Imperial Spain 1469-1716

by John H. Elliott

  For some years it had been obvious to the Conde Duque that the existing administrative system was inadequate for this purpose. The cumbersome machinery of the Councils merely obstructed his designs, and gave excessive powers to men who had no sympathy for his reforming policies. Over the years he had gradually been building up a nucleus of ‘new’ men in whom he could place absolute confidence - men like José González, his secretary, and Jerónimo de Villanueva, the Protonotario of the Council of Aragon. He made some progress in undermining the Councils by appointing his own chosen agents to them, but it became increasingly apparent that the whole conciliar system was so heavily committed to the maintainence of the status quo that he could never get from the Councils the swift and effective decisions he so badly needed for the promotion of his policies. He therefore turned more and more to the use of special Juntas, which rapidly proliferated under his Government, and took over from the Councils much of their most important work. This was especially true of the so-called Junta de Ejecución, which was set up in 1634 and replaced the Council of State as the effective policy-making body in the Spanish administrative system. Dominated by Olivares himself, and filled with his own friends and servants, the Junta de Ejecución was ideally placed to carry through the Conde Duque's designs for a more intensive exploitation of the resources of the Monarchy.

  The new men of the Olivares régime displayed both zeal and ingenuity in their efforts to find new sources of revenue. Since administrative difficulties and the opposition of the Cortes prevented any radical reorganization of the tax system in Castile, it was necessary to devise supplementary means of raising money. The year 1631 saw the introduction of a tax on the first year's income from offices known as the media anata, and also of a salt tax, which provoked a rising in Vizcaya. In 1632 the Conde Duque obtained the Pope's consent to a special grant from the clergy, and appropriated a year's income from the Archbishopric of Toledo. He also ordered the collection of a voluntary donativo to help save Flanders and Italy, nobles being expected to give 1,500 ducats and caballeros 150. In 1635 he confiscated half the yield of all juros held by natives, and the entire yield of those belonging to foreigners – a device he continued to employ in succeeding years. In 1637 he imposed a new tax in the form of stamped paper, which became obligatory for all legal and official documents. In the same year he seized 487,000 ducats in American silver, and gave the owners ‘compensation’ in the form of unwanted juros; and two years later, ignoring the repercussions on Seville's trade, he appropriated a further 1,000,000 ducats by the same device. He sold Crown rents, titles, and offices, and revived the old feudal obligations of the aristocracy, who found themselves expected to raise and equip infantry companies at their own expense. In consequence, although the nominal distinction between hidalgos and pecheros remained as strong as ever, the practical distinction tended to disappear, as the aristocracy found itself mulcted of its money by a succession of fiscal expedients from which it could find no way of escape.

  In spite of the success of the Conde Duque's efforts to squeeze more money from Castile, he was as well aware as anyone that there was bound to come a moment when Castile would be squeezed dry. This meant that the Union of Arms must be made effective, and in particular that Catalonia and Portugal, which were allegedly the two wealthiest States in the peninsula, must be induced to play a part commensurate with their presumed resources. Both of these States seemed to Olivares dangerously ‘separated’ from the rest of the Monarchy. The Portuguese had stood aloof while Castile prepared relief expeditions in 1634 and 1635 for the recovery of Portugal's own possessions in Brazil, which had been lost to the Dutch since 1630. The Catalans had shown themselves even more uncooperative, for they had again refused to vote a subsidy when the King and Olivares returned to Barcelona in 1632 to continue the interrupted session of the Cortes. Obstructions placed by the city of Barcelona had brought the Cortes to a standstill, for reasons that seemed to Olivares unbearably trivial. It was now thirty-three years since the Catalans had voted their last subsidy to the King, and since then the Principality had been nothing but a source of concern and annoyance to the Spanish Crown. If, as the Conde Duque believed, Catalonia was a rich province with a population of over a million (nearly three times the real figure), then it was high time that it should come to the assistance of Castile and to the rescue of the royal treasury.

