FOR three hundred years a bitter controversy has raged around the actions of Philip II. of Spain. Until our own times no attempt even had been made to write his life-history from an impartial point of view. He had been alternately deified and execrated, until through the mists of time and prejudice he loomed rather as the permanent embodiment of a system than as an individual man swayed by changing circumstances and controlled by human frailties.

The more recent histories of his reign—the works of English, American, German, and French scholars—have treated their subject with fuller knowledge and broader sympathies, but they have necessarily been to a large extent histories of the great events which convulsed Europe for fifty years at the most critical period of modern times. The space to be occupied by the present work will not admit of this treatment of the subject. The purpose is therefore to consider Philip mainly as a statesman, in relation to the important problems with which he had to deal, rather than to write a connected account of the occurrences of a long reign. It will be necessary for us to try to penetrate the objects he aimed at and the influences, personal and exterior, which ruled him, and to seek the reasons for his failure. For he did fail utterly. In spite of very considerable powers of mind, of a long lifetime of incessant toil, of deep-laid plans, and vast ambitions, his record is one continued series of defeats and disappointments; and in exchange for the greatest heritage that Christendom had ever seen, with the apparently assured prospect of universal domination which opened before him at his birth, he closed his dying eyes upon dominions distracted and ruined beyond all recovery, a bankrupt State, a dwindled prestige, and a defeated cause. He had devoted his life to the task of establishing the universal supremacy of Catholicism in the political interests of Spain, and he was hopelessly beaten.

The reasons for his defeat will be seen in the course of the present work to have been partly personal and partly circumstantial. The causes of both these sets of reasons were laid at periods long anterior to Philip’s birth.

The first of the great misfortunes of Spain was an event which at the time looked full of bright promise, namely, the marriage of Juana, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabel, to Philip of Austria, son of the Emperor Maximilian. This marriage eventually burdened the King of Spain with the German dominions of the House of Austria, the imperial crown, with its suzerainty over Italy, the duchy of Milan, and, above all, the rich inheritance of the House of Burgundy, the Franche ComtÉ, Holland, and the Netherlands. Even before this the crown of Aragon had been weakened rather than strengthened by the possession of Sicily and Naples, which latter brought it into inimical contact with France, and also necessitated the assertion and defence of its rights as a Mediterranean Power in constant rivalry with Turks and Algerians. This had been bad, but the vast and scattered territories of Charles V. cursed Spain with a foreign policy in every corner of Europe. In his Austrian dominions the emperor was the outpost of Christianity against the Turk, the bulwark which restrained the Moslem flood from swamping eastern Europe. His galleys were those which were to keep the Mediterranean a Christian sea. Flanders and the Franche ComtÉ gave him a long flat frontier conterminous with France, whose jealous eyes had been fixed covetously for centuries on the fine harbours and flourishing towns of the Low Countries.

Most of these interests were of very secondary importance to Spain itself. The country had only quite recently been unified; the vast new dominions which had fallen under its sway in America might well have monopolised its activity for centuries to come. The geographical position of the Iberian peninsula itself practically isolated it from the other countries of Europe, and rendered it unnecessary for it to take any part in the discords that prevailed over the rest of the continent; whilst the recent religious struggles with the Moors in Spain had consolidated Catholic Christianity in the country, and prevented the reformed doctrines from obtaining any footing there. Spain indeed, alone and aloof, with a fertile soil, fine harbours, and a well-disposed population, seemed destined to enjoy a career of activity, prosperity, and peace. But the possession of Flanders brought it into constant rivalry with France, and necessitated a close alliance with England, whilst the imperial connection dragged it into ceaseless wars with the Turks, and, above all, with the rising power of Protestantism, which ultimately proved its ruin. Philip, who succeeded to this thorny inheritance, was, on the other hand, bounded and isolated by mental limitations as irremovable as the Pyrenees which shut in his native land. As King of Spain alone, having only local problems to deal with, modest, cautious, painstaking, and just, he might have been a happy and successful—even a great—monarch, but as leader of the conservative forces of Christendom he was in a position for which his gifts unfitted him.

