by Henry Kamen
Medinaceli, a friend of Ruy Goméz, had served as viceroy of Sicily11 and then of Navarre. From the start he was dogged by bad luck. His fleet sailed from the northern coast on 1 May 1572 but was forced back by bad weather and resumed its voyage two weeks later. In the Channel it was harassed by the Dutch, who destroyed many of the ships. Once in Flanders, he quickly saw that the situation was desperate, and Alba's position completely untenable. The latter in his turn bitterly resented Medinaceli's interference. But he found no support in Madrid, where he was now accused of following his own whims rather than the wishes of the king.12 The new governor seemed to adopt the viewpoint of the Netherlanders. ‘Excessive rigour, the misconduct of some officers and soldiers, and the Tenth Penny, are the cause of all the ills,’ he affirmed, ‘and not heresy or rebellion.’13 He held up for emulation the policy of Charles V, who had pacified the Comuneros of Spain through clemency and had limited punishment of the rebellion of Ghent to ‘a handful’. It was an argument to which the Netherlanders listened with satisfaction, and to which Philip was being obliged to turn.
Alba's attempts to repress revolt with brutal efficiency promised initial success but were in the end counter-productive. In October 1572 he allowed his troops to sack and massacre in the town of Mechelen, which had supported Orange. The horror of it provoked Spanish officials to protest directly to the king.14 In the next few weeks it was the turn of Zutphen and Naarden. Haarlem put up a stubborn resistance from December 1572 to the following July, but surrendered after receiving reassurances. Philip was ill in bed at San Lorenzo when he received the news on 24 July. It was hailed as a great success. Secretary Gracián, who read him the despatch, reported that to the king ‘the news of Haarlem has been better medicine than a great many doctors’.15
Philip was of course informed of the merciless methods used by Alba and his commanders. On entering Haarlem, the Spaniards had methodically executed the entire garrison, over a thousand persons, in cold blood.16 This would serve as a further lesson. But many Spanish advisers were horrified at the cruelty. Deep fissures opened up among Philip's policy-makers. Medinaceli was determined to stop the war, and to issue a general pardon along lines approved of in principle by the king. But when he and Alba met in November 1572 to discuss it, no agreement was possible. Medinaceli insisted that the pardon would encourage ‘the innocent’. Alba replied grimly ‘that he did not know who the innocent were. If His Excellency knew, could he tell him?’17
Philip's secretary Gabriel Zayas, who handled most of the relevant correspondence and was in principle a supporter of Alba, was faced with the unenviable task of sending on to the king bitter criticisms from Spanish officials. A senior officer with Medinaceli reported ‘the abhorrence in which the name of the house of Alba is held’. ‘Cursed be the Tenth Penny and whoever invented it, since it is the cause of all this.’18 Writing to the king, a correspondent urged that ‘Your Majesty not let yourself be persuaded’ that there was any way forward other than clemency and pardon. Rigour had failed, despite the fact that over 3,000 people had been executed in just over five years.19 A Spanish captain in the trenches, suffering through the freezing winter of 1572-3, confessed that ‘I don't understand this war nor do I believe that anyone understands it’, and expressed dismay that the king did not seem to realise how terrible the situation was. ‘I do not think that, the way things are going, it will be possible to take this country.’20
Granvelle, now viceroy of Naples, also saw no victory in Haarlem. ‘We are still losing. The hatred that the country has for those who now rule is greater than you can imagine.’ The whole of Alba's regime, he summed up, amounted to ‘many millions ill-spent, and the complete ruin of those provinces’.21 In Milan the viceroy, Luis de Requesens, strongly disapproved of what had happened at Haarlem. He had already had occasion to disagree strongly with the duke's methods. ‘Mercy,’ he urged, ‘is very necessary.’22
In these months, the opinions of the humanist Benito Arias Montano, then in Antwerp preparing a new royal edition of the Bible, were crucial. The king asked him to consult with the Netherlanders to find out ‘what is the real solution that one can apply’.23 Philip treated with great respect the reports he received from the illustrious scholar. Montano had, like the king, been a strong supporter of Alba. Now the king allowed himself to take an alternative view. He would discuss Montano's reports with secretary Gracián as they walked up and down the length of the great library in the Escorial.24
Alba's methods were not working. Opposition among the people of the Netherlands was hardening, not weakening. The military toll was appalling. To add to the misery of conditions and climate, the soldiers suffered a high death rate. The taking of Haarlem, for example, may have cost the besiegers some 10,000 men. Finally, the burden on the exchequer was insupportable. Juan de Ovando, president of the council of Finance, drew up an estimate in August 1574 which showed that current annual income of the treasury was around six million ducats, while obligations came to eighty million.25 The current debt in Flanders was around four million, or two-thirds of all the available income of the government of Spain. To this had to be added the current costs there, over 600,000 ducats a month, the biggest single burden on the treasury. The monthly expense in Flanders was over ten times the cost of defence in the peninsula, and twenty times the cost of the royal household and government.
