In his last years Felipe also had to worry more about France than in the previous three decades. His armies had defeated Henri II at St. Quentin in 1557, leading to the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559. One of the outcomes of that treaty was that Felipe married Henri’s daughter Élisabeth of Valois. She died after 9 years aged only 23, but Felipe truly loved her, and their daughter, Isabel Clara Eugenia, was very dear to Felipe. Henri’s death in 1559 was notoriously gruesome: at a jousting tournament that was part of the marriage celebrations for Felipe and Élisabeth, his opponent’s lance pierced Henri through the eye. After that time, France descended into the chaos of its own religious civil wars, and the French kings were mostly concerned with internal matters. Felipe was directly and disastrously pulled into French politics again after Henri III was assassinated in 1589. Henri of Navarre had the best claim to the throne, but he was a Protestant, and Catholics, including Felipe, could not tolerate the idea of a Protestant on the French throne. Felipe’s worry was that France would then enter the war in the Netherlands and threaten Spanish interests in northern Italy. So he used Farnese’s army to press the claim of Isabel Clara Eugenia. There was little chance of her ever being accepted, however. In 1593 Henri of Navarre converted to Catholicism and was crowned king in 1594. To rally France to his cause, he then declared war on Spain in 1595. Thus Felipe was at war with the English, the Dutch, and the French simultaneously. This vast overextension helped cause Felipe’s fourth bankruptcy in 1596.
That bankruptcy did convince Felipe to start reducing Spain’s commitments, in part to prepare the ground for his son’s succession, since Felipe could feel his own end was nearing. He arranged for Isabel Clara Eugenia to marry Archduke Albrecht of the Austrian branch, and made them co-regents of the Netherlands. This was a way of distancing Spanish authority from the territory, though Albrecht and Isabel did not have ultimate decision-making authority. It proved to be only a temporary solution. In 1596 Felipe also received a humiliating blow when the Earl of Essex captured the port of Cádiz in Andalusia and held it for 17 days—a foreign power managed to take an important Spanish city. Felipe sent the ill-fated armada of 1596 in retaliation. In these last years Felipe was chronically ill with several ailments, including gout and a blood disease. After an attack of gout in 1596 he could not use his right arm, and fell into depression. He made peace with France in 1598. In June that year he knew he was failing and so retired to the Escorial. He was bed-ridden for the last 53 days of his life and died in September 1598. In the context of the dynasty’s history, Felipe was in some ways extraordinary, thanks to his longevity and particularly his immense influence. In other ways, though, he was very much like some Habsburgs who came before him (such as his father), and many who came after: he diligently worked to promote his dynasty’s interests, but those often proved inimical to his realm’s welfare.
Felipe III (1578–1621)
Felipe III came along at a very difficult time for Spain, and he was definitely not up to the task of addressing the monarchy’s problems. The epithet of the time was poco rey para tanto reino (“little king for a lot of kingdom”). He was not a dolt, but was simply very lazy. He understood politics and the affairs of state, but was just not interested in them. He preferred gambling, bullfights, and especially hunting. Once, in the autumn of 1603, he hunted for 15 straight days, leaving at 4:00 in the morning and not returning until 11:00 at night.4 Though not a bad man, he should never have been king. Felipe II was all too aware of his son’s character. This consummately conscientious monarch lamented not long before he died, “God, who has given me so many kingdoms, has denied me a son capable of ruling them.”5 Though he was not the genetic calamity that were either Felipe’s mentally disturbed first son Don Carlos or the last Spanish Habsburg king, Carlos II, Felipe III contributed very little to the dynasty and its realms. His reign can be succinctly summed up as a time of exhaustion, misrule by his favorite minister, and holding actions with regard to Spain’s foreign policy interests.
