The king at play
MATEO Vázquez’s dual position as the king’s chaplain and secretary gave him a unique vantage point from which to observe his master’s inner feelings and emotions, and he once reminded a colleague that ‘kings have pleasures and desires just like other men – but with this difference: they have far more power to pursue them than their subjects and vassals. Moreover, just as many things change every day so do those pleasures and desires.’1 Philip’s undoubted ‘power’ makes it all the more remarkable that after he returned to Spain in 1559 he pursued the same pleasures and desires with little variation for the rest of his life.
The compulsive traveller
Although Philip made Madrid his permanent administrative capital in 1561, he spent less than half his life there. He resided in his Aragonese lands for several months in 1563–4 and 1585–6, with a shorter visit in 1592; he toured Andalusia in 1570; and in 1580 he left for Portugal and spent three years away from Madrid. Teofilo Ruiz has stressed in A king travels that these long, slow royal progresses involved immense preparation and lavish urban spectacles that often left the king exhausted, and that each of them was ‘inextricably linked to the exercise and experience of power’.2 At other times the king travelled informally, moving rapidly between his country houses with a small entourage and sometimes alone as he tried to escape the bustle of his court, because ‘tranquillity’, according to a Venetian ambassador in 1565, ‘is His Majesty’s greatest entertainment and relaxation’. ‘Being alone pleases him more than anything’, the ambassador’s successor confirmed in 1571, while the time he spent in his ‘country houses brings infinite contentment to his soul’.3
Four of the king’s country houses could accommodate a considerable entourage: the Pardo (where the king regularly went hunting, especially in the autumn), Aranjuez (where he enjoyed the spectacular gardens each spring); El Bosque de Segovia (also known as Valsaín, which had both excellent hunting and fishing, and was relatively cool in summer); and San Lorenzo el Real de El Escorial, built to fulfil his vow after the victory of St Quentin in 1557 to erect a major monument in honour of the saint on whose feast day the battle had been fought and won (chapter 3). The complex eventually served as dynastic mausoleum, monastery, seminary and library as well as royal palace, and after 1571 Philip resided there for increasingly long periods.
9. Philip’s country retreats. Philip built way-stations roughly half way between Madrid and his principal country houses: Aceca on the way to Toledo; Vaciamadrid on the way to Aranjuez; Torrelodones and Fuenfría on the way to E1 Bosque de Segovia.
So predictable did the king’s movements between his various residences become that someone at his court (some said his wayward son Don Carlos) composed a little book entitled ‘The great and noble travels of King Philip II’ with the same itinerary on every page: ‘from Madrid to the Escorial, from the Escorial to the Pardo, from the Pardo to Aranjuez, from this royal palace back to the capital’.4 The jibe overlooked the amount of work the king managed to transact while he travelled. The entry for 3 October 1572 in the journal kept by his secretary Antonio Gracián reveals that, after a few days at the Escorial, ‘His Majesty left after lunch and we slept at la Despernada [one of the small way stations]’. The next day, ‘A courier arrived at La Despernada with dispatches from Zayas [secretary of state for northern affairs], two from Gaztelu [secretary of the council of the Orders], Antonio Pérez [secretary of state for southern affairs], and Eraso [secretary of the council of the Indies] … Tonight His Majesty arrived at the Pardo and sent a courier with replies’ to all the dispatches. Philip spent the next two days at the Pardo, where he received and returned dispatches from eight ministers before returning to Madrid.5
Creating his network of country houses meant that the king often lived in the middle of building sites – and he did so through choice: in the course of his reign, Philip intervened in more than one hundred architectural projects, reflected in the thousands of orders copied into the eight fat registers of his Ministry of Public Works between 1556 and 1598. Although the king apparently lacked a comprehensive architectural programme for all these projects, in effect he served as his own clerk of works taking an almost endless series of ad hoc decisions that enabled him to keep everything under close personal control.
The lack of a comprehensive programme did not mean a lack of vision. The teaching of his preceptor Honorato Juan, and the careful study of the books by Vitruvius, Serlio and others in his library, each containing splendid illustrations of Italian and Roman buildings, had given the young prince a sound grasp of the principles of architecture; and his travels in Italy, Germany and the Netherlands had introduced him to many distinct architectural styles. All this produced a sublime confidence that he could improve on the plans drawn up by his architects (see plate 20). As soon as he returned to Spain in 1551 he began to issue orders designed to reconfigure the royal palaces of Castile and their gardens ‘in the Flemish style’, with red-brick walls and black-slate roofs surrounded by neat, verdant gardens, streams and lakes; and after his departure from Flanders in 1559 he ordered Granvelle to send slaters and masons from the Netherlands to create Flemish-style buildings; hydraulic engineers to make artificial streams and lakes like those of the Netherlands; and gardeners to tend the plants also brought from the Low Countries.
