Years of crusade, 1568–1572
THE year 1568 was an annus horribilis for Philip II. Apart from the tragedy of Don Carlos and the death of his wife Isabel, his disaffected Dutch subjects secured foreign support for an invasion of the Netherlands that cost a fortune to defeat. Worst of all, at the end of the year, the Moriscos of Granada rebelled. Even in Madrid, criticism of the king and his policies mounted. ‘It makes me sad and depressed to see Your Majesty angry and frustrated at what people are saying,’ Philip’s chief adviser, Cardinal Diego de Espinosa, wrote soothingly, adding ‘I therefore beg Your Majesty not to exhaust yourself.’ In a remarkably frank rescript, Philip revealed how demoralized he felt:
These things cannot fail to cause pain and exhaustion, and, believe me, I am so exhausted and pained by them, and by what happens in this world, that if it was not for the business of Granada and other things which cannot be abandoned, I do not know what I would do … Certainly I am no good for the world of today. I know very well that I should be in some other station in life, one less exalted than the one God has given me, which for me alone is terrible. And many people criticize me for this. May God grant that in heaven we will be treated better.1
Over the next two years, Philip’s situation improved dramatically. His troops pacified both the Netherlands and Granada; his fourth wife, Anne, bore the longed-for heir; and his brother won a spectacular victory over the Ottoman navy at Lepanto. Espinosa now felt jubilant. Spain had a prince, he boasted to the duke of Alba at the end of 1571, ‘and His Majesty is healthy. With this and with the great victory at sea (the greatest since Moses parted the Red Sea), it seems that we lack little.’ Nevertheless, some continued to criticize the king’s reliance on Espinosa. That same day, the duke of Alba’s agent in Madrid reported:
The world here continues as usual – I mean the government, because the man in red [el rojo: Espinosa] still carries everything on his shoulders, although there is no shortage of people who would like to relieve him of his burden, at least in part. Indeed the matter has now reached such a state that preachers use their pulpits to tell His Majesty openly of the evils of entrusting so much to one person.
The events of 1572 would show the folly both of the crusading policies that ‘the man in red’ had pressed upon the king and of ‘entrusting so much to one person’.2
‘Creating a New World’: the duke of Alba and the Netherlands
The duke of Alba brought with him to Brussels in 1567 an extensive agenda, elaborated in his meetings with Philip at Aranjuez: ‘If Your Majesty looks closely at what is to be done,’ the duke observed, ‘you will see that it amounts to creating a New World.’ The king committed part of his agenda to paper in formal Instructions, but much remained secret and in June 1568 Alba provided a detailed account of how he had implemented ‘the orders I committed to memory’.3 The first and most important of these was ‘to arrest the most prominent suspects and offenders, in order to give them an exemplary punishment, and also some of the guilty lesser offenders’. Accordingly, two weeks after he arrived in Brussels, Alba created a special court, the ‘council of Troubles’, to try all those suspected of rebellion or heresy. He then arrested and imprisoned Egmont and Hornes, their secretaries and some other political leaders, charging all of them with treason; and in March 1568, his agents coordinated the simultaneous arrest throughout the Netherlands of over 500 suspects, including all available signatories of the Compromise. Over the next five years the council of Troubles tried over 12,000 persons for treason and condemned almost 9,000 of them to lose some or all of their goods. It executed over 1,000 of them, including Egmont and Hornes.
Alba had less success to report in fiscal matters. Philip had instructed him to ensure that the Netherlands henceforth fund their own administration and defence by imposing a sales tax (similar to the alcabala in Spain). The duke boasted that the Netherlands would soon provide ‘300,000 ducats a year which Your Majesty can put in your treasury’ to form a strategic reserve ‘to meet the emergencies that may arise’, but the invasion of the Netherlands by troops commanded by William of Orange forced him to postpone this initiative. It took Alba almost six months to destroy most of his adversaries. Few escaped (although Orange was one of them) and the duke regarded his success as proof of divine favour for Philip’s cause (‘God be praised for showing such clear and evident favour to Your Majesty’s affairs’). The king, by contrast, showed more interest in raising taxes.4 Defeating Orange had required the dispatch of a further two million ducats from Spain, and a month later the Moriscos of Granada rebelled, leading Philip to warn his lieutenant in Brussels: ‘I am very much afraid that sending so much money from here to help you over there will one day cause us problems, without sufficient resources at a time when we may most need them.’5 In April 1569 Alba dutifully convened the States of the various Netherlands provinces and demanded that they approve three new taxes. They agreed to the Hundredth Penny (a tax of 1 per cent on capital assets), mainly because it would be a one-time levy, which eventually produced almost two million ducats; but they rejected both the Twentieth Penny (a 5 per cent levy on all sales of land), and the Tenth Penny or alcabala (a 10 per cent tax on all other sales). The duke used his Spanish troops to induce the States to offer another one-time levy of two million ducats and, given the critical situation of the Monarchy, the king authorized Alba to accept this offer.
Having accomplished so much, in 1570 Alba asked the king for permission to return to Spain. Philip’s long response showed a remarkable understanding of his prickly and proud subordinate.
