by Henry Kamen
Flemish art had long exercised a crucial influence in the peninsula. It had been favoured under Ferdinand and Isabella and during the reign of Charles V.127 Philip now brought his personal enthusiasm to bear, arranging for paintings and artisans to be brought to Spain. He was the first to introduce into Spain the landscaped gardens of Flanders. His experience of buildings in the north had given him further ideas on what could be done in Spain. Continually, during the years of his absence, he sent instructions and suggestions for the reconstruction of the Spanish palaces. In August 1559 he signed in Ghent a letter to Juan Bautista de Toledo, then in Naples, inviting him to Madrid to become his principal architect. In childhood he had come to know the Netherlands music that his father had made standard at the Spanish court. Philip went further by taking back with him to Castile his Flemish choristers. From then on, he always had two sections to his chapel, the Flemish and the Spanish. His contact with the north was for him a positive experience which he fully appreciated and about which he never uttered a single criticism.
His anxiety to leave, however, is easy to understand. He had been away for over five long years. He was happy to return to a land whose climate, language, and people he knew; ‘desiring, above all, to obtain some rest and ease in his native land’.128 Of the sixteen years since 1543 that Philip had been governing Spanish affairs, he had spent eight out of the country. He had visited northern Italy, the Alps, southern Germany, the Rhineland, the Netherlands, parts of France, and southern England. For him, Augsburg, Milan, London, Cologne, Antwerp and Trent were not faraway places but towns whose streets he had trodden. His father excepted, no other European ruler of the time had travelled and seen so much, or accumulated so much practical experience of international relations. He had lived with the Protestant problem in Germany at close quarters, seen heresy punished in England, and been present in person on the battlefield against France. He had met in person, both in peace and in war, most of the prominent personalities of his time. In later years all this accumulated experience filtered through into his letters and influenced his decision-making. During the years abroad, his inability to speak any language other than Castilian (and Latin) may have limited his contact with others and reinforced the impression of a tight-lipped king. But his keen and sensitive eye took everything in, eagerly devoured what evidently pleased him and rejected what did not suit his temperament. Though brought up in Castile, he was never limited to the horizon of Spaniards. The new king of Spain who came home in 1559 was very much a European.
But he was also, by the vicissitudes of power, now primarily a southern European. The reluctance of the emperor Ferdinand to let the Imperial crown out of the hands of his family, in time made permanent the division between the two halves of Charles V's empire. But there was not, under Philip, any rupture. The new king of Spain continued to maintain close and active links with the empire and the German princes.129 In the west, the inopportune death of Mary Tudor dissolved the Anglo-Spanish alliance and a friendship which went back to the Middle Ages suddenly ground to a halt. Spain emerged on the world stage as a great power. With a firm base in northern Europe (the Netherlands), and a key position in Italy (through Milan and Naples), it stood poised to dominate western Europe. France, clearly, could never tolerate this.
The royal party arrived in Vlissingen on 11 August, but had to wait for a favourable wind. Philip occupied himself on excursions to the islands in the area. After supper on Wednesday the twenty-third, he moved into his cabin. Early on the twenty-fifth the formal leave-taking commenced. First the great lords, among them Egmont and Orange, said farewell.130 Then at midday it was the turn of Margaret of Parma, accompanied by her son Alessandro Farnese, who took ship with the king. In mid-afternoon ‘the king embarked with his whole fleet towards Spain, with an easterly wind, very small, next to a calm … The number of his ships was twenty Spanish, thirty Hollanders, and forty of others of less sort’, the English envoy in the Netherlands reported.131 The journey home was uneventful. They put into Laredo on the evening of Friday, 8 September, and the king disembarked. At midday on Saturday, before everything from the ships could be unloaded, a storm hit the coast. Some of the ships capsized, with the loss of men, property and papers. Undeterred, after only a short rest, Philip set off directly for Valladolid. He entered the city, which was decked out with triumphal arches, on Thursday, 14 September.
