It is clear from the composition of this Junta that Philip IV had learnt the lesson of the Catalan Revolution and was determined to associate representatives of the various provinces of the peninsula in the delicate task of governing Spain during the royal minority. The days of Castilian hegemony were over, and even if Philip IV's Junta proved to be no more than an ephemeral institution which quickly lost its power to the Austrian Father Nithard, the Queen's Jesuit confessor, the principle of scrupulous regard for provincial rights which informed its composition was carefully maintained for the rest of the century. The weakness of Castile, in fact, made the reign of Charles a golden age for the privileged classes in the various provinces of the Monarchy. In Spain and Italy, provincial liberties were given a fresh lease of life; 1 in America the colonial aristocracy was able to build up its great estates unchecked by interference from a central Government which had struggled so hard in the sixteenth century to retain effective control over its new domains. The half century which saw the consolidation of royal power in France was thus for the Spanish Monarchy an age of continuing decentralization a period during which the ‘Aragonese’ federal system was perhaps more wholeheartedly accepted than at any other moment during the government of the House of Austria.
This, however, was not federalism by conviction but federalism by default. The tranquillity enjoyed by the various provinces of the Monarchy was the direct outcome of Castilian weakness. Unable to tackle its own problems, and quite without the energy and the resources to repeat the centralizing experiments of the Conde Duque de Olivares, Castile allowed the other provinces to go their own way, and tacitly resigned itself to a constitutional formula which was in effect no more than a polite fiction for administrative and political stagnation in a changing world.
Spain's prospects as a European power clearly depended on Castile's capacity for recovery from the debilitating weakness of the middle years of the century. The immediate need was a long period of good government; but unfortunately there was no one capable of providing it. The Queen and Father Nithard, having reduced the Junta to impotence, had no conception of how to set about the task of restoring a land to which both of them were foreign. The Cortes of Castile, which might at this moment have come into its own, had long since shown itself to be little more than a forum in which the procuradores watched over the interests of their own privileged class; and there were no deep regrets when it ceased to be summoned after 1665. Nor was the aristocracy of Castile capable of filling the vacuum left by the decline of royal power. The great aristocratic houses had been able to weather the economic storms of the mid-century thanks to the possession of vast and inalienable estates; but with one or two distinguished exceptions, like the Count of Oropesa, their representatives were of such unmitigated mediocrity that they could contribute nothing to the salvation of their country. The moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the Castilian ruling class, which had so perturbed the Conde Duque a generation earlier, was now fully exposed at the moment when it could least be afforded.
While the Councils, lacking any firm direction from above, competed with each other for precedence and jurisdiction, political adventurers intrigued for favour at Court. Father Nithard had made numerous enemies, of whom not the least was Don Juan José de Austria. Fearing imminent arrest, Don Juan fled in October 1668 first to Aragon and thence to Catalonia. During the winter months he managed to build up for himself an enthusiastic following in the Levantine kingdoms, and when he set out for Madrid early in 1669 with the intention of reaching a settlement with the Queen, he was greeted with acclamation all along the route. Looking increasingly like a conquering hero as he approached the capital, he felt strong enough by the time he reached Torrejón de Ardoz to demand the dismissal of Nithard. The following day, 25 February 1669, Nithard hastily left Madrid, and Don Juan's triumph appeared complete.
The coup launched by Don Juan José in 1669 had a certain symbolical significance, for this was the first occasion in modern Spanish history when an attempt was made from the periphery of the peninsula to seize control of the Government in Madrid. As such, it hints at a change of great importance in the balance of political forces inside Spain. Until 1640 it was always a question of Castile intervening in the life of the peripheral provinces; but now, for the first time, the peripheral provinces were themselves tentatively beginning to meddle in the affairs of Castile. Although Don Juan's coup was in fact badly bungled, a precedent had none the less been set; and in some ways it was a hopeful precedent, for it suggested that Aragon and Catalonia were beginning to emerge from their political isolation and to show that general concern for the welfare of the Monarchy which Olivares had demanded from them so insistently, and to such little effect.
