The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty

by Benjamin Curtis

  The Spanish Habsburgs’ attempts to suppress the revolt in the Netherlands lasted roughly 80 years and bled both men and treasure. It was the graveyard of their reputation and ultimately of their dominance in Europe. The conflict was not constant; there were various respites as both sides licked their wounds, only to return to battle later. Nor was it an unending campaign of repression on the part of Spain. There were periods of moderation as well. But once the rebellion had broken out, a final suppression would have been nearly impossible, since the territory was so far away from Castile and was surrounded by so many potential allies. The causes of that rebellion are multitudinous, but can be boiled down to a few fundamental elements. Unlike Charles V, who had grown up in the Low Countries, Felipe was perceived there as a foreign ruler, too thoroughly Spanish to understand the issues of the territory. His efforts to milk this rich province via taxes to pay for the dynasty’s far-flung foreign policy ventures also aroused resentment, as they had even under Charles. But changes in governance under Felipe caused increased friction with the estates and the high nobility. The real power of governance in the Netherlands lay with a few members of the Council of State who were especially trusted by and loyal to Felipe. This exclusivity cut out many other nobles from government, and hence from the political influence they thought they deserved.

  Though Felipe’s rule was by no means absolutist, like his father Charles, and great-grandfather Maximilian, his general objective was to make government more responsive to his will, which could conflict with the province’s established privileges. Resistance to the foreign king and his taxes then combined with religious cleavages to make the rebellion particularly intractable. Lutheranism and Anabaptism had been filtering into the Low Countries for some time, and resentment was growing over the Inquisition’s tactics against them. The prospects for rebellion greatly escalated after 1559 as the numbers of militant Calvinists grew and started preaching active resistance to the Catholic king.

  In the first years of the 1560s the Dutch nobility were pressuring Felipe both to remove Cardinal Granvelle, who was essentially the prime minister in the territory, and also to moderate the Inquisition. Revolt truly burst out in 1566 when mobs of Calvinists attacked Catholic churches. Felipe was shocked by this action, and so authorized the Duke of Alba to take a military force to the Netherlands to contain the rebels. Alba arrived in the summer of 1567 and set up what he called the “Council of Troubles,” but his opponents called it the “Council of Blood.” This body convicted approximately 9,000 people of crimes and executed or exiled over 1,000. The symbol of Alba’s harshness was that he arrested two prominent nobles whom he not altogether fairly accused of treason, the Counts of Egmont and Hoorn, and had them beheaded on Brussels’ Grande Place in 1568. Another noble who became a leader of the revolt, Willem of Orange, fled to escape capture. This severe response met with resistance both inside and outside of Spain. Margherita [Margaret] of Parma, Felipe’s half-sister and the regent of the Netherlands, resigned in protest over Alba’s harsh tactics. In Spain there was a tussle between two factions: the faction surrounding Alba insisted on a hardline crackdown of the revolt, while the faction surrounding the Prince of Éboli was more moderate, advocating for a negotiated solution. Felipe’s own stated justification for the crackdown was simply that it was necessary to suppress a rebellion. His unstated justifications—which however he entrusted to Alba—also included rooting out heresy and centralizing the obstreperous Dutch provinces into a more unified and pacified kingdom.

