by Henry Kamen
For nearly thirty years the Alba-Eboli polarisation had dominated politics at the court of Philip II. The king had had to manoeuvre his way carefully between the clashes of interest, and did not emerge unscathed. ‘The king's government,’ fumed a pro-Eboli grandee, the admiral of Castile,219 early in 1578, ‘is not a government of justice but of tyranny and vengeance. Everything is in the hands of lowly and vindictive people, many of whose fathers were Comuneros.’220 Family hatreds and rivalry of this type would continue to affect government. But from 1582 the king was a free agent.
7
The World of Philip II
The yellow narcissus they brought you from Aranjuez comes, I think, from the fields rather than from the garden, though its perfume is not so sweet.1
The Spanish monarchy arrived late in the company of other princely courts. In the fifteenth century the European Renaissance made Italy the principal magnet for scholars, writers and artists who took the new ideas back to their noble and princely courts in France, Germany, Burgundy and England. A circuit of cultural interchange was created, but Spain lay on its fringes. In the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, a few scholars had brought from Italy ideas that took some root in the small noble courts and in the court of Isabella. At the same time, close links with the Netherlands confirmed the influence of Flemish art and, later, of the ideas of Erasmus. The lack of a fixed royal court, and the emperor's absences, made it impossible for these influences to become securely rooted.
Philip's permanence in the peninsula after 1559 changed the scene. He brought back with him a wealth of ideas and schemes. As sovereign of the Netherlands and much of Italy, he had access to the talents of the principal humanists and artists of his time. Despite his state debts, he set aside sums for his cultural plans. In the 1560s he put together a painstaking and impressive programme. Having seen the great palaces and gardens of Italy, southern Germany, England and the Netherlands, he knew that Spain must compete. A new court must be created, dignified as a royal residence, with a fitting environment of art and music.
More than this, the monarchy should be seen as the active promoter of science and learning. He chose humanists as tutors for his son. His chief secretary, Gonzalo Pérez, was a known humanist. The gains of humanism should be extended by reforming the curriculum in the universities, and by launching a new multilingual version of the Bible. Surveys should be made of all that was known. This was particularly important in respect of the Indies. Appointments were made of official historians and official chroniclers.
Spain was in a unique position to launch such a programme. In addition to contacts with Italy and the Netherlands, the peninsula could draw on its own internal experience of the culture of Jews and Arabs. Philip's commitment to Catholic orthodoxy was beyond question. But beyond that he kept his pulse on all branches of enquiry, including both the exotic and the informal.
He never wrote down an outline of what he might do. At one time or other in the 1560s, however, he made decisions intended to set all the above in motion. Looking at the enormous range of matters involved, one cannot fail to admire his energy and purpose. At the same time, there were serious obstacles of which he was perfectly aware. Though there were prominent exceptions, as a class the Spanish elite, nobles and clergy, had little cultural sophistication.2 An Imperial ambassador to Madrid in the 1570s commented that when the nobles spoke of certain subjects they did so in the way that a blind man speaks of colours. They travelled out of Spain very seldom, he said, and so had no perspective with which to make judgments.3 They were unlikely to contribute much to creating a new courtly culture. The printing industry in the peninsula was primitive,4 and largely in the hands of foreigners. Good books would have to be introduced from abroad. Indeed, the problem was that nearly everything would have to be imported if any progress were to be made in Spain. The king even insisted on importing his own writing paper, since he found Castilian paper too coarse.
To keep his programme in action, Philip had to maintain a policy of relatively open frontiers. Protecting Spain against heresy was feasible, and he attempted it; sealing it off from Europe was, by contrast, never his intention. The censorship decree of 1558 and the restrictions on studying abroad were, by their nature, limited in impact. They applied only to the realms of Castile, and were in any case difficult to enforce. In practice, Castilians continued to enjoy the freedoms available to most Europeans: to publish outside the country, and to travel without hindrance. In the non-Castilian parts of Spain a free movement of books, persons and students continued to operate for much of the reign.5 Foreign scholars, technicians and artists took advantage of the free access in order to come and seek the patronage of the Spanish king.
*
Until mid-century the usual centre of administration in Castile had been Valladolid. Though never quite a capital city, Valladolid had since the days of Ferdinand and Isabella been the regular centre of royal activity. Both Charles and Philip had been crowned there. The outbreak of heresy in the city may have been among the reasons which impelled Philip at the end of 1559 to leave it and install his government in the more central location of the old capital of Spain, Toledo.
Toledo, however, had problems that became evident in the months the court was there. The city formed a spectacular froth of buildings on the crest of a rock. The Tajo, snaking round its base, gave it a picturesque charm. But the medieval centre with its cramped streets and buildings was too small to accommodate the large numbers of the court and bureaucracy. When the court wanted to breathe, it had to go elsewhere. In the spring of 1560, shortly after arriving in Toledo, the king decided to take his wife to see Aranjuez. There preparations had to be made for receiving ‘four thousand persons, not counting the carriages’.6 Aranjuez, of course, had few buildings apart from the palace, and the luckless courtiers had to be accommodated in makeshift tents. Even with its buildings, by contrast, Toledo did not have space. Neither did it have the infrastructure to supply food, and above all water, to the larger population. Its social life was influenced by the presence everywhere of clergy, whose life-style did not coincide with that of the court. Elizabeth of Valois did not like the city.7 The bitter winter of 1560–1, during which Toledo's death rate doubled, may have been the last straw.
