Philip of Spain

by Henry Kamen

  Eventually the royal party entered Saragossa in the afternoon of 24 February. They were given a rapturous welcome by a city packed with people. The courtiers were fortunate enough to coincide with the celebration of Carnival (3 to 6 March), a festivity that had always pleased the king. ‘All restraints are thrown off during these three days,’ observed Cock of the proceedings, which to his northern temperament seemed licentious. On 10 March the duke of Savoy, Carlo Emanuele, finally arrived from Italy with his escort. The king, accompanied by courtiers and his guards, came out on horseback to meet him, and they rode into the city together at the head of their procession. At 10 p.m., with cardinal Granvelle officiating, Catalina and the duke made their marriage vows.92 ‘The roofs sagged with the weight of the people’ who climbed on them in order to be able to see the celebrations that night.

  The wedding ceremony was held in the cathedral the day after, 11 March.93 The king was dressed in black, with the Fleece round his neck. The duke was in a suit of yellow bordered with pearls, with diamonds set in gold as buttons; over it he wore a black cloak. The bride was dressed in red bordered with gold, pearls and precious stones. The elaborate festivities were followed by a ball which ended at ten o'clock at night. The bride retired to her chamber, and the duke was permitted to enter. The following day, everyone was exhausted. ‘There was silence throughout the palace the whole day until the evening.’94

  It rained almost every day but this did not prevent the holding of balls and tourneys. The swollen river Ebro rose, prompting the courtiers to go out on the bridges to see the swirling water. There were celebrations every night, including a tourney in the house of the duke of Medinaceli which lasted until two in the morning. On 31 March the king held a private ceremony at which the duke of Savoy, the Admiral of Castile, the duke of Medinaceli, and four Italian nobles were received into the order of the Golden Fleece. A tourney in the Admiral's house followed the ceremony. In the morning of 2 April the royal party set out for Barcelona. Before leaving, the king signed letters summoning the Cortes of the realms of Aragon to meet in Monzón in May. Leaving Granvelle, who was seriously ill and remained behind in Saragossa, Castilian nobles drifted back to their estates, and the Aragonese capital lapsed once again into tranquillity. ‘Wherever you go there is only silence’ an ambassador who remained behind complained.95

  It was not a fortunate journey to Barcelona. The duke of Savoy was taken ill. The party made a stop at the famous monasteries of Catalonia: after a night at Poblet they went on to Montserrat. But at Montserrat the Infanta Isabel caught a fever, and the Infante Philip was taken violently ill with vomiting. The king was suffering serious pains from his gout. In the circumstances he decided against a ceremonial entry into the city, on the excuse that he was making a purely private visit to see his daughter off. In the first week of May the whole royal group entered Barcelona quietly and informally. They were met by a storm of protest: it was not every day that a city could greet its king. ‘The city councillors were angry because they felt they had been cheated, the citizens were angry because His Majesty had not entered in triumph, everybody was angry that the guilds had not greeted him/ The city insisted on declaring a week of feasting, during which ‘everything else was dropped and the citizens simply did nothing’.96 The royal party was in no condition to participate. Besides, the duke again fell ill.

  It was five weeks before everybody in the royal party recovered their health. The king could not take part directly in the festivities, but watched from his window. On one of the nights, he and the family ‘after dinner stayed a long time at the windows of the palace overlooking Broad Street, watching with great satisfaction the people as they went by and others who were dancing’.97 He celebrated his fifty-eighth birthday on 21 May. The duke and new duchess of Savoy eventually left on 13 June. The leave-taking at the quayside lasted two hours because Catalina was weeping and unhappy to leave her sister and father. Philip was disconsolate. ‘His sadness was very great, and he had never been seen to express his feelings and affection so openly; with a handkerchief to his face, he poured out a flood of tears.’98 Finally the young couple set sail in the fleet, forty galleys strong, of admiral Gian Andrea Doria.

