History of the United Netherlands, 1584-1609 Part 102

The body was to be brought to the church, and placed in the stately tomb already prepared for its reception. "Ma.s.s being performed," said the king, "the prelate shall place me in the grave which shall be my last house until I go to my eternal dwelling. Then the prince, third king of my name, shall go into the cloister of St. Jerome at Madrid, where he shall keep nine days mourning. My daughter, and her aunt--my sister, the ex-empress--shall for the same purpose go to the convent of the grey sisters."

The king then charged his successor to hold the Infanta in especial affection and consideration; "for," said he, "she has been my mirror, yea; the light of my eyes." He also ordered that the Marquis of Mondejar be taken from prison and set free, on condition never to show himself at Court. The wife of Antonio Perez was also to be released from prison, in order that she might be immured in a cloister, her property being bestowed upon her daughters.

As this unfortunate lady's only crime consisted in her husband's intrigue with the king's mistress, Princess Eboli, in which she could scarcely be considered an accomplice, this permission to exchange one form of incarceration for another did not seem an act of very great benignity.

Philip further provided that thirty thousand ma.s.ses should be said for his soul, five hundred slaves liberated from the galleys, and five hundred maidens provided with marriage portions.

After these elaborate instructions had been read, the king ordered a certain casket to be brought to him and opened in his presence. From this he took forth a diamond of great price and gave it to the Infanta, saying that it had belonged to her mother, Isabella of France. He asked the prince if he consented to the gift. The prince answered in the affirmative.

He next took from the coffer a written doc.u.ment, which he handed to his son, saying, "Herein you will learn how to govern your kingdoms."

Then he produced a scourge, which he said was the instrument with which his father, the emperor, had been in the habit of chastising himself during his retreat at the monastery of Juste. He told the by-standers to observe the imperial blood by which the lash was still slightly stained.

As the days wore on he felt himself steadily sinking, and asked to receive extreme unction. As he had never seen that rite performed he chose to rehea.r.s.e it beforehand, and told Ruys Velasco; who was in constant attendance upon him, to go for minute instructions on the subject to the Archbishop of Toledo. The sacrament having been duly.

administered; the king subsequently, on the 1st September, desired to receive it once more. The archbishop, fearing that the dying monarch's strength would be insufficient for the repet.i.tion of the function, informed him that the regulations of the Church required in such cases only a compliance with certain trifling forms, as the ceremony had been already once thoroughly carried out. But the king expressed himself as quite determined that the sacrament should be repeated in all its parts; that he should once more--be anointed--to use the phrase of brother Francis Neyen--with the oil which holy athletes require in their wrestle with death.

This was accordingly done in the presence of his son and daughter, and, of his chief secretaries, Christopher de Moura and John de Idiaquez, besides the Counts Chinchon, Fuensalido, and several other conspicuous personages. He was especially desirous that his son should be present, in order that; when he too should come to die, he might not find himself, like his father, in ignorance of the manner in which this last sacrament was to be performed.

When it was finished he described himself as infinitely consoled, and as having derived even more happiness from the rite than he had dared to antic.i.p.ate.

Thenceforth he protested that he would talk no more of the world's affairs. He had finished with all things below, and for the days or hours still remaining to him he would keep his heart exclusively fixed upon Heaven. Day by day as he lay on his couch of unutterable and almost unexampled misery, his confessors and others read to him from religious works, while with perfect gentleness he would insist that one reader should relieve another, that none might be fatigued.

On the 11th September he dictated these words to Christopher de Moura, who was to take them to Diego de Yepes, the confessor:--

"Father Confessor, you are in the place of G.o.d, and I protest thus before His presence that I will do all that you declare necessary for my salvation. Thus upon you will be the responsibility for my omissions, because I am ready to do all."

Finding that the last hour was approaching, he informed Don Fernando de Toledo where: he could find some candles of our lady of Montserrat, one of which he desired to keep in his hand at the supreme moment. He also directed Ruys de Velasco to take from a special shrine--which he had indicated to him six years before--a crucifix which the emperor his father had held upon his death-bed. All this was accomplished according to his wish.

He had already made arrangements for his funeral procession, and had subsequently provided all the details of his agony. It was now necessary to give orders as to the particulars of his burial.

He knew that decomposition had made such progress even while he was still living as to render embalming impossible: He accordingly instructed Don Christopher to see his body wrapped in a shroud just as it lay, and to cause it to be placed in a well-soldered metallic coffin already provided. The coffin of state, in which the leaden one was to be enclosed, was then brought into the chamber by his command, that he might see if it was entirely to his taste. Having examined it, he ordered that it should be lined with white satin and ornamented with gold nails and lace-work. He also described a particular brocade of black and gold, to be found in the jewelroom, which he desired for the pall.