  Felipe downplayed the religious objectives of the crackdown in part for reasons of international politics. He was understandably worried about reaction from France and England to what could be seen as a crusading army in northern Europe. Its presence there did not fail to provoke a response: English and French pirates began harassing Spanish ships, cutting off sea communications between Spain and the Low Countries. Dutch pirates known as the “Sea Beggars” captured the city of Brill in 1572 and declared that Willem of Orange was now their sovereign. Alba’s repression failed to subdue the rebellious sectors of the population (by no means the majority), and his attempt to institute a new tax to make the Netherlands pay for its own military subjugation incited further resistance. Felipe recognized that Alba’s policies were not working and so took a more moderate course, appointing as governors first Luis de Requesens, and then Don Juan. Just as the conflict was subsiding somewhat, Felipe’s 1575 bankruptcy meant he could not pay his troops, and so they rioted. In November 1576 they attacked Antwerp, killing some 8,000 people. This incident has become known as the “Spanish Fury” even though most of the soldiers were either Germans or Walloons. Partly in response to this atrocity, the estates of the 17 Dutch provinces demanded that Felipe withdraw all his troops and accept the religious situation there. Felipe intended to meet these conditions, but neither Don Juan nor the militant Calvinists agreed, so they both kept up their attacks. By the late 1570s the situation was dire for all sides. What had begun as a nobles’ movement to assert their rights and privileges had become a widespread rebellion in which the chances for reconciliation had dissipated. At the end of the decade, the rebels openly rejected Felipe’s sovereignty and began calling for a new king.

  Willem of Orange made a complete break with Felipe in 1580, after Felipe had offered a reward for his assassination. That break took the form of a proclamation in 1581 by the Dutch States General that declared Felipe’s sovereignty over the Netherlands ended. This was of course not the end of the conflict, and in the 1580s under the brilliant politician and military leader, Alessandro Farnese (who also happened to be Felipe’s nephew), Spain came close to victory over the rebels. Farnese set about creating a split between the nobles in the south of the Low Countries, who were mostly Catholic, and those in the north, mostly Calvinist. In the 1579 Treaty of Arras, Spain agreed not to station troops in the territories that signed the treaty, and even to pay the nobles’ previous military expenses. In response, nobles in the northern provinces announced the Union of Utrecht to defend their autonomy and the Protestant faith. Felipe had Willem of Orange assassinated in 1584, and by 1585 Farnese’s military campaign had reconquered the cities of Bruges, Gent, Brussels, and Antwerp. One reason for his success, besides his own cunning, was that increased silver revenues boosted Felipe’s resources at this time. By the end of this decade Farnese was advocating that Felipe agree to the terms of allowing private Calvinist worship while still remaining sovereign of the north, but Felipe rejected those conditions. He instead ordered Farnese to send his armies into France to aid the Catholic side in France’s civil wars in both 1590 and 1592, which diverted the focus from the Netherlands and helped keep the revolt there alive. Farnese himself died in 1592, but he had succeeded in splitting the Low Countries in two, such that Spain still controlled the southern portions. Neither he nor any of his successors were able to recapture the north.

  With the benefit of hindsight it is clear that Felipe could never have completely subdued the rebellion by force. He himself probably recognized this at certain times, which is why in 1573 he directed Requesens to take a more moderate line. There are a number of reasons, then, why he persisted, and why defeat became inevitable, even though it did not arrive until 1648. Felipe refused to negotiate because he simply could not stomach the idea of having “heretics” as his subjects. He held stubbornly to the idea of un rey, una fe, una ley (“one king, one faith, one law”).2 The religious differences exacerbated the strife, as throughout Europe at this time confessional compromise was extremely difficult to achieve. Additionally, the Netherlands were hazardous terrain for any military, with lakes and marshes that created serious challenges, especially for moving artillery. The distance of all these events from Spain also posed difficulties that were nearly insurmountable for the age; Felipe was always far away from the situation, and yet he was the one who had to make the final decisions. There can be no question that the Dutch revolt seriously undermined Felipe’s entire reign and Spanish Habsburg power mor
e generally after he was gone. It brought him into direct conflict with England and provided more flashpoints for conflict with France. It also disrupted Spain’s commerce, not just with Europe, but with the Americas as well. Moreover, it was the source of exhausting military expenditures. Felipe’s debacle in the Netherlands, motivated largely by what he identified as his dynastic interests, ended up profoundly debilitating the dynasty.