While still in the Netherlands, the king took another major decision essential to the creation of a uniform ‘Philip II style’. In 1559 he invited Juan Bautista de Toledo, who had worked with Michelangelo on St Peter’s basilica in Rome, to join him in Spain; two years later he declared that ‘from now on, and for the rest of your life, you will be our architect’. The position was new. Philip’s pre-decessors had appointed an individual master of works for each project: henceforth everyone answered to Toledo. The king ordered him to reside at court and ‘make the plans and models that we ask of you for all our works, buildings, and other tasks related to the said office of architect’ and, to this end, Toledo created a special ‘study’ in the Madrid Alcázar where he trained a team of draughtsmen to prepare technical drawings. But the king did not entirely trust Toledo: he made frequent visits to monitor progress. For example, when he returned to Castile in May 1564 after several months in Aragon, Philip did ‘not spend even two days in the same place, instead going with a very small entourage to visit all his palaces around [Madrid] one after the other.’6
Unfortunately for his initiative, the king also appointed Toledo to several additional positions – master of works at the Escorial, Aranjuez, El Pardo and the Madrid Alcázar – and ordered him to prepare technical drawings for these and other projects. Inevitably, Toledo fell behind with his tasks. In 1565 Philip opined that ‘he neglects them out of pure idleness, weakness, and slothfulness, and not out of malice, because when he wants to do something, he knows just how to do it’; but, he added testily, ‘if he does not get on with it, it will not be possible to let him work on so many things’.7 As Toledo fell further behind, the king’s frustration mounted. ‘This is no good at all!’ he exploded. ‘It is no less than an insult that instead of finishing the work, as I had expected and ordered … so far he has not even done the half of it.’ The architect remained unperturbed. ‘Buildings are like plants,’ he crooned: ‘They only grow if they are watered, and the water they need is money.’ This appeased the king somewhat. ‘This is fine philosophy about the lack of money,’ he commented grudgingly as he released more funds.8
The disagreements continued until Toledo’s death in 1567, when Philip made an extraordinary decision: he left vacant the posts of royal architect and of master of works at all the various projects. Instead, he made use of a man with impressive skills as a technical draughtsman but virtually no experience as an architect: Juan de Herrera. In 1563 Philip had appointed Herrera to assist Toledo, and together they prepared plans for work at the alcázares of Madrid, Toledo and Segovia, the Alhambra of Granada, and the Escorial, the boldest and most ambitious expression of the ‘Philip II style’ – and also the only one that survives intact.
The ‘eighth wonder of the world’
At first, the king thought of fulfilling his vow to honour St Lawrence by expanding one of the existing royal convents run by the Jeronimites, the ‘praying order’ in whose house at Yuste his father had found solace. Charles had specified in his testament that he must be buried beside his wife in the royal chapel in Granada, and although a subsequent codicil allowed his son to choose an alternative resting place, so long as it was beside the empress, upon hearing of their father’s death Philip ordered his regent, Juana, to send their father’s corpse to Granada. Probably due to lack of money, Juana failed to do this, and just before leaving the Netherlands Philip ordered her to leave Charles’s remains at Yuste, so that he could personally supervise their re-burial ‘with the authority and respect that we desire’ after his return to Spain. It seems that Philip had already decided on an important change to his plan to honour St Lawrence: the creation of a mausoleum for his family.9
Philip spent eighteen months compiling a shortlist of appropriate sites for the last resting place of his father (and other deceased members of the royal family) in a new convent, to be called ‘St Lawrence of Victory’, and in April 1561 he advised the general of the Jeronimite Order that ‘I intend to return soon to see the sites that I have already visited and discussed, to decide in which of them to start building’. The king made his decision two months later: he would build ‘his’ Jeronimite monastery in the foothills of the Sierra de Guadarrama near the village of El Escorial, some thirty miles north-west of Madrid – far enough away from the capital to ensure it would remain a place of retreat. He asked the general for approval and the latter suggested only one change: instead of ‘St Lawrence of Victory’ the new foundation should be called ‘Royal St Lawrence’. The king agreed.10
In 1562 Philip visited the site twice, accompanied by Toledo, who ‘had already devised the plan of the principal parts of the edifice’: a single structure arranged around twelve patios, perhaps in imitation of the gridiron on which St Lawrence had been martyred. Despite the king’s numerous disputes with both his architect and the leaders of the new monastic community, this design prevailed, giving a distinctive form to one of the largest edifices of its day: a single quadrilateral complex 740 feet by 560 feet (207.20 metres by 156.80 metres), with a modest royal apartment close to the basilica, and surrounded by a walled compound of gardens and fields that eventually measured thirty square miles. Toledo began to supervise the clearing and levelling of the site and on 20 August 1563, a day determined to be astrologically propitious, Philip watched as the first stone of the basilica was laid.
According to Fray Antonio de Villacastín, the monk who oversaw the day-to-day construction, ‘Ever since that day, the work advanced at a furious pace as ordered by King Philip’; but the ‘fury’ soon dissipated because Philip introduced two major changes: adding a seminary to train priests and increasing the monastic community from fifty to one hundred monks. These changes required the construction of an entire additional storey. To make sure that this and other subsequent changes were implemented, Philip gave one of his secretaries ‘the plans of the monastery, in final form’, with instructions to ‘make sure that Juan Bautista [de Toledo] makes copies of them, together with the written annotations, without changing a thing; and he must make multiple copies, because we need three for each floor: one set for the monks, the other for Juan Bautista, and the third set for me. Make sure he makes them this week.’11 The king’s insistence on micromanagement caused serious delays and immense cost overruns. In 1569, Philip issued a sharply worded Instruction that forbade the building contractors to make any change to the plans without his express consent (‘We order that you consult us before each change’) and even removed their freedom to hire site labour: instead, usually working through Juan de Herrera, the king negotiated contracts directly with specialists in the various types of construction required, and then provided them with a copy of the agreed plan as well as specifications down to the sixteenth part of a foot. This unusual system of construction created an assembly line of workers, all following the same protocols, so that Philip could control every aspect of the building process – which explains the visual uniformity that is the most striking feature of the Escorial.12
In 1576, such a ‘great dispute’ developed between the monks and the building contractors that Philip decided to pay a special visit ‘to see it all for himself. To resolve the matter, he first visited the stone quarries to see how they handled the blocks’, and then he returned
to inspect the work on the basilica, observing and assessing how the finished blocks and those still to be finished were handled, and assessing also the time spent on each. He decided it was better and advantageous to bring the blocks from the quarry already finished, because His Majesty worked out that it would save time and money.
