Philip of Spain

by Henry Kamen

  The strong democratic traditions to be found in Spain, and the absence of theories of royal power, might together have produced a down-to-earth, popular monarchy. In practice, foreign observers tended to claim that Philip's monarchy took on the stern appearance of a despotism. A Swiss traveller observed: ‘“We are all kings,” say the Spaniards, but this has not prevented Philip from being the most absolute monarch in the world.’137 It was largely an optical illusion. The king's ‘unlimited’ power was in practice limited by the extensive areas of Spain where the authority of great lords and prelates was, in day-to-day matters such as taxation and justice, greater than his. He could pass few laws without consulting those affected. For money he was heavily dependent on others. Even in matters affecting his own orders, his authority was questioned. In 1577 he ordered the duke of Feria to marry a certain noble lady. The duke refused. ‘Your Majesty cannot make the order,’ he argued, ‘because this is a case affecting honour, and the prince cannot compel a subject to do anything against his own honour.’138 In 1581 the king sent an apparently simple request to a college in Salamanca, asking for confidential papers on an official who had just been appointed to a government council. The college refused. Confidential papers, it argued, were totally confidential. Not even the king could breach their secrecy. ‘To say that Your Majesty is not bound by a precept of natural law, such as that on secrecy, is unacceptable, because the precept binds us all equally.’139 The examples demonstrate cogently that the king's power was not quite what outsiders imagined it to be.

  Like all rulers of Spain, Philip had reason to complain of the famous fueros or liberties of the non-Castilian realms. There were always points of conflict where he found his hands tied, whether in dealing with bandits in Valencia or Moriscos in Aragon. Wherever possible, he cut corners, but none of his differences took the shape of serious opposition to the fueros. He never harboured any intention of touching them. ‘Looked at closely,’ he told the French ambassador in Monzón in 1563, the fueros ‘gave him more liberty than people said. As long as those provinces rendered him fidelity and obedience, he had no wish to innovate there.’140 In 1589 a Carmelite friar in Catalonia, despairing of the disorder and banditry in that province, suggested to Philip that he should abolish the laws of Catalonia and substitute those of Castile. ‘This would perhaps be a good opportunity for Your Majesty to get rid of these laws and put this land in a reasonable state … Your Majesty will know best how to do it, and with more thought it will perhaps be easier than it seems.’141 If Philip ever saw the letter he did not see fit to reply.

  The king's power, in brief, was ‘absolute’ but substantially restricted. A leading legal expert of the time, Castillo de Bobadilla, specified that laws made by the king were not binding if they went against conscience, or faith, or natural law, or accepted laws. The idea of raison d’état, he said, existed only in tyrannies and not in Spain.142 The complex nature of political authority in Spain was ill suited to royal oppression. The king, in any case, had an extraordinary tolerance for those types of dissent which did not threaten to turn into rebellion. When some individuals were arrested for protesting against the increase in taxes in 1575, he ordered their release. ‘The prince of whom subjects complain the least,’ he is reported as saying, ‘is he who gives them most freedom to complain.’143 Criticism of taxes abounded in the later years of his reign, but with one prominent exception (in 1591 in Avila) he appears to have put up with it.

  Despite occasional clashes of interest, Philip did not emphasise royal power at the expense of the liberty of his subjects. In the Castilian countryside, the tranquil advance of local autonomy possibly even worked in the opposite direction: an increase of effective liberty.144

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  Philip shared the premiss, derived from Christian tradition, that private sins affect public morality, and that public morality is carefully watched by God. He was singularly careless of his own sexual sins when younger, although, in other respects, he seems on the evidence to have exhibited correct personal behaviour. In religion, he carried out all his duties faithfully, with the required degree of public piety. He heard mass daily. He went to communion four times a year.145 At no time did he imagine, however, that religious morality could be imposed. When his bishops, full of zeal from their sessions at Trent, attempted in 1565 to put reform of lay morals on their agenda, he warned them firmly to drop the issue. When he was drawn in the 1570s into conflict with the zealous archbishop of Milan, Carlo Borromeo, his confessor Chaves lectured the archbishop that ‘a people cannot be forced into perfection’.146

