Imperial Spain 1469-1716

by John H. Elliott

  Don Carlos, the child of Philip's first wife, Maria of Portugal, had grown up to be an abnormally vicious creature of uncontrollable passions, totally unfitted for the government of an empire. Added to this was a deep hatred for his father, and an unmeasured ambition which may have led him into making sympathetic overtures to the Dutch rebels. At eleven o'clock on the night of 18 January 1568 a strange procession, consisting of the King, the Duke of Feria, Ruy Gómez, and other members of the royal council, made its way downstairs to the bedroom of the 23-year-old Prince. As they opened the door, the ministers rushed forward to seize the dagger and arque-bus which the Prince always kept at the head of his bed. After a painful scene, in which Philip announced to his frightened son that he would treat him no longer as a father but as a king, the chamber was barred, guards were placed outside the door, and Don Carlos found himself in permanent confinement. Four days later the King wrote to the President of the Valladolid chancillería informing him of the Prince's arrest – a measure which had become necessary ‘for the service of Our Lord and for the public welfare’.

  The King's action was openly criticized by his subjects. The Prince, whatever his failings, had committed no criminal offence, and the royal justice was held to be excessively rigorous. Perturbed by the groundswell of opposition, Philip wrote to the grandees, the bishops, and the town councils explaining that the Prince's arrest was a matter of absolute necessity, and making it clear that he wanted no representations made about the matter. This did not prevent the States of the Crown of Aragon from sending embassies to Madrid to request an explanation, which was not forthcoming. The King preserved an icy silence on the subject, partly, no doubt, because the misfortunes of his son touched him very deeply. The fate of the heir to the Spanish throne was, however, a matter of universal interest, and nothing could prevent the most intense gossip and speculation both inside and outside Spain. In consequence, when the wretched Don Carlos died on on 24 July, after having wrecked his always precarious health by a combination of hunger-strikes and violent remedial measures, the worst was at once assumed: the King had poisoned his son. For years afterwards the most sinister rumours travelled round Europe, until they came out at last into the open when William of Orange, in his famous Apology of 1581, levelled a formal accusation against the King.

  There seems no reason to doubt either that the Prince's arrest was a necessity, or his death an accident. But there is something rather terrible about the picture of a king whose sense of duty was so rigid that he could not bring himself to visit his son in his last hours of agony. This was not for want of feeling. The death of Don Carlos moved his father deeply, and left a gaping void in what was to be a year of fearful bereavement. Philip's third and much-loved wife, Elizabeth of Valois, died in the autumn of 1568, having borne him only daughters, Isabella Clara Eugenia and Catherine. In 1570 he married his fourth wife, Anne of Austria, the daughter of his sister Maria and of his cousin, the Emperor Maximilian II; but of the five children she bore him before her death in 1580, only one, the future Philip III, lived beyond the age of eight. Through the life of Philip II there filed an endless succession of funeral corteges, tragic reminders of the mortality of princes; and the King, to conceal his sorrows, taught himself to maintain an icy self-control, and devoted himself with redoubled energy to his solitary labours.

  It was, then, as a professional ruler that Philip surveyed the world, sometimes wistfully sighing for the quiet life of a gentleman with an income of 6,000 ducats a year, but ruthlessly suppressing personal joys and sorrows when they threatened to interfere with his duties as a king. He did, however, manage to secure some private life by building for himself the Escorial – part-mausoleum, part-monastery, and part royal residence – where he could retreat from the public gaze and devote any leisure hours to his library and his pictures. He was a great connoisseur, and a generous patron of artists; and he took a deep personal interest in the building of the Escorial by Juan Bautista de Toledo and his disciple Juan de Herrera. The outcome of their labours, began in 1563 and completed in 1584, effectively epitomized the man and his times. In the Escorial, with its frigid façade, the exuberant plateresque of the early Spanish Renaissance is gone for ever, replaced by the cold symmetry of a constricting classicism, imperial, dignified, and aloof a fitting symbol of the triumph of constraint in the Spain of the Counter-Reformation, and of the triumph of authoritarian kingship over the disruptive forces of anarchy.