4
The Cross and the Crescent 1559–1565
Had there been no Inquisition, there would be many more heretics.1
Philip returned only to plunge into severe problems at home. There were food shortages. In 1559 torrential spring rains fell, the river Duero flooded, and southern Castile was suffering from grain scarcity. In Aragon, there was political uproar provoked by an attempt of the Inquisition to extend its control over the Moriscos of the nobility.2
The first priority was financial. One week after arriving in Valladolid, he summoned a Cortes to meet in a month's time in Toledo. In his opening proposal, which he read in person, Philip expressed his satisfaction at being home again. He reported on the peace, on the threat from foreign heresies, and concluded by hoping the Cortes would grant the money necessary to his policies. He expressed his willingness to satisfy the petitions they presented, promising for example (a promise he did not keep) not to sell off any more property from the crown's patrimony.3
The next priority was the question of the discovery of Protestants. It was an issue that gripped the imagination of Spaniards for the next three years.
Astonishingly, Reformation heresy had made little impact on Spain. Nearly forty years had passed since the dawn of the German Reformation, and of all western countries Spain alone seemed immune to its appeal. There was in Spain, unlike other western countries, a refreshing absence of repression. ‘We interpreted everything freely’, a priest commented. There was no need at that time to be suspicious of anyone.’4 Persecution of conversos, at its most intense over a generation before, was now only sporadic. Suddenly, the discovery in 1557–8 of groups of alleged Lutherans in Seville and in Valladolid itself, with well-known clergy, nobility, and royal officials among them, shook the government out of its complacency. With Charles V urging her on from his retreat in Yuste, the regent Juana took a number of urgent measures. All those under suspicion were arrested by the Inquisition, a stringent censorship law was decreed for Castile, and a new Index of forbidden books was rushed through. In May 1559 the first of a series of autos de fe was held in Valladolid, at which some of those arrested were executed.
The star of Inquisitor-General Valdés had been waning in government circles; now the discovery of ‘heretics’ enabled him to recover the initiative. In long and confident letters to the king in Brussels he described the efficiency with which the Holy Office had acted and the impressive number of people it had arrested and punished.5 Meanwhile, he also brought off another coup: the arrest on charges of heresy of Spain's leading prelate, the archbishop of Toledo. The Dominican Bartolomé Carranza, chaplain and court preacher to Philip, had accompanied Philip during the visit abroad. Impressed by the swarthy Navarrese priest, Philip in 1558 appointed him to the archbishopric. Carranza was consecrated by Granvelle in Brussels in February 1558, and returned to the peninsula that August. Exactly a year later, as a result (many said) of the personal enmity of Inquisitor Valdés, he was arrested by the Inquisition. He was accused, among other charges, of making heretical statements in a Catechism he had just published in Antwerp. The case became one of the most famous of the century.
The figures Valdés cited to the king for Protestants could not fail to alarm. Philip returned in time to be able to preside over an auto de fe in Valladolid on 8 October 1559. The ceremony attracted much attention, for it was a novelty in Spain. Up to the 1520s, when the great persecution of conversos began to die down, many autos had been held, but they were simple religious ceremonies with no pomp or ritual. In the following generation there had been very few. The king had previously attended only one, a humble
affair in Toledo on 25 February 1550.6 The Valladolid display, like the auto held there in May and another held in Seville in September, was intentionally impressive.
The ceremony was staged by the Inquisition in the main city square of Valladolid, with the assisting public crowding around the sides. The proceedings began at 6 a.m. A formal sermon was preached, then the king, baring his sword before the inquisitors, took an oath to uphold the authority of the Holy Office. The central spectacle was a procession of penitents, whose sentences were read out by the officiating inquisitors. This occupied the most time. Those who repented were publicly accepted back into the bosom of the Church; the unrepentant were condemned to the relevant punishments. Solemn mass brought the proceedings to a close. The whole ceremony, witnessed by several thousand spectators, lasted some twelve hours. By its combination of faith, punishment and spectacle, the auto was deliberately devised as a piece of theatre which would both impress and deter.
