Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  The global struggle involving Spain became even more acute after 1635. That year, as we have seen, the German leaders tried to bring peace to their own nation. One indirect consequence was the declaration by France of war against Spain. In the same year, in Asia there was a reaction against the Iberians. In Japan the Tokugawa shogun Iemitsu (1623–49) issued a decree prohibiting trade to the south and the east, and his country retreated into a period of isolation (the sakoku or ‘closed country’ era). Ever since the ‘expulsion of the Bateren’ in 1614, the Catholic community in Japan and the trading interests connected with them had been under pressure from the Shogunate. The persecution of Christians began in the year that Ieyasu (see Chapter 4) died, 1614, and reached its peak in 1622 with the execution of fifty-five Christians at Nagasaki. The remaining Spaniards were expelled three years later.

  The continuing strength of the Christians, however, surfaced during the great Shimabara rebellion of 1637 in Kyushu, in which the rebels marched with banners extolling the Virgin Mary. Their forces, some thirty-seven thousand, were besieged in April 1637 and brutally massacred. The repression was beneficial to the Spaniards, for the size of the uprising forced the Japanese authorities to cancel any ideas about invading Luzon.44 In 1639 what remained of the Portuguese community in Japan was also driven out. The seriousness of the situation was amply demonstrated by the savage reception given the next year, 1640, to an embassy of merchants sent by the Portuguese of Macao. All the members of the embassy were on their arrival immediately seized and beheaded. By 1644, when sakoku was in force, not a single Jesuit, native or foreign, remained in Japan. The indigenous Christians were ferociously persecuted. Some three thousand Japanese Christians were put to death. By 1660 there were virtually no Christians to be found in Japan.

  The position of the Spaniards in East Asia had deteriorated rapidly after the entry of the Dutch into those waters. Portugal, which had played so brilliant a role for over a century in exploration, trade and missionary activity, was completely unable to defend its scattered outposts in Asia. The Dutch took over their position in Ceylon in 1630, and in Melaka and Taiwan in 1641. The council of Portugal, the advisory council set up for that realm in Madrid, urged the king to divert more resources to Asia. But the Spaniards were powerless to help.

  Their vulnerability in Asia may be seen in the case of Taiwan. The island's key position on trade routes made it the objective of efforts by outsiders – Japanese, Chinese, and Portuguese – to establish bases there. In order to break into the Portuguese trade with Japan, the Dutch in 1624 seized the harbour at Tayovan on the south coast of the island. Two years after they had done so, the Spaniards of Manila landed soldiers at Keelung harbour on the northern tip of Taiwan.45 On a little island in the harbour they constructed the fort of San Salvador, a useful base from which to protect the trading route between Manila and Japan. They felt, with an eye on Japan, that it could also serve as a point of departure for Spanish missionaries. Since the isolated fort did not give sufficient protection, in 1628 they sent a unit to occupy the coast of the adjacent tip of Taiwan, at Tan-shui. There they built a mission where a Dominican, Jacinto Esquival, wrote the first ‘vocabulary’ of the local language. The settlement later developed a school for the children of Taiwanese natives and of Japanese settlers. However, the Taiwan settlements were not economically viable and Manila soon reduced its support. In 1640 the Keelung garrison numbered no more than fifty Spaniards; in addition, thirty Taiwanese, two hundred slaves and one hundred-and-thirty Chinese soldiers brought the total force to around four hundred.46 It was not difficult for the Dutch, who had been in northern Taiwan since 1626, to capture Keelung in August 1642 and bring the Spanish presence on the island to an end.

