CHAPTER XIV.
WHEN SPAIN WAS GREAT.
Although Queen Isabella assumed all responsibility for the first voyage of Columbus, and is said to have declared, “I am ready to pawn my jewels for the expenses,” yet the treasury of Aragon has the credit of providing the necessary funds. Already fifty-six years of age when he started on this voyage, Columbus had spent eighteen of the best years of his life supplicating at courts and pleading for recognition; so he was no longer blessed with health and vigour. Returning from the first triumphant achievement early in 1493, the same year he sailed from Cadiz with a larger fleet, and discovered islands farther to the south than those which he first saw and landed on, as well as the island of Jamaica. In 1498 yet another voyage revealed the island of Trinidad and a portion of the north coast of South America; but, through the course of events which we can not follow in this history, he was sent home to Spain in chains by his enemy, Bobadilla. The queen, though she received him with distinction, and did all she could to soothe his wounded sensibilities, yet was unable to secure him another command until 1502, when he sailed on his last and most disastrous voyage, which ended in the wreck of his ships on the north coast of Jamaica, and his final return to Spain, worn with disease and broken-hearted from abuse. Two years after the death of Isabella he too departed this life, in the year 1506, at the city of Valladolid, where the house in which he died is still pointed out to the stranger. His remains were at first deposited in Valladolid, then taken to Seville, and about the year 1540 transported to Santo Domingo, in accordance with his last request.
Following closely in the wake of Columbus were other voyagers and other discoverers, notably Americus Vespucci, who, together with a valiant Spaniard named Ojeda, sailed along the north coast of South America from the Pearl Islands to the Gulf of Maracaibo, in the year 1499, trading with the natives, and finally returning with a rich cargo of pearls and other valuable products of their barter. They not only obtained the beautiful pearls which unfortunate Columbus had somehow overlooked the year before, but they first saw those curious people, the Lake Dwellers, in the Gulf of Maracaibo, whose settlements over the water suggested the name by which the region adjacent is known to-day, of Venezuela, or Little Venice. Americus Vespucci was further rewarded, on his return, by being appointed chart-maker to the king, and eventually his name came to be applied to the continent discovered by Columbus in 1498. That, at least, was long held to be the case, but of late years it has been noticed that the word “America” may have been derived from the native name of one of the provinces on that coast, Americapan.
So we might go on tracing the extension of Spanish conquests, until these pages, which we have dedicated to outlining the history of Spain, would be filled with the doings of her valiant sons, and the numerous adventurers attracted to her service by the reports of her growing greatness. But still we can not ignore these brave conquistadores who sought fame and riches in the New World, the path to which had been opened by Columbus. Two or three years after the death of Columbus the gallant Ponce de Leon, then governor of a province of Santo Domingo, went across the channel and conquered Puerto Rico, whence, in 1512, he sailed to the discovery of Florida, after his romantic search for the fabled “Fountain of Youth.” To note how, when once started, the stream of exploration and conquest flowed on unimpeded, we have but to turn to the island of Santo Domingo, discovered by Columbus in 1492, and where the first schemes of colonization were carried out.
In the year 1509 the son of Columbus, Don Diego, was appointed governor and viceroy of the island, in tardy recognition of the claim of his father to the title of “High Admiral of the Ocean-Sea.” In 1511 one Velasquez sailed over to Cuba and there established a colony, and with him, among others who subsequently became famous, was an obscure individual named Hernando Cortes, who, fired by the reports of a new land discovered to the west, was placed in command of an expedition, by Velasquez, who fitted it out; and the result was the ultimate conquest of the vast territory of Mexico, which was first brought to notice by Hernandez de Cordova in 1517. From this conquest, which was not achieved until about 1521-’22, flowed millions and millions in treasure to fill the coffers of Spain. Cortes himself, a man of humble origin, was born in Spain in 1485, only seven years before Columbus sailed on his first voyage; yet he added a kingdom to the realms of Spain before he was forty years of age!
In the year 1513 the brave but unfortunate Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, from a high point in the Isthmus of Darien, saw, first of all Europeans, the vast Pacific; yet it was not until nearly twenty years afterward that Francisco Pizarro, the ignorant soldier, who was born in the same province as Cortes, in Spain, and who had served with Gonsalvo de Cordova in Italy, subjugated the native people of Peru, and made himself a virtual king. By the conquest of Peru and the murder of the Inca by Pizarro more than fifteen million dollars in treasure was secured, and ultimately the mines of that country enriched Spain for many, many years.
So, as we have seen, Spain was prolific in men of force and gallantry, who poured out their blood freely for her sake, and who ventured their lives rashly in the expeditions she sent forth. The long wars with the Moors, lasting for centuries, had brought forth a race of soldiers unequalled perhaps in any other country at that time. They seem to have been bred and nurtured for these very deeds of risk and heroism which were born of their encounters with the natives of the New World; for self-denial, for intrepidity under almost insuperable difficulties. They were also fierce and cruel—how fierce and how cruel it is only necessary to read of the conquest of Mexico by Cortes; of the conquest of Peru by Pizarro; yes, of the treatment of the innocent natives by Columbus himself, who initiated the system of slavery, by which eventually they were extinguished in the West Indies. Humanity was foreign to their nature; long familiarity with the bloody work of the Inquisition in the home country, the persecution of Moors and Jews, the scenes of rapine and massacre they had witnessed and heard reported by their fathers, had accustomed these conquistadores to cruelty and merciless oppression. Even the gentlest and most merciful of them were so only by comparison, for their progress everywhere could be traced by ruin and desolation, by ravaged homes and murdered men, women, and children.