Next morning he complained to Don Christopher that the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper had not been administered to him for several days. It was urged that his strength was deemed insufficient, and that, as he had received that rite already four times during his illness, and extreme unction twice, it was thought that the additional fatigue might be spared him. But as the king insisted, the sacrament was once more performed and prayers were read. He said with great fervour many times, "Pater, non mea voluntas, sed tux fiat." He listened, too, with much devotion to the Psalm, "As the hart panteth for the water-brooks;" and he spoke faintly at long intervals of the Magdalen, of the prodigal son, and of the paralytic.

When these devotional exercises had been concluded, father Diego expressed the hope to him that he might then pa.s.s away, for it would be a misfortune by temporary convalescence to fall from the exaltation of piety which he had then reached. The remark was heard by Philip with an expression of entire satisfaction.

That day both the Infanta and the prince came for the last time to his bedside to receive his blessing. He tenderly expressed his regret to his daughter that he had not been permitted to witness her marriage, but charged her never to omit any exertion to augment and sustain the holy Roman Catholic religion in the Netherlands. It was in the interest of that holy Church alone that he had endowed her with those provinces, and he now urged it upon her with his dying breath to impress upon her future husband these his commands to both.

His two children took leave of him with tears and sobs: As the prince left the chamber he asked Don Christopher who it was that held the key to the treasury.

The secretary replied, "It is I, Sir." The prince demanded that he should give it into his hands. But Don Christopher excused himself, saying that it had been entrusted to him by the king, and that without his consent he could not part with it. Then the prince returned to the king's chamber, followed by the secretary, who narrated to the dying monarch what had taken place.

"You have done wrong," said Philip; whereupon Don Christopher, bowing to the earth, presented the key to the prince.

The king then feebly begged those about his bedside to repeat the dying words of our Saviour on the cross, in order that he might hear them and repeat them in his heart as his soul was taking flight.

His father's crucifix was placed in his hands, and he said distinctly, "I die like a good Catholic, in faith and obedience to the holy Roman Church." Soon after these last words had been spoken, a paroxysm, followed by faintness, came over him, and he lay entirely still.

They had covered his face with a cloth, thinking that he had already expired, when he suddenly started, with great energy, opened his eyes, seized the crucifix again from the hand of Don Fernando de Toledo, kissed it, and fell back again into agony.

The archbishop and the other priests expressed the opinion that he must have had, not a paroxysm, but a celestial vision, for human powers would not have enabled him to arouse himself so quickly and so vigorously as he had done at that crisis.

He did not speak again, but lay unconsciously dying for some hours, and breathed his last at five in the morning of Sunday the 13th September.

His obsequies were celebrated according to the directions which he had so minutely given.

These volumes will have been written in vain if it be now necessary to recal to my readers the leading events in the history of the man who had thus left the world where, almost invisible himself, he had so long played a leading part. It may not be entirely useless, however, to throw a parting glance at a character which it has been one of the main objects of this work, throughout its whole course, to portray. My theme has been the reign of Philip II., because, as the less is included in the greater, the whole of that reign, with the exception of a few episodes, is included in the vast movement out of which the Republic of the United Netherlands was born and the a.s.sailed independence of France and England consolidated. The result of Philip's efforts to establish a universal monarchy was to hasten the decline of the empire which he had inherited, by aggravating the evils which had long made that downfall inevitable.

It is from no abstract hatred to monarchy that I have dwelt with emphasis upon the crimes of this king, and upon the vices of the despotic system, as ill.u.s.trated during his lifetime. It is not probable that the military, monarchical system--founded upon conquests achieved by barbarians and pirates of a distant epoch over an effete civilization and over antique inst.i.tutions of intolerable profligacy--will soon come to an end in the older world. And it is the business of Europeans so to deal with the inst.i.tutions of their inheritance or their choice as to ensure their steady melioration and to provide for the highest interests of the people. It matters comparatively little by what name a government is called, so long as the intellectual and moral development of mankind, and the maintenance of justice among individuals, are its leading principles.

A government, like an individual, may remain far below its ideal; but, without an ideal, governments and individuals are alike contemptible. It is tyranny only--whether individual or popular--that utters its feeble sneers at the ideologists, as if mankind were brutes to whom instincts were all in all and ideas nothing. Where intellect and justice are enslaved by that unholy trinity--Force; Dogma, and Ignorance--the tendency of governments, and of those subjected to them, must of necessity be retrograde and downward.