You have achieved so much there in God’s service and mine that I am well aware that it has been the salvation and preservation of those provinces, and at present you may feel that you have accomplished everything necessary to put religion, justice, obedience, treasury, defence and the other things on a sound footing … Nevertheless, if you do not stay on for a while to finish the task entirely, it could easily revert to its former state.
Philip continued slyly: ‘Taking these final steps directly affects you, because if something should undermine your achievement, or if some unfortunate event should occur because it remained incomplete, it could not fail to cause you much grief and regret.’ Therefore, although ‘I understand your good reasons to want some leave and rest, after such a long absence and after all the spiritual and physical exertions required of you since you left Spain’, Philip turned the question back to the questioner. ‘I urge you to weigh these two considerations most carefully with the Christian prudence that God has given you, keeping in mind the primacy you have always given to His service and mine.’ If, after mature reflection, the duke decided that he could safely leave without ‘the dangers that I foresee’, he must tell the king ‘at once, using an express messenger, and I will then name and send a successor so that he can be there a few days before your own departure’.6
Philip’s letter was a masterpiece. He appeared to leave Alba free to choose, but by asking how the duke would feel ‘if some unfortunate event should occur because [your work] remained incomplete’ he made virtually sure that he would stay at his post. Alba would bitterly regret his decision not to return to Spain while his reputation remained more or less intact, but that lay in the future. For the moment, both he and the king focused their attention on the journey of Anne of Austria through the Netherlands.
The lonesome death of Baron Montigny
In 1566 Margaret of Parma had sent a prominent Netherlands nobleman, Floris de Montmorency, Baron Montigny and brother of the count of Hornes, as her special envoy to Spain (chapter 8). As soon as news arrived in Madrid that Alba had arrested Egmont and Hornes, Montigny was seized and imprisoned in Segovia castle. Although the baron denied any wrongdoing, the testimony and confiscated papers of his colleagues incriminated him. In addition, the baron had publicly rebuked the king over his refusal to go to the Netherlands, ‘bringing colour to His Majesty’s cheeks’; moreover, nine months after his arrest he was captured while trying to escape. The council of Troubles reviewed the case against him in absentia, found him guilty of treason and decreed that ‘his head be cut off and displayed on a pike’. Alba referred the dossier to Philip and kept this verdict secret until he received a response.7 Shortly afterwards, Anne of Austria arrived in Brussels, and Alba reported that Montigny’s relatives and friends reminded her of the baron’s long career of service to the dynasty. Anne graciously agreed to champion his cause. The duke pointed out to Philip that it would be difficult ‘to cut off his head’ and ‘display it on a pike’ after Anne had begged her new husband to show clemency; he therefore suggested that it would be simpler to kill Montigny before the queen arrived and pretend he had died of natural causes.8
Philip accepted this advice. Some of his advisers in Madrid suggested ‘putting some sort of poison in Montigny’s food or drink’ but ‘it seemed to His Majesty that this would not be an act of justice, and that it would be better to garrotte him in his cell with such secrecy that no one would ever know that he had not died of natural causes’. Philip ruled out killing the baron in Segovia castle, where he still languished in prison, because that was where the marriage to Anne would take place; so in August 1570, just as his bride prepared to leave the Netherlands, Philip ordered Don Eugenio de Peralta, castellan of Simancas, to go to Segovia and take Montigny under guard to the archive fortress.9
Philip now orchestrated the most elaborate and remarkable act of dissimulation of his entire reign. Peralta allowed his prisoner unusual freedom within the walls of Simancas, even allowing him ‘to sunbathe in a patio’, but the day before Anne landed at Santander, Peralta left a forged ‘paper, written in Latin, near Montigny’s apartment’ that apparently revealed new escape plans. This justified placing the baron in close confinement again, and Peralta now composed a letter full of falsehoods specifically (Philip later explained to Alba) ‘so they could later be made public both here and there [in Flanders]’. According to Peralta’s letter, the baron had contracted ‘a fever which (according to the doctors) is extremely serious’ and the castellan sent for a compliant doctor, who ‘entered and left the fortress as if he were treating Montigny, bringing with him medicines’, and also a confessor.10
The next stage of the deception now unfolded. A royal judge, together with a notary and an executioner, came secretly to Simancas and notified Montigny that he had been sentenced to death. Philip had given permission for the baron ‘to confess and receive the sacraments, if it seemed appropriate, and to turn back to God and repent’; and once he had recovered his composure, Montigny confessed, took communion and drew up a statement of his innocence. He expressed his appreciation for ‘the king’s clemency and goodness’ for deciding ‘that he should be executed in private and not in public’ (the fate of his brother, Hornes), but he ‘continued to protest his innocence’. ‘Once he finished speaking’, the last act of Philip’s dissimulation took place.
The executioner did his job, garrotting him, and immediately the royal judge, the notary and the executioner left … so that no one knew they had been in Simancas; and the said notary and executioner were placed under sentence of death if they ever revealed it. After this, [Peralta] dressed Montigny in a Franciscan habit, to conceal the fact that he had been garrotted, announced his death, and started to plan his burial.