Contemporaneously with her conquests in the New World, Spain herself acquired increasing territory in Europe, not alone by force of arms, but chiefly through matrimonial alliances and succession to power. To understand how this came about, we must retrace our course and bestow a parting glance upon the affairs of Isabella and Ferdinand. This royal pair, under whom Spain had at last become consolidated into a veritable kingdom, with a union of interests if not unity of purpose always, had five children born to them: Juan, the only son, born 1478, who married a daughter of Maximilian, Emperor of Germany, but died without heirs, in 1497; Isabella, born 1470, married twice, to two princes of Portugal, whose only child lived but two years; Juana, born 1479, married to the Archduke Philip, son of Maximilian, who had two sons, Charles and Ferdinand; Mary, born 1482, and Catherine, born 1485, who became the unfortunate wife of Henry VIII of England, and from whom she was divorced in 1533.
By the death of Juan in 1497, of Isabella in 1498, and of the latter’s child two years later, the succession to the throne now devolved upon Juana, in accordance with the will of her mother, Isabella, executed in October, 1504. King Ferdinand, who had so successfully administered the affairs of the crown of Castile during thirty years, was appointed regent until Juana’s elder son, Charles, should attain to his majority.
Though at first there was a disagreement between Ferdinand and Philip, Juana’s husband, as to the regency, all difficulties were settled in 1505 by mutual agreement, and the next year, by the sudden death of the young archduke, the king became sole regent, and virtually ruler over all Spain. Juana, the bereaved “lady proprietor,” was crazed by this affliction, smiting upon a mind already diseased, and until her death, forty-seven years after, took no part in the affairs of the kingdom. As Juana loca, or “Crazy Jane,” she is known to history. She became most insanely jealous respecting her dead husband’s remains, would not allow them interred, and journeyed with them from place to place, always in the night; for, she mournfully said, “A widow who has lost the sun of her own soul should never expose herself to the light of day.” Thus she lived in mental darkness, in her palace of Tordesillas, for nearly half a century, an object of pity and commiseration.
Left at liberty to pursue his conquests where he would, Ferdinand first turned to matrimony, and married Germaine, a frivolous niece of Louis XII of France, in 1506. Three years later his great cardinal, Ximenes, waged war on Oran, a port on the African coast, equipped an army at his own expense—or rather from the revenues he derived from his position as Primate of Spain—and took the Moorish stronghold after great slaughter on both sides. The figure of this austere and virtuous cardinal, who so faithfully served first Isabella, then Ferdinand, Juana, and finally Charles, and who found time to attend to affairs of state and to purge the kingdom of its heretics through inquisitorial fires, to carry on a war at his own cost, to found a university, to cause to be translated the famous Complutensian Bible, which employed men of learning fifteen years at the task—his is one of the sturdiest and strongest of this epoch. The University of Alcala, founded in 1500, and the renowned Bible, the last portion of which was printed in 1517, are but two of the many monuments he erected during his life.
In the year 1511 the Holy League was formed between Ferdinand and Pope Julius II, Venice, and Henry VIII of England, against the French, by which Spain was the gainer; and in 1512 Navarre was annexed to Aragon, thus welding the northern kingdoms into one. In December, 1515, Gonsalvo de Cordova, the “Great Captain,” who had won Ferdinand’s victories in Italy, passed away; to be followed but a month later by his sovereign, who expired on a morning in January, 1516, in a wretched tenement where he had been overtaken by heart disease.
He was in his sixty-fourth year; his reign had endured forty-one years, and at his death he left a reputation for ability, wisdom in diplomacy, sincere interest in the affairs of his people, and economy in the administration of the vast dominions embraced under his kingship over Spain, Naples, and the two Americas.
For more than twenty years he had borne the title bestowed upon him by Pope Alexander, in 1494, and as the great King of Spain, Ferdinand “the Catholic,” he has passed down to history and the present time. His remains were taken to Granada, where they were at first deposited within the Alhambra; but to-day all that is earthly of Ferdinand and his glorious consort repose in the magnificent marble tomb in the royal chapel of Granada, which with its exquisite carvings and memorial effigies, was executed by world-famous artists at the command of Charles, the son of Juana loca the demented queen.
CHAPTER XV.
CHARLES I AND PHILIP II.
