Imperial Spain 1469-1716

by John H. Elliott

  There was, then, a new confidence in the Castile of the later 1570s. The long years of ordeal seemed at last to be over, and the crusading spirit of an earlier generation had been resurrected by the triumph of Lepanto and by the challenge of the Protestant advance. This was a time of extraordinary intensity in Castile's spiritual life – an intensity which was apparent at many levels, and extended to many different spheres. It was reflected, for instance, in the reform movement within the Religious Orders. St Teresa, intent on returning to to the austerity of the primitive rule, founded the first house of Discalced Carmelites at Ávila in 1562; by the time of her death in 1582 there were fourteen priories and sixteen convents, and the grand total had risen to eighty-one by the beginning of the 1590s. Besides reforms in the existing Orders, new Orders made their appearance and established their houses – seventeen religious houses were founded at Madrid during the reign of Philip II. A great impetus was given, too, to charitable foundations. Many hospitals and alms-houses were established, and in the Hospitaller Brothers of St John of God there appeared a new religious congregation dedicated to the work of caring for the sick. St John of God (1485-1550) was a Portuguese who, after a dramatic conversion, found his true vocation when he set up a hospital for the poor sick at Granada in 1537. In 1572 his growing number of followers were organized by Pius V into a congregation under the Augustinian Rule. The Brothers enjoyed a remarkable success: by 1590 there were said to be 600 of them in Italy, Spain, and the New World, and they had seventy-nine hospitals containing over 3,000 beds.

  The intense religious activity of the later sixteenth century, and the growth of a strong social conscience stirred by the sufferings of the sick and the poor, were in part a response to the programme formulated at the Council of Trent. As the Protestant challenge to Rome grew in strength and effectiveness, the need for reform came everywhere to be accepted as urgent. Quiroga, for instance, as Bishop of Cuenca before his elevation to Toledo, devised elaborate schemes for the promotion of charity and the advancement of learning in his diocese, and gave generous assistance to the poor. He was concerned, too, for the reform of his diocesan clergy, and as Primate of Spain he summoned in 1582 the twentieth Toledan Council, which was intended to initiate a movement for the reform of the clergy and laity, and to implement the Tridentine decrees. The extent to which the reform of the clergy was successful is difficult to gauge. There were probably some 100,000 religious in sixteenth-century Spain, with the numbers varying greatly from one region to another: in Galicia the regular and secular clergy represented 2 per cent of the population, in Catalonia 6 per cent. In some areas, notably Catalonia, parish priests were very poor, and standards of learning and morality were low, in spite of the earlier attempts at reform. It is probable, too, that as the century advanced and the numbers entering the Church increased, there were more priests incapable of being touched by any movement for reform. Against these, however, must be set an élite who represented the best ideals of Tridentine Catholicism; but there is no way of discovering what proportion this élite constituted of the clergy as a whole.

  While the Council of Trent gave a powerful stimulus to religious activity, it must, however, be recognized that much of this activity derived from spiritual movements that existed in Spain long before the Council closed in 1565. It was true that Illuminism and Erasmianism had been formally suppressed, but the spiritual fervour which had originally inspired them forced its way irresistibly into new channels, and welled up afresh in the spiritual revival of the 1560s and 1570s. In particular, the neo-Platonic overtones of these movements, and their insistance on inward piety and the direct communion of the soul with God, had evoked a deep response among the inmates of monasteries and convents. In these institutions it found expression in the wave of mysticism which is one of the glories of later sixteenth-century Castile. The Inquisition first responded, in 1559, by placing a large number of mystical works on the Index. But if, as Melchor Cano believed, the tendency to an internal form of religion was the great heresy of the age, it was a-tendency so deeply rooted that it proved impossible to dislodge. Moreover, monks and nuns could hardly be considered the natural allies of Erasmus, who had devoted his life to attacking them. Convinced, after all, that a mystical movement which could be kept well under control in the monasteries did not represent the great danger that had first been assumed, the Inquisition reversed its policy, and decided to tolerate the mystics. The result was a quite extraordinary outburst of mystical and ascetic literature. The climate was favourable, in that the reform movement was everywhere advancing, and the national crusade against Islam and the Protestants was mounting to its climax. In addition, there was the natural genius of St Teresa, who fired others with her example, and commended so enthusiastically the works of kindred spirits like Luis de Granada that the writings of the mystics achieved a certain fame. It was also peculiarly fortunate that mystical literature should have flourished at a time when the vernacular had attained an outstanding quality in literary expression, for the mystics were able to convey, both in prose and in verse, an extraordinary sense of personal immediacy when describing their arduous pursuit of the union of the soul with God.

