The unrestrained favour extended by the Queen to such an upstart as this gave hosts of new adherents to Don Juan; and such of them as had access to the young King, now rapidly approaching his legal majority, took care to paint the wretched condition of the country in the blackest colours, and to ascribe the trouble to the Queen’s bad minister. The boy, though nearly fifteen, was still a child; backward and, at best, almost an idiot. He could hardly read or write, for the weakness of his wits and the degeneracy of his physique had caused his education to be entirely neglected, and he was, even in his mature age, grossly ignorant of the simplest facts. But, like his father, he was gentle, kind and good-hearted, and his compassion was easily aroused by the sad stories told him of the sufferings of his people, especially when they came from the lips of his father confessor, Montenegro, and his trusted tutor Ramos del Manzano.
They, and the great nobles who prompted them, understood that the moment had come for action when, in the late autumn of 1675, Mariana and Valenzuela ordered Don Juan to sail in Ruyter’s fleet to Sicily and eject the French; and what to them was just as important, leave them with no rivals near them when the King came of age. Charles was persuaded by his confessor, and without the knowledge of his mother, to sign a letter recalling his half-brother to Madrid; and with this in his hand Don Juan could refuse, as he did, to sail for Sicily. On the morning of 6th November 1675, the day that Charles reached his fifteenth year and the regency ended, Madrid was astir early to see the shows that were to celebrate the new reign, though the country, in its utter exhaustion and misery, was in no spirit to rejoice now.
To the surprise of most was seen a royal travelling carriage rapidly approach the Buen Retiro palace, and the escort that surrounded it proclaimed that the occupant of the coach was no other than Don Juan. All was prepared for the coup d’etat. The prince hurried, unknown to Mariana, to the young King’s apartment, and kneeling, kissed the boy’s hand; whilst a decree, already drafted, was presented to the King, appointing his half-brother the universal minister of the crown. Mariana had passed the night at the palace a mile away, but the coming of her enemy to the Buen Retiro had been announced to her before he alighted. Without losing a moment she flew to the Retiro and reached her son’s room just as the decree that would have ruined her was about to be signed. She was an imperious woman, and had been Queen-Regent of Spain for over ten years: her control of her feeble son had been supreme whilst she was with him, and her angry orders that the room should be cleared might not be gainsaid. Left alone with her son, she led him to a private room and, with tears and indignant reproaches, reduced the poor lad to a condition of abject submission to her will.
The president of the Council of Castile had already told her, that as Don Juan had come by the King’s warrant, the same authority alone could send him back, and Charles was induced to sign a decree commanding the prince to return forthwith to his government in Aragon and remain there till further orders. Now was the time when boldness on the part of Don Juan would have won the day; for the nobles, court and people, were mostly on his side against Valenzuela and the Queen, whose means did not allow them to bribe everybody. But Don Juan was as vain and empty as he was ambitious and failed to rise to the occasion. The sacrosanct character of the King of Castile, moreover, was still a strong tradition, and Don Juan, who knew his fellow-countrymen well, dared not aim at ruling instead of the King, but through the King. So that night Don Juan and his supporters met in conclave, and weakly decided to obey the King’s new command without protest, instead of making another attempt to override Mariana’s influence upon her son; and the prince returned to Aragon overwhelmed with confusion and disappointment.[[274]]
The triumph of Mariana was complete, and she took no pains to conceal her joy when she attended that night in state the theatre of the Buen Retiro, in celebration of the King’s coming of age. In a few days all those who had had a hand in the futile conspiracy were on their way to exile; and, to keep up appearances, Valenzuela himself was given the rich post of Admiral of the Andalucian coast, with another rich marquisate, as an excuse for his absence from the capital during the first few weeks of the King’s majority. He was soon back again, collecting new honours from the feeble King at the instance of Mariana, and to the indignation of the other nobles. The great post of Master of the Horse, usually held by one of the first magnates of Spain, was given to Valenzuela; and when the jealous grandees remonstrated he was made a grandee of Spain of the first class to match his new dignity. All this, and the fact that Don Juan had been deprived of his viceroyalty, though banished from Court, may testify to Mariana’s determination and boldness, but says little for her prudence; for all Spain, high and low, was against her, and Valenzuela was a weak reed to depend upon in the face of so powerful an opposition.
In the meanwhile the conspiracy against Mariana grew in strength. Don Juan amongst his faithful Aragonese could plot with impunity, whilst the nobles in Madrid were working incessantly to the same ends, namely, the banishment of Mariana and the impeachment and punishment of Valenzuela. In February 1676 all the principal grandees signed a mutual pledge to stand together until these objects were attained; and as, in virtue of their position, they had unrestrained access to the King, who was now nominally his own master, the result of their efforts was soon seen.
