by Henry Kamen
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His way blocked by England, facing stalemate in the Netherlands, Philip was now abruptly dragged into the affairs of France by the murder of Henry III, last king of the Valois dynasty. Henry's position as king was being steadily undermined in 1588 by the Catholic League, which was led by Spain's allies the Guises. In an abrupt coup just before Christmas 1588, Henry organised the assassination of the duke and the cardinal of Guise. The Venetian ambassador was present on the day Philip received the news. ‘When the king heard of the death of the Guises he stood for a space with his eyes on the ground, musing. Then he said, “This is a matter for the pope.”’68 Even kings could not kill cardinals with impunity. The pope excommunicated Henry III. Leadership of the League passed to Guise's brother the duke of Mayenne, who continued to rely on Spanish support.
In his turn the king of France was murdered by a mad monk on 2 August 1589. The killing sent a shiver of fear down the spine of Spaniards. None of the Spanish theologians of the time, significantly, wrote in favour of killing kings, unlike their French colleagues a few miles away.69 The royal council, concerned for Philip's security, urged him ‘not to see or speak to people who are not known’.70 Since Henry had been excommunicated, Philip on the advice of his council did not order any commemoration masses at San Lorenzo.
Henry III's death automatically meant that the Protestant Henry of Navarre, next in the line of succession, became king. Philip's lifelong attempt to restrain France, a country which in real terms had always been considered a more direct threat than England, now threatened to blow up in his face. ‘Truth to tell,’ he had confided earlier in the year, ‘I have very little confidence in the way things are going.’71 Though Spanish policy continued to treat with the utmost gravity the continuing menace from England and from the Turk, it was primarily France that occupied Philip's attention during the remainder of his reign.72
The international situation now was too complicated for the king to try and impose a single policy, if he could devise one, on his advisers. Armada year had brought differences of opinion out into the open. The king began to be more testy with his ministers and more distrustful of those who claimed to be helping him. When a matter came up concerning the count of Chinchón, Philip snapped: ‘In many of the things the count thinks up he deceives himself, indeed I would say in most things.’73 He refused to accept criticisms, and began to feel that his ministers were undermining his work. In June 1589, in an angry note to the Junta of three, he insisted that money must be found before it was too late. ‘And I believe that we are already too late, if you do not suggest a solution at once and bring it to me, since I am making the request not to our enemies but to my own ministers.’74
In a remarkable outburst, which Philip confined to his papers, where alone he felt able to give vent to his frustrations, he hit out at his detractors in the administration and criticised his secretary for paying attention to them. Vázquez had commented (without naming them) that many people with opinions on foreign policy favoured a further fleet against England, and a decisive strike against France in order to secure the Netherlands.75 Philip, in a private note of November 1589, reacted angrily.
Efforts had been made to collect more ships, he asserted, but it was not so easy:
We shall see if these things are as easy as those who suggest them imagine. I would also like to know from them if they think these things can be done just by wishing and imagining, for if this were so I would be second to none in doing them immediately and without a further thought. But since they are done not like this but with money, one has to go through the process, in which I see how little they are doing and the slackness of every single one of them, from the first to the last.
The important issue was the money, which they were doing nothing to raise; and were it not for the importance of the matter, ‘it would be easier not to strain my head, and simply leave things as they are’.
The councillors had suggested recruiting Italian princes to intervene militarily in France, and sending a special Spanish representative to exert influence in the selection of a Catholic alternative to Henry of Navarre.
On what you say about France and Flanders, not all those who have spoken to you about the matter have the same loyalty as you, and are certainly sowing these ideas for their own private ends. They couldn't come up with a solution to anything and wouldn't even know how to. Their assumptions are false. Nobody in Italy stirs a leg except for private advantage … And the idea of sending [a representative] is perhaps to avoid sending money, of which they have some, while I who do not have any would be only too glad to have some of it.
What was needed, he said, was not intervention but a miracle. ‘If God doesn't work a miracle we cannot expect anything from France or from anything else, except the very worst. Even a child could tell you the problems and dangers, but very few could produce a solution without money.’ For some time the king had routinely identified his cause with that of God. When it seemed, particularly after the Armada, that God was not collaborating, the identification became obsessive. He himself could do nothing. It was now therefore the responsibility of God.
