In 1554 he had again issued from the peninsula to marry the queen of England, a privilege which his father had graciously resigned to him. He was united to Mary Tudor at Winchester, on the 25th of July of that year, and if congeniality of tastes could have made a marriage happy, that union should have been thrice blessed. To maintain the supremacy of the church seemed to both the main object of existence, to execute unbelievers the most sacred duty imposed by the Deity upon anointed princes, to convert their kingdoms into a hell the surest means of winning heaven for themselves. It was not strange that the conjunction of two such wonders of superstition in one sphere should seem portentous in the eyes of the English nation. Philip’s mock efforts in favour of certain condemned reformers, and his pretended intercessions in favour of the princess Elizabeth, failed entirely of their object. The parliament refused to confer upon him more than a nominal authority in England. His children, should they be born, might be sovereigns; he was but husband of the queen—of a woman who could not atone by her abject but peevish fondness for himself, and by her congenial blood-thirstiness towards her subjects, for her eleven years’ seniority, her deficiency in attractions, and her incapacity to make him the father of a line of English monarchs.
It almost excites compassion even for Mary Tudor, when her passionate efforts to inspire him with affection are contrasted with his impassiveness. Tyrant, bigot, murderess though she was, she was still woman, and she lavished upon her husband all that was not ferocious in her nature. Forbidding prayers to be said for the soul of her father, hating her sister and her people, burning bishops, bathing herself in the blood of heretics, to Philip she was all submissiveness and feminine devotion. It was a most singular contrast—Mary the queen of England, and Mary the wife of Philip. Small, lean, and sickly, painfully near-sighted, yet with an eye of fierceness and fire; her face wrinkled by care and evil passions still more than by time, with a big man’s voice, whose harshness made those in the next room tremble; yet feminine in her tastes, skilful with her needle, fond of embroidery work, striking the lute with a touch remarkable for its science and feeling, speaking many languages, including Latin, with fluency and grace; most feminine, too, in her constitutional sufferings, hysterical of habit, shedding floods of tears daily at Philip’s coldness, undisguised infidelity, and frequent absences from England—she almost awakens compassion and causes a momentary oblivion of her identity.
Her subjects, already half maddened by religious persecution, were exasperated still further by the pecuniary burdens which she imposed upon them to supply the king’s exigencies, and she unhesitatingly confronted their frenzy, in the hope of winning a smile from him. When at last her chronic maladies had assumed the memorable form which caused Philip and Mary to unite in a letter to Cardinal Pole, announcing not the expected but the actual birth of a prince, but judiciously leaving the date in blank, the momentary satisfaction and delusion of the queen was unbounded. The false intelligence was transmitted everywhere. When the futility of the royal hopes could no longer be concealed, Philip left the country, never to return till his war with France made him require troops, subsidies, and a declaration of hostilities from England.
Upon his first journey out of Spain, in 1548, into his various dominions, he had made a most painful impression everywhere. “He was disagreeable,” says Envoy Suriano[b] “to the Italians, detestable to the Flemings, odious to the Germans.” He was thought deficient in manly energy. He was an infirm valetudinarian, and was considered as sluggish in character, as deficient in martial enterprise, as timid of temperament as he was fragile and sickly of frame. It is true that, on account of the disappointment which he occasioned by his contrast to his warlike father, he mingled in some tournaments in Brussels, where he was matched against Count Mansfeld, one of the most distinguished chieftains of the age, and where, says his professed panegyrist, Cabrera,[c] “he broke his lances very much to the satisfaction of his father and aunts.”
PHILIP’S CHARACTER
[1556-1598 A.D.]
Those who were most disposed to think favourably of him remembered that there was a time when even Charles V was thought weak and indolent, and were willing to ascribe Philip’s pacific disposition to his habitual cholic and side-ache, and to his father’s inordinate care for him in youth. They even looked forward to the time when he should blaze forth to the world as a conqueror and a hero. These, however, were views entertained by but few; the general and the correct opinion, as it proved, being that Philip hated war, would never certainly acquire any personal distinction in the field, and when engaged in hostilities would be apt to gather his laurels at the hands of his generals, rather than with his own sword. He was believed to be the reverse of the emperor. Charles sought great enterprises; Philip would avoid them. The emperor never recoiled before threats; the son was reserved, cautious, suspicious of all men, and capable of sacrificing a realm from hesitation and timidity. The father had a genius for action, the son a predilection for repose. Charles took “all men’s opinions, but reserved his judgment,” and acted on it, when matured, with irresistible energy; Philip was led by others, was vacillating in forming decisions, and irresolute in executing them when formed.
His talents were, in truth, very much below mediocrity. His mind was incredibly small. A petty passion for contemptible details characterised him from his youth, and, as long as he lived, he could neither learn to generalise, nor understand that one man, however diligent, could not be minutely acquainted with all the public and private affairs of fifty millions of other men. He was a glutton of work. He was born to write despatches, and to scrawl comments[82] upon those which he received. He gave audiences to ambassadors and deputies very willingly, listening attentively to all that was said of him, and answering in monosyllables. He spoke no tongue but Spanish, and was sufficiently sparing of that, but he was indefatigable with his pen. He hated to converse, but he could write a letter eighteen pages long, when his correspondent was in the next room, and when the subject was, perhaps, one which a man of talent could have settled with six words of his tongue. The world, in his opinion, was to move upon protocols and apostilles. Events had no right to be born throughout his dominions, without a preparatory course of his obstetrical pedantry. He could never learn that the earth would not rest on its axis, while he wrote a programme of the way it was to turn. He was prolix with his pen, not from affluence, but from paucity of ideas. He took refuge in a cloud of words, sometimes to conceal his meaning, oftener to conceal the absence of any meaning, thus mystifying not only others but himself.
He appeared on the whole the embodiment of Spanish chivalry and Spanish religious enthusiasm, in its late and corrupted form. He was entirely a Spaniard. The Burgundian and Austrian elements of his blood seemed to have evaporated, and his veins were filled alone with the ancient ardour, which in heroic centuries had animated the Gothic champions of Spain. The fierce enthusiasm for the cross, which in the long internal warfare against the crescent had been the romantic and distinguishing feature of the national character, had degenerated into bigotry. That which had been a nation’s glory now made the monarch’s shame. The Christian heretic was to be regarded with a more intense hatred than even Moor or Jew had excited in the most Christian ages, and Philip was to be the latest and most perfect incarnation of all this traditional enthusiasm, this perpetual hate. Thus he was likely to be single-hearted in his life. It was believed that his ambition would be less to extend his dominions than to vindicate his title of “the most Catholic king.”