PHILIP was left a widower for the third time in 1568, at the age of forty-two, with two children, both girls, by his beloved third wife. With such an empire as his, and with his views of his mission, it was most undesirable that he should be succeeded by a female, and especially one of French extraction, and he had already recognised this by causing some of his young Austrian nephews to be brought up in Spain under his influence. The emperor, however, largely dependent as he was upon the Lutheran princes, could not look quite unmoved at Alba’s barbarities in the ancient patrimony of his House, and became uncomfortably pressing upon the matter at the commencement of Alba’s rule. Philip resented his interference, but thought well to disarm him for the future by marrying the Archduchess Anne, the emperor’s daughter, whom her father had so persistently put forward as a bride for the unfortunate Carlos. The preliminaries were easily arranged. Philip was more than double the bride’s age, and was her uncle, but that mattered nothing. The pope’s dispensation was obtained, and in August 1570 the new consort travelled in state through Flanders to take ship for Spain. The fleet which was to escort the queen was a powerful one, and threw Elizabeth of England into a fever of alarm until it had safely passed. On her way through Antwerp the new queen was appealed to by the sorrowing mother of Horn and Montigny. Her eldest son had fallen on the scaffold, but her second was alive, a prisoner in the castle of Segovia. He had been smiled upon by Philip until Alba’s blow had fallen upon his brother and the rest of the Flemish nobles, and had then suddenly been imprisoned. He was innocent of all offence, said his mother, a loyal subject, and a good Catholic, and she prayed the queen earnestly to plead for her son. Anne arrived at Santander on October 12, 1570, and slowly progressed through Spain to Segovia for the wedding. For two years the tribunal of blood in Flanders had been trying the Flemish nobles for treason in absentia. Bergues had died in semi-arrest, and faithful Renard, the victim of Granvelle’s hate, had also died mysteriously a week after his imprisonment. But Montigny—Florence de Montmorenci—still remained in seclusion in the strong castle of Segovia. Philip was always a stickler for the fulfilment of legal forms, and awaited the result of the trial in Flanders with ill-disguised impatience. At last the decision came, the finding being that which might have been foreseen. Montigny was condemned for treason in defending the action of the Flemish nobles before the king’s secretary. The judgment was submitted to the council—Ruy Gomez, Espinosa, and the rest of the camarilla—who advised that Montigny should be poisoned slowly. But no, the king would have none of that. The law prescribed death by strangulation for the crime, and the law must be carried out. A public execution was out of the question, and the marriage festivities were to be held at Segovia; so Montigny was spirited away to the bleak castle of Simancas, and on the very day (October 1) that Philip arranged the pompous ceremony of the queen’s reception at Segovia he penned an order to the gaoler of Simancas to hand over to the alcalde of the chancery of Valladolid the person of Florence de Montmorenci. Arellano had been an inquisitor at Seville, and was appointed specially to the chancery of Valladolid for the purpose in hand. To him the most minute instructions were given for the execution of Montigny. The priest that was to administer the last consolations to the dying man was named, and at the same time a doctor was instructed to visit the prisoner daily, ostentatiously taking with him from Valladolid the usual medicines for fever. The hour of the night that the alcalde and the executioner were to leave the city and the smallest particulars were set forth for their guidance, but before and above all, no one was to know that Montigny had not died a natural death. His property had been confiscated for his crime, and so, said Philip, he has nothing to leave; but still he may make a will, and dispose of the property, if he will consent to do so, in the form of a man who knows he is dying of a natural illness. He might write to his wife, too, in the same way. The king is careful to repeat that he had been tried and condemned by a legal tribunal, and it was only out of mercy and consideration for his rank that he was to be saved the ignominy of a public execution. The poor creature expressed his thanks for the king’s clemency, avowed his unshaken fidelity to the Catholic Church, and the shameful deed was done in that same round turret room in which the bishop AcuÑa, the leader of the Comuneros, lived for years, before he met a similar fate fifty years previously. Montigny was executed on October 16, whilst Anne was on her way to Segovia. The first favour she asked of her husband was to spare the life of Montigny. Philip replied that he could not have refused to grant her request, but unfortunately the prisoner had died of sickness. Couriers, swifter than the queen, had long ago brought to Philip the tidings of the promise made to Montigny’s mother. Forewarned, forearmed, he doubtless thought, and the hapless Montmorenci’s fate was sealed by his mother’s apparently successful intercession with the queen.