He was the offspring of the marriage of first cousins, both his parents being grandchildren of cunning, avaricious Ferdinand, and of Isabel the Catholic, whose undoubted genius was accompanied by high-strung religious exaltation, which would now be considered neurotic. Her daughter, Juana the Mad, Philip’s grandmother, passed a long lifetime in melancholy torpor. In Charles V. the tainted blood was mingled with the gross appetites and heavy frames of the burly Hapsburgs. The strength and power of resistance inherited from them enabled him, until middle age only, to second his vast mental power with his indomitable bodily energy. But no sooner was the elasticity of early manhood gone than he too sank into despairing lethargy and religious mysticism. Philip’s mother, the Empress Isabel, came from the same stock, and was the offspring of several generations of consanguineous marriages. The curse which afflicted Philip’s progenitors, and was transmitted with augmented horror to his descendants, could not be expected to pass over Philip himself; and the explanation of his attitude towards the political events of his time must often be sought in the hereditary gloom which fell upon him, and in the unshakable belief that he was in some sort a junior partner with Providence, specially destined to link his mundane fortunes with the higher interests of religion. His slow laboriousness, his indomitable patience, his marble serenity, all seem to have been imitated, perhaps unconsciously, from the relentless, resistless action of divine forces.

On the other hand, his inherited characteristics were accentuated by his education and training. From the time of his birth his father was continually at war with infidels and heretics, and the earliest ideas that can have been instilled into his infant mind were that he and his were fighting the Almighty’s battles and destroying His enemies. In his first years he was surrounded by the closest and narrowest devotees, for ever beseeching the divine blessing on the arms of the absent emperor; and when the time came for Philip to receive political instruction from his father, at an age when most boys are frank and confiding, he was ceaselessly told that his great destiny imposed upon him, above all, the supreme duty of self-control, and of listening to all counsellors whilst trusting none. No wonder, then, that Philip, lacking his father’s bodily vigour, grew up secret, crafty, and over-cautious. No wonder that his fervid faith in the divinity of his destiny and the sacredness of his duty kept him uncomplaining amidst calamities that would have crushed men of greater gifts and broader views. No wonder that this sad, slow, distrustful man, with his rigid methods and his mind for microscopic detail, firm in his belief that the Almighty was working through him for His great ends, should have been hopelessly beaten in the fight with nimble adversaries burdened with no fixed convictions or conscientious scruples, who shifted their policy as the circumstances of the moment dictated. Philip thought that he was fittingly performing a divine task by nature’s own methods. He forgot that nature can afford to await results indefinitely, whilst men cannot.

Philip was born at the house of Don Bernardino de Pimentel, near the church of St. Paul in Valladolid, on May 21, 1527. His mother was profoundly impressed with the great destiny awaiting her offspring, and thought that any manifestation of pain or weakness during her labour might detract from the dignity of the occasion. One of her Portuguese ladies, fearing that this effort of self-control on the part of the empress would add to her sufferings, begged her to give natural vent to her feelings. “Silence!” said the empress, “die I may, but wail I will not,” and then she ordered that her face should be hidden from the light, that no involuntary sign of pain should be seen.

In this spirit of self-control and overpowering majesty the weak, sickly baby was reared by his devout mother. Two other boy infants who were born to her died of epilepsy in early childhood, and Philip, her first-born, remained her only son.

In the midst of the rejoicings that heralded his birth news came to Valladolid that the emperor’s Spanish and German troops had assaulted and sacked Rome, and that Pope Clement VII. was surrounded by infuriated soldiery, a prisoner in his own castle of St. Angelo. In the long rivalry which Charles had sustained with the French king, Francis I., who had competed with him for the imperial crown, one of the main factors was the dread of the entire domination of Italy by Spain, by virtue of the suzerainty of the empire over the country. The excitable and unstable pontiff, Clement VII., thought that his own interests were threatened, and made common cause with Francis. The emperor’s troops were commanded by Charles de Montpensier, Duke of Bourbon, who had quarrelled with his own sovereign, and was in arms against him, and he unquestionably exceeded the emperor’s wishes in the capture and sacking of the eternal city, the intention having been to have held the pontiff in check by terror rather than to degrade him in the eyes of the world. Charles made what amends he could for the blunder committed by Bourbon, and at once suspended the rejoicings for the birth of his heir. But the gossips in Valladolid gravely shook their heads, and prophesied that the great emperor’s first-born was destined to be a bane to the papacy in years to come. It will be seen in the course of the present book that during the whole of his life Philip regarded the papacy and the persons of the pontiffs without any superstitious awe, and mainly as instruments in his hands to achieve the great work entrusted to him by Providence.