Charles, elder son of Juana, and grandson of Isabella and Ferdinand, was born in the year 1500, at Ghent, and all his life held an affection for the people of his native land, which the Spaniards never shared. Still, he was virtually King of Spain at the death of his grandfather Ferdinand, and his mother, owing to her lunacy, only nominally queen. Henceforth, for more than half a century, this grandson of the King of Aragon and Queen of Castile appears the dominant figure, the greatest ruler, in Europe. “It has been said that Charles had more power for good or ill in Europe than has been exercised by any man since the reign of Augustus; and that, on the whole, he did as much harm with it as could possibly be done.”
This is the verdict of an impartial historian, and seems borne out by the facts, for his long reign was chiefly one of war, and waged more for personal aggrandizement than for reasons of state. He was seventeen years of age when he first entered Spain, the year following Ferdinand’s death, and eighteen when proclaimed king at Valladolid. The interregnum had been skilfully bridged by Cardinal Ximenes, who had vigorously suppressed various insurrections caused by the dissatisfaction of the nobles and the people at the introduction of a host of foreigners, greedy and rapacious, from the Flemish country. Notwithstanding the great services of the octogenarian Ximenes, who had so faithfully served not alone the young prince, but before him his mother and grandparents, he sent him a frivolous letter containing implied reproof, which reached the cardinal either just before or just after his demise, which occurred in November, 1517. Adrian of Utrecht, subsequently Pope, succeeded Ximenes, under whom Charles’s forces met and overcame the rebels, headed by Juan de Padilla, in 1522.
In January, 1519, another great personage departed this life, in the death of Maximilian, Emperor of Germany, paternal grandfather of the young King of Spain, upon whom, in June of the same year, was bestowed the imperial crown. He was thus at nineteen years of age, as Charles V of Germany and Charles I of Spain, sovereign over a vastly wider realm than any Castilian king had ever dreamed of conquering. From his father, Philip, he had inherited dominion over the Netherlands and Franche-Comté; through his mother and from Ferdinand the kingdoms of Spain; and now, by the Diet of Frankfort, he was made Emperor of Germany. It may be said that with his coronation at Aix-la-Chapelle, in October, 1520, his troubles really began; for Francis, the French king, also young and powerful, urged a right to the crown; and henceforth, until the death of the latter, in 1547, there was enmity between them.
That same year occurred the famous meeting on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, between French Francis and Henry VIII of England; but not long after Henry was fighting as an ally of Charles against the King of France. To recount their quarrels and battles would be too wearisome as well as fruitless a task; but they culminated at the famous battle of Pavia, when the French king’s army was routed, and Francis himself taken prisoner by the Spaniards, in 1524. He was not released until he had forfeited his claims to Charles’s possessions in Burgundy, etc., and returned to France in January, 1526, after signing the Treaty of Madrid, and leaving as hostages two of his sons.
But Francis did not respect his promises, and soon there was war again between the two, more battles, more signing of treaties, more shedding of blood and devastation of territories, until the war-worn subjects of both sovereigns were weary of a conflict in which they obtained no gains and shared no profits. Especially were the Spaniards wroth at being repeatedly called upon to donate funds and men, men and funds, for the carrying on of foreign wars. Yet they rarely rebelled, and only grumbled and protested when the Cortes was called, knowing that it meant only more money for the king and his favourites, more sacrifices at the feet of Moloch the insatiate. Through all the years of his reign Charles was carrying on war of another kind, also, with the enemies of the Romish Church. Simultaneously with his coronation as Emperor of Germany rose the apparition of Protestantism in the person of the redoubtable Luther; and the assembling of the Diet of Worms, for the discussion and extermination of Lutheranism, was one of the first acts of the young sovereign, in January, 1521. It was an unequal fight, that between the poor peasant-priest Luther and the mighty emperor; yet, though the former died in 1541, his cause eventually won—as all the world knows—and not all Charles’s efforts could strangle in its cradle the young giant of Reformation.
At the age of twenty-six Charles married Isabella of Portugal, a beautiful princess, to whom he was much attached, and who became the mother of his only legitimate son, Philip II, who was born in 1527. That same year Charles was called upon to wage another little war with Francis, who had broken his pledges and formed a league with Henry of England and the Pope. The Spanish armies, under lead of the recreant Constable of Bourbon, overran Italian territories, took and sacked the city of Rome, committing every imaginable excess, and ending by making the Pope himself a prisoner. Although his own army had committed this sacrilege, Charles pretended to be grieved at the event, particularly at the indignity offered to the person of the Pope; but only three years later he had the imperial crown set upon his brow by this same Pope Clement, who had only regained his liberty by the payment of a heavy ransom.
The treaty then signed by the hitherto hostile belligerents, called the Peace of Cambrai, was probably hastened by the threatened invasion of western Europe by the Mohammedans under Soleyman the Magnificent; and it was this fear also that caused Charles to treat his Protestant subjects so leniently in Germany, when in Spain they would all have been burned at the stake or put to the sword. But he needed their valiant arms in opposing the Moslems of Turkey in their victorious progress; hence they were temporarily spared, to grow eventually into a body politic of such proportions that, to his sorrow, they eventually overcame him. He, however, vindicated his claim to be considered the champion of Christendom, in 1535, by organizing an expedition against Barbarossa, the pirate king, and liberating hundreds of Christians confined in the dungeons of Tunis. Another attempt upon Algiers, in 1541, resulted in the dispersion of the Spanish fleet by a storm, and disastrous defeat. The year 1536 was made memorable to the citizens of Ghent because, having refused to furnish their quota for carrying on the wars in France, they were treated by Charles as rebels and punished with terrible severity.