Don Juan lacked the political skill to exploit a situation which seemed to have turned decisively in his favour. He duly obtained from the Queen the creation of a Junta de Alivios intended to introduce far-reaching reforms, but it succeeded in devising only minor improvements in Castile's fiscal system, and left the fundamental abuses untouched. While Don Juan hesitated to assume the supreme power, the Queen strengthened her position by creating a royal guard, known as the Guardia Chamberga, under the command of one of Don Juan's most determined opponents, the Marquis of Aytona. Either because he feared to plunge Castile into civil war, or because he doubted his own strength, Don Juan did nothing to force the issue. For a moment, there was a stalemate; and then Don Juan surprised everyone by accepting an offer from the Queen of the viceroyalty of Aragon, and conveniently removed himself from the neighbourhood of the capital.
After the failure of Don Juan's bloodless coup, power at Madrid fell into the hands of an Andalusian adventurer who had found favour with the Queen. This was Fernando de Valenzuela, the son of an army captain. Valenzuela managed to ingratiate himself with the populace of Madrid, for which he provided cheap bread and bullfights, but he was faced with the hostility of Don Juan José and the opposition of the grandees, who resented his rapid climb into the ranks of the higher aristocracy. When Charles II was officially proclaimed of age in 1675 it was expected that Valenzuela would be replaced by Don Juan José, but once again Don Juan allowed himself to be outmanoeuvred and the Queen Mother and Valenzuela managed to cling to power.
The political history of Castile now began to assume some of those characteristics of a comic opera, for which in a later age it was to become notorious. Indeed, it was at this moment that one of the essential ingredients of nineteenth-century Castilian politics first appeared – the pronunciamiento. As the grandees, exasperated by Valenzuela's accession to their ranks, banded together in December 1676 to demand the recall of Don Juan, the latter began to march on Madrid at the head of the army which had been fighting the French in Catalonia. The Queen took the only action open to her in the circumstances, and offered him the government. Valenzuela was arrested, and exiled to the Philippines. From there he later made his way to Mexico, where a throw from a horse brought his remarkable career to a fittingly spectacular conclusion.
The government of Don Juan José from 1677 until his unexpected death in 1679 was attended by disappointment at home and humiliation abroad. France and Spain had been at war since 1673, with Catalonia as the principal battlefront. Hopes of recovering Roussillon for Spain were dashed by the outbreak of revolt in Sicily in 1674, and it was necessary to abandon the offensive on the French frontier so that troops could be sent to crush the rising. Although the French were thwarted in Sicily, the Peace of Nijmwegen, which brought the war to an end in 1678, registered a further decline in Spain's international standing. It lost not only a number of important towns in the Netherlands, but also the entire Franche-Comté, that treasured survival from the Burgundian past, which had fallen into French hands in 1674. The empire that Charles V had governed was being shorn of its territories one by one, as Castile revealed itself too weak to come to their help; and Castile itself was sinking beneath the hopeless government of Don Juan. The expected saviour of Spain had shown himself, once p
ower had been entrusted to his hands, to be totally incapable of exercising it. As he failed to tackle even the most obvious abuses, he forfeited in turn the support of the army, the Church, and the populace, and was mercilessly lampooned in the streets of the capital. His death in September 1679 came too late to save his reputation He died as he lived – the first of that long line of flashy leaders from whom the Castilians, expecting everything, obtained nothing.