In April 1528, when Philip was eleven months old, he received the oath of allegiance as heir to the crown from the Cortes of Castile, and from that time until the return of his father to Spain in 1533 the royal infant remained under the care of his mother and one of her Portuguese ladies, DoÑa Leonor de Mascarenhas, to whom Philip in after-life was devotedly attached. He was even then a preternaturally grave and silent child, with a fair pink-and-white skin, fine yellow hair, and full blue lymphatic eyes, rather too close together. It is no uncommon thing for princes to be represented as prodigies, but Philip seems, in truth, to have been really an extraordinary infant, and exhibited great aptitude for certain studies, especially mathematics. Charles on his arrival in Spain decided to give to his heir a separate household and masters who should prepare him for the duties of his future position. A list was made of the principal priestly professors of the Spanish universities, which was gradually reduced by elimination to three names. These were submitted to the empress for her choice, and she selected Dr. Juan Martinez Pedernales (which name = flints, he ingeniously Latinised into Siliceo), a professor of Salamanca, who was appointed tutor to the prince, with a salary of 100,000 maravedis a year. The emperor probably knew little of the character of his son’s tutor. He had intended in the previous year to appoint to the post a really eminent scholar, the famous Viglius, but did not do so. Whatever may have been Siliceo’s virtues, and according to priestly historians they were many, the emperor had subsequently a very poor opinion of the way in which he had performed his duty.

In a private letter from Charles to his son ten years afterwards, to which other reference will be made, the emperor says that “Siliceo has certainly not been the most fitting teacher for you. He has been too desirous of pleasing you. I hope to God that it was not for his own ends”; and again, “He is your chief chaplain, and you confess to him. It would be bad if he was as anxious to please you in matters of your conscience as he has been in your studies.” But Philip evidently liked his tutor, for later he made him Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain. The prince must have been an apt pupil in the studies which most attracted him. He was never a linguist of any proficiency, but could read and write Latin well at quite an early age, and certainly understood French and Italian. But he was a Spaniard of Spaniards, and nothing shows the strict limitations of his capacity more than the clumsiness with which he expressed himself even in his own language, although he frequently criticised and altered the words and expressions employed by his secretaries.

The governor appointed to teach Philip the social duties and exercises fitting to his rank was an honest Spanish gentleman who possessed the full confidence of the emperor—Don Juan de ZuÑiga, Comendador Mayor of Castile. From him he learnt fencing, riding, and warlike exercises, and especially dancing, of which during his youth he was very fond. Don Juan was somewhat uncompromising of speech, and apparently made no attempt to flatter or spoil his pupil, for the emperor in 1543, when Philip was sixteen, warns him that he is to prize Don Juan the more for this quality, and is to follow his advice in all personal and social matters.