Philip was particularly impressed by the fact that among those condemned were some well known to him. The previous auto, in May, had included Dr Agustín Cazalla, at whose sermons he had often assisted. The present one, in October, included the civil governor of Toro, Carlos de Seso. There was a total of thirty accused, most of them members of the newly discovered groups. Though accused of ‘Lutheranism’, no more than a handful of them had identifiably Protestant beliefs. During the procession Seso is said to have called out to the king, ‘How could you permit this to happen?’ Philip is said to have replied sharply, ‘I would bring the wood to burn my own son, if he were as wicked as you.’ It is possible that he said it, for three years later he used a similar phrase in front of the French ambassador.7 But it was more likely a later invention. Almost exactly the same words had been used by the pope in an interview with the Venetian ambassador in Rome twelve months before!8
The auto ended after the mass, and most of the public drifted back to their homes. The king did not go to the sequel, carried out on the confines of the city. One of his aides, the Netherlander Jean de Vandenesse, went to see out of curiosity and was shocked. Twelve accused, among them four nuns, were burnt at the stake; two were burnt alive. ‘It was a very sad spectacle,’ Vandenesse limited himself to commenting.9 The king never assisted at executions. Like all heads of state, he had to deal with problems of crime and punishment, but managed to do it without disturbing his own equanimity. An auto de fe was for him, as for all those who saw it, a deeply moving experience which uplifted faith. He never witnessed the burnings.
Immediately after the auto Philip went off to visit his palace at Valsaín. Over the next three months he alternated between Valsaín, Aranjuez and the Alcázar. In November 1559, he issued a decree ordering Castillans who were studying at foreign universities to return home. The decree may have been inspired by a suggestion he had received many years before from a friar; at that time he had simply set the paper aside, with a note: ‘file this’.10 Issuing the decree now, he was aware that it was little more than a gesture. There were few Castilians studying abroad. The decree in any case did not apply to students from the non-Castilian realms of Spain, who remained free to go to foreign universities of their choice. But there was no doubt in his mind about the need for action against a Lutheran threat. Shortly after his return, in September, placards were found posted up on public buildings in Toledo, attacking the Catholic Church as ‘not the Church of Jesus Christ but of the devil and his son, the Antichrist pope’. Early in November heretical leaflets were found during mass in Toledo cathedral; the doors were shut at once, and all foreigners were searched.11
Just over a year later, in Seville pamphlets circulated attacking ‘these thieving inquisitors, who publicly robbed and burnt the bones of Constantino out of jealousy’. The leaflets also asked the public to ‘pray to God for his true Church, so that it may firmly and steadfastly endure the persecution by the synagogue of Satan’ (that is, the Inquisition).12
The events of 1559 were probably decisive in shaping Philip's attitude to the religious question in Spain. Nipping heresy in the bud would save Spain from going the way of other nations. He had seen at first hand the consequences of diversity of religion in northern Europe: the disorder and blood-letting there must not be repeated here. The English authorities under Queen Mary had executed nearly three times as many heretics as died in Spain in the years just after 1559, the French under Henry II at least twice as many. In the Netherlands ten times as many had died. ‘The healthiest case is Spain,’ he observed with some justice to the Inquisitor-General.13 After hearing of the good work done at Valladolid, the bishop of Pamplona commented with satisfaction: ‘We have great peace and tranquillity, and the best of it is that we are free of Luther.’14
The efficiency of the Holy Office in identifying and dealing with the problem marked it out as being the ideal weapon to counter subversive doctrine. Time and again in later years the king would revert to these two basic ideas – timely repression,.and the efficacy of the Inquisition – as proven truths. He gave, as a result, unswerving support to the Inquisition. When he was at Monzón three years later he was sent an account of an auto de fe that the inquisitors of Barcelona had just held and in which they had punished some ‘Lutherans’, all French. ‘We have seen the account,’ he wrote back to the inquisitors, ‘and urge you to keep up the good work. I shall always order special favour and attention to be paid to the interests of the Holy Office.’15 From that date his sentiments never changed. ‘We cannot and must not agree [the statement is of 1571] to anything that is in any way unfavourable to the Holy Office, seeing from our experience every day the necessity that there is for it.’16 It was a lesson he did not cease to press untiringly on other European rulers.
