Before the signature of this important act, the health and strength of the king had visibly declined; in fact he exhibited in himself a mere shadow of existence. His deplorable, and as it appeared, extraordinary state, one alike of pain, of mental vacuity, and even of half consciousness, gave rise to a report that he was bewitched. He prepared for his end; appointed a council of regency, headed by Cardinal Portocarrero, until the duke of d’Anjou should arrive in Spain; and on the morning of November 1st, 1700, bade adieu to his worldly sorrows, after one of the most disastrous reigns on record.[c]
THE DISTRESSES OF SPAIN
[1665-1700 A.D.]
Thus, at length, terminated the long but inglorious sway of Charles II, in the thirty-ninth year of his age, and the thirty-sixth of his unfortunate reign. His character is written in the events of his clouded life. He was mild and conscientious; suspicious and distrustful from diffidence in his own powers and talents; timid, inconstant, and irresolute, from the influence of hypochondriac affections; chaste from temperament; ignorant from total want of instruction; superstitious from habit and education; he was utterly destitute of discernment, energy, or skill; he was but a ghost even of his grandsire Philip III, and in his premature decay formed no unfit emblem of the declining kingdom over which he reigned.
Charles, indeed, was not wholly responsible for the state of degradation to which Spain was reduced when he closed his fatal career. The administrations of Lerma and Olivares had prepared the way for a long train of losses, humiliations, and disasters; but the wavering and fluctuating counsels of Charles completed the ruin of his country. Spain, which contained twenty millions of inhabitants in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, had only eight millions at the close of the reign of Charles II. Moncada, an author of the beginning of the seventeenth century, estimated the population of its capital at 400,000; and Uztariz, who wrote immediately after the accession of the Bourbons, calculated it at only 180,000, so that it may be rated that it had diminished by one-half during the reigns of Philip IV and his son. Except, indeed, from courtesy and custom, and the extreme interest excited by the question of the succession, Spain, at the end of the reign of Charles, would scarcely have been reckoned among the powers of Europe.
Her finances were in a state of most frightful disorder. The revenues of the crown were absorbed by those agents or farmers, on whom the urgent necessities of government reduced it to depend for supplies; and, at the same time, the people, both in the capital and provinces, were loaded with every species of extortion and monopoly. The ample treasures of the New World were still worse administered; the viceroys, after defrauding the crown and oppressing the subject, were suffered to return from their governments and to enjoy, with impunity, the produce of peculation. The harbours of Spain contained but ten or twelve rotten frigates; the arsenals for the navy were neglected, and even the art of shipbuilding had fallen into oblivion. Her army amounted to not more than twenty thousand men, without discipline, pay, or clothing. Her forts and citadels had crumbled into ruins. Even the breaches made into the walls of Barcelona during the Catalan insurrection continued open, and at the other chief fortresses there were neither guns mounted nor garrisons maintained. Such was the want of vigour in the laws, and remissness in the officers of justice, that reins had been given to every species of licentiousness. The slightest rise in the price of provisions excited tumult and alarm. Madrid had become the rendezvous of robbers and the asylum of assassins, who haunted even the palaces of the grandees or the churches, unmolested and unpunished. Its squares and streets were filled with discarded domestics and famishing artisans, without occupation or the means of subsistence. Those establishments destined to maintain the respect due to royalty had sunk into empty form, and were insufficient to protect the king from mortifying insults, both to his authority and person. The responsible ministry were without intelligence or skill in the science of government: the real influence was in the officers of the household—the king’s confessor, the prelates, and the inquisitors of the realm. The private and bitter jealousies of the grandees, the enmity of the provinces towards each other, and the rigid adherence to ancient forms and usages, however inapplicable to modern circumstances, all conspired to prevent a cordial co-operation in any useful or national object, and completed, in the last year of the seventeenth century and at the end of the Austrian dynasty, the picture of Spain.
Yet the sway, no doubt, of the imbecile Charles may have appeared more feeble from the contrast it presented to the energy and skill of the other governments of Europe, which, at the close of this century, were ruled by the ablest monarchs who had ever appeared, at one era, since the first rise of its states on the wreck of the Western Empire. The energies both of Holland and England were wielded by William III; Louis XIV reigned in France, the prudent Pedro in Portugal, John Sobieski in Poland, Charles XII in Sweden, and in Muscovy Peter the Great—the immortal czar.[k]
FOOTNOTES
[93] [Catalan writers, witnesses of these scenes, describe with enthusiasm the patriotic ardour shown by all classes in the town, the courage, daring, and diligence displayed even by women and children in bringing provisions, ropes, ammunition, medicine, and all kinds of assistance to the defenders on the walls, those who had nothing themselves going to the houses and through the streets asking for help. Even the nuns in their convents sent biscuits and preserves, while others prayed to God for the triumph of the Catalan cause; some women dressed as soldiers and went about with swords and daggers.[b]]
[94] The troubles in Naples included the famous insurrection led by the fisherman Masaniello.