Philip no doubt knew who his critics were. But he did not name names either, and merely concluded, to Vázquez: ‘You have done well to inform me of all this. You know very well that the way we do things is not how people think we do them, and that if it were expedient to reveal everything they might perhaps judge differently. But it's more important to get on with the job than pay attention to badly informed people.’
Two days later he stated uncompromisingly that he had no intention of interfering in France. ‘Until we see how things turn out, we shall not send anyone there.’76 He consulted closely with Moura and Idiáquez. Don Cristóbal in particular played an influential role in policy. But the division of opinions in the government left Philip frustrated. If no effective decision were taken, it would not be his fault, he told himself. ‘In everything I have fears of the little agreement there is among my ministers, who always end up wrecking everything.’77 The king would not have drawn much consolation from learning that his ministers blamed him. ‘It is no comfort to think,’ one of them wrote to Philip's chief military administrator, ‘that a people might end in disaster through the fault of its ruler.’78
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The political paralysis intensified the frustration felt among all levels of the population. Nowhere was there more unease than in court circles. It had been commonplace in the Spanish tradition for visionaries to state their views on politics, and to do it publicly.79 From the king downward, everyone felt free to consult seers and prophets who might have access to special sources of information. Even foreign visionaries (such as the French seer Nostradamus) were listened to with respect in Spain.80 Prophecies were usually tolerated if they remained prophecies, and did not sound like sedition. Philip was nearly always sceptical of visionaries, and unimpressed by them. When informed of the special visions of a priest in 1584, he commented: ‘I know the man well and think that he has good motives, because he has spoken to me in Aranjuez and also here. However I don't know if the science is up to much.’81 But, like his contemporaries, he was not usually so doubting.
The problems of the late 1580s made visions a live political issue.82 A famous Portuguese visionary, sister María de la Visitación, known as the ‘nun of Lisbon’, fell foul of the authorities in Portugal because she meddled in politics. She was arrested and lightly penanced in 1588. In Madrid in 1587–8 considerable attention was paid by some members of the elite, and even members of the Cortes, to the presages of doom uttered by Miguel de Piedrola. An ex-soldier but also a man of considerable culture, he adopted the name ‘Prospero’ and from the 1570s began spreading his message. Luis de León was among those who consulted him.83 The king, as we have seen, had him investigated in 1578.84 Among other things, he forecast (precisely for the year 1588) ‘the imminent destruction of Spain’.85 Philip knew him well and had usually treated him as a well-meaning crank. Piedrola continued his
strange ways. His letters in 1580 refer to Madrid as ‘Babylon’, a city doomed by divine wrath.86 In 1587 he was involved in a killing which brought matters to a head. Despite strong support for him within the king's council,87 he was arrested in 1588. The Inquisition, which dealt with his case, put him on show in an auto de fe in Toledo in 1589, and sent him off to confinement in a monastery for seven months.88
The credit given to prophecies irritated many. A leading writer in 1588 denounced the fact that ‘through them bad news has begun to be spread about and even, astonishingly, believed. The talk is of dreams, for example threats of widespread death and destruction, and that the chosen few have to save themselves in caves.’89
In this atmosphere the affair of Lucrecia de León assumed considerable importance. Aged twenty-two when arrested by the Inquisition in Madrid in 1590, Lucrecia was a seer whose prophecies and dreams stimulated a small aristocratic circle at court.90 Her dreams, coming in the wake of the Armada, took on a verisimilitude not to be found in those of Piedrola. She saw a Spain ravaged and invaded, a Philip too feeble to cope. Some dreams were uncanny prognostications. In December 1587, eight months before the event, she saw the defeat of the Spanish fleet by the English. Subsequent dreams, as narrated to her confidants, presented an image of the kingdom which undoubtedly reflected concerns felt and expressed by very many people. In a dream in the spring of 1590 she was told by one of her dream figures: ‘Philip does not know, and if he knows he does not want to believe, that his enemies will soon be in his lands. He wants to spend his summers in the Escorial, but he should beware, it is not the time to retire there without fear.’ ‘Beware,’ warned one of the figures, ‘for this is the time of thunder.’ Another dream a week later presented Philip as a tyrant who ‘has destroyed the poor’, and who would be punished by God through the agency of Elizabeth of England. Philip lived in his palace, ‘his eyes bound and his ears shut’, surrounded by a Spain in ruins: ‘the hour has come to endure purgatory in Spain’.91
Lucrecia's dreams, which seem to have stopped shortly after her arrest, were limited in their impact to a small group of people and were not therefore accorded too much significance by the government. But the inquisitors took a more serious view. They saw that Lucrecia was repeating calumnies which echoed those spread about by William of Orange's Apology. She spoke of ‘sins committed by the king in killing his son and queen Elizabeth [Valois]’. The king had ‘taken the land from the peasants’. God would punish. ‘God wished to remove him and his son, and there would remain no one of his seed, and the Moriscos and heretics would destroy Spain.’ People had been repeating these things for several months, if not years. Yet until now the government had taken no action. The king himself seemed to accept the criticisms and calumnies as normal.
