Imperial Spain 1469-1716

by John H. Elliott

  The years 1647–8, which saw the completion of a peace settlement with the Dutch, saw also the narrow escape of the Spanish Monarchy from total dissolution. Once Catalonia and Portugal had revolted, there was every chance that the other provinces of the Monarchy would sooner or later make an effort to follow their example. As early as the autumn of 1640 the English ambassador at Madrid had written home that ‘Aragon and Valencia begin to waver’, but in spite of Catalan appeals for help, they were as reluctant to throw in their lot with the Catalans, as the Catalans had been to assist the Valencian Germanías in 1520, or the Aragonese in 1591. It was one of the greatest fortunes of the House of Austria that the States of the Crown of Aragon, while individually difficult and intractable, consistently failed to come to each other's assistance in emergencies, and to present a united front. This failure, which reflects the intense parochialism of Catalans, Aragonese, and Valencians in the years after the Union of the Crowns, was possibly the salvation of the dynasty in the most dangerous decade of the Monarchy's existence the 1640s. Had Aragon and Valencia rallied to the help of the Catalans, the Iberian peninsula of the mid-seventeenth century would have reverted to its condition in the mid-fifteenth, divided between the three power blocs of Portugal, Castile, and the Crown of Aragon.

  The danger in the mid-1640s came not from further movements in the Crown of Aragon, but from the former Aragonese possessions in Italy. In the summer of 1647 Sicily and Naples, exasperated by the constant stream of fiscal demands, revolted against the government of their Spanish viceroys. It seemed at this juncture that everything was lost, and that, with a little encouragement from the French, the Monarchy would in fact disintegrate into its component parts. Cardinal Mazarin, however, failed to exploit his opportunity to the full, and the Sicilian and Neapolitan movements were both suppressed. In August 1648 a plot was discovered which would have made the Duke of Hijar king of an independent Aragon with Mazarin's help, but by this time the chances of success were slight. The Monarchy had held together sufficiently during the crisis of 1647 for Hijar's conspiracy to seem no more than what in reality it was – a foolhardy adventure by a bankrupt grandee.

  The ability of the Spanish Monarchy to weather the storm of the mid-1640s suggests that its structure possessed hidden reserves of strength which revealed themselves only in an emergency. On the whole, this is perhaps too flattering an explanation. By a paradox which would have delighted the heart of González de Cellorigo, such strength as it possessed derived from its weakness. As a result of the dynasty's consistent failure to establish throughout the Monarchy that unity and uniformity which it was Olivares's ambition to introduce, the provinces had retained under the government of the House of Austria a degree of autonomy far greater than the subordination of the viceregal governments to Madrid would suggest. Even if viceroys were expected to translate royal orders into action, they had to rely on provincial aristocracies and local governmental and municipal authorities to make the orders effective. Inevitably this meant that government consisted of a series of compromises, worked out between the provincial governing class, the viceroys, and the Councils in Madrid. As such, it may often have been inefficient and unsatisfactory, but only rarely was it actively oppressive. Viceroys came and viceroys went, but provincial aristocracies endured, yielding a little here, gaining a little there, and generally defending themselves with a considerable degree of success against any vigorous attempts by a viceregal government to extend the boundaries of royal power. Consequently, although Sicilian or Aragonese nobles might perpetually grumble about the extent to which they were neglected by the King, they were not on the whole prepared to translate words into deeds. Government by Madrid might seem intolerable, but the alternative could well be infinitely worse.

  This was confirmed by the experience of Catalonia. The Catalan aristocracy was as discontented as the rest of the nation by 1640, and was duly swept into revolution along with everybody else. But it soon became clear that a revolution which had originally begun as a movement to free Catalonia from the domination of Madrid, possessed social overtones which threatened to subject the aristocracy to the rule of the mob. All the hatreds that had racked Catalonia in the preceding decades – the hatred of the poor for the rich, and of the unemployed rural population for the bourgeois and aristocratic landlord – came to the surface in the summer and autumn of 1640 as the traditional forces of order were weakened or removed. When Claris died shortly after the victory of Montjuich, no one remained with sufficient prestige to restrain the many anarchic elements in Catalan society. Under a French-controlled government, the Principality fell apart, split into warring factions by social antagonisms and family feuds; and one by one the nobles slipped over the border into Aragon, finding that the government of Philip IV was on the whole to be preferred to the government of a clique of politicians taking their orders from the King of France.