In the 1590s, while Felipe II was still alive, there was a dawning sense that Spain was in crisis. The problems were legion. Grim conditions in the countryside caused many peasants to migrate to the cities. This led to an agricultural dearth such that Spain could no longer feed itself. Food shortages reached near-famine levels in the late 1590s. In 1596 the plague struck, and epidemics afflicted the country periodically over the next several decades. When combined with the final expulsion of the moriscos, it is estimated that Castile lost some 600,000 people, or one tenth of its population, during Felipe III’s reign. High taxes and rampant inflation also hurt the overall economy. The productive classes were too small to support the large, parasitical nobility. There was a lack of investment in projects such as irrigation and infrastructure. A plan to make the Tajo river navigable so that one could reach the sea from Toledo went nowhere in part because of fatalistic attitudes like those of the theologians who proclaimed that if God had wanted the Tajo to be navigable, he would have made it so. The enormous wealth of American silver was spent mostly on the military and not more productively. And even the value of its colonies was declining for Spain in these years. Their populations also decreased, their demand for goods produced in Spain declined (demand was supplied instead by the English and the Dutch), and silver shipments dwindled. Awareness of these problems did spark reform proposals from people who have become known as the arbitristas. Their ideas included rationalizing the tax system in Castile, reducing the size of the court and government expenditure, and repopulating the countryside, but not much came of these proposals.
Felipe III came to the throne at age 20. Several of his father’s key advisors were removed from court or demoted, though he retained a few competent and honest counselors to serve him. Unfortunately his main advisor, and the man as much as anyone who can be said to have ruled Spain at this time, was Francisco de Sandoval y Rojas, the Duke of Lerma, a venal, incompetent, detestable human being. He was Felipe’s close friend and favorite—and that is the only reason he held his position, since he certainly did not merit it through experience or ability. He was Felipe’s valido, akin almost to a prime minister, for 20 years to 1618. Lerma was not much more interested than Felipe in actually governing; his primary interest was the exercise of power. He came from a noble family of modest means in Valencia, and was 25 years older than the new king. Felipe II, before he died, had already cautioned his son about Lerma’s influence. During his lifetime, too, Lerma was widely reviled by all those outside the immediate circle he corruptly promoted. And those he promoted were often as inept as he was, except at enriching themselves. Lerma’s main achievement was to extricate Spain from some of the wars in which it had been embroiled. While this was helpful, he did not use the respite from battle to rebuild and reform the country in any significant way. After 1615 Felipe began to acknowledge the deficiencies in Lerma’s rule, and Lerma was ousted three years later, replaced by his own son.
That the later Habsburg kings relied on such powerful validos is not surprising. Besides the fact that the dynasty’s heads somewhat lost their taste for governing, the monarchy’s government had grown too large for one man to oversee. Felipe II had assumed a huge burden of work, but even he depended on capable, often non-noble, university-educated secretaries to help him. Under his successors, the aristocracy reasserted itself both through the office of the valido and through the council system. The valido controlled access to the king (Lerma even tried to limit the queen’s access, since she opposed him). He also controlled the patronage system, managing the client relationships by which government in the early modern state often operated. Where a valido such as Lerma neglected day-to-day governance, the councils controlled much of the actual administration of the realm. These were captured by the high nobility, which then ran the state even more openly in their own interests. Lerma never had complete authority over the councils, which could and did take decisions without him. The Castilian Cortes, too, saw their power grow under Felipe III as they were co
nvened more regularly to raise taxes.
Financial problems and an acknowledgment that Spain’s military power was being exhausted led to a policy of peace abroad. An armistice was signed with England in 1604. A brief, somewhat successful offensive against the Dutch ended after a drop in American silver revenues and a mutiny by the troops. The state bankruptcy of 1607 also forced a change in policy. The Netherlands’ regent Albrecht counseled peace, and arranged a truce in 1609 that was to last 12 years. As part of this truce, Dutch sovereignty was recognized, which in itself was a major blow to Spain’s prestige, though it was still not the last act in the conflict. The Dutch continued their depredations on Castile’s and Portugal’s overseas empires regardless. Also, Henri IV of France was assassinated in 1610, which put that rivalry to rest for a time. In 1612 a double marriage was arranged: Felipe’s daughter Ana married the future Louis XIII, and Felipe’s son Felipe IV married Élisabeth, Henri IV’s daughter. This was a marital treaty that did not result in success for the Habsburgs. Its intertwining with the Bourbon dynasty eventually helped bring about the end of Habsburg rule in Spain.