In 1540 Loyola established in Spain the order of Jesuits, which subsequently came to have such influence in religious and political affairs. The French king in 1542 renewed hostilities, and after two years of warfare a peace was declared, in 1544. About this time it seemed to Charles that the occasion was ripe for a war of extermination against his Protestant subjects of Germany. At first he triumphed over their large and well-equipped armies, in 1547 defeating the Elector of Saxony and taking him prisoner. That year, also, Francis of France died, and thus the emperor was left freer to persecute those who differed from him in their religious beliefs. But a Protestant champion soon arose in the person of Prince Maurice of Saxony, whose vigorous action not only reduced the emperor to the humiliating necessity of signing a treaty of peace (August 2, 1552), but set in motion a train of events that forever made impossible his cherished project of the rooting out of Protestantism.
Three disastrous years of warfare followed the Peace of Passau, but nothing was gained for Charles, and in 1555, by the Peace of Augsburg, his hated enemy, Protestantism, scored a triumph through receiving legal recognition, by which its roots struck so deep into European soil that no efforts of the emperor’s could avail to extricate them. It is thought that the humiliation of this defeat of his lifelong scheme in behalf of the papists was the cause of his final determination to abdicate in favour of his son Philip, which he did in October of the same year, 1555. His mother, Juana, died this year, having passed the whole term of her son’s brilliant reign in the gloom of insanity.
In January, 1556, he formally ceded all his Spanish possessions to Philip, and retired to the monastery of Yuste, where he passed three years more in the quietude of peaceful scenes, and finally expired on the 21st of September, 1558.
After forty years of fighting, he found nothing so delightful as the seclusion of a monastery; after mingling in the stirring scenes of a world of which he was at times the most prominent figure and centre around which it moved, he found nothing so conducive to tranquillity and happiness as the domestic avocations of gardening and carving simple toys. He had crossed central and western Europe forty times, had visited England, carried war into Africa, had battled with the French, the British, the Italians, and Turks; while at the same time his great captains had subjugated the natives of the two Americas, and deluged the western isles and continents with blood. Mexico, Peru, and Chili were reduced to submission during his reign. In 1521 the great navigator, Magellan, had passed through the straits that now bear his name and circumnavigated South America, on that same voyage discovering the Philippine Islands, which were afterward named in honour of Philip II.
We should pause here to note that it was during Charles’s reign that Spain’s history became inextricably mingled with or touched upon that of every great division of the world, and that the emperor held possessions in Asia, Africa, Europe, North and South America.
CHAPTER XVI.
SPAIN’S RELIGIOUS WARS.
The keynote of Philip’s character was bigotry. Trained in diplomacy by his imperial father, brought up in the atmosphere of royal courts, born to intrigue and bred to dissimulation, he early gave promise of a great future which he never fulfilled.
When, at his abdication, in 1555, Charles admonished his son to “fear God, live justly, respect the laws; above all, cherish the interests of religion,” he really meant, as the codicil to his will expressed, in 1558: “Keep alive the fires of the Inquisition, and exterminate every heretic in the kingdom.” And, so far as it lay in his power, the filial son obeyed the precepts of his father to the letter!
Born in 1527, at twelve years of age he lost his mother by death, and at twenty-seven, or in 1554, he was married to “Bloody Mary,” Queen of England, and thus became titular King of the British Isles, though never actually and actively engaged in the affairs of that kingdom during the fourteen months of his residence there. Indirectly, the result of this alliance was a fearful persecution of Mary’s Protestant subjects, and the burning at the stake of martyrs like Latimer and Cranmer, and more than three hundred others, before she died in 1558. Fortunately for England, no children were born of this alliance, the evil results of which were shown by the war with France, into which Mary was drawn by Philip, and the loss of Calais to the English. “When I am dead, Calais will be found written on my heart,” said the unhappy queen; but the faithless husband, for whom she sacrificed so much, was not inconsolable at her death, and soon again embarked in matrimony.
In truth, Philip was already a widower when he espoused Mary Tudor, for he had been married to Maria, daughter of King John of Portugal, in 1543, who died within two years, leaving a son, Don Carlos, who became an object of suspicion to his unnatural father, by whom he was imprisoned, and probably poisoned, in 1568.
Shortly after the death of Mary of England, Philip sued for the hand of her sister, Elizabeth, who scornfully repelled him, and in June, 1559, he married Isabella, daughter of Henry II of France. His marital record was completed when, in 1570, after the death of Isabella, he espoused his niece, Anne of Austria, daughter of Emperor Maximilian II. Thus within the space of twenty-seven years he had been four times married, three times to the daughters of kings and once to the daughter of an emperor. But his various attempts to ally himself with royalty—with the reigning houses of Portugal, England, France, and Austria—resulted in no direct benefit to him or to his kingdom. A curious if not revolting circumstance attending two of these marriages was, that while Mary of England was at one time the betrothed bride of his father, Isabella of France was intended for his son Don Carlos! It is supposed that it was on account of his jealousy of the relations between his lovely bride and his son that Philip persecuted and imprisoned the latter, and finally hounded him to his death.