  Don Luis de Haro was shrewd enough to turn Catalonia's internal dissensions to account, at a time when the French Government, under the impulse of the Italian-born Mazarin, was directing its attention away from Catalonia to Italy. As the French military effort in Catalonia weakened and the schisms in Catalan society widened, hope revived in Madrid that the Catalans could again be brought back into the fold. Slowly, the feeble armies of Philip IV advanced into the Principality whose powers of resistance were terribly weakened by hunger and then by plague. Mazarin, preoccupied with the Fronde, was unable to send adequate help, and by the beginning of 1651 the French position was everywhere crumbling. In July of that year the army of the Marquis of Mortara based on Lérida joined forces with the Tarragona army commanded by Philip IV's bastard son, Don Juan José de Austria, and the combined armies advanced on Barcelona. They were too weak to undertake a direct assault on the city, but the capital was invested and gradually starved out. Finally, on 13 October 1652, Barcelona surrendered. Three months later, Philip IV conceded a general pardon, and promised to observe all the Principality's laws and liberties as they had existed at the time of his accession to the throne. After twelve years of separation Catalonia was once again a part of Spain.

  The failure of the Catalans to cut permanently loose from Madrid reflects both an original uncertainty in their aims at the start of the revolution, and a continuing failure to create a sense of national unity and purpose that transcended traditional social divisions. Their experience, which was shared by the Sicilians and the Neapolitans, does much to explain the unexpected resilience of the Spanish Monarchy at its moments of greatest peril. As long as the Spanish Crown left provincial liberties intact, and acted as a bulwark of the existing social order, loyalty to the King of Spain among the upper classes of provincial societies was not without its practical advantages. Once Olivares and the Protonotario had disappeared from the scene, and Philip IV had made it abundantly clear that the Principality could keep its old constitutional structure, the Catalan ruling class had little inducement to continue a rebellion which had weakened the barriers against social upheaval, and had exchanged the inefficient tyranny of Castile for the far more authoritarian government of the King of France.

  The one exception to this picture of the meek return of a series of prodigal sons was Portugal. There were various reasons for the persistence and success of the Portuguese in their revolt. They had been united to Castile for only sixty years – too short a period for the population to reconcile itself to a permanent association with its traditional enemies, the Castilians. Moreover, Portugal had in the Duke of Braganza a ready-made king, whereas the Catalans, under the leadership of their Diputació, had a system of government which demanded a high degree of political maturity for effective functioning, and was too republican in character to inspire foreign confidence in an intensely monarchical age. Portugal also had geographical and economic advantages that Catalonia lacked. It was close enough to France to receive French help, while sufficiently far away to avoid falling under French domination. Where Catalonia remained confined to the world of the Mediterranean, Portug
al belonged to the more dynamic world of the Atlantic, and had a vigorous mercantile community with strong business and financial ties with the countries of the north. It also had, in Brazil, the remnants of an empire, which, if it could once be recovered from the Dutch, might provide a firm basis for a new prosperity. Against all expectations, the Dutch failed to retain their hold on Brazil: after the departure of Prince John Maurice in 1644, the government of the country passed into less competent hands, the Dutch West Indies Company failed to mobilize adequate support in Amsterdam, and by 1654 Brazil was once again a Portuguese possession.

  The recovery of Brazil was the salvation of Portugal. The sugar and slave trades provided it with resources for continuing the struggle with Spain, and helped to stimulate foreign interest in its survival as an independent State. In spite of the weakness of Castile, however, Portugal's survival by no means appeared at the time to be a foregone conclusion. Much depended on the international situation and the continuing help of France, and by the mid-1650s the Franco-Spanish war was at last drawing to a close. It would have been impossible for Castile to have continued the war for so long had not the revolts and disorders in France seriously weakened French arms and reduced the campaigns to military charades. As it was, the weakness of France gave Spain certain transient successes which seem so to have affected Don Luis de Haro that he unaccountably missed the opportunity to conclude a remarkably favourable peace treaty in 1656. The war therefore dragged on for another three years, during which the hostility of Cromwell's England again tilted the balance against Spain; and it was only in 1659, during protracted negotiations on the Isle of Pheasants on the River Bidasoa, that a Franco-Spanish peace settlement was finally agreed.

