701 



PHILIP 1L (OF SPAIN). 



PHILIP II. (OF SPAIN). 



I I 



Philip has therefore truly been represented u monster of bigotry 

 and cruelty ; but it appear* unjust to add to these revolting qualities, 

 a* tome writers hare done, the reproach of hypocrisy. Charles was a 

 persecutor only from policy, but Philip from conviction. Charles 

 made religion subservient to his views of temporal aggrandisement ; 

 Philip oft. n sacrificed his true political interests to what he conceived 

 to be the service of religion. The emperor held the pope a prisoner, 

 while he burnt others for denying his supremacy j bis son engaged 

 only with deep reluctance in a legitimate war against Pope Paul IV., 

 and in order to purchase a reconciliation with that arrognnt pontiff he 

 abandoned the fruit of victory like a repentant criminal. The indulgence 

 of sennal pasaion has been adduced as another proof, no less than his 

 cruelty, of the hypocrisy of Philip's religious pretensions ; but the 

 licence of his private life in this respect was one of those inconsistencies 

 which have sullied purer minds. 



The marriage of Philip II. with Mary, queen of England, which 

 had taken place in 1554, enabled him, soon after liis accession to the 

 Spanish crown, to engage his consort's kingdom with his own, in 1557, 

 in a war against France. The only memorable event of this contest 

 was the victory of St. Quentin, gained by his troops. Ue was not 

 himself present at the battle ; but at the subsequent assault of the 

 town he showed himself in armour to encourage the soldi, ry, though 

 without sharing their danger; and it was observed that this was the 

 first and last time in which he appeared on the field, and the only 

 other occasion on which he assumed a military suit was when he 

 directed the arrest of his son, the unhappy Don Carlos. The war was 

 concluded in 1559 by the peace of Cateau Cambresis, upon terms 

 Advantageous for Philip. Ue hod meanwhile, by the death of Mary, 

 to whom he had been a cold and unkind husband, lost his connection 

 with England. Leaving his provinces of the Netherlands under the 

 government of his natural sister Margaret, duchess of Parma, Philip 

 railed for Spain, which he never quitted again ; nud his arrival in that 

 kingdom was immediately followed by a sanguinary persecution, 

 through which he succeeded in crushing the germs of the lieformation 

 in the peninsula. He was present at an auto-da-fe, or public act of 

 faith, at which forty unhappy persons were led to the stake by the 

 Inquisition. When passing him, one of the victims in this dreadful 

 procession appealed to him with loud cries of mercy. " Perish thou, 

 and all like thee ! " was his merciless reply ; " If iny own son were a 

 heretic I would deliver him to the flames." 



It was amidst such scenes that he accomplished a vow, made to 

 heaven and to St. Lawrence, on the day of which saint the battle of 

 St. Quentin had been gained, to testify his gratitude for that victory. 

 At the village of Escurial, near Madrid, he built a suberb palace, to 

 which, in honour of the saint and of the instrument of his martyrdom, 

 he gave the form of a gridiron. At the same period he transferred the 

 seat of government from Toledo, the ancient capital of Castile, to 

 Madrid, which latter city thenceforth became the metropolis of Spain. 

 In the south of that kingdom his persecution goaded to revolt the 

 Moorish population, who had compounded for the quiet possession of 

 their native seats by a pretended conversion to Christianity ; and after 

 a furious contest, embittered by religious hatred and marked by 

 horrid atrocities on both sides, a portion of the Moon were drivtu to 

 eck refuge in Africa, and the remainder (1571) reduced to sub- 

 misuon. 



Meanwhile Philip diligently applied himself to tho extirpation of 

 herei-y in the rest of his dominions. In his Italian possessions, both 

 of Milan and Naples, fire and the sword were successfully employed 

 for this purpose ; but the attempt to establish the Spanish Inquisition 

 in tho Netherlands with the same view first provoked a spirit of insur- 

 rection (1566), which, throughout the remainder of his long reign, 

 exhausted his immense resourcts of men and money, and after the 

 frightful devastation of those fertile and flourishing provinces, for 

 ever tore seven of them from the Spanish monarchy. When Philip 

 found that the government of Margaret of Parma wanted strength to 

 enforce hit religious edicts in the Netherlands, he replaced her by the 

 ferocious Ferdinand Alvarez de Toledo, duke of Alva. The character 

 of thi* man'* M! ministration may be estimated by hi* sanguinary 

 bout that in let* than six years he had consigned 18,000 heretics to 

 the stake and the scaffold, before his master was compelled, by the 

 failure of his cruel measures, to recall him. The milder government 

 of his successor Iteqaescns the warlike renown, the energies, and the 

 artifice of Don John of Austria, natural brother of l'hili|> (who had 

 Rained for him the great naval victory of Lepanto over the Turks in 

 1571) and the military genius of Alenandro Faruese, duke of Parma, 

 the ablest general of bu times were all in succession equally inef- 

 fectual to suppress the revolt of the Netherlands. William the 

 Silent, prince of Orange, whose deep enmity Philip had provoked, 

 proved the moat dangerous of his insurgent subjects ; and under thai 

 prince and Us son Maurice they successfully prosecuted a struggle, of 

 which the principal event* are related under another head. [NASSAU, 

 BOCAE or.] 



While the cruel and bigoted tyranny of Philip was thus dissevering 

 seven provinces of the Netherlands from his dominions, he unex- 

 pectedly acquired powssion of another kingdom. On the death o 

 Henry, king of Portugal, without issue, Philip, a* his nephew, asserted 

 title to the succession ; and his power easily enabling him to pro 

 tail against hi* feeble competitor, Don Antonio de Crato, his troops 



under the Duke of Alva, entered Lisbon, and in two mouths , 

 annexed the Portuguese crown and colonial dependencies for sixty 

 rears to the Spanish monarchy. 