At home, Lerma decreed the final expulsion of the moriscos from Spain in 1609. His motivations were partly to distract from Spain’s other troubles, but also to expunge Islam once and for all from Spanish soil. The moriscos were still feared as a kind of fifth column for Turkish (or even French) interference, and because they amounted to one-third of Valencia’s population and one-fifth of Aragon’s, they were viewed as a real threat. In all, some 300,000 people were deported, mostly to North Africa. This expulsion brought bad but not terrible economic effects. While some areas became depopulated and experienced labor shortages, the moriscos were too marginal to the Spanish economy for major disruption. Persistent economic problems in Catalonia, however, contributed to a banditry problem there, as royal power was relatively weak on the ground. Castile continued to suffer under taxes that burdened it disproportionately: in 1610 Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia contributed only 600,000 ducats to the state budget, while Castile contributed 5.1 million. Castile, in effect, massively subsidized the defense of the other realms. Lerma and Felipe did not use the financial crisis to instigate meaningful reforms but took the easy way out and simply debased the currency. Even in peacetime Felipe III continued to spend extravagantly on his court, not separating public revenues from private. On his deathbed in 1621, he proclaimed, “Oh, if God would give me life, how differently I would govern!”6 He at least recognized his failings, but given that one of those failings was inconstancy, it is not likely that even had he lived longer he would have mended his neglectful ways.
Dynastic strategies
Felipe II’s long travails in marriage and producing an heir demonstrate the strength of dynastic norms in guiding his behavior. They also humanize a man whose image is too often distorted. Felipe married four times because his wives and sons kept dying. One of the seminal episodes in the stories of the Black Legend—and indeed a major, terrible moment in Felipe’s life—was the drama surrounding his firstborn son, Don Carlos. Carlos was genetically the outcome of a husband and wife (María Manuela of Portugal) who were cousins. From infancy he had physical problems, with an abnormally large head and a frail body. His mental disturbances were widely noted already in his mid-teens, as he gained a reputation for being erratic and cruel. The reality cuts a notable contrast with the character from Schiller’s play (and Verdi’s opera), who is a dashing crusader for liberty in the Netherlands. Schiller and Verdi were correct insofar as Carlos hated his father, and he did involve himself in the Dutch conflict, possibly even making contact with the rebel leader Egmont. Felipe’s response to Carlos’s many outrages was fairly lenient, but in 1568 he was finally convinced that he could never let his son become his heir. On the 18th of January that year Felipe had Carlos imprisoned and visited him one last time; his reasonable justification was that Carlos was a danger to the public welfare. In prison, Carlos went through a series of hunger strikes and extreme cures and weakened himself so much that he died in July of 1568. Contrary to legend, there is no reason to believe that Felipe had him killed. Actually, Felipe grieved very deeply—and part of his grief may have been that of the father whose sense of kingly duty impelled him to lock up his son for the good of the realm.
An unyielding dynastic imperative then dictated Felipe’s remaining marriages. He sincerely loved his third wife, Élisabeth de Valois, and probably would not have married again after he lost her had he not needed an heir. In 1570 he took his fourth wife, his niece the Archduchess Anna of Austria. She was the daughter of his cousin, Maximilian II, and his sister María. In a classic example of how power buys privilege, the pope granted Felipe the dispensation to allow a marriage between such close relatives. This marriage produced Felipe III, his father’s fourth son but the only one who lived to adulthood. Despite such obviously risky outcomes from consanguineous marriages, the Habsburgs persisted in them. Felipe III also married a cousin, for instance. The justifications were primarily twofold. One was that the Habsburgs insisted on marrying into other families that were both Catholic and close in rank to themselves—and there were very few such contenders. Indeed, the dynasty’s exalted view of itself meant that to its members, there were in truth no other families of equal rank. The second reason was to solidify dynastic solidarity between the two branches of the family. Here the marriages can be counted a success: the extent to which the family maintained, if not a unified front, at least a coordinated one, is remarkable.
