Towards the tomb – and beyond, 1593–1603
A hardening of the arteries
IN 1590 the marquis of Velada, a prominent courtier, criticized the life of the ageing Philip II as little more than ‘hunting, buildings and gardening’ – a view implicitly endorsed by the Jeronimite monks at the Escorial, the king’s ‘ordinary residence from Easter to All Saints Day’: they filled their chronicles with descriptions of how and when he hunted, reviewed architectural plans and enjoyed his gardens. Beyond the convent, however, criticisms of the king and his policies had a sharper edge. According to the royal chronicler Antonio de Herrera, the revolts in Castile, Sicily and Aragon in 1591
gave rise to speculations full of doubt and fear. The good regretted the toil and the reverses; the others, through hatred of the current state of affairs, which they considered miserable, rejoiced and blamed the king who amid all the dangers was wasting his time on activities and matters of little importance, affirming that if he were gone everything would improve.
In 1595 a saying began to circulate: ‘If the king does not die, the kingdom will die’, and by then the king’s failing health fuelled speculation that he might die soon.1
Monsieur de Longlée, the long-serving French resident at the court of Spain, had reported in July 1586 that Philip ‘looks older and more pensive’ because ‘his gout causes him pain’, and indeed the king lay in bed incapacitated for several weeks that summer. The following year, Philip informed his daughter Catalina that ‘I have not been able to walk for five or six days and was confined to bed because I twisted my knee. What gives me most pain is my hand, which has prevented me from writing or doing anything else with it for several days. That is why I have not written to you. And my eyes are not too good either.’2 In March 1588, Philip again apologized to Catalina for ‘not writing to you’ because ‘my gout started earlier than usual – I have now had it for two months’ – and ‘I still walk with a stick’. In addition, ‘they have drawn blood once, and also purged me, so I have been very tired and very thirsty. All this has left me very weak, and I take a long time to do everything.’ Longlée noticed that ‘His Majesty is thinner’, and portraits of the king at this time show him with tired eyes and hollow cheeks – the latter probably reflecting the loss of his remaining teeth, often by extraction, ‘and removing one of them hurt a lot’ (see plate 43).3
‘Hurt a lot’: like his contemporaries, Philip had no painkillers or antibiotics, and it was primarily to reduce the constant pain in his limbs from 1595 that he resorted to a ‘special chair for the gout’, with movable positions from almost vertical to horizontal. The chair ‘allowed him to rest and to take the weight off his limbs whenever he left his sickbed’. On many days Philip now ‘stayed seated in the chair from the time he arose in the morning until he went to bed at night’, wearing light clothes over his nightgown, and he ‘lay there as if he were in his own bed, since the seat was wide and deep’ (see plate 44).4
The king’s mind, as well as his body, began to deteriorate, and he now complained not just that he lacked time to take decisions (as he had always done) but also that he lacked time even to think about taking them. When Mateo Vázquez made the admirable suggestion that the president of the council of Castile should hold office for only three years, just like other senior officials, the king replied wearily: ‘There is much food for thought here, and I will think about it – although there are so many other things to think about now that I don’t know how I stay sane. God help us.’ Yet still Philip refused to relinquish power. As Nuncio Camillo Caetani put it in 1594: ‘although the king is old and constantly sick’, nevertheless ‘he wants to be involved in all business matters’ and, as he had always done, he ‘consults few people before he embarks on prolonged, difficult and dangerous affairs’.5
The dispatches of Caetani, the only diplomat who still received personal audiences, reveal that the king went through a pattern of ‘ups and downs’ during his last years. Thus in April 1596, the nuncio reported that on some days Philip ‘transacts the normal amount of reading and writing’ and even ‘wrote a letter to His Holiness in his own hand’; while in June he watched the bullfights staged in the square outside his palace, where ‘the whole city saw him on a stage, walking without assistance or a cane, sitting and getting up, wearing his sword and ordinary clothes for five hours’. At an audience the following month, by contrast, Caetani found ‘His Majesty much more downcast and weak than usual, indeed more than I have ever seen him’. His face ‘was emaciated and his eyes lacked their usual sparkle’, and he ‘showed great weakness in speaking and moving’.6
This cyclical pattern is the key to understanding the last years of the reign. Intervals of relative health enabled Philip to retain ultimate control of the policies pursued by his ministers, while awareness that illness might incapacitate him at any moment led to some important administrative innovations to ensure that the central government functioned smoothly even without the king’s direct participation. In Madrid, a committee of experienced ministers called the Junta Grande (the ‘Big Committee’) summarized and evaluated the consultas sent by each central council before sending the dossier to the Junta de Noche of senior ministers who (as before) accompanied the king. The juntas added their recommendations before each item arrived on Philip’s desk. This procedure reduced a multi-page consulta to a single line and twenty consultas to a single page. Jerónimo Gassol, who became secretary of the Junta de Noche after the death of his brother-in-law, Mateo Vázquez, in 1591, handled both the recommendations of the Junta de Noche and the documents marked ‘to be placed in the king’s hands’ (chapter 4). Normally the king dictated his rescript to Gassol, and then added his initials, but he could and did still demand more information or advice before reaching some decisions. ‘Tonight or tomorrow, communicate this to the three ministers who were in the Junta, who will know more about this,’ Philip instructed Gassol on one consulta, ‘so that before I get up Don Cristóbal [de Moura] can tell me what they advise so that, once I know that, I can make up my mind.’7
In September 1593, Philip decided to double the size of the Junta de Noche (henceforth known as the Junta de Gobierno), and he added his nephew Albert, who had served as viceroy of Portugal since the king’s departure a decade before. Albert now returned to Madrid where he both gave audiences and received ambassadors in the king’s name; but he did not preside over the Junta, an honour the king reserved for Prince Philip, albeit always accompanied by his governor, the marquis of Velada. Philip instructed the Junta de Gobierno that in matters ‘in which you already know more or less what I want – investigating faults, supervising the execution of decisions already taken, distributing modest rewards and promotions, and making lesser appointments’ – it should ‘send me the resolution directly, either written in the margins or on the dorse of the consultas, so that I can initial them’; but he retained greater control over ‘more serious matters, such as the administration of the treasury, raising loans’ and defence. In these cases, ‘send me your recommendation on a separate paper so that I can write or dictate the appropriate decision. After that, as soon as I return the paper communicating what I decide on each matter, you can put the rescript and resolution on each consulta and send them back to me; and I will get the prince my son to initial them’ before Gassol returned each consulta to the relevant council for implementation.8
Philip later refined this system. After the death of Fray Diego de Chaves in 1592 the king’s ministers begged him to ‘name a confessor because many matters of conscience arise and we do not know who to consult about them’: eventually Moura’s nominee, Fray Diego de Yepes, became the royal confessor and to him Philip henceforth sent specific proposals to see if they could be implemented ‘in good conscience’. In addition, the king increasingly communicated his orders through Moura. At first he did so clandestinely. Thus in October 1594, he instructed Moura to ‘tell Gassol to write a rescript on this consulta that corresponds to your paper of advice, making it seem that it is my opinion and not yours, and then let him send it to me to initial’.9
These administrative changes achieved three goals. First, although Philip retained the ultimate decision in ‘more serious matters’ for much of the time, when he fell ill Moura deputized for him, having become the royal Favourite in all but name. Moreover, whatever the king’s state of health, the Junta de Gobierno transacted routine government business in an orderly fashion – and, should he die suddenly, it would oversee the orderly transfer of power to his heir. Above all, the junta served as a ‘collective tutor’ to the prince: just like his father at the same age, by presiding over the daily meetings of senior ministers the heir to the throne learned how to rule the dominions that would soon be his.