There can be little doubt to those who observe the movements of mankind during the course of the fourteen centuries since the fall of the Roman Empire--a mere fragment of human history--that its progress, however concealed or impeded, and whether for weal or woe, is towards democracy; for it is the tendency of science to liberate and to equalize the physical and even the intellectual forces of humanity. A horse and a suit of armour would now hardly enable the fortunate possessor of such advantages to conquer a kingdom, nor can wealth and learning be monopolised in these latter days by a favoured few. Yet veneration for a crown and a privileged church--as if without them and without their close connection with each other law and religion were impossible--makes hereditary authority sacred to great ma.s.ses of mankind in the old world.

The obligation is the more stringent, therefore, on men thus set apart as it were by primordial selection for ruling and instructing their fellow-creatures, to keep their edicts and their practice in harmony with divine justice. For these rules cannot be violated with impunity during along succession of years, and it is usually left for a comparatively innocent generation, to atone for the sins of their forefathers. If history does not teach this it teaches nothing, and as the rules of morality; whether for individuals or for nations, are simple and devoid of mystery; there is the less excuse for governments which habitually and cynically violate the eternal law.

Among self-evident truths not one is more indisputable than that which, in the immortal words of our Declaration of Independence, a.s.serts the right of every human being to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; but the only happiness that can be recognised by a true statesman as the birthright of mankind is that which comes from intellectual and moral development, and from the subjugation of the brutal instincts.

A system according to which clowns remain clowns through all the ages, unless when extraordinary genius or fortunate accident enables an exceptional individual to overleap the barrier of caste, necessarily r.e.t.a.r.ds the result to which the philosopher looks forward with perfect faith.

For us, whose business it is to deal with, and, so far as human fallibility will permit, to improve our inevitable form of government-which may degenerate into the most intolerable of polities unless we are ever mindful that it is yet in its rudimental condition; that, although an immense step has been taken in the right direction by the abolition of caste, the divorce of Church and State, and the limitation of intrusion by either on the domain of the individual, it is yet only a step from which, without eternal vigilance, a falling back is very easy; and that here, more than in other lands, ignorance of the scientific and moral truths on--which national happiness and prosperity depend, deserves bitter denunciation--for us it is wholesome to confirm our faith in democracy, and to justify our hope that the People will prove itself equal to the awful responsibility of self-government by an occasional study of the miseries which the opposite system is capable of producing. It is for this reason that the reign of the sovereign whose closing moments have just been recorded is especially worthy of a minute examination, and I still invite a parting glance at the spectacle thus presented, before the curtain falls.

The Spanish monarchy in the reign of Philip II. was not only the most considerable empire then existing, but probably the most powerful and extensive empire that had ever been known. Certainly never before had so great an agglomeration of distinct and separate sovereignties been the result of accident. For it was owing to a series of accidents--in the common acceptation of that term--that Philip governed so mighty a realm.

According to the principle that vast tracts: of the earth's surface, with the human beings feeding upon: them, were transferable in fee-simple from one man or woman to another by marriage, inheritance, or gift, a heterogeneous collection of kingdoms, princ.i.p.alities, provinces, and: wildernesses had been consolidated, without geographical continuity, into an artificial union--the populations differing from each other as much as human beings can differ, in race, language, inst.i.tutions, and historical traditions, and resembling each other in little, save in being the property alike of the same fortunate individual.

Thus the dozen kingdoms of Spain, the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands, the kingdoms of the Two Sicilies, the duchy of Milan, and certain fortresses and districts of Tuscany, in Europe; the kingdom of Barbary, the coast of Guinea, and an indefinite and unmeasured expanse.