By the time Anne reached Valladolid, only seven miles from Simancas, Montigny was dead and buried. Philip gloated to Alba that the deception had ‘succeeded so well that up to now everyone believes he died of his illness’, and no doubt he spent his wedding night in Segovia castle with a clear conscience: the pleas of his new wife for clemency had come just too late.11
Another ‘New World’
Philip’s fiscal pressure on the Netherlands formed part of a remarkable Imperial strategy that sought to mobilize the resources of all his dominions. In 1568 the king tasked Espinosa with creating a large committee, soon known as the Junta Magna, to overhaul the entire colonial administration. From the outset, the ministers followed the admirable precept ‘that the general principles in all these matters are the ones that can be dealt with and settled here: we must refer specific and detailed matters to those who will put them into practice’ (a distinction that Philip himself might have embraced with profit).12
The junta began with religious matters because in the words of Fray Bernardo de Fresneda, the royal confessor, ‘promulgating the Sacred Scriptures forms the basis for the just claim of His Majesty and his predecessors to rule and be sovereigns over those dominions’. It recommended the introduction of provincial councils, episcopal visitations and new dioceses (each with a seminary) as enjoined by the council of Trent; and to fund these ecclesiastical innovations it proposed a more equitable division of tithes so that local churches and convents received more support. The junta also called for the establishment of tribunals of the Inquisition in Mexico and Lima both to persecute heresy and to ‘silence the differences of opinion that have developed among the preachers and confessors in those provinces concerning the jurisdiction and moral justification for what we acquired and now hold’ – in other words, no cleric could henceforth call the legality of Spanish rule into question.13 Next came the economic foundations of the colonies. To ameliorate the lot of indigenous subjects, the junta proposed reforms to the landholding system; to stimulate production, it devised new regulations for mining, commerce and manufacture; and to augment the crown’s revenues, it advocated a combination of tribute levied on communities (rather than on individuals) and a sales tax.
After three months of intense but focused discussion, the junta presented its comprehensive recommendations to the king. Don Francisco de Toledo, named as viceroy of Peru, who had participated in the debates, made an additional request: so that he should be both ‘feared and loved’ he sought permission to use both ‘the sword of punishment’ and ‘the gratification of rewards’. Philip agreed, and even allowed Toledo and his colleague Don Martín Enriquez, named viceroy of New Spain, to spend money without his express warrant whenever they engaged in ‘pacification’ and ‘in time of war and rebellion’.14 Thanks to this flexibility, Enriquez waged a ‘war of blood and fire’ against the Chichimecas to stabilize the northern frontier of New Spain; while Toledo subjugated the last Inca survivors in Peru and sent vital reinforcements to the settlers of Chile in their struggle against the Araucanians. These initiatives cemented Madrid’s control over the American continent from the Rio Grande in northern Mexico to the Bio Bio in Chile, while the religious, political, economic and military initiatives proposed by the Junta Magna and endorsed by the king ensured that America would remain Spanish until the nineteenth century and Catholic to this day. It forms Philip’s greatest achievement and his most lasting legacy.
Rebellion in Spain: the Morisco Revolt
The Junta Magna was one of two bodies, both chaired by Espinosa, tasked by Philip with promoting uniformity among his subjects. The other, created in 1566, debated what to do about the 400,000 Moriscos of Spain, an ethnic minority equivalent to about 6 per cent of the total population – but not evenly spread across the country: almost half of all Moriscos lived in the kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia, where they made up between one-fifth and one-third of the population, while most of the rest populated the kingdom of Granada, comprising over half of the total inhabitants. Some mountainous regions, like the Alpujarras south and east of Granada, boasted scarcely any residents except Moriscos.
Ever since the expulsion of all Muslims who would not convert to Christianity in 1502, the central government had striven to integrate those who remained. In 1526, while he resided in Granada (and sired Philip), Charles V presided over a commission that formulated a series of decrees (known as the Mandatos) aimed at Christianizing the Moriscos, but almost immediately he suspended them for forty years in return for a substantial payment from the community. The Moriscos secured this reprieve largely because the Turkish conquest of Hungary and war with France made Charles both desperate for money and anxious to maintain domestic peace in Spain; and when the forty-year term expired in 1566, with another Ottoman offensive in progress as well as rebellion in the Netherlands and New Spain, the chances of renewing the suspension seemed similarly propitious. Unlike his father, however, Philip refused. Instead, Espinosa and his committee issued a proclamation in both Arabic and Castilian commanding the enforcement of ‘the Mandatos of the Emperor Charles V in the year 1526’: all Moriscos must abandon their dress, language, customs and religious practices within one year, on pain of fines and imprisonment.15
Faced with this comprehensive attack on their lives and liberty, a group of Moriscos began to plan a major insurrection – the first in Castile since the Comunero revolt – and on 24 December 1568, the inhabitants of almost 200 Morisco villages in the Alpujarras murdered local priests and other prominent Christians, while a task force made an unsuccessful attempt to persuade the inhabitants of Granada’s Moorish quarter to join them. Since at this stage the insurgents scarcely numbered 4,000, a counter-attack by the local authorities scored some early successes; but they lost control of their troops, who committed atrocities that gave the rebellion a new lease of life. The king therefore appointed his brother Don John to supervise both military operations in the countryside and the deportation of all Moriscos from the city of Granada – but this too boosted the rebels’ cause because many of the deportees fled to the Alpujarras, where at least 4,000 volunteers from North Africa joined them. The rebels now started to raid Christian outposts on the coastal plains, forcing Philip to recall some veteran troops from Italy to regain control.
