Philip of Spain

by Henry Kamen

  Though largely cut off from his papers, ‘the Boss’ attempted to continue directing policy. ‘As usual, His Majesty does just what he wants,’ said Moura resignedly in February 1596, ‘no matter how much we lecture him.’31 Infirmities were no obstacle to the king's amazing resistance. In 1595, under the direction of the resourceful Jean Lhermite, an adjustable chair was constructed for his use.32 He would get out of bed directly into the chair, which allowed him both to sit up for desk-work as well as recline completely for sleeping. When necessary he would pass the whole day in the chair, climbing back into bed at night. In February 1596 he and the court celebrated a subdued Carnival (‘the weather was good but the food awful,’ commented Moura)33 in Vaciamadrid. In March he even went hunting at Aranjuez, though with what success we do not know. That month the court moved to Aceca, where the king was taken seriously ill, sparking off in Madrid rumours of his death. Courtiers were tied down in Aceca for two months. In April 1596 the gout ‘increased to such an intensity of pain that his right arm is powerless’.34 By this time his body was beginning to suffer from dropsy, which caused swelling of the abdomen and legs, while provoking a continuous thirst.35 He moved only by means of his wheelchair.

  Philip by this time was firmly decided on the policy of disengagement in the north, both in the Netherlands and in France. In Flanders a plan was drawn up to give the provinces their autonomy under the archduke. Albert would marry the Infanta Isabel, and the two would become joint rulers. Meanwhile the war against Henry IV was pursued with vigour in order to have a firm negotiating position. Spanish forces scored some notable successes on the French frontier, capturing Cambrai, Calais (April 1596) and Amiens. The last of these posed a significant threat to the city of Paris. Henry IV accordingly made a special effort and eventually recovered the city after a six-month siege.

  In mid-May the king felt a bit better and decided to take the court to Toledo, where they stayed for three months. During this sojourn the conflict with England took a dramatic turn. In London the war party in the council favoured a proposal by the earl of Essex, favourite of the queen and patron of Antonio Pérez, for a surprise attack on Spain. On 30 June 1596, a powerful fleet commanded by Lord Howard of Effingham, hero of the Armada, appeared before Cadiz. A local captain estimated there were forty warships and over a hundred smaller vessels.36 The fleet carried 10,000 English soldiers under Essex, and 5,000 Dutch under count Louis of Nassau. A witness described it as ‘the most splendid armada ever seen’.37 Nowhere in Spain was there a comparable fighting force available.

  Some forty large vessels and eighteen galleys were anchored in Cadiz harbour. At 1 p.m. on 1 July the enemy sailed in, taking or destroying all the Spanish vessels. A government official on the spot estimated that 200 ships were burnt.38 Two hours later the men put ashore and occupied the city. The defenders fled, leaving the English and Dutch in unimpeded control of the city for two entire weeks. They left on 16 July, after burning a good part of the town so that, Essex explained, no further armadas could sail from it. Though small, Cadiz was the main Spanish port for trade to America and northern Europe. A symbol of Spain's sea power, its occupation without hindrance for over two weeks was a serious blow to Spanish prestige.

  The humiliation was, seen in perspective, the lowest point to which Spain's honour and reputation could have sunk. As recently as May there had been general jubilation at court when news arrived of the death of Francis Drake (from yellow fever) in the Caribbean. The king had then declared that ‘this good news will help me to get well rapidly’.39 Now the impunity with which the English demonstrated they could take and hold Cadiz shattered the euphoria. Moreover, it was galling that instead of behaving like barbarians they had acted like gentlemen, leaving the churches unprofaned (though they burned many of them) and the women inviolate. ‘The nobles showed us all the courtesy you could wish,’ reported a local priest, ‘but the common soldiers, mainly the Flemings, kept shouting “Hang the pope!” … Not a single woman was forced, not a single person was killed in cold blood, virtually no outrages happened.’40 A Spanish officer confirmed that the English had been ‘very disciplined, without the slightest incident’.41 The king might make gestures of defiance (he ‘seized a candelabrum and with energy declared that he would pawn even that in order to be avenged on the Queen’),42 but the nobles and courtiers were unimpressed and angry. In Burgos a cathedral dignitary referred to the events of Cadiz as the ‘shame of our nation’.43 From Gibraltar a correspondent wrote to one of the royal secretaries that ‘affairs are in a state that demands we speak clearly and utter the truth and declare it to the king and his ministers’.44 The humiliation provoked from the writer Cervantes a sonnet of biting contempt for the impotence of the Spanish. For several years now, everything had gone wrong. Central government had virtually ceased to function during the king's illness. On all sides there was a feeling of dissatisfaction.

