Imperial Spain 1469-1716

by John H. Elliott

  On the whole, the wealth of the aristocracy seems to have been spent more on the patronage of literature and painting than on architecture. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there had been much building of palaces, but in the seventeenth century the Church rather than the aristocracy was responsible for the most impressive edifices – innumerable churches and convents, in which the austerities of Herrera gradually yielded to a more ornate and theatrical style, culminating in the often frenzied convolutions of Churrigueresque baroque.

  If the decline in aristocratic building is to some extent an indication of a decline in aristocratic wealth – at least in relation to that of the Church – the grandees still retained enough money to indulge in keen competition for the patronage of authors and artists. This was particularly true in Andalusia, where there was acute rivalry among the three great houses of Guzmán, Afán de Ribera, and Girón, for the patronage and friendship of the most distinguished talents. Moreover, the patronage was often well informed. Don Fernando Afán de Ribera, Duke of Alcalá (1584–1637) was an amateur painter, a great book collector, and a distinguished Latin scholar, who devoted his spare time to the investigation of Castilian antiquities; the Count of Olivares, after leaving Salamanca University, spent several years at Seville in the company of poets and authors, and tried his own hand at writing verse. When he became the Favourite of Philip IV – himself a great connoisseur, and a patron of art and letters – he made the Court a brilliant literary and artistic centre, famous for the theatrical presentations and literary fiestas in which such names as Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca figured prominently among the participants.

  The climate was therefore propitious for literary and artistic production, although, as Cervantes was to discover by bitter experience, even genius did not guarantee a regular income. At the same time, the moral and emotional involvement of the intellectuals in the tragic fate of their native land seems to have provided an additional stimulus, giving an extra degree of intensity to their imagina-tion, and diverting it into rewardingly creative channels. This was especially true of Cervantes, whose life – from 1547 to 1616 – spans the two ages of imperial triumph and imperial retreat. The crisis of the late sixteenth century cuts through the life of Cervantes as it cuts through the life of Spain, separating the days of heroism from the days of desengaño. Somehow Cervantes magically held the balance between optimism and pessimism, enthusiasm and irony, but he illustrates what was to be the most striking characteristic of seventeenth-century literature and artistic production – that deep cleavage between the two worlds of the spirit and the flesh, which co-exist and yet are for ever separate. This constant dualism between the spirit and the flesh, the dream and the reality, belonged very much to seventeenth-century European civilization as a whole, but it seems to have attained an intensity in Spain that it rarely achieved elsewhere. It is apparent in the writings of Calderón and the portraits of Velázquez, and it prompted the bitter satires of Quevedo. ‘There are many things here that seem to exist and have their being, and yet they are nothing more than a name and an appearance,’ Quevedo wrote at the end of his life.13 Yet which was the real and which the illusory in González de Cellorigo's ‘society of the bewitched, living outside the natural order of things’? Was the reality of Spanish experience to be found in the heroic imperialism of a Charles V or in the humiliating pacifism of Philip III? In the world of Don Quixote, or the world of Sancho Panza? Confused at once by its own past and its own present, the Castile of Philip III – the land of arbitristas – sought desperately for an answer.

  Revival and Disaster

  1. THE REFORM PROGRAMME

  DURING the second decade of the seventeenth century it became increasingly obvious that the Government of the Duke of Lerma was living on borrowed time. Both at home and abroad the situation was deteriorating alarmingly. It was true that the murder of Henry IV in 1610 had opportunely removed any immediate danger of war with France, and that the double marriage treaty of 1612 between Louis XIII and the Infanta Ana on the one hand, and between Prince Philip and Elizabeth of Bourbon on the other, held out hopes of a new and happier chapter in the history of Franco-Spanish relations. But the pax hispanica never extended into the world overseas. The Dutch had used the years of peace since 1609 to consolidate and extend their gains in the Far East at the expense of the Portuguese empire. As the depredations of the Dutch continued, one minister after another came round to the view expressed in 1616 by Don Fernando de Carrillo, the President of the Council of Finance, that ‘it has been worse than if the war had gone on’. The problem of the Dutch, unsolved and perhaps insoluble, was to dog the Spain of Philip III and IV as it had dogged that of Philip II, as if to confirm that the Spanish Monarchy would never shake itself free of the damnosa hereditas of the Netherlands.

