Philip's life tragedy
We shall see as time goes on that this attitude is the one natural to Philip through all the troubles which gathered blacker and blacker, as the evil seed sown by him and Olivares grew and ripened. He himself, acting conscientiously and under divine inspiration, was never wrong in the measures he adopted. If suffering and adversity came, they always came either from the wiles of the evil one, or for some wise inscrutable purpose of God. They were never at this time a consequence of any want of wisdom or prescience of his. His heart bled, as we see by his own passionate words quoted above, for the misery of his subjects, but it never seemed through his life to occur to him that the way to remedy it was to abandon an untenable position in his foreign relations, and devote his energies to the concentration of national resources for the promotion of productive industry and interior economy.
This was Philip's tragedy, the tragedy of a lifetime which this book will try to follow to its sad disillusioned end. The haunting, sorrow-stricken, compassionate face shows through its proud mask of impassivity and its leaden eyes deep traces of the terrible struggle within; of the throes of a man who dared not show his pain, and who in later years bared his soul but to one woman in the world. Weak of will, tender of conscience, sensitive of soul. A rake without conviction, a voluptuary who sought sensuous pleasures from vicious habit long after they had ceased to be pleasures to him, and yet expiated them with agonies of remorse which made his soul a raging hell.
This is the man. Philip the Great! "The Planet King," as the flattering poets called him; this pale, long-faced, sallow young man of twenty-one, who came back to his capital in the spring of 1626 already embittered and disillusioned, confronted by wars and threats of wars on all sides, overwhelmed with poverty yet inflated with pride: seeking escape from his troubles in the company of poets, painters, actors, and courtesans, and in the buffoonery of distorted dwarfs and half-idiotic monstrosities, whilst the dark heavy man with the big square head and arrogant mien led the nation down the slope that ended in inevitable disruption and ruin.
[[1]] He wrote a series of interesting descriptions of the ceremonies and feasts in honour of Charles's visit to Madrid. Terpsichore.
[[2]] Apuntamientos. Secretly printed in Madrid, 1623.
[[3]] When the Duke of Osuna was arrested early in Philip's reign he had 300 servants resident in his house.
[[4]] There are copies of many of these decrees in British Museum MSS. Add. 9933 and 9934.
[[5]] Contemporary transcript by Father Torquemada. MSS. Add. 10,236 British Museum. The original is in the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid.
[[6]] It may be noted that Olivares, who of course cut down his own household, still had 122 servants after that process. Revista de Archivos, iv. p. 20.