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National decay

[1665-1700

been considerably weakened, for it was less by her own efforts than by those of the Triple Alliance that the march of the French armies had been stayed.

The Spaniards were equally unsuccessful in the management of their political and military affairs during the ensuing War, in which Spain formed part of a coalition against France. Louis XIV, in his deep hatred of his Dutch enemies, had entered into a negotiation with Spain with the professed purpose of partitioning the Dutch Republic between them. For one moment only the Spanish statesmen seemed inclined to accept such a proposal. Soon enough they were brought to recognise that they were threatened with a greater danger by the growing ascendancy of the French monarchy than by the ancient subjects of their country. Spain therefore joined the enemies of Louis XIV. The War, the events of which are related elsewhere in this volume, ended with new losses for Spain. In the third War against Louis XIV in which Spain took part, the Spanish armies also fought with little success. If by the Peace of Ryswyk the French King had to restore nearly all the conquests made by him in the course of the War, it was by the strength of her allies, not by her own efforts, that this result was secured for Spain, This extraordinary diminution of the weight which Spain could cast into the balance of Europe is of course attributable to the general decay of the country, of which the reasons are not far to seek.

"Loyalty and superstition," writes Buckle, "were the leading principles which influenced the Spanish mind and governed the march of Spanish history." "When there were able sovereigns," he says again, "the country prospered; when there were weak Princes it declined." Thus, the weakness and the mistakes of the Crown, together with the increasing power of the Church, account for the rapid decline of Spain in the seventeenth century. King Charles II, owing to his infirmity of body and mind, throughout his reign paid little attention to public affairs. It was accounted a great thing, and a rare occurrence, if he worked four or five hours in a day, and people knew it must be a very extraordinary business which one morning in May, 1694, made him miss his dinner, served punctually at noon. The whole administration was lazy and indolent. William III had told Alexander Stanhope, before sending him in 1690 as envoy to Madrid, that he must arm himself with great patience, if he meant to submit to the slowness of movement awaiting him at that Court. "They manage," writes Stanhope, "all their own affairs with the same phlegm, seldom resolving anything till the occasion be past." "This country," he says on another occasion, "is in a most miserable condition. No head to govern, and every man in office does what he pleases, without fear of being called to account." Very frequently the officers in high position were quite old men, who had done good service in former years. When Stanhope, one day, reminded the Secretary of State for the North, a man more than fourscore years old, of a piece of

1665-1700] Administrative collapse. The Church 375

business that had previously been treated between them, the Spaniard did not remember to have ever heard of it.

The weakest point of the administration was the public finances. Every means had to be tried to fill the royal coffers. Year by year, the flotas came from Mexico and Peru laden with bullion; but, owing to the large assignments granted beforehand, little of it came into the King's coffers. The bills sent abroad by the Government were often returned protested. In 1693, no branch of the public revenue could exhibit a credit of 100,000 crowns. In order to get money, the dignity of a Grandee of Spain was sometimes sold; so were, generally, the viceroyships and Governments in the Indies, as well as some of the high offices at home. The wages and salaries of all Ministers and officers were, in 1693, reduced by one-third of their amounts. The revenues were already anticipated

for

many years. Even the worst of all means for procuring money for the Government was applied; namely, a depreciation of the coinage. No wonder, if on so weak a basis it was not possible for Spain to maintain the high position which she had formerly held among the great Powers of the world. Her army, once the best in Europe, was now in a very miserable condition. The troops fighting in Catalonia in 1699 are described as "all starving and deserting as fast as they can." The navy was no better. When Stanhope first came to Spain, it owned, he says, eighteen good men-of-war, which in 1693 were reduced to two or three. While the Government and the people of Spain became poor, the Church continued to grow richer. Her deciding influence was felt through the whole life of Spanish society. The greatest power in the country was the Inquisition; it was greater than the King's, and menaced the safety of all-not only the subjects of the King, but also foreign Protestants living in Spain. When Oliver Cromwell had demanded liberty from the Inquisition for the English merchants, war with Spain had ensued. Since that time the power of