No sooner was this scene over than Count Castrillo entered the chamber and announced that Don Juan had come and was waiting to see his father. Philip knew, and bitter the knowledge was, that his wife and son would be in open strife from the day the breath left his body; but that Don Juan should return from exile unbidden, and dared to disobey his King, whilst yet he lived, aroused one more spark of sovereign indignation in the moribund man. ‘Tell him,’ he said, ‘to return whence he came until he be bidden. I will see him not; for this is no time for me to do other than to die.’ At early dawn on Friday, 17th September, poor Philip the Great breathed his last. ‘And curious it is,’ said a contemporary courtier, ‘that in the chamber of his Majesty when he died, there was no one but the Marquis of Aytona and two servants to weep for the death of their King and master. In all the rest of the court not one soul shed a tear for him. A terrible lesson is this for all humankind; that a monarch who had granted such great favours and raised so many to honour, had no sigh breathed for him when he died.’[[269]]
The same night the dead body of the King was dressed in a handsome suit of brown velvet, embroidered and trimmed with silver, with the great red sword-cross of Santiago worked upon the breast, preparatory to the pompous lying-in-state in the same gilded hall of the old palace at Madrid, where the comedies the King had loved were so often played before him. At the same time in an adjoining room the Councils of Castile and State gathered to hear the will read by the secretary, Blasco de Loyola, which made Mariana Queen-Regent of Spain, with the assistance of a special council of regency, consisting of the great dignitaries of the State, failing two of whom the Queen might appoint two substitutes, an eventuality which partially occurred within a few hours of Philip’s death by the decease of the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo, Moscoso. Don Juan, who was commended to the widow in the will, waited to hear no more than the elevation of Mariana to the regency, and then took horse with all speed and hurried back to the safe seclusion of his fief of Ocaña. A few days afterwards, the sumptuous lying-in-state being concluded, the body of ‘Philip the Great’ was carried in a vast procession to the Escorial, to rest for ever in the jasper niche before which he had so often prayed and wept.[[270]]
Mariana, at the age of thirty-one, was now ruler of Spain for her son Charles II., aged four, and she lost no time in showing her tendencies when left to herself. The root of most of the calamities that affected Spain were the traditions that bound it to the imperial house. All that the country needed, even now, was rest, peace and freedom from foreign complications in which Spaniards had no real concern. But Mariana was Austrian to her finger tips; and ever since Philip’s health began to fail she had been working for the predominance of her kindred and weakening the bonds of friendship with France, knit by the marriage of Maria Theresa with Louis XIV.
There was already a large party of nobles who, seeing the national need for peace, looked with distrust upon a policy which would still waste Spanish resources in fighting the battles of the empire in mid-Europe: and when to the vacancy in the Council of Regency and the Inquisitor-Generalship, caused by the death of Cardinal Moscoso a few hours after the King, Mariana appointed her Austrian confessor, Father Nithard, Spanish pride flared out and protest became general. Nithard was doubtless a worthy priest, though of no great ability, but if he had been a genius the same detestation of him would have prevailed, for he was a foreigner, and it was guessed at once that between him and the Austrian Queen Spain would be sacrificed as it had been in the past to objects that were not primarily Spanish. Observers abroad saw it too, and although the French envoy who went to condole with Mariana on Philip’s death assured her of the desire of Louis to be friendly with her, the first acts of her regency gave to the French King a pretext for asserting his wife’s right to the inheritance of Flanders, as her dowry had not been paid, and her renunciation was asserted to be invalid.
In May 1667 Louis invaded Flanders with 50,000 men, faced only by a small disaffected and unpaid force under the Spanish viceroy, the result being that the French overran the country and captured many principal cities. Don Juan was summoned in a hurry from his exile to the Council of State in Madrid, and he and his sworn enemy Mariana divided between them the sympathies of the capital and the country. Pasquins and satires passed from hand to hand on the Liars’ Parade and in the Calle Mayor, mostly attacking Nithard and the Queen, who were blamed for the war; and the relations between Don Juan and Mariana grew more strained every day.
