Martin A. S. Hume

“ No dead and gone human visage looms so clearly through the mist of ages as that strange lymphatic face of Philip IV., which the genius of Velazquez delighted to portray from youth to age. The smooth-faced stripling in hunting dress, with his fair pink and white complexion, his lank yellow hair, and his great mumbling Austrian mouth, shows more plainly on canvas than he could have done whilst alive how weak of will and how potent of passion he was, how easily he would be led by the overbearing Count-Duke of Olivares to sacrifice all else for splendid shows and sensuous indulgence ”

“ By this time, late in the year 1587, the final plan of the Armada had been settled. Parma had received his full instructions from Philip some months before; all Spain and Catholic Christendom were ringing with preparations for the fray, and the great fleet—or what Drake had left intact of it on his summer trip to Cadiz—was mustering at Lisbon under gallant old Santa Cruz, who was already dying broken-hearted at the neglect of his wise precautions, at the confusion, waste, and ineptitude which foreboded the crowning disaster. ”

“ Spain, flooded with the precious metals from the Indies, richer perhaps in actual bullion than ever a country was before or since, with home-grown silk in abundance, and the most deft and tasteful weavers in the civilised world, was therefore obliged to import its manufactured gold and fine stuffs from abroad, whilst its own humbler citizens languished amidst the wealth they were not allowed to earn. No decrees could prevent rich people from squandering their money on dress, least of all when the Emperor and his Court were in a constant blaze of magnificence. ”

“ So great was the fame of his ferocity that the panic mongers, who were for ever sending to Elizabeth and Cecil intelligence of the dreadful vengeance which was to fall upon England at the hands of King Philip, could invent nothing more terror-striking than their constantly repeated dread that Julian Romero was to swoop down upon the coast and serve English Protestants in the same way as he had treated those of the Netherlands. ”

“ The wealth and power have passed from the hands of the few to the hands of the many, and instead of one man living in squalid splendour in the comfortless palace surrounded by hosts of unproductive hinds, hundreds live in comfort, usefulness, and self-respect upon the spot. There is probably more money spent in a week by working people in the garish music-hall that occupies the Strand front than would have sufficed to keep Durham Place in full swing for a year during the time of its greatest grandeur. ”

“ Gardiner sat at the end of the high table, and on the floor were four other tables, where the nobles, to the number of 158, partook of the feast. Before the King and Queen stood Lords Pembroke and Strange with the sword and staff of state, and all the courtly ceremony of saluting the dishes as they are brought in, and doffing bonnets to the throne, even in the absence of the Queen, is set forth with admiring iteration by the form-loving Spaniards. Their jealous eyes, too, do not fail to notice that the Queen takes precedence in everything. ”

“ The soft arts of peace were practised with greater success than ever, now {219} that the Moslem and the Christian were fast merging into one people in Seville and Toledo, and the refinement of the one was strengthened by the energy of the other. Beautiful stuffs, stiff with gold and gems, gauzy silk, soft cloths, and fine linens, had no longer to be brought from the Moors or the kingdoms across the sea. Seville, Toledo, and Cordova could produce everything that the most luxurious extravagance could desire, and the sumptuary laws for a time were forgotten. ”

“ His virile brother, Don Juan José of Austria, in whom the worn-out blood of the imperial race had been quickened by the brighter but baser blood of his actress mother, had been poisoned. His beloved first wife, the beautiful Marie Louise of Orleans, had faded away in the sepulchral gloom of that dreary Court, and his new German wife, Marie Anne of Neuberg, with her imperious violence, frightened him out of what little wit he had left by her advocacy of new ideas. For new ideas to that poor brain were the inventions of the very Devil himself. ”

“ Drake, true to the sea and to the tactics by which he had so often beaten the Spaniards, was in favour of pushing on to Lisbon by sea, letting three or four fireships drift about the castle of São Gian, which commanded the entrance to the harbour, so that the smoke should spoil the aim of the guns, and then make a dash for the city—and doubtless, thought Drake, for the galleon, with its million gold crowns, lying in front of the India house. Dom Antonio, whose one idea was to keep foot on the land where he was king, sided with Norris. ”

“ It is true that immediate danger was over. The hasty English levies had been sent home again, bragging of the prowess they would have shown if the hated Spaniard had dared to land, and the panic and fright had given place to perfectly natural congratulations on the special protection vouchsafed by the Almighty to the Virgin Queen and her people. The heroics were over, and England was free, for the present at all events, to don its work-a-day garb again.
But the easy victory had inflamed men's minds. There had been very little fighting even on the fleet, and none at all on shore ”