  The departure of Catalina left Philip deeply unhappy. He took up again the correspondence he had begun in Lisbon, and wrote of ‘the great loneliness in which you leave me’. The day after she left, the king and his party went to stay in a coastal villa in Llobregat. He went out to gaze at the shimmering Mediterranean. ‘I could see all the sea, but you were no longer in the bay.’ ‘You don't need to ask me to forgive you for leaving,’ he responded to the first letter he received from her when she made landfall in Italy. ‘I could not take my leave of you or of the duke in the way I wanted, nor could I say some of the things I was thinking, and so I have put down on this paper those thoughts and others I had afterwards.’ More relaxed, as always, on paper than in person, he now said what he had meant to say at the quayside. He wrote of ‘how much I love you’, and said that ‘the duke and I have to contend over who loves you most’. ‘Here your sister and I cannot stop thinking always of you and missing you very much.’99

  The Infanta for her part was enchanted by her new existence. Life in Turin was uncluttered by the ceremonial which often made the Spanish court tedious. The ambitious young duke was beginning to convert the city into a worthy European capital.100 Catalina could go where she liked, invite whom she liked. Her Spanish chamberlain was scandalised by the informality in Savoy. He complained to Madrid of ‘the meagre household and few attendants that the Infanta has’, and of ‘the social contact here, more informal and familiar than over there’.101 The duke entertained her, and put on parties and plays in her apartments. The new duchess fulfilled her wifely duties and became pregnant immediately.

  From Barcelona the king made his way back to Aragon, for the Cortes at Monzón. The general Cortes opened at the end of June 1585, and the sessions dragged on, through the intense heat of the summer. ‘My duties don't always give me time for all I would like,’ Philip managed to write to Catalina. ‘I am very envious of where you go and what you see’ was his response to her descriptions of the mountains of Piedmont. ‘I would very much more prefer to do the same than to be here.’ Meanwhile a severe epidemic broke out in the area of Monzón and several members of the king's court and chapel were among the hundreds who died. The spate of deaths gave rise to the greatest alarm when on 7 October the king was taken ill again with fever and gout. As a precaution, Philip looked over his testament, and made his confession,102 and prayers were offered for him. Early in November the three realms took the oath to the Infante Philip. By the end of that month, the king was completely well. In deference to his poor health, the final sessions of the Cortes (in December) were held a short distance away at Binefar and were brief. The weather turned cold and it began to snow.

  On 13 December the royal party embarked in boats and sailed down the river Ebro. Musicians played to them as they relaxed. They spent Christmas and the New Year in Tortosa by which time the weather had become sunnier. ‘Those of us who escaped from Monzón are in good health,’ Philip wrote with relief to Catalina.103 On 2 January 1586 they left Tortosa and headed south towards Valencia. The party entered Valencia city on the nineteenth, to a multitudinous welcome. ‘The windows everywhere were full of beautiful girls, whom His Majesty greeted courteously.’104

  Philip was thoroughly relaxed in the pleasant climate of the Mediterranean. He received news of Catalina's pregnancy and assured her that ‘if I could, I would write to you every day out of pleasure’. But ‘there is no lack of lots of business’. He also felt the cold (‘of course, you young people don't feel it as much as we the old do’) but the royal palace in Valencia, with its views and gardens, made up for that.105 For the first few weeks of his stay there he abstained deliberately from work, and alternated leisure with participation in the festivities (Philip thought they were ‘very fine’) put on for the royal party.106 On 2 February the archbishop of V
alencia laid on for the royal family a banquet in which enormous quantities of food and wine were made available. The guests sat down to 1,200 bottles of white wine, twenty-one sheep, nineteen turkeys, ninety-six chickens, eighty-three brace of partridge, forty-one capons, 120 pounds of bacon, and an enormous quantity of other items.107 Vegetables and fish were entirely absent, but fresh fruit was available. The occasion seems not to have had adverse effects on the king.