In contrast to these sensible domestic changes, Philip persevered with the same disastrous foreign policies as before. In October 1596 he ordered his admiral, Don Martín de Padilla, to lead the Atlantic fleet painstakingly created in the wake of the Armada in an attack on Ireland. When Padilla pointed out the risks of setting forth so late in the year Philip deployed the same sort of spiritual blackmail that he had used in the past against Alba, Santa Cruz and Medina Sidonia.
You must leave immediately in the name of God and do what I have ordered in the voyage and in the whole campaign. Although I realize that the season is advanced, and that this poses risks, in this we have to trust in God (who has done so much for us). To stop what we have begun now would be to show weakness in His service.10
Padilla complied but, just as he had predicted, storms struck his fleet soon after it set sail, causing the loss of many ships and some 2,000 men.
Although Philip failed to harm Elizabeth in 1596, the queen again managed to inflict severe damage on him. For two weeks in July, an Anglo-Dutch force occupied Cádiz, and then burned it – taking with them numerous hostages and two royal galleons, as well as destroying ships and property worth four million ducats before moving north, apparently intending to attack Lisbon. As Don Juan de Silva, charged with the defence of Portugal, bitterly observed: ‘A king of Spain can preserve his reputation without capturing London’ but ‘it cannot be preserved or recovered if we lose Lisbon in the same way we lost Cádiz’. Given that the Portuguese refused to serve under the Castilian commander appointed by the king, it was perhaps fortunate for Philip that the English sailed for home without putting his ‘reputation’ to the test.11
King versus Cortes
As usual, failure did not shake Philip’s determination ‘to put our trust in God’: he continued to fight multiple enemies on multiple fronts, even though his wars cost roughly twice his total revenues. He therefore reconvened the Cortes of Castile and asked them to vote yet more taxes to fund his foreign wars, but the assembly that began in May 1592 lasted twice as long as any of its predecessors, largely because some deputies defied their king. Senior ministers reminded the Cortes that ‘His Majesty had exhausted all his royal patrimony, and on top of that he owes thirteen million ducats in unsecured loans’ and ‘that all the resources and devices on which His Majesty might rely for the preservation and defence of these realms’ were exhausted; but instead, they found, ‘almost all the deputies wish to beseech Your Majesty most insistently that, before anything else, you order a reduction in war expenditure, both in the Netherlands and elsewhere’.12 One deputy bluntly stated that ‘although the wars with the Dutch, England and France are holy and just, we must beg Your Majesty that they cease’, while another urged ‘Your Majesty to abandon all these wars, making the best terms that you can’.13
Philip had never taken criticism well, and he now delivered a biting reprimand to the doubting deputies: ‘Tell them that these wars are necessary and unavoidable unless Spain is to suffer the miseries that afflict other parts of Christendom,’ he instructed one of his ministers, who must also insist that
they should and must place their trust in me, in the love I have for these kingdoms, and in the long experience I have in governing them, [and accept] that I shall always do what is in their best interests. Speak to them at length in this vein and advise them that they are never, on any pretext, to come to me with such a suggestion again.14
In addition, Philip offered some deputies bribes in return for a favourable vote and intimidated others with summary arrests and house searches. He even sent a message to ‘forewarn the theologians’ of all towns represented in the Cortes ‘that if the deputies should turn to them for advice, they may include in their opinions a full account of my obligations, and the reasons why we must find a remedy for the needs that face us’ (and he sneakily demanded that the theologians share with him what they discovered).15 Instead of winning over ‘the troublemakers’ (los dificultosos, as the government termed its critics), however, the king’s combination of intransigence and interference fostered an ‘organized opposition with a coherent political agenda’ in the Cortes: an agenda that I. A. A. Thompson has termed ‘Castile first’. By spring 1596 the opposition had become so articulate and inflexible that some ministers favoured dissolving the Cortes so that ‘we might convene others who are not so attached to their pretensions or so smart’.16
Then came the Anglo-Dutch assault on Cádiz. According to historian Guillermo Céspedes del Castillo, ‘This episode was perceived in Spain as a national disgrace and an irreparable humiliation that produced a wave of pessimism and sadness.’ Shortly after hearing the news, Philip composed a strongly worded ‘I told you so’ rebuke to the Cortes.
