by Henry Kamen
His second child by Elizabeth, Catalina Michaela, was born in October 1567. Though he would again have preferred a son, since he had no male heir other than Don Carlos, the king never ceased to lavish affection on the two girls. This domestic happiness was brusquely shattered by tragedy. A few weeks after the birth of Catalina, Elizabeth became pregnant again. She also became continuously ill. She died, as we have seen, in October 1568.
Perpetual pregnancy was, unfortunately, the duty of young ladies in high positions. The queen must produce a male heir. Virtually annual pregnancy was the single most important cause of death among ladies of high degree. The social gaiety of court life was tempered by the sober reality of having to move about with a constantly large stomach, and endure regular but dangerous childbirth.
The deaths of Elizabeth and Don Carlos involved the dissolution of their respective households. This usually meant that employees were released, and personal property (clothes, paintings, jewellery) sold. It was the moment to make savings, for both the queen and the prince had been big spenders.
Philip chose in the case of Elizabeth to make a radical change that reveals much about his preferences. He had loved Elizabeth generously. But he had been too generous. For eight years he surrendered to her every whim. In retrospect, he recognised that she was spoilt and capricious, self-willed and with expensive tastes. She had brought an enormous retinue of French ladies, many of whom she succeeded in retaining. She imposed her demands on the king, and influenced his decision to leave Toledo for Madrid. She purchased extravagantly and her expenditure on parties and outings was impressive. She commissioned endless amounts of silver and jewellery from court artists. In 1560 she gave to the wife of the French ambassador ‘a necklace of gold with four rubies and four diamonds’.137 Her household was plunged deeply into debt, to the despair of her chamberlain, Juan Manrique de Lara, a cultured noble who was chosen for the job in part because he spoke French. Nobody, he told the king, wanted to lend money to her because of her debts.138 She gave sumptuous receptions, and commissioned paintings lavishly. It was said of her that she never wore the same dress twice.139 An inventory of her jewels made after her death leaves no doubt about the magnificence of her spending.140 She was no innocent in politics, and used her influence with Philip on several occasions. The king seems not to have showed any impatience, and tolerated her every whim.
A memorandum of Elizabeth's trip to Bayonne in 1565 shows that she spent 80,000 ducats when the king had budgeted only 15,000. In his marginal comments on the report by the aggrieved chamberlain, Philip was left trying to figure out how to cover the costs. The itemised list was appalling. ‘For the many expenses in her chamber and in gifts of silks, textiles, cloth of gold, gold and silver’, she had spent 20,000 ducats a year in the last few years. ‘For outings each year to the woods of Aranjuez and Segovia, with carriages and costs’, over 8,000 a year. ‘For purchases during three years [1562–5], up to 10,000 ducats in jewels, stones and pearls.’ Her gifts of jewels to visiting dignitaries was ‘a great quantity’, and could not be estimated. For Bayonne she had bought 12,000 ducats' worth of jewels and clothes and in Bayonne had given away gifts of jewellery to the value of 20,000 ducats. During the journey she had spent 12,000 ducats just on banquets.141
When in 1570 the new queen's chamberlain, the marquis of Ladrada, was preparing for the arrival of Anna, Philip left him in no doubt that everything must change. The household must revert to the practice of the time of his mother, the empress Isabel. It is one of the moments that his correspondence lets us glimpse his veneration for her. ‘It is not acceptable,’ he told Ladrada, ‘to continue the household practice of the late queen; everything must be done as it was in the time of my mother,’ That was over thirty years ago, but ‘I believe that the duke of Alba and Ruy Gómez will be able to inform you about it; what used to be done then must be done now’.142 During the months following his marriage to Anna, he continued to sweep away the customs and changes brought in by Elizabeth. The standard now was to be the peninsular usage of his mother. Asked whether queen Anna should observe the practice of making an offering in church, he replied: ‘I cannot recall ever seeing my mother making the offering. I wouldn't do it.’ On a point of household procedure, he noted: ‘It's what I remember being done in the time of my mother.’ On a matter of the queen distributing gifts to all her household at Christmas, he ruled that ‘in my mother's time gifts were given, but only to chaplains and cantors; giving more in this past period was, I think, an irregularity, like many other matters’.143 The last phrase was a cut at the late queen's way of doing things. He remained adamant about the need to run the royal family in the way that his mother had done. The drawback was that he now had only a hazy recall: ‘I cannot remember what used to be done in the time of my mother’.144
Philip's marriage to Anna brought him a tranquillity that he had never experienced.145 She was the only one of his wives with whom he could converse in his own tongue, since she was bilingual in Spanish and German. They formed a perfect household. She was delighted to have her brothers Albert and Wenzel around her. Philip treated them in every way as sons. With them and his two daughters for company, he had a complete family circle. ‘He loves his wife deeply,’ reported a diplomat in 1577, ‘and is seldom or never without her.’146 The queen, happy in an environment she knew, reciprocated the king's affections. Poignant testimony came from Dr Vallès. He related how when the king fell seriously ill in Badajoz, during the Portuguese campaign, Anna expressed her wish to die if necessary in his stead, ‘for the great love she bore to His Majesty’.147 When the king was not with Anna, she was accompanied and entertained by the princess Juana.