  On 4 February, a Tuesday, he went to visit the port of Valencia, the Grao, and inspected the sea-wall. He delighted in the views of the fields and countryside. On Thursday, the entire royal party went for a picnic beside the lake of La Albufera. The ladies ventured out in boats and were rowed by local fishermen.108 On Saturday, a bull-run was held; the king watched from a palace window.

  That week an observer commented that Philip had never looked better or more relaxed in ten years.109 He was helped considerably by Isabel, who read him the letters and despatches he had to deal with, adding her suggestions on how they should be answered. Philip even gave her access to the most important papers of state.110 The repose also allowed him time to think. He became even more convinced that England must be dealt with, and did not attempt to disguise the resentment he felt against Elizabeth.111 At the end of 1585, when news first reached him of the treaty of Nonsuch, he realised that a confrontation with England could no longer be avoided. But it took several more weeks of thought and consultation before his options became clear.

  The king left Valencia, somewhat reluctantly, on 27 February 1586. The trip back from Valencia to Castile was uncomfortable. Philip missed the green of the Mediterranean coast, so green ‘that it's unbelievable’. Instead, as they approached Castile they were buffeted, he complained, by ‘much cold and a terrible wind always in our faces’. The hills were covered with snow and it was bitterly cold.112 Whenever they entered a town, the king took care to ride in formally on horseback. The whole royal family wore black, in mourning for Margaret of Parma, who had just died.

  Philip's first care on his return was to see how far, after fourteen months of absence, the building programme had advanced.

  We thought Aranjuez was terrible, at least I did. We were there four days and then came to Madrid, where I found that the building work I had left was in good shape, though not finished as I had wished. I stayed there four more days and came one evening to El Pardo, where much less has been done than I had thought. Then I came here [San Lorenzo] where a great deal has been done.113

  He arrived in San Lorenzo on 26 March and spent Easter there. At the end of May he and the court returned there, to spend the whole summer of 1586.

  Foreign envoys often clung to their own stereotype of the king. The Venetian ambassador said in 1584 that his character made him ‘love retreats and solitude, and flee from nearly every kind of pleasure’.114 The reality could not have been more different. The visit to the eastern realms, faithfully described by Henry Cock, shows us a king who, in spite of his very poor health, enjoyed to the full the tourist pleasures of the Mediterranean. He also (despite the ambassador) disliked solitude. He loved to be surrounded by his children, and hated the separations after they came back to Madrid. ‘I have been lonely without them,’ he told Catalina, ‘which has also brought back the loneliness I feel without you.’ She, however, sent him in April the good news of the birth of her first child, Filippo Emanuele, named after its grandfather. The messenger brought him the letter in Vaciamadrid when he had not yet woken up. ‘It has been for me,’ the king wrote back, ‘the biggest possible satisfaction and I am overjoyed that you have given me my first grandson.’115 He knew, he added jokingly, that she had given birth in Holy Week in order to miss the long, boring religious ceremonies. He wrote to Carlo Emanuele to congratulate him. ‘Let me now guess,’ he wrote, ‘which of us two loves him more, since I love him greatly for being the son of you both.’116

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  Philip was celebrating the feast of Corpus Christi in June 1585 in the Catalan town of Igualada, when he received disturbing news of an insurrection in Naples.117 His informant, sent specially by the viceroy of Naples, was his subsequent biographer Luis Cabrera. The Spaniards had been present in mainland Italy long enough to be feared and distrusted. They considered Italians a difficult people to deal with,118 and many Castilian leaders were uncomfortable about having to be in Italy. Only the defence of the Mediterranean justified their stay. Philip, for his part, took the view that Spain was not an oppressor. Italians, he felt, suffered more under their own nobility than under Spanish tutelage.