Reviewing the budget for the 1569 campaign gave the king pause for thought – ‘No one who has not experienced war themselves would believe what it requires’ – but, he reassured Espinosa (incorrectly), ‘it seems that this war will not cost as much as the others in which I have participated’.16 When the revolt dragged on into 1570, Philip decided to go to Andalusia in person, entering Córdoba on horseback, advancing through the crowds in majestic circles so that everyone could see his self-confidence (and his horsemanship). Since this display did not suffice to end the war, the king sent an emissary into the Alpujarras to negotiate, and in May the rebels ‘surrendered, handed over their standard, and submitted themselves to His Majesty’s mercy’.17
As the king’s Dutch opponents would soon discover, submission ‘to His Majesty’s mercy’ was a high-risk strategy, and six months later, according to a pre-arranged schedule, his officials herded some 50,000 Moriscos into designated hospitals and churches. To create a false sense of security among the deportees, Philip ordered those supervising the operation to explain that the war had caused such devastation that ‘it is impossible for them to survive’ in the kingdom of Granada.
For the time being the Moriscos will be removed from there and taken to Castile and other provinces where the harvest has been abundant and the war has caused no damage, so they can be fed and maintained properly for the coming year, while we consider when and how they can return.
This, of course, was totally false – the king had already decided that no Moriscos would ever return to Granada – but (as with Montigny) he regarded telling lies as the essential prerequisite to a favourable outcome. In the event, a quarter of the deportees died during the following two months, either of hunger as they marched in the rain and snow or by drowning at sea when storms struck the galleys on which they travelled. According to historian José Alcalá-Zamora y Queipo de Llano, ‘In one way or another, the war of Granada caused the death of at least 90,000 people.’18
Deportation formed only half of Philip’s solution to the Morisco problem. He also confiscated the deportees’ lands and invited inhabitants from other parts of Spain to come and settle on them. A new council for the Repopulation of Granada surveyed the confiscated property and redistributed it among the new settlers, offering incentives and granting them tax relief and subsidies until they could sustain themselves on their new lands. By 1598 some 60,000 immigrants had settled in 250 Granadine communities.
This complex process of ethnic cleansing testified to Philip’s vision and power: no other Western ruler of his day could have coordinated the movement of so many people in such a short time. And yet the venture failed. Many rural areas in Asturias and Galicia were abandoned or ruined when their more energetic settlers left for Andalusia. Nevertheless, there were never enough settlers: the kingdom of Granada as a whole lost about a quarter of its pre-war population while the Alpujarras region, with almost 6,000 families according to the census of 1561, had fewer than 2,000 in 1587. Moreover, although ethnic cleansing permanently removed the risk that an Islamic ‘fifth column’ in southern Spain might welcome Ottoman or Maghrebine invaders, northern towns liberated from Muslim rule centuries before suddenly acquired a ‘Moorish Quarter’. An analysis of the DNA of Spain’s current population shows that although chromosomes normally associated with people of North African descent are almost totally absent from eastern Andalusia they are relatively common (up to 20 per cent) in Galicia, León and Extremadura.19
Lepanto: ‘The greatest victory since Moses parted the Red Sea’
Despite Philip’s prediction that the war in Granada ‘will not cost as much as the others in which I have participated’, it left him ill prepared to campaign in the Mediterranean after an Ottoman expeditionary force occupied most of the Venetian island of Cyprus in 1570. Venice desperately sought aid from the other Christian powers of the Mediterranean and found an enthusiastic advocate in Pius V, who saw the struggle as a crusade. The pope sent out envoys urging all Christian rulers to join a Holy League to save Cyprus and drive back the forces of Islam, but he pinned his chief hope on Philip.
The king demanded a high price for his support. Previous popes had allowed the kings of Castile to raise taxes on the Church for pious causes; and Philip exploited Pius’s anxiety to create a Holy League to demand a renewal of all these taxes, known as the ‘Three Graces’, and an improvement in the terms. His ambassador in Rome told Pius in March 1570 that ‘unless His Holiness immediately conceded’ the Three Graces ‘it would make the venture impossible, because without these and other concessions [His] Majesty could not even ensure the defence of his own dominions, let alone at the same time undertake a major war like this one’. The blackmail worked: Pius made so many generous financial concessions that, in the coarse phrase of Espinosa, ‘His Holiness seems to have acted out a proverb that we have in Castile: the constipated die of diarrhoea.’20
Philip nevertheless retained his own agenda. He eventually agreed to join the Holy League only because he expected that, as the most powerful partner, he would be able to use the combined fleet to recover Tunis, not Cyprus, and when it became clear that he might not get his way, he sought ways to back out. ‘To tell you the truth, I do not regret that we have not yet signed’ the League, he confided to Espinosa, because ‘as things currently stand’,
I do not believe it will ever achieve any success. It is not possible to deliver what I have promised, not only this year (which is totally impossible) but also in future years because even four time the ‘Graces’ I have been conceded would not suffice for that … Even if we gain prestige by joining the League now, it will be a very different story if we fail to honour our commitments.21
After much hard bargaining, in May 1571 Philip agreed to pay half the operational budget of the Holy League, while Venice, the Papacy and the other participants provided the rest; and Don John of Austria now took command of the combined fleet, which was assembling at Messina.
