Imperial Spain 1469-1716

by John H. Elliott

  The proposed Catalan Cortes of 1640 never met. The Catalan towns and peasantry were hardly in the mood to support the burden of billeting a foreign army, while the troops were in no frame of mind to put up with the second best. During February and March of 1640 troops and civilians clashed in many parts of the Principality, and the Count of Santa Coloma proved quite unequal to the task of keeping order. The Conde Duque responded to the situation as he had responded in the autumn of the previous year – by harsh threats and increasingly imperious orders to the viceroy to see that one of Spain's last remaining veteran armies was properly billeted at whatever cost to the native population. At the beginning of March, on hearing that the clashes over billeting were continuing, he ordered Santa Coloma to arrest one of the Diputats, Francesc de Tamarit, and to have a secret inquiry made into the activities of Claris. But the arrest of Tamarit only made a serious situation worse. The peasantry were banding together against the tercios, and the towns and villages of northern Catalonia were in a highly inflammatory mood. At the end of April a royal official was burnt to death at Santa Coloma de Farnés, and the tercios were ordered to billet in the town and the surrounding countryside to punish the population for their crime. On reaching Santa Coloma de Farnés they could not be prevented from sacking it and setting it on fire. Their action roused the entire countryside to arms. Encouraged by the Bishop of Gerona's excommunication of the troops, a growing peasant army bore down on the tercios, which succeeded in making a skilful retreat towards the safety of the coast with the rebel forces following close on their heels. Finding themselves balked of their prey, the rebels then moved southwards, and on 22 May a group of them made an entry into Barcelona itself, headed straight for the prison, and released the arrested Diputat.

  It was only when the news of the release of Tamarit reached the Conde Duque that he began to realize that he was faced with open rebellion. Until now he had tended to let himself be guided in his handling of the Principality's affairs by the Protonotario, Jerónimo de Villanueva, a character as antipathetic to the Catalans as they were to him. The Protonotario had encouraged him to believe that his Catalan policies were on the verge of success and that the Principality would shortly become a useful member of the Spanish Monarchy; but now he was suddenly confronted with evidence that the policies were leading to disaster. To some ministers it seemed that the rebels' entry into Barcelona provided Madrid with the necessary pretext for using the army to punish the Principality and to strip it of its obnoxious laws and liberties, but the Conde Duque realized that it was essential to set the problem of Catalonia into the wider context of the affairs of the Monarchy as a whole. He had to think of the repercussions in Aragon, Valencia, and Portugal of a frontal assault on Catalan liberties, and he had to bear in mind the gravity of the military situation in Germany and Italy, the exhaustion of Spain's armies, and the danger at such a time of holding down a province of the Monarchy by force of arms. Realizing that there could at this stage be no simple and clear-cut solution to the intractable problem of the Catalans, he reversed his policies of the preceding months, and ordered on 27 May that steps should immediately be taken to conciliate and pacify the Catalans before the situation got entirely out of hand.

  The Conde Duque's change of policy came too late. The rebellion in Catalonia was rapidly acquiring a momentum of its own, inspired by hatred not only of the troops and the royal officials, but also of the rich and of all those in authority. The rebel bands moved from town to town, stirring up the countryside in their wake. Seeing that his authority was gone and that law and order were everywhere collapsing, the unfortunate Count of Santa Coloma begged the town councillors of Barcelona to close the city gates against the casual labourers who always flocked into the city at the beginning of June to hire themselves out for harvesting. But the councillors were either unable or unwilling to agree; the harvesters made their usual entry; and on Corpus day, 7 June 1640, they inevitably became involved in a brawl. The brawl soon acquired the dimensions of a riot, and within a few hours the mob was hounding down the royal ministers and sacking their houses. The viceroy himself had moved to the dockyards for safety, but a group of rioters forced its way in, and Santa Coloma was caught and struck down as he attempted to escape from his pursuers along the rocky beach.