In war and diplomacy Philip was at first more fortunate than in matrimony, for in 1557 his generals gained the important victory of San Quentin, and of Gravelines, 1558, over the French, between whom and the Spanish and English a treaty of peace was signed in 1559. It was at this time that the English lost Calais, and the French much territory; the only benefits accruing to Philip of Spain, who acquired two hundred towns in Italy and the Netherlands.
Although opponents in war, Henry II of France and Philip II of Spain were of one religion, and united as against their heretical subjects; so the alliance with Isabella was quite in the natural course of events. In a tournament which followed the ceremony the King of France was accidentally killed by the Scotch captain of his guards, the Count of Montgomery; and thus Queen Isabella began in sorrow that sad, short period of married life with Philip II which was terminated by her early death.
After a visit to the Spanish Netherlands, in 1559, Philip returned to Spain, and never again set foot on Flemish soil. But he always kept those distant provinces within his ken; not with their best interests at heart, but with a view to crushing out the Protestants with fire and with sword. He left his half-sister, Margaret, Duchess of Parma, to rule in his absence, assisted by Cardinal Grenville, and with instructions to root out heresy from the land, at whatever cost. Spain at that time had its prisons filled with victims of the Holy Office; its autos-da-fé, or burnings of heretics at the stake, were of weekly occurrence, no Sabbath being deemed complete without these dismal spectacles.
But in the Low Countries the infamous inquisitors encountered a resistance more formidable than from the passive wretches of downtrodden Spain. Though their streets flowed with human blood, though the flames rose from every square and market place, yet the Netherlanders opposed the attempt to subvert them. They rose in rebellion when the Inquisition was introduced, in 1565, and to suppress them the great Duke of Alva, who had won victories for both Charles and Philip, was despatched with an army considered sufficient for the purpose. This general, of consummate abilities yet of monstrous cruelty, afterward boasted that he had executed eighteen thousand men by hanging and drowning, by the rack and fire, besides the many killed in battle. He put to death Counts Egmont and Horn, drove the valiant William of Orange into exile; and the flames of war and bitterness which he kindled lasted for more than two generations, resulting in the eventual loss of all the northern Netherlands to Spain. He was rewarded by the Pope with the title of supreme Defender of the Faith, but left the country pursued by the maledictions of the people. His infamous “Council of Blood” rode rough-shod over all the rights of the people, and sent to the gallows and the block the highest and the wealthiest of the country, whose properties were confiscated for the benefit of the king. At last, after the northern provinces had maintained a successful war for several years, the Duke of Alva was recalled, and the king’s half-brother, Don John of Austria, was sent in his stead. One of Alva’s last offices was to conquer Portugal for Philip, in 1580.
During this gloomy period in the Netherlands there occurred several things of importance in Spain and the farther East which had a bearing on the fortunes of the Christian world. At home a Moorish rebellion disturbed the land. Goaded to desperation by oppressive laws, hunted like beasts by the familiars of the Holy Office, at last the Moriscoes could endure no more. Many fled to the mountains and organized a rebellion, which for several years kept the Spanish soldiers actively engaged ferreting them out in their retreats and dragging them to death. “Better not reign at all, rather than over a nation of heretics,” was Philip’s declaration as the Moors begged for the retention of their ancient religion and forms of dress. He was determined to make them all conform to his own ideal of religious faith; and the result was loss and irreparable disaster to the country over which he reigned as king. By the year 1572 the rebellion was crushed, its leaders all murdered, and the unfortunate Moriscoes scattered in exile far from the homes of their ancestors, where hitherto they had been peacefully tilling the soil and engaged in manufactures that redounded to the benefit of Spain.
In the year 1571, in alliance with Rome and Venice, Spain arrested the westward-flowing flood of Mohammedanism at Lepanto, one of the “decisive battles of the world,” when one hundred and thirty Turkish galleys were wrecked or captured, twenty-five thousand Turks were killed, twelve thousand Christian galley slaves liberated from their living death, and vast booty taken from the enemy.
Lepanto was the western limit of Islam’s latest advance in Europe; after that fateful battle it receded toward the Orient. But for King Philip’s insane jealousy of his half-brother, Don John of Austria, who so bravely led the Christian hosts, the allied forces might have laid siege to Constantinople; as it was, Don John sailed across the Mediterranean with twenty thousand men and captured Tunis, on the African coast. It was soon after retaken by the Turks, and many years later the other Spanish dependencies went the same way.
