by Henry Kamen
It was debated whether to ask the cities for money. On looking at the matter, many points emerged from which it appeared that to ask for money would be very long and arduous, since the countryside is poor and exhausted and every day the towns present petitions about the expenses they had during the last campaign. Because of all this, it was suggested that it would be better if this army were raised at Your Majesty's own expense.50
The sentiments were so direct as to be naive. Charles needed money, and did not have to be reminded that his people were over-taxed. He was to find to his surprise that over the next few months Philip lined up very readily with those ministers who thought that Castile could not be bled further. But only the prince was courageous enough in his letters to express these sentiments boldly. He took part conscientiously in meetings. In February 1544 he informed his father that ‘I ordered a meeting of the council of State, to be attended also by the president and two members of the royal council, as well as the members of the council of Finance. In several meetings which they had in my presence they debated’ how one could meet the request for money.51 The conclusion to which he and they came was, he wrote in September, that peace was necessary, ‘for the well-being and succour of Christendom and of these realms, which are so needy and exhausted that I cannot find words to express their state, except to assure you that only your return to these realms can be the real remedy for everything’.52
Evidently those who were unhappy about the wars abroad were influencing the prince. On the same day that Philip sent his September letter, Cobos wrote that ‘the prince's letter deals so exactly with all details of business, that it leaves me with nothing to say except to refer to it’.53 It was a convenient subterfuge. Cobos had always opposed Charles's imperial commitments,54 and he could now rely on Philip to support him. The prince however was no passive tool. He continued to devote himself to hunting, and participated in occasional jousts (unimpressively, according to one witness, who commented that ‘the prince has taken part in two superb tourneys, though I feel the tourneys were better in Piedmont’).55 But he was capable of using his own initiative, and when his sister María fell ill in the autumn he personally decided when and where the court should move in order to protect her health.56 That November, his wife's pregnancy was confirmed, which increased his domestic commitments but did not deter him from some of the most important political steps he was to take in these years.
News of the peace of Crépy (September 1544) between the emperor and France reached Valladolid in October. Spaniards, who had little to gain from the war, were overjoyed, but for Charles there were complications. The peace made him think of offering one of two alternative marriage alliances to Francis I's second son, the duke of Orléans. He could offer either his daughter María, with possession of the Netherlands at his own death; or his niece Anne of Hungary, with possession of Milan a year after the marriage. The emperor consulted his advisers in Spain and the Netherlands on the matter. In Spain Philip took charge of the discussions. In late November he went to Madrid to consult personally with his sister María, since ‘she will open her mind to no one more than to me’.57 ‘I hope to be back soon,’ he wrote to his friend Francisco Borja, duke of Gandía, ‘at the latest before Christmas.’58 He came back to Valladolid rather earlier, on 29 November, and took part in the debate in the council of State, which had convened during his absence.
Philip took a close interest in the question (which we shall touch on later), and introduced a procedure by which formal opinions would be expressed individually, so as to guide his own decision-making. He first ordered the council to have four or five meetings in which the members could elaborate their thinking.
Afterwards when I came the council met immediately in my presence, and I wished to hear all that they had discussed and debated. They debated again and discussed the matter at length, and although they were settled in their views I ordered them to think more about it. On the third day, I said, they should meet again in council and come to it with their minds made up so we could arrive at a decision. It was so done. Since we learned from our contacts that their opinions were divided, I ordered each member to express his view.59
This remarkable initiative, laying down a procedure which Philip was to follow throughout his tenure of power, shows his determination to elicit considered advice and to consult all opinions, as his father had advised, before making decisions.
In subsequent weeks Charles was to find that his son was no compliant servant of his policies. At the end of December 1544 the prince wrote that he and a majority of the council were opposed to the emperor's wish to seize the silver that had come from America for private merchants. ‘Above all since it would undo what has cost me many meetings, consultations and agreements to achieve, there being so little silver.’60
The resistance of Spanish officials to the wars in the north was expressed most clearly in the prince's important letter to the emperor of March 1545.61 In it he stressed that ‘I do not need to repeat the situation of the treasury of these realms, how everything up to the year 1548 is assigned and spent, leaving nothing for expenses, and the same is the case with the taxes on the poor people of these realms’. There was no point in the emperor citing the ability of the king of France to raise a grant of taxes, for France was bigger and richer than Castile. Each nation must be treated according to its own laws and customs, ‘and these realms will not tolerate being treated in that way, for each nation must be approached with respect and dealt with differently according to the nature of its people’. Philip stressed that he had consulted with his advisers and they had agreed (the failure of 1538 was in their minds) that it would be futile to convene the Cortes of Castile. The emperor's suggestion to convene the Cortes of Aragon was also not viable, because of ‘the universal poverty in those realms, especially in the principality of Catalonia as a result of several barren years and the wars in Perpignan’.