  The murder of Santa Coloma left such authority as remained in Catalonia in the hands of the Diputació and of the city councillors and aristocracy of Barcelona. Although they managed to shepherd the rebels out of Barcelona itself, it was impossible to maintain control over a movement which was spreading through the Principality, wreaking vengeance on all those of whom the rebels disapproved. Stunned as he was by the viceroy's murder, Olivares still seems to have hoped that the rebellion could be checked without recourse to arms, but the new viceroy, the Catalan Duke of Cardona, died on 22 July without being able to halt the drift to anarchy. Almost at the same moment the rebels gained control of the vital port of Tortosa. The loss of Tortosa made it finally clear that troops would have to be sent into Catalonia, in spite of the obvious risk of war in a province bordering on France; and Olivares pressed ahead with the formation of an army for use against the rebels.

  The Conde Duque believed that the Catalans were still too loyal to call on the French for help, but he underestimated the determination and vigour of Claris, and the hatred of his Government and of Castile which his policies had inspired in every class of Catalan society. Some time before, Claris had already made tentative overtures to the French, and Richelieu, who had shown himself well aware of the possibilities of causing trouble both in Catalonia and Portugal, declared himself ready to offer help. During the autumn of 1640 Claris and Olivares stood face to face, Claris hoping to avoid the necessity of committing the Principality to an open break with Madrid, and Olivares equally hoping to avoid the necessity of using an army against the Catalans. ‘In the midst of all our troubles,’ wrote the Conde Duque to the Cardenal Infante in October, ‘the Catalan is the worst we have ever had, and my heart admits of no consolation that we are entering an action in which, if our army kills, it kills a vassal of His Majesty, and if they kill, they kill a vassal and a soldier…. Without reason or occasion they have thrown themselves into as complete a rebellion as Holland….’

  But worse was to come. The revolt of the Catalans was bound to have its repercussions in Portugal, where there was a growing determination to cut the country's links with Castile. Uneasily aware that he could never be sure of Portugal as long as the Duke of Braganza and the higher Portuguese nobility remained at home, Olivares had ingeniously thought to kill two birds with one stone by ordering the Portuguese nobility to turn out with the army that was to be sent into Catalonia. This order meant that, if Portugal was ever to break free from Castile, it must act quickly before Braganza was out of the country. Plans for a revolution were laid in the autumn of 1640, probably with the connivance of Richelieu, who is believed to have sent funds to the conspirators in Lisbon. On 1 December, while the royal army under the command of the Marquis of los Vélez was gingerly advancing into Catalonia, the Portuguese conspirators put their plan into action. The guards at the royal palace in Lisbon were overwhelmed, Miguel de Vasconcellos – Olivares's confidant and principal agent in the government of Portugal – was assassinated, and Princess Margaret was escorted to the frontier. Since there were virtually no Castilian troops in Portugal, there was nothing to prevent the rebels from taking over the country, and proclaiming the Duke of Braganza king as John IV.

  The news of the Portuguese Revolution, which took a week to reach Madrid, forced Ohvares and his colleagues to undertake an urgent reappraisal of their policies. Simultaneous revolts in the east and west of the Spanish peninsula threatened the Monarchy with total disaster. Peace was essential: peace with the Dutch, peace with the Catalans. But although the Conde Duque now offered favourable terms to the Catalans, and the upper classes in Catalonia seemed predisposed to accept them as the army of los Vélez moved closer and closer to Barcelona, the populace
was in no mood for surrender. It rioted in Barcelona on 24 December, hunting down ‘traitors’ with a savagery surpassing that of Corpus; and Claris, faced on one side with the fury of the mob, and on the other with the advancing Castilian army, took the only course open to him. On 16 January 1641 he announced that Catalonia had become an independent republic under French protection. Then on 23 January, finding that the French were not satisfied with this, he withdrew his plans for a republican system of government, and formally declared the allegiance of Catalonia to the King of France, ‘as in the time of Charlemagne, with a contract to observe our constitutions’. The French were now prepared to give the Catalans full military support; the French agent, Duplessis Besançon, hastily organized the defence of Barcelona, and on 26 January a combined French and Catalan force met the army of los Vélez on the hill of Montjuich outside the walls of Barcelona, Los Vélez unaccountably gave the order to retreat, and the last chance of bringing the revolt of the Catalans to a speedy end was lost.