  The formal entry of France into the war in Europe appeared to pose serious problems for Spain. But for many years the French had already been financing and supplying the enemies of Spain, and the long-expected declaration did not change the real military situation, which continued to be favourable to the Habsburgs. Moreover, a few days after the French declaration of war the leading German Protestant princes agreed with the emperor Ferdinand II (Peace of Prague, 30 May) to cease supporting the Swedes and to withdraw from the conflict. Spain could consequently count firmly on the military support of the emperor. Entry into a state of war with its traditional enemy the French was for Spain a solemn moment, but by no means a disturbing one. French military potential was undeveloped, there was no organized army and few resources were available to wage a sustained war. The Spanish, moreover, were in the unusual situation of enjoying a naval alliance with one of their inveterate enemies, the English. In August 1634 the Spanish ambassador in London, Necolalde, signed a treaty with the government of Charles I which guaranteed English neutrality in any conflict with the Dutch. Olivares was overjoyed to obtain such backing from a nation he considered to be ‘masters of the world's trade’. English support, which lasted until the outbreak of the Civil War in that country, turned out to be very useful. Spanish vessels could shelter in English ports from Dutch pirates, Spanish silver could be transported by land through England, and even Spanish troops could use the same route. A veritable ‘English Road’ had been created to make up for loss of the ‘Spanish Road’ through Savoy.

  After the victory at Nordlingen, the immediate priority was to restore initiative to the forces in the Southern Netherlands and recover some of the strategic fortresses that had recently been lost to the Dutch, such as Maastricht, Wesel and 's-Hertogenbosch. The position in those provinces was almost immediately and drastically changed by the French declaration of war. A month after it, in June 1635, French and Dutch armies simultaneously invaded the Netherlands. The invasion petered out, and in response the army of Flanders in June the following year, with eighteen thousand men under the cardinal infante and including an Imperial contingent, invaded France. The offensive was not intended to open up a new military front, for Spain's strategy was still at that moment concentrated on the Rhine and against the Dutch.47 Surprisingly, however, it succeeded. The army pushed southwards up the valley of the Oise and by August had reached the fortress of Corbie, a few miles from Paris, which it took after a week's siege. There was panic in the French capital, and the royal family was evacuated. Just over a month later a Spanish force that had crossed the Basque frontier captured the border town of St Jean-de-Luz.

  It was a short-lived success. The French recovered Corbie in November and St Jean-de-Luz a few months later. But the success of the army of Flanders threw into relief the crucial role that Belgium was now playing in the defence of the Spanish empire. In 1628 it was calculated in Madrid that Spain was paying two-thirds of the cost of the war in Flanders, and the southern Netherlands one third. The Flanders’ one-third was a high proportion for a country that had been at the centre of conflict for sixty years, had seen its industry ruined and its fields laid waste. This did not seem to deter the Netherlanders. When the cardinal infante took over, he continued the archduchess's tendency to take an independent line. He backed the proposals made in 1636 by a group of Belgian financiers, led by van Hoelbeeck, to take over part of Spain's war financing and in that way avoid having to rely perpetually on the Genoese. The proposals would involve contact also with Dutch financiers. It was a daring idea, which called for secret collaboration with the ‘rebels’, but it could lead to splitting the Dutch from the French. It would unavoidably mean having to overlook the ‘heresy’ of the Dutch collaborators. The cardinal infante was in favour, and in January 1638 wrote to Philip IV suggesting that ‘toleration is the lesser evil’ and could be a positive way forward. He repeated the idea in several other letters, and unilaterally suspended persecution of Protestants in parts of the Southern Netherlands.48 The proposals were never put into effect, but they cleared the way for the adoption by Spain of a more pragmatic attitude to the Dutch, one that very soon became reality.

  The successes of the cardinal infante were soon checked by the resolve of the Dutch and French to bring an end to th
e destructive activities of the corsairs operating from Dunkirk. In May 1637 the Stadholder Frederick Henry prepared a large force with the intention of attacking the port, but was unable to embark his men because of unfavourable winds and finally had to abandon the effort. He thereupon changed the objective, and in July gave orders for the army to set out for Breda. The fortress was considered a symbol of power, especially since its capture by Spinola and the army of Flanders twelve years before, since when its defences had been considerably strengthened. With its garrison of four thousand men, it was considered impregnable. Frederick Henry prepared for a difficult siege, and dammed the river in order to flood the countryside around; English and French forces were entrusted with holding the lines to the south. The cardinal infante brought his troops up but could not approach the city, and was forced to attempt diversionary attacks. After a resistance of eleven weeks the fortress, which had been subjected to a massive bombardment and where only half the garrison still survived, capitulated in October 1637.