  At home, both the condition of Castile and the state of the royal finances gave rise to increasing concern. In spite of the return of peace, the Crown was still managing to spend some 8,000,000 or even 9,000,000 ducats a year – a figure quite without precedent, complained Carrillo (not entirely accurately) in 1615. If Philip II had managed to spend even more in the heyday of the 1590s, he had at least been able to draw on substantial revenues from the Indies. But in 1615 and again in 1616 the treasure fleet, which could be relied upon in the early years of the reign to bring the Crown 2,000,000 ducats a year, brought scarcely 1,000,000 ducats, and in the closing years of the decade the figure dropped to well below 1,000,000.

  The gradual drying-up of the stream of silver from America – which is to be explained by the increasing cost of working the mines, by the growing self-sufficiency of the colonists, by heavier expenditure by the viceregal government in the New World, and perhaps by a fall in world silver prices – made it increasingly urgent to tackle the problem of financial and economic reform. To the voices of arbitristas and of procuradores of the Castilian Cortes were now added those of the Crown's financial ministers, urging Lerma to take action. In the early summer of 1618 he at last bowed before the storm. A special Junta, known as the Junta de Reformación, was created, and the Council of Castile was ordered to produce a report outlining possible remedies for Castile's present ills. But the Duke himself, who had sensibly taken out an insurance policy in the form of a cardinal's hat, was not to benefit from his belated piece of initiative. On 4 October 1618 he fell from power as the result of a palace revolution engineered by his own son, the Duke of Uceda, and his disgrace was followed by the arrest, in February 1619, of his henchman Don Rodrigo Calderón, who was later brought to trial on an imposing array of charges.

  The Council of Castile duly produced its consulta on 1 February 1619. This was not, in fact, as impressive a document as it is sometimes made out to be, and its seven curiously assorted recommendations marked no advance on what the arbitristas had been saying for years. The misery and depopulation of Castile were ascribed to ‘excessive taxes and tributes’, and the Council proposed a reduction of taxes and reform of the fiscal system, which would partly be achieved by calling on the other kingdoms of the Monarchy to come to Castile's assistance. The Council also suggested that the King should curb his naturally generous instincts in the bestowal of mercedes. The Court should be cleared. New sumptuary decrees should be enforced, to curtail the fashion for expensive foreign luxuries. Deserted regions should be repopulated, and agricultural labourers be encouraged by the grant of special privileges. No more licences should be given for the establishment of new religious foundations. Moreover, the number of existing convents and grammar schools should be reduced and the hundred receiverships set up in 1613 be abolished.

  Although these recommendations were curiously vague on exactly those points where it was most necessary to be specific, they were none the less important as representing the first real recognition by Philip III's Government of the gravity of Castile's economic problems. But the regime of the Duke of Uceda was no better equipped to transform policy into action than that of his father, and for two precious years the
Council of Castile's proposals were quietly ignored. The days of the regime, however, were numbered. In the summer of 1619 Philip III made a State visit to Portugal, where the Cortes were assembled to take the oath of allegiance to his son. On the return journey he was taken ill, and although his condition improved shortly afterwards – thanks, it was said, to the intercession of St Isidore, whose remains were placed in his room – it soon became clear that he could not expect to live much longer. Full of contrition for a life which was as blameless as it had been unprofitable, he died at the age of forty-three on 31 March 1621, to be succeeded by his sixteen-year-old son, heir to a wasted estate.