“ His kinsman of Castile was in worse case, for his dominions were more open to the Moor. Saint Ferdinand conquered the splendid Moorish city of Seville in 1248, where he died four years later, leaving his son, Alonso the Wise, to succeed him as King of Castile. Oriental luxury surrounded the frugal Castilians on all hands. The wealth of plundered cities, the spoils of Moslem palaces were to be had for the grasping, so that it was natural that extravagance in attire and eating should soon threaten to soften the Christian conquerors dwelling in the midst of the gentler, vanquished Moor. ”

“ Provisions and munitions of war were hastily sent from Spain, and the Prior Fernando de Toledo was already on the move, slowly bringing such troops as he could muster for the relief of Lisbon, whilst the castles and walls of the city were put into a state of defence. The Castilians, few in number and intensely hated by the townsfolk, knew that in a fight the brunt would fall upon them, and that the Portuguese, even though they might not help the enemy, and this was by no means certain, would not raise a finger to support the dominion of Philip. ”

“ The war was going badly for Philip and England. The French had taken Calais, and Guines was on the point of falling; if the contest was to be carried on at all more money and more men must be squeezed out of unwilling England, or otherwise peace must be made, with England for a scapegoat. Philip could not come himself, so he sent his haughty, overbearing favourite Feria as his ambassador to bully and bribe the English courtiers and coerce the sorely beset Queen. ”

“ When the Cardinal King died in 1580, Philip II., who for two years had been intriguing, suborning, and threatening the leading Portuguese to acknowledge his right to the succession, stretched out his hand to grasp the coveted crown. Of the two native claimants one, the Duchess of Braganza, was timid and unready; the other, Dom Antonio, was ambitious, bold, and eager. ”

“ Fiery de Spes was all for war and retaliation, but beyond seizing English shipping in Spanish and Flemish harbours, Philip would not go. He was driven for money and sorely beset on all sides, his commerce well-nigh swept from the seas, his credit diminished, and his rebellious subjects in Flanders blockading his own coasts against him. Mary Stuart was urging him to action, his own ministers were assuring him ceaselessly that the only way to check English aggression was to "set the fire to Elizabeth's own doors by raising troubles in England or Ireland if he was not prepared to go to war." ”

“ Hot-blooded Essex, with all the thoughtlessness of his twenty-two years, tired of sickly dallying with an old lady and of squabbling with Raleigh, tired of his debts, his duns and duties as prime favourite, had made up his mind to see some fun, and had fled against the Queen's orders. No one had seen him of course, but the Swiftsure, with Sir Roger Williams, the general second in command of the army, mysteriously left the harbour as soon as Knollys had told his tale. ”

“ There are slashings and quarrels every day between Englishmen and Spaniards, and only just now there was a fight in the palace itself, where several were killed on both sides. Three Englishmen and a Spaniard were hanged for brawling last week. Every day there is some trouble ... God help us, for these barbarous, heretical people make no account of soul and conscience; disobey God, disregard the saints, and think nothing of the Pope, who they say is only a man like themselves, and can have no direct dominion over them. The only Pope they recognise is their sovereign. ”

“ His own towns, both in the Spanish colonies and in old Spain, had been sacked and burnt by English seamen without any declaration of war; and rebellion in the ancient patrimony of his house had been, and was still, kept alive by English money and English troops.
Englishmen, then as now, had the comfortable and highly commendable faculty of believing their own side always to be in the right, and they knew in this particular case that it was much more profitable to plunder than to be plundered, to attack rather than defend. ”

“ All this splendid apparatus was a comparatively new thing for Spaniards at the time; the homely, unceremonious relations between sovereign and people had only been put aside for the pompous etiquette {141} of the house of Burgundy, on the coming of Philip's grandfather from Flanders with his Spanish bride to take up the sceptre dropped by the dead hand of Isabel the Catholic, and the gold of the Indies had since that time poured into Spain and spread a thirst for showy pomp even amongst the frank, honest, homely gentlemen who had formed a majority of the Spanish hidalgo class. ”

“ The marriage will indeed have been a failure if the Queen have no children. They told us in Castile that if his Highness became king of England we should be masters of France; but quite the contrary has turned out to be the fact, for the French are stronger than ever and are doing as they like in Flanders.... Kings here have as little power as if they were vassals, and the people who really govern are the councillors; they are not only lords of the land, but lords of the kings as well. ”