When Anna was expecting in 1571, Philip was the soul of concern. In June he observed, from San Lorenzo, that ‘the fact is that the queen's rooms [in the Alcázar in Madrid] are hot, at least at night, and so it would be better for her to pass to my chamber for sleeping since it is cooler at night.’ ‘If the queen wants to leave the palace,’ he noted in July, ‘remind her to go in a chair so that she doesn't have another fall’, apparently a reference to a previous mishap. Near the end of her pregnancy, ‘let me know a day ahead if she happens to feel pains, since I don't want to miss the birth’.148 Through all the days of separation he continued to write twice a week to the queen. She gave birth to Fernando two hours before dawn on 4 December. Philip spent six hours at her bedside.149 In his years with Anna he continued to suffer bouts of bad health and deep political anxiety, but never lacked personal tranquillity. Twenty years before, in Brussels, the Venetian ambassador had described him as melancholic. In the 1570s he had put melancholy behind him. ‘Try,’ he urged Mateo Vázquez during one of the secretary's fits of depression, ‘to get rid of melancholy, it is very bad for you.’150
He was middle-aged before he began to find happiness in marriage, and the same happened with his sentiments as a father. Don Carlos deprived him of the chance to extend his love to his own. He grasped eagerly at the hope of having other sons. He persuaded his sister María, married to the emperor Maximilian II, to allow two of her children to visit him. He was delighted to receive into his household the young archdukes Rudolf and Ernst in 1564. He became fond of them, continued their education, gave them pride of place on his progress through Andalusia in 1570, and was reluctant to let them return home. The stay confirmed both princes in their preference for things Spanish. There is also every reason to speculate that Rudolf's later passion for art and the occult was born during his eight formative years amid the rich and exotic collections of his uncle Philip.151 It was probably in Spain, for example, that Rudolf first encountered the works of the English astrologer John Dee, whose books Philip bought when in London.152 The archdukes sailed from Barcelona in July 1571, and were back in Vienna four weeks later.153 Ernst, later a governor of the Netherlands, died prematurely in 1595. His brother went on to become emperor. Their place in the king's affections was taken by their younger brothers Albert and Wenzel, who came with Anna in 1570.
Wenzel suffered from poor health, and died in 1578. Albert, who was to make the peninsula his home, displayed all the gifts that the king longed for in a son. He shone ‘in his studies and in everything’,154 Philip remarked with pride. In May 1577 the king got him a cardinalate, with a view to giving him the see of Toledo. Since Albert was still too young for the position, Philip planned meanwhile to give it to ‘some old man who will not live long’.155 He picked Gaspar de Quiroga, the seventy-eight-year-old Inquisitor-General and bishop of Cuenca. Quiroga, appointed in November 1577, tricked everybody by living nearly twenty years more.