Philip's own secretary Vázquez told him in February 1591 that the expensive foreign policy could not be sustained, because ‘here the people are perishing, and with them very rapidly both agriculture and cattle-farming, and officials are neglecting many matters touching conscience, justice, government and public welfare’. He foresaw the risk of ‘everything collapsing all at once’. ‘The people are full of complaints, and many say that things are not right … There are criticisms and laments and much fear of great punishments from heaven.’92
Philip's reflections on Vázquez's comments were those of a tired but patient old man. ‘These are not matters to be ignored by someone like me who, as you know, is concerned about his responsibilities, since they distress and grieve nobody more than me. But, all in all, they are much more difficult to deal with than people think …’ On the ‘complaints’, he observed that ‘I was told that there was a danger of a sedition involving two of the leading persons here (although most of them are, I think, alone in these things), over the woman about whom I wrote’, namely Lucrecia.93
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The atmosphere of criticism did not mean that Philip was losing control. His tenacity was astonishing. Nowhere can his firm hand be seen more clearly than in the way he and his ministers kept the higher aristocracy in rein. Conflicts between nobles were always a source of potential disorder. The prominent jurist Castillo de Bobadilla commented in these years on the king's efficiency. ‘He did not pardon their faults with his habitual clemency, nor did he respect their estates and power, and there is no peace officer now who cannot act against them.’ All this, he felt, was ‘a happy situation never before attained’.94 No offence went unpunished. The most distinguished nobles of the realm found themselves in prison for offences that might have been overlooked in other times. In 1577 the brother of the Admiral of Aragon was executed for raping a nun.95 The count of Fuentes went to prison in 1578 for a violent quarrel, the marquis of Las Navas in 1580 for sexually harassing a girl.96 In 1586 the king condemned no less a person than Luis Hurtado de Mendoza, fourth marquis of Mondéjar, to prison and then to military service overseas, for murdering one of his servants in order to enjoy the favours of the man's wife.97 The marquis spent most of his life in confinement, dying in Africa during his spell of military service. In 1587 the king ordered the imprisonment of the duke of Osuna and his son the marquis of Peñafiel, for gambling. The same year he ordered the detention of the marquis of Carpio. In 1588 the marquis of Alcalá was placed under close arrest in the tower at Mota de Medina and the trial began of the count of Puñonrostro, accused of murdering a man. ‘If matters go on at this rate,’ an ambassador commented, ‘the court will be emptied of grandees.’98
The disciplinary decisions were never made by the king alone.99 They were always backed up by the whole council or by the Junta of ministers. As in 1579, when Alba and his son were arrested, there was usually a consensus in the government about what action should be taken. Perhaps the most startling arrests of the entire reign took place in 1590. In July that year the duke of Alba, Antonio Alvarez de Toledo, who succeeded to the title in 1585, committed the same blunder that his uncle Don Fadrique, the previous duke, had committed in 1579: he married in defiance of the king's permission. Philip was not to be trifled with. In August 1590 he ordered the imprisonment of the five grandees who were party to the marriage: the dukes of Alba, Francavilla and Pastrana, and the Admirals of Castile and Aragon.100 It was a very serious case that could have led to vendettas among the nobility. The governing troika consulted all sections of the council, and agreed with the king that ‘it would be just and fitting to order the immediate arrest of the duke of Alba and those who went with him, thereby disciplining one side and calming the other’.101 The king's firmness could also be seen in 1591, when he sacked his chief magistrate and president of the royal council, the count of Barajas, after being warned by Father Chaves that justice was in a deplorable condition. Barajas died later that year, deeply embittered. For years, Philip refused to appoint a successor.102 Not surprisingly, the great lords breathed more freely when the old man had gone.