It was also evident now that Spain was powerless to coerce Portugal any longer, and in February the humiliating treaty was signed—mainly by the influence of Fanshawe[[271]] and Sandwich—in February 1668, recognising the independence of the sister Iberian nation. Louis XIV. carried on his attacks in Flanders with vigour, and rejected all overtures of peace except on terms which aroused Spaniards to indignation. The Spanish Franche Comté was occupied by the French in February 1668; and then, but only by a supreme effort, a fresh army of nine thousand men was collected in Spain to defend her territories. The Austrian friendship was of little use to Spain, as usual, and Castile had once more to fight her own battle. In these circumstances of national peril the influence of Mariana and Nithard on the Council of Regency procured an order for Don Juan to take command of the army and lead it to Flanders against the French, and with an ill grace the royal bastard left Madrid on Palm Sunday, 1668, for his rendezvous at Corunna, where the treasure ships from Cadiz and his troops were to join him. Don Juan saw in this move an intention of getting him away from the centre of government, and the impression was strengthened by the almost simultaneous exile or arrest, on various trivial pretexts, of some of those who were known to sympathise with him, one of whom, Malladas, was strangled in prison by Mariana’s orders.
All through the spring Don Juan lagged at Corunna, excusing himself from embarking on various grounds, ill-health being the principal; until, at length, thanks to the intervention of England and Holland, Louis was brought to sign terms of peace with Spain at Aix la Chapelle, in May 1668, that left him in possession of the Flemish territories he had conquered. But still Mariana and Nithard were determined that Don Juan should go and take possession of his government in Flanders, and sent him a peremptory order to embark. This he refused to do, and a decree of the Queen in August directed him to retire to Consuegra, and not approach within sixty miles of Madrid. He had many friends and adherents, especially in Aragon, and his discontent extended to them. Those in Madrid began to clamour that Mariana and Nithard were keeping the little King in the background away from his people, and alienating those who might serve the monarchy best.
Charles II. was now aged seven, and so degenerate and weak a child was he, that he had been up to this period, and continued for some years afterwards, entirely in the hands of women, and treated as an infant in arms. He was dwarfish and puny, with one leg shorter than the other, his gait during the whole of his life being uncertain and staggering. His face was of extraordinary length and ghastly white, the lower jaw being so prodigiously underhung that it was impossible for him to bite or masticate food, or to speak distinctly. His hair was lank and yellow, and his eyes a vague watery blue. This poor creature with his mother at his side, in obedience to the clamour of Don Juan’s friends, was first brought out in public for his subjects to see at a series of visits to the convents and churches of Madrid in the summer of 1668.[[272]] Just as the King and Mariana were about to start from the palace at Madrid on one of these excursions, in October 1668, an officer came in great agitation to the door of the Queen’s apartment and prayed for audience. He was told that the coach awaited their Majesties, and the Queen could not see him then, but would receive him when she returned. He begged in the meanwhile to be allowed to stay in a place of safety in the palace. This request made his visit seem important enough for Mariana to be informed of it: and she ordered him to be introduced at once. When he entered he threw himself upon his knees and besought that he might speak with her alone; and for a half hour he was closeted with the Queen.
The story he had to tell was of a widespread conspiracy of Don Juan and his friends against the Regency, and without delay the net was cast that swept into prison one of Don Juan’s principal agents in Madrid, Patiño, and all his household. In a day or two a force of soldiers was despatched to Consuegra to arrest Don Juan himself, but found the bird flown. Behind him he had left a document addressed to the Queen, violently denouncing Nithard as a tyrant and a murderer, whilst protesting his own loyalty to his father’s son. Madrid began again to murmur at the persecution of a Spanish prince in Spain by a foreign Jesuit, and though a brisk interchange of manifestoes and recriminatory pamphlets was carried on, the great mass of the people were unquestionably on the side of Don Juan against the German Queen and her Jesuit favourite.
The Prince fled to Barcelona, where Nithard was especially hated and the Madrid government always unpopular, and there nobles and people received Don Juan with enthusiasm. Messages of support came to him from all parts of Spain, and French money and sympathy powerfully aided his propaganda, so that by the end of the year 1668 affairs looked dangerous for Mariana and her confessor. The Queen and her Camarilla took fright and tried conciliation, but Don Juan knew that he had the whip hand, and in a letter written in November to Mariana peremptorily demanded the dismissal of Nithard within fifteen days. Mariana’s friends on the Council of Regency voted for the impeachment of Don Juan for high treason; and for a time vigorous measures against him were like to be taken. But the Council of Castile, the supreme judicial authority, through its most influential member, warned the Queen that in a controversy between the King’s brother and a foreign Jesuit Spaniards must necessarily be on the side of the former, and the Queen must be cautious or she would alienate the country from her. Mariana thereupon wrote softly to Don Juan inviting him to approach Madrid that a conference of conciliation might be held. But the prince would not trust Nithard, who, he said, had planned his murder, and he declined to risk coming to the capital except in his own time and way.