The archdukes were loved as sons156 but never quite supplanted his own children in the king's affections. As the princesses Isabel and Catalina grew, they came to occupy a profound part of the king's emotional life. He played a direct role in their upbringing. When Isabel was three she was described by a secretary as ‘the most comely child in Spain’. Her greatest wish was to imitate her father and ‘write like him’. To keep her quiet, ‘there's no better way than giving her paper and ink, and with this she is happier than with anything else you could offer’.157
His attachment to the girls was such that he allowed them to take part in his office work. In one of the most appealing of all vignettes of his role as king, we see Philip in the summer of 1573 at the Escorial, working at his papers in the company of Anna and the two girls. He would write and sign, Anna would scatter sand on the text to dry it, and the girls would take the papers to another table where Sebastián de Santoyo, the king's office aide, would arrange them in bundles to be sent out to the secretaries.158 Anna was heavily pregnant that summer. The plan was to have the baby in Madrid, for which she set out on 12 August, but the pains started that evening and she gave birth instead in Galapagar.
Philip was given less opportunity to lavish love on his sons, who by misfortune died one after another. In the nine and a half years that Anna was married to Philip, she bore him five children. Fernando, born in 1571, died in 1578. Carlos, born in 1573 in Galapagar, died two years later. Diego, born in 1575 just three days after the death of Carlos, became the apple of Philip's eye and was sworn in as heir before the Portuguese campaign. He died in 1582. Only the Infante Philip, born to Anna on 14 April 1578, survived the king. The delightful portrait of the two princes Diego and Philip, done in 1579 by Sánchez Coello, allows us to imagine the royal residences resounding to the sound of scurrying feet. The scurrying was always brief. Anna's last child, María, born early in 1580, died in the summer of 1583, shortly after the king's return from Portugal. Philip was deeply affected. It removed almost his last link with Anna.
*
The king appears to have suffered his first attack of gout in 1563, when he was thirty-six.159 Serious attacks began in July 1568, in his foot.160 The problem stayed with him for the rest of his life. Possibly because of it, he was always quick to sympathise with those around him (and they were many) who had the same misfortune. Once when Mateo Vázquez complained how ill he felt, the king urged him not to worry: ‘you know that this is how things are in the world’.161 It was the illnesses within his family that brought out his most profound reactions of concern. In the autumn of 1572 Anna's first child and male heir to the throne, Fernando, was unwell. The king continued business as usual, but under pressure. Night after night he literally could not sleep for worry. ‘These days that I am away,’ he ordered the queen's chamberlain, ‘send me a despatch every night, and you yourself write every night, so that I know in the morning how the prince has been that day.’ When some days later he received a favourable report, he sighed: ‘I think I shall be able to make up tonight the sleep I lost the other night’.162 He felt the same degree of concern for each member of his family.
The king's own health had never been good. It may not have been helped by his food intake. In the mid-1550s he had a balanced diet. Meat and game dominated his table, as was common in all noble households. But in 1550–1 his meals in the Netherlands and Augsburg also included salads, cheese, olives, fruit and fish.163 It is possible that he ate the fish, for it is unlikely that his steward placed before him meals which he did not like. In England in 1555, salads and fruit were regularly on his table. After his return to Spain in 1559 this seems to have changed. In the 1560s and 1570s the Venetian ambassadors stated that the king ate only meat and that ‘for many years he has not eaten fish or fruit’.164 In 1570 a Spaniard (not a courtier and so not necessarily informed) stated that the king ‘has not tasted fish in all his life’.165 The abstention from fish at this date was a fact. But the king certainly consumed fruit.166 In general, he ate sparingly at meals. He drank a little wine, but never more than two cups. Later in life his health made him restrict all aspects of his diet.