Philip’s fourth wife was a devout, homely, prolific creature, intensely devoted to her husband and children, of whom she bore many, though most of them died in early childhood. “She never leaves her rooms, and her court is like a nunnery,” wrote the French ambassador. All around her was frigid, gloomy etiquette and funereal devotion. As years and disappointments gathered on Philip’s head his religious mysticism deepened. “For God and your Majesty,” was now the current phrase in all addresses to him. He never gave an order—hardly an opinion—without protesting that he had no worldly end in all his acts. It was all for the sake of God, whose instrument he was. For his own part, his life was a constant round of drudgery and devotion. The smallest details of government went through his hands, besides the most trivial regulations with regard to the lives and habits of his subjects. Their dress and furniture were prescribed with closest minuteness, their styles of address, number of servants and horses, their amusements, their funerals, their weddings, their devotions were settled for them by the gloomy recluse whom they rarely saw. Whilst he was busy with such puerilities, affairs of great moment were set aside and delayed, his ambassadors in vain praying for answers to important despatches, his armies turning mutinous for want of money, and his executive ministers through his wide domains alternately despairing and indignant at the tardiness of action which they saw was ruining the cause he championed.

The king’s only relaxations now were the few hours he could spare in the bosom of his family, to which he was devotedly attached, especially to his elder daughter, Isabel. But even in his home life his care for detail was as minute as it was in public affairs. The most unimportant trifle in the dress, management, studies, or play of his children came within his purview. The minutiae of the management of his flower-gardens, the little maladies of his servants, the good-or ill-temper of his dwarfs and jesters did not escape his vigilance. The private and financial affairs of his nobles came as much within his province, almost, as his personal concerns, the furnishing and decoration of his rooms had to be done under his personal supervision, and the vast task of building the stupendous pile of the Escorial on an arid mountain-side, and adorning it with triumphs of art from the master hands of all Christendom, was performed down to the smallest particular under his unwearied guidance. With all his prodigious industry and devotion to duty, it is no wonder that this want of proportion in the importance of things clogged the wheels of the great machine of which he was mainspring, and that the nimble wit of Elizabeth of England and Catharine de Medici foresaw, in ample time to frustrate them, the deep-laid ponderous plans against them which he discussed ad infinitum before adopting. His favourite place for work was at the Escorial, where, said the prior, four times as many despatches were written as in Madrid. As soon as a portion of the edifice could be temporarily roofed in, the monks were installed, and thenceforward Philip passed his happiest moments in the keen, pure air of the Guadarramas, superintending the erection of the mighty monument which forms a fitting emblem of his genius—stupendous in its ambition, gloomy, rigid, and overweighted in its consummation. Here he loved to wander with his wife and children, overlooking the army of workmen who for twenty years were busy at their tasks, to watch the deft hands of the painters and sculptors—Sanchez Coello, the Carducci, Juan de Juanes, the Mudo, Giacomo Trezzo, and a host of others—whom he delighted to honour. As a patron of art in all its forms Philip was a very MÆcenas. He followed his great father in his friendship for Titian, but he went far beyond the emperor in his protection of other artists. Illuminators, miniaturists, and portrait painters were liberally paid and splendidly entertained. The masterpieces of religious art, the cunning workmanship of the Florentine goldsmiths and lapidaries, the marvels of penmanship of the medieval monks, the sculptures of the ancients, were all prized and understood by Philip, as they were by few men of his time. This sad, self-concentrated man, bowed down by his overwhelming mission, tied to the stake of his duty, indeed loved all things beautiful: flowers, and song-birds, sacred music, pictures, and the prattle of little children, a seeming contradiction to his career, but profoundly consistent really, for in the fulfilment of his task he considered himself in some sort divine, and forced to lay aside as an unworthy garment all personal desires and convenience, to suppress all human inclinations. He was a naturally good man, cursed with mental obliquity and a lack of due sense of proportion.

