Pity this busy monster
Raymond Carr
PHILIP OF SPAIN It is odd to think back to my schooldays some 70 years ago when Protestantism was still at the core of our identity as a nation. Drake was our national hero and the defeat of the Armada the crowning victory that had saved England from slavery under Catholic Spain. The Black Legend, invented as a piece of war propaganda by Dutch and English pamphleteers which presented the Spain of the Inquisition, whose torturers provided a catalogue of Protestant martyrs, as a threat to the liberties of Protestant Europe, was incorporated in our patriotic mythology. The legend flourished in Protestant America. For J. L. Motley, his- torian of the heroic struggle of the Dutch against Spanish domination, Philip II of Spain was a monster of bigotry and cruelty, a mediocre king who was a 'consummate tyrant'.
Despite an abundance of specialised studies of his reign, there has been no full- length biography of Philip II. Henry Kamen's impeccable scholarship provides it, even if he sometimes overloads the read- er with detail. He has ransacked the rele- vant archives to present Philip as a 'normal' man — his phrase — with normal appetites. He gives us the attractive sides of a monarch usually portrayed as a sombre, secretive, black-clad bureaucrat. Reserved and silent in public, in private he turns out to be a lover of music, a dancer and even a bit of a joker: he released an elephant in the living quarters of the monks of the Escorial. An enthusiastic gardener, he delights in flowers; a countryman at heart, he misses the song of nightingales in Lisbon. His 'normality' stands revealed in his addiction to hunting; he was a dab hand at shooting rabbits with a crossbow. He made Madrid capital of Spain because its surroundings offered good sport.
The Escorial is his monument as a discerning, knowledgeable builder. A patron of Titian, meticulous in all things, he instructed that his pictures be hung high up, out of harm from cleaners washing the floor. His humanist education left little mark on him; he remained a poor linguist, a handicap for the ruler of a multinational empire. Rather than a great Renaissance prince, he was a great collector. His collec- tion of relics included 7,000 items: bodies and bits of bodies, bones, hairs of Christ and the Virgin, etc. His superstition was ridiculed in The Black Legend. Verdi's opera reminds us that a central feature was his supposed ill-treatment of his son Don Carlos. Kamen, rightly, sees Carlos as a dangerous loose cannon, a cruel psychopath capable of riding a fine horse to death. Once he got over an early taste for mistresses, Philip became a model family man: a devoted husband to his last wife and whose letters to his daughters are those of a loving and concerned father.
Was he a great king? He inherited from his bankrupt father, the Emperor Charles V, the impossible task of ruling over the largest empire Europe had known. Apart from his vast American possessions, he was ruler of the Netherlands, Portugal and part of Italy. He had neither the money nor the authority to govern this bundle of territo- ries, each with its peculiar institutions and local privileges. Distance defeated him; let- ters took months to arrive. He pored over and annotated them. No decision was reached without taking the advice of his councils and an army of ad hoc commit- tees. This was a convenient escape clause. It not only excused delays as papers piled up on the king's desk; it relieved the king of any personal responsibility. He never saw a heretic go up in flames; he merely followed the advice of the Inquisition. To him, as to his fellow monarchs, heresy was a political crime: If there is difference over religion [he wrote to the Lutheran king of Denmark] neither government nor state nor the authority of princes nor peace and concord and tranquil- lity among subjects can be maintained.
It was his duty to his subjects to stamp out heresy. As an unconditional supporter of the Inquisition, Kamen writes, 'he never erred on the side of mercy'. When the French ambassador informed him that 3,000 Huguenots had been massacred in Paris, 'he began to laugh, with signs of extreme pleasure and satisfaction'.
Quevedo, the great satirist of the Golden Age, wrote that 'Europe bears our hegemo- ny with hatred'. On this reading Philip's wars can be seen, not as a Catholic crusade by a bigot, but as the defensive reaction to the aggression of jealous neighbours France and England — or as the defence of Christendom against the Turks. At the centre of all Philip's difficulties, the ulcer that ate at the heart of the monarchy, plunging it into bankruptcy, was the Revolt of the Netherlands, where the defence of local privileges was combined with an out- break of Protestant heresy. Philip and his advisors — divided on this as on every other issue — could find no solution. Alba arrived in 1567, executing 3,000 of Philip's subjects in a few months. By 1574 the king recognised that it was 'not possible to make peace in Flanders through a policy of war'. Yet he could not bring himself to make the one concession that might have brought peace: religious freedom.
Kamen describes the final agonies of the reign, presided over by a monarch crippled with gout, his eyesight worn out by desk work, his fingers so full of pus that he could not hold a pen. The defeat of the Armada was a crushing blow; Philip blamed no one. The winds that destroyed his fleet were the work of God. By the end of his reign even in loyal Castile, visionaries were seeing Philip in dreams as a tyrant, 'his eyes shut', who had 'destroyed the poor' by taxes to finance his foreign wars, a verdict which many subsequent historians would endorse.
He bore his prolonged struggle with death as he bore his defeats, with admirable stoicism. Wracked with pain, his room in the Escorial `stenching and foul' since he was so covered with abscesses that he could not be moved from his bed, he died an exemplary Christian death in 1598. Kamen's scholarship succeeds in arousing our sympathies for Philip as a human being and as a monarch engaged in a heroic, life- long struggle against his enemies. It was his Protestant enemies, out of necessity, given their internal squabbles, who were to make tolerance a civic virtue. To Spanish liberals, he imprisoned Spain in an inward-looking, intolerant Catholic state. To General Fran- co he was the greatest Spanish monarch. Close to the Escorial, Franco, as victor in the civil war, built the basilica in which he is buried. To Protestants and Liberals, Philip must remain a monster.
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