On the other side of the Pyrenees, in France, an event occurred in 1572 peculiarly acceptable to Philip—the atrocious massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s night, when four thousand Huguenots were murdered in cold blood, through the treachery of the queen regent, Catherine de’ Medici, and her son Charles IX. In the provinces of France at least thirty thousand more fell victims of the hate and fury of their compatriots who differed from them in their religious belief; and they could not fly to Spain for succour, for there sat their inveterate enemy, who was only too anxious to interfere in the affairs of France. He had his hands full, with the encroaching Moslems on one side and the obstinate Netherlanders on the other; yet he found time to attend to all these things, and to manage the affairs of his vast empire in the New World also.
Two years after the recall of Alva from the Low Countries, or in 1575, Holland and Zealand were united under Philip’s bitterest enemy, William of Orange, and the next year witnessed the famous “Pacification of Ghent” between the Protestant and Catholic provinces, by which the Inquisition was declared abolished, mutual toleration agreed to in religious matters, and a united stand maintained against the Spanish soldiery. In 1578 the free states brought about a treaty with Queen Elizabeth of England, and the next year the Union of Utrecht—a stepping-stone to their great and final declaration of independence and repudiation of Spain, in 1581. As the Duke of Parma, who had succeeded Don John of Austria, advised the removal of the head and front of the opposition in the person of the noble patriot William the Silent, Philip at once declared him a miscreant and outlaw, and offered a reward of twenty-five thousand crowns to whoever would murder him. This is the reason why Philip II of Spain has been called the murderer of William the Silent, because, instigated by the proffered reward, a miserable wretch was finally successful in assassinating William, in July, 1584. Although he himself did not point the pistol which ended the life of William the Silent, yet Philip was as actually his murderer as if he had done so; likewise of his secretary, Escovedo, of his own son, Don Carlos, of the Counts Egmont and Horn, of Don John of Austria, and thousands of others who were put to the sword, beheaded, hanged, and burned to death by his commands.
Were we writing the history of the Netherlands we might find examples of Philip’s tortures, might produce evidence of his most inhuman cruelty to his brother man too revolting, too horrible for contemplation. He reminds us of nothing so much as of a vile and venomous spider intrenched in his web at Madrid, whence radiate threads of communication to the confines of his realm—to Naples and the Netherlands, to Africa and the Americas—all connecting with the capital where sits this arch-enemy of mankind, absorbing the life-blood of his innumerable victims. This human spider rioted in scenes of blood, yet rarely shed blood directly by his own hand; his foul parasites executed his commands, and burned and strangled by his orders; he was Briareus-like; no one could escape him; no life was safe if once he wanted it. So it was that, while he gratified his hideous instincts, his country became poorer and poorer; while he sucked the blood of his prey, he also sapped the land of its vitality; his armies were numerous, his wars were costly, and as he had encouraged no domestic industries—had killed rather than fostered skilled artisans—all the vast wealth brought to the shores of Spain by her flotillas of treasure galleons was absorbed by unworthy favourites, was scattered abroad on many a battlefield, or went to reward hired assassins and a mercenary soldiery. For the credit of humanity, for the credit of the cause of religion—which he pretended to champion and up-hold—we would his life were otherwise than what it was; but it has been said of him, and of his father, Charles I, that no other sovereigns with such glorious privileges, with such great opportunities for doing so much good, ever did so much harm!
The Netherlands may be considered as lost to Spain when their cause was championed by the “Virgin Queen” Elizabeth, who sent, in 1586, the Earl of Leicester to represent her with an army. It was at a skirmish attending one of the battles of this year that there fell one who has received almost immortal acclaim for his knightly courtesy: Sir Philip Sidney, who, dying, refused a cup of water that a brother soldier might be refreshed.
Though King Philip may have welcomed a war with England, as a hotbed of Protestantism and the realm over which ruled Elizabeth, whose refusal to marry him still rankled in his bosom, yet he was soon to regret it. For, in 1587, that great sea-lion, Sir Francis Drake—not then “Sir,” however, but plain Admiral—pounced upon the seaport of Cadiz, sank two hundred and fifty galleys and transports, and created consternation everywhere in Spain.
The next year, in spite of Drake’s ravages, sailed the great armada—one hundred and forty ships and thirty thousand men, with friars, inquisitors, etc.—for the conquest and conversion of England: argosies in which were centred the hopes of Spain; only to be crushed and defeated by one half its number of English ships, combined with the adverse elements, so that only a pitiful remnant returned to Spanish ports. A last expiring effort at naval supremacy was made in 1595; but this fleet also was sunk, carrying with it Spain’s prestige on the ocean wave.
And at last, in misery and torture from a loathsome disease, at the age of seventy-one, in the year 1598, Philip II departed this life; his chief legacy an impoverished kingdom, his greatest monument the Escorial, that palace, monastery, mausoleum, library, upon which he had spent thirty years of time and lavished millions of treasure.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
Two royal lives practically extend throughout the sixteenth century, or from the year 1500 to 1598. The lives and reigns of three of their successors carry us forward exactly a century further, for Philip III reigned from 1598-1621; Philip IV, 1621-1665; and Charles II, 1665-1700. The house of Hapsburg had come in with Charles I, who was also Charles V of Germany; it terminated in Spain in the reign of Charles II, after an even two hundred years of power.