  Some political leaders were convinced that policies must be reversed. Instead of retreating everywhere, as the king was doing, it was time to go on the attack. Peace was absolutely necessary, but it must be a peace with honour. The most outspoken proponent of this line was one of Spain's chief naval commanders the Adelantado of Castile, Don Martín de Padilla, count of Sancta Gadea and commander-in-chief of the Atlantic fleet. In a remarkable memoir to the king, drawn up immediately after the sack of Cadiz, he stated:

  I see, Sir, that [other nations] are trying to destroy us, and I say ‘trying’ because they have managed to take Cadiz … If this loss is followed by what we may rightly fear should we not overcome our stupefaction, what respect will men have for Spaniards?

  No power exists that can maintain continuous wars, and even for the greatest monarch it is important to conclude wars rapidly. There will be many who would consider this desirable, saying that the policy we now follow will never end the war and that the expenditure there [Flanders] in men and money is enormous; and that if another cure is not found the patient will soon die…

  Padilla proposed what may be called the ‘final push’ solution. The king should collect all available men and ships and make a final attack on England. Peace would then be attained on Spain's terms, and the reign ‘will with reason be called a Happy and Golden Century’.45 It was a last desperate alternative, a chance to exorcise the ghost of 1588. The ailing Philip took it.

  Padilla was given the responsibility of putting together an Atlantic task force. Such a force was an absolute necessity in order to defend the peninsula against the impressive naval threat mounted by England and was intended also to be used in a retaliatory strike. In September the king sent Padilla a memorandum drawn up by the English Jesuit Robert Persons. The paper outlined the situation in Ireland and suggested an invasion through Cork.46 As it turned out, the real objective was to be France. Philip hoped to exploit the advantage the Spaniards had gained by the capture of Calais in April that year. In October 1596 a fleet of eighty-one large ships, with other smaller vessels, set out under Padilla's command from Lisbon and Coruña. His instructions were to give out that he was heading for Ireland, but he was in reality to make for Brittany and seize Brest.47 A couple of days out to sea, the fleet was caught by a storm in the Channel and scattered. The largest galleon disappeared, with all the wages – 36,000 ducats – it was carrying. Other vessels straggled into northern ports. By the first week of November, Padilla informed the king gloomily from his base at Ferrol, only forty-nine of his eighty-one ships had returned.48

  Neither the king nor the Adelantado gave up hope. By January 1597 Padilla had an adequate force with which to defend the coasts. In July the government asked him to consider two possible targets for a mission. The first was Brest. This would give support to the Spaniards and Mercoeur in Brittany and would also provide an excellent port for use against England. The second possibility was England, more precisely the port of Milford Haven in Wales. When Padilla eventually put out to sea again, it was at the head of a fleet even larger than that of the previous year: some ninety-e
ight vessels, including twenty-four galleons, and over 17,000 men.49 His instructions were to seize the port of Falmouth.50 The ships sailed from Ferrol on 19 September but bad weather made them put into Coruña. They left Coruña eventually on 18 October, but after four days at sea were once again scattered by a storm. Padilla rounded up what ships he could and brought his fleet back to Ferrol. A week later, only thirty-eight ships and three galleons had made it back.51 ‘It was exactly a year ago, to the day, that the last disaster happened,’ he reflected gloomily. Nobody was blamed, for the winds were the work of God. A month later Padilla was busy transporting men to Flanders. He had a word of advice, however, for the king. ‘If Your Majesty decides to continue the attempt on England, take care to make preparations in good time and in good quantity, and if not then it is better to make peace.’52