  Though he felt deeply about religion, not until the later years of the reign did he display signs of religiosity. It is certain that he was not (as his Protestant enemies claimed him to be) a bigot or fanatic in his personal attitudes. His letters to his daughters, written in 1581, virtually exclude religion as a topic. On the other hand, he never ceased to be aware of his personal responsibility as a Catholic ruler. ‘The cause of religion,’ he informed his envoy in France in 1590, ‘has been and is my principal guide in everything I have done and do.’147 But he normally made such statements when he was about to pursue policies which, in the opinion of others, were not primarily serving the cause of religion. This did not prevent him identifying his role as king as the service of God. ‘God's service and mine, which is the same’ is a phrase that recurs throughout his correspondence. It was a stock phrase, not so different from similar appeals to God made by other rulers. By the 1580s, however, as we shall see, the identification of the two became more obsessive. Another of his declarations – that he would rather lose all his realms than compromise on religion – was also a favourite phrase, repeated frequently in the 1560s. He used it to his wife,148 to ambassadors, and to his own officials. His harshest comments relating to religion were reserved for political rebels, the Dutch Calvinists and the French Huguenots. The severity was always over rebellion, rather than over religion.

  He did not admit the principle of toleration to Protestants within his own states, given the bloodshed caused by religious conflict in other nations of Europe. If his subjects in Flanders wanted to worship as Protestants they could do so, but would have to emigrate. ‘To think that a passion so great as this about choice in religion can be resolved by soft means,’ he told the emperor Maximilian in 1570, was ‘a complete illusion’. Soft measures, if adopted, must always be accompanied by the threat of discipline.149 But he had good relations with Protestant states, such as Denmark and Sweden. He had German Protestant troop commanders in the army of Flanders.

  He also, in contrast to the legendary image of a fanatical king, came to accept the inevitability of toleration in specific circumstances. If England were invaded, he decided in 1576, there must be no religious persecution.150 His own previous experience there, and the fact that England was not his direct moral responsibility, may have induced this attitude. But it is significant that some years later he was also able to move towards accepting a form of toleration in the Netherlands. Following the Spanish tradition, he likewise accepted – albeit reluctantly – the need to coexist with Muslims (in Spain) and Jews (in Italy and north Africa) as subjects.

  His confessors, like those of other Catholic rulers, occupied a special place in government. They were always allotted a place on committees where moral questions were on the agenda. They were also consulted continually by the king on a broad range of issues. On all these occasions, they expressed their views by formal vote or in writing. This gave them a constitutional role which somewhat modifies the popular image of the confessor as an uncontrollable secret influence on the king. Philip, moreover, did not actually have to confess to his ‘confessor’. He always had a small group of chaplains to whom he confessed, and when not with them he confessed to any priest he cared to. At San Lorenzo, he confessed to various friars who were not in his team of confessors.151

  In the absence of documentation, it is difficult to prove that confessors were able to influence the king. During his reign the king
had two principal confessors. The first was the Franciscan Bernardo de Fresneda, who served from 1553 till his death in 1577.152 A fat prelate who thrived on political scheming, Fresneda was a mortal enemy of Carranza and possibly influenced Philip's position in that affair. Philip's second important confessor was the ascetic Dominican Diego de Chaves. There is no evidence to suggest that the king's decisions on any matter were the result of special advice from his confessor alone.

  Curiously, Philip showed no special favour to the Jesuits, who were much in evidence both at his court and in Spain generally. He encouraged them in their first phase of expansion in the 1560s. They, in return, gave him invaluable support during the campaign for the Portuguese succession. In the late 1580s, when the order had serious problems with the Inquisition, he seems however to have distanced himself from them, while still keeping up excellent relations with individual Jesuits.