The experience we are now beginning to suffer in our homeland shows how advantageous it would have been to keep our enemies tied down in their homeland when we had the chance, and how important it would have been to be able to do so now, if we had not run out of resources … You cannot find a better defence for your own homeland than to make war abroad. Everyone can clearly see and understand that whatever wars I have waged abroad have been to maintain the calm, peace and quiet of these kingdoms, and to keep away from them the misfortunes that war brings.17
Suitably chastened, the deputies now voted new taxes, but they attached numerous conditions: that the money could be used only to pay for the defence of Spain, not for any foreign war; that the Cortes itself must oversee collection and disbursement of the funds; that the king and his heir must ‘promise and obligate themselves and their successors to the inviolable observance’ of all the concessions; and that any breach of these and other conditions would put an end to tax collection. The king refused: ‘Even if I and my successors wanted to comply with some conditions, it would be impossible.’18 While the king and the Cortes haggled, Philip’s wars continued to drain his resources. Even before the sack of Cádiz the marquis de Poza, president of the council of Finance, described Spain’s impossible financial and strategic position to Moura just as bluntly as had the ‘troublemakers’ in the Cortes:
His Majesty must see that it is impossible to carry on as we are, because although we have already spent all His Majesty’s revenues until the year 1599, his expenses continue and even increase, so that even if his revenues were unencumbered, we could not carry on. To do this, one only needs to know what I know: that His Majesty must either reduce his expenditure voluntarily until things improve, or else find a way to achieve the impossible.
A few days later he added despairingly: ‘Even if we escape from this obstacle, we will inevitably encounter another one tomorrow because each day is more impossible than the last.’19
The borrower from hell
To anyone who had lived through the fiscal crisis of 1574–5, such language could mean only one thing: another bankruptcy. Given that ‘here we are drowning tied back-to-back’ (in Moura’s colourful phrase) on 13 November 1596, ‘since loans are now so hard to find, and the total that we now owe’ to bankers exceeded 14 million ducats, Philip signed another Default Decree that suspended all interest payments and confiscated the capital of all outstanding loans. Castile had become the world’s first serial defaulter on sovereign debt and Philip had become, in the phrase of a recent book, ‘the borrower from hell’.20
The decree produced the predictable chaos. In Spain ‘all trade ceased and it was feared that many merchants would be ruined’, while in the Netherlands Philip’s commanders received orders that
If the [Dutch] rebels attack you, then you and the officers and soldiers with you should still do what is expected of honourable men; but if you find that you face intolerable pressure before relief can reach you, then rather than sacrifice yourself, I charge and command you to make the best terms you can.21
When the Cortes complained about the hopeless situation, the king again replied ‘I told you so’:
It grieved His Majesty more than anyone that his needs have caused this Decree, without any way to avoid it. If His Majesty could defend this kingdom with his own body alone he would do it; but since this cannot be done without money, and since he has none, the said Decree was unavoidable. In addition, part of the cause lies in the delay of the Cortes in providing him with assistance.22
Such rhetoric did nothing to solve the underlying problems, since Philip’s wars continued to cost double his revenues and, as Moura put it, ‘however much more we acquire, the more we have to defend and the more our enemies want to take from us’. While Philip poured his resources into France in a vain attempt to prevent Henry of Navarre from becoming king, a small but well-trained Dutch army captured one Spanish-held stronghold after another, doubling the size of the Republic by 1598.23
Philip’s difficulties in securing troops, fleets and the funds to sustain them during the last decade of his reign were not entirely of his own making. An episode of global cooling caused freak weather conditions. According to James Casey, ‘The 1590s were a decade of extremely bad weather’ in Spain: the chronicles and tithe records for Valencia and Murcia revealed ‘an exceptional run of wet years between 1589 and 1598’.24 Andalusia also suffered an unparalleled sequence of extremely wet years between 1590 and 1593 and again between 1595 and 1597. Further north, the problem was not too much rain but too little: a series of tree rings from Navacerrada, high in the Guadarrama mountains that divide Old and New Castile, reveals that the lowest annual precipitation ever recorded in the past millennium occurred during the 1590s. At the same time, an epidemic of bubonic plague moved inexorably south from the port-cities of Cantabria. In Mateo Alemán’s bitter novel The Life of Guzmán de Alfarache, as the hungry narrator travelled from Cazorla to Madrid in 1598 he observed grimly that
people gave little charity, and no wonder because the year was generally sterile; and if it was bad in Andalusia, it was worse as one entered the kingdom of Toledo, and the further inland the worse the scarcity. That was when I heard people say: ‘God save you from the plague descending from Castile and hunger rising from Andalusia.’25
The widespread misery led Fray Diego de Yepes to send Philip a hard-hitting analysis of the situation that came close to spiritual blackmail. ‘Since Your Majesty’s indispositions prevent me from saying some things in person,’ the confessor began, ‘I cannot avoid saying them in writing.’ After detailing concrete examples of negligence and malfeasance in government, he concluded:
God has entrusted the conservation of the Catholic faith and the expansion of the Christian religion to Your Majesty, and since they both depend on the sound government, justice and prosperity of these kingdoms of Spain I hope you will be pleased to arrange matters so that on the Day of Judgment (which is not far off), you can appear in the presence of God confident that you have done everything possible.
When nothing improved, Yepes sent an equally stark warning to Moura that fighting wars and rising taxes at a time of dearth ‘will bring down our world’. He also deployed spiritual blackmail on his colleague:
Your Lordship can see where this leads. The poor cry out, but His Majesty does not hear them, nor does he want to hear me. I simply do not know what to do. May God in His mercy protect Your Lordship, whom the world blames for all this (along with me)… I beg Your Lordship to look into this carefully, and advise His Majesty, because I have had no luck in writing or speaking to him.26
Exit strategies
Such defeatism, coupled with the news that Elizabeth, Henry IV and the Dutch leaders had signed a triple alliance against Spain and now sought to coordinate their attacks, convinced Philip and his most trusted ministers that they must make peace at any price. Despite the objections of a committee of theologians that it was contrary ‘to the law of conscience’ they concluded a general settlement with those affected by the Default Decree by which, in return for resumption of interest on the confiscated capital of their earlier loans, a consortium of bankers signed new loans worth over seven million ducats to fund one last campaign.27 Philip also empowered Albert, now his governor-general in the Netherlands, to undertake indirect peace negotiations with England. At first, the king tied his nephew’s hands – ‘you will conduct yourself in this matter in such a way that you do not close the door to peace, but do not open it either’ – but later conceded broad powers, similar to those he had conferred on his lieutenants in the first half of the reign: ‘Since you know about everything, you will be able to derive the best possible advantage; and since I have delegated everything to you, I have nothing more to say except that I await news of what happens.’28 Philip also accepted a papal offer to mediate a settlement with Henry IV of France, who saw peace with Spain as the best way to end the French civil war and consolidate his domestic position. The peace of Vervins, signed on 2 May 1598, largely confirmed the terms agreed at Cateau-Cambrésis thirty-nine years before, permitting Philip and his advisers to present it as a successful outcome since Spain sacrificed little territory.