  The principles of mathematical harmony that obtained in the architecture of the Escorial were also applied to the selection of a capital. In 1561 the Spanish Court, which was still peripatetic, moved from Toledo to Madrid. It seems that the move was not, at the time, intended to be permanent, but Madrid was conveniently close to the new palace of the Escorial, and it gradually came to be recognized as the capital of the Monarchy. The town's only real claim to this particular honour lay in its geographical position as the mathematical centre of Spain, and somehow this conferred upon its choice a kind of inevitability; for, in the words of the chronicler Cabrera, ‘it was right that so great a Monarchy should have a city which could function as its heart – a vital centre in the midst of the body, which ministered equally to every State in time of peace and war’.2

  In spite of the selection of Madrid as a permanent capital, Philip did not entirely cease to travel. Apart from frequent visits to Toledo, to Aranjuez and to his hunting lodge of El Pardo, he visited Barcelona in 1564, Córdoba in 1570, Lisbon in 1582–3, the capitals of the three States of the Crown of Aragon in 1585, and Aragon again in 1592. But, unlike that of Charles V, the government of Philip II was essentially a fixed government – a fact with enormous implications for the future of his territories.

  The choice of a capital at once central and remote contradicted one of the fundamental assumptions on which the Spanish Monarchy rested. If the many territories that together constituted the Monarchy were regarded as independent units of equal rank, then they were all entitled to an equal degree of consideration. The development of a conciliar system represented an attempt to deal with this problem, but Charles had always supplemented conciliar government by repeated visits to his various kingdoms. The establishment of a permanent capital meant in effect the renunciation of the Emperor's practice of peripatetic kingship – a practice which, for all its drawbacks, had the very great advantage of giving his peoples occasional visual proof that their King had not forgotten them. Admittedly a fixed capital was not in itself inconsistent with frequent royal visits, but as soon as the Court was organized on the assumption that it would not be permanently on the move, it tended to develop an inertia of its own arising from the trouble and expense of frequent upheavals.

  In assuming that he could acquaint himself intimately with the needs and problems of his territories from an observation-post in the geographical centre of Spain, Philip tended to overlook the fact that this solution to the problem prevented his territories from acquainting themselves with him. Perhaps because of his own sense of unease among the crowd, which can only have been increased by his unhappy experiences in the Netherlands, he tended to underestimate the magical effects of the royal presence, and to neglect those little personal gestures in which his father excelled. As a result, he allowed a barrier to grow up between him and his subjects, which his constant but solitary concern for their interests was insufficient to surmount.

  Philip was equally mistaken in assuming that residence in the mathematical centre of the peninsula would foster the impression of absolute impartiality in the treatment of his subjects. The first to complain were the Italians, who found themselves part of a Monarchy that was acquiring an increasingly Spanish colouring; for the King, having settled in Spain, had also chosen to dispense with the assistance of several of his father's non-Spanish advisers. It was true that in the new Council of Italy, created in 1555, there were three places reserved for Italians, but its first president was a Spaniard, the Duke of Francavilla. ‘The King,’ reported the Venetian ambassador, ‘has n
o regard but for Spaniards; with these he converses, with these he takes counsel, with these he rules.’