  In September 1640, before the outbreak of the Portuguese revolt, Olivares had written in a long memorandum: ‘This year can undoubtedly be considered the most unfortunate that this Monarchy has ever experienced.’ The defeat of los Vélez at Montjuich set the seal on the disasters of 1640, confirming in the most conclusive manner that there could be no going back on the events of that fatal year. For 1640 had, in fact, marked the dissolution of the economic and political system on which the Monarchy had depended for so long. It had seen the disruption and decline of the Sevillian commercial system which had given the Spanish Crown its silver and its credit; and the disruption also of the political organization of the Spanish peninsula, inherited from the Catholic Kings and transmitted unchanged by Philip II to his descendants. This political disruption was itself the outcome of the crisis of the reign of Philip III – the crisis of the Atlantic economy as the New World shrank back into itself, and the crisis of the Castilian economy, undermined by long years of abuse and by the strain of unending war. In attempting to exploit the resources of the peripheral provinces of the peninsula, Olivares had simply attempted to redress the balance that had been tilting more and more against Castile, but he did it at a moment when the economies of Portugal and Catalonia were themselves being subjected to growing pressure, and when Castile no longer had the strength to impose its will by an assertion of military power. As a result, he had imposed an excessive strain on the fragile constitutional structure of the Spanish Monarchy, and precipitated the very disaster that it was most necessary to avoid.

  From the moment of defeat at Montjuich, Olivares knew that the game was up. He had neither the money nor the men to prosecute effectively the war abroad, while simultaneously attempting to suppress two revolutions at home. But for all his despair, he was not the man to surrender without a struggle, and he made superhuman efforts to gather together fresh armies and to husband the Crown's diminished resources. The unbroken succession of defeats, however, had gravely weakened his position, and had given a new boldness to his many enemies. Throughout Castile he was hated as a tyrant, but the real danger came less from the populace than from the grandees. In the summer of 1641 his agents unearthed a conspiracy by two great Andalusian nobles, the Duke of Medina-Sidonia and the Marquis of Ayamonte, both of them members of his own family of Guzmán. Medina-Sidonia was the brother of the new Queen of Portugal, and it seems that plans were being made not only to remove the Conde Duque and to restore an aristocratic chamber to the Castilian Cortes, but to follow the example of Portugal and turn Andalusia into an independent State.

  In spite of the failure of Medina-Sidonia's conspiracy, the nobles continued to plot. Conditions in Castile were terrible, for in February 1641 the Conde Duque had begun tampering with the coinage, and vellón prices rose to dizzy heights, with the premium on silver in terms of vellón reaching 200 per cent in certain instances before a deflationary decree in September 1642 again brought prices crashing down. Yet for all the misfortunes both at home and abroad, the King was still unwilling to part with his Favourite. In April 1642 he and the Conde Duque left for the front in Aragon, where the army met with no more success than before their arrival. During September French forces completed the conquest of Roussillon by capturing Perpignan, and in October the army commanded by the Conde Duque's cousin and close friend, the Marquis of Leganés, was defeated in its attempts to recapture Lérida. Back in Madrid, the Count of Castrillo, who had been entrusted with the government, was working away to under-mine the Conde Duque's influence, and when the King returned to Court at the end of the year it was clear that the Conde Duque's days were numbered. On 17 January 1643 the King at last took the decision that had been so long awaited: Olivares was given leave to retire to his estates, and on 23 January he left Madrid for exile, never again to return to the capital where he had reigned for twenty-two years. Stunned by his dismissal, he still sought to vindicate his policies, which found an eloquent exposition in a tract entitled the Nicandro, written to his instructions and under his inspiration. But nothing now could set the clock back. Exiled farther away, to his sister's palace at Toro, he died on 22 July 1645 under the shadow of madness. So passed the first and the last ruler of Habsburg Spain who had the breadth of vision to devise plans on a grand scale for the future of a world-wide Monarchy: a statesman whose capacity for conceiving great designs was matched only by his consistent incapacity for carrying them through to a successful conclusion.