Alba, from a different point of view, was equally desperate about the war. In February 1573 he wrote to Zayas, appealing for a diversion of resources from the Mediterranean and towards the north:
I beat my head against the wall when I hear them talk of the cost here! It is not the Turks who are troubling Christendom but the heretics, and these are already within our gates … For the love of God, ask for the new supplies that I have detailed to His Majesty, because what is at stake is nothing less than the survival of his states.
Throughout the year, he continued to rage, plead, and rail against those in authority in Madrid. ‘Until those who serve in his councils are dead or sacked, His Majesty will achieve nothing here.’ That was in April. ‘I can't go on,’ he wrote in July.26
In sending Medinaceli to Brussels Philip had effectively dropped his all-out backing for Alba. But by the end of 1572 he was clear in his mind that the tandem of the two dukes was unworkable, and he decided to withdraw them both. He had already warned Alba explicitly. ‘I shall never have enough money to satisfy your needs,’ the king wrote, ‘but I can easily find you a successor able and faithful enough to bring to an end, through moderation and clemency, a war that you have been unable to end by arms or by severity.’27 On 30 January 1573 he signed and despatched an order appointing his old friend Luis de Requesens, grand commander of Castile and currently governor of Milan, to the governorship of the Netherlands.
Requesens, who had been in fragile health for many months, was aghast at being asked to take on this cross. He confided to his brother Juan de Zúñiga that Flanders was ‘lost’, that ‘I am no soldier’, and that he understood neither French nor Dutch, the two languages of the country. In short, ‘I find a thousand reasons for not accepting’.28 When, six months later, he had made no move to obey, the king insisted that he accept without question.29
In October Philip sat down and wrote, in his own hand (a sure sign that he was expressing his own intimate thoughts), a confidential letter to Requesens.30
He laid bare his thinking on the problems of the north. The key to regaining the Netherlands was command of the sea. But a primary obstacle was money: the cost of the war had exceeded all predictions. Deciding policy was very difficult, since his advisers were split. ‘Some say that the cause of these rebellions is religion, and that there is no solution other than punishment and rigour.’ This was the view of Alba ‘and all his allies’. ‘Others say the contrary’, blaming bad treatment, the army and the Tenth Penny; ‘and that the solution is moderation and a general pardon’. This was the view of ‘all those from those states and even some from Spain’. Among these was Arias Monta
no, who was perhaps too inclined to the views of the Netherlanders, but whom Requesens must consult.
With such difference of opinions I have found myself very confused. And since I don't know the truth of what is going on there, I neither know the solution that is necessary nor what to think. It seems to me that the most reliable is to believe neither one side nor the other, since I think that both go to extremes. I think that the best view to take, though with great discretion, is in the middle.
Philip noted that Requesens would be receiving two sets of instructions, one in Castilian, and one in French. They would reflect differing points of view, but he was to feel completely free to follow either. The king insisted only on one principle: ‘that you treat the people there with love and goodwill, since in this there is nothing to be lost’.
