Charles secured the consent of his brother to the rest of his projects by promising to guarantee the succession of the imperial crown after the death of Ferdinand to his son, the Archduke Maximilian, who was to marry Charles’s eldest daughter, Maria.
As soon as this had been agreed to, the emperor sent the Duke of Alba to Spain with an able statement of the whole case for Philip’s information, setting forth the new combination and its advantages, and urging the prince to make a progress through the territories which were destined to be his. The voyage was to be a long, and, to a man of Philip’s habits and tastes, not an attractive one. Notwithstanding the emperor’s exhortations years before, he spoke no German or Flemish, and indeed very little of any language but Spanish. He was already of sedentary habits, and feasts and the bustle of state receptions were distasteful to him. But he was a dutiful son, and during all the summer of 1548 the splendid preparations for his voyage kept Castile busy, whilst Maximilian, the heir to the empire, was on his way to Spain to marry the Infanta Maria and assume the regency during Philip’s absence.
CHAPTER II
The union of the Low Countries to Spain—The Italian suzerainty—The effects thereof—Etiquette of the House of Burgundy adopted in Spain—Ruy Gomez—Philip’s voyage—His unpopularity with Germans and Flemings—Fresh proposals for his marriage—The family compact for the imperial succession—Defection of Maurice of Saxony—War with France—Treaty of Passau—Defeat of the emperor at Metz.
ALBA left Germany for Spain at the end of January 1548, travelling by way of Genoa, and taking with him the exposition of the emperor’s new policy, which was to result in so much trouble and suffering to future generations. The lordships of Flanders and Holland had never up to this period been regarded by Charles as attached necessarily to the crown of Spain. Indeed at various times the cession of Flanders to France had been amicably discussed, and only shortly before Charles had considered the advisability of handing the Low Countries over to his daughter Maria as a dowry on her marriage with Maximilian. But the step of making them the inalienable possessions of the ruler of Spain would burden the latter country with an entirely fresh set of interests, and render necessary the adoption of a change in its foreign policy. Flanders once attached to the crown of Spain could never fall into the hands of France, and the latter Power would find itself almost surrounded by Spanish territory, with its expansion to the northward cut off. In the event of the Spanish suzerainty over Italy being established also, French influence in Italy would be at an end, and the papal power dwarfed. This therefore meant that France and the pope would make common cause in a secular struggle against Spain. The dishonesty of Ferdinand the Catholic about Naples had begun the feud, the rivalry of Francis I. for the imperial crown had continued it, and now if Flanders and Holland, instead of belonging to harmless Dukes of Burgundy, were to be held permanently by France’s great rival, the whole balance of power in Europe would be changed, and France must fight for life.
The Dukes of Burgundy and Counts of Holland, as possessors of the Flemish seaboard, had for generations found it necessary to maintain a close alliance with England, whose interests were equally bound up in preventing France from occupying the coast opposite its own eastern shores, the principal outlet for its commerce. By Charles’s new resolve this obligation to hold fast by England was transferred permanently to Spain, which country had not hitherto had any need for intimate political relations with England, except such as arose out of mutual commercial interests. Spain itself—and no longer the emperor as Duke of Burgundy—was thus drawn into the vortex of Central European politics, and herefrom came its ruin.