It will do us no harm to recapitulate, that under Isabella and Ferdinand the Spanish monarchy was consolidated; under Charles I it grew to be an empire, wide-extended, world-embracing; and under Phillip II began to shrink again to meaner proportions.
Charles could not secure the empire to his son, as it went to his brother Ferdinand, neither could he bestow upon him transcendent abilities; but Philip equalled him in his intensity of purpose, his capacity for protracted labour, his inclination to provoke war, and surpassed him in religious fanaticism. Both, however, were self-sufficient, needing no counsellors, no outside help to formulate their plans of action. With the incoming of Philip III we witness the beginning of a long line of favourites, of irresponsible courtiers, under whom Spain suffered for nearly two centuries more. The first was Sandoval, whom his royal servant created Duke of Lerma, and under whom (notwithstanding the death of Holland’s great ally, Elizabeth, in 1603) the United Provinces gained their virtual independence by the Treaty of Antwerp, in 1610. The Netherlands were under the comparatively mild sway of the Infanta Isabella, her armies led by the Archduke Albert and the Marquis Spinola, and opposed by Prince Maurice of Nassau. By the end of the first decade of this century the Dutch East India Company was established, and their fleets not only brought rich cargoes to Holland, but they preyed upon Spanish commerce as well. To such a condition, finally, had Philip II’s policy brought affairs, that after thirty years his former vassals, the sturdy rebels of the northern Netherlands, were rejoicing over inflowing wealth, while Spain’s treasuries were empty, or exhausted as soon as replenished.
Though without that positive power for evil possessed by his father, Philip III was malignant, capable at times of great evil, as was shown in his expulsion of the Moriscoes, or the last of the Moors, in 1609. At this time the bulk of them were living in Valencia, where they were highly esteemed for their sobriety, diligence, conformity to the laws, and as skilled artisans; but owing to the suggestion of the Archbishop of Toledo, Sandoval’s brother, Philip banished them all to Africa, to the number of more than half a million, where and in the voyage thither they suffered incredible hardships. Their only blame lay in their industry and thrift, and the country soon felt their loss through a further decline of its agriculture, manufactures, and mining. Thus departed from Spain the last vestige of the Moors, whose ancestors had invaded the peninsula nine hundred years before. With them, and with the Jews, departed also in great measure the country’s prosperity. The Moors, says a writer on Spain, had brought here the cultivation of the mulberry, sugar cane, cotton, and rice. The spices and sweets of Valencia were famous, as well as the sword blades of Toledo, the silks of Granada, and the leather of Cordova. Nobody knows the extent of Moorish treasure still buried in Spain; but if the Spaniards had spent as much time in tilling the soil as in hunting for the undiscovered gold and jewels, the country would be more prosperous than it is to-day.
Weak, vacillating, swayed by his wife and his favourites, Philip III was yet morose and melancholy, and eventually turned upon Lerma, forcing him to retire to his country seat, but not until after the Church had made him a cardinal.
The eldest son of Philip III succeeded him at his death, in 1521, which is said to have been hastened by the punctilious etiquette of his court, caused by delay in removing him from a fire, near which he had been seated by one of the attendants.
As Philip IV, the new heir to the throne dabbled in disastrous wars to even a greater extent than his father, and he could not prevent being drawn into the vortex of that terrible Thirty Years’ War (1618-’48) between the Catholics and Protestants of Europe. It was a legacy, indeed, from his great-grandfather, Charles, who had been compelled to a truce with the Lutherans, when he would fain have exterminated them, eighty years before.
This, the fourth Philip of the Spanish line, although called “Philip the Great,” must needs have a royal favourite in one Gasparo de Guzman, Duke of Olivarez, for whose misfortunes he served as a scapegoat. Olivarez began well, by executing a former sub-favourite, Calderon, and prosecuting Lerma for his fraudulent practices—a proceeding which has an aspect of grim humour, in view of his own subsequent venality and official corruption. He sent Spinola to war again with the Netherlands, that grave of so many Spanish soldiers; but the Dutch were now too strong for the mother of tyrants, and not many years after, in 1628, captured the Spanish treasure fleet, and in 1639 almost annihilated the Spanish navy at Dunkirk. He was scarcely more fortunate in Italy; he even ventured to match himself against that past-master of diplomacy and intrigue, Cardinal Richelieu, with a result that might have been expected. His tyranny and oppressive exactions raised a revolt in Catalonia, which lasted thirteen years; and it was about this time that Portugal threw off the coils which Philip II had wound around her and regained an independence which she has ever since retained.