Alba's self-defeating rigour, and the corresponding failure of his son Don Fadrique to capture Alkmaar in 1573, turned the tide of events in the Low Countries. But there were also important developments in Spain which signalled a change of direction. Between 1572 and 1573 familiar faces disappeared from the political scene. The death in September 1572 of Espinosa removed a diehard conservative. Philip had raised him to positions of eminence because he admired his efficiency, but he soon came to disagree with the cardinal's work methods. Espinosa often executed decisions verbally instead of putting them on paper. This made for speed, but Philip felt that it cut out the possibility of reflection. He also disapproved of the cardinal's discourteous attitude to the grandees. In a brief exchange over a matter concerning Flanders, Philip called the cardinal a liar. The incident almost literally killed Espinosa.31 He died on 5 September 1572, of apoplexy during an illness. The king was at the monastery of St Jerónimo in Madrid when he heard the news, and paid grudging tribute to his minister. ‘I am not among those who will not miss the cardinal,’ he commented.32 Shortly after, with the death of Ruy Gómez on 29 July 1573, the Eboli group lost its spokesman. Friends of Alba commented on Philip's genuine and evident grief for the man who had been his friend and adviser for two decades.33
Espinosa bequeathed to the king the services of his private secretary, the priest Mateo Vázquez de Leca.34 Twenty-four hours after the cardinal's death, Vázquez entered the royal service. He treasured thereafter ‘the first note that His Majesty wrote to me’,35 a little scribbled note in Philip's hand which the secretary carefully dated to 6 September 1572. Swarthy, plump and balding, Vázquez was of Corsican origin. Educated by the Jesuits in Seville (where one of his schoolmates was the young Cervantes), his pious, fatherly demeanour won the confidence of all. He gained the trust of the king and became his ‘arch-secretary’.36 But he also earned the rivalry of secretary Antonio Pérez and the hostility of the widowed princess of Eboli, who more than once referred to him (because of his complexion) as ‘this Moorish dog’.
In the late autumn of 1573 the new governor of the Netherlands travelled up the ‘Spanish road’ (the military route to the north) with two companies of Italian troops. He entered Brussels on 17 November and formally took over from Alba. The duke, who left for Spain in December, did his best to persuade Requesens that the war must go on. He said that he had advised the king to ‘lay waste in Holland all the country that our people could not occupy’.37 The grand commander of Castile was horrified at this warmongering solution. ‘From the very first day,’ he was to comment later, ‘I have had the water up to my teeth.’38
Philip had always been aware that Spain must be a naval power. He had devoted years to building up a strong fleet in the Mediterranean. In the Netherlands, as he reminded Requesens, it was essential to get control of the sea. The governor responded by pleading in December 1573 for the king to ‘send a mighty armada and make a final effort’.39 But a substantial naval force being planned by Pero Menéndez de Avilés in the port of Santander in 1574, never got under way. The death of Menéndez that September, and an outbreak of typhus among the crews, forced cancellation.40 During 1575 further attempts were made to send naval help. In September and again in November fleets were sent out from Santander. The first was hit by storms and dispersed along the English coast. The second, crippled by mutiny and bad weather, never made it to sea. At the end of December the king decided to postpone the naval effort.41
Officials lamely recognised that the Dutch were far superior to them at sea.42 Outside the Mediterranean, Spain's naval power in Europe was virtually zero. To keep trade going, Philip tolerated the transport of goods to and from Spain by Dutch rebel ships. From Seville it was reported that ‘Flemings, English and Dutch control all the trade’43 In 1574 the king was offered the use of a Baltic port, on the Swedish coast, from which to strike against the rebels and cut off their wheat supplies.44 It was the first of several proposals of this type.45 The offer could not be taken up. In the north, as a consequence, Spain lost out to the maritime superiority of the Protestant powers. It was a fatal weakness that with time assured the Dutch their freedom, and created continuing problems for Spain.
Arias Montano's reports on Flanders were sent to Requesens. In Madrid meanwhile Philip encouraged the search for solutions. The day after Alba's return to Madrid the king received a note from Vázquez: ‘it is clear that nothing will be achieved through force, and it could be the right time to reach a solution in those states’. As though to remove any notion of defeatism from such a move, the secretary concluded: ‘In moments of greatest need God always sends Your Majesty his greatest marks of favour: St Quentin, Lepanto, Granada, all turned out well.’46
Could Flanders also be turned into a small victory? In Castile, which had suffered most from the rise in war taxation, criticism of foreign commitments was intense. There was no imperialist fervour at court, only a reluctance to drag out the agony in the north. Dropping Alba, the pilot of Spain's imperial pretensions, was one step towards a possible peace.
Nor was America immune to dissension.