  His most profound personal devotion, which he may have picked up from his governess Estefania de Requesens, was to the Virgin of Montserrat. It encouraged his affection for Catalonia, and motivated several visits to the monastery. Above all, it inspired him to rebuild entirely the church at Montserrat. He also had particular respect for the shrines of the Virgin at Guadalupe, and the Pilar in Saragossa. In moments of special crisis, such as the illness of Don Carlos in 1561, or that of Elizabeth in 1564, he contacted the clergy at these sites to ask for their prayers.

  Precisely from 1580, after the death of Anna, his tendency to religion became more marked. The monks of San Lorenzo noticed it immediately. He also began to rely more on God for political help, if we may judge by his letters. The setting up in 1583 of a committee to clean up the night-life of Madrid was evidence of his greater concern for public morality. He was, even so, not an extremist about such matters. When in 1583 he received denunciations of moral turpitude in the capital, he demurred. No specific cases, he said, had ever been referred to him. Sweeping statements about immorality were too vague, he said: he received such every Sunday from members of the public.153 By the time of the Armada, however, God had been enlisted full time in the cause of religion. Philip even permitted himself to question why (after the disaster) God had abandoned His own cause.

  He never felt any contradiction between his profound Catholic belief and his high-handed actions in respect of the Church. His continuous hostility to aspects of papal policy was inherited from his father.154 It also coincided with a common Spanish distrust of the papacy and of Italians in general. From 1555 he had used troops against the pope. He consistently blocked the entry of all papal decrees into his realms and periodically expelled nuncios. ‘Secular princes,’ he emphasised to his ambassador in Rome in 1578, ‘are not bound to carry out the mandates of the pope in temporal matters.’155 He cited canon lawyers and his own advisers for this conclusion. An unswerving supporter of the spiritual authority of the papacy, he could not brook its refusal to support him blindly. ‘It is intolerable,’ he complained to Granvelle, ‘that because I am the only one who respects the apostolic see, instead of thanking me as they should they make use of it to try and usurp my authority.’ His impatience exploded on paper into little bursts of anger. ‘I am fed up and near the end of my patience, and if it should come to that they will very possibly regret it … There are many other things that I would like to say on this, but it is midnight and I am very tired.’156

  Within Spain Philip felt himself completely free to act as he liked in Church matters. With extensive powers over the nomination of dignitaries and the disposal of Church revenue, he was no less head of his Church than the Protestant rulers of northern Europe were of theirs. When in the 1560s and 1580s he gave his support to reforms within the peninsular Church, he did not hesitate to sanction the use of troops against monasteries and convents. The king had total control over appointment of bishops, but always consulted carefully before naming to sees. He once rejected the nominee of his council. ‘If we make him bishop,’ he asked with a wry irony, ‘which of his two sons will inherit the bishopric?’157

  The king's support for the Inquisition was unswerving. His devotion to it provoked unfounded rumours that he wished to establish it in the Netherlands. Ironically, at the very period that Spain's Inquisition was being attacked by Protestant propaganda in the Netherlands, it was being subjected to criticism within Spain itself. At court, voices questioned the role of the Inquisition in the Carranza case. Philip demonstrated his apparent impartiality by paying for the expenses of the revered canon lawyer, Dr Martín de Azpilcueta, to go to Rome in 1567 and defend the archbishop. Carranza's case dragged on for five more years, largely because of Philip's refusal to let the Inquisition lose face.158 In 1567 in Valencia, and in 1568 in the cities of Murcia and Mallorca, bitter attacks were mounted against the Inquisition.159 The most severe problem was Catalonia, where in July 1569 the tribunal, hard pressed by hostile Catalans but stoutly supported by Philip, succeeded in having the constitutional representatives of the province, the diputats, arrested for heresy. The storm aroused by the case blew over in a few months.