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The arrests of Lucrecia and of the grandees, both in 1590, were probably not connected. But in the case of the grandees the king may well have considered the connection with Antonio Pérez,103 who in April 1590 escaped to freedom.
In 1580, Antonio Pérez tells us in his memoirs, ‘the king left for Portugal. Antonio Pérez remained in Madrid under house arrest in his own house. No moves were made in his case. This was the state of things until the end of 1585.’104 But the matter was not put on ice. Rodrigo Vázquez de Arce's officials continued to collect evidence. The king wrote to president Pazos from Lisbon in November 1581 that ‘if the matter had been one which could have been pursued through a public trial, this would have been done from the first day’.105 In the spring of 1582 Rodrigo Vázquez, in Lisbon, began to draw up the list of charges. At this juncture the king decided to separate the two cases of Pérez and La Eboli, and to proceed for the moment only against the princess. Pérez would be left for later.
The princess, confined since her arrest in the castle of Santorcaz, was moved later to the family palace at Pastrana. Her case, not directly involving affair
s of state, was dealt with simply by a resolution of the king's council in November 1582. In Pastrana she was closely confined to a suite of rooms. Desperate, periodically ill, she here passed the last ten years of her life. A final illness ended her trials in February 1592.
Pérez, meanwhile, lived in Madrid freely and without impediment. Ministers and diplomats visited him. In the summer of 1584, just over a year after Philip's return from Lisbon, official charges were presented against the ex-secretary. The government was slow to act, for a very compelling reason: Pérez was in possession of an alleged ‘thirty cases’ of the king's confidential papers. When it appeared that Pérez might flee, he was arrested in January 1585, ten days after the king had left to go to Saragossa. He attempted to escape, with the help of his friend cardinal Quiroga,106 but was seized and imprisoned. Over the next four years he was confined in various locations, often with a surprising degree of freedom. This benevolence ended in 1589. He and his wife still refused to hand over many of the papers. When accused pointedly of the murder of Escobedo, and asked to explain the alleged involvement of the king, Pérez maintained that he knew nothing. Finally, in February 1590, he was put to the torture. Philip, whose gout prevented him going to spend Holy Week at San Lorenzo, was directly at hand following events. At the end of March the king, tranquil, assisted at a splendid joust in which all the young nobility of the court participated. Pérez's friends, meanwhile, made plans to get him out. With their help, on the night of 19 April Pérez escaped from prison and made directly for his homeland, the kingdom of Aragón.
The laws of Aragon gave Pérez complete protection against the king. He appealed to be tried by the court of the justiciar of Aragon, which was independent of crown control. He was lodged for his own security in the justiciar's prison in Saragossa. From here, he began a campaign to win over Aragon to his cause. Several members of the lesser nobility, fired by enthusiasm for the liberties of their country, rallied to him. The king, meanwhile, took urgent steps to prosecute Pérez in Aragon. In these same weeks he was preoccupied with events in France, and an unstable Aragonese frontier was the last thing he wanted. He also pressed the Inquisition, headed by Quiroga, to claim jurisdiction over Pérez on a trumped-up charge of heresy. The idea of using the Holy Office may have occurred to him after a visit to Toledo in February 1591. He attended an auto de fe – described by a Flemish courtier who was there as ‘a very sad spectacle, distressing to see’107 – and then went on to San Lorenzo.
