Tyrone’s rebellion—The English sacking of Cadiz—Philip’s resignation—His last illness and death—Results of his life—Causes of the decadence of the Spanish power

CHAPTER I

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