At the age of twelve Philip lost his mother, and two years afterwards, in 1541, his political instruction may be said to have commenced. The emperor, although still in the prime of life, was already tired of the world. His great expedition to Algiers, from which he had hoped so much, had brought him nothing but disaster and disappointment, and he arrived in Spain in deep depression. A letter supposed to have been written to him at the time by Philip, full of religious and moral consolation for his trouble, is quoted by Cabrera de Cordoba and subsequent historians; but on the face of it there are few signs of its being the composition of a boy of fourteen, and it is not sufficiently authenticated to be reproduced here. The emperor in any case was delighted with his son. He found him studious, grave, and prudent beyond his years, and during the period that the father and son were together the great statesman devoted a portion of every day to initiate his successor in the intricate task before him. In 1542 Philip was to receive his first lesson in practical warfare, and accompanied the Duke of Alba to defend Perpignan against the French, but he saw no fighting, and on his way back to Castile he received the oath of allegiance of the Aragonese Cortes at Monzon, Philip himself swearing in October at Saragossa to maintain inviolate the tenaciously-held privileges of self-government cherished by the kingdom of Aragon. How he kept his oath will be seen in a subsequent chapter. The tendency of Charles’s policy was in favour of centralisation in the government of Spain, and he several times in writing to his son shows his dislike of the autonomy possessed by the stubborn Aragonese. He had completely crushed popular privileges in his kingdom of Castile, and would have liked to do the same in Aragon. This will probably explain Philip’s eagerness in subsequently seizing upon an excuse to curtail the rights of the northern kingdom. Before this period Charles had conceived another project in favour of the consolidation of Spain. Ferdinand the Catholic, with the papal authority, had seized the Spanish kingdom of Navarre, and added it to his own dominions. Thenceforward the titular sovereigns of Navarre were only tributary princes of France, but they did not lightly put up with their deprivation, and were a constant source of irritation and danger to Spain on the Pyrenean frontier. The design of the emperor was nothing less than to put an end to the feud, by marrying Philip to the heiress of Navarre, Jeanne d’Albret. It is idle to speculate upon the far-reaching results which might have ensued from such a match, but in all probability it would have changed the whole course of modern history. At the time this design was in view (1539) “to extinguish the quarrel of Navarre and tranquillise both our conscience and that of our son,” Philip and Jeanne were twelve years old, and the marriage would doubtless have taken place but for the vigilance of Francis I. To have brought the King of Spain over the Pyrenees as Prince of BÉarn, and the semi-independent sovereign of a large part of the south of France, would have ruined the French monarchy, so poor little Jeanne was married by force to a man she detested, and Philip had to look elsewhere for a bride.

On the occasion of Charles’s own marriage, the dowry from the wealthy royal family of Portugal had provided him at a critical juncture with money to carry on the war with France; and now again, with his exchequer chronically empty, and the demands upon it for warlike purposes more pressing than ever, the emperor sought to tap the rich stream of the Portuguese Indies by wedding his son to Princess Maria, daughter of John III. and of Charles’s sister Catharine, another consanguineous marriage of which we shall see the result later. Before the affair could be concluded the emperor was obliged to leave Spain (May 1543). In July of the previous year Francis I. had fulminated against his old enemy his famous proclamation of war, and to Charles’s troubles with the Protestants of Germany was now added the renewed struggle with France, in which he was to have the assistance of the English king. The emperor’s intercourse with his son during his stay in Spain had convinced him of Philip’s precocity in statesmanship, and so he determined to leave in his hands the regency of Spain in his absence.

This was one of the most important junctures of Philip’s life. He was barely sixteen years old, and was thus early to be entrusted with Charles’s secret system of government, an instruction which left deep marks upon Philip’s own method for the rest of his life. The two letters written by Charles to his son before his departure from Spain are of the utmost importance as providing a key for Philip’s subsequent political action. Although Philip was entrusted with the ultimate decision of all subjects, he was to be guided by some of the most experienced and wisest of Charles’s councillors. First there was the Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo, Tavara, and next the Secretary of State, Francisco de los Cobos, who had been at the emperor’s right hand for so long. The young regent is secretly told by his father that the reason why these two were appointed as his principal councillors was because they were respectively heads of factions, and their rivalry would prevent the prince from falling under the influence of either political party. With merciless scalpel the great emperor lays bare, for the benefit of the lad of sixteen, the faults and failings of the statesmen who are to aid him in the government. He is warned not to trust any of them separately. Their hypocrisy, their greed, their frailties of character, and conduct are pointed out by the worldly-wise ruler to the neophyte; and the moral of it all is that he should listen to the opinions of every one, and especially of rivals, and then decide for himself.