  Criticism of the Holy Office by Italians, Spaniards and others elicited from the king some of his most stubborn defences. He had no doubts in 1569: ‘Had there been no Inquisition there would have been many more heretics, and the country would be in a lamentable state, like others where there is no Inquisition as we have in Spain.’160 It was the only issue on which the king firmly refused to admit any dissenting point of view. His affirmation in October that year to the pope was unwavering: ‘I cannot and must not fail to support the Inquisition, as I shall always do all the days of my life’.161

  ‘In the days of Philip the Second,’ an inquisitor wrote wistfully twenty-five years after the king's death, ‘the Inquisition experienced great felicity.’162 Without doubt, Philip was the tribunal's greatest patron. He obtained from the pope the first regular financing of the Holy Office. He reformed its treasury and personnel. He attended its autos de fe. He sanctioned the establishment of new tribunals, in America and in Galicia. He protected it against all critics, most notably during the events in Saragossa in 1591. But he never added to its powers, never used it to advance his political aims, and when possible stepped in to correct abuses.

  Neither through the Inquisition nor by any other means did the king ever attempt the impossible task of which he has been most frequently accused: isolating Spain from western civilisation. He actively worked to open Spain's frontiers to the best that Europe could offer in art, technology and science.163 There were few effective controls on literary publication, and Spaniards actually published more books in Europe during the last decades of his reign than they had ever done before.164

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  At the centre of a vast monarchy, the king had the unenviable task of trying to make all its segments work in harmony. Charles V and his advisers never attempted to unify the emperor's dominions and had no concept of a centralised policy. Philip, because of his permanent residence there and the initiative which men and money from the peninsula had begun to take in the European world by the 1550s, began to centralise his policy on Spain. The control was primarily Castilian, given the greater weight of Castile in Spain's affairs. It took two forms. On one hand, Castile ruled over overseas territories that were considered to have been won by conquest, and were treated as colonies, suitable for exploitation and settlement: the Canaries and America fell into this category. On the other hand, Castile's king ruled over sovereign territories in Europe which had come his way by inheritance (the Netherlands, for example) or by agreements (Milan). In the colonies, it was difficult to avoid a domineering and rapacious policy. The problem (common to all empires) was that Spaniards also came to adopt the same rapacious attitudes in the free states associated with their monarchy.

  Philip was not a conscious imperialist. He never held or voiced theories about imperial power or status, and never possessed any recognisable principles of empire.165 His court, except in the triumphalist years of the early 1580s, was not imperialist.166 O
ne of his own officials in the 1560s, Fernando Vázquez de Menchaca, published a treatise in which he defined political power as the preserve of the people, and dismissed theories about universal power for kings as a fairy-tale.167 The official attitude remained unchanged throughout the reign.

  A dedicated bureaucrat, Philip's intention was above all to make things function efficiently. He had little patience with men or institutions which impeded this aim. Efficiency could be achieved in three main ways: by getting the correct information on which to base decisions, by having reliable officials (where possible, they should be Castilian officials), and by securing adequate sums of money.

  The information was vital, since he was well aware of his ignorance of the geography and politics of his realms. From the 1560s he began the task of collecting data on the monarchy. Before leaving the Netherlands in 1559, he commissioned the cartographer Jacob van Deventer to draw detailed surveys of ‘all the towns of these provinces’.168 In 1566 he told the viceroy of Naples that ‘since every day there arise matters in which for greater clarity it is necessary to know the distances of the places in that realm, and the rivers and frontiers it has’, a detailed map should be sent to him. In 1575 the viceroy was asked for ‘a survey of that realm, for business that arises here’.169 The same procedure seems to have been followed in all his realms. In 1566 Philip ordered the preparation of a completely new geographic survey of Spain, permitting ‘not a span of land to pass without inspection’.170 The survey, unfortunately, was never completed; what was done ‘is kept by His Majesty in his study’.171 Now preserved in the Escorial, it was the most impressive survey of its kind undertaken in any European state of the sixteenth century. In 1570 he commissioned a Portuguese cosmographer, Francisco Domínguez, to carry out a geographical survey of all New Spain. The following year he appointed an official ‘cosmographer-historian’ for America, Juan López de Velasco.