This firm refusal of money was accompanied by a spirited presentation of the plight of the people of Castile:
With what they owe for other things, the common people who have to pay the taxes are reduced to such extremes of misfortune and poverty that many of them go naked without clothing. And the misery is so universal that it afflicts not only Your Majesty's subjects but even more those of the nobility, for they cannot pay their taxes nor have the means to do so. The prisons are full, and all are heading for ruin. Believe me, Your Majesty, if this were not true I would not dare write it to you.
In fact, the financial situation was so acute, and the demands of the emperor so insistent, that eventually meetings of the Cortes in Castile and Aragon were held. In Aragon proper a small grant was obtained, but in Valencia and Catalonia the Cortes refused to vote anything without the royal presence.
In Castile the prince personally supervised the negotiations for the Cortes that opened in Valladolid in March 1544. The Cortes of Castile consisted in theory of three estates, with representatives from the higher clergy, the great nobles and the leading (at this period, eighteen) towns. In practice, for some time now only the deputies of the towns normally met, since the main business tended to be taxation, from which the other estates were in principle exempt. The nobles, we have already seen, ceased to be summoned after 1538. The standard procedure was for the towns to send two deputies each. If all the deputies attended, the assembly with its secretaries and officials would not have numbered more than about fifty people. The king or his representative would open the session with a speech setting out the purpose of the summons. This would be replied to formally by a member of the Cortes, and the debate or negotiations would then begin.
‘I ordered the deputies to meet,’ Philip wrote to his father, ‘and after I said a few words the proposal was read to them and they replied in the usual way.’ The speech consisted of a plea for money to help the emperor against France and the Turks. ‘And after debating and arguing with them on the matter, and about the great distress and poverty in which these realms are, or at least the peop
le who have to pay the taxes, it appeared superfluous to talk about other matters, and it was agreed to consult with all the cities’ represented in the Cortes.62 Negotiation usually went on for weeks. The Cortes invariably presented a number of petitions (in 1544 they totalled nearly sixty), with which Philip had to deal if he hoped to get a grant of money. He was asked to make sure that the assembly would be called at least every three years. Cautious but firm, he promised to do what seemed best.
By 1544, on all the evidence, Philip was a fully committed head of government,63 influenced certainly by the views of those in power but with initiatives and ideas of his own which he expressed freely in his letters to the emperor.
*
From Germany Charles kept a watchful, but liberal, eye on his son's progress. He was aware of Philip's fondness for women, and instructed Zúñiga shortly after Philip's marriage to control contact between the young couple. The governor faithfully made sure that Philip followed Charles's wish ‘that the prince absent himself sometimes from his wife, and in particular that they should not be together during the day’. The question was in part resolved by an attack of scabies which Philip suffered shortly after the wedding and which obliged him to sleep apart from Maria for over a month.64 At the same time there was growing evidence that the prince seemed not to be as enamoured of his bride as was expected.
In these weeks Charles warned the grand commander to ‘moderate the great lust you always had for hunting’, since it was leading the prince to hunt excessively and indiscriminately. Philip must also continue to study, despite his marriage and affairs of state. Zúñiga, the emperor complained, was not giving him enough information. He had heard from other sources ‘of the coldness the prince adopts to his wife in public, which distresses me very much’. He put it down, nonetheless, to ‘the timidity of someone of his years’. There were other matters about the prince's style of living which worried both Zúñiga and the emperor: the excessive time Philip spent in going to bed and getting up, expensive parties, going out at night.65 Philip also enjoyed tournaments, which he mounted on a big scale. ‘The prince is in good health,’ Gonzalo Pérez wrote in May 1544; ‘in March he organised a tournament and put on another yesterday in the countryside; it was a great success, with close on a hundred taking part.’66 Seen in perspective, despite his father's worrying, all this looks like the relatively harmless life-style of a young aristocrat.
Philip's coldness to his wife was to be expected in an arranged marriage between two very young people. In January 1544 the emperor was informed that ‘the prince is somewhat distant with the princess, and in Portugal they feel strongly about it’. Later, in the autumn, the best that Cobos could report was that the couple ‘get on together very well’, and that the prince was not making inordinate sexual demands on his wife.67 Whatever the young prince's sentiments for his wife may have been, they were not allowed to mature. In giving birth to a son, Carlos, on 8 July 1545 she suffered a serious haemorrhage that led to her death four days later. She was just over seventeen. Cobos informed Charles that ‘the prince felt the loss deeply, which shows that he loved her; although,’ he felt obliged to add, ‘some took a different view of his outward reactions.’68 Aged eighteen, Philip had left his childhood world behind. He was now a father and a widower, and apprentice head – since 1543 – of the Spanish state.