  In the peninsula, among the common people, there was a palpable economic crisis. The heartland of the peninsula was afflicted in the 1590s by a number of small epidemics.53 Then from 1596 a virulent outbreak of plague began to affect northern Castile. Stragglers from Padilla's fleet who made it to Santander found the city in the grip of an epidemic. In many parts of Andalusia there was no food because of drought. The late 1590s were particularly difficult years: after the harvest failure of 1594, production picked up in 1595 and 1596, but fell again steeply in 1597. In August 1598 the harvest in Castile and Andalusia failed.54 In Castile the tax burden led to protests and demands for the suspension of the millones. Villagers refused to pay. One treasury official suggested reducing the alcabala, because of ‘the shortages at present’. He could vouch for the poverty: ‘I have seen it as someone who has been serving Your Majesty for four years’.55 A petition of 1596, claiming to speak on behalf of the peasants, referred to the realms of Castile as ‘wasted and poor’.56 This time it was not mere hyperbole. ‘For many years now,’ a senior official observed, ‘the harvests have been so poor that there have been famines and suffering for want of bread.’57 Peasants thronged into the capital to seek relief from taxes. The council of Finance presented a memorial to the king on ‘the pitiful sight of so many farmers and villagers coming here to ask for help with their debts’.58 Commenting on the taxes, a canon of Jaén caused a stir in November 1597 when he declared that ‘if we in Spain were governed by a republic as in Genoa or Venice, perhaps there would be no need for all of this’.59 Similar opinions had been expressed over two generations before, during the revolt of the Comuneros.

  On all sides, or so it seemed to the hard-pressed Spaniards, their nation was in retreat. In November 1597 the Constable of Castile and governor of Milan, Juan Fernández de Velasco, reported to Philip that ‘there is a general desire in Italy to expel the Spaniards. Our salvation can only lie in more troops, money and above all speed.’60 But there seemed to be a sort of paralysis at the nerve centre, San Lorenzo. Philip's secretary of war wrote: ‘everything is in such a state that just to see the way things are going takes away one's will to work and serve’.61 Not the least of Spain's problems was the insurmountable debt, a direct result of the cost of war. Philip had suspended payments to creditors in November 1596, but he was obliged to borrow yet more. The result was a further arrangement to clear the debt in November 1597.

  In Portugal, constantly restless under Spanish control, resistance centred on hopes of the return of king Sebastian.62 The king's body had never been reliably identified on the battlefield of Alcazar-el-Kebir. Some remains were brought to Portugal and in December 1582 were solemnly buried, in the presence of Philip II, in the Jeronimite church of the Belem in Lisbon. Among the Portuguese, popular legend refused to believe in the remains and maintained that the king had merely disappeared. He would return after seven years of penitence. From about 1585, accordingly, pseudo-Sebastians began to appear. The myth of the king's return kept alive the hopes of partisans of Antonio of Crato. Other opponents of Spain, in both England and France, lent their support to the story. The most celebrated of the Sebastians was in 1594. A Portuguese priest, Miguel dos Santos, gained the confidence of Anna, illegitimate daughter of Don Juan of Austria, who was living in a convent at Madrigal, south of Valladolid. She was twenty-six at the time. Santos introduced into her household a young pastrycook, whom he later explained was in reality the disappeared king. The two, declared Santos, were destined to marry and bring about the liberation of Jerusalem. The pastrycook, named Gabriel de Espinosa, was an obvious impostor, but he received the powerful support of Antonio of Crato, Antonio Pérez and Henry IV of France. The government treated the case very seriously. In 1595 both Espinosa and Santos were hanged, and Anna confined in a convent. The Portuguese did not give up their desire to find their lost king. In 1598, once again, a Sebastian appeared, this time in Venice.