  But the Monarchy of Philip II was not even in the full sense a really Spanish Monarchy. As time went on, it became increasingly Castilian in character. Even if Philip had no such intention, the very selection of a capital in the heart of Castile naturally gave his government a Castilian complexion. The King had established his residence in a stridently Castilian environment; he was surrounded by Castilians and was dependent on Castilian resources for the overwhelming proportion of his revenues. In these circumstances it was natural enough that viceroyalties and other lucrative offices at Court and in the Monarchy should be bestowed on Castilians. But it was no less natural that this trend towards the Castilianization of the Monarchy should have been watched with the deepest concern by Catalans and Aragonese. Where Charles V had managed to hold general Cortes for the Crown of Aragon almost every five years, Philp II held them twice only, in 1563 and again in 1585. The infrequency of the sessions is almost certainly to be explained by the fact that the small subsidies eventually voted by the Aragonese kingdoms were simply not worth the heavy expenses of the journey and the large political concessions required before the money was forthcoming. But Cortes which to the King were merely an occasion for the extraction of money, were looked upon by the peoples concerned as primarily an opportunity for seeing their King and obtaining redress of their grievances. The virtual abandonment of the Cortes of the Crown of Aragon therefore seemed to Aragonese, Catalans, and Valencians to represent an abandonment of themselves, and they came to look upon this neglect as part of a Castilian plot to deprive them first of their King and then of their liberties.

  The effect of the isolation of the King in the heart of Castile was therefore to reinforce the latent suspicions of the non-Castilian regions of the peninsula about Castlian intentions. The mutual antagonism of Castilians and Aragonese, which had so chequered the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella, had already developed by the end of Charles V's reign into an undisguised contempt for the Aragonese among the Castilians, and a corresponding anxiety about Castilian intentions in the Crown of Aragon. As seen by the Aragonese and the Catalans, the spectacular success of Castile had merely added to the already unbearable arrogance of its inhabitants, who ‘want to be so absolute, and put so high a value on their own achievements and so low a value on everyone else's, that they give the impression that they alone are descended from heaven, and the rest of mankind are mud’.3 Castilian aristocrats had openly expressed their hatred of Aragonese institutions, and had given the impression that the time would come when the Crown of Aragon would be ruled by the laws of Castile. It was therefore easy enough for Catalans and Aragonese to see the policies of Philip II as one further stage in an elaborate conspiracy to Castilianize the Monarchy.

  There is no clear evidence that Philip himself entertained any such design. He had been instructed by his father to treat the States of the Crown of Aragon with the utmost circumspection in view of their extreme sensitivity about their laws and liberties; and the revolt of the Netherlands no doubt gave extra point to this advice. Moreover, Philip had inherited the Emperor's patrimonial concept of his dominions as independent units, all with their own individual laws, which he was under conscience bound to observe. While he may have hoped to reduce their mutual isolation by intermarrying the various provincial aristocracies, he does not appear to have grasped, any more than his father, the concept of the Spanish Monarchy as a living organism with an existence of its own, over and above that conferred upon it by its subordination to a single ruler. Indeed, perhaps precisely because he looked upon himself as the only link between his various territories, Philip found it difficult to conceive of them as possessing any unity, real or potential, other than that provided by his own person.

  So personalized a concept of the nature of the Monarchy naturally tended to endow it in the King's mind with a purely static character, whereas in fact, like all constitutional organisms, it was inevitably subject to change. The very choice of Castile for the establishment of a capital, and the consequent process of gradual Castilianization, was itself bound to introduce changes by modifying the constitutional position of the provinces and their relationship to their King. Exaggerated as the immediate fears of the provinces may have been, they were not far wrong in suspecting that the Monarchy was being set on a path which would lead inexorably to a specifically Castilian solution of its constitutional problems. For this was, after all, one possible answer to the problem of the Monarchy's diversity. There was at least the logic of simplicity in the Castilian demand that the various states of the Monarchy should be stripped of their tiresome laws and privileges, and be governed instead by the laws of Castile.

  Against the Castilian answer to the problems of the Monarchy there was, however, a possible alternative answer which possessed a greater appeal for the non-Castilian provinces. This was to be found in the work entitled El Concejo y Consejeros del Príncipe, published at Antwerp in 1559 by the Valencian humanist Fadrique Furió Ceriol. As might have been expected of a Valencian, Furió's proposals stemmed from the Aragonese tradition of empire, in which each territory preserved its own constitutional structure and kept its own laws and liberties. The empire for him seems to have been a kind of federal organization, with the King drawing his councillors equally from all his States.