  Although the Conde Duque squeezed a certain amount of money out of the cities of Lisbon and Barcelona by bullying and blackmail, his real need was for regular financial and military assistance from Catalonia and Portugal. It was difficult to achieve this without reorganizing their Governments, but administrative reform was practically impossible in Catalonia because the constitutions forbade the appointment of Castilians to any offices other than the vice-royalty. There were similar difficulties in Portugal, but slightly more scope for manoeuvre. Under Philip III Portugal had been governed by viceroys, but the system had proved unsatisfactory, and in 1621 the viceroyalty had been replaced by an administration of governors. This, however, had led to constant dissension in Lisbon. In 1634 Olivares found, as he believed, the answer to these difficulties by appointing a member of the royal family, Princess Margaret of Savoy, as Governess of Portugal. The Princess's appointment had the merit of meeting Portuguese complaints about royal neglect, and also made it possible to infiltrate a number of Castilians into the Portuguese administration under the guise of advisers.

  The scheme was not a success. The Government in Lisbon turned itself into two rival camps of Castilians and Portuguese, whose constant bickering made effective administration impossible. Moreover, the Lisbon Government's fiscal policies soon ran into trouble. The Princess had been sent to Lisbon with instructions to obtain from the Portuguese a fixed annual levy of 500,000 cruzados, to be obtained by the consolidation of existing taxes and the introduction of certain new ones. Although these taxes were to be used to equip expeditions for the recovery of Portugal's overseas territories, this did nothing to reconcile a populace which had always hated the union with Castile; and in 1637 riots broke out in Évora and other towns. Fortunately for the Conde Duque, the riots failed to flare up into nation-wide revolution, in spite of Richelieu's promises of help to the Portuguese. Although the lower clergy enthusiastically supported the rioters, the aristocrácy, with the Duke of Braganza at its head, held aloof, and the risings petered out. But the Évora riots were an ominous indication that Portugal might one day attempt to break loose from the Castilian connexion. The upper classes might for the present remain loyal to Madrid, but their loyalty was being subjected to a growing strain. The aristocracy felt itself deprived o offices and honours, and neglected by the King. The commercial classes in Lisbon and the coastal towns were beginning to find that the Union of the Crowns had outlasted its economic value. They had found compensation for the loss of their Far Eastern empire under Philip III by building up for themselves a new sugar empire in Brazil, and by exploiting the resources of Castile's American territories. But in recent years there had been increasing discrimination against Portuguese merchants in the Spanish colonies, and the military and naval power of the King of Spain had proved insufficient to save Brazil from the Dutch. The bonds that tied Portugal to Spain were therefore being dangerously weakened at the very moment when Olivares was bringing Portugal under increasing pressure in order to make it an effective partner in the Union of Arms.

  It was, however, in Catalonia, rather than in Portugal, that Olivares first came to grief. The outbreak of war with France in May 1635 greatly enhanced the strategic importance of the Principality of Catalonia, since it guarded the eastern half of Spain's border with the enemy. This made it all the more unfortunate that relations between the Catalans and Madrid were so bad, and that Olivares had failed to obtain a subsidy from the Catalans before the war broke out. He was now in the delicate position of having to fight the war from a disaffected frontier province of whose, loyalty he could no longer be entirely sure. At the same time, needed the assistance
of the Catalans to supplement the diminished manpower of Castile, and to contribute to the royal revenues. This was all the more necessary now that the war with France had again increased the Crown's expenditure. For the financial year October 1636 to October 1637, for instance, the Council of Finance had attempted to arrange the following provisions:

  Escudos

  For Flanders

  4,384,000

  For Germany

  1,500,000

  For Milan

  2,500,000

  To be provided in Spain

  2,000,000

  For the fleet

  500,000

  For the royal households (in the event of a military expedition by the King)

  64,000

  For ambassadors

  150,000

  In addition to this, a further 2,000,000 escudos were required for the royal households, the ordinary expenses of the fleet, and the frontier garrisons.