It was in the years around 1680, between the death of Don Juan José and the fall of his mediocre successor, the Duke of Medinaceli, in 1685, that Castile's fortunes reached their nadir. The French envoy, the Marquis de Villars, was shocked at the change for the worse since his first mission to Madrid in 1668.2 Although ‘the power and the policy of the Spaniards’ had been ‘diminished constantly… since the beginning of the century’, the change had ‘become so great in recent times that one can actually see it occurring from one year to the next’. The feeble King and his feeble Minister, Medinaceli, were both reduced to a ‘blind dependence’ on the Councils, and particularly on the Council of State – ‘an assembly of twenty-four persons without spirit or experience’, like the Duke of Medina de las Torres, who had ‘spent all his life in Madrid in total idleness, almost exclusively shared between eating and sleeping’. All important offices in the State and the army went solely to men of rank. Over the past forty years, tax collectors and tax tribunals had proliferated to an extraordinary degree. In conclusion, ‘it would be difficult to describe to its full extent the disorder in the government of Spain’, or, for that matter, the misery to which Castile had been reduced.
There is no reason to doubt the accuracy of Villars's description. The early 1680s were in fact, the years of Castile's total administrative and economic collapse. Apart from raw wool, as Villars pointed out, Castile had no exports with which to attract foreign wealth, and two-thirds of the silver in the treasure fleet went straight to foreigners without even entering Spain. Above all, the currency of Castile was now approaching the climax of its giddy career. In the last years of the reign of Philip IV, the premium on silver in terms of vellón rose to 150 per cent, and the last monetary measure of the reign – a deflationary decree in October 1664 – failed to reduce it for more than a few passing moments. By the middle of 1665 it was up again to 115 per cent; it reached 175 per cent by 1670 and 200 per cent by 1675. There was a sharp rise in Castilian commodity prices during the 1670s, and by the end of the decade a fresh attempt at deflation became inevitable. It came on 10 February 1680, when the ‘good’ vellón minted since 1660 was deflated by one half. The decree brought a violent collapse of prices, and produced a succession of bankruptcies from the Crown downwards. There was widespread recourse to barter; riots occurred in Toledo and Madrid; the royal family could not even raise sufficient funds for its annual trip to Aranjuez; and – more serious – the last remnants of Castilian industry were destroyed.
The economic paralysis of Castile in the 1680s was accompanied by the paralysis of its cultural and intellectual life. The depressing later years of Philip IV had at least been illuminated by the sunset glow of Castile's great cultural achievement. But Gracián had died in 1658, Velazquez in 1660, and Zurbarán in 1664. With the passing of Calderón de la Barca in 1681 and Murillo a year later, the last luminaries of the literary and artistic generation of the golden age disappeared. These men had no worthy successors. At a moment when inquiring minds in other parts of Europe were turning towards philosophical and scientific investigation, the spirit of inquiry was almost dead in Castile. There were still isolated groups of devoted scholars, but educational standards had slumped, as the universities fell back on the most arid Thomism and showed themselves hostile to any sign of change.
The exact reasons for the intellectual failure of later seventeenth-century Castile are extremely hard to establish. The inadequacies of contemporary education are obvious enough, but it is far from clear to what these inadequacies should be attributed. The Jesuit Mariana thought that much of the blame lay with his own Order, which had acquired a monopoly of the lower reaches of the educational system. In his Discourse on the affairs of the Company of Jesus, written in 1605, he pointed out that his Order had taken over the teaching of ‘humane letters’ in the most important towns in Spain. ‘There is no doubt,’ he continued, 3that less Latin is known in Spain than fifty years ago. I believe – indeed, I am certain – that one of the major causes of this misfortune is to be found in the fact that the Company has been entrusted with these studies…. Formerly, the secular teachers of grammar’ were expert in various branches of learning, ‘since they devoted their whole lives to the work. But among our members, there are hardly any who have any knowledge of these things; and laymen, seeing the posts occupied, are no longer willing to enter the profession.’3
Mariana was so passionate a critic of his own Order that his judgements are generally too partisan to be taken purely on trust. Certain aspects of Jesuit education were extremely good. The emphasis placed on theatrical productions in Jesuit schools seems, for instance, to have acted as a powerful stimulus to Spanish drama, and, as the curriculum of the Colegio Imperial at Madrid makes clear, science and mathematics were by no means neglected in the higher institutes of learning. Mariana himself, while criticising the primary education, admits that the more advanced studies were better organized. This comment perhaps provides a clue to the character of Jesuit education in Spain, for by no means all the students can have proceeded to the more advanced course of study. Since the average pupil in Jesuit schools did not begin the study of science, mathematics, and philosophy before the age of sixteen, it is possible that a large number had to be content with the ‘humanistic’ course in classical languages and learning, in which – as Mariana suggests – the standard of teaching often left much to be desired.