He arrived too late to prevent the Ottoman fleet from sacking Venetian settlements on the coast of Crete but in late September, having run short of provisions and acquired copious booty to sell, the Ottoman commanders decided to winter in the Gulf of Lepanto. They evidently assumed that their adversaries would not dare to commence operations so late in the campaigning season, but Philip had different ideas. He reminded the pope that ‘this great concentration of infantry, cavalry, galleys and ships will be of little benefit or effect’ if it merely defended its own bases, while ‘raiding the coasts and lands of the enemy will not yield any fruit of importance’. Instead, the king argued, ‘It would be best to gather as large a force of galleys as possible, enough to outnumber the enemy, and use it to optimal effect, which would be to seek out and destroy the enemy’s main fleet, which constitutes the real threat.’ The king evidently charged his brother with executing this daring strategy, because on 16 September Don John informed a political ally that his fleet was setting forth ‘with the intention of seeking a battle, as you will see’.
Many people over there argue that it is now too late in the year, and that the enemy will already have withdrawn anyway; others say that they never retreat, and will sally forth when they learn we have entered their territorial waters. In this fleet, enthusiasm for a fight is high, and confidence in victory no less … If you want to know any more, you can read about it in the history books!22
Don John led the largest Christian fleet ever seen in the Mediterranean – 208 galleys and 30 other warships – to Corfu. When it found no Ottoman ships or garrisons to attack it dropped down to the Gulf of Lepanto, where it encountered the entire Ottoman fleet and prepared for action. Some 170,000 men fought in the battle of Lepanto on 7 October 1571, and although the forces of the Holy League suffered serious losses – at least 7,500 dead and 20,000 wounded (among them Miguel de Cervantes) – they won a stunning victory, capturing 130 Ottoman warships, 400 pieces of artillery and almost 3,500 prisoners. In addition they sank 110 Ottoman galleys and liberated some 15,000 galley slaves.
Was this ‘the most memorable and happy event that past centuries have seen or that future centuries will ever see’ (as Cervantes claimed), let alone ‘the greatest victory at sea that has ever been’ (as the naval commander Gian Andrea Doria asserted) or ‘the greatest victory since Moses parted the Red Sea’ (the verdict of Espinosa)? No: Cyprus remained in Ottoman hands, and the victors failed to execute the instructions of the Venetian Senate to ‘remove from the enemy, by whatever means, the potential to recreate his fleet’.23 Yet had the great battle not been fought and won, the Turkish fleet would surely have left the Gulf of Lepanto early in 1572 and either conquered some Venetian outposts in the Adriatic or taken Crete. Instead, the Christian victory sparked uprisings in Greece and Albania, which for a time threatened Turkish control of the peninsula, and temporarily halted the westward advance of the Ottoman empire.
‘To kill or capture Elizabeth’
The Lepanto campaign was not Philip’s only crusading venture in 1571. No sooner had he agreed to sign the Holy League than he authorized the duke of Alba to invade England and overthrow Elizabeth Tudor. This dramatic policy change towards ‘a sister whom I love so much’ began two years before when the queen seized some ships carrying money from Spain to the Netherlands. Although the money was not strictly royal property, it belonged to a consortium of Genoese bankers who had agreed to lend the duke of Alba money to pay off his army. Philip’s ambassador in England, Don Guerau de Spes, saw this as the prelude to a trade war and he urged both Alba in the Netherlands and Philip in Spain to confiscate English ships and goods. Both obliged, and Elizabeth promptly placed Spes under arrest. Earlier that year, Philip had expelled the English ambassador at his court, Dr John Man, a married Protestant cleric, on the grounds that his continued presence at court might offend ‘God Our Lord, whose service, and the observation of whose holy faith, I place far ahead of my own affairs and actions and above everything in this life, even my own’.24 The rhetoric disguised the fact that, without Man and Spes, Philip possessed no direct diplomatic channel through which to resolve disputes with England.
This anomaly increased Alba’s influence over the king’s policy. The duke had resided in England during the 1550s; he maintained his own intelligence network there; and, above all, he possessed his own strategic agenda. On the one hand, he never saw the point of replacing Elizabeth Tudor with Mary, Queen of Scots, whom many Catholics saw as the rightful ruler of England, because she had grown up at the French court and retained close relations with the French royal family. On the other hand, since the prosperity of the Netherlands depended on trade with England, Alba opposed any action that might jeopardize it. Curiously, although Philip recognized that his Dutch subjects ‘always want to remain friends’ with England, he never seems to have realized that Alba himself shared this view – even though it would torpedo his plans to overthrow Elizabeth.
In February 1569, outraged by the imprisonment of Spes and the confiscation of the Genoese treasure, Philip asked Alba to suggest how best to launch an outright attack on England. The duke refused: he replied forcefully that defeating the prince of Orange had left his treasury empty, and so all funds for intervention in England would have to come from Spain – knowing very well that the revolt of the Moriscos would prevent this, at least for a while. Alba’s intransigence made Philip more receptive to a proposal from Roberto Ridolfi, a Florentine banker who handled secret funds sent by the pope to the English Catholics. In 1569, Ridolfi visited Spes (despite his confinement) bearing a message from the duke of Norfolk and two of Elizabeth’s Catholic councillors saying that they intended to force her to restore close links with both Rome and Spain.
