Once more the rivals, Richelieu and Olivares, France and Spain, were face to face in North Italy; the Pope, Venice, and the new Duke of Mantua (Nevers) being on the side of France. Richelieu was victorious almost everywhere over the Spaniards, Germans, and Savoyards. Carlo Emmanuele sank to the grave broken hearted, leaving his ancient duchy in the occupation of the French conquerors, and Spinola died of grief before Casale at the scant support and ungenerous treatment he received from Spain. His successor, Santa Cruz, patched up an ignominious treaty with the French in the field, to the violent indignation of the Spaniards at home; for the country which had paid most for the war had gained nothing by the peace. But the treaty of Casale was merely a local pacification between France and Spain. The house of Austria must be crushed, if France were to be raised to the first rank amongst the nations. Olivares unhappily could not shake off the imperial traditions which had been the ruin of Spain; and for many years to come Spanish men and money wrung from starving Castile were still poured in an endless stream to fill the armies of the Emperor. Year after year the deadly struggle went on in Central Europe. Sweden and the Protestants with France on the one side, the house of Austria and the Catholics of Germany on the other; with Spain and Spanish Flanders as the milch cow to provide the wherewithal to face all the progressive elements of Europe.
The Thirty-Years' War
With the vicissitudes of this epochal war between antagonistic civilisations the present book is not directly concerned, but only with such echoes and influences of it as reached the Court of Spain. Battles and sieges, the death of heroes and the fall of kings, seared their deep brand upon the page of history. Spain, bereft of commerce and almost of industry, might in its agony protest with passionate tears that it could suffer no more, and lower its dark brows when the arrogant minister who ruled the fainéant King was mentioned.[[11]] But through it all Madrid laughed and rioted with ghastly gaiety and pagan fatalism, eating, drinking, and making merry, lest before to-morrow it should die. Outside its mud walls the fields lay bare and arid, in the provincial cities sloth and apathy ruled supreme over grass-grown market squares and empty streets; but in the Court, "the only Court," the Madrileños boastfully called it, shameless waste ran riot still; flaunting finery elbowed aside the squalid parasites that sought its smiles and struggled for its scraps; vain shows and vainer posturings filled the hollow days, and the witling who had pompously declaimed a turgid epic upon the nation's glory was held a hundred times a greater hero than he who starved in Flemish dykes, or rotted of putrid fever in overcrowded hosts before a German city, fighting and dying, as scores of thousands of them did, for the vague mirage of Spanish honour, of which the Court of Philip the Great was the centre and the source.
The Policy of Olivares
There is no doubt that deep discontent smouldered throughout the country at the results of Olivares' policy. Spaniards were ready enough to acclaim the privilege and duty of their country to set all the world right about religion, and to interfere in the quarrels of Central Europe. The boastful vainglory of Spanish superiority and the hollow pretence of the King's irresistible power and wealth were as popular as ever, though evidence of their falsity was patent in every house in the land. But though by most Spaniards the dire effect was not traced to its true cause, and they never thought of blaming themselves for their sufferings, the minister who was the protagonist of the system was held personally to be the cause of all the trouble. Already the outer realms, Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, and Portugal, understood clearly that Olivares aimed at destroying their ancient autonomy,[[12]] and were seething in anger against him and the triflers at Madrid. The greater nobles, even in Castile itself, disgusted at the monopolous arrogance of Olivares, stood ostentatiously aloof from him, only awaiting an opportunity to retaliate. The minister had taken care to place in the councils persons entirely subservient to him, or those whose age or feebleness of character made them innocuous. His principal subordinate ministers were his own kinsmen,—the Count of Monterey; the Marquis del Carpio; Marquis of Leganes; the Marquis of Aytona; the Marquis of Heliche, who had married his only daughter, but to Olivares' intense grief had been left a widower within the year; and the Duke of Medina de las Torres; Cardinal Zapata, the Inquisitor-General and member of many Councils, who was old, weak, and foolish; and the King's confessor, Sotomayor, was a man of no character, and entirely sold to the minister.
It will be seen, therefore, that Philip was quite inaccessible to anyone not in the interests of Olivares. The Queen resented her husband's isolation, but the minister and his wife kept her also well under subjection, and her love of pleasure made her almost as easy to manage as the King.
If it had been possible, even now, for the whole truth to be told to Philip as to the real causes of the poverty and wretchedness that afflicted the country, a prompt reversal of the policy that caused it might have arrested the ruin. But, in any case, it was unlikely that such change should be made; for Philip himself failed to see, as did the friends as well as the foes of Olivares, that only by a frank acceptance of the fact that Spain must abandon all her old flighty notions and impossible claims, could prosperity be brought back to the country. To prevent the danger of Philip's either discovering for himself or being told by others how deep and growing the discontent of the country was, Olivares plunged the idle young King more completely than ever in the pleasures and distractions that occupied most of his time and thoughts. Hunting, play-going, religious ceremonies, literary amusements, and other entertainments left no opportunity for investigation and sustained application to business by the King. It is evident that now, whatever may have been the case at the beginning of the reign, the minister deliberately promoted this waste of time for his own ends; and his efforts to distract the King increased as the discontent in the country and Court grew.
A sumptuous feast
On the 1st June 1631, for instance, the Countess of Olivares gave a sumptuous entertainment to the sovereigns, as she was in the habit of doing on every possible pretext, in the gardens of her brother, the Count of Monterey;[[13]] and this is represented by the contemporary chronicler, who describes both fetes to have aroused the emulation of her husband to give another entertainment to the King and Queen on the night of St. John, three weeks later, that should eclipse all similar occasions. The document from which I am quoting, written by a whole-souled admirer of Olivares, is too long and tedious for reproduction entire here, but a few extracts from it may be interesting as showing now desperately the Olivares tried to please.
"Although there were but few days to arrange everything, the Count-Duke was determined to show the extreme love and care with which he serves our Lord the King, and how easily he conquers the most difficult tasks by means of it. As a beginning of the preparations for the feast, which was, amongst many other things, to include two new comedies not yet even thought of, much less written, his Excellency ordered Lope de Vega to write one, which he did in three days, and D. Francisco de Quevedo and D. Antonio de Mendoza the other, which they wrote in a single day, and the comedies were handed to the companies of Avendaño and Vallejo, the two best now on the boards, to study and rehearse."