This acquisition teemed but a step to the universal dominion at 

 which Philip aimed ; and in the pursuit of his double ambition of 

 extending his sway and extirpating the Protestant faith, the remainder 

 if his life was passed in designs for subjugating both France and 

 Jigland. In the former country, after secretly allying himself with 

 the queen-mother, Catherine de' Medici, and the Romish party, for the 

 destruction of the Huguenots, he subsequently and openly supported 

 he Roman Catholic league, under the Guises, against Henri IV. ; and 

 t was not until that sovereign by changing his religion completed his 

 victories over the league, that the subtle tyrant of Spain abandoned 

 lis hopes of reducing France to subjection. His project for the con- 

 quest of England was more avowedly proclaimed, more perseveringly 

 mrsued, and more disgracefully defeated ; but it is needless in this 

 jlacc to repeat the narrative, so glorious in our annals, of the destruction 

 of the magnificent fleet of 160 vessels of war which, under the pre- 

 sumptuous title of the Invincible Armada, Philip had equipped for 

 .he reduction of this island (1588). [ELIZABETH, vol. ii., col. 701-704 ] 

 The manner in which ho received tha mortifying intelligence of the 

 annihilation of his fondest hopes by the shipwreck as well as the . 

 of his navy, displayed some greatness of mind as well as religious 

 resignation : " I sent my fleet," said he, " to combat with the English, 

 )ut not with the elements : God's will be done ! " 



The close of Philip's reigu and life was embittered by the failure of 

 all his plans of ambition and intolerance. The contest in the Low 

 Countries was daily becoming so adverse to the Spanish arms, that one 

 of his last acts was an abdication of his title over the whole of those 

 provinces in favour of his daughter Isabella and her consort the 

 Archduke Albert. His haughty spirit was reduced to submit to this 

 measure, as the only remaining expedient for preventing the total 

 alienation of the Netherlands from his house. England and France 

 also had escaped from his toils; and the peace of Vervins, which he 

 was compelled to conclude with Henri IV., left that sovereign aecuivly 

 established on the French throne. Philip died in tho same year i 

 at the age of seventy-two, after protracted and excruciating sull'ering, 

 under a complication of dreadful uialailies. 



Philip II. was four times married. The Queen of England, by whom 

 lie had no issue, was his second wife. His first was his cousin, Mary 

 of Portugal ; and by her he had one son, Don Carlos, whose fate has 

 deepened the sombre aspect of his reign. That young prince, who 

 appears to have been of a haughty and violent temper, was exasperated 

 by his father's refusal to admit him to a share in the administration 

 of the kingdom, though he had never shown any capacity for public 

 affairs. After giving many proofs of a discontented and disordered 

 mind, he was, on the charge, as it would seem from the researches of 

 Mr. Prcscott, of aiming at the king's life, and of having shown heretical 

 tendencies, arrested in his bed by Philip himself at midnight on the 

 1 8th of January 1568. To the council of state, and to foreign courts, 

 Philip merely assigned as his reason for so acting the necessity laid 

 upon him by " his duty to Qod and regard for the welfare of the 

 monarchy." Philip it was clear had come, for some reasons, to regard 

 his son with settled aversion, and it soon came to be understood that 

 he was condemned to an imprisonment from which there was no hope 

 of release, and in which he was to be treated with tho utmost rigour ; 

 and that it was a subject on which every one must be silent. Happily 

 for him, death in the course of a few months terminated his miserable 

 existence (July 24, 1568), at the age of twenty-three years. The horrid 

 suspicion that his death had been hastened through poison or other 

 means by his father's command, which prevailed at the time, has been 

 frequently repeated since, and is directly though inconclusively stated 

 by Llorente, the secretary of the Inquisition, in his ' Histoire de 1'Inqui- 

 sition,' torn, hi., p. 171, &c. Bo the manner of his death however what 

 it may, there can be little doubt that, as Mr. Prescott observes, " the 

 responsibility to a great extent must be allowed to rest on Philip, 

 who, if he did not directly employ the hand of the assassin to take the 

 life of his son, yet by bis rigorous treatment drove that son to a state 

 of desperation that brought about the same fatal result." (' Hist, of 

 Philip II.,' book iv., chap. 7.) But the authentic version, which we 

 have related, of this mysterious and tragical affair, has been still 

 further variously discoloured by calumny and fiction. Writers, who 

 believed Philip to be the murderer of his son, have upon this foundation 

 formed the superstructure for a romantic tale of a mutual and criminal 

 passion between Don Carlos and his father's third wife, the Princess 

 Elizabeth of France, who had originally been betrothed to himself, 

 and whose life, which cloned quickly afterwards, is also said to have 

 boen sacrificed to the jealous vengeance of her husband. For this 

 charge against all the parties, there seems however to have been no 

 foundation. (See a full sketch of tho career of Don Carlos, and an 

 elaborate, able, and just examination of the whole question of his 

 connection with Elizabeth, and hit treatment by his father, in Prescott's 

 'History of the lleign of Philip tha Second,' vol. ii., book iv., chaps. 

 G, 7, and 8.) By Elizabeth, Philip had two daughters, who, together 

 with his son and successor by his fourth wife Anne, daughter of the 

 Emperor Maximilian II., were the only legitimate issue which he left. 

 In the midst of his persecuting zeal he had given one purer proof of 

 bis regard for religion, and sacred literature owes an obligation to his 