  An indisputable success for Felipe was that he achieved the age-old dream of unifying the Iberian peninsula under one ruler. This came about as a result of the death of the Portuguese king Sebastian in 1578, killed leading a reckless crusade in Morocco. He left no heir, and much of the Portuguese nobility was also killed or captured. Felipe then moved methodically to take over Portugal, staking his claim to the succession via his mother, the Portuguese princess Isabel, and his first wife, María of Portugal. His claim was stronger than that of the other main contenders, only one of whom—António, the Prior of Crato, a bastard relation to the Portuguese royal family—put up a real fight for the crown. Most of the Portuguese nobility and merchants favored Felipe, though the towns supported António. In the summer of 1580 Felipe sent Alba into Portugal with an army, and he quickly routed António’s paltry force. This was not so much an army of conquest as an army to secure Felipe’s legitimate claim. He was then officially chosen by the Portuguese Cortes in 1581 as the new king. It was also not a conquest because Felipe did nothing to subjugate Portugal. In fact, he capitulated in terms of letting the nobility keep all their old privileges. He promised that the Cortes would only meet in Portugal, that laws for Portugal would never be made from outside the country, that all officials handling Portuguese business would be Portuguese, and that the viceroy would likewise either be Portuguese or a member of the royal family. Felipe, in short, did nothing to centralize or integrate Portugal into his other Iberian kingdoms. This was purely a personal, dynastic union.

  Portugal was joined to Spain as part of the Habsburgs’ empire from 1580 to 1640. The union brought notable benefits, but also some drawbacks. The nobility had quickly gone to Felipe’s side because they thought that Spain’s military might would be able to protect Portugal’s colonial interests and that access to Spanish silver would benefit the Portuguese economy. Spain, too, benefited from access to the large Portuguese fleet, markets in Asia, and lucrative trade in spices. The conjoined monarchy could plausibly claim to dominate the Atlantic, and attained a near monopoly in all American trade. Moreover, the Iberian king was now truly a global monarch, claiming all of the Americas as his territory, as well as patches of Africa, India, and Asia. The Habsburg empire became the first on which the sun never set. On the other hand, with only slightly augmented resources the king now had to defend an even greater expanse of the planet’s surface, and his enemies soon began preying on the Portuguese overseas possessions. Dutch and English pirates assaulted Brazil, for example. Felipe himself came to Portugal and remained there from 1580 to 1583, even contemplating for a time making Lisbon his new capital. That reorientation of the monarchy’s interests more firmly toward the Atlantic and its overseas empire is one of history’s great could-have-beens, but in the end Felipe returned to Castile.

  Though pirates and the Armada are some of the most indelible images of Felipe’s reign, these were only two elements in a much more complicated relationship with England. From 1554 to 1558 Felipe was in fact King of England by right of his marriage to his cousin Mary Tudor, the English queen. Mary was Catholic, like her mother Catalina [Catherine] of Aragon, Henry VIII’s first wife. As queen, Mary launched a campaign of forcible re-Catholicization in England that earned her the nickname “Bloody.” Felipe was in England from 1554–5 and then again in 1557, and actually counseled her to take a more restrained course. Felipe’s claim to the English royal title died with Mary in 1558, after she failed to produce an heir. Her half-sister Elizabeth I then became queen, and while the idea was floated to marry her to Felipe, neither of the two parties was especially interested. Relations between Felipe and Elizabeth remained on reasonably good terms until the late 1560s when her encouragement of piracy and the Dutch revolt caused an abrupt about-face. John Hawkins and Francis Drake were raiding Spain’s settlements in the New World from the late 1560s. Drake captured a major treasure shipment in Panama in 1572 and then attacked the colonies from the Pacific side during his circumnavigation of the globe from 1577 to 1580. Elizabeth’s concern in the Netherlands was to see Felipe withdraw his armies there, which were dangerously close to England, and she gave financial support to Willem of Orange.