  The subsequent months were anything but successful for the Franco-Dutch troops, for the army of Flanders lived up to its reputation as a fighting force. At this stage, in 1638 the French took the decisive step of invading the Iberian peninsula through the Basque provinces, always an easy target. When the forces under Condé invested the fortress of Fuenterrabía, the government in Madrid made a frantic attempt to round up soldiers from the peninsula. Olivares also ordered the naval forces at La Coruña, then being prepared for Flanders under the command of Admiral Lope de Hoces, to give support by sea. Unfortunately, a French squadron of forty-one vessels commanded by the soldier-archbishop of Bordeaux, Henri, cardinal de Sourdis, trapped Hoces's ships in the bay of Guetaria, near San Sebastián, on 22 August 1638. Of all the Spanish vessels, one galleon managed to escape but eleven were destroyed including Hoces's own command ship (the admiral had to swim ashore). Only one quarter of the four thousand men on board the fleet survived.49

  Shortly after this naval disaster the Habsburg cause suffered another major reverse in the land war. Spain had hitherto relied for the security of its troop movements on the protection offered by the Imperial fortress of Breisach, on the Rhine. In August 1638 France's ally Duke Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, commanding a Franco-German army, laid siege to the fortress, which was starved into surrendering in mid-December. Cardinal Richelieu had always considered the taking of Breisach a fundamental prerequisite of the campaign. It commanded not only the traditional ‘Spanish Road’ taken by Spanish troops coming north from Milan, but also the route followed by troops that made their way to the Rhine through the Holy Roman Empire. With Breisach in French hands, Spain's overland route to the Netherlands was definitively closed. There remained only the sea route through the Channel.

  That too was closed the year after.

  In September 1639 the Spanish government, resorting as in 1588 to the tactic of irresistible naval force, managed to put together a massive fleet of around a hundred vessels, including some seventy warships and about thirty transport vessels of English and German origin.50 The warships included twenty-one Belgian vessels, and ships from Lisbon, Naples, Cadiz, Galicia and the Basque country.51 The fleet, carrying twenty-four thousand sailors and soldiers under the overall command of Admiral Antonio de Oquendo, had instructions to go to the relief of Dunkirk. Oquendo's most outstanding previous action had been as commander of the Portuguese-Spanish armada sent from Lisbon in 1631 to retrieve Pernambuco from the Dutch. For that expedition he had two thousand Portuguese, Italian and Spanish troops on board. In an engagement off the coast of Brazil both Oquendo and the opposing Dutch fleet suffered heavy losses, and only one third of the admiral's men reached shore. It was not a promising precedent.

  No sooner had Oquendo entered the Channel in 1639 than he was sighted at nightfall on 15 September by a small group of thirteen ships under the Dutch admiral Tromp. Unwilling to risk anything, Oquendo took shelter off the Downs, along the cliffs between Dover and Deal, where he was kept under observation by a small English squadron, anxious to preserve English neutrality. While Oquendo waited, the Dutch in their enthusiasm for the expected conflict volunteered ships and men to aid Tromp, who within three weeks found himself at the head of an impressive force of 105 vessels. On 21 October Tromp's fleet entered English waters, thereby violating the neutrality on which Oquendo had relied, and attacked with devastating results. The Spanish admiral attempted, as the Armada had done in 1588, to come to grips with the enemy. Tromp, however, avoided this and kept his ships at artillery range, then at the opportune moment sent in his fireships. Some thirty Spanish galleons were destroyed, together with one quarter of the military force accompanying the fleet.52 The survivors, including Oquendo, managed to make it to Dunkirk. The battle of the Downs was historic: the Dutch celebrated it as a supreme achievement, and historians have claimed that it marked the end of Spanish pretensions to naval power in Europe. For Olivares it was a calamity that (he said) ‘strikes the heart’; it certainly destroyed the reputación of Spain. A Spanish officer who fell into Dutch hands wrote home that the Dutch were ‘better sailors’ and ‘could do with our ships whatever they wanted, just as in 1588’. It was only the first of the naval reverses that occurred during these months. In the early weeks of 1640 a large Portuguese-Spanish fleet that had set out under its commander Da Torre in 1638 with the intention of expelling the Dutch from Brazil, was surprised, defeated and dispersed near Pernambuco by a Dutch squadron less than half its size.