  Philip IV differed from his father in being quick-witted, intelligent, and cultivated, but resembled him in his absence of character. Quite without the animation of his younger brother Ferdinand (who, with singular inappropriateness, had been created Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo in 1619 at the grave age often), he was inclined by temperament to depend on others who might stiffen his resolution and assist him in the formidable task of making up his mind. Born to rely on Favourites, he had already adopted – or, more accurately, been adopted by – his first and most influential Favourite before he came to the throne. This was a gentleman of his household, Gaspar de Guzmán, Count of Olivares. The Count was an Andalusian aristocrat, born in 1587 at Rome, where his father was Spanish ambassador. He was educated at the University of Salamanca and was intended for a career in the Church, but the sudden death of his elder brother made him heir to the family title and estates. Ambitious for office and advancement, he had to wait until 1615 before Lerma, naturally distrustful of so strong a personality, gave him office as a gentleman of the chamber to the young Prince Philip. Once in the royal household, Olivares worked hard, and eventually with success, to win the favour of the Prince. In the squalid intrigues of the last years of the reign he threw in his lot with the Duke of Uceda, and successfully manoeuvred for the recall to Madrid of his uncle, Don Baltasar de Zúñiga, who had been acting as ambassador at the Court of the Emperor. Being a man of ability and influence, Zúñiga would be more useful to his nephew at the Court of the King of Spain.

  As Philip III lay on his death-bed, Zúñiga and Olivares moved fast to wrest control of the Government from the inept hands of the Duke of Uceda, and the favour of the new King carried them triumphantly to success. Until his death in October 1622 Zúñiga was nominally the first minister of Philip IV. But Zúñiga's ministry was in reality no more than a screen behind which Olivares groomed himself for the position of Privado that he held for twenty-two years, until his fall from power in 1643. A restless figure, never fully at ease either with others or with himself, Olivares was less one personality than a whole succession of personalities, co-existing, competing and conflicting within a single frame. By turns ebullient and dejected, humble and arrogant, shrewd and gullible, impetuous and cautious, he dazzled contemporaries with the versatility of his performance and bewildered them with his chameleon changes of mood. Somehow he always seemed larger than lifesize, bestriding the Court like a colossus, with state papers stuck in his hat and bulging in his pockets, always in a flurry of activity, surrounded by scurrying secretaries, ordering, hectoring, cajoling, his voice booming down the corridors of the palace. No man worked harder, or slept less. With the coming of Olivares, the indolent, easy-going days of the Duke of Lerma were gone for ever, and the stage was set for reform.

  Olivares was, by nature and conviction, the heir of the arbitristas, determined to undertake with ruthless efficiency the reforms that had been so long delayed. But he was also the heir to another tradition which had found powerful advocates in the Spain of Philip III – the great imperial tradition, which believed firmly in the rightness, and indeed the inevitability of Spanish, and specifically Castilian, hegemony over the world. Under the government of Lerma this tradition had been muted in the capital of the Monarchy, where the eclipse of the crusading tradition had been curiously symbolized by the displacement in 1617 of St James from his position as sole patron of Spain. In future the warrior saint was to have a feminine partner in the person of a highly idealized St Teresa. But just as St James still had his fervent partisans, so also did the militant tradition of which he was the symbol. The supine policies of the Lerma régime were regarded with anger and contempt by many of its agents, who refused to reconcile themselves to the humiliating pacifism of Philip III's Government. Profiting from the weakness of the régime they despised, these agents – the great Italian proconsuls, like the Count of Fuentes, the Marquis of Bedmar, the Marquis of Villafranca, and the Duke of Osuna (viceroy of Sicily from 1611–16 and of Naples from 1616–20) – conducted over the years a militant and aggressive policy entirely at variance with that of Madrid. Although Osuna was re-called in disgrace in 1620 and later imprisoned on the orders of Zúñiga and Olivares, both ministers, in fact, shared many of his aims and aspirations. They believed, like him, that Spain could remain true to itself only if it remained true to its imperial tradition, and they despised the defeatist policies which had, in their opinion, brought it to its present miserable state.