His conviction of the need for a firm hand in religious matters was born of his first-hand experience of political disorder in northern Europe. It did not arise from any unusual intensity of faith among Spaniards. Ironically, at the very time that Protestants were discovered, clergy in Spain were becoming aware of the ignorance and unbelief among their own people. In 1554 a well-known friar, Felipe de Meneses, confessed that ‘find a greater inclination to liberty in Spain than in Germany or any other nation.’17 With good reason might the king fear contagion spreading to his lands. This explains his failure to lift a finger to help the imprisoned Carranza. The archbishop had many personal enemies and rivals who envied his promotion to the wealthy see of Toledo. Their number included inquisitor Valdés, and the royal confessor Fresneda. In the atmosphere of crisis and danger from heresy which reigned in Castile, the alarmists prevailed. Carranza's trial was allowed to drag on. He was fated to spend nearly seventeen years in confinement in Spain and later in Rome.
The controls of 1559 are sometimes presented as imposing a regime of repression and fear. The controls were, it is true, unprecedented. Yet they were similar to steps being taken in other countries. Despite them, after the crisis of 1559 Spain provided an extraordinary spectacle of normality. Repression did not increase, nor were there signs of Protestantism. Some of Erasmus's works were prohibited, but he continued to be bought, read and cited without fear.18 The trade in books from abroad was not interrupted. Spaniards travelled freely and several came into direct contact with the new ideas in Europe.
Taking advantage of the discovery of Protestants, Inquisitor-General Valdés in 1558 tried to persuade the king that he should (almost literally) hand the country over to the Inquisition. More tribunals should be set up in the provinces, licences for printing books should be issued only by the Inquisition, all book sales should be subject to the Inquisition, the Inquisition should have vigilantes everywhere.19 ‘I desire only that the interests of the Holy Office be respected,’ the king replied tactfully from St Quentin.20 But he ignored the proposals.
Brought up in an environment where anti-Semitic attitudes were common, Philip was also sensitive to the warnings he received from Valdés about the implication of ‘Jews’ (a term used by anti-Semites when referring to converso Christians)
in the new heretical movements. In 1547 he had rejected Siliceo's statute of blood purity in Toledo. Nearly ten years later, the situation appeared different. He now apparently felt that ‘all the heresies in Germany, France and Spain have been sown by descendants of Jews, as we have seen and still see every day in Spain’.21
But there is good reason to doubt whether Philip ever expressed such extraordinary sentiments. There is no evidence, either in his statements or his policies up to this time, that he could either believe or harbour such strange anti-Semitic ideas. The phrase was, in fact, derived from the memorial that Siliceo had sent him some time before in defence of the statute.22
In Brussels he also rejected a tempting offer from the leader of the exiled Spanish Jews, Jacob Abravanel. The Jewish presence was still strong in the western Mediterranean,23 and many Spanish Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 were active in the Italian states. Some had taken refuge in Naples, from which they were forced out in 1541. Abravanel was among those who then went to live in the republic of Venice. In 1558 he wrote to Philip, offering a handsome sum in gold if the king would permit his people to return to Naples for a guaranteed twenty-five years.24 Philip had serious financial problems but rejected the offer.
On his return to Spain, the king was to find evidence that seemed to link conversos with heresy. Some of the ‘Protestants’ in both Valladolid and Seville were of converso origin. Inquisitor Valdés, anxious to maintain his influence, did not hesitate to feed Philip with information about converso conspiracies. Another bishop, earlier that year, had warned the king that ‘conversos are the source from which this accursed doctrine first arose’.25 Alarmed by the appearance of the Protestants, suspicious of ‘Jewish’ activity, Philip assumed from this time a more anti-Semitic stance in his policies, and became more than ever convinced of the need to support the Inquisition. He was kept informed of the discovery and arrest by the Inquisition of Murcia, in that decade, of a group of judaising conversos.26