  The terms of the Treaty of the Pyrenees were not as favourable as those which Mazarin had offered in 1656; but considering Spain's desperate weakness and the number of defeats it had suffered during the preceding twenty years it escaped surprisingly lightly. Its territorial losses were few: in the north, Artois; along the Catalan-French frontier, the county of Rosellón and part of Cerdaña – regions which Ferdinand the Catholic had recovered from France in 1493. Final arrangements were also made for the marriage of Philip IV's daughter Maria Teresa to Louis XIV: the dowry was fixed at 500,000 escudos, full payment being a condition of Maria Teresa's renunciation of all future claims to the Spanish throne. But if the terms of the peace settlement seemed remarkably moderate, the peace as a whole marks the formal passing of Spain's century-old pretensions to European hegemony. Already in 1648 it had made peace with the Dutch rebels, and had parted company with the Austrian branch of the Habsburgs, who had signed a separate peace with France. Now in 1659, in making its own peace with France, the Spanish Monarchy tacitly recognized the failure of its European ambitions, and turned its back on the continent whose destinies it had for so long attempted to control.

  With the French war over, Philip IV could at last hope to realize his ambition of recovering Portugal for the Spanish Crown. But the Portuguese war was to bring the King nothing but further disillusionment during the last twilight years of his reign. With infinite labour, three Spanish armies were assembled under the command of Don Juan José de Austria, the Duke of Osuna, and the Marquis of Viana. Considering the disastrous financial circumstances of the Monarchy, this itself was no mean feat. The ability of the Spanish Crown to keep afloat financially during the second half of the reign of Philip IV is in fact something of a miracle at a time when miracles were so earnestly prayed for, and so disappointingly few. After the bankruptcy of 1647 only six years passed before the next bankruptcy in 1653. The bankruptcy itself was no cause for surprise. The Crown's expenses had been continuing to run at 11,000,000 or 12,000,000 ducats a year, of which half were in silver and the other half in vellón. José González, a survivor from Olivares's team of ministers and now president of the Council of Finance, returned to the Conde Duque's theme that the millones should be abolished, and proposed instead a flour tax, such as had been advocated in the 1620s. But again the opposition was too strong; the millones remained, and the Crown continued to employ the usual expedients like manipulation of the coinage and the sale of offices, which once again failed to produce the necessary income. The unfortunate bankers were, as usual, compensated in juros, and the dreary cycle began to repeat itself once more. In 1654 it was estimated that, out of the 27,000,000 ducats nominal annual income of the Crown, only 6,000,000 actually found their way to the treasury, ‘and on many days the household of the King and Queen lack everything, including bread’. With the entry of England into the war, the Spanish coast was blockaded, the treasure fleet was captured in 1657, and for two years no silver arrived from the Indies. The Peace of the Pyrenees therefore came just in time, at a moment when it was possible to send only 1,000,000 ducats a year to Flanders instead of the usual 3,000,000, and when scarcely a banker remained who was willing to become involved in the financial affairs of the Spanish Crown.

  The conclusion of peace with France brought some financial relief, but the new campaign in Portugal was expected to cost 5,000,000 ducats a year. There was no hope of raising this money from new taxes, since everything that could be taxed was already taxed, and further imposts were bound to be self-defeating. In the end, the Council of Finance solved its problem by issuing a new coinage known as moneda ligada whose silver content would give it a higher intrinsic value than vellón. By minting 10,000,000 ducats, it was hoped to have 6,000,000 free for the Portuguese campaign. This cynical monetary manoeuvre merely added to the instability of Castilian prices, and proved in the end to have been undertaken in vain. The Spanish armies in Portugal were badly equipped and badly led, and the Portuguese enjoyed the assistance of England and of France, which sent troops under the command of Marshal Schomberg. The army of Don Juan José was defeated by Schomberg at Amexial in 1663; and a new army, scraped together with enormous difficulty, was defeated at Villaviciosa in 1665.

