Catharine wrote often in reply to the depressing news from her daughter, arousing her hopes for a son who should, in his time, put all things right; but Isabel at twenty-three had lost her gay elasticity, and the advance of her pregnancy meant the advance of her exhausting malady. Philip, as usual, was tenderly solicitous for her ease and happiness; full of hope, too, that a son at last was to be born to him, for upon this everything depended. The lying stories which long afterwards the traitor Antonio Perez wove with hellish skill in the safe refuge of Essex House, accusing Philip of jealousy of his wife with Don Carlos, and subsequently with one Pozzo, are hardly worth more credit now than the sentimental romance of the Abbé de St. Real about her love for Carlos. Perez, whose only wish was to blacken Philip indelibly to please his enemies, and his own paymasters in England and France, hints that Philip himself connived at his beloved wife’s murder by poison: but even if the confidential letters of her French friends now before us did not disprove this, the fact that nothing could be so unfortunate for Philip’s policy as Isabel’s death would give it the lie.
Isabel had been suffering for months from heart failure and bodily irregularities; and on the 3rd October 1568, the violent remedies administered to her by her doctors caused a miscarriage. The poor Queen knew that she was doomed, for when before daybreak Philip, heartbroken, came and sat by her bed, she calmly took a last farewell of him, praying him to be good to their two little girls, to be friendly with Catharine and King Charles IX., and kind to the attendant ladies who had served her so well: ‘with other words worthy of admiration, and fit to break the heart of a good husband, such as the King was. He answered her in the same way; for he could not believe that she was so near her end, and promised all she asked him; after which he retired to his room in great anguish, as I am told.’[[196]] The dying woman had confessed and received extreme unction during the night; and early in the morning the French ambassadors were summoned to her chamber. ‘She knew us at once, and said, Ah! ambassador, you see me well on the road out of this unhappy world into a better one ... pray my mother and brother to bear my loss patiently, and to be satisfied with what pleases me more than any prosperity I have enjoyed in this world, to go to my Creator, where I may serve him better than I can here. I shall pray Him that all my brothers and sisters may live long and happily, as well as my mother and brother Charles: and I beg you to beseech them to look to their realm, and prevent heresy taking root. Let them all take my death patiently, for I am very happy.’ ‘O!’ replied the principal ambassador, ‘your Majesty will live a long time yet, to see France good and happy.’ ‘No, no, ambassador,’ she whispered, shaking her head with a faint smile. ‘I do hope it will be so, but I do not wish to see it. I would much rather go and see what I hope very soon to see.’
After much more tender talk of her own land and people, the dying Queen took farewell of her countrymen and prayed awhile with her ghostly comforters: then fell into slumber for a short ten minutes. At midday, ‘she suddenly opened her eyes, bright and sparkling, and it seemed to me as if she wished to tell me something more, for they looked straight at me:[[197]] and then Isabel of the Peace passed quietly into the world her gentle soul longed for. ‘We left the palace all in tears, for throughout the people of this city there is not one, great or small, that doth not weep; for they all mourn in her the best Queen they have ever had.’ Philip in grief hid himself from the world in the monastery of Saint Jerome; but his task in the world was greater to him even than his sorrow or his love. The hopes of the French alliance to extirpate heresy had failed, failed utterly and completely. England, helping the insurgent Flemings with all her might, had drifted further, and ever further, away from him. In France the reformation was growing, and only two lives—and bad ones—stood between the throne and a Huguenot King. There was no male heir to inherit the thorny inheritance of championing orthodox Christianity throughout the world. Whither could Philip turn for sympathy and a mother for the heir he yearned for? Not to England; not to France, for both had failed him. Where but to his own kin in Austria; to his niece Anna, the betrothed of his dead son Carlos: and on the second anniversary of Isabel’s death Anna of Austria landed in Spain to marry her uncle Philip. Isabel of the Peace politically had lived in vain.
BOOK IV
I
ISABEL OF BOURBON
The niece wife of Philip II. bore him many children, of whom one weakling alone survived to inherit the oppressive crown of his father. Anna was a homely, devout soul, submissive and obedient to her husband, ever busy with her needle and her household cares; and, like the other members of her house, overpowered with the vastness and majesty of the mission confided by heaven to its chief.[[198]] On the voyage to Portugal in 1580 Philip fell ill at Badajoz, and when his life was despaired of Anna fervently prayed that he might be saved, even if she had to be sacrificed instead. Her prayer was heard; and as the husband of fifty-three recovered the wife of thirty sickened and died, leaving Philip broken and lonely to live the rest of his weary life for his work alone. The struggle to prevent the victory of reform in France, which occupied Philip’s later years, and consummated the ruin of his country, rendered impossible a renewal of the idea of a French and Spanish coalition, except, indeed, by the conquest of France by Philip, which many years of fruitless war proved to be impossible, whilst the gallant cynic, Henry of Navarre, could hold up the national banner of France as a rally point against the foreign invader.
