The Story of Nations - Holland/Chapter 14

When the wisest man in Holland had been murdered, and the greatest general of the age was in the prime of his activity and skill, Philip ought to have had no difficulty in overcoming the resistance of the Netherlands. And when we add to this that the cities were so jealous of each other, that they could not be brought to act together, that they were constantly at strife even in their own walls, were hesitating when they should have been bold, penurious when they should have been liberal, and were being bought and sold by the prince whom they had invited to rule over them, and the nobles whom they knew to have committed a thousand treasons against public liberty, it should have been easy to stamp out opposition. Holland and Zeland, it is true, were uncontaminated. They, had refused to recognize Anjou, even when William pressed them to do so, and though they were as yet unconscious of their powers, and could not foresee the great future which was before them, though they were foolishly timid and parsimonious at times when courage and self-sacrifice would have been the highest still they had been made a nation by Father William.

Philip always cherished the widest schemes of conquest or aggrandisement. He wished to achieve the empire of the world. It is true he was no warrior, indeed, he was little better than a clerk. He was no financier, for his revenue was anticipated and mortgaged, and he was living from hand to mouth. He never imagined that any difficulties were in his way, for no one about him during his reign of forty-one years hinted that there was anything which he could not accomplish. It must be allowed that he bore his own losses, which were in fact the losses of others, with amazing serenity. He planned the affairs of the world, the conquest of kingdoms, the assassination of princes, the extirpation of heretics, the election of popes, and a thousand other things, at his writing-desk in the vast palace which he had built among the Spanish mountains in memory of the great victory of St. Quentin, the winner of which had, by Philip's orders, been executed at Brussels. His hand, or rather his pen, was in everything. Let us look for a short time at the principal projects which engaged him, the completion of which was a bar to the rapid conquest of the Netherlands.

The last king of the house of Valois was on the French throne. His only brother had just died, and he had no hope of issue. The heir to his house according to French law, now undisputed for at least two centuries and a half, that females could not inherit the throne or transmit a title to it, was Henry, King of Navarre, and prince of Béarn. Philip treated the Salic law, as the French law regulating the succession to the crown was called, as an absurdity, and claimed it for his daughter, and whatever husband he might assign to her. In order to achieve this result he had distributed bribes lavishly among such leading Frenchmen as professed to favour his pretensions. Among these was the Duke of Guise, who took enormous sums from him, and, under pretence of furthering Philip's schemes, was doing his utmost, by means of Philip's money, to secure the crown for himself. Over and over again, during the long course of this eventful war, Parma and his army were forced to abandon or suspend some necessary operation in order to further his master's and uncle's designs in France.

Philip laid claim also to the throne of England, and for a long time had designed to subdue it. Elizabeth, it is true, was reigning in it, and it was a cardinal article in Philip's political creed, that subjects should be of the religion of their ruler. But then Elizabeth was a heretic, excommunicated by the Pope, and deposed by the same infallible authority. Philip admitted that the claims of Mary Stewart, who had been in an English prison for seventeen years, were superior to his own, and he therefore intrigued to liberate her, as he hired assassins to murder her rival and gaoler. Her son, who had been King of Scotland from infancy, was a heretic, and therefore out of the question. He would, therefore, be the guardian of Mary Stewart's interests, and having liberated her, set her on the throne. After Mary's execution he averred himself even more to be the heir to the English throne. He had some little plea for it, for he was descended from John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and titular King of Spain. It was by the fact that he represented both the daughters of John of Gaunt, that he had become King of Portugal. After Mary's death Philip's efforts for the subjugation of England were redoubled.

He had been exceedingly anxious to procure his own election as Emperor of Germany. This elective dignity had become, and remained to the wars of Napoleon, hereditary in the house of Hapsburg, and Philip was unquestionally the representative of that house. But after the resignation of Charles the Fifth, the empire of Germany went to that magnificent monarch's younger brother, much to Philip's disgust and wrath. He had, however, never lost sight of what he thought his right, and put forward his pretensions whenever he could. But beside these schemes of temporal aggrandisement, he had to manage the Papacy, to secure the election of such popes as were favourable to his views. So he had to fill the Sacred College as far as possible with his own creatures, and secure a good understanding with them all. For this end money was wanted. An empty purse was no argument at Rome, and it was necessary for him to be lavish. So what with bribing statesmen, hiring assassins, conciliating cardinals, and keeping armies and navies on foot and on sea, this king of universal ambition was sorely put to for money. While the Dutch were inventing new taxes by the score and getting opulent in spite of their sacrifices Philip did not know where to turn, even for the means to carry on his government. At last he took the desperate step of repudiating his debts, and so of getting into worse straits than ever.