“ Tired with their six days' march and their labour in the trenches, Norris' little army were glad to pass their first night before Lisbon in such peace as the besieged would allow them.
If the enterprise was ever to succeed this was the moment. The English were more numerous as regards men bearing arms, but they had come upon their wild-goose chase against a fortified city without any battering artillery or proper appliances for a siege, whilst the Spaniards were behind strong walls, with unlimited sources of supply from the river front across the Tagus. ”

“ With the exception of a few particulars of his later life given in a local history of Cuenca by Father Muñoz, no Spanish writer has ever been at the trouble of tracing what little may be known of his stirring career. And yet the man in his day was the very prototype of those indomitable adventurers, lusting for blood and gold, who, the sword in one hand and the cross in the other, hunted down to death the Indians of one hemisphere and the "heretics" of the other. ”

“ All the English archers and the guard and porters about the Prince wore the flaming colours of Aragon, and the Spanish attendants and courtiers looked on with jealous rage at the attendance on him of English servants. ”

“ Many were for sending 3,000 men to Cascaes at once. They had given the enemy a good drubbing, they said, and they would sally no more; but Norris had lost hope in Portuguese promises, and was not quite so contemptuous of the enemy as some of them, and he decided that he would wait only one day more for Dom Antonio's levies. If 3,000 came in that night he would send a like number of English to Cascaes for the munitions, otherwise he would raise the siege and leave before daybreak. In vain Antonio prayed for a few days' longer grace. In nine days all Portugal would acclaim him. ”

“ The Portuguese nobles were known to be disaffected, and a rising in favour of Dom Antonio was feared. Philip, with the energy of despair, did what he could, ill as he was, immersed in mountains of papers dealing with trivial detail. But he could do little. The Portuguese nobles who were at all doubtful were ordered to come to Madrid, the Spanish grandees were enjoined to raise and arm their followers and hold themselves in readiness to march either towards the Pyrenees or to Lisbon. ”

“ A FIGHT AGAINST FINERY. (A HISTORY OF THE SUMPTUARY LAWS IN SPAIN.)
It is a curious reflection that whilst all the serious acts and surroundings of civilised life have been rendered amenable to the law, whilst the very instincts inherent in the nature of mankind have been dominated and regulated by authority, utter failure has attended the persistent efforts of rulers to cope with the trivial follies of fashion, or to limit the vanity and extravagance of personal adornment. ”

“ The poorer classes bitterly hated the foreigner, and particularly the Spaniard, whose King was really the only other serious claimant to the throne. The churchmen were devotedly attached to the ecclesiastical claimant, the nobles were Portuguese before all, and Antonio was acclaimed the national sovereign. But not for long; the terrible Alba swept down upon Lisbon, as years before he had come down upon the Netherlands, and crushed the life out of Portuguese patriotism. There was no religious question to stiffen men's backs, and no William of Orange to command them here. ”

“ These English are the most ungrateful people in the world, and hate the Spaniards worse than the devil, as they readily show, for they rob us in the town itself, and not a soul dares to venture two miles on the road without being robbed. There is no justice for us. We are ordered by the King to avoid dispute and put up with everything whilst we are here, enduring all their attacks in silence. They therefore despise us and treat us badly. We have complained to Bibriesca and the ambassador, but they say it is for his Majesty's sake that we must bear everything patiently. ”

“ An attempt to shame ladies into obeying the law was made for the first time, of many, in these pragmatics of 1563-4 by giving to women of bad character the right to deck themselves in prohibited finery in their own houses. But Madrid was already commencing upon the downward career which made it for more than a century the most dissolute place in Europe, and women of rank even were proud of their effrontery, so that no attempts to induce them to obey the law by appeals to their modesty ever succeeded. ”

“ Amongst the five hundred courtiers and servants, besides soldiers, who accompanied Philip to England, several would naturally be able and disposed to put upon record, for transmission to their friends in Spain, full narratives of the great events they witnessed—events, be it said, which had deeply stirred the public imagination of Spaniards, who had been taught to believe that the marriage of their prince in England would mean not only the mastery of their country over France, but the restoration of all Christendom to the true faith. ”

“ But in the face of all provocation, in the face of Alba's assurance that his prestige was being ruined by his tame submission, he could only say after long delay (December 16, 1569) that if Elizabeth's hardness of heart continued he should really have to consider what could be done. "We here think that the best course will be to encourage with money and secret favour the Catholics of the North, and to help those in Ireland to take up arms against the heretics and deliver the crown to the Queen of Scotland, to whom it belongs by succession." ”