After that, according to Villacastín, ‘eighteen cranes were all simultaneously at work, at a cost of 10,000 ducats a month just for the wages of the supervisors and workmen working on the basilica’, until in 1584 the king wept openly as he attended its consecration (see plate 21).13 Thanks to the king’s personal intervention, as Catherine Wilkinson Zerner observed, although ‘many teams of workmen were employed on the building, yet it is impossible to distinguish any differences in handling. The almost perfect uniformity of the technical execution of the Escorial is an amazing accomplishment.’14
Meanwhile, the monastic community came to life. In 1571, the Jeronimites sang Mass for the first time in the new church, with the king watching from a window in his apartment that overlooked the altar. Shortly afterwards, novices from Madrid and monks from the Jeronimite house at Guadalupe arrived ‘in perfect order, two by two, led by two mounted guides’. There followed ‘a sung Mass; and this afternoon, solemn vespers in honour of St Lawrence. His Majesty attended everything.’ ‘You can well imagine’, wrote a royal minister, ‘how happy His Majesty must feel to see everything already in this state.’15
Philip also arranged for the transfer of the bodies of eleven of his relatives from resting places all over Spain to be reburied at the Escorial, and he devoted much thought to erecting suitable funeral effigies in the new basilica. In 1572, he approved a plan for two groups of larger-than-life statues kneeling on either side of the main altar as if they had joined the monks in perpetual prayer, and work began on a group of seven figures in the cenotaph of Charles, including his two sons who had died as infants. Philip probably intended to include his sisters Juana and María in his own family group, but (perhaps in the interests of getting the job done) he reduced each one to just five figures. Just before he died in 1598 he admired the stunning gilded and jewelled bronze statues of his parents and three of his aunts cast by Pompeo Leone and his workshop, and approved the plaster casts of himself and his family (solemnly installed in 1600: see plate 22). As Rosemarie Mulcahy observed, ‘They are arguably the most impressive royal funerary sculpture in European art.’16
The pharaonic splendour of the Escorial impressed everyone. In 1593 John Eliot, an English visitor, thought it ‘the most magnificent palace in all Europe’ and ‘the most beautiful building I have seen in my whole life’. Thirty years later, the Welsh traveller James Howell ‘was yesterday at the Escorial to see the Monastery of Saint Laurence, the eighth wonder of the world’, where he admired ‘the site of the place, the state of the thing, and the symmetry of the structure’. Having considered what might have ‘moved King Philip to waste so much treasure’, Howell reported that ‘there be a hundred monks, and every one hath his man [sc. servant] and his mule, and a multitude of officers; besides there are three libraries there, full of the choicest books for all sciences … To take a view of every room in the house, one must make account to go ten miles.’ It was, he concluded, ‘a world of glorious things that purely ravished me. By this mighty monument, it may be inferred that Philip the Second, though he was a little man, yet had he vast, gigantic thoughts in him to leave such a huge pile for posterity to gaze upon and admire his memory.’17
The cost of realizing the king’s ‘vast, gigantic thoughts’ at the Escorial was stunning. Looking back, Villacastín estimated that over the thirty-five years of construction, the king had spent 6.5 million ducats: more than the entire revenue of Castile for one year. Jehan Lhermite, the royal valet to whom Villacastín provided this detailed estimate, noted that ‘popular opinion holds this valuation to be somewhat short, and certainly different methods have been used to make estimates’ so that ‘some say it cost 14 million’. Lhermite himself thought that ‘taking everything into account, and taking it as a whole, the cost may have risen to 9 or 10 million’ – and promptly added ‘I have heard that His Majesty himself does not want anyone to know for sure the precise expenditure’.18
In their estimates of the ‘precise expenditure’ of constructing such a vast edifice in such a short time, Howell, Villacastín and Lhermite all forgot the ‘opportunity costs’: the hours that Philip spent on the project instead of on other matters. Consider his response to a letter from the prior of San Lorenzo in November 1571: after stating the need for another preacher, and requesting that the king resolve an architectural dilemma in the sacristy, the prior announced that ‘today we expelled one of the novices who came from the convent of St Bartholomew because …’ The half-line of text giving the reason for the ‘expulsion’ has been neatly excised with scissors. Just in case the secretary charged with responding to the prior should think this odd, the king wrote in the margin: ‘This is fine: I cut out the rest.’19 Presumably the novice – one of those whose arrival had so stirred the king’s heart on St Lawrence’s Day a few months earlier – had been caught committing some serious offence, such as sodomy, and the king wanted to erase all mention of it in order to avoid polluting both the file and the enterprise (see plate 23).