  The mystics found in personal religion a refuge from the confusions and disorders of the world, but others preferred to confront directly the intellectual and religious problems of the age. The most pressing of all these problems in the world of the Counter-Reformation was the relationship of religion to the humanist culture of the Renaissance. In some fields, such as political thought, the challenge was obvious. Later sixteenth-century Spain produced a succession of writers, like Arias Montano and the Jesuit Pedro de Ribadeneyra, who were concerned to refute the teachings of a pagan Machiavelli, by reaffirming the scholastic tradition that all power is divinely derived and that its exercise should conform to the dictates of a Natural Law implanted in men's hearts. In other fields, however, the challenge was more subtle and less easily met, although the ultimate response was perhaps more satisfying than that of the political theorists. Renaissance humanism had found its philosophical expression in neo-Platonism, to which earlier sixteenth-century Spanish writers were strongly attracted. This was especially obvious in the vogue of the pastoral novel, with its idealized vision of an earthly paradise – a vision difficult to reconcile with the Christian doctrine of man's fall This fundamental incompatibility meant that sooner or later there was likely to be a reaction both against the idealism of Renaissance culture and against its anthropocentric emphasis. As the campaign against the Erasmians had shown, there were many conservatives in Castile ready to reject the entire Renaissance tradition; but against these were ranged others, like Luis de León and Alonso Gudiel, anxious to preserve what they could of Renaissance ideals and to fuse them with the reinvigorated Roman Catholicism of the post-Tridentine age.

  The fusion of Renaissance and Counter-Reformation ideals was the work of the later decades of the sixteenth century. It had begun already in philosophy, in the revived and renewed scholasticism of the school of Salamanca. In literature, it took the form of a gradual shift from idealism to realism – a realism preoccupied with a world that had been corrupted by the sinfulness of man, whose redemption could come only through the performance of good works and an absolute trust in the saving grace of God. While the famous picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes, published in 1554, was already realistic in tone, it remained for Mateo Alemán, in his Guzmán de Alfarache of 1599 to transform the memoirs of a pícaro into the mordantly realistic autobiography of a converted sinner: a book in which the sense of sin is overpoweringly strong. Not only was there a new awareness of man's inherent sinfulness in the masterpieces of Spanish literature of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but also a new preoccupation with human psychology, which perhaps owed something to the mystical movement of the preceding decades. But one further element was needed to complete the transition to the harsh realism of the late sixteenth century. This was the ability to set the moral and material problems o
f the individual against his social background. It was the misfortunes that overcame Spain in the last ten or fifteen years of the century which somehow suddenly brought the picture into focus, and gave to Spanish authors their acute realization of the unutterable complexity of existence, as they watched with disillusionment and incomprehension the shipwreck of a nation that appeared to have been abandoned by its God.

  There can be no doubt that the international religious conflict of the later sixteenth century acted as a sharp incentive to Spanish religious and intellectual sensibility, posing challenges which were often triumphantly met. But it would also seem that the cost was high, for individual scholars had been harassed and persecuted, and fresh constraints had been imposed on the expression of ideas. There is something stifling about the atmosphere of later sixteenth-century Spain, as if the religious life of the country had become too intense, and the ways of escape too few. In a citadel so barred against the outer world it was perhaps natural that feuds and rivalries should abound. These were years of bitter dissension between the different Religious Orders, and also of feuds within the Orders themselves, as the conservatives and the progressives battled for control. The Jesuits, especially, came under heavy attack from the secular clergy and from the other Orders – particularly the Dominicans – who suspected them of harbouring Illuminist and heretical tendencies in their midst. Philip II himself, under the influence of Melchor Cano and Arias Montano, distrusted them deeply, and made several attempts to prevent the Papacy from conferring further privileges upon an Order which was already far from amenable to control by the Inquisition and the Crown. As the Jesuits, undeterred by royal coldness, successfully consolidated their position, the temper of religious controversy became increasingly bitter, and mounted to a climax with the publication by the Spanish Jesuit Luis Molina at Lisbon in 1588 of his Concordia Liberi Arbitrii – a book which initiated a violent debate between the Jesuits and the Dominicans on the problems of grace and free will.

  Within the Orders also there was acrimonious controversy. Rivalries among the Augustinians played their part in the arrest by the Inquisition of Luis de León; the reform of the Carmelites by St Teresa was checked in the 1580s by a revolt from within the Order, led by the conservative Nicolás Doria. These feuds, exacerbated by personal enmities, were in reality a reflection of the continuing struggle between Renaissance and anti-Renaissance, between those who accepted certain elements of the humanist tradition and those who did not.

  Enormous energy was consumed in this struggle, and if a spirit of defeatism pervaded later generations, this may well have been because the strain of conflict was ultimately too much to bear. The Spain of the mid-sixteenth century had not only been fighting Moors and Protestants, but had also been attempting to resolve the inner tensions created by the presence of conversos and Moriscos; and at the same time it had been confronted with the enormous task of determining its relationship to a Europe which attracted and repelled it in equal degrees. In these circumstances, it was not surprising that it faltered. For a moment it had seemed that the solution was simple, and the enemy plain. While Valdés and Cano crusaded to impose Spanish on Erasmian Christianity at home, the Duke of Alba crusaded to impose Spanish on Erasmian Christianity in the rebellious Netherlands. But a crusade tends, by its very nature, to be an oversimplification, and it sometimes creates more problems than it solves. As long as the crusaders could believe in their crusade, Spanish religion burnt with a special intensity. But the faith militant could not always be sustained at a white heat; and already by the 1570s it was becoming apparent that, along with heresy, something of inestimable value had perished in the flames.