It was unthinkable to go back to Valladolid, which in any case in 1561 suffered a serious fire that destroyed a good part of the city centre. Arson was suspected, and by official accounts ‘over 2,200 houses were burnt’.8 The city was out of commission for several years while plans for rebuilding (personally examined and approved by the king) were drawn up.9 Philip was forced to put in train a completely new scheme for a capital elsewhere. His choice of Madrid was in no way influenced by its central location in the peninsula. More important was its position relative to the royal residences, which would allow him to commute without difficulty from his administrative capital to his hunting resorts.10 This enabled him to plan for the growth of Madrid and also to develop the royal palaces within a short radius of the capital.
Among aristocrats and their ladies who had lived in the sophistication of the Netherlands, the return home in 1559 was a severe disappointment. Spain – and above all Toledo – was a backwater. The king, his courtiers claimed, would love to go back. ‘We greatly miss Flanders, and though His Majesty pretends otherwise I suspect he feels the way all of us do,’ a noble wrote to Granvelle. His wife, he continued, ‘wishes more than anyone to go back to Flanders and never has anything good to say of Spain. And of course she is right. It's hardly necessary to say that the cleanliness there and the filth here are two quite different things.’11 In short, he said, ‘we have passed a terrible summer in the most miserable place in the world, which has nothing in its favour but the fame of “Toledo! Toledo!”’ An intimate of the king, the count (later duke) of Feria, had the same impression of Philip's ideas about returning north. ‘I swear to you that His Majesty wishes so much to return that I would not believe it if I did not see it.’ Feria had an English wife, which influence
d his own preferences. ‘Spain is the most backward province on the face of the earth, and devil take me if I do not round up half of all I have and return to Flanders. Besides which, my wife pleads with me every day to go back and has not had a day's good health since she came.’12 These testimonies make more credible the view that Elizabeth Valois also influenced her husband to look for a more cosmopolitan court environment.
The move from Toledo, decreed early in May 1561, took place formally on the nineteenth of the month. In mid-century Madrid had been a small, unexciting town of some 9,000 people.13 The court occasionally based itself there, as did Philip between 1551 and 1553. After the move of 1561, the town grew rapidly. There were 16,000 residents by the end of 1561 and 34,000 by 1570. A generation after 1560, the population had increased eightfold.
With increased size came problems of supply, sanitation and crime. A few years later, a witness described it as ‘full of royalty, priests, nobles, magistrates, officials … criminals, thieves, ruffians and vagrants’.14 When queen Anna came to Madrid in 1570, one of her retinue thought the city ‘the dirtiest and filthiest in Spain’. ‘After ten at night it is no pleasure to walk through the city and listen to the emptying of urinals and the discharge of filth.’15 Although Madrid could be on occasion clean, visitors were more usually impressed by its squalor. The king made efforts to remedy the situation, but eventually confessed himself beaten.16
The royal residence in Madrid was the Alcázar. A small palace of Mudéjar style, and occasionally used in the Middle Ages by Castilian rulers, it was enlarged from 1536 onwards by Charles V. From the 1540s prince Philip took an interest in the works and in improving the surrounding streets.17 When the decision to move to Madrid became firm, the building programme speeded up. Juan Bautista, aided by a number of Italian artisans, contributed. In the reformed and enlarged building the king in the 1560s chose as his apartments those on the west, overlooking the river Manzanares and the small Casa de Campo. As with all his architects, he was meticulous and demanding over details. His sketches and notes to Juan Bautista were merciless: ‘This has to be the entrance’, ‘this has to be the chancel entrance’, ‘this is the gateway where the horses must be when it rains’.18 He got the changes he wanted. By the late 1560s, long before San Lorenzo had taken shape, the Alcázar had been transformed into the crown's biggest and most imposing residence. It was also the most visible symbol of the adoption of Italianate style and the abandonment of traditional Spanish architecture.
*
Philip's passion for reconstructing the residences was profound. In the 1540s, when he was regent, the passion only grew. In the 1550s his admiration for the noble residences of northern Europe kept him busy sending messages to his architects in Spain. It was from the Netherlands in 1556 that he first sent orders for the site at Aceca to be rebuilt. From there too, in the same year, he arranged for the acquisition of land just over the river Manzanares below the Alcázar. Here, in 1562, under the direction of Juan Bautista, construction was begun of a small Casa de Campo surrounded by gardens.
Philip's lifelong dedication to building had two inseparable components. In the first place, he was fascinated by the aesthetic and technical aspects of palace construction. He knew from direct experience that Spain had nothing to compete with the architecture of Italy or the Netherlands. As a result, he was determined to recreate in Castile, as symbols of his power, residences which could equal anything anywhere else. The rebuilt Alcázars of Madrid and Toledo were the end products, within an urban context, of this desire.