The document which the king cut (a dramatic and apparently unique step) was just one of thousands of letters concerning the monastery that reached his desk, and almost all required a royal decision. In addition, contrary to his normal practice of transacting all business in writing, the king made many decisions concerning San Lorenzo only after a personal visit that involved extensive consultation with those carrying out his orders. Thus in June 1575 one of the monks noted that the king came to ‘his convent’ because ‘he still had many important matters to resolve’ – but by this he did not mean winning the war in the Netherlands, defending the Mediterranean or anticipating the impact of the Decree of Bankruptcy (the things that most of his contemporaries would have rated as the ‘important matters’ in 1575) – but rather arguments with the prior, Villacastín and the contractors, who ‘decided nothing without the approval of His Majesty’.20 Where the Escorial was concerned, the king neglected nothing. To decide which design would be best for the stalls in the choir, the king paid for a ‘model of the stalls’ to be brought all the way to Badajoz, where he then resided, so he could personally inspect and approve the design (1580). He even spent time deciding where the toilets should be situated: ‘I wonder whether bad smells from the toilets will emanate from these holes: to help me make up my mind about this, I would like to see the plan of the water conduits,’ the king wrote. Nor did Philip consider only the royal apartments: ‘Let these toilets be constructed so that they do not cause the quarters of the kitchen staff to smell.’21 One wonders how many other rulers of the day found time to worry whether the kitchen staff would be able to smell excrement.
Philip spent almost as much time on the creation of his gardens as on building his palaces and, indeed, one of the Jeronimites at the Escorial suspected that the king tried to ensure that buildings and gardens proceeded at the same pace. Philip’s characteristic holograph rescript on a letter from his minister of public works – one of hundreds that survive – reveals not only his passionate interest in birds and gardens but also the same excitement and enthusiasm for ‘anything outdoors’ that he had displayed as a boy (chapter 1).
Find out how the pheasants are doing at the Casa de Campo and if anything more is needed for them, and if it would be better to let them all free at once, or only some of them, or whether we should keep them cooped up. Let me know about this, and tell me whether they have started building any of the walls at the Pardo, and how work there is getting on. And write to Aranjuez and ask them about the buildings there and about the hedges, and whether they can hear the pheasants there …
Here, too, he wanted to imitate what he had seen in his travels outside Spain. He sent gardeners as well as architects to northern Europe for inspiration, and when his chief gardener died Philip made haste to secure the ‘plans and paintings of the orchards and fountains, and of the gardens in France, England and the Netherlands and elsewhere, and the other things that I made him do’.22
Not everything came from abroad. In 1561, Philip told his minister of public works: ‘I want some myrtles to be brought immediately from Valencia to be planted here this year, and also some trees that are said to grow there called locust trees, which are very beautiful’. The minister must not only arrange for their delivery but also hire an experienced gardener to plant them, and ‘find out where we can find orange trees for the Pardo’.23 The king bought in bulk, so that by the time of his death the gardens in Aranjuez boasted almost 223,000 trees, all of them planted under his personal supervision. According to Catherine Wilkinson Zerner, ‘Aranjuez was the largest domesticated landscape before Versailles, and its design was unique.’24
Philip was a keen fisherman, in both rivers and ponds, and he normally took steps to ensure he would get a good catch. First, he eliminated all competition with draconian legislation: anyone caught fishing in the royal ponds would receive one hundred lashes for the first offence and would be sent to the galleys for the second. Then he cheated. One day in 1566 he gave orders that ‘in case I am free to go to the Pardo … lower the water level in the small pond tonight so that it will already be lower tomorrow and I can fish there if I want’. A few years later, he adopted the same technique when he and some of his courtiers wanted ‘to fish in the large pond at la Fresneda’, near the Escorial: one of his engineers ‘lowered the water in the pond’ and ‘they caught many fish’.25 Against such an unscrupulous and determined angler, the royal fish had no chance.
More exotically, Philip created two zoos. One at the Casa de Campo boasted elephants, rhinoceros and lions – but security proved less than perfect: in 1563 a lioness escaped and almost mauled a courtier to death while the royal family looked on helplessly from their coach. The smaller royal zoo at Aranjuez started with four camels, brought to the palace from Africa. Since they proved useful as beasts of burden on construction sites, they were encouraged to breed and by 1600 there were about forty of them. In 1584 the king added ostriches from Africa and, to avoid making a mistake in the design of the Ostrich House, he ordered two different designs: ‘one suitable just for ostriches, which will cost 500 ducats, and the other also suitable for other sorts of birds, costing 3,000 ducats’. Philip chose the cheaper one, but this proved to be a false economy: one day a ‘wild ostrich’ escaped and attacked a gardener, injuring him so severely that he was off work for several weeks.26
Patron of arts and sciences
Philip was an avid collector of artistic treasures. By the time of his death he owned a hoard of over 5,000 coins and medals, all in special cabinets; he possessed jewels and works of art in silver and gold; he had 137 astrolabes and watches; he accumulated musical instruments, trinkets, precious stones and 113 statues of famous people in bronze and marble. The size of these collections, like his 7,422 relics (chapter 5), suggests an obsession with acquiring things; but Philip had a genuine and almost inexhaustible curiosity. Thus in 1583 he made a special visit to Segovia ‘to see that excellent machine for minting coins, invented by the Archduke of Austria’ just installed there. Four years later, when Jehan Lhermite arrived from Antwerp with a pair of skates, the king arranged for a skating display on the frozen lake at the Casa de Campo and took his children out in a warm coach to watch. Afterwards he summoned the new arrival to approach ‘because he wanted to examine close up one of my skates, which I showed him’. Since the ice continued for three more weeks, the royal party turned out several times to watch Lhermite execute ‘three or four audacious pirouettes on the middle of the ice’.27
The king employed another Fleming, Francis Holbeek, ‘who was in charge of distilling perfumed water’ at the palace of Aranjuez, to create a botanical garden from which to produce ‘quintessences’ capable of curing human ailments, according to the teachings attributed to Ramon Llull (Philip systematically collected copies of Llull’s works for the Escorial library). The project was in full swing by 1569 when Francisco Franco, professor of medicine at the university of Seville, praised the king for sending ‘a diligent herbalist throughout Andalusia with a catalogue of herbs, searching for specimens of each one to take to Aranjuez’, where ‘His Majesty created large gardens for all sorts of plants with medicinal properties’.28 The next year Philip extended his search, ordering Francisco Hernández, his protomédico (chief health official), to sail to America and seek out plants for medicinal uses. Over the next seven years Hernández recorded some 3,000 flora, of which more than 800 were carefully pressed and sent back to the king to be bound into volumes, together with drawings and a commentary.