The greatest of the emperor’s Spanish subjects was the Duke of Alba, yet this is how he is sketched for the benefit of Philip. “The Duke of Alba would have liked to be associated with them (i.e. Cardinal Tavara and Cobos), and I do not think that he would have followed either party, but that which best suited his interests. But as it concerns the interior government of the kingdom, in which it is not advisable that grandees should be employed, I would not appoint him, whereat he is much aggrieved. Since he has been near me I have noticed that he aims at great things and is very ambitious, although at first he was so sanctimonious, humble, and modest. Look, my son, how he will act with you, who are younger than I. You must avoid placing him or other grandees very intimately in the interior government, because he and others will exert every means to gain your goodwill, which will afterwards cost you dear. I believe that he will not hesitate to endeavour to tempt you even by means of women, and I beg you most especially to avoid this. In foreign affairs and war make use of him, and respect him, as he is in this the best man we now have in the kingdom.” And so, one by one, the bishops and ministers who were to be Philip’s advisers are dissected for his benefit. The prince was ready enough to learn lessons of distrust, and it afterwards became one of the main principles of his system that only creatures of his own making should be his instruments for the political government of Spain.

Quite as extraordinary as the political instructions were the minute rules of conduct given by the emperor to his son for the regulation of his married life and the continuance of his studies. He is not to consider that he is a man with nothing to learn because he married early, and is left in so great a position, but is to study harder than ever. “If this, my son, be necessary for others, consider how much more necessary is it for you, seeing how many lands you will have to govern, so distant and far apart.... If you wish to enjoy them you must necessarily understand and be understood in them; and nothing is so important for this as the study of languages.” The coming marital relations of the young prince were in somewhat curious terms, left entirely to the guidance of Don Juan de ZuÑiga, and the lessons enforced all through the proud and anxious father’s instructions, were piety, patience, modesty, and distrust. These were Philip’s guiding principles for the rest of his long life. The prince fully answered the expectations of his father. During the next few years, full of stress and storm for the wearying emperor, a close correspondence was kept up between them, and the plans and principles of the father were gradually assimilated by the son.

In November 1543 the Portuguese princess crossed the frontier to marry Philip. She was of the same height and age as her bridegroom, a plump bright little creature; but he was already grave and reserved, short and dapper, but erect and well made, of graceful and pleasant mien. But for all his gravity he was still a boy, and could not resist the temptation of going out in disguise to meet her, and mixing in her train. His coming was probably an open secret, for the princess on the day of his arrival took care to look especially charming in her dress of crimson velvet, and with white feathers in her jaunty satin hat. The meeting took place in a beautiful country house of the Duke of Alba near Salamanca, and on November 15 the wedding procession entered the city itself. All that pomp and popular enthusiasm could do was done to make the marriage feast a merry one. Bulls and cane tourneys, dancing and buffooning, fine garments and fair faces, seemed to presage a happy future for the wedded pair. The bride was Philip’s own choice, for his father had at one time suggested to him Margaret, the daughter of his old enemy Francis, but the prince begged to be allowed to marry one of his own kin and tongue, rather than the daughter of a foe, and the emperor let him have his way.

Little is known of the short married life of the young couple. It only lasted seventeen months, and then, after the birth of the unfortunate Don Carlos, the poor little princess herself died, it was said at the time from imprudently eating a lemon soon after her delivery. The birth of the heir had been hailed with rejoicing by the Spanish people, and the news of the death of the mother caused redoubled sorrow. Philip was already extremely popular with his people. His gravity was truly Spanish; his preference for the Spanish tongue, and his reluctance to marry the French princess, as well as his piety and moderation, had even now gained for him the affection of Spaniards, which for the rest of his life he never lost. His early bereavement was therefore looked upon as a national affliction. For three weeks after the death of his wife the young widower shut himself up in a monastery and gave way to his grief, until his public duties forced him into the world again. The Prince of Orange in his Apology, published in 1581, said that even before Philip had married Maria he had conferred the title of wife upon DoÑa Isabel de Osorio, the sister of the Marquis of Astorga. This has been frequently repeated, and much ungenerous comment founded upon it, strengthened, it is true, to some extent by the fact that subsequently for some years marital relations certainly existed between them. It is, however, in the highest degree improbable that Orange’s assertion was true. In the first place no Spanish churchman would have dared to marry the prince-regent before he was out of his boyhood without the knowledge of the emperor, and the matter is now almost placed beyond doubt by the already-mentioned document, which proves that Philip had pledged his word of honour to his father that he had hitherto kept free of all such entanglements, and would do so in future. Whatever may have been Philip’s faults, he was a good and dutiful son, with a high sense of honour, and it is incredible that he would thus early have been guilty of deceit upon such a subject as this.