  4. DEFEAT AND SURVIVAL

  At the time of Olivares's fall from power the Spanish Monarchy seemed to have no future – only a past. But how much of the past could still be preserved was itself an open question. The death of Richelieu, two months before the disgrace of Olivares, had been followed by the death of Louis XIII early in 1643. These changes in France held out hopes of a general change for the better in the international situation, but it was doubtful whether Spain now had the strength to exploit the new possibilities offered by the advent of a regency government in Paris. The defeat of the Spanish infantry at Rocroi on 19 May 1643 seemed to symbolize the downfall of the military system which had sustained Spanish power for so long. The country now lacked both the armies and the leaders to turn the new international situation to account.

  The years after 1643 saw a careful dismantling of the Conde Duque's system of government. The Juntas were abolished; the Councils recovered their powers; and the Conde Duque's principal lieutenant, Jerónimo de Villanueva, after steadily losing ground at Court, was arrested on suspicion of heresy by officers of the Inquisition in 1644. There was a general desire to forget the nightmare years of the Olivares régime, and Philip IV showed himself responsive to the mood of the moment by announcing that he intended in future to govern by himself without the aid of a Privado. The King did his best: he attended in person the meetings of the Council of State and dispatched business with commendable promptitude and efficiency. But although the spirit was willing the flesh was weak, in spite of the comfort and support which Philip derived in his solitary labours from the correspondence of a remarkable nun, Sor Maria de Ágreda, who gave him at once spiritual consolation and much sensible political advice; and gradually the power slipped from the King's hands into those of a discreet courtier, Don Luis de Haro, the nephew of Olivares.

  It was typical of Haro that he succeeded in making people forget whose nephew he was. All things to all men, modest and friendly, Don Luis shunned the title of Privado while discreetly exercising its functions. A friend to the King where Olivares was his master, he had no difficulty in remaining in power until his death in 1661; and if his retention of power represented the triumph of mediocrity, this hilfrtftt ddf hi

  The immediate task of Don Luis was to steer the Monarchy back to peace, without letting it lose any more of its possessions in the process. During 1644 delegates for a peace conference had been arriving at the Westphalian towns of Münster and Osnabrück, but it was clear that the Spanish delegates were in a painfully weak position. The military situation continued to deteri
orate, and at home Don Luis and his colleagues were struggling hard to avert another bankruptcy, which finally came twenty years after that of Olivares, in October 1647. But Spain's principal delegate at Westphalia, the Count of Peñaranda, was able to play on growing Dutch fears of the rising power of France, and succeeded in frightening the Dutch by revealing a secret offer made by Richelieu's successor, Cardinal Mazarin, to return Catalonia to Spain in exchange for Flanders. He also profited from the fact that the question of Brazil, which had always in the past prevented an understanding with the Dutch, had ceased to be of concern to Spain once Portugal was lost. By 3 January 1648 the general terms of a separate Spanish-Dutch treaty were agreed, and these formed the basis of the Treaty of Münster of 24 October 1648. By the Treaty, Spain recognized at last what had long been a fact – the independence and sovereignty of the United Provinces. After seventy years or more of conflict which, more than any other external event, had sapped the power and resources of Castile, the Government of Spain now bowed to the inevitable and accepted its inability to put an end to the revolt of the Netherlands. But the war with France continued.