*
In these years, there was a serious crisis of stability in Spanish Peru.47 Among the discontented Indians a millennarian movement known as Taqui Ongo took shape. It predicted an end to the reign of the Christians, and a return of the ancient gods. Although the viceroy, Francisco de Toledo, put an end to native resistance the discontent was rooted in the minds of thinking Spaniards in America. A Dominican friar in Peru, Francisco de la Cruz, had dreams in which he foresaw the ‘destruction of Spain’ because of the king's policies. In a statement of 1575, he claimed that ‘it is commonly said among those who come from Spain, that the officials there are more concerned about ways of squeezing silver from the realm than about how to govern it in the interests of public welfare and peace’. He criticised ‘what the king has done with the revenue he has received and receives from Spain and its realms, squandering it and falling into debt’.48 Concern for the over-taxed inspired, in Cruz's visions, dreams of a new order in which God would ‘wreak justice and punishment on behalf of the poor and humble’, both in America (where the Indians would become his chosen people) and in Spain. Cruz's confused views reflected those of many colonists in the New World, who felt that Spain and its Church had let them down. The friar was arrested in 1575 by the Inquisition, interrogated over a period of three years, and eventually burnt at the stake in 1578.
Philip was attentive to voices from America, though he may not have known of Cruz's case. The problems of the New World crossed his desk routinely. Since his contact with Las Casas thirty years before, and the subsequent debates over the Indians, Philip had limited his intrusion into American affairs largely to the question of law and order, or ‘pacification’ as it came to be called. Viceroy Toledo's successful term of office seemed to have achieved the pacification of the Andean peoples. The introduction of the Inquisition into America in 1571 offered protection for the faith. But, for many missionaries, there were still fundamental problems to be solved before a secure peace could be achieved. It was precisely the new regime in America – a regime of viceroys, inquisitors and bishops – to which they (like Francisco de la Cru
z) objected.
Unhappy about aspects of Toledo's regime in Peru, the Jesuit father José de Acosta wrote to the king to protest against the unjust taxes levied on the Indians. Elsewhere he referred to the colonists as ‘the shit of Spain’ (Hispaniae faeces). Philip was taking some steps to mitigate the injustice of the colonial regime. The most notable was his important Ordinance on Discoveries, of 13 July 1573, which definitively banned further conquests in America, and emphasised the preaching of religion and the protection of the Indian as primary objectives. The aim was to stop further and fruitless expeditions, and to consolidate control over the vast area already subject to Spanish rule. Though naive in its ideals, the ordinance was a substantial advance on the more aggressive guidelines that preceded it. Las Casas's own writings were used in framing its text.49 From now on, Spain recognised a frontier to its American domains. The only people authorised to move the frontier forward were the missionaries, aided if necessary by small military escorts.50 The king also tried to undo some aspects of Toledo's harsh policies, and ordered repayment to the Indians of money which the viceroy had extorted. When Toledo returned to Madrid, Philip is said to have rebuked him, and to have condemned the execution of Tupac Amaru.51 He had been sent to America, Philip told him, to govern kings, not to kill them.
But it was not possible now, any more than it had been a generation before, to control events in the New World. The protest of Francisco de la Cruz was typical of much informed opinion. Fray Luis de León, in a discourse at Salamanca in 1579, denounced the colonists for ‘committing murder and exterminating peoples and entire races’. Although the king officially took no sides in the disputes over America, there is no mistaking the forward-looking tone of the laws he passed in Spain.52 The fact that such legislation had little effect in practice exposes the naivety of the government without calling in question its good intentions. In January 1588 Philip conceded the first of several audiences to José de Acosta, who had just returned from America and undoubtedly came to present him with a copy of his new book, On the Salvation of the Indians, the first powerful Jesuit contribution to the debate. He also pressed some other memorials into the king's hands.53 Philip later commented that they were ‘important, and he told me certain things which also are’.54 It is unclear whether the meeting influenced the passing that year of a decree which relaxed the racialist practices of the American Church and allowed men of mixed Spanish-Indian parentage (mestizos) to be ordained priests.55 There can be no doubt that the king's active favour over the years for both Las Casas and Acosta helped the views of these men and of their mentor Francisco de Vitoria to ‘triumph over all others’ (the phrase is Acosta's)56 in Spain. By contrast the opposing view was officially discouraged, and its chief proponent Sepúlveda, Philip's one-time tutor, died virtually forgotten and blind in 1573, at the age of eighty-three.