Whilst Alba was pursuing his campaign of blood in the Netherlands, Philip found it necessary once more to struggle for the supremacy of Christianity in the Mediterranean. It has been related how, after the heroic defence of Malta, the Turks and Algerines had been finally driven off with the death of Dragut in 1565. A new sultan, Selim II., had arisen in the following year, and he had determined to leave Spanish interests alone and to concentrate his attacks upon the Venetians, through whom most of the Eastern trade of the Levant passed. Philip’s interests and those of Venice had not usually been identical, as Spain aspired to obtain a share of the oriental commerce, and France and the Venetians had made common cause, more or less openly, with the Turk against Spain. When the republic saw its great colony of Cyprus attacked by the Turks, it consequently appealed in the first place to Pius V. Piala Pasha, the Italian renegade, was already (1569) besieging Nicosia with a great fleet, whilst the Moriscos were yet in arms in Andalucia. The inhabitants of Cyprus were welcoming the infidel, and without prompt and powerful help Cyprus would be lost to Christianity. The pope, at all events, acted promptly, and sent his legate to Philip with proposals for an alliance with the Venetians against the common enemy of their faith. He arrived in Andalucia at the time when the Moriscos had been finally subdued, and entered Seville with Philip. Alba for the moment had crushed out resistance in Flanders, and had not yet aroused the fresh storm by his financial measures. Philip therefore willingly listened to the pope’s proposal, backed energetically, as it was, by the young victor of the Moriscos, Don Juan of Austria, all eager to try his sword against an enemy worthy of his steel; and after three days of devotion and intercession before the bones of St. Ferdinand in Seville, Philip decided to lay aside his unfriendliness with the merchant republic and join it to beat the infidel (spring of 1570).

By the summer Nicosia had fallen, and before Doria’s galleys from Genoa and Colonna’s galleys from the pope could be ready for service, private negotiations were in progress between Venice and the Turks for a separate peace. Here was always the danger for Philip. His Neapolitan and Sicilian possessions, as well as the Balearics and the African settlements, were very open to the Turk, and if the Venetians deserted him, he would have brought upon his own coasts the scourge of Piali and his three hundred sail with a fierce army of janissaries. It was not until the end of 1570, therefore, that Philip was satisfied that the Venetians would stand firm. Philip’s views undoubtedly extended far beyond the recapture of Cyprus for the Venetians. This was the first opportunity that had fallen to him of joining together a really powerful league to crush the strength of Islam in the Mediterranean. Cardinal de Granvelle was in Rome, and at last, through his persuasions, Pius V. regranted to the Spanish king the much-desired privilege of selling the Crusade bulls, and other financial concessions. Pius had also to give way on another point which was very near Philip’s heart, for the king never missed an opportunity of gaining a step forward in his policy of centralisation of power in himself. Undeterred by the ill success of the Aragonese in their protest against the abuses in the civil jurisdiction of the Inquisition, the Catalans had proceeded still further, and had taken the dangerous step of sending an envoy direct to the pope to beg him to put an end to the oppression of the Holy Office, by virtue of an old bull which gave to the pontiff the right to decide in all doubtful cases, and limited the jurisdiction of the Inquisition to matters of faith. The pope dared not go too far in offending Philip, but he went as far as he could, and issued a bull reasserting the right of appeal to Rome in certain cases. Philip did as he had done before, simply prohibited the promulgation of the bull in Spain, and clapped the leaders of the Catalans into the dungeons of the Inquisition. Things had arrived at this stage when Pius had to beg Philip’s aid for the Venetians. Then he was obliged to cede to the king’s instances, and promise not to interfere in any way with the prerogatives of the Spanish crown. The league against Islam was to be a permanent one, and the urgent prayers of Don Juan obtained for him the supreme command of the expedition. He was a fortunate and a dashing young officer, but he was in no sense the great commander that he has