His other faculties were quite normal. Antonio Pérez claimed that the king had insensitivity to smell.167 This is extremely doubtful, when we consider evidence such as his pleasure in flowers and their perfume. The quotation at the head of this chapter is one example among many. His eyes gave him trouble, a natural consequence of paperwork and middle age. He seems to have used spectacles, though they appear in no portrait of his. His sight, he observed in 1578, ‘fails me a great deal at night’.168
Precisely because he was forced to rely so much on doctors, he had no faith in any of them. ‘Physicians are terrible people’, was his opinion. At a pinch, if there was a real need, he might entrust himself and the queen to doctor Francisco Vallés. Otherwise doctors should be avoided. Their resort to bleeding ‘may do more harm than good’. Nor did he take to quack remedies. Years later, when his secretary recommended him some herbs, he replied: ‘I don't believe that this or anything else is useful or reliable for getting rid of the gout. There are other better things for relieving it.’169 The best policy was quite simply ‘looking after oneself and taking a bit of care with one's health’.170 Exercise meant walking and lots of fresh air. In 1559 in Brussels he insisted on ‘the benefit to my health from exercise and the countryside’.171 But the exercise must be regular. To keep in shape, he felt, ‘it's a good idea to find moments on good days to do a bit of exercise, and neither stop doing it nor do it all at once. Life in the countryside is good for the body and very relaxing.’172 These good counsels applied above all to his family. When the Infanta Isabel was six he advised that she ‘get up early and do exercise’, and that both she and her sister go to bed early at night, because ‘going to bed early allows you to get up early, and it would be a good idea for both of you to adopt this custom from now on’.173
The years, inevitably, took their toll. On the eve of the occupation of Portugal, Philip was all too conscious of his age and infirmities. He had been ruling Spain for well over thirty years. Ill-health was the main threat, but age also pressed. At Christmas 1574 he felt that ‘someone who remembers so little and has his head so full as I do’, was no longer in possession of a reliable memory. In the spring of 1576 he professed to ‘feel so old’ that he was ready for ‘when Our Lord wishes to call me, which could be very soon’.174 The hair on his head was beginning to whiten.175 With age came resignation. ‘I don't believe that my life matters so much, at least not to me,’ he confided in 1578.
The mid-1570s were, for all that, probably the years in which he experienced the greatest personal tranquillity. A Venetian envoy has left us his observation of the king in 1577:
He rises very early and attends to affairs or correspondence until mid-day, when he eats always at the same time and almost always the same type and amount of food. He drinks from an average-size glass, which he drains twice. In general his health is good. However, he sometimes suffers from a stomach illness and a bit of gout. Half an hour after lunch, he despatches all the petitions and other documents that need his signature. Three or four times a week he goes to the country in a carriage, to hunt game and rabbits with a crossbow.
Above all came his devotion to Anna. ‘He visits the queen three times a day: in the morning before mass, during the day before he begins work, and at night
when he goes to bed. They have two low beds separated by a palm's width, but because of the curtain covering them they appear one bed. The king loves his wife deeply and never fails to visit her.’176
He disliked being separated from her. When possible, they spent the entire summer together. During the summers of 1576 and 1577, they spent four or five months at the Escorial. In March 1578 a late snowstorm caught them there. They were forced to spend the whole of Holy Week ‘huddled together’,177 cut off from work. When the snows cleared Anna returned briefly to Madrid to give birth to the Infante Philip (on 14 April), but returned a month later and passed the rest of the summer with the king. They made periodic outings to the other residences. In June Philip put on (as we have seen) another of his great chivalric tournaments for her near the abbey at Párraces, with the participation of some 800 knights. It was observed that the king did it all for Anna, ‘whom he loves and cherishes’, and that ‘the king, like a good husband, wished to entertain her with these people’.178
8
The Statesman
Kings and princes are instituted primarily to govern, to administer justice to their subjects, and to defend them from their enemies.1
Setting up a permanent capital in the 1560s brought a closer attention to the machinery of government. Among the first changes made by the king was a reform in the system of councils. When Philip took over Naples and Milan from his father in 1554 it became obvious that special machinery must be devised for dealing with Italian affairs, normally handled by the council of State. This led to the creation, between 1556 and 1559, of a separate council for Italy.2 Pursuit of more efficiency was not the only reason. The new council was a linchpin for the whole system of power alliances, based on marriage and influence, which extended throughout the Italian possessions and whose reins were held by Eboli.3