The ease with which Ridolfi glided between the government’s various opponents does not seem to have aroused Spes’s suspicions, and early in 1571 he entrusted to Ridolfi an ambitious plan, for which he coined the term ‘the Enterprise of England’. It called on Philip to persuade the other states of Europe to boycott all trade with England; to send financial support to Norfolk and his allies; and to fan the discontent of Irish Catholics. More radically, Spes suggested that the king should either support Mary Stuart’s claim to the English crown or else claim it for himself. Ridolfi first went to Brussels, where he explained the Enterprise to Alba, whose suspicions were immediately aroused by the effortlessness with which Ridolfi had managed to leave England with incriminating documents. Nevertheless, he allowed the conspirator to proceed to Rome.
Ridolfi arrived at an auspicious moment. Pius V had recently issued a bull deposing Elizabeth and now sought a means to carry it out. For a while the Holy League distracted him but on 20 May, the same day that representatives of Spain, Venice and the Papacy signed the Holy League, Pius entrusted Ridolfi with letters urging Philip to support the Enterprise of England. Six weeks later, the king granted Ridolfi an audience. The Italian made a remarkable impression on the king: a few days later, when the nuncio urged the king to support the Enterprise, much to his surprise ‘His Majesty, contrary to his normal custom [at audiences], spoke at length and entered into great detail about the means, the place and the men’ that he would devote to it.
He ended by saying that he had wanted and waited for a long time for an occasion and opportunity to reduce, with God’s help, that kingdom to the [Catholic] faith and the obedience of the Apostolic See a second time, and that he believed the time had now come, and that this was the occasion and the opportunity for which he had waited.25
Philip proved as good as his word. In July he sent a secret letter to Alba affirming that Mary Stuart was ‘the true and legitimate claimant’ to the English throne, ‘which Elizabeth holds through tyranny’, and asserting that the duke of Norfolk
has the resolve, and so many and such prominent friends, that if I provide some help it would be easy for him to kill or capture Elizabeth [le sería facil matar o prender a la Isabel] and place the Scottish queen at liberty and in possession of the throne. Then, if she marries the duke of Norfolk, as they have arranged, they will without difficulty reduce [England] to the obedience of the Holy See.
In the course of the next six weeks, Philip continued, Alba must therefore prepare a powerful fleet and army to carry this out. He promised to send immediately 200,000 ducats – but ‘I warn and charge you expressly that you must not spend a single penny of this sum on anything else, however urgent it may be’. No doubt sensing how unrealistic all this would seem, Philip concluded that ‘since the cause is so much His, God will enlighten, aid and assist us with His mighty hand and arm, so that we will get things right’. The king’s enthusiasm increased as the festival of St Lawrence approached, when one of his ministers noted that ‘His Majesty proceeds in this matter with so much ardour that he must be inspired by God’; and it persisted even after news reached him that Elizabeth had ordered Norfolk’s arrest.26 Even with experienced rulers, one must never underestimate the power of self-deception.
Philip alone
In his History of Philip II, Cabrera de Córdoba later identified 1571 as ‘a fortunate year for the Monarchy’, but by the time it ended Philip had managed to alienate virtually all his former allies. Unravelling the Ridolfi plot revealed to Elizabeth that her ‘good brother’ had planned to murder her. Not surprisingly, she never trusted him again and instead increased surveillance of all Catholics in England and executed those who proved obdurate (including the duke of Norfolk). She also supported privateering activity against Philip (a dozen major expeditions left England in the 1570s to plunder Spanish property) and provided material assistance to his Dutch rebels because, as Alba later pointed out, ‘the queen knew full well that the king our lord had tried to deprive her of the kingdom and even to kill her’. He therefore ‘regarded the queen as quite justified in what she had done and is still doing’ to disrupt the Netherlands.27 Philip’s faith-based strategy had left a toxic legacy.
Philip also managed to alienate Emperor Maximilian in 1571. When intelligence reports suggested that France stood poised to intervene in support of a rebellion against the ruler of the small but strategically important Imperial fief of Finale Ligure, adjacent to Genoa, Philip mounted a surprise invasion. This unilateral action infuriated Maximilian, who mobilized the independent states of Italy to condemn Philip’s unprovoked attack. Empress María tried to mediate between her brother and her husband, assuring Philip:
God knows how much I want to settle this accursed dispute over Finale, so that Your Highness need not exhaust yourself over it. I really believe that if it were not for the prestige that blinds us so much, the emperor would not act as he does, which is to importune Your Highness; but I am very confident that it will turn out as we wish, because Your Highness can see that the emperor does not lack good cause.28
Since Philip refused to ‘see’ this, Maximilian sent a special commissioner to reside in his duchy of Milan – also an Imperial fief – with orders to watch ostentatiously over the interests of the Austrian Habsburgs in Italy. This was a major humiliation, and it led Philip to withdraw his forces from Finale – but this recognition that ‘the emperor does not lack good cause’ came too late: Maximilian provided no assistance to Philip in 1572, when a new rebellion broke out in the Netherlands.