Once Philip, in sheer despair, turned, when it was too late, to England again in the hope of bringing it into his system by force, if intrigue and subornation of conspiracy and murder failed: but with the defeat of the Armada that hope fled too; and again there was no possible bride but an Austrian cousin for Philip’s heir, Philip III., and no feasible policy from Philip’s point of view but a continuance of the close family alliance with the German Habsburg descendants of Joan the Mad. The Emperor, it is true, was forced to tolerate his Lutheran princes; but he and his house made common cause with the Philips when the French cast greedy eyes towards Catholic Flanders or Italy. Margaret of Austria brought to sickly, scrofulous Philip III. an anæmic body and a stunted mind to rear his children. She implored her mother passionately to save her from the terrifying honour of sharing the gloomy throne of her cousin, for in her Styrian home she lived the life of a nun, devoted only to the humble care of the poor and sick of her own land: but she was sternly told that all must be sacrificed to the supreme duty that was hers; and thenceforward she, too, lived in the awestricken atmosphere of religious abnegation, which was the mark of her Spanish kindred.[[199]] In besotted, conventual devotion, and frivolous trifling in turns, her monkish husband and she passed their lives; their children, of whom they had several, all bloodless decadents of low vitality, with big mumbling jaws and lack-lustre eyes, brought up in the same pathetic tradition that to them and Spain—poor, ruined, desolated Spain now—was confided the sacred duty and honour of upholding religious orthodoxy throughout the world at any cost or sacrifice.
So long as Henry IV. was King of France, even though he had ‘gone to mass,’ the close union with Spain was impossible: but on the fateful day in May 1610 when, in the narrow Paris lane, the dagger of Ravaillac pierced the heart of the great ‘Béarnais,’ all was changed. The Queen-Regent of France was one of the Papal Medici, imbued, as they all were, with the tradition of Spain’s orthodoxy and overwhelming might. Her marriage with Henry had been a victory for the extreme Catholic party in Europe; but so long as Henry lived he had prevented violent reaction. Now that he was gone, with his Huguenot traditions, France and Spain, it was thought, might again be joined in a Catholic league, and together impose their form of faith upon the world, either by armed force or political pressure. It was a foolish, impracticable plan, for Frenchmen were too far advanced now to be used to play the game of impotent bankrupt Spain, powerful only in its pride and its traditions.
But James I. of England had been toadying and humiliating himself to gain Philip’s aid in favour of his son-in-law, the Palatine in Germany, and it doubtless seemed a good stroke of policy on the part of France and Spain to leave him and the Lutherans isolated. In any case no time was lost, and before Henry IV. had lain in his tomb at St. Denis a year it was agreed that the Spanish Infanta, Anna, should marry Louis XIII. of France, and that Isabel, or Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of Henry IV. and Marie de Medici, should become the wife of Philip, Prince of Asturias, the son and heir of the Spanish King. All the betrothed were children of tender age, and it was agreed that the exchange of brides should be deferred until the Infanta was twelve years old (1613). Pompous and lavish embassies went through the solemn farce of paying honour to the girl-children respectively as Queen of France and Princess of Asturias. The Duke of Mayenne, of the house of Guise, ruffled and swaggered in Madrid with a marriage embassy so splendid in 1612, that the cost of entertaining him beggared the capital for years; and so keen was the emulation in sumptuousness of dress and adornments during the interminable festivities in Madrid to celebrate the double betrothals, that the Spanish nobles came to dagger-thrusts on the subject in the palace itself.
In Paris Ruy Gomez’s son, the Duke of Pastrana, paid similar court to the dark-haired girl of nine who was betrothed to young Philip, heir of Spain, two years younger. Three years more had to pass, notwithstanding the impatience of the French, before the backward little Infanta Anna, in October 1615, was conveyed with a pomp and extravagance that ill matched the penury of her father’s realm, to the frontier of France, there to be exchanged for Isabel of Bourbon, her brother’s bride.[[200]] On the 9th November 1615 all the chivalry of France and Spain were once more assembled on either bank of the little stream of Bidasoa that separated the two countries. Wasteful luxury and vain magnificence had been squandered wantonly by the Spanish nobles, determined, as usual, to put the French to shame. At Behovia, the point where the ceremony was to take place, sumptuous banqueting-halls had been erected upon rafts moored on each side of the stream, whilst in mid-current another raft supported a splendid pavilion covered with velvet and cloth of gold, and carpeted with priceless silken carpets from the East. Here the Duke of Guise delivered Isabel of France to the Duke of Uceda, in exchange for Anna of Austria, thenceforward Queen of France. The romantic and turbulent career of the latter is related elsewhere: here we have to follow the fortunes of the beautiful dark-haired girl of twelve who, like Isabel of the Peace fifty-four years before, turned her back upon her native land to cement the Catholic alliance between France and Spain.[[201]]
The circumstances were widely different, for the battle of religious liberty in Europe was practically won, though the blind faith and vanity of Philip III. refused, even now, to recognise the fact, or his own poverty-stricken impotence. The Medici Queen-Regent of France, moreover, was a very different person from her kinswoman Catharine. She was not playing her own game so much as that of the cunning Italians who directed her, and it was soon evident, under Richelieu, that Frenchmen were no longer to be made the playthings of foreign ambitions. Isabel, child as she was, had a stout heart and a high spirit, as befitted her father’s daughter. She was willing enough to be a queen upon the most pretentious throne in Europe; but she was not made for martyrdom, and, as we shall see, her marriage was even less influential in securing lasting peace and co-operation between France and Spain than that of the previous Isabel had been.