Shortly afterwards, in Madrid, the king approved the marriage treaty between his daughter Isabella Clara Eugenia and Albert; and then, together with her and Prince Philip, he signed an act that ceded limited sovereignty in the Netherlands to Isabella and Albert. Spanish influence was limited to defence, foreign policy and matrimonial affairs (if Isabella should die before her brother, leaving no heirs, he would succeed her; if she had a daughter, then the daughter should marry the king or prince of Spain, in order to reunite the Monarchy). In August 1598, in Brussels, Albert assumed power in Isabella’s name and left for Spain to marry her, joining en route the prince’s bride-to-be. The king had at last followed his father’s advice and partitioned his inheritance.
When seeking a bride for his son, the king had as usual confined himself to Habsburg candidates, eventually narrowing his search to the three teenage daughters of his cousin, Archduke Charles of Styria. He requested portraits of all three (almost impossible to tell apart) but his first choice, the oldest, died almost immediately. Her mother obligingly offered to send both her younger daughters to Spain, where Philip could choose one as his daughter-in-law and keep the other in reserve in Las Descalzas Reales. Her prescience was soon vindicated. Philip requested the pope’s dispensation for his son to marry the older surviving archduchess despite ‘the multiple degrees of consanguinity and parentage’ that existed between them (cousins on both their mothers’ and their fathers’ sides), but no sooner had the pope complied than she too died, forcing Philip to request an identical dispensation for his son to marry her only remaining sibling, Margarita, then just thirteen years old. Once again the pope obliged; Margarita and the prince married in May 1599, and she lived long enough to give birth to five children, all of whom survived into adulthood. The future of the Spanish Habsburgs at last seemed secure.29
‘My children and my grandchildren’
Although Philip died six months before his son’s wedding, he already had grandchildren. In April 1588 he congratulated his daughter Catalina ‘you have done very well to have three fine children in just three years’. The previous day, he noted, ‘was your wedding anniversary and that night you began an activity at which you evidently excel, judging by its fruit’ – a surprisingly vulgar reference to his daughter’s sex life. The following year Philip received not only descriptions but also paintings of the new family members. ‘I was delighted to read what you wrote about my grandsons, and to receive the little book that the duke [of Savoy] sent me containing your portrait and theirs – although I would much prefer to see you and them, because I’m sure I would enjoy their pranks’ – a surprising comment, since Philip had shown little interest in the ‘pranks’ of his own children. But his love for Catalina was unfeigned and profound, and when news arrived of her death in childbirth in 1597 he wept and howled and grieved so long that one of the monks at the Escorial believed that it ‘deprived the king of many days of life and health’.30
The king’s love for his older daughter was also unfeigned and profound. After Catalina left Spain, Isabella was ‘normally with her father’, visiting him every day after dinner, travelling with him, and sometimes even signing letters in his name when arthritis prevented him from signing himself.31 This makes the cruel fate that the king planned for her ‘if she is not married at the time of my death’ doubly remarkable. In a secret codicil to his testament of 1594 he wrote, ‘I declare and command that she may choose as her residence, until she marries, either the Alcázar of Segovia or the palace at Tordesillas’. Although the king went on to praise the ‘great virtues and qualities that God has given her’, and affirmed ‘the love I have and owe to such a daughter’, he still planned to exile her from her only living relatives (her brother Philip at court, and her aunt María and cousin Margarita in Las Descalzas Reales) to either the fortress where Lupercio Latrás (and many others) had been imprisoned and executed or the palace where his grandmother Juana had languished in solitary confinement. Although Philip’s survival for four more years saved Isabella from this fate, his decree displayed extraordinary insensitivity towards a daughter ‘whom I love so tenderly on account of her virtues and because she has been such good company for me’.32
Philip’s plans for her brother, the prince of Asturias, were more conventional and reflected his unhappy experience with his first heir, Don Carlos. When in 1585 the king created a household for Prince Philip, then seven years old, the new governor, Don Juan de Zúñiga (son and homonym of the king’s own stern governor) reminded his master that ‘I have seen the damage that arose from the factions in the household’ of Don Carlos, so ‘it would be best for the servants of His Highness to be allies of his governor, so that this danger does not arise’.33 The king evidently paid heed, choosing the rest of the prince’s servants primarily for their loyalty, rather than for their talent. The prince’s tutor, García de Loaysa Girón, exemplified the loyal mediocrity that Philip promoted. On hearing of his appointment, someone who claimed to have been Loaysa’s ‘intimate and devoted servant’ for thirty years lamented that although the new tutor knew all about
languages, mathematics, astrology, logic, philosophy, metaphysics, theology … he is ignorant of a thousand other things. He has never learned to speak with a woman, whether good or bad; what to do with playing cards; … or that there are more streets in Alcalá than the one that leads from his house to the church and the university.34
The writer could hardly have identified more accurately those skills that Philip would not want his heir to learn! Chatting up women, playing cards and being street-wise (especially in Alcalá) were precisely the vices that (in the king’s mind) had ruined Don Carlos.