of other territory, in Africa; the controlling outposts and cities all along the coast of the two Indian peninsulas, with as much of the country as it seemed good to occupy, the straits and the great archipelagoes, so far as they had--been visited by Europeans, in Asia; Peru, Brazil, Mexico, the Antilles--the whole recently discovered fourth quarter of the world in short, from the "Land of Fire" in the South to the frozen regions of the North--as much territory as the Spanish and Portuguese sea-captains could circ.u.mnavigate and the pope in the plent.i.tude of his power and his generosity could bestow on his fortunate son, in America; all this enormous proportion of the habitable globe was the private property, of Philip; who was the son of Charles, who was the son of Joanna, who was the daughter of Isabella, whose husband was Ferdinand. By what seems to us the most whimsical of political arrangements, the Papuan islander, the Calabrian peasant, the Amsterdam merchant, the semi-civilized Aztec, the Moor of Barbary, the Castilian grandee, the roving Camanche, the Guinea negro, the Indian Brahmin, found themselves--could they but have known it--fellow-citizens of one commonwealth. Statutes of family descent, aided by fraud, force, and chicane, had annexed the various European sovereignties to the crown of Spain; the genius of a Genoese sailor had given to it the New World, and more recently the conquest of Portugal, torn from hands not strong enough to defend the national independence, had vested in the same sovereignty those Oriental possessions which were due to the enterprise of Vasco de Gama, his comrades and successors. The voyager, setting forth from the straits of Gibraltar, circ.u.mnavigating the African headlands and Cape Comorin, and sailing through the Molucca channel and past the isles which bore the name of Philip in the Eastern sea, gave the hand at last to his adventurous comrade, who, starting from the same point, and following westward in the track of Magellaens and under the Southern Cross, coasted the sh.o.r.e of Patagonia, and threaded his path through unmapped and unnumbered cl.u.s.ters of islands in the Western Pacific; and during this spanning of the earth's whole circ.u.mference not an inch of land or water was traversed that was not the domain of Philip.

For the sea, too, was his as well as the dry land.

From Borneo to California the great ocean was but a Spanish lake, as much the king's private property as his fish-ponds at the Escorial with their carp and perch. No subjects but his dared to navigate those sacred waters. Not a common highway of the world's commerce, but a private path for the gratification of one human being's vanity, had thus been laid out by the bold navigators of the sixteenth century.

It was for the Dutch rebels to try conclusions upon this point, as they had done upon so many others, with the master of the land and sea. The opening scenes therefore in the great career of maritime adventure and discovery by which these republicans were to make themselves famous will soon engage the reader's attention.

Thus the causes of what is called the greatness of Spain are not far to seek. Spain was not a nation, but a temporary and fact.i.tious conjunction of several nations, which it was impossible to fuse into a permanent whole, but over whose united resources a single monarch for a time disposed. And the very concentration of these vast and unlimited, powers, fortuitous as it was, in this single hand, inspiring the individual, not unnaturally, with a consciousness of superhuman grandeur; impelled him to those frantic and puerile efforts to achieve the impossible which resulted, in the downfall of Spain. The man who inherited so much material greatness believed himself capable of destroying the invisible but omnipotent spirit of religious and political liberty in the Netherlands, of trampling out the national existence of France and of England, and of annexing those realms to his empire: It has been my task to relate, with much minuteness, how miserably his efforts failed.

But his resources were great. All Italy was in his hands, with the single exception of the Venetian republic; for the Grand Duke of Florence and the so-called republic of Genoa were little more than his va.s.sals, the pope was generally his other self, and the Duke of Savoy was his son-in-law. Thus his armies, numbering usually a hundred thousand men, were supplied from the best possible sources. The Italians were esteemed the best soldiers for siege; a.s.sault, light skirmis.h.i.+ng. The German heavy troopers and arquebuseers were the most effective for open field-work, and these were to be purchased at reasonable prices and to indefinite amount from any of the three or four hundred petty sovereigns to whom what was called Germany belonged. The Sicilian and Neapolitan pikemen, the Milanese light-horse, belonged exclusively to Philip, and were used, year after year, for more than a generation of mankind, to fight battles in which they had no more interest than had their follow-subjects in the Moluccas or in Mexico, but which const.i.tuted for them personally as lucrative a trade on the whole as was afforded them at that day by any branch of industry.

Silk, corn, wine, and oil were furnished in profusion from these favoured regions, not that the inhabitants might enjoy life, and, by acc.u.mulating wealth, increase the stock of human comforts and contribute to intellectual and scientific advancement, but in order that the proprietor of the soil might feed those eternal armies ever swarming from the south to scatter desolation over the plains of France, Burgundy, Flanders, and Holland, and to make the crown of Spain and the office of the Holy Inquisition supreme over the world. From Naples and Sicily were derived in great plenty the best materials and conveniences for s.h.i.+p-building and marine equipment. The galleys and the galley-slaves furnished by these subject realms formed the princ.i.p.al part of the royal navy. From distant regions, a commerce which in Philip's days had become oceanic supplied the crown with as much revenue as could be expected in a period of gross ignorance as to the causes of the true grandeur and the true wealth of nations. Especially from the mines of Mexico came an annual average of ten or twelve millions of precious metals, of which the king took twenty-five per cent. for himself.