We know a little of his financial position, and how hopeless was the prospect of improving it. Spain, though populous and fertile, was less fruitful for revenue purposes than any European country. In Spain, labour was dishonourable, manufactures and trade were looked down on with contempt, and indolence was a mark of gentility. Spanish bigotry and Spanish pride had expelled the most industrious and wealth-producing part of the nation. It may be doubted whether the Italian possessions of Philip paid the cost of their civil and military establishments. The Netherlands, which supplied three-fifths, at one time, of the revenues which his ancestors enjoyed and squandered, were now beggared or hostile. The Flemish artisans had been murdered or exiled, had quitted Flanders in thousands for England and Holland. These wealth-winning people were gone and their places were ill supplied, at least from a revenue-raising point of view, by Jesuits, monks, inquisitors, and bishops.

It is difficult to discover what he got from his possessions in the New and Old World. He had inherited at least all the dominions which Alexander the Sixth, Spaniard, Pope, and profligate, had bestowed on his ancestors. In his eyes the Atlantic and Pacific were Spanish lakes, as much his property, his exclusive property, as the fishponds in the Escurial were. Indians of the Old World, Indians of the New World, from the Northern land of frost to the Southern land of fire, were as much his subjects as the Spaniards and the Flemings were. In accordance with the gift of Alexander, the whole world outside Europe was under the indefeasible sovereignty of Spain. Now in Philip's reign the mine of Potosi was discovered, and the king had a royalty on all mines in his dominions. But it may be safely alleged that much metal was raised on which the royal dues were not paid. Still it is clear that vast quantities of metallic wealth were annually poured into Spain. The misfortune to Philip's government was that so little of these great riches abode with him. His expenditure was a vast sieve, through which his revenue instantly drained away. Besides, the population of Philip's American dominions was speedily extirpated by the compulsory labour which the Spanish conquest put on them. There is not a single descendant left of the races which Columbus found in the Caribbees. The native populations of Mexico and Peru were attenuated to a shadow of what they were when Cortes and Pizarro made their conquests. To fill up the void which this vigorous and exhausting process had made, and to save the residue of the population, the benevolent bishop, Las Casas, had suggested the importation of negro slaves, and his advice had been followed.

We shall never know all, or much more than a little, of what Philip disbursed annually in bribes. Work of this kind is always done secretly, and neither the giver nor the receiver cares to keep, or at least to expose, a record of the transaction. But it is pretty certain that wherever in any European country Philip had an interest, or thought he had an interest, he paid and fertilized his agents, though he was impoverishing himself. The age was not nice in receiving money. Kings and nobles, ministers of state and judges, were not at all above taking money or money's worth for their services. Men who wanted favours done, or losses averted, went with cash in their hands to those who were sworn to execute Justice between parties.

Of course the greater part of Philip's bribes were wasted. He did not get value received for what he spent. In the nature of things, it was not possible always to carry out a timely treason. There must be opportunities, there must be agents. The opportunity may not come, and a rash attempt, foredoomed to failure, would be worse than any delay, however long and costly. The agents too must be carefully selected. They might turn on those who employed them, and make terms with those whom they prefessed to betray, or pretended to destroy. One of the men whom Parma hired to murder Orange went straight to the Prince, gave full details of the plot, and remained for his whole life a faithful and useful servant of the States. We do not read that he sent back the money to Parma with which he was supplied. We know that Guise, who took Philip's money, intended to baffle Philip's plans in his own interest; and after the murder of Guise, when his brother and son also took Philip's money, for the same professed aims, they in the end, and for a price, threw over Philip and acknowledged Henry of Navarre.

It is inevitable that the tools and hirelings of bad men will be bad themselves. The doctrines of Machiavelli were not even wise, shrewd as they seem to be. For one hit which policy succeeds in - for dissimulation and lying used to be called policy in public affairs - it makes twenty misses. Perfidy may not only make its victims cautious, it may make them equally' perfidious. At any rate, the man who secures agents by hire for evil ends, need not be surprised if his agents betray him, and he loses both money and reputation. No political system, which has been founded on lying, is discovered to be stable in the end. The ambitious schemes of Philip, and the arts he employed to effect them, were the ruin of Spain. For a long time she was the terror of the nations. Even when Holland pricked the bubble she still seemed formidable.