  ‘One Monarch, One Empire, and One Sword’

  1. KING AND COURT

  IN a sonnet addressed to Philip II, the poet Hernando de Acuña looked forward to the imminent arrival of the promised day on which there would be but one shepherd and one flock in the world, and ‘one monarch, one empire, and one sword’. This sentiment was well calculated to appeal to a king who saw in unity beneath his own personal direction the sole hope of salvation in an embattled and heresy-ridden world. There was no particular arrogance in this belief. It sprang, rather, from Philip's sense of the mission conferred upon him by his Maker. As King he had to exercise a double trusteeship, first for God, and secondly, through God's appointing, for his subjects, whose humble servant he was: ‘for the people was not made for the sake of the prince, but the prince was instituted at the instance of the people.’1 The King must ‘work’ for the people – ‘trabajar para el pueblo’ – who had been committed to his charge. It was his task to protect them from foreign enemies and to dispense justice among them, for the essence of good government was that it should be just government, in which the King rewarded the good, punished the wicked, and saw that all men, irrespective of rank, remained in undisturbed possession of their rights and property.

  The man upon whom this task devolved had been carefully trained for his office. Charles V had impressed upon his son his own high sense of duty, as expressed in the famous confidential instructions which he prepared for him before leaving Spain in 1543. Philip was advised to keep God always before his eyes, and to listen to the advice of good counsellors; he must never give way to anger; he must never do anything ‘offensive’ to the Inquisition; and he must see that justice was dispensed without corruption. These instructions were carefully followed, for Philip entertained for his father a respect amounting to veneration. He was for ever measuring himself against his father, desperately attempting to live up to the idealized model of the great Emperor; and this in turn made him acutely conscious of his own shortcomings. His feelings of inadequacy only increased this indecisiveness which appears to have been a hereditary characteristic of the Habsburgs. Always in need of advice, and yet intensely suspicious of the motives of those who proffered it, he would endlessly procrastinate as he struggled to reach his decision. Himself a weak man, he tended to shun strong personalities, whose resolution he envied and whose strength he feared; instead he would turn for counsel to the faceless men, to a Ruy Gómez or a Mateo Vázquez – supple characters who would insinuate where an Alba would command. Distrustful and yet too trusting, Philip felt completely safe only among his State papers, which he would tirelessly read, mark, annotate, and emend, as if hoping to find in them the perfect solution to an intractable conundrum – a solution which would somehow dispense him from the agonizing duty of making up his mind.

  Yet against the hesitation and the uncertainties must be set an iron sense of duty to God and to his subjects, and a passionate desire to live up to the high moral obligations inherent in a concept of kingship, the roots of which were deeply embedded both in the scholastic tradition and in the Castilian popular consciousness. The king who disregarded the moral law and transgressed the bounds of justice was a tyrant, and it was universally held that the people could refuse to obey the commands of such a ruler:

  En lo que no es justa ley

  No ha de obedecer al Rey.

  (Calderón, La Vida es Sueño, Act II)

  The King's confessors and the Court theologians therefore had a positive role to play in advising the sovereign on all questions which appeared to pose problems of conscience, just as the King in turn had a certain moral obligation to follow their advice. It was in accordance with this tradition that Philip consulted his theologians in 1566 on the legitimacy of his religious policy in the Netherlands, and summoned in 1580 a Junta consisting of Fray Diego de Chaves, Fray Pedro de Cascales and the royal chaplain, Arias Montano, to advise him on whether the use of force would be justified in securing for himself the Portuguese succession.

  Since all power derived from God, the King was morally bound to maintain justice and to right wrongs. Philip II took this duty with intense seriousness. There are several instances of his intervening in cases of an alleged miscarriage of justice, as when an oidor from the chancilleria of Valladolid treated in a high-handed manner the corregidor of Madrigal de las Altas
Torres; and in 1596 the King found time to write to the President of the Valladolid chancilleria about the case of a soldier who had been whipped without having first been given the opportunity to exonerate himself. He considered it morally incumbent upon him to be scrupulous in his regard for special liberties and fueros, but here again, in cases of a conflict between two laws, the higher law must prevail. This meant that fueros could not be employed as a mere pretext for committing disorders, as the students of Salamanca discovered to their cost in 1593, when they resisted arrest by royal officials on the grounds of their privileged status, and the King ordered that they should be punished ‘in conformity with the laws of our kingdoms, in spite of the said privileges of exemption conceded by us’.

  Contemporaries were impressed above all by the King's readiness to allow justice to take its course, even at the expense of his own private interest and comfort. Baltasar Porreño, who collected innumerable anecdotes about Philip II in his Dichos y Hechos del Rey Don Felipe II, constantly insists upon this trait, and quotes the King's words to a councillor about a doubtful case in which the Crown's financial interests were deeply engaged: ‘Doctor, take note, and inform the Council, that in cases of doubt the verdict must always be given against me.’ But the supreme example of the King's ruthless subordination of all personal considerations to the public welfare is to be found in the terrible and grotesque affair of the arrest and death of Don Carlos.