  These figures provide some indication of why it seemed impossible to Olivares to leave the Catalans alone: unable to raise more than half this sum from his ordinary and extraordinary revenues, he could afford to neglect no opportunity for attempting to extract a few more hundred thousand ducats wherever there seemed the remotest chance of success. Since all direct approaches to the Catalans had proved abortive, he began to toy with ideas of obtaining their assistance by more covert means. In 1637, when French troops crossed the Catalan frontier, the Catalans themselves had been slow in sending help; in 1638, when the town of Fuenterrabia in Guipúzcoa was besieged by the French, Catalonia alone of the States of the Crown of Aragon had refused all military aid. Determined to make the Catalans concern themselves, ‘as up to now they have apparently not been concerned, with the general affairs of the Monarchy and of these kingdoms’, he decided in 1639 that the projected Spanish attack on France should be undertaken from the Catalan border, so that the Catalans would find themselves involved in the war whether they liked it or not.

  In the event, it was the French army which entered Catalonia in the early summer of 1639, capturing the frontier fortress of Salses on 19 July. The fall of Salses gave the Conde Duque a useful pretext for pushing the Catalans a little further into the Union of Arms. The Count of Santa Coloma, the native viceroy of Catalonia, was ordered by Madrid to mobilize the Principality for war, so that it could assist the royal army in Rosellón (Roussillon) to recover the captured fortress. During the autumn of 1639 the viceroy and the local ministers did their best to induce the adult male population of Catalonia to turn out for the war, and relentlessly harried the country into sending supplies to the front. For six long months the siege went on, amidst such foul conditions that many troops, both Catalan and non-Catalan, deserted the ranks. Furious at the desertions, Olivares ordered the royal ministers in the Principality to ignore the constitutions of Catalonia whenever the well-being of the army was at stake, on the grounds that the supreme law of defence outweighed all lesser laws. The unconstitutional proceedings of the ministers confirmed Catalan suspicions about the Conde Duque's ultimate intentions, and made the Principality more and more reluctant to co-operate in the Salses campaign. Hatred of Madrid, of the viceroy, and of the viceregal administration mounted throughout Catalonia during the autumn and early winter of 1639, as royal orders became harsher and the country was constantly pressed to provide more men and more supplies for the Salses army. As a result, when the French finally surrendered the fortress on 6 January 1640, the Principality was in a dangerously explosive mood. The aristocracy, who had suffered heavy casualties during the campaign, hated and despised the Count of Santa Coloma for putting the orders of Madrid before the interests of his colleagues and compatriots. Barcelona and the towns had been finally alienated from a Government which had done nothing but attempt to extract money from them over a period of twenty years. The peasantry had suffered severely from the confiscation of their animals and crops. Increasingly, the Principality was listening to the appeals of the clergy to hold fast to its historic liberties, and was finding a responsive leadership in the Catalan Diputació headed by a vigorous cleric, Pau Claris, canon of the cathedral chapter of Urgel. By the beginning of 1640, therefore, Olivares, who had won a campaign, was on the point of losing a province – a danger of which he apparently remained unaware. For all his actions at the beginning of 1640 suggest that he believed himself to be close at last to the achievement of one of his most cherished ambitions: the establishment of the Union of Arms.

  3. 1640

  By 1640 the Conde Duque had come to see the Union of Arms as the best, and perhaps the only, hope for the Monarchy's survival. After early successes in the war with France, of which the most spectacular was the Cardenal Infante's invasion of France from Flanders in 1636, Spain had suffered a number of serious reverses. In 1637 the Dutch recaptured Breda, whose surrender to Spinola in 1625 had been immortalized by Velázquez. In December 1638 Bernard of Weimar took Breisach – a far more serious loss, since it meant that the Spanish road from Milan to Brussels was cut, and that the Spanish armies in the Netherlands could only be reinforced by sea through the English Channel. Then, in October 1639, Admiral Tromp defeated the fleet of Don Antonio de Oquendo at the Battle of the Downs, destroying at a single blow both the navy on which Olivares had expended so much effort, and the chances of sending relief to the Cardenal Infante in the Netherlands. On top of this came the failure of the combined Spanish-Portuguese armada which set out from Lisbon in September 163 8 to attempt the reconquest of Brazil. After spending a fruitless year off Bahia, it was brought to battle by a considerably smaller Dutch fleet on 12 January 1640. At the end of four days of inconclusive fighting, its Portuguese commander, the Count of La Torre, abandoned his attempt to attack Pernambuco, and allowed the armada to disperse to the West Indies, leaving the control of the Brazilian seas in the hands of the Dutch.