The object lesson to which they could point was a very plain one. Spanish troops were still pouring out their blood upon the battlefields of Europe without benefit to Spain: the distress in the capital itself was appalling; even the King’s household sometimes being without food, or means of obtaining it. On every side ruin had overwhelmed the people. Industry had been crushed by taxation, whole districts were depopulated and derelict, and neither life nor property was safe from the bandits who defied the law in town and country.[[275]] Spain had almost, though not quite, reached its nadir of decadence: and, though the distress was really the result of long-standing causes described in the earlier pages of this book, the boy monarch was made to believe that it all arose from the mis-government of his mother and Valenzuela; and that Don Juan could remedy all the ills and make Spain strong and happy again.
The noble conspirators took care, this time, to neglect no precautions that might ensure success, and obtained (27th December 1676) from the King an order to which Mariana was obliged to consent, for Don Juan to return to Madrid; whilst on various pretexts they kept the Queen as much as possible from influencing her son. Valenzuela was, of course, informed of what was going on, and, recognising that the coalition was strong enough to crush him, had suddenly fled into hiding a few days previously. The night of the 14th January 1677, after the King had retired to his bedchamber in the palace of Madrid, and Mariana doubtless thought that all was safe until the next morning, Charles, accompanied by a single gentleman-in-waiting, escaped by arrangement with the conspirators, down backstairs and through servants doorways, from the old palace to the Buen Retiro, where the nobles and courtiers were assembled. Long before dawn a decree reached Mariana in her bedroom in the palace, ordering her not to leave her apartments without the written permission of the King. Her rage and indignation knew no bounds, and for the rest of the night letters alternately denouncing the undutifulness, and appealing to the affection of her son, showered thick and fast from the Queen in the old Alcazar to the sixteen year old boy with the long white face, who was trying to play the King in the pleasance of the Buen Retiro. None of her letters softened him, if ever they reached him, which is doubtful, and all the next day the antechambers at the Retiro were crowded with courtiers, applauding the King’s stroke of State, whilst in the Alcazar on the cliff the Queen-Mother found herself neglected by flatterers, a prisoner in the palace where she had reigned so long.
The next day news came that Don Juan, with a great armed escort and household, had arrived at Hita, thirty-five miles from the capital; and there the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo and a crowd of grandees met him with a message from the King, asking him to dismiss his armed men and come to Court for the purpose of taking the direction of affairs. But Don Juan had his conditions to make first, and he refused to enter the capital until Mariana had left it, Valenzuela made a prisoner, and the hated Chambergo regiment disbanded. He had his way in all things, and the same night, with rage in her heart, Mariana rode out of the capital for her banishment at Toledo; the Chambergos were hurried away for shipment to Sicily; and then came the question where was Valenzuela. Reluctantly, and bit by bit, it was drawn from the King that he himself had contrived the flight of his mother’s favourite, and knew where he was hidden amongst the friars of the palace-monastery of the Escorial.
From his windows overlooking the bleak Sierra of Guadarrama the fugitive favourite gazed in the gathering dusk of the 17th January 1677 in fancied security; when, to his dismay, a large body of cavalry trotted into the courtyard and dominated the palace. Amongst them the alarmed Valenzuela descried his enemy the Duke of Medina Sidonia, and a group of other grandees. Flying for refuge within the consecrated precincts, he besought the prior to save him; and when the doors of the monastery had been closed the prior greeted the troops and nobles in the courtyard and demanded their pleasure. ‘We want nothing,’ they replied, ‘but that you will deliver to us the traitor Valenzuela.’ ‘Have you an order from his Majesty?’ asked the prior. ‘Only a verbal one,’ replied Don Antonio de Toledo, son of the Duke of Alba, who took the lead. ‘In that case,’ replied the monk, supported by a murmur of approval from his brethren behind, ‘we will not surrender him, except to main force; for we shelter him by written warrant of the King.’ Threats and insults failed to move the monks, and an attempt at arrangement was at last made by means of an interview in the church between Valenzuela himself and the Duke of Medina Sidonia and Toledo. Owing mainly to the violence of the latter the interview had no result; and, as the prior saw that the soldiery were preparing to force the sanctuary, Valenzuela was hidden in a secret room contrived for such eventualities where he might defy discovery. The enraged nobles and soldiery, balked of their prey, ransacked the enormous place, room by room, for three days, overturning altars, insulting and violating the privacy of the monks, and committing sacrilege undreamt of in Spain for centuries, for which they were smartly punished afterwards by the ecclesiastical authority.[[276]]