At length an opportunity offered when Espinosa, in a discussion respecting the affairs of Flanders, made a statement which the king deemed not entirely conformable to truth. Philip at once broke in upon the discourse with an appearance of great indignation, and charged the minister with falsehood. The blow was the more effectual, coming from one who had been scarcely ever known to give way to passion.[381] The cardinal was stunned by it. He at once saw his ruin, and the vision of glory vanished for ever. He withdrew, more dead than alive, to his house. There he soon took to his bed; and in a short time, in September 1572, he breathed his last. His fate was that of more than one minister whose head had been made giddy by the height to which he had climbed.[382]
The council of state under its two great leaders, Alva and Ruy Gomez, was sure to be divided on every question of importance. This was a fruitful source of embarrassment, and to private suitors, especially, occasioned infinite delay. Such was the hostility of the parties to each other, that, if an applicant for favour secured the good-will of one of the chiefs, he was very certain to encounter the ill-will of the other.[383] He was a skilful pilot who in such cross seas could keep his course.
Yet the existence of these divisions does not seem to have been discouraged by Philip, who saw in them only the natural consequence of rivalry for his favour. They gave him, moreover, the advantage of seeing every question of moment well canvassed, and, by furnishing him with the opposite opinions of his councillors, enabled him the more accurately to form his own.
In the mean time, the value which he set on both the great chiefs made him careful not to disgust either by any show of preference for his rival. He held the balance adroitly between them; and if on any occasion he bestowed a mark of his favour on the one, it was usually followed by some equivalent to the other.[384] Thus, for the first twelve years of his reign, their influence may be said to have been pretty equally exerted. Then came the memorable discussion respecting the royal visit to the Netherlands, Alva, as the reader may remember, was of the opinion that Philip should send an army to punish the refractory and bring the country to obedience, when the king might visit it with safety to his own person. Ruy Gomez, on the other hand, recommended that Philip should go at once, without an army, and by mild and conciliatory measures win the malcontents back to their allegiance. Each advised the course most congenial to his own temper, and the one, moreover, which would have required the aid of his own services to carry into execution. Unfortunately, the violent measures of Alva were more congenial to the stern temper off the king, and the duke was sent at the head of his battalions.
But if Alva thus gained the victory, it was Ruy Gomez who reaped the fruits of it. Left without a rival in the council, his influence became predominant over every other. It became still more firmly established, as the result showed that his rival's mission was a failure. So it continued, after Alva's return, till the favourite's death. Even then his well-organized party was so deeply rooted, that for several years longer it maintained an ascendancy in the cabinet, while the duke languished in disgrace.
Philip, unlike most of his predecessors, rarely took his seat in the council of state. It was his maxim that his ministers would more freely discuss measures in the absence of their master than when he was there to overawe them. The course he adopted was for a consulta, or a committee of two or three members, to wait on him in his cabinet, and report to him the proceedings of the council.[385] He more commonly, especially in the later years of his reign, preferred to receive a full report of the discussion, written so as to leave an ample margin for his own commentaries. These were eminently characteristic of the man, and were so minute as usually to cover several sheets of paper. Philip had a reserved and unsocial temper. He preferred to work alone, in the seclusion of his closet, rather than in the presence of others. This may explain the reason, in part, why he seemed so much to prefer writing to talking. Even with his private secretaries, who were always near at hand, he chose to communicate by writing; and they had as large a mass of his autograph notes in their possession, as if the correspondence had been carried on from different parts of the kingdom.[386] His thoughts too—at any rate his words—came slowly; and by writing he gained time for the utterance of them.
Philip has been accused of indolence. As far as the body was concerned, such an accusation was well founded. Even when young, he had no fondness, as we have seen, for the robust and chivalrous sports of the age. He never, like his father, conducted military expeditions in person. He thought it wiser to follow the example of his great-grandfather, Ferdinand the Catholic, who stayed at home and sent his generals to command his armies. As little did he like to travel,—forming too in this respect a great contrast to the emperor. He had been years on the throne before he made a visit to his great southern capital, Seville. It was a matter of complaint in Cortes that he thus withdrew himself from the eyes of his subjects. The only sport he cared for—not by any means to excess—was shooting with his gun or his crossbow such game as he could find in his own grounds at the wood of Segovia, or Aranjuez, or some other of his pleasant country seats, none of them at a great distance from Madrid.
On a visit to such places he would take with him as large a heap of papers as if he were a poor clerk, earning his bread; and after the fatigues of the chase, he would retire to his cabinet and refresh himself with his despatches.[387] It would, indeed, be a great mistake to charge him with sluggishness of mind. He was content to toil for hours, and long into the night, at his solitary labours.[388] No expression of weariness or of impatience was known to escape him. A characteristic anecdote is told of him in regard to this. Having written a despatch, late at night, to be sent on the following morning, he handed it to his secretary to throw some sand over it. This functionary, who happened to be dozing, suddenly roused himself, and, snatching up the ink-stand, emptied it on the paper. The king, coolly remarking that "it would have been better to use the sand," set himself down, without any complaint, to rewrite the whole of the letter.[389] A prince so much addicted to the pen, we may well believe, must have left a large amount of autograph materials behind him. Few monarchs, in point of fact, have done so much in this way to illustrate the history of their reigns. Fortunate would it have been for the historian who was to profit by it, if the royal composition had been somewhat less diffuse and the handwriting somewhat more legible.
PERSONAL HABITS OF PHILIP.
Philip was an economist of time, and regulated the distribution of it with great precision. In the morning, he gave audience to foreign ambassadors. He afterwards heard mass. After mass came dinner, in his father's fashion. But dinner was not an affair with Philip of so much moment as it was with Charles. He was exceedingly temperate both in eating and drinking, and not unfrequently had his physician at his side, to warn him against any provocative of the gout,—the hereditary disease which at a very early period had begun to affect his health. After a light repast, he gave audience to such of his subjects as desired to present their memorials. He received the petitioners graciously, and listened to all they had to say with patience,—for that was his virtue. But his countenance was exceedingly grave,—which, in truth, was its natural expression; and there was a reserve in his deportment which made the boldest feel ill at ease in his presence. On such occasions he would say, "Compose yourself,"—a recommendation that had not always the tranquillizing effect intended.[390] Once when a papal nuncio forgot, in his confusion, the address he had prepared, the king coolly remarked: "If you will bring it in writing, I will read it myself, and expedite your business."[391] It was natural that men of even the highest rank should be overawed in the presence of a monarch who held the destinies of so many millions in his hands, and who surrounded himself with a veil of mystery which the most cunning politician could not penetrate.