Philip had an ulterior motive for creating these medical herb gardens and collecting American flora. In 1585 work began at the Escorial on constructing a complex of ‘seven or eight rooms’ with special chimneys and furnaces to serve as a laboratory ‘where you could see strange ways of distilling and new types of stills, some of metal and others of glass, in which they carried out a thousand tests’. Some 400 glass stills arrived in 1588 (with another hundred in case of breakages), many of them linked to the brass ‘philosopher’s tower’, almost seven metres high, capable of producing up to ninety kilograms of ‘quintessences’ per day (see plate 24).29
Philip was curious about many other aspects of the natural world. When in 1562 the construction of the Pardo palace was held up for lack of water, he accepted the services of a diviner (zahorí): a Morisco ‘boy of about eight’ who claimed he could detect water ‘beneath the ground, whether it was deep or just beneath the surface, but that he could only “see” on days of bright sun’. Philip instructed the boy to put his skills to work ‘on the first day with bright sun’ – and decided to go and watch him: ‘I would like you to bring the boy who divines today, because it seems it will be sunny.’ When the boy’s prediction led to the discovery of water twenty-four feet beneath the surface, Philip sent him to work at the Escorial.30
The king also encouraged other forms of scientific learning that today enjoy higher repute. Printing presses in several Spanish cities published 74 editions and 57 reprints of scientific treatises between 1561 and 1610 (compared with 65 and 40, respectively, between 1521 and 1560). Some works, like José de Acosta’s Natural and moral history of the Indies, first printed in Latin at Salamanca in 1589, achieved great commercial success both in Spain and abroad, but most publications depended on a royal subsidy. It is hard to see how any printer could have afforded to publish Pedro Ambrosio Ondériz’s handsomely illustrated translation of Books XI and XII of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry in 1585 without a royal subvention of 700 ducats; while a royal gift of 300 ducats proved crucial in allowing Don Diego de Zúñiga to publish in 1584 his Commentaries on the Book of Job in Latin, the only unequivocal endorsement of Copernicus’s heliocentric view to appear in early modern Spain.31
Philip also subsidized many non-scientific writers, especially those who lionized his own family – the poet Juan Rufo received a subsidy of 500 ducats towards the cost of publishing his Austriada, an epic poem about Don John of Austria – and those who dedicated their work to him, but the largest payments went to those who worked on religious projects of which he approved. Above all, he provided the Plantin Press of Antwerp with over 10,000 ducats towards the cost of printing the eight-volume Biblia regia (see plates 15 and 16) and he paid for the publication in Rome of the three-volume in-folio Explanations of Ezekiel and of the city and temple of Jerusalem. In 1590 the king granted an audience to the two authors of this ambitious work, full of lavish engravings that showed how Solomon’s Temple might have looked, and after insisting on some design changes he granted them 8,000 ducats for the engraving and printing of 2,000 copies (although he saw this as an advance on future sales, believing that ‘my treasury will recoup whatever we spend now on this venture’).32
Philip’s curiosity led him to initiate several projects designed to improve his knowledge of the kingdoms over which he ruled. Shortly before he returned to Spain in 1559, Philip commissioned the Flemish cartographer Jacob van Deventer ‘to visit, measure and draw all the towns of these [Netherlands] provinces, with the rivers and villages adjoining, likewise the frontier crossings and passes. The whole work is to be made into a book containing a panorama of each province, followed by a representation of each individual town.’33 By the time van Deventer died in 1575, he had completed over 250 bird’s-eye plans. His survey constitutes a unique cartographic achievement: no other region in the sixteenth century can boast a series of town plans of similar accuracy, uniformity and precision. While van Deventer toiled in the Netherlands, Philip invited another Flemish cartographer, Anton van den Wyngaerde (Antonio de las Viñas), to undertake a similar survey of Spanish towns. Wyngaerde’s technique was somewhat different, for he worked from a slight elevation and in panoramic format, rather than from bird’s-eye perspective; but the record was just as impressive. Finished views of fifty-six Spanish cities by Wyngaerde exist, together with preparatory sketches for several more.
To set beside these urban images in 1566 Philip commissioned the necessary surveys to create a map of the Iberian Peninsula on an unprecedented scale. A team of experts led first by Pedro de Esquivel, professor of mathematics at the Complutense University, and then by Juan López de Velasco, ‘royal cosmographer’, worked on the project; and although it was never published, the team produced an atlas containing an overall map of the peninsula, together with twenty detailed regional maps on a scale of 1:430,000, similar to that of standard aeronautical charts today and by far the largest European maps of their day to be based on a detailed ground survey.