often been represented, and the work of organisation of his force on this occasion must be credited mainly to the famous seaman Alvaro de Bazan, Marquis of Santa Cruz; whilst De Granvelle, who had been appointed Viceroy of Naples, was indefatigable in his efforts to collect the resources and men necessary for the struggle. By the summer of 1571, when the Spanish fleet was gathered at Messina, Cyprus had fallen amidst scenes of hellish carnage which aroused the Christian force to fury. The fleet of Venice had suffered much, and notwithstanding the reproaches of the pope for his tardiness in following up the Turks, who were now harrying the Adriatic, it was September 1571 before Don Juan and his combined fleets left Messina. He had 208 galleys, 6 galleasses, and 50 small boats, 29,000 men-at-arms, and 50,000 sailors and rowers. The force was a great one, but it had a great task before it. Piali and Uluch Ali had joined, and had a fleet which had never yet been beaten at sea in the Mediterranean. Time after time the Turks had shown that in a sea-fight they were superior to any power in the world; but this was a holy war. The pope had sent to Don Juan in Naples a blessed banner of blue damask covered with sacred emblems; all the pomp and solemnity that the Church could confer upon an expedition was extended to this; prayers and rogations for its success were sounding through every church in Catholic Christendom, and, above all, the hearts of men, and women too, were aflame with enthusiasm when they saw the fervent zeal of the splendid young prince who was to lead the hosts of Christ against the infidel. Dressed in white velvet and gold, with a crimson scarf across his breast, his fair curls glinting in the sun, he looked, they said in Naples, like a prince of romance, and men, high and low, upon his fleet were ready to go whithersoever he might lead them. Every man on the fleet fasted, confessed, and received remission of his sins, and all felt that they were engaged in a struggle for the Cross. The Turks were still ravaging the Venetian territories, as they had ravaged Corfu, but the experienced commanders of Don Juan’s force were opposed to attacking the dreaded enemy in the open. Better repeat the policy of the past, and lay siege to some fortified place. Doria especially, was for turning back and awaiting the spring. But Don Juan would have no such timid tactics, and decided to attack the Turkish fleet, which, his spies told him, was lying in the bay of Lepanto. He sighted the enemy at daybreak on October 7—Sunday—advancing with flags flying and cymbals clashing; and after giving orders for the fray, Don Juan knelt with all his army before the crucifixes, the whole of the force being solemnly absolved by the Jesuits and other monks, who swarmed on the ships. Then through the fleet in a pinnace the young general sailed, crying out words of exhortation to his men. “Christ is your general!” “The hour for vengeance has come!” “You are come to fight the battle of the Cross, to conquer or to die,” and so forth. There is no space here to describe the battle in detail. The story is a familiar one; how the Turks were swept from the seas and their power on the Mediterranean gone for ever. There was no resisting a force worked up to the pitch of fervour which Don Juan had infused into his. Much of the glory must be given to the cool and timely support afforded at a critical moment by the Marquis of Santa Cruz, but Don Juan, exalted in fervour and enthusiasm, personified the victory; and to him the palms of conquest were awarded. The world rang with adulation of the young hero. The pope forgot his dignity, Titian forgot his ninety-five years, the Christian world forgot prudence and restraint, and talked of conquering anew the empire of Constantine, of which Don Juan was to be the ruler. There was one man, however, who did not move a muscle when he heard the stirring news, and that man was Philip II. He was at vespers when the courier came, but after he read the despatch he said no word until the sacred service was over, and then a solemn Te Deum was sung. But when he wrote to Don Juan it was in no uncertain words. With his views he was of course incapable of personal jealousy, though not of suspicion, and he wrote: “Your conduct undoubtedly was the principal cause of victory. To you, after God, I owe it, and I joyfully recognise this. I am rejoiced that He has deigned to reserve the boon for a man who is so dear to me, and so closely allied in blood, thus to terminate this work, glorious to God and men.”