Perhaps Philip over-reacted – surrounding his son with servants who were worthy but dull and whose first loyalty was to the king increased the attraction to the prince of an older courtier devoted to him: Don Francisco de Sandoval y Rojas, count of Lerma and marquis of Denia – but that development lay in the future; for the time being, Loaysa’s pedagogy produced admirable results. In 1594 Philip allowed his son to sign ‘I the prince’ (Yo el príncipe) on routine letters and warrants, countersigned by a royal secretary ‘By order of His Majesty, and of His Highness in his name’. Three years later, according to the nuncio, ‘The prince already takes a full part in government’ and ‘every day provides evidence of his increasing discretion and valour’. All this, he concluded, ‘promises a wonderful new Golden Age’. Nevertheless, the nuncio continued, although the prince affixed his signature, ‘all the documents are drawn up by order of His Majesty, so that there is little difference or distinction between the prince’s signature and the stamp which used to be used in the king’s name’. Moreover, when the king was sick Moura acted as ‘arbiter of the affairs of all his kingdoms, of his councils, of his armies, of his fleets, of his ministers, of his treasury’.35
Philip did his best to ensure there would be continuity after his death. ‘I am very satisfied with Don Cristóbal de Moura,’ he wrote in a paper of instruction to his son during his last illness, ‘and with the other ministers whom I keep at my side’ (that is: the Junta de Gobierno); but
As a ruler, you must employ the services of everyone, each in his own office, without becoming the servant of any individual. Instead you should listen to many, and keep your opinion of them secret so that you remain free to choose the best, acting as master and leader. This will bring you prestige, whereas the opposite [course] will squander it because instead of commanding, which is what kings do, you will be commanded.36
Philip also prepared two more personal papers of advice for his son. One was ‘something that St Louis king of France prepared for his son, just before his death’ three centuries before: Philip transcribed it in his own hand and gave it to his confessor, with orders to pass it on to his son after his death. It contained many platitudes about faith (love God and avoid sin; confess regularly; advance the Catholic faith and obey the pope; attend Mass and hear sermons regularly) and justice (the prince should neither speak nor hear ill of others; should allow no blasphemy; should uphold the law; and should favour the poor). Some of St Louis’s other pious injunctions coincided with Philip’s own outlook: ‘If you are thinking of undertaking anything of importance, share it with your confessor or some other pious men of exemplary life so that you will know what you should do’; ‘when you suffer adversities, endure them with courage and consider that you richly deserved them, and that way you will learn from them’; ‘Do not make war, especially against other Christians, without good cause and counsel’; ‘As far as you can, preserve peace.’37
Philip kept a final paper of advice in a special casket. A little before his death, he asked for the casket and took out the ‘paper that it contained and gave it to the prince, saying: “You will find here the way to rule your kingdom”’. In essence the document was an attempt to tie his son’s hands, even though he was already 20. The king reminded him:
With the love of a father who is so fond of you and so wants you to get things right, and with the experience I have of all the men who will serve you, I have talked to you, among other things, about the persons I think worthy of promotion, whom you can trust and use for the well-being of these kingdoms. I remind and advise you to remember well what I have told you. I think you will find it useful.38
None of Philip’s instructions on ‘how to rule your kingdom’ contained the sort of detailed advice provided to him by his own father half a century before; but this is not surprising because, both in 1543 and 1548, Charles wrote when he was far away and feared he might die before he saw his heir again. Philip, by contrast, lived under the same roof as his son and he explicitly referred to ‘what I have already told you’. He did not need to write it all down.
From Madrid to Purgatory, via the Escorial
In May 1597 Philip turned 70, and like many septuagenarians, he spent more time sick and more time asleep – ‘Every day, His Majesty gets up after lunch and goes to bed after dinner,’ Velada noted – and everything he did took more time. Thus the journey from Madrid to the Escorial, which the king had once managed on horseback in a day, could now take a week, and when he arrived sometimes ‘he had to go straight to his sickbed’.39 Any setback that threated the king’s health alarmed his courtiers because (as one of them put it) as soon as Philip died ‘we are on another stage and all the characters in this play will be altogether new’. When ‘the old king leaves us’, he continued lugubriously, ‘another era begins, and we do not know how it will be’. The harbingers of change were everywhere. During the fiesta of St John in June 1598 the prince of Asturias took the future duke of Lerma with him to the bullfights in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor, and they watched together ostentatiously from a window. Everyone could see that Lerma sat ‘very close to His Highness’s chair’ and that ‘the prince ignored all the other courtiers’.40 Uncertainty about the future paralysed the affairs of the Monarchy. According to Velada, ‘the councillors feel they can no longer tell the king everything, so they try to prolong and postpone everything’; and although ‘the prince our lord orders and resolves what needs to be done, as long as his father lives he does so with great respect and moderation’.41
This uncertainty did not continue for long. A few days after the fiesta of St John, although his doctors advised him to rest, Philip left Madrid for the last time, ‘prepared to go and die in his royal monastery of St Lawrence’ which, Fray José de Sigüenza claimed, he had decided long before would be ‘his glorious tomb’. The king travelled there ‘in the same chair that they used to carry him around the palace, carried by four boys’ and, to avoid the intense heat, he only travelled in the evenings. This time, instead of resting after his arrival, the king immediately travelled ‘all round the buildings in his chair, from top to bottom, leaving nothing unseen. Such dramatic changes in his health left his doctors amazed.’42 On 22 July 1598 Philip took to his bed, but for some weeks he still managed to transact business. He nominated several prelates to vacancies; he gave many of his personal servants handsome rewards; he appointed some officials to positions in the household of his future daughter-in-law, Margarita; and he pardoned some prisoners, including some of those involved in the revolt of Aragon. He even showed mercy to ‘the wife of Antonio Pérez: provided she retires to a monastery, she can leave prison, and she can receive back the property that belongs to her, and her children may inherit their share of it’.43
On 17 August, although in great pain and helplessly incontinent, Philip gave a final audience to Caetani, who ‘found him in bed, immobile and extremely weak, but with all his senses alert and an admirable composure of spirit’. The nuncio first invited the king to ‘ask pardon for all his faults, sins and errors that he had committed through malicious and false information and advice’ (perhaps a reference to the murder of Escobedo?). Then he shamelessly exploited his advantage to offer the king, on behalf of the pope, substantial spiritual benefits if he would grant the pope certain disputed jurisdictions in his dominions (chapter 5):
I begged only one thing from His Majesty in order to remove all the impediments and obstacles that stood in his way [to heaven]: namely that he should make a clear declaration that he wanted to settle and resolve the jurisdictional problem in all his kingdoms and dominions, that he should give the Church what was really its due, and that he should tell the prince of his intention.
Despite the excruciating pain, his fear of Purgatory, and the ignominy of lying in his own excrement, Philip firmly rejected this naked attempt at blackmail:
His Majesty told me, with a smiling face and a fearless spirit, that he was greatly pleased by my visit, that his illness was serious and he was prepared to die, that he submitted himself to the judgment of God on whether he would live or die, and that he wanted nothing more than to die in a state of grace and seek forgiveness for his sins.