Philip also commissioned a series of questionnaires, later known as the Relaciones topográficas, sent out in the 1570s to every settlement in Castile requiring information about its geography, history, economy, population and ‘antiquities’ as a prelude to writing a detailed ‘description and history’ of the kingdom. The king added a letter explaining that he needed each community to complete the questionnaire ‘because if we were to send a person to compile the necessary information, it could not be accomplished with the speed that we would like to see in this venture’.34 López de Velasco initiated a similar operation in America. He sent out questionnaires in the king’s name to communities in both New Spain and Peru, asking who had discovered and colonized each location. What was its climate, landscape and population (and how had it changed over time and why)? Which native peoples lived there, how did they live and what did they eat? What buildings, secular and ecclesiastical, existed? López de Velasco also asked for maps – although here he miscalculated, because many colonial communities lacked a Spanish cartographer and so sent back a map drawn by an indigenous artist who used the traditional conventions.
The king sent all the results of these various projects to the Escorial in the hope that, on top of its other functions, it would become a research centre. His foundation charter of 1567 envisaged a college for twenty-four students in theology and arts, and a seminary for thirty ordinands. In addition, ‘I have given orders to collect a good number of books’ in the monastic library, he explained as he asked one of his ambassadors to purchase certain volumes, because ‘it is one of the principal source of memories that we can leave, both for the special benefit of the monks who will live in this convent and for all the scholars who will come here and read them’.35 By the time of his death, the monastery library contained 14,000 volumes (including those acquired by Calvete de Estrella).
Philip created a research centre in Madrid, too. On Christmas Day 1582, ‘desiring the benefit of our vassals, and that our kingdoms should possess some experts proficient in mathematics, architecture and related forms of knowledge’, Philip appointed three founding professors to a new academy of mathematics in the capital. One of them, Juan Bautista Lavaña, a Portuguese cartographer, would receive 400 ducats a year ‘to work and study in our court, where he will take charge of cosmography, geography and topography, and read mathematics’. All three scholars reported directly to Juan de Herrera, who signed a certificate confirming that they had performed their work satisfactorily and so could collect their generous salary – considerably more than that of any university professor. This was deliberate. In 1584 Herrera published his Instructions for the new academy, which stressed two points: its exalted clientele and its elitist philosophy. The professors must give public lectures in Castilian (not Latin) each morning in the patio of the Alcázar primarily
so that the nobles in the palace and court of His Majesty should be instructed in courtly speech and manners so that, by the time they leave for the wars or for an administrative posting, they will have a laudable and virtuous career on which to spend their time rather than fall, for lack of conversational skills and enthusiasm, into pointless pursuits and the faults that grow from youthful idleness.
In short, the academy aimed to groom administrators fit for the king’s service.36
A day in the life
These myriad interests, combined with his amazing dedication to work and prayer, must lead any reader to wonder how Philip managed to accomplish so much. Like all humans, his days contained only twenty-four hours and his weeks only seven days, and whether he resided in Madrid, Lisbon or in one of his country houses he followed much the same routine. He normally slept alone until 8 a.m. – and did not rise before then: ‘See to it that until eight o’clock there is no hammering or great noise,’ he told his minister of works one evening. After his barbers had shaved him and his gentlemen of the bedchamber had dressed him, the king began work by signing the papers prepared by his secretaries the previous day. ‘I am now signing what has arrived, because that always comes first,’ he once observed. This activity could consume much time: one morning he complained that among his various accomplishments ‘the least has been to sign almost four hundred letters’.37 Next, the king went to ‘hear Mass and explain his affairs to God’. According to Fray Pablo de Mendoza, who in 1583 proposed a detailed daily schedule for the king, ‘in this you might spend an hour and a half’.38 After that, Philip either gave audiences (when in Madrid) or worked on his papers until 11 a.m., when he ate the first of his two daily meals, usually alone. Then he took a siesta while his ministers worked, and then began the main work of the day, with valets bringing to the king’s desk a stream of consultas from his councils, and also the memorials and letters ‘to be placed in the king’s hands’, for Philip to read and then write his decision. We know the king was right-handed because whenever arthritis afflicted his right hand or wrist he complained that he could not sign anything; we also know that his weakening eyesight sometimes reduced his ability to work by candlelight. He frequently complained about this: ‘It is already late and at this hour my eyes are in such a state that I can hardly see’; or ‘I have neither time nor eyesight, which is very poor at night’; or ‘I am writing with my eyes half shut’.39
By 1580, the use of a stamp with his signature circumvented the weakness in his wrist, and his sight received unexpected relief from England, which boasted an active lens-crafting industry. Secretary of State Gabriel de Zayas begged a Spanish merchant living in London to send him a pair of spectacles because ‘although I (praise God) do not need them, I would like to help the duke of Alba and other colleagues who use them’. Before long, Philip himself was wearing reading glasses to work – although he refrained from doing so in public: ‘My sight is not as good as it used to be for reading in a coach,’ he admitted in 1586, but ‘I am ashamed to wear glasses outside’.40
Better clocks formed another artificial aid to efficiency. Lhermite provided a detailed description of the two clocks that ‘His Majesty normally used in his apartment’. One came equipped with chimes, and both with oil lamps so that they acted ‘like night lights instead of candles’ and ‘His Majesty made use of no other light than that of these two lamps when he needed to read his papers’. They ‘gave an unusual and powerful impression,’ Lhermite continued:
One might say that there was no other object or item of furniture that the king valued more, or that he liked more, or that he got more use from than these two machines, which he kept before his eyes day and night. In summary, we could say they completely controlled the life of the good king, because they regulated and measured his life, dividing it by the minute, determining his daily actions and occupations [see plate 25].41