The next year Pius V. died and the league was loosened. Don Juan, full of vast projects of conquest in Tunis, Constantinople, and elsewhere, with encouragement of Rome and the churchmen, kept his fleet together for two years, always clamouring for money for his great projects. But Philip had his hands full now with Alba’s second struggle in the Netherlands, and had no wish or means for acquiring a great Eastern empire which he could not hold, and he was already looking askance at his brother’s ambitious dreams. The mercantile Venetians too, had justified Philip’s distrustful forebodings and had made a submissive peace with the Turk, who kept Cyprus, and Philip could not fight the Turks alone. But Don Juan was not to be entirely gainsaid. In October 1573 he sailed for Tunis, which he captured, almost without resistance, and then returned to the splendour of Naples, still full of projects for a vast North African Christian empire, of which he hoped to obtain the investiture from the new pope, Gregory XIII. Such ambitious dreams as these had floated through Don Juan’s mind after he had suppressed the Morisco rising in Andalucia; and even then prudent Ruy Gomez, whose pupil he had been, took fright, and warned the prince’s secretary, Juan de Soto, one of his own creatures, that these plans must be nipped in the bud. The prince was over headstrong then, but he had got quite out of leading strings now.

When the king’s orders were sent to him to dismantle Tunis and make it powerless for future harm, he disobeyed the command. He wanted Tunis as strong as possible as his own fortress when he should be the Christian emperor of the East. All this did not please Philip, and he simply cut off the supply of money. Artful De Granvelle too, the Viceroy of Naples, saw which way the tide was setting, and took very good care not to strengthen Don Juan’s new conquest. Within a year Tunis and Goleta were recovered by the Turk, and the 8000 Spaniards left there by Don Juan were slaughtered. Neither Philip nor De Granvelle could or would send any help. Better that the two fortresses should be lost for ever, as they were, than that the king’s base brother should drag him into endless responsibilities with his high-flown schemes.

Don Juan, in fact, was evidently getting out of hand. Ruy Gomez had recently died; Cardinal Espinosa had also gone, and the most influential person with the king now was his famous secretary, Antonio Perez. He was the legitimised son of Charles V.’s old secretary of state, and had been brought up by Ruy Gomez in his household. Young as he was, he was already famous for his extravagance, luxury, and arrogance, which added to the hatred of the nobles of the Alba school against him. He was overpoweringly vain and ambitious, but was facile, clever, and ingratiating, and, above all, had the king’s confidence, which once gained was not lightly withdrawn. Philip, in pursuance of his father’s principle, liked to have about him as ministers men whom he himself had raised from the mire, and whom he could again cast down.

Perez aspired to succeed to Ruy Gomez, and was dismayed to lose so promising a member of his party as Don Juan. He therefore persuaded the king to recall Don Juan’s secretary, Soto, who was blamed for encouraging his young master’s visions; and, to be quite on the safe side, sent in his place as the prince’s prime adviser another pupil and page of Ruy Gomez, also a secretary to the king—Juan de Escobedo—with strict orders that he was to bring Don Juan down from the clouds and again instil into him the shibboleths of the party of diplomacy, chicanery, and peace. With such a mentor surely the young prince could not go wrong, they thought. But Don Juan was stronger than the secretary. Juan de Escobedo was quickly gained over to his ambitious views, more completely than Soto had been, and was soon perfectly crazy to make his master Emperor of the Catholic East.