The Jesuits, however, were not the only teachers in Spain. Nor were they even particularly numerous, considering the size of the Religious Orders in the seventeenth century. The total membership of the Jesuit Order in Spain, as distributed among the four traditional Spanish provinces, was: 4
1580 1615 C. 1700
Aragon 200 390 523
Castile 500 613 560
Toledo 480 570 544
Andalusia 260 600 489
1,440 2,173 2,116
While the Jesuits in the seventeenth century succeeded in winning the support of the Spanish Crown, and obtained from the King in 1621 the right for their own colleges to confer degrees, they never achieved a monopoly of education. The universities continued to fight them with every weapon at their disposal, and did their best to prevent the foundation of the Colegio Imperial. But the universities had nothing better to offer of their own. Indeed, it was precisely in order to give young Spanish nobles a better grounding in such subjects as science and mathematics that Olivares and his Jesuit confessor, Hernando de Salazar, originally devised the new college in Madrid.
But the Colegio Imperial was a failure. Similarly, the famous academy at Madrid where scientific and mathematical questions had been discussed since 1583, faded out of existence at the very time when the Colegio Imperial was coming into being. Somehow, the intellectual curiosity and excitement which had distinguished sixteenth-century Castile had disappeared. The Church, too, had lost its former vitality. There were too few seminaries to train a growing priesthood, and many of the clergy were notorious for their ignorance. Philip IV made various attempts to limit the wealth and expansion of the Church and tried, with some support from Rome, to inaugurate a reform of the Religious Orders. In 1677 a reduction in the number of the clergy and a fresh attempt at reform of the Orders were again seriously contemplated, but once again nothing of note was achieved. Vested interests were too powerful, opposition to change too strong, and the Crown was too weak to do what needed to be done.
Inert and immovable, the top-heavy Church of baroque Spain had little to offer a passive population but an unending succession of sedatives, in the form of Te Deums, processions, solemn masse
s, and heavy ceremonial which ministered to its apparently insatiable passion for display. Religious festivals in some places occupied a third of the year. The rites of the Church had degenerated into mere formalism, its dogmas into superstitions, and the dead weight of the vast apparatus of ecclesiastical bureaucracy lay heavy on Castile.
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the supine, priest-ridden Castile of Charles II was typical of all Spain. In some parts of the peninsula there are unmistakable signs of a new vitality, both intellectual and economic. Unfortunately, however, so little is known about Spanish social and economic history in the second half of the seventeenth century that all assertions about movements of the Spanish economy must remain extremely tentative; but already by the last quarter of the century the first hesitant indications of economic revival can be discerned. The fact that different regions of the peninsula had remained in their own economic compartments, curiously detached one from another, meant that the rhythm of economic decline varied from one region to the next. It would seem that the decline of Castile began earlier, and lasted longer, than that of other parts of Spain. In the Principality of Catalonia, for instance, the commercial crisis dated from the 1630s, and the demographic and monetary crisis from the 1640s; and whereas Castile experienced violent inflationary and deflationary movements throughout the 166os and 1670s, the Catalan coinage was stabilized after the deflation of 1654. Valencia, which was also free from the scourge of Castilian vellón, experienced a downward movement of prices and wages in the 1650s and 1660s. On the whole it would appear that the economic movements of the peripheral provinces of the peninsula conformed more closely to general European movements than did those of Castile; and that just as western Europe as a whole was climbing out of its mid-century depression in the 1670s, so also the Spanish periphery was following suit.
Imperial Spain 1469-1716 Page 43