When the weather was fine, Philip sometimes escaped the tyranny of his clocks – although seldom his paperwork: ‘So far I have been unable to finish with these devils, my papers, and I still have some left to read tonight, even though I am taking some with me to read in the country, which is where I am going right now,’ he announced to his secretary one day in spring 1577.42 Occasionally he dropped everything in order to relax outdoors. In the first years of his reign, in the Netherlands, he hunted birds in Brussels (‘we used dark lanterns to drive the magpies into nets, and before night fell we had killed fourteen of them’) and he hunted game in the palace of his aunt Mary at Binche (‘which is a great place for it, and also for the benefit brought by exercise and the open air to my health’).43 After his return to Spain, Philip continued for some years to take part in jousts and tournaments, and even in his fifties he still travelled and hunted on horseback. His ministers sometimes felt resentment when their master relaxed. For example, at El Bosque de Segovia in 1576, Mateo Vázquez included an implicit reproach in a note about the matters that had arisen ‘since Your Majesty left to go fishing’; but Philip paid no attention. He later informed Vázquez that ‘because I have arranged to go on an outing with the queen, I won’t need you today’.44
The king enjoyed watching spectacles, especially with his family. In 1584, at the Escorial for Corpus Christi, Philip and his children spent three hours watching ‘a play about the conversion of St Pelagia’, and a decade later, in Madrid just before Lent, they watched two Italian acrobats on a high wire stretched in front of the Alcázar, dancing and performing in time to music ‘making everyone laugh’. The king also enjoyed bullfights, for example attending the five days of corridas held in Lisbon in 1582 to celebrate the defeat of a French attack on the Azores, and describing the finer points in a letter to his daughters.45 In 1586 he looked forward to attending an auto-de-fé in Toledo, explaining to his secretary that ‘It’s really something if you have not seen one before’; and although he was disappointed on this occasion, he was lucky five years later when he visited the city and took his children to watch the spectacle. His only regret, he wrote to his daughter Catalina in distant Turin, was that ‘you have never seen one’.46
Indoors, Philip’s principal source of relaxation since he was a boy seems to have been jesters, buffoons and dwarves. Apart from Perejón (chapter 1), the best known is Magdalena Ruiz, who entered royal service in 1568 and died at the Escorial in 1605. Magdalena had epileptic seizures, got drunk, and over-ate (especially strawberries) until she was sick. Whenever she appeared in public the crowd chanted ‘Whip her, whip her’, hoping to provoke or frighten her. The king took her with him to Portugal and filled the letters he wrote to his daughters with accounts of her deeds and defects. ‘Magdalena is very angry with me,’ he told them in 1581, ‘and says she wants to leave and that we are trying to kill her; but tomorrow I think she will have forgotten all about it.’ She could be rude as well as angry: after taking a short trip in 1584, Philip reported that ‘I rode out on horseback but returned in my carriage, and because I did not ride back, Magdalena told me that I wanted to go back to being a baby’.47 The frequency with which Magdalena appears in the king’s letters to his children suggests that he saw her every day.
Once reunited with his paperwork, Philip normally worked until 9 p.m., when he ate dinner (almost always alone) – although he usually took a short stroll first. One day in 1578, he confessed (in writing, naturally) to Vázquez ‘I have been very careless today’ because his valets had brought him two files and ‘I put them on a desk where I had other papers, so that I could see them later, but because I had many audiences, and the rest of the files that I gave you, and lots of other papers that I signed earlier, I forgot about them – so that even though we spoke this evening … I did not remember them until now, when it is already nine o’clock’. But then the king had a stroke of luck: ‘Having just asked for dinner [to be served], while taking a stroll, and walking near the desk, I happened to see them and read them.’ When dealing with matters that he felt could not wait, the king might delay his dinner for an hour or more. ‘It’s ten o’clock and I have not dined or lifted my head all day,’ he complained to Vázquez in 1588 as he wrestled with Armada business, ‘as you will see by the size of the file’ he was returning; but ‘now I have neither eyes nor concentration’ and so ‘send the rest back to me tomorrow’.48
His meals, when they came, were abundant but monotonous. Every day at lunch and dinner Philip could choose from fried or roast chicken; a partridge or a piece of game; a side of venison or beef (normally about two kilos). Soup and white bread came with every meal, plus fruit with lunch and salad with dinner; but, according to his household account books, the king rarely ate fruit or vegetables. Until 1585, he ate fish every Friday but in that year he obtained express permission from the pope to eat meat every day, even during Lent, because ‘We do not want to risk a change to our diet’. Henceforth, he gave up meat only on Good Friday.49
After dinner, the king continued to work on his papers until about 11 p.m., but seldom later. One day in 1572, at the Escorial, Antonio Gracián received a letter from Madrid ‘and I was urged to deliver it to His Majesty before he went to bed. I sent it immediately, but it was almost 11 o’clock and His Majesty had already retired and so it could not be delivered.’ A decade later Philip upbraided Mateo Vázquez for sending him dossiers at bedtime: ‘I was already in bed last night when this came and, as you know, my doctors do not wish me to see any papers after I have eaten dinner.’ Sometimes, as the king looked back on his day, it seemed as if he had done nothing but push papers: one evening at the Escorial, he complained to his daughters (in Madrid) that ‘I have spent the whole day reading and writing’ and so ‘I am writing this after 10 o’clock, very tired and very hungry’.50
Only the combination of his many virtues – his ability to work long and hard days, his intelligence and his memory, his exercise regime and his moderation in all things – can explain Philip’s ability to take so many decisions on so many different matters throughout the fifty-five years that he governed. Nevertheless, this prowess disguised a surprising indiscipline in what he chose to concentrate on. Thus he read and commented on countless papers concerning the Escorial and ecclesiastical patronage, however trivial, whereas many documents on issues of national security contain few signs of royal interest – just as Don Diego de Córdoba, Don Juan de Silva and others complained (chapter 4). The king was not unaware of this problem. In March 1566, with war in the Mediterranean, a rebellion narrowly averted in Mexico and trouble brewing in the Netherlands, Secretary Pedro de Hoyo apologized for troubling his master with ‘trivia’ about the royal palaces: ‘When I see Your Majesty with many tasks, I am sometimes afraid to worry you with matters that could be postponed without detriment.’ The king replied ‘I gave up on the tasks: although there are plenty of them these days, sometimes a man can relax by doing other things.’51 Everyone who has wielded executive power can sympathize with this statement: in a time of crisis, solving minor problems can provide short-term satisfaction, even relaxation, which seems to make the major problems less daunting. But Córdoba, Silva and the rest felt that Philip did not ‘relax’ by ‘doing other things’ just ‘sometimes’: they complained that he did so constantly, so that ‘relaxation’ became escapism.