  It is possible, according to one estimate, that the Spanish navy between 1638 and 1639 lost close to one hundred warships, ten times the number of ships it was to lose at the battle of Trafalgar in the early nineteenth century.53 These apparently bleak figures, however, obscure a perspective that is little less than astonishing and sheds enormous light on the nature of Spanish power. In the seventeenth century, Spain could still draw on the resources of the member states of the world monarchy. With extraordinary speed this battered but still persistent nation returned to the fray, refusing to face the realities of its position. News of the disaster at the Downs reached Madrid on 15 November 1639. Immediately the government sent out orders to acquire with all haste ships, cannon and sailors from the four points of the compass.54 Supplies were demanded from Naples, Sicily, Genoa and Tuscany, and the galleys available in Italy were given orders to bring all that was obtained. The cardinal infante received orders for the purchase of warships from the Dutch (the enemy!) and from the Hansa. It was the first concrete sign that Spain had decided to come to terms with the Dutch. The kingdom of Naples was asked for six thousand infantry, eighteen galleys and quantities of gunpowder. Early in 1640 Oquendo returned to Spain from Flanders, in a fleet that included four new warships built in Dunkirk shipyards. The capacity of Spain to draw on global resources can only give rise to awe. No other nation on the face of the earth had such potential at its disposal.

  At the same time, no other nation was as incapable as the Spanish of recognizing that its power was deceptive, and rested largely on the ability of others to come to its aid. In official circles, defeat was unthinkable. A leaflet issued in Seville shortly after the battle of the Downs celebrated ‘the great victory’; and fifty years later Oquendo's grandson was granted a marquisate to honour the ‘great naval victory’ won by his grandfather. It is obvious, of course, that the Downs was no victory, but neither was it the end of Spanish naval power, which continued (as long as the money did not run out) to rely on the resources of its partners in the empire.

  The French invasion of the Spanish peninsula reaped its greatest successes with intervention in Portugal and Catalonia. In 1639 Olivares deliberately chose Catalonia as his main war front and centred attention on the French siege of the border fortress of Salses, which was finally recovered in January 1640 after a late rally by the Catalans. Feeling that the initiative should not be lost, Olivares decided to billet in Catalonia an army of nine thousand men, in preparation for the new campaign. The Catalans had refused to take part
in the Union of Arms, and he saw no alternative to relying mainly on Castilian troops. ‘With their present attitude’, he observed, ‘the Catalans are of no help to the monarchy, serving it neither with their persons nor with their goods.’55 There were clashes between peasants and soldiers throughout the province, and in February the viceroy accused the Catalan governing authority, the Diputació, of ‘deliberately stirring up the people and attempting to destroy the army’. A wave of social disorder overtook the principality. On 7 June, the feast of Corpus Christi, a group of Catalan insurgents disguised as reapers entered Barcelona, provoked a riot, drove the viceroy out of his palace and murdered him on the beach as he was trying to escape on a galley. Led by Pau Claris, canon of the see of Urgell, a section of the Diputació that had no wish to negotiate with Madrid began talks with the French. ‘Without any sound reason or justification’, lamented the count duke, ‘the Catalans have launched a rebellion as complete as that of Holland.’ In January 1641 the rebels transferred the title of count of Barcelona from Philip IV to Louis XIII, thereby putting themselves under the crown of France.

  Contemplating events in the principality, the historian Gil González Dávila wrote to a friend in Aragon: ‘The view of discerning people is that Catalonia will be the Flanders of Spain, putting an end to what little remains of life and substance in it. We had the gout in our lower parts [that is, the Low Countries] and could not get rid of it. Now we have it in the head. When will we be cured?’56 The next ten years were traumatic ones for Catalonia. In 1642 the French occupied Rosselló. This time it was permanent. The sufferings and expense of war rapidly disillusioned the Catalans. When Juan José de Austria recovered Barcelona in October 1652 they were ready to accept his conditions. The Catalan revolt brought about the fall of Olivares and contributed to the collapse of Spain's military hegemony. Catalonia north of the Pyrenees was lost for ever after the treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, and the aspiration for unity within the peninsula vanished definitively with the successful revolt of Portugal.