  In the very first years of Philip's reign, therefore, two possible solutions to the problem of imperial organization – a Castilian and a federalist – stood face to face. The problem itself, which had already begun to acquire a new importance as Philip assumed the guise of a Castilian monarch, became urgent with the revolt of the Netherlands in 1566. On the King's treatment of the Dutch rebels depended much more than the fate of the Netherlands alone. If the Castilian extremists were to win the day, then the Neapolitans, the Aragonese, and the Catalans would have cause to fear that their turn would come next. If, on the other hand, the problem of the Netherlands could be solved in such a way as to keep the Netherlands a contented member of the Spanish Monarchy, the non-Castilian provinces would be better able to withstand the pressure of an over-mighty Castile. From the 1560s, then, the problem of the Netherlands hovered over all the deliberations in Madrid, urgently requiring an answer and yet too complex to allow of any clear-cut solution. For the problem of the Netherlands was ultimately the problem of the Spanish Monarchy as a whole – of its future direction and constitutional structure.

  2. THE FACTION STRUGGLES

  The method by which the debate on the Netherlands was conducted is only understandable in terms of the governmental system of Philip II. The essence of this system was the combination of conciliar advice with royal action – or inaction. The King himself was the executive officer, personally attending to all matters of government, however trivial. It was he who studied the dispatches, drafted the orders, and carefully supervised the labours of his secretaries.

  To some extent, indeed, Philip was his own secretary. Certainly he had many of the secretary's characteristics: ‘no secretary in the world uses more paper than His Majesty,’ Cardinal Granvelle acidly remarked.4 In spite of this, even Philip needed considerable secretarial assistance. The sixteenth century was for many countries the great age of the secretary, who was becoming an important officer of state with discretionary powers. This rise of the secretary had partly occurred under the influence of Spain, for the French secretaries of State appointed by Henry II in 1547 to some extent modelled themselves on their Spanish colleagues. In Spain itself, however, the further development of secretarial power was inevitably checked by the King's personal bureaucratic proclivities. None the less, the secretaries remained indispensable, and their indispensability gave them a great, if shadowy, influence in the management of government. Always close to the royal person, and intimately acquainted with the contents of his dispatches, they could not but be powerful figures, assiduously courted by the many pressure groups within the Spanish Monarchy.

  Of
the secretarial officials trained by Los Cobos, almost the only experienced survivor on the accession of Philip II was Gonzalo Pérez. Originally recommended to Cobos by the Emperor's secretary Alonso de Valdés, just before Valdés's death in 1532, Pérez was an excellent Latinist and a man of considerable erudition. Having entered the Church without apparently possessing any deep sense of vocation, he rose to eminence on his appointment as secretary to Prince Philip in 1543. From this time onwards he was in Philip's constant service, minuting his correspondence and deciphering his confidential dispatches. As sole secretary of State, Pérez enjoyed enormous influence - perhaps too much for one man, for on his death in 1566 the secretaryship was divided into two, along geographical lines. Norte, the northern department, went to a Basque, Gabriel de Zayas, while Italia, the southern department, was entrusted to Gonzalo's illegitimate son, Antonio Pérez.

  While the executive part of the government consisted of the King and his secretaries, the advisory part remained the various councils, organized largely as they had been in the reign of Charles V. Philip was extremely careful to continue his father's practice of excluding great nobles from office in the central government, and reserving their services for viceroyalties, embassies, and military commands. But in a hierarchically ordered society it was impossible to overlook the claims, the aspirations, and the feuds of the magnates; and although many of them chose to live like kings on their estates rather than pass their days in attendance on an uncongenial monarch in an uncongenial Court, it was essential to provide opportunities for them to make their voices heard. Philip was from the first acutely aware of the fact that he ruled a deeply divided land, in which the control of such cities as Toledo and Seville was disputed by rival aristocratic factions organized on a basis of family relationships and an elaborate clientage system. The only way to neutralize these dangerous feuds was, as he appreciated, to give them an outlet at Court, providing in one of the Councils a forum in which the partisans could express their rival views.