  The king had always expressed fears of the ‘excessive number of people’119 in Naples, at that time the world's largest urban conglomeration.120 In May 1585 a serious riot took place in conditions of grain shortage, and a prominent magistrate, Starace, was murdered and ceremonially mutilated. Cabrera, an eyewitness, told the king how the mob ‘drank the blood of the corpse and ate his heart’. The subsequent popular disturbances were harshly put down, hundreds were arrested and thirty-one people were executed. There was a clear danger for Spain. Threats were made against ‘these pigs of Spaniards’, and some of the disaffected even warned the viceroy to ‘keep well in mind what has happened in Flanders’.121

  Portugal, governed by the archduke Albert, also continued to be a cause for concern. There were rumours at court early in 1585 that the king might return to Lisbon; the idea of making it the capital instead of Madrid was not out of the question. Cardinal Granvelle informed the Venetian ambassador ‘that it would be of little use for His Majesty to visit Portugal for a few days only, but that he was ready to advise him to reside there permanently, as a place excellently suited for France, England, Flanders, India and also for commanding the Mediterranean.’ He added that ‘this would be the true way in which to curb the queen of England’.122 In the spring of 1586 Granvelle was still pressing Philip to go to Lisbon, but without success.123

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  The shadow of England, meanwhile, loomed larger. By the beginning of 1585 Philip and his advisers were convinced that the damaging activity of corsairs in the Channel and along the Spanish coast must be checked. To make matters worse, in March the king received information that Francis Drake was being put at the head of a large naval expedition intended to sail to the West Indies and seize the silver fleet before it left American waters. Philip immediately tried to round up enough large vessels to go out and protect the silver shipment. Lacking Spanish vessels, in May 1585 he sent out an order that appropriate foreign ships in peninsular ports be pressed into service for the crown. The order affected German, English and Dutch ships; French vessels were considered too small. The move was interpreted, especially in England, as a hostile act. There was uproar among English merchants; and the government, to placate them, issued letters of reprisal authorising them to seize Spanish vessels to make up for their losses. Philip's action was one normally permitted to governments in cases of emergency. But in this case it had far-reaching consequences.124 Ever careful not to offend England, he had not singled out English ships in any way. In London, however, the embargo decisively alienated merchants, who normally favoured peace with Spain. From now on they backed a hard line, at the same time that they tranquilly continued to trade wherever possible with Spanish exporters. At the end of 1587, at the very moment that Philip's great Armada was poised to strike against England, the king was astonished to hear that in the port of Bilbao ‘the English come and go as if we were at peace with them’.125 The embargo of May 1585 also, unfortunately for Philip, served to confirm English government intentions.

  It gave Elizabeth an excuse for moving on to the offensive. In September 1585, a month after signing the treaty of Nonsuch, she formally authorised the most destructive of Francis Drake's expeditions. Drake had in the years since the incident at San Juan de Ulúa made himself feared in the Caribbean for his piratical attacks on Spanish settlements. Between 1577 and 1580 he capped his achievements by sailing round the globe. He returned to England richly laden with stolen Spanis
h gold, and was knighted by the queen. The big fleet of twenty vessels put at his disposal by Elizabeth in 1585 was obviously financed by the state. He was now no mere pirate, but a national hero. On 14 September Drake sailed from Plymouth. He had to put in at the port of Baiona in Galicia for refitting twelve days later. During the two weeks his vessels stayed in Baiona his conduct was exemplary.126 Such, however, was his reputation that rumours (all false) quickly arose of outrages allegedly committed by his troops. ‘Drake is master of the sea,’ the Venetian ambassador commented from Madrid. ‘No steps are being taken here, not because they do not care, but because of the great deficiency of everything.’127 After its tranquil stay in Galicia the English fleet headed out across the Atlantic to America. On the way, in November, Drake for the first time resorted to force, and plundered in the Cape Verde islands.

  An effective state of war existed. The marquis of Santa Cruz pointed out that Drake's naval attacks had cost the crown four times its current war costs. It now made sense to check a deteriorating situation by striking at England. ‘The policy of defence is not enough,’ a secretary summed up the king's view early in 1587; ‘we need to direct our fire at their own country.’ The whole Spanish system was at issue. A naval expedition was called for: ‘the objective of this Armada is both the security of the Indies and the reconquest of the Netherlands.’128