Here again dynastic norms were decisive. Habsburg heirs received an education to inculcate a sense of family allegiance. One example is how after Charles V died, Felipe II treated his uncle Ferdinand deferentially. Ferdinand became the acknowledged head of the family, even though the Spanish branch was generally considered the “senior,” certainly the richer and more powerful. Ferdinand, inaugurating another Habsburg practice to ensure solidarity, sent his children to the Spanish court for a time, as subsequent Austrian Habsburgs would continue to do. The intra-family marital alliances also worked to coordinate dynastic policy. At Felipe III’s court his wife, Margarete of Styria, and his aunt and grandmother in one, Empress María, Maximilian II’s widow, both represented the interests of the Austrian branch. María, in particular, worked closely with the Viennese ambassador to Madrid for some 20 years. Though excluded from formal political power, Margarete and María did exert considerable influence. They constituted one of the main forces of resistance to Lerma’s iniquity, such that Lerma expressly (and unsuccessfully) tried to forbid Margarete from speaking to Felipe about political matters. She pressed her husband to govern more conscientiously, and the Venetian ambassador described Margarete as “capable of great things.”7
In another sign of successful dynastic management, the Habsburgs continued to find ways to make even younger or distant members useful to the family. The string of accomplished Habsburg women who acted as regents in the Netherlands continued with Margherita of Parma, an illegitimate daughter of Charles V and therefore Felipe II’s half-sister. Felipe II loved and esteemed his daughter Isabel Clara Eugenia: he sought her political advice and even let her help him with his paperwork. He actually had much more confidence in her than he did in Felipe III. Together with her husband and cousin Archduke Albrecht of Austria, she also became an able governor of the Netherlands. Another of Charles’s illegitimate children, Don Juan, became the talented military commander at Lepanto and in the Low Countries. Relations between the heads of the two branches did occasionally hit rough patches. Felipe II and Maximilian II definitely did not like each other, and Felipe III started maneuvering to grab the Austrian line’s titles as his cousin Rudolf II’s reign collapsed.
Catholicism also became a major Habsburg norm to reinforce family solidarity as well as dynastic legitimacy. One reason for the trust and respect between Felipe II and Ferdinand was that they trusted each other’s religious stances. Being a Habsburg meant being a strong Catholic. From two potentially divergent branc
hes, this ideology helped coordinate the whole family into what was seen by contemporaries as one symbiotically connected international unit. The dawning of the Counter-Reformation precipitated a change in the Habsburgs’ religious legitimation strategies. Prior to Charles V the dynasty had espoused fairly generic ideas about divine right and the prince’s duty to protect Christianity. As religious conflict sharpened in Europe, though, Felipe believed it was in the best interests of his subjects that they remain Catholic. He considered it his right to decide on the religion of his realms, but also his duty to protect his subjects from heresy. Like many religious people at all times, Felipe felt that his faith was the true one, the only true guarantor of society’s moral fundament and cohesion. He watched the French Wars of Religion with alarm, convinced that religious pluralism would lead to disunity and violence in his own realms. In these ideas, Felipe was in the mainstream of his day. What was different about him was that he had the resources plus the will to assert Catholicism’s primacy.
His belief in the dynasty’s mission to defend Catholicism does not mean that he was a crusader looking to conquer souls or annihilate infidels. Many of the actions that might be seen as religiously motivated—war with the Turks, English, or Dutch—were really driven by security concerns. He did not mount a major assault on England until 1588 despite its ostensibly heretical status, and after Lepanto his combat engagements with the Turks and their allies in North Africa were few. In the Netherlands, countering Protestantism was one consideration. A bigger one was suppressing what he considered an unlawful revolt against his authority and discouraging rebels elsewhere. Religion was a motivation but not the motivation for Felipe’s politics. Like his father, he had numerous and bitter clashes with the papacy. He in fact went to war with Pope Paul IV in the 1550s. For his own reasons, Felipe sought to block papal attempts to excommunicate Elizabeth I of England in 1561 and 1563. That Felipe was not some simple-minded crusader is also shown by the fact that Spain implemented the Council of Trent’s decrees quite quickly after 1564. This is evidence for his conviction that some kind of reform was necessary within the Catholic Church. Moreover, he carried out these reforms not in submission to Rome but partly to increase his own power, since he had insisted throughout the Council that the crown control many aspects of Church governance in Spain. In sum, as devoted as he was to the Catholic Church, it never trumped his dynastic considerations, and Felipe never served it blindly. Neither was the victory of the Counter-Reformation one of his overriding political goals.
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