Sex in the palace?
A few others have suggested that the king’s ‘relaxation’ included illicit sexual relations. In his 1997 biography, Philip of Spain, Henry Kamen asserted that Philip’s ‘fondness for women was evident (he was scrupulously faithful to only [his fourth wife], Anna)’. Specifically, ‘When Philip went to the Netherlands in 1555 he immediately had love affairs with at least two ladies’; and ‘despite his marriage’ to Isabel of France, ‘Philip continued to divert his sexual energies elsewhere’. ‘He may have had other lovers,’ Kamen added mysteriously, ‘but they are not documented.’52 It seems that only one lady left direct testimony concerning the king’s infidelity. According to the confessor and eulogist of Lady Magdalen Dacre, some time in 1554 or 1555,
[w]hiles she lived a mayd of honour in the court, on a tyme King Philip who had maryed Queene Mary, youthfully opened a window where she was washing her face, and sportingly putting in his arme, which some other would perhaps haue taken as a great honour and reioyced thereat … she tooks a staffe lying by, and strongly stroke the King on the arme.
The confessor, who included this incident in a chapter entitled ‘Of her notable chastity’, had no doubt that Philip had some ‘lewdnes’ on his mind, and rejoiced that Lady Dacre had ‘rejected the King’; and it is indeed hard to see why else a married monarch would have ‘youthfully opened a window’ explicitly to grope one of his wife’s maids while she washed herself.53 All other stories of Philip’s affairs are based on indirect evidence, however, and most concern only two ladies. The first alleged affair, with Isabel Osorio, seems plausible (chapter 1); the second, with Doña Eufrasia de Guzmán, does not. To be sure, in 1565 Venetian ambassador Giovanni Soranzo claimed that Philip had sired a child, the prince of Asculi, by Doña Eufrasia (like Osorio, a lady-in-waiting to Princess Juana); but Soranzo was apparently the only ambassador to mention this, and he did so only after returning to Venice, not in his dispatches written while in Spain. A comment by Ruy Gómez, whose household office obliged him to sleep in the king’s bedchamber, indirectly refuted Soranzo. In October 1564 he provided the French ambassador with ‘some details of the king’s former love affairs, which had now ceased, and had been outside the palace, so that everything was now going so well with the queen [Isabel of France] that one could not wish for more’. In reporting this indiscretion to King Charles IX, the ambassador made no mention of Doña Eufrasia or anyone else – and since the queen was Charles’s sister, had there been any suggestion of adultery he would certainly have mentioned it, as well as any illegitimate child sired by the king.54
Nevertheless, speculation continued. In 1578 the Spanish ambassador in Rome, Don Juan de Zúñiga reported on ‘a rumour that has recently spread far and wide: that Your Majesty has a bastard son’ (presumably Asculi) and was about to confer on him lands of the Military Orders, for which the pope would need to give his consent. Therefore, Zúñiga continued, ‘if there is a son, it would be wise to request in advance a papal dispensation for the lands that Your Majesty might wish him to have, even though he is not legitimate’. What makes this letter so extraordinary is that Zúñiga, who had known Philip ‘since he was a child’ (as he stated later in the same letter), should apparently show no surprise that ‘Your Majesty might have such a son’.55 A few years later, also in Rome, a cardinal asked his agent in Madrid whether Philip had an illegitimate daughter. After careful enquiry, the agent replied that ‘As yet, I have not heard a word about any natural daughter of His Majesty’; and although ‘I have heard that a couple of princes have some claim to be his sons’, he did not believe it ‘because His Majesty has not given any sign of recognizing them as such’.56 Nevertheless, others remained credulous. When William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s chief adviser (and formerly a minister of Philip and Mary), read a list of the gentlemen adventurers mustered aboard the Spanish Armada in May 1588, he found the name of ‘the prince of Asculi’ and annotated it: ‘The king of Spayne’s bastard’. Likewise, ten years later an English manuscript prepared for Elizabeth’s Favourite, the earl of Essex, and entitled Anatomie of Spayne devoted a page to Philip’s ‘yncestuous adulterie’ with Doña Eufrasia.57 Why would otherwise sensible statesmen like Burghley and Essex fabricate an almost certainly false adulterous sex life for Philip? The answer lies in the king’s aggressive foreign policy in northern Europe, which led his enemies to use every artifice at their disposal to undermine him.