  In the middle years of the 1580s the conflict with England intensified, leading up to the impossibly bold sailing of the Armada. In 1585, retaliating against England’s sponsorship of piracy, Felipe seized any English ship in Spanish ports. That same year, Elizabeth sent several thousand men to the Netherlands to secure Dutch ports against Spanish attack, and she authorized Drake to go raiding in the Americas. Spain got involved in a plot to have Mary, Queen of Scots, seize the English crown, but the conspiracy was exposed and she was executed in 1587. By this point Felipe had resolved to go forward with the plan to send an invasion force to England. Its primary purpose was not to conquer England. Rather, the hope was to stop aid for the Dutch rebels, and the pirate assaults on Spanish shipping. The plan envisioned sending a fleet of ships up from Spain to guard another fleet of barges that would take Farnese’s army in the Netherlands over to the English shore. The odds on this idea actually working were very long though not nil. A number of fatal miscalculations made the odds even longer. Felipe was the only person who had all the information to coordinate the whole operation—but he was far away from the action. The two commanders, Medina Sidonia for the fleet and Farnese for the army, could never overcome the difficulties in communications between their forces. Farnese was also never able to secure a deep water port for the fleet, which meant it would be forced to anchor where it was vulnerable to attack from English ships. The enormous difficulties were fairly obvious, and caused Medina Sidonia to fall into despair when offered command. It was an offer he could not refuse, though he was convinced before the Armada ever left port that it would fail.

  Felipe, too, was aware of the problems, but insisted the plan go forward. His unrealistic belief that God would sort it all out is one of the final reasons why the Armada failed. Nonetheless, it set sail from Lisbon in May 1588 with 130 ships and some 25,000 men. It reached the English Channel in July, but catastrophically allowed the English fleet under Drake and Lord Effingham to escape to windward of the Spanish ships, which afforded them an enormous advantage in the ensuing combat. The fleet made it to its rendezvous point with Farnese in August—but Farnese could not sail the barges with his troops out to meet the fleet because he had no protection from the lurking Dutch ships. Soon the English began sending fire ships into the Armada, and then a great storm came and drove it east and north, away from its target. Medina Sidonia decided that his best course of action was to sail all the way around the British Isles and thence home. It is to his credit that the disaster was not worse. The losses were considerable: the loss of ships and experienced seamen was a major blow to commerce with the Americas, the loss of reputation was a terrible personal blow to Felipe, and the loss in a great endeavor was demoralizing to Spain itself. The Armada’s defeat was seen as a turning point after which Habsburg Spain never quite regained its enterprising triumphalism. It was also seen as a victory for Protestants everywhere. A Huguenot commander wrote to Elizabeth’s spymaster Francis Walsingham, “In saving yourselves you will save the rest of us.”3 In some ways, though, Spain recovered quite quickly. Felipe assembled a new, smaller armada in 1596, intended to occupy Ireland, and then another large one in 1597, but both were again scattered by storms.

  Felipe’s last decade is a depressing story of troubles at home, defeats abroad, and his own failing health. In 1591–2 there was an uprising in Aragon mostly among the lesser nobility who feared their privileges were being curtailed. Those
privileges were both extensive and extremely feudal: lords had almost complete authority over their vassals, and royal power was weak in the territory. Felipe intended to impose his jurisdiction there to a greater degree, beginning with appointing a non-Aragonese official to be viceroy. Felipe’s treacherous former secretary, Antonio Pérez, who because of his scheming had been imprisoned on and off, escaped his jail and fled to Aragon to foment unrest. Felipe sent an army in to capture him and quell any rebellion. Ultimately there was no major fighting, and Pérez was forced to flee to France. In June 1592 Felipe summoned the Aragonese Cortes to resolve the conflict. He ended up conceding to the nobility most of their old privileges, and strengthened the crown’s power only modestly, gaining for example the right to appoint the chief judicial official. This was another chance, as with Portugal, where Felipe could have driven a harder bargain and integrated the realm more tightly under his authority. He did not do so because that was not his conception of his monarchy. He continued to view his realms as separate, with their own governmental systems, tied together only through him as king.