He then stated that ‘he was resolved to settle these matters of jurisdiction, that his intention had always been that the Church and the Apostolic See should get respect and reverence, and the prince would do the same … Up to this point,’ the nuncio continued, ‘I understood everything he said, because he made a great effort to speak loudly and clearly,’ but afterwards, ‘although he spoke many other words on this matter, I missed them because he lacked the strength and said them in a confused and obscure manner.’ The king had not lost his grip, however. Two days later, with shaking hand, he signed a document expressing his desire to resolve the ‘conflicts between the ecclesiastical and secular jurisdictions’ – but instead of unilaterally giving ground as the nuncio requested, Philip proposed that the pope and he should ‘sort everything out through the intercession of some respected, knowledgeable and upright people who would dispassionately clarify what appertained to each of the parties’. And ‘if Our Lord should call me before this can be done, I charge and command the prince my son to follow through – making clear that he should not agree to anything prejudicial to the royal jurisdiction where it is founded in truth’. Philip thus remained true to his father’s instructions fifty years before: ‘to behave with the submission of a good son of the Church … without giving them any just cause for offence with you. But do this without any prejudice to the pre-eminences, prosperity, and peace of the said kingdoms.’44 It was an impressive display of Philip’s iron resolve even as his death approached.
On 1 September, Philip signed a document granting permission for the marriage of Isabella Clara Eugenia, but it proved to be his last act as king. He continued to lie incontinent on the bed in his tiny study in the Escorial, unable to move and unable to bear being touched because sores developed all over his emaciated body. Sometimes the doctors caused so much pain as they treated them that ‘he cried out that he could not stand it’. He sometimes asked them ’to stop for a moment and at other times pleaded that they should treat him more gently’, and during one especially painful procedure he announced ‘that he was going to die in their hands’. According to his valet, Jehan Lhermite, ‘the stench that emanated from these sores’, and also from his soiled bed, constituted ‘a different kind of torment, on account of his lifelong concern with personal hygiene’.45
Although he could not move, the king could still watch and listen, and his devotions during his final illness reveal a great deal about his personal faith. Guided by his confessor, Philip studied certain passages of the Bible (especially the Psalms and passages from the Gospel that emphasized forgiveness: the redemption of Mary Magdalene; the return of the Prodigal Son; pardoning the thief on the Cross) and the spiritual works of two subjects whom he had known personally: Luis de Granada from Spain and Louis de Blois (Blosius) from the Netherlands. Isabella and Yepes took turns reading out extracts from Blosius, and the king repeated them, often several times – particularly passages about how human anguish as well as Christ’s Passion can redeem penitent sinners. Physical suffering in this life, Blosius suggested, lessened the sinner’s punishments in the afterlife, and perhaps his intense and repeated meditation on such passages helped the king to endure the constant pain.
Philip also found spiritual comfort in images. Although today his apartment at the Escorial is almost bare, during his last illness the king ‘had crucifixes and relics surrounding his bed and on all the walls’. His devotion to them is revealed by an anecdote told by Lhermite: ‘One day His Majesty was lying sick in his bed and he suddenly needed to urinate. Before taking the urinal, he asked me to cover with a curtain an image he revered of Christ before Pilate and another of the Virgin that hung near his bed’ – evidence that Philip saw these images as capable of experiencing the events around them. As Carlos Eire has pointed out, ‘To him they were silent, supernatural witnesses and companions.’46 The same was true of the thousands of relics which the king had assembled at the Escorial, and every day the monks brought a different selection to his bedside, where he revered and kissed them and had them placed on his sores. One day, after a ‘great display of these heavenly treasures’, their custodian ‘thought he had finished and started to take them away, when the king said “Look: you have forgotten the relics of such-and-such a saint, and you have not brought it for me to kiss!”’ When pain or exhaustion caused Philip to lose consciousness, the Infanta Isabella found that the only sure way to rouse him was to say loudly ‘“Don’t touch the relics!”, pretending that someone was near to one, and the king immediately opened his eyes’.47
The king also continued his normal devotions. From his sickbed he followed the services celebrated at the high altar of the basilica and he had holy water sprinkled on his face and body, confident in the Church’s teaching that it could wash away venial sins. He spent much time listening to a succession of preachers (when they tired, he would command ‘Fathers, tell me more!’) and he confessed frequently (on one occasion he took three days, apparently reviewing the sins of his entire life). He received extreme unction twice, and took communion until his doctors warned that he would be unable to swallow the host.
Philip had prayed that he would be fully conscious during his last moments of life and his prayers were answered. On the night of 12 September he underwent a paroxysm so powerful that those around his bed ‘thought he had died, but he suddenly opened his eyes with an unusual liveliness’. He began to laugh softly, realizing that he was about to die fully conscious. He asked for his parents’ crucifix ‘and held it with a fervour and devotion’ that amazed everyone. Then ‘he kissed it several times and afterwards he also held a consecrated candle from Our Lady of Montserrat, on which you could see the image of the Virgin herself, and kissed it too’. For two hours he focused on the crucifix and the candle until at five o’clock on 13 September 1598, ‘as dawn broke in the east’ and ‘as the seminary choristers were singing Mass’, Lhermite, Sigüenza and several others watched as their king ‘gave two or three gasps, and his saintly spirit left him to enjoy eternal life’.48
The king is dead! Long live the king!
Looking back in 1605 on the king’s death, Sigüenza invoked the already popular trope that Philip had ruled ‘an empire on which the sun never set’.
With the dawn of that most happy day, which was a Sunday, the new king assumed power. He began to govern the greatest empire under the sun, because if he had sent letters announcing the news [of his father’s death] from the point where the sun rises to where it sets, returning to the same place, he would have found his own subjects to receive them everywhere.49
Everywhere the late king’s subjects went into mourning. In Brussels, a funeral service took place on 29 December, the fortieth anniversary of the service there for Charles V; in New Spain and in the Philippines (appropriately enough, given Philip’s lifelong support for the Holy Office) the Inquisition organized the royal exequies. Many of Spain’s allies also arranged splendid commemorations. In Florence, the Grand Duke commissioned an impressive iconographic programme that included twenty-four enormous paintings by local artists of different episodes from the king’s life; while in Rome, Pope Clement VIII paid tribute to the fact that ‘His Late Majesty never wished to grant freedom of conscience’.