  Olivares therefore combined in himself the quixotic imperialism that belonged to the golden age of Charles V and Philip II, and the practical, down-to-earth approach of the arbitristas, for whom windmills remained windmills, whatever was said to the contrary. Throughout his career, the ideal and the practical, the crusading tradition and the reforming tradition, existed uncomfortably side by side, and it was oddly appropriate that the very first month of his ministry, when everything was set for reform, should also see the return of Spain to war. In April 1621 the truce with the Netherlands expired, and was not renewed. Apart from the fact that the triumph of the bellicose Orangist party in the United Provinces in any event made the renewal of the war virtually certain, there were powerful arguments in Madrid as well as in the Hague for allowing the truce to lapse. The Council of Portugal insisted on the irreparable harm done to Portugal's overseas possessions by the Dutch during the years of ‘peace’; the Council of Finance tried to show that the cost of maintaining a standing army in Flanders in peacetime was not substantially less than in war. It was also argued that if the Dutch were once again engaged at home, they would be able to devote less energy to their pirate ventures, and a world-wide struggle could thus be localized. In addition, certain measures had already been taken which suggested that on this occasion there was a real chance of success against the Dutch. The revolt of the Valtelline in 1618 had provided a pretext for the Duke of Feria, Governor of Milan, to establish Spanish garrisons in this strategic valley linking Milan and Austria; and the revolt of Bohemia in the same year allowed Spain's best commander, Ambrosio Spínola, to occupy the Palatinate and secure control of the Rhine passages. These two actions, undertaken in the last year of the Uceda régime, had enabled Spain to consolidate its hold over the vital ‘Spanish road’, up which men and supplies could be sent from Milan to Flanders.

  The success of the Spanish commanders helped to strengthen the hand of those who wanted a return to belligerent policies, and created a climate in which the renewal of war came almost to be taken for granted. So it was that in the very first month of its existence the new Government found itself committed to the continuation of war in the Netherlands and to the probability of its extension in central Europe. This immediately pushed up the figures for the anticipated expenditure of 1621. For years the Duke of Osuna had been insisting that the preservation of an empire as large and scattered as that of Spain depended on the possession of a first-class fleet. Under the Government of Philip III the Spanish fleet had been scandalously neglected, and ships had been allowed to rot in the dockyards for lack of money. But Olivares seems to have appreciated that a vigorous naval policy was essential for the success of Spanish arms, and by an order of November 1621 the Atlantic fleet was to be increased to a total of forty-six ships, and the sum allocated to its upkeep raised from 1,000,000 ducats a year.

  By another royal order of the same month, th
e expenditure on the Flanders army was raised from 1,500,000 to 3,500,000 ducats a year. The Crown's anticipated annual expenditure was now over 8,000,000 ducats – and its annual deficit in the region of 4,000,000, with revenues being mortgaged for three or four years ahead. Since, as Olivares insisted in a memorandum he wrote at this moment for his royal master, ‘kings cannot achieve heroic actions without money’, the return to war itself gave extra urgency to the programme for reform. This was now begun with considerable vigour. As an earnest of the new ministry's intentions, the long list of royal favours and pensions was slashed, an inquiry was ordered into all ministerial fortunes acquired since 1603, and the hated Rodrigo Calderón was publicly executed. At the same time, new life was breathed into the moribund Junta de Reformación, and the fruits of its labours appeared in February 1623 in the publication of a series of twenty-three articles of reform. These were a mixed series of ordinances, which draw their inspiration from the writings of the arbitristas and from the Council of Castile's consulta of 1619, and were infused by a conviction that morals and economics were inextricably intertwined. There was to be a two-thirds reduction in the number of municipal offices; strict sumptuary laws were to be introduced to regulate the prevalent excesses of dress; measures were to be taken to increase the population; prohibitions were to be imposed on the import of foreign manufactures; and brothels were to be closed. Here at last was that general reform of morals and manners which, it was assumed, would bring about the regeneration of Castile.

  Unhappily for Olivares's good intentions, the unexpected visit of the Prince of Wales to Madrid the very next month threw austerity to the winds; the origins of ministerial fortunes proved to be so mysterious that the inquiry had to be abandoned; and the plan for the reduction of municipal offices had to be jettisoned on the insistence of the procuradores of the Cortes, who found their municipalities threatened with heavy financial loss. Within three years there was nothing to show for the great reform programme except the modest achievement of the abolition of the ruff. In the face of public inertia, and the covert opposition of Court and bureaucracy, even the reforming energies of an Olivares were doomed to frustration.