  These reverses filled the Conde Duque with gloom. For years he had been struggling to scrape together men, and money, and ships, and all his efforts seemed doomed to disappointment. He placed much of the blame for these defeats on the inadequacies of the Spanish commanders. Almost from the beginning of his ministry he had been complaining of what he called the falta de cabezas – the lack of leaders. It was because of his belief that the Spanish nobility was failing in its duties of leadership that he had sponsored the founding in 1625 of the Colegio Imperial at Madrid, an academy for the sons of nobles run by the Jesuits and designed to provide, in addition to a liberal education, practical instruction in mathematics, the sciences, and the art of war. But the Colegio Imperial failed in its principal aim. No new generation of military commanders appeared to take the place of Spinola and the Duke of Feria, and the higher Castilian aristocracy proved a constant disappointment to the Conde Duque. By 1640 he no longer bothered to conceal his contempt for the grandees, and they in response turned their backs on a Court where nothing awaited them but gibes from the Favourite and endless appeals to their pockets.

  The absence of leaders was one of the principal reasons for Olivares's increasing anxiety to obtain a peace settlement. It was particularly with this in mind that he wrote in March 1640 in a memorandum for the King: ‘God wants us to make peace, for He is depriving us visibly and absolutely of all the means of war.’ But peace was not easy to obtain. As early as 1629 he had made moves for a truce with the Dutch, and by 1635 he was offering to close the Scheldt and hand over Breda, as long as the Dutch would give back Pernambuco. But the Dutch were adamant in their refusal to surrender their conquests in Brazil, and Olivares in turn could not afford to give up Brazilian territory for fear of the repercussions in Portugal. He had also begun secret negotiations with France almost as soon as the war broke out, but as long as Spain was winning victories he pitched his demands too high, while as soon as Spain began to suffer defeats and he moderated his demands, Richelieu lost interest in the immediate conclusion of a settlement.

  Yet if peace was unattainable, it was becoming increasingly difficult to prosecute the war. C
astile was by now so denuded of men that the levies were pitiful affairs, and it was becoming quite impossible to keep the armies up to strength. Moreover, the economic position was by now exceptionally grave, for Spain's last real source of economic strength – the trading system between Seville and America – was failing. Olivares's repeated confiscations of silver remittances and his constant interference with the American trade had produced the inevitable result. The merchants had lost confidence; Sevillian shipping was in decay; and although the silver supplies were still coming regularly to the Crown – at least until 1640 when no silver fleet arrived – the whole system of credit and confidence by which Seville had for so long shored up the Spanish Monarchy was gradually crumbling. With Castile exhausted and America failing, the principal foundations of Spanish imperialism over the past hundred years were slowly giving way.

  The gravity of the situation inspired Olivares with the boldness of despair. There was still, he believed, hope – not of out-and-out victory, but of a stalemate which would induce a no less exhausted France to come to terms. But this required an unrelenting pressure on the French, such as would only be possible if every part of the Monarchy – Catalonia and Portugal, Flanders, and Peru – joined forces in a supreme co-operative endeavour. The Catalans, for instance, must contribute troops for use in Italy, and they must prepare themselves for a fresh campaign along the French frontier. If the constitutions stood in the way of this, then the constitutions must be changed, and surely there could be no more favourable moment than the present, when a royal army was actually stationed in the Principality. The Conde Duque therefore arranged that the army which had been fighting the Salses campaign should be billeted in Catalonia until the next campaigning season; and under the shadow of the army he planned to hold a new session of the Catalan Cortes, which was to be used solely for the amendment of the more obnoxious constitutions.