  At Villaviciosa Spain lost her last chance of recovering Portugal. Eventually, on 13 February 1668, she accepted the inevitable and formally recognized the country's independence. But Philip IV himself had not lived to see this final humiliation, for he died three months after the battle of Villaviciosa, on 17 September 1665. His later years had been as melancholy as those of his Monarchy, for whose misfortunes he considered his own sins to blame. His first wife, Elizabeth of Bourbon, had died in 1644, and his only son, Baltasar Carlos, in 1646. His second marriage in 1649, to his niece, Mariana of Austria, brought him two sickly sons, of whom the second, Charles, by some miracle survived to succeed his father at the

  Map 5

  age of four. This last pallid relic of a fading dynasty was left to preside over the inert corpse of a shattered Monarchy, itself no more than a pallid relic of the great imperial past. All the hopes of the 1620s had turned to dust, leaving behind them nothing but the acrid flavour of disillusionment and defeat.

  10

  Epitaph on an Empire

  1. THE CENTRE AND THE PERIPHERY

  THE Castile bequeathed by Philip IV to his four-year-old son was a nation awaiting a saviour. It had suffered defeat and humiliation at the hands of its traditional enemies, the French. It had lost the last vestiges of its political hegemony over Europe and seen some of its most valuable overseas possessions fall into the hands of the heretical English and Dutch. Its currency was chaotic, its industry in ruins, its population demoralized and diminished. Burgos and Seville, formerly the twin motors of the Castilian economy, had both fallen on evil times: the population of Burgos, which had been about 13,000 in the 1590s, was down to a mere 3,000 by 1646, and Seville lost 60,000 inhabitants – half its population – in the terrible plague of 1649. While the rival city of Cadiz gradually arrogated to itself the position in the American trade previously enjoyed by Seville, the trade itself was now largely controlled by foreign merchants, who had secured numerous concessions from the Spanish Crown. Castile was dying, both economically and politically; and as the hopeful foreign mourners gathe
red at the death-bed, their agents rifled the house.

  Was there, then, no hope of resuscitation? Castile, which had lived for so long on illusions, still clung to the more potent of them with the tenacity born of despair. A Messiah would surely arise to save his people. But unfortunately, while there was no lack of candidates during the thirty-five years of the reign of Charles II, their qualifications proved on closer examination to be disappointingly meagre. The poor King himself, the centre of so many hopes, turned out to be a rachitic and feeble-minded weakling, the last stunted sprig of a degenerate line. His mother the Queen Regent Mariana, was totally devoid of political capacity. His half-brother, Don Juan José de Austria, Philip IV's illegitimate son, convinced himself and succeeded in convincing many others, that he was another Don John for the salvation of Spain. His father knew better, and was careful to exclude him from the Government which he bequeathed to Charles II. This consisted of a carefully selected body of five ministers acting as a Junta de Gobierno to advise the Queen Regent until the King reached the age of fourteen. In this Junta, the balance both of personalities and nationalities was scrupulously maintained. One of its leading members was the wily Count of Castrillo, who had organized the overthrow of Olivares in 1642–3. Since the death of his nephew Don Luis de Haro in 1661, Castrillo had ruled Spain in partnership with a hated rival, the Duke of Medina de las Torres, who, however, was excluded from the Junta. The other members were the Count of Peñaranda, the diplomat who had negotiated the Treaty of Münster; Cristóbal Crespí, the Valencian Vice-chancellor of the Council of Aragón; the Marquis of Aytona, a noble with military experience from a distinguished Catalan family; a cleric, Cardinal Pascual de Aragón, the son of the Duke of Cardona, the Catalan grandee who had been Viceroy of Catalonia in the 1630s; and a Basque, Blasco de Loyola, to act as the Junta's secretary.