The war of Granada had greatly impressed the exiled prince of Orange. ‘It is an example to us,’ he confided to his brother early in 1570: ‘if the Moors are able to resist for so long, even though they are people of no more substance than a flock of sheep, what might the people of the Low Countries be able to do?’29 Since the prince knew that the ‘people of the Low Countries’ would not be able to tackle Alba and his Spanish troops alone, he worked hard to find allies. His agents forged links with the numerous communities of Dutch exiles – perhaps 60,000 men, women and children who had fled to England, Scotland, France and Germany to escape condemnation by the council of Troubles – and these exiles provided recruits for a fleet of privateers known as the ‘Sea Beggars’, sailing under letters of marque issued by Orange. The exiles distributed plunder taken by the Sea Beggars from merchant ships belonging to Philip’s subjects and allies, thereby raising money for Orange’s cause as well as sustaining his fleet. Meanwhile Orange and his brother Louis of Nassau fought with the French Calvinist leader Gaspard de Coligny, unsuccessful defender of St Quentin in 1557 and equally unsuccessful patron of the attempt to colonize Florida in 1565. Now Coligny persuaded Charles IX of France to recognize Louis and Orange as his ‘good relatives and friends’ and to pay them a subsidy.
King Charles also agreed that his sister Margot would marry the Protestant leader Henry of Navarre, and that as soon as the wedding had taken place Coligny and his Protestant followers could invade the Netherlands in support of Orange and the exiles. On the strength of this commitment, Orange laid plans for other invasions to coincide with the main attack by Coligny: the Sea Beggars, together with a squadron to be assembled at La Rochelle by Filippo Strozzi, a Florentine exile with extensive military and naval experience, would capture ports in Holland or Zeeland; Orange’s brother-in-law, Count van den Berg, would invade Gelderland with a small force from Germany; and Orange himself would raise an army in Germany and invade Brabant. The only problem lay in timing: everything depended on the date fixed for the marriage of Margot and Henry, but after frequent postponements in April 1572 Charles IX announced that the wedding would take place the following August.
The second Dutch Revolt
Conditions in the Netherlands could hardly have been more favourable to Orange’s cause. The combined impact of raids by the Sea Beggars, the English trade embargo and war in the Baltic had caused a major economic recession: food prices soared just as thousands of families lost their livelihood. Nature intensified the misery: storms caused widespread flooding by seawater; ice and snow froze the rivers; and a plague epidemic ravaged the country. Alba pleaded with the king to send funds from Spain to provide relief but in February 1572 Philip replied, ‘With the Holy League and so many other things that must be paid for from here, it is impossible to meet the needs of the Netherlands to the same extent as we have been doing up to now.’ A month later he was even more insistent: ‘It is my will that henceforth the Netherlands be sustained from the proceeds of the Tenth Penny.’ Collection of the new tax must begin at once.30
Since the provincial States still refused to sanction the Tenth Penny, Alba decided to impose it without their consent. His officials started to register all commercial activity, and when in March 1572 some shopkeepers and merchants in Brussels ceased to transact business in protest, the duke brought detachments of his Spanish troops into the city – but to no avail: the shops remained shut and economic activity atrophied. Maximilian Morillon, Cardinal Granvelle’s agent in Brussels, reported that ‘Poverty is acute in all parts’, with thousands in Brussels ‘dying of hunger because they have no work. If the prince of Orange had conserved his forces until a time like this,’ Morillon concluded, ‘his enterprise would have succeeded.’31 Morillon sealed his prescient letter on 24 March 1572. Just one week later, a party of Sea Beggars captured the seaport of Den Brielle in Holland in the name of William of Orange, and they flamboyantly declared that they would treat everyone well ‘except for priests, monks and papists’.
Nevertheless, the rebel garrison of Den Brielle was small (perhaps 1,100 men, against the millions at Philip’s command); the town was isolated; and it lacked fortifications. News that Strozzi’s fleet at La Rochelle might launch an attack convinced Alba that the effective defence of South Holland and Zeeland required the immediate construction of a citadel at the largest port in the region, Flushing on the island of Walcheren, and on 29 March 1572 he dispatched one of his leading military architects to the city with the necessary plans. For good measure he also sent a warrant to arrest the local magistrates, who had failed to start collecting the Tenth Penny.