The reign of Olivarez came to an end after twenty years or so of maladministration, but Spain’s territorial losses went on under his nephew and successor, Luis de Haro. All through the history of these times there was always an undercurrent of war between France and Spain, now one nation and then the other being victorious. Hitherto the prestige of the Spanish soldiery had been sufficient to hold the French in check; but Turenne took from them Roussillon, in 1642, and at the battle of Rocroi, the next year, the great Condé administered a crushing defeat, so that their century-long reputation for invincibility was shattered. Condé again defeated the famous Spanish infantry at the battle of Lens, in 1648, and that same year a final peace was concluded with the Netherlands. On the sea Spanish ships were again defeated by the renowned Van Tromp, the same Dutch admiral who sailed with a broom at his mast head in token that he had swept the seas clean of his country’s enemies. Until this period the transatlantic possessions of Spain had been kept intact, though many coast cities and towns had been bombarded, and fleets of treasure galleons destroyed; but in 1665 one of Cromwell’s admirals took the island of Jamaica, and this was the beginning of such losses by Spain.
All these defeats, with but few redeeming victories, reduced Spain from the once proud position she had held as dictator in European affairs to become subordinate to France, her ancient enemy. By the Peace of Westphalia, in 1648, Spain had suffered indirect defeat, as thereby the Protestants had secured religious toleration, against which Charles I and the three Philips had fought for more than a century. By this peace, also, France and Spain were left the only combatants on the field of European warfare, but in 1659 they came to terms by the Treaty of the Pyrenees; France gave back to Spain her territory of Catalonia, and Spain ceded to France Artois and Roussillon. Further, a promising guaranty of the stability of this present peace was the marriage the following year of the Infanta Maria Teresa, Philip’s eldest daughter by his first wife, to the great king, Louis XIV of France. Six years later, after a protracted struggle, the decisive battle of Villaviciosa lost Portugal finally to Spain, at the news of which the king was so affected that he swooned away, his death occurring shortly afterward, September 17, 1665.
One would think that peace might now reign between France and Spain, since Philip IV left his throne to a helpless child of four years, whose brother-in-law was King Louis XIV. But Louis the despot was a law unto himself. He no sooner saw the opportunity, with Spain powerless to oppose him, and his hands free in other directions, than he promptly sent his armies into the Netherlands. Alarmed at his schemes of conquest, England, Sweden, and Holland joined together in the “Triple Alliance,” which for a while held him in check, until they tied his hands again in 1668 by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. At the Spanish court, meanwhile, affairs were in a scandalous condition, for the queen regent was ruled at first by a German Jesuit, and later foisted into favour an agreeable young man who had been merely a page, and whose highest conception of pleasure was to occupy the place of honour at a bullfight. If it may be said of the reign of Philip IV that it was the most disastrous to Spain since that of King Roderick the Goth, little more can be claimed for that of Charles II, his son, who came into the succession in 1675, at the age of fourteen. Like all the issue of Philip II, he was weak almost to idiocy, and so superstitious that in later life he had himself exorcised for witchcraft.
His uncle, Don John, at first assisted him with his counsels, but after his death a favourite named Eguya succeeded him, to be followed by the Duke of Medina Celi, then by the Count of Oropesa; and none of them laboured for the aggrandizement of Spain. By the Treaty of Nimeguen, in 1678, and by the Twenty Years’ Truce of Ratisbon, Louis XIV should have abstained from further aggressions, but his mischief-loving spirit was not to be curbed. He invaded Catalonia in 1689, bombarded Alicante and Barcelona, capturing the latter, and acted in a manner altogether in keeping with the character of this treacherous and unfaithful monarch, whose long life is but a record of infamy.
By the Peace of Ryswick, in 1697, Louis unexpectedly gave back to Spain all the territory he had conquered, an act inexplicable until the terms of the secret “Partition Treaty” became known, when it was found that he had arranged for the partition of Spain, with the assistance of other powers, by which his son the dauphin was to have the bulk of the dominions, including the Italian possessions.
Spain had now become so weak that the expected death of her king was the signal for a gathering of her royal neighbours, who sat around like vultures expectant of their prey until the pitiful apology of a monarch at last shuffled off this mortal coil. The last of his house to reign in Spain, intellectually degenerate and physically impotent, Charles II passed away, leaving no direct heir to the throne. Before his death, however, aware of the coalition against the throne in the event of no successor being named, Charles willed his dominions to the electoral Prince of Bavaria, whose mother was a daughter of Philip IV. But the prince died before the king, and this reopened the question of succession, which will be treated in the next chapter.
It is one of the paradoxes of civilization that a barren or a blood-fertilized soil sometimes produces the most luxuriant growth and yields the richest harvests. So with Spain. During the century of her greatest oppression, during the years of her decadence, she brought forth the flower of her literature and of her art. We may call the era of intellectual and artistic development, or rather inflorescence, by whatever name we will—Augustan, Elizabethan, or Victorian—but the fact is, the sovereign has no claim to this distinction, for he or she merely happened to reign when this took place.
Thus we find during the reigns of the three Philips such world-renowned names as Garcilasso de la Vega, the historian; Las Casas, Oviedo, Bernal Diaz, and Cortes, military writers; Cervantes, author of the immortal Don Quixote; Lope de Vega, the dramatist, minor poets in great numbers, and great painters like Murillo, Ribera, and Velasquez. Titian, even, was a friend of his patron Charles I, and spent some of his last years painting portraits for Philip II.