Because he wanted to make the subjects of other rulers follow the Catholic faith and obey this Holy See, he encumbered his royal patrimony and spent all the wealth that came to him from America and all the revenues provided by Castile throughout his long reign. One could therefore say that the king’s entire life was a constant struggle against the enemies of our Holy Faith.50
Some of his Late Majesty’s subjects felt less enthusiasm for the ‘constant struggle’ that had consumed their patrimony too. Some inhabitants of Madrid immediately fretted about the expense – ‘mourning His Majesty, whose death is now confirmed, will cost us an arm and a leg’ – and, indeed, as soon as they got the news, only six hours after the event, the city council ordered:
All people of every degree and quality shall wear mourning for the king our lord, who is in glory, within three days. Women will put on black bonnets and shall wear no dresses of silk. Those who cannot afford to wear mourning or a caperuza [a special pointed hat] shall wear a hat without trimmings as a sign of sorrow.51
Since all the Spanish kingdoms had already recognized Prince Philip as their next ruler, his succession was automatic, and on 11 October ‘the city of Madrid raised the standard of the new king’. A week later, hooded and clothed in black, young Philip III presided over two days of funeral ceremonies in the royal convent of San Jerónimo, with a vast catafalque modelled on the Escorial, illuminated by a thousand huge candles while 1,500 more candles lit the church.
Historian Carlos Eire has argued that ‘the death of no other monarch or public figure in early modern European history ever attracted as much attention as that of Philip II’, basing his assessment on the survival of over forty printed funeral sermons and descriptions of local commemorations of the late king. Salamanca, a university town, held a poetry competition with prizes for the best Latin epigram and the best Spanish sonnet to celebrate the late king’s achievements.52 But few other cities could afford such splendour. In Palencia, the magistrates decreed that everyone should go into mourning and, as in Madrid, ‘those who could not afford this should wear a hat without trimmings’; but, in view of the general poverty, the magistrates of Palencia added that those who could not afford a hat ‘should wear something black on their heads’. In Cádiz, still recovering from the ‘destruction and damage done by the English fleet’ in 1596, the magistrates discussed ‘where we might find money to comply with our obligation to wear mourning and perform the ceremonies’ and struggled to pay for the damask to make ‘the royal standard required to celebrate the new king’s accession’. They tried to economize by recycling ‘the timber used for the catafalque to make the stage on which we will raise the standard’ but when they eventually ‘tried to auction off the timber, no one came to buy it’. In desperation, ‘they tried to make some carpenters buy’ the wood but such was the prevailing poverty that ‘they did not want to pay a single penny for it’.53
Only Seville staged exequies that rivalled those of Madrid. When news of Philip’s death arrived, the council determined ‘to put on the greatest spectacle ever seen’, and to this end black drapes and flags went up all around the city, driving up the price of black cloth until the magistrates had to impose price controls. A magnificent catafalque, modelled (like that in Madrid) on the Escorial and illuminated with over 2,000 candles, stood in the midst of the darkened cathedral to serve as the focus when, on 26 November, the city’s clergy, magistrates, judges and Inquisitors filed in to take part in the ceremony. As their eyes grew accustomed to the light, however, the various groups of dignitaries noticed subtle differences in the quality and quantity of seats assigned to them. Arguments broke out among them until, in the middle of the funeral Mass, the Inquisitors excommunicated the magistrates because they would not vacate their superior seats. The ceremony ended in chaos. Eventually the council of Castile resolved all the precedence disputes and Seville re-staged its solemn exequies at the end of December. This time everything transpired without incident until a ‘swaggering poet’ declaimed a sonnet ‘To the catafalque of King Philip II in Seville’ that scandalized the audience:
I swear to God, such grandeur leaves me stunned,
and I’d give a doubloon if I could describe it!
For who is not filled with wonder, or does not marvel
at this splendour, at this great structure?
By the living Christ! Each part is worth
more than a million. Isn’t it a shame
that it will not last a century. Oh great Seville,
Rome triumphant in spirit and in riches!
I’ll bet that the dead man’s spirit
has today abandoned Heaven,
where he rests eternally, to enjoy this spot.
A braggart overheard these words and said:
‘What you say, gentleman soldier, is true,
and anyone who says otherwise is lying.’
And then straight away (incontinente)
he put on his hat, brandished his sword,
glanced around and stole off. And that was that.54
The scandal arose not only from the blasphemy of uttering oaths in a church, but also from the general sarcasm about the amount of money spent on ephemera (‘such grandeur leaves me stunned’; ‘each part’ of the temporary catafalque of wood and cardboard ‘is worth more than a million’). Worse still, the poem was scatological: the term incontinente (a double entendre in Spanish) reminded everyone of the late king’s terminal diarrhoea, described in every account of his final agony. Yet the ‘swaggering poet’ knew from personal experience what it meant to serve the late king as a ‘gentleman soldier’: his name was Miguel de Cervantes.