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  In these last months, Philip turned once again to an issue that had surfaced time and again during his reign: the role of the Jews. The king had, since the 1560s, looked askance at Spaniards of Jewish origin (conversos) and had turned his back on the pleas of exiled Jews to be allowed back to Spain. Despite this, he had tolerated Jews in his realms outside the peninsula, notably in Africa and Italy. Then in December 1590, responding to local pressure, he ordered the expulsion of the tiny Jewish community in Milan, an order he was later to suspend. The expulsion was not carried out till the spring of 1597.63 This apparent move against the Jews was balanced at home by a curious about-turn on a matter affecting conversos.

  There had always been doubt in official circles about the justice of the blood-purity statutes that existed in some Castilian institutions. Philip himself had intervened in cases where conversos were discriminated against on grounds of their Jewish blood. In 1589, for example, he appointed a converso to a post in the cathedral of Sigüenza, and refused to back down when the blood-purity rules were quoted at him.64 The statutes, he decided, must be looked at. He had in the past shown scepticism about their role. When in 1574 a group of nobles attempted to set up a new order of knighthood in which the principle of selection would be purity of blood, he vetoed the plan.65 Around 1590 he gave his support – ‘he has my approval’66 – to a well-known preacher, Father Salucio, who was preparing a study critical of the statutes. But the king seems to have done nothing on the whole subject of blood purity until about 1597. He then set up a special committee, with the Inquisitor-General among its members, to find ways of reforming the statutes.67 It was in 1597 also that he did a clear volte-face on the matter. In 1570 he had firmly refused to nominate a converso priest to a Church post in Toledo but in 1597 he appointed the same man to be bishop of Córdoba.68 The evolution of his views on the issue, greeted with satisfaction by many, accorded with the general demand for change and renovation at the end of the reign.

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  Throughout the early months of 1597 illness kept the king immobile in Madrid. He ventured out only in May, when he went briefly to El Pardo. He then moved on to spend the summer at San Lorenzo. In spite of his infirmities, he went out in his coach hunting. After another severe attack of gout, on 24 August he drew up a final codicil to his testament of 1594.69 In seventeen clauses, it added details to his previous dispositions. He left his keys to Don Cristóbal, with orders that ‘all the papers of my late confessor fray Diego de Chaves, written by him to me or by me to him, be burned’. Chaves, keeper of the king's conscience, had died on 21 June 1592 at the splendid age of ninety. At his death the king had ordered his papers to be collected up,70 but nothing was decided about them. Now the inevitable decision was made. A priceless source for the king's motives and actions was thereby destroyed. From his own personal papers, said the king, ‘documents of importance should be taken to Simancas, and other papers of old matters be burned’. He now also formally authorised his son to sign all state documents in his name. His own signature had sometimes continued to appear on papers, but done with a rubber stamp.

  The worst personal blow was yet to come. Throughout the 1590s one of the greatest comforts to the bedridden king had been the regular letters from Catalin
a, to whom he also continued writing.71 His principal theme was his grandchildren, whom the duchess went on producing. ‘I am delighted with what you tell me about my grandchildren,’ runs a typical passage, ‘and with the little booklet that the duke sent me with portraits of you and the family, although I would be even happier to see both you and them, since they would not fail to give me great pleasure with their mischief.’72 The intervention in France had drawn Savoy into the military operations, which gave father and daughter an excuse to talk about matters other than family. In her perfectly formed handwriting, the duchess wrote brief letters at the rate of about three a fortnight. When necessary, cipher was used. Philip in his turn gave her advice on political matters, but inevitably did not have so much time to write. ‘I admit that I have not written for days, since I have to reply to your letters of 16 May, 23 June, and 11 and 16 July’ (August 1590). ‘I owe you a reply to seven letters of 12, 14, 28 and 30 July, and 3, 9 and 12 August; you must believe that they always give me the greatest pleasure’ (September 1591).73 His letters also got shorter and shorter. The chief obstacle was his gout. He could neither sign state papers nor write in his own hand to his daughter. He was sometimes too ill even to dictate. In May 1591 he managed to dictate ten lines of a letter, and then added, in his own shaky hand, ‘I have left this because I couldn't manage any more’.74 ‘The gout is to blame,’ he excused himself in 1593, ‘that I haven't been able to reply sooner.’75