Founded upon the statements of so bitter an enemy of Philip’s as Orange, and upon the remarks of the Venetian ambassadors that he was incontinent “nelli piacere delle donne”; that, above all things, he delighted, “nelle donne; delle quali mirabilmente si diletta”; and that “molto ama le donne con le quali spesso si trattiene”—it has been usual to represent Philip as quite a libertine in this respect, and the lies and innuendoes of Antonio Perez have strengthened this view. That Philip was perfectly blameless in his domestic relations it would be folly to assert, but he was an angel in comparison with most of the contemporary monarchs, including his father; and probably few husbands of four successive wives have been more beloved by them than he was, in spite of his cold reserved demeanour. Behind the icy mask indeed there must have been much that was gentle and loving, for those who were nearest to him loved him best; his wives, children, old friends, and servants were devotedly attached to him, even when they disagreed with his actions; and in the rare intervals of his almost incessant toil at the desk no society delighted him so much as that of his children. Charles had on April 24, 1547, won the battle of MÜhlberg, and had for the time utterly crushed the leaders of the Reformation in Germany. The Diet of Augsburg was summoned, and the Declaration of Faith, which it was hoped would reconcile all difficulties, was drawn up. This perhaps was the highest point reached in Charles’s power. Now, if ever, was the time for carrying into effect his dream for assuring to his son the succession to almost universal domination. It had been the intention of Ferdinand the Catholic that Charles, his elder grandson, should succeed to the paternal dominions, the empire and Flanders, whilst Ferdinand the younger should inherit Spain and Naples. Charles, however, arranged otherwise, and made his brother King of the Romans, with the implied succession to the imperial crown on his elder brother’s death. But as Philip’s aptitude for government became more and more apparent to his father, the ambition of the latter to augment the heritage of his son increased. Ferdinand and his son Maximilian clung naturally to the arrangement by which the imperial crown should be secured to them and their descendants, but the emperor determined that as little power and territory as possible should go with it. Upon Philip accordingly the vacant dukedom of Milan was conferred in 1546 by special agreement with Ferdinand, who doubtless thought that it would not be bad for him to have his powerful nephew as prince of a fief of the empire, and so, to a certain extent, subordinate to him. But this was no part of Charles’s plan. Sicily had long been attached to the crown of Aragon, Naples had been added thereto by Ferdinand the Catholic, and now Milan was to be held by the King of Spain. Parma and Piacenza also had just been captured from the papal Farneses by the emperor’s troops (1547), and now Charles conceived an arrangement by which the suzerainty of the empire over Italy should be transferred to Spain, the states of Flanders and Holland secured to the possessor of the Spanish crown, and the emperor consequently left only with his Austrian dominions, poor and isolated, with the great religious question rending them in twain. The transfer of the Italian suzerainty was to be announced later, but Charles secured the consent of his brother to the rest of his projects by promising to guarantee the succession of the imperial crown after the death of Ferdinand to his son, the Archduke Maximilian, who was to marry Charles’s eldest daughter, Maria.

As soon as this had been agreed to, the emperor sent the Duke of Alba to Spain with an able statement of the whole case for Philip’s information, setting forth the new combination and its advantages, and urging the prince to make a progress through the territories which were destined to be his. The voyage was to be a long, and, to a man of Philip’s habits and tastes, not an attractive one. Notwithstanding the emperor’s exhortations years before, he spoke no German or Flemish, and indeed very little of any language but Spanish. He was already of sedentary habits, and feasts and the bustle of state receptions were distasteful to him. But he was a dutiful son, and during all the summer of 1548 the splendid preparations for his voyage kept Castile busy, whilst Maximilian, the heir to the empire, was on his way to Spain to marry the Infanta Maria and assume the regency during Philip’s absence.