2
The Renaissance Prince 1545–1551
Believe me, Your Majesty, if this were not true I would not dare write it to you.1
‘I cannot think where this will stop,’ the Castilian religious reformer Teresa of Avila commented around mid-century. ‘I have seen so many changes in my lifetime that I do not know how to go on. What will it be like for those who are born today and have long lives before them?’2
The Spain over which prince Philip presided in his father's absence was indeed changing in several ways. Like many countries in Europe, ‘Spain’ was not a unified state but an association of provinces sharing a common king. The majority of provinces were grouped under the crown of Castile, which included Castile but also the kingdom of Navarre and the autonomous Basque provinces. The eastern provinces, forming the crown of Aragon, comprised the autonomous territories of Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia. Most provinces enjoyed their own laws, institutions and monetary system, and were subject to the political control of their local nobility.
The king – above all an absentee king like Charles – was in no position to rule by absolute authority. He exercised control instead through agreements and the judicious use of influence. Royal power was strongest in Castile, where tradition allowed the king to raise taxation and an army. Fortuitously Castile, which also ruled directly over America, was the largest realm of Spain and contained three-quarters of its population. It became the base upon which Charles, and later Philip, constructed their policies.
Charles's grandfather, Ferdinand the Catholic, had begun the nation's emergence as a European power by his active foreign policy. In 1504, after years of war in southern Italy, he won sovereignty over the kingdom of Naples. Ferdinand's wife Isabella had given particular attention to the conquest in 1492 of the Muslim kingdom of Granada, and had backed Columbus in his voyages to the New World. Charles, on his accession to the Spanish throne, was drawn into this immense range of imperial interests. As sovereign of the Netherlands he enjoyed the title of duke of Burgundy; to his many other titles he subsequently added that of Holy Roman Emperor in Germany. Ruler of the biggest accumulation of states ever known in European history, he drew Spain into an imperial role it had never before experienced.
Spain in mid-century was well poised to make its mark on the world. Charles's empire was not created by the Spanish, but they were beginning to play an important part in it. Spain's military fame rested chiefly on its long, valiant battle against the advancing forces of the Turkish empire. In 1535 the emperor, with forces drawn mainly from Italy and Spain, had scored a brilliant victory over the Muslims by capturing the north African city of Tunis. Since then the small Spanish fortresses scattered around the western Mediterranean, such as La Goletta, were the only protection of the Christian west against Islamic power. On constant guard against the great external threat, fearful of the enormous potential Muslim threat at home (in Granada), Spain was uniquely fitted to lead a crusade in defence of the west. Spanish military detachments could be found in Italy, Germany and Flanders. The presence of these troops in other states was inevitably resented. ‘They are loved by nobody,’ a courtier of prince Philip observed.3 Hostility was the price to be paid for Spain's growing imperial role.
In good measure, the outside world was suspicious because it did not know Spain. Some non-Spaniards had served in the wars against the Muslims of Granada, some had gone on pilgrimage to the shrines at Santiago in Galicia or Montserrat in Catalonia. Cultured foreigners visited the peninsula, however, only if the royal court was there. It is significant that the Italian humanist Castiglione, who made Spain his home early in the century, dedicated himself to producing a book on the theme of The Courtier. Charles's continuous absence deprived the country of a regular court. Castile without its king tended to become a cultural backwater.
Spain's isolation from the outside world was commented upon by travellers and ambassadors. Envoys of the republic of Venice, who made frequent visits, seldom failed to present the country in an unfavourable light. In very many ways, the peninsula was indeed off the beaten track. Yet Spaniards who had done a bit of travelling thought their own country quite satisfactory. ‘Of everything that I have seen,’ commented one, ‘the best is Spain … The people there are liberal but not so bookish as in Italy, courageous but not so barbarous as the Germans, humane and amiable but without the placidity of the inhabitants of Flanders.’ In Spain there was more tranquillity, more freedom for everyone. ‘How little the Spanish peasant would complain about the taxes he pays if he knew what happened elsewhere and to what taxes others are subjected!’4
*
In Europe it was a time of gr
owth, expansion and exploration. Spaniards were in the forefront of the movement, building their new frontiers beyond Europe. In America in 1521 the adventurer Hernán Cortés had overthrown the capital of the Aztec empire and founded the city of Mexico. Ten years later, the Pizarro brothers launched the expeditions which overthrew Inca power in Peru. America since that time had become a prey to wealth-hungry settlers. In 1542, shortly before he sailed for Italy, Charles signed the text of the ‘New Laws’, which attempted to protect the native population of America against Spanish exploitation. In 1543 the merchants of Seville banded together to form a ‘Consulate’ to organise trade to the New World. It was the first stage of an adventure that also caught the imagination of the young prince Philip. ‘Our Spaniards,’ his historiographer-royal later wrote, ‘traversed the Equator, discovered the other pole, and in many things disproved through direct experience the astrology and geography of the ancients, gaining for the world another world besides.’5
Few Spaniards were unaware that overseas discoveries were playing a part in the economic changes at home. The ports of Andalusia, which traded directly to America, were booming; Seville tripled its population; and silver and exotic goods from the New World began to enter Spain's economy. Many Spaniards got richer, among them a brother of Teresa of Avila, who went to America, made himself wealthy, and returned to live in comfort in Avila.