It would be difficult and almost superfluous to indicate the various resources placed in the hands of this one personage, who thus controlled so large a portion of the earth. All that breathed or grew belonged to him, and most steadily was the stream of blood and treasure poured through the sieve of his perpetual war. His system was essentially a gigantic and perpetual levy of contributions in kind, and it is only in this vague and unsatisfactory manner that the revenues of his empire can be stated. A despot really keeps no accounts, nor need to do so, for he is responsible to no man for the way in which he husbands or squanders his own. Moreover, the science of statistics had not a beginning of existence in those days, and the most common facts can hardly be obtained, even by approximation. The usual standard of value, the commodity which we call money--gold or silver--is well known to be at best a fallacious guide for estimating the comparative wealth--of individuals or of nations at widely different epochs. The dollar of Philip's day was essentially the same bit of silver that it is in our time in Spain, Naples, Rome, or America, but even should an elaborate calculation be made as to the quant.i.ty of beef, or bread or broadcloth to be obtained for that bit of silver in this or that place in the middle of the sixteenth century, the result, as compared with prices now prevalent, would show many remarkable discrepancies. Thus a bushel of wheat at Antwerp during Philip's reign might cost a quarter of a dollar, in average years, and there have been seasons in our own time when two bushels of wheat could have been bought for a quarter of a dollar in Illinois. Yet if, notwithstanding this, we should allow a tenfold value in exchange to the dollar of Philip's day, we should be surprised at the meagreness of his revenues, of his expenditures, and of the debts which at the close of his career brought him to bankruptcy; were the sums estimated in coin.

Thus his income was estimated by careful contemporary statesmen at what seemed to them the prodigious annual amount of sixteen millions of dollars. He carried on a vast war without interruption during the whole of his forty-three years' reign against the most wealthy and military nations of Christendom not recognising his authority, and in so doing he is said to have expended a sum total of seven hundred millions of dollars--a statement which made men's hair stand on their heads. Yet the American republic, during its civil war to repress the insurrection of the slaveholders, has spent nominally as large a sum as this every year; and the British Empire in time of profound peace spends half as much annually. And even if we should allow sixteen millions to have represented the value of a hundred and sixty millions--a purely arbitrary supposition--as compared with our times, what are a hundred and sixty, millions of dollars, or thirty-three millions of pounds sterling--as the whole net revenue of the greatest empire that had ever existed in the world, when compared with the acc.u.mulated treasures over which civilized and industrious countries can now dispose? Thus the power of levying men and materials in kind const.i.tuted the chief part of the royal power, and, in truth, very little revenue in money was obtained from Milan or Naples, or from any of the outlying European possessions of the crown.

Eight millions a year were estimated as the revenue from the eight kingdoms incorporated under the general name of Castile, while not more than six hundred thousand came from the three kingdoms which const.i.tuted Arragon. The chief sources of money receipts were a tax of ten per cent.

upon sales, paid by the seller, called Alcavala, and the Almoxarifalgo or tariff upon both imports and exports. Besides these imposts he obtained about eight hundred thousand dollars a year by selling to his subjects the privilege of eating eggs upon fast-days, according to the permission granted him by the pope, in the bull called the Cruzada. He received another annual million from the Sussidio and the Excusado. The first was a permission originally given by the popes to levy six hundred thousand dollars a year upon ecclesiastical property for equipment of a hundred war-galleys against the Saracens, but which had more recently established itself as a regular tax to pay for naval hostilities against Dutch and English heretics--a still more malignant species of unbelievers in the orthodox eyes of the period. The Excusado was the right accorded to the king always to select from the Church possessions a single benefice and to appropriate its fruit--a levy commuted generally for four hundred thousand dollars a year. Besides these regular sources of income, large but irregular amounts of money were picked up by his Majesty in small sums, through monks sent about the country simply as beggars, under no special license, to collect alms from rich and poor for sustaining the war against the infidels of England and Holland. A certain Jesuit, father Sicily by name, had been industrious enough at one period in preaching this crusade to acc.u.mulate more than a million and a half, so that a facetious courtier advised his sovereign to style himself thenceforth king, not of the two, but of the three Sicilies, in honour of the industrious priest.

It is worthy of remark that at different periods during Philip's reign, and especially towards its close, the whole of his regular revenue was pledged to pay the interest, on his debts, save only the Sussidio and the Cruzada. Thus the master of the greatest empire of the earth had at times no income at his disposal except the alma he could solicit from his poorest subjects to maintain his warfare against foreign miscreants, the levy on the Church for war-galleys; and the proceeds of his permission to eat meat on Fridays. This sounds like an epigram, but it is a plain, incontestable fact.