In the second place, however, he never cared for the city as an environment. His first love was always the open air, fields and forests, riding and hunting. He regularly insisted to his children, as well as to his ministers, that they should take fresh air more often. In the Netherlands he first discovered the delight of endless landscaped gardens, and the possibility of combining countryside with palaces. Full of enthusiasm, he brought the idea of the garden back with him in 1559. He received further advice from those who had direct knowledge of the gardens of Italian princes. As each garden developed, he would pass scribbled lists of plants and ideas to the designers. He sent experts abroad. When one of his designers died he asked for his notebooks to be sent to him; and in particular one ‘which says it is of gardens in Italy though I think it refers to France or England, which he did when I sent him to see the gardens there’.19 In his instructions one phrase recurred: the plants must be like those ‘in Flanders’.20 In the hands of the Dutch and Italian specialists whom he attracted to Spain, and notably under the expert guidance of Juan Bautista, Philip's palace gardens became a superb example of Italian Mannerism.21 Readily accessible from the capital, they offered a haven of peace to which he could escape from his bureaucratic duties. His love of nature also turned him into one of the first ecologist rulers in European history. A constant traveller through the countryside of central Castile, he noticed and was concerned by the condition of the forests. ‘One thing I would like to see done,’ he stated to a minister in 1582, ‘is about the conservation of the forests … I fear that those who come after us will have much to complain of if we leave them depleted, and please God we do not see it in our time.’22 Above all, the country represented for him the pleasures of hunting, his principal and lifelong relaxation. All his residences were developed with hunting in mind.
Philip's palace programme was sketched out by 1567, and no new projects were added to it. The impact of his new ideas could be seen in the palace of El Pardo, which he himself had done much to rebuild in the previous decade. Now in 1559 he ordered his architect to remove the entire roofing and have it covered in the Flemish style. For technical reasons nothing could be done until 1562, when the king repeated his decision to re-roof it ‘in the Flanders style’.23 Experts (‘Flemish carpenters’) were brought in from the Netherlands to do it. The rooms of the palace had recently been decorated in the traditional Castilian style. Philip now ordered the entire interior to be redecorated in the Italian manner. Finally, the extensive woods and gardens were put under the direction of a Fleming (‘the Dutchman’). The evocative drawing that Jean Lhermite made of El Pardo at the end of Philip's reign shows to perfection the balance between countryside and palace which the king desired. One can also, in the drawing, just make out the form of the splendid building, a typical example of the marriage between Castilian architecture, Flemish influence and Italian art.
The secretary of works, Pedro de Hoyo, was kept busy with the extensive paperwork. Philip followed every detail with loving care. In one of his reports in May 1562 Hoyo listed prices. ‘I did not think it was so much’ Philip scribbled in the margin. Hoyo: ‘They tell me the orange trees in the Pardo are in splendid condition.’ Philip: ‘I am glad to hear it.’ Hoyo: ‘And that the flowers that are sown in double rows have begun to come out.’ Philip: ‘Tell them to take care when watering.’ Hoyo: ‘Men need to be hired to weed the slopes.’ Philip: ‘This seems fine. But they need to be trustworthy men who will not steal the birds' nests or the eggs.’ Shortly after – this was in Madrid – Philip sent Hoyo a note: ‘Send me by dinner tonight the lists of plants so I can check them against what has come from Flanders.’24
After El Pardo, the building to which Philip dedicated most enthusiasm on his return from Flanders was Valsaín, frequently referred to simply as ‘the Wood (el Bosque)’, in the woods near Segovia. Originally a residence of the fifteenth century, it was modified on the prince's orders in the late 1540s. In the 1550s further works were undertaken to turn it into a small palace. After he returned from the north, Philip paid special attention to the gardens and fountains.25 He drew his own sketches, with comments. ‘The paths have to be broad like what you see here … and the path in the middle has to be as wide as shown here,’ he ordered in 1562.26 When the French ambassador Saint-Sulpice presented his credentials to Philip that year, the king chose Valsaín for the audience. He quickly got the formalities out of the way, and chose to dilate to Saint-Sulpice instead on th
e pleasures of the site. The Flemish engineer Jacques Holbecq was in charge of the water and fountains. The gardener was commissioned to import plants and seeds from Italy and Flanders. In May, excited by the glorious colour of the flowers in bloom, he wrote to Philip that ‘they have never looked so beautiful as now. Your Majesty must come at once to dinner here.’27 The final touches were put to the interior of the palace in the 1570s.
Aranjuez was the site which, after the Escorial, most benefited from the services of Juan Bautista. With Philip's encouragement, the architect and the master of works Juan de Castro laid the basis for a superb residence. One of the king's pet schemes, which he pursued throughout his reign, was to make the river Tajo navigable. At Aranjuez Juan Bautista undertook a prolonged effort of engineering which succeeded in improving transport on part of the river.28 Water for irrigation and watering was an urgent need on this site. Thanks to Juan Bautista, it became possible to transform the entire area of Aranjuez, with a perimeter of nearly twenty-five miles, into a huge garden.