The Tenth Penny epitomized all the disagreeable aspects of the ‘new world’ envisaged by Philip and Alba: it was unconstitutional; it was oppressive; it was foreign; and its proceeds were destined for the hated Spanish garrisons. In addition, it placed magistrates everywhere in an impossible position: those who complied lost control of their towns, and Alba dismissed those who refused. The Sea Beggars knew what they were about when they flew at their masthead flags showing ten coins. Philip nevertheless persevered. On 16 April 1572, before news of the capture of Den Brielle arrived in Spain, he again informed Alba that ‘we cannot send you any more money from here’, because ‘my treasury has reached the state where no source of income or money-raising device remains which will yield a single ducat’. By then the citizens of Flushing had defied him – first by refusing to admit a Spanish garrison, then by murdering the engineer sent to construct a citadel, and finally by admitting the Sea Beggars. Philip immediately recognized the strategic importance of this development, since both he and his father had sailed to Spain from Flushing in the 1550s. ‘It would be good’, he wrote officiously to Alba,
that if you have not already punished the inhabitants of those islands, and those who have invaded them, you should do so right away without allowing time for them to receive more reinforcements, because the longer the delay, the more difficult the venture. When you have done this, make sure that nothing like this can happen again on the island of Walcheren, because you can see what a danger it poses.32
Alba scarcely needed this lecture on strategy. He would no doubt have taken great pleasure in punishing ‘the inhabitants of those islands’, but in May the port of Enkhuizen in North Holland also declared for Orange and accepted a garrison of Sea Beggars, while Louis of Nassau and a band of French Protestants surprised the city of Mons in Hainaut, defended by powerful fortifications. The following month van den Berg and his German troops captured the stronghold of Zutphen in Gelderland, while Orange himself crossed the Rhine at the head of an army of 20,000 and advanced towards Brabant. Before long, fifty towns had rebelled against Philip and declared for Orange.
Facing so many threats, Alba now took a crucial decision: he refused to re-inforce his hard-pressed subordinates in the northern provinces and instead withdrew their best troops southwards to await the expected French invasion – which never came. Although the wedding of Margot of Valois and Henry of Navarre passed without incident on 18 August, a few days later a Catholic marksman tried to assassinate Coligny, but only managed to wound him. Fearing that the botched assassination attempt would provoke a Protestant backlash, Charles IX did nothing to prevent – and may have encouraged – a killing frenzy by the Catholics of Paris on St Bartholomew’s Day, 24 August, that took the life of Coligny and most other Huguenots in the capital. The slaughter of the Protestant populations of a dozen other French cities soon followed.
These events transformed the situation in the Netherlands. As Morillon observed, ‘If God had not permitted the destruction of Coligny and his followers, this country would have been lost’; and the prince of Orange agreed. The massacre, he wrote to his brother, was a ‘stunning blow’ because ‘my only hope lay with France’. But for St Bartholomew, ‘we would have had the better of the duke of Alba and we would have been able to dictate terms to him at our pleasure’. On 12 September the prince’s attempt to relieve Mons failed, and the city surrendered one week later.33
Now Alba turned his attention to the other towns in rebellion, and since the campaigning season was running out he decided upon a strategy of selective terror, calculating that a few examples of unrestrained brutality would accelerate the process of pacification. At first the policy proved spectacularly successful. First his men stormed Mechelen, which had refused to accept a royal garrison and instead admitted Orange’s troops, and sacked it for three days. Even before the screams abated, all other rebellious towns in Flanders and Brabant had surrendered. The duke now moved against Zutphen, which (like Mechelen) had defected to the rebels at an early stage, and sacked it. Once again, strategic terror paid off: Alba proudly informed the king that ‘Gelderland and Overijssel have been conquered with the capture of Zutphen and the terror that it caused, and these provinces once again recognize the authority of Your Majesty’. The rebel centres in Friesland also surrendered, and the duke graciously pardoned them, but he resolved to make an example of one more town loyal to Orange in order to encourage the surrender of the remaining rebel enclaves. Naarden, just across the provincial boundary of Holland, obligingly declined a summons to surrender, and so (as the duke smugly reported to his master) ‘The Spanish infantry stormed the walls and massacred citizens and soldiers. Not a mother’s son escaped.’34
Almost immediately, just as Alba had anticipated, envoys from Haarlem (the nearest rebel stronghold) arrived at the camp; but, instead of offering unconditional surrender, they asked to negotiate. The duke refused: he demanded immediate surrender or else his troops would take the city and sack it. This proved to be a fateful decision. The rebels had put down far deeper roots in Holland and Zeeland than in the other provinces, and Haarlem (unlike Mechelen and Zutphen) boasted a hard core of Orangist loyalists: after declaring spontaneously for the prince, the city allowed a large number of exiles to return and take charge. The new rulers promptly purged and reformed the town’s government, closed Catholic churches and allowed Calvinist worship. All of those involved in thus flouting the king’s authority in both politics and religion knew that they could expect no mercy if Alba’s Spanish troops got inside their walls – and if any of them doubted this, they had only to consider the fate of Mechelen, Zutphen and now Naarden. Moreover, it was now December, the fields were frozen and the duke’s forces were far weaker. The very success of his campaign had dramatically reduced the size of the Spanish army, both because the sieges and storms had caused relatively high casualties among the victors, and because each rebellious town recaptured, whether by brutality or clemency, required a garrison.
Alba now commanded scarcely 12,000 effectives: to besiege Haarlem, which boasted a powerful garrison and strong defences, with such a relatively small force would have been rash at any time. In the depths of winter, on tactical grounds this was an act of egregious folly. It was also an act of egregious folly on financial grounds. The war in the Netherlands had absorbed almost two million ducats in 1572, and the war in the Mediterranean cost almost as much – with the certainty of an increase in 1573 because in February, as the Spanish troops froze in the trenches before Haarlem, the Venetian Republic resolved to sacrifice Cyprus in return for peace with the sultan. Alba’s intransigence towards the envoys from Haarlem had plunged Philip into his worst nightmare: a full-scale war on two fronts.