Many other Spaniards, male and female, bitterly criticized the late king. Two days after his death, the pious Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza shared with a friend her hope that ‘God will guide [Philip III] for the good of the Church, so that he can prevent the ruin of the kingdom’. The following month, Iñigo Ibáñez de Santa Cruz, secretary of the marquis of Denia (the Favourite of the new monarch and soon to be duke of Lerma), wrote a comprehensive guide to ‘The causes of the ignorant and confused government in the time of the late King Philip II, our lord’. Ibáñez excoriated not only the excessive cost of Philip’s foreign policy (‘thirty million wasted in the bogs of Flanders’ and ‘as much again’ in the fruitless wars against France and England) but also his addiction to ‘trivia’ (menudencias): he was ‘one of those men who know a lot about a little but is totally ignorant about everything else’. He also ridiculed the late king’s personal habits (‘a friend of women, paintings, beautiful gardens, big buildings, and intricate apartments’ with a taste for ‘perfumes and aromatic scents and other feminine things’) and his alleged dependence on mediocre ministers (like Mateo Vázquez and Don Cristóbal de Moura). ‘Oh wretched Spain,’ Ibañez concluded, ‘wretched Monarchy: lost, ruined and wasted.’55
That same month, Balthasar Álamos de Barrientos, an ally of Antonio Pérez, composed a blistering ‘Discourse to the King Our Lord about the current state of his realms’ that almost parodied Charles V’s ‘Political Testament’ just half a century before (chapter 2). Álamos de Barrientos noted the hostility of almost all the Monarchy’s neighbours. France now boasted a powerful king who ruled a unified state and sought every opportunity to foster a war in Italy that would weaken Spain further. England’s inveterate hatred had led it to support Spain’s rebels, to interlope in the Americas and even to launch direct attacks on the peninsula. The independent states of Italy, even the Papacy, all resented Spanish dominance and longed to see it end. Álamos also described at length the discontents of the new king’s subjects, with open rebellion in the northern Netherlands, vehement anti-Spanish sentiment in the south, and discontent in Portugal, Spanish Italy, Aragon and the Americas. This left Castile to carry the entire burden of empire, but ‘the cities of the kingdom lack men, the smaller villages are totally depopulated, and hardly anyone is left to work the fields’. Therefore, Álamos continued, ‘nowhere is free from this misery, and no one has the wealth and abundance that they used to have’; and he blamed this ‘primarily on the burden of taxes, and the fact that the yield is spent on foreign wars’.56
The chorus of critics included several clerics, starting with some of those who delivered sermons at memorial services for the late king. In November 1598, Fray Lorenzo de Ayala, preaching in Valladolid (the late king’s birthplace), noted:
Our Catholic King died after a drought that lasted almost nine months without a break, revealing that the earth had declared itself bankrupt – just like an unsuccessful merchant. At the same time, the price of everything in Castile increased as supplies ran short, coinciding with the collapse of public health throughout the kingdom and opening the door to plague in many areas.
‘These disasters,’ he concluded ominously, ‘were harbingers of the greatest catastrophe Spain has ever suffered since our Patriarch Tubal, grandson of Noah, settled here.’ A few months later a Jesuit, Juan de Mariana, published a political treatise that included a remarkable section explicitly attributing the failure of the Armada to the sins of its creator:
A few years ago, we sent a great fleet to the shores of England and we sustained a wound, an ignominy, which the passage of the years cannot efface. That was a punishment for the sins of our nation but, unless memory fails, God was also enraged by the vile lusts of a certain prince who had forgotten the sacred personage he was, in his advanced age if not senility; and the rumour spread at that time that he had indulged himself immoderately in lasciviousness.
In 1600, Martín González de Cellorigo, a lawyer who worked for the Inquisition, published a memorial arguing that the ‘decline of Spain’ (a term he invented) had begun under Philip, so that the country ‘is today in a state that we all believe to be worse than ever before’.57
Even some of the late king’s close collaborators agreed. Two weeks after Philip’s death the Venetian ambassador heard Don Martín de Padilla, captain-general of the Ocean Sea, ‘declare that the world would see what Spaniards could do, now that they have a free hand and are no longer subject to a single brain that thought it knew all that could be known and treated everyone else like a blockhead’. Padilla was scarcely less outspoken when he addressed the new king directly:
I grieve to see that, because we lack the funds, we undertake campaigns with such weak forces that they serve more to irritate our enemies than to punish them; and the worst is that, whatever we may say, we eternalize the wars so that they become an infinite burden, and the problems that stem from these wars are both major and endless.58
From Purgatory to Paradise
Not all Spaniards shared this pessimism, however. The marquis of Velada, one of those present at the king’s death, entertained no doubt that ‘His Majesty died like a saint this morning’; while according to another eyewitness, ‘it is entirely credible that after such a life and such a death we may count His Majesty as a saint’.59 Somewhat later, ‘various pious individuals, through divine revelation, saw the soul of the most prudent king enter Paradise, after being in Purgatory’ – but the ‘pious individuals’ failed to agree on the time frame. A Carmelite nun claimed it took place after only eight days; while a chaste maiden claimed to have seen the king’s soul ascend exactly fourteen days after his death. Five years later, at Marchena in Andalusia, Sor María de la Antigua saw in a vision on three consecutive Sundays a ‘fire’ in the sky which, she claimed, ‘the whole world saw’; but she only learned its significance later when she heard about the vision of Fray Julián de San Agustín (or Alcalá), a pious Franciscan who by then had over 600 miracles to his credit.60 It had taken place near the village of Paracuellos de Járama:
One day in late September in the year 1603, [Fray Julián] said in front of five witnesses that at 9 p.m., or a little later, two red clouds would appear in the sky, one in the east and the other in the west, and they would unite; and at the moment they united the soul of the Catholic King Philip II of glorious memory would leave Purgatory and enter Paradise.
Having made this prophecy, according to Fray Antonio de Daza (who wrote a short biography of his fellow Franciscan), Fray Julián retired to pray,
And the aforementioned witnesses affirm that when he said these things, the sky was clear and serene, and remained so until 9 p.m., or a little later, when two red clouds appeared in the east and in the west, so bright that the night seemed like day because you could see the houses and streets as clearly as if the sun was in the clouds.61
This vision became so celebrated that in the 1640s the painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo commemorated it on a canvas for a Franciscan convent in Seville, showing Fray Julián, the five witnesses and the eerily illuminated streets of Paracuellos de Járama, as well as Philip entering Paradise (see plate 45).
However, a striking anomaly troubled Daza. Although the late king ‘always strove to exalt the faith and extirpate heresy’, and although he had suffered terrible agony during his last illness,
Four years passed between his death and the time when Fray Julián had this revelation and made his prophecy – more than enough time, in our opinion, taking into account also the many prayers and Masses said throughout his dominions for his soul, to purify it in Purgatory, so that thus purified it could be with God for ever.
In his account of a similar vision by another Franciscan, this time of Charles V’s soul ascending to Paradise ‘four years after his death’, Daza had no doubt about the cause of the delay: it was ‘because he did not punish Luther when he had the chance’.62 But why had Charles’s son, who had never hesitated to burn heretics and never compromised with heresy, been detained in Purgatory? Daza could not answer his own question, and he was not alone. Hundreds of people have tried to evaluate the place of Philip II in history and legend, some seeing him as a saint and a hero who deserved a prominent place at God’s right hand, others as a sinner and a villain who deserved to rot in Hell.