In this, his good star still further favored him. The armada, equipped at so much cost by the French king at Marseilles, had no sooner put to sea, than it was assailed by furious tempests, and so far crippled, that it was obliged to return to port without even effecting a descent on the Spanish coast.
These accumulated disasters so disheartened Louis the Twelfth, that he consented to enter into negotiations for a suspension of hostilities; and an armistice was finally arranged, through the mediation of his pensioner Frederic, ex-king of Naples, between the hostile monarchs. It extended only to their hereditary dominions; Italy and the circumjacent seas being still left open as a common arena, on which the rival parties might meet, and settle their respective titles by the sword. This truce, first concluded for five months, was subsequently prolonged to three years. It gave Ferdinand, what he most needed, leisure, and means to provide for the security of his Italian possessions, on which the dark storm of war was soon to burst with ten-fold fury. [26]
The unfortunate Frederic, who had been drawn from his obscurity to take part in these negotiations, died in the following year. It is singular that the last act of his political life should have been to mediate a peace between the dominions of two monarchs, who had united to strip him of his own.
The results of this campaign were as honorable to Spain, as they were disastrous and humiliating to Louis the Twelfth, who had seen his arms baffled on every point, and all his mighty apparatus of fleets and armies dissolve, as if by enchantment, in less time than it had been preparing. The immediate success of Spain may no doubt be ascribed in a considerable degree to the improved organization and thorough discipline introduced by the sovereigns into the national militia at the close of the Moorish war, without which it would have been scarcely possible to concentrate so promptly on a distant point such large masses of men, all well equipped and trained for active service. So soon was the nation called to feel the effect of these wise provisions.
But the results of the campaign are, after all, less worthy of notice as indicating the resources of the country, than as evidence of a pervading patriotic feeling, which could alone make these resources available. Instead of the narrow local jealousies, which had so long estranged the people of the separate provinces, and more especially those of the rival states of Aragon and Castile, from one another, there had been gradually raised up a common national sentiment like that knitting together the constituent parts of one great commonwealth. At the first alarm of invasion on the frontier of Aragon, the whole extent of the sister kingdom, from the green, valleys of the Guadalquivir up to the rocky fastnesses of the Asturias, responded to the call, as to that of a common country, sending forth, as we have seen, its swarms of warriors, to repel the foe, and roll back the tide of war upon his own land. What a contrast did all this present to the cold and parsimonious hand with which the nation, thirty years before, dealt out its supplies to King John the Second, Ferdinand's father, when he was left to cope single-handed with the whole power of France, in this very quarter of Roussillon. Such was the consequence of the glorious union, which brought together the petty and hitherto discordant tribes of the Peninsula under the same rule; and, by creating common interests and an harmonious principle of action, was silently preparing them for constituting one great nation,—one and indivisible, as intended by nature.
* * * * *
Those who have not themselves had occasion to pursue historical inquiries will scarcely imagine on what loose grounds the greater part of the narrative is to be built. With the exception of a few leading outlines, there is such a mass of inconsistency and contradiction in the details, even of contemporaries, that it seems almost as hopeless to seize the true aspect of any particular age as it would be to transfer to the canvas a faithful likeness of an individual from a description simply of his prominent features.
Much of the difficulty might seem to be removed, now that we are on the luminous and beaten track of Italian history; but, in fact, the vision is rather dazzled than assisted by the numerous cross lights thrown over the path, and the infinitely various points of view from which every object is contemplated. Besides the local and party prejudices which we had to encounter in the contemporary Spanish historians, we have now a host of national prejudices, not less unfavorable to truth; while the remoteness of the scene of action necessarily begets a thousand additional inaccuracies in the gossipping and credulous chroniclers of France and Spain.
The mode in which public negotiations were conducted at this period, interposes still further embarrassments in our search after truth. They were regarded as the personal concerns of the sovereign, in which the nation at large had no right to interfere. They were settled, like the rest of his private affairs, under his own eye, without the participation of any other branch of the government. They were shrouded, therefore, under an impenetrable secrecy, which permitted such results only to emerge into light as suited the monarch. Even these results cannot be relied on as furnishing the true key to the intentions of the parties. The science of the cabinet, as then practised, authorized such a system of artifice and shameless duplicity, as greatly impaired the credit of those official documents which we are accustomed to regard as the surest foundations of history.
The only records which we can receive with full confidence are the private correspondence of contemporaries, which, from its very nature, is exempt from most of the restraints and affectations incident more or less to every work destined for the public eye. Such communications, indeed, come like the voice of departed years; and when, as in Martyr's case, they proceed from one whose acuteness is combined with singular opportunities for observation, they are of inestimable value. Instead of exposing to us only the results, they lay open the interior workings of the machinery, and we enter into all the shifting doubts, passions, and purposes which agitate the minds of the actors. Unfortunately, the chain of correspondence here, as in similar cases, when not originally designed for historical uses, necessarily suffers from occasional breaks and interruptions. The scattered gleams which are thrown over the most prominent points, however, shed so strong a light, as materially to aid us in groping our way through the darker and more perplexed passages of the story.