Philip now felt his latter end approaching; and, from a natural desire to leave his wide-spreading dominions in a tranquil state to his son, he gladly accepted Pope Clement VIII’s proposal to mediate a peace between France and Spain. The negotiation was procrastinated by the archduke’s surprise and capture of Amiens, which Henry thought it indispensable to recover, before he would even listen to terms. The Spanish garrison in that town capitulated in the autumn of 1597; and in the following summer, notwithstanding the opposition of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Maurice, the Peace of Vervins was concluded upon equitable conditions—all conquests being mutually restored, and all pretensions to any part of each other’s dominions mutually relinquished.
This peace and the investing of the infanta with the sovereignty of the Netherlands were the last acts of Philip. He did not live to see the celebration of her marriage, or of his son’s with Margaret, daughter of the archduke Charles of Austria, which he had concluded. He had for years been, like his father, a martyr to the gout, but had never permitted his sufferings to interfere with his regal duties. During the severest paroxysms, he regulated everything, and frequently, when urged to spare himself, said that the pains in his joints did not lame his brain. His last illness was dreadful, his limbs being covered with ulcers that generated swarms of the most loathsome vermin. In that condition he lay for fifty days, and is said to have exhibited during the whole time a wonderful example of Christian patience and resignation. He died on the 13th of September, 1598. Of his numerous children, two only survived him—his son Philip, and the infanta Isabella. A second daughter, Catherine, had married the duke of Savoy, but died before her father, leaving a large family.
In America the limits of the Spanish empire were extended during this reign, but not so as sensibly to affect the power or the greatness of the mother-country. One fact, however, deserves notice. Whilst all surrounding Indians bowed beneath the yoke, and were rapidly swept away by the unaccustomed toils their new masters required, one bold and warlike tribe in the province of Chile, named the Araucans, after submitting like the rest, rose against their oppressors, and for years defied all the troops the Chilian and the Peruvian Spaniards could send against them. The war was ended only by a treaty recognising their independence. In the East Indian seas the Philippines were named and colonised.
[1556-1598 A.D.]
Philip II had received Spain from his father in a state of brilliant prosperity. Her agriculture and manufactures were flourishing, and were competent to supply her large exports to her American colonies. That from this happy condition Spain began, during his long reign, to decline, is admitted by those Spanish writers who most warmly eulogise Philip; nor is the great pecuniary distress denied to which the lord of America and her mines was latterly reduced. The two facts form a curious comment upon the extraordinary prudence considered by them as his peculiar characteristic.
For this decline various causes have been assigned by philosophical historians, as, the numerous colonies that drained the population of the mother-country; the disgust which men, who saw immense fortunes easily and rapidly accumulated, in the plunder or the mines of the New World, conceived for the toils and the slow profits of trade and husbandry; the enormous waste of men and money occasioned by the various and simultaneous wars into which Philip was hurried, by either an extravagant ambition or an uncalculating bigotry. Experience and a maturer philosophy teach us that whatever ills may be thus occasioned, they are in their nature temporary, requiring only time to correct themselves; and direct us to seek the true cause of the gradual downfall of Spain in her loss of liberty.
The union of Spain into one monarchy, under Ferdinand and Isabella, had lessened the long-existing intimate connection between king and people, and the dependence of the former upon the latter: the natural consequence was a diminished respect on the part of the crown for popular rights. The splendour of Charles’ reign, his clemency, conciliating manners, and good government, perhaps, blinded the nation to his gradual invasion of their privileges, and neglect of the forms of a free constitution. Under the sterner sway of Philip, a complete despotism was established, and it seemed to give him a boundless power, alarming Europe, at the moment his authority began to decline. Since the cortes had fallen into contempt, the cities had lost their importance, and an arbitrary system of taxation had shaken the security of property.
Under such circumstances, commerce languished, and had no energy to resist the blow when the English and Dutch fleets intercepted the vessels bearing Spanish merchandise to America, or bringing back an ample return. Agriculture, like manufactures, must always suffer from the impoverishment of any portion of the community; but in Spain it now laboured under peculiar additional evils. When the nobles were lured from their rural homes to court, for the purpose of weakening their feudal power, the peasantry, divided from their natural protectors, robbed of the encouragement and support of almost princely establishments in every part of the country, sank into a degraded class; whilst the mighty lords themselves became mere intriguing courtiers, rapacious for money, in order to rival each other in splendour, and tyrants of those dependent peasants to whom their ancestors were as fathers. In this state, the vital spirit that should have reacted against every disaster was no more; and calamities, in their nature temporary, became permanent.
Philip II adorned Spain with many useful and some ornamental works. He erected the Escorial, which has ever since been a favourite royal residence. The Escorial is an immense pile of building, uniting a monastery, a cemetery, and a palace, dedicated to St. Lawrence in gratitude for the great victory of St. Quentin, gained upon the day on which his festival is celebrated; and to stamp it yet more manifestly his, is built in the form of a gridiron, the instrument of that saint’s martyrdom. The expense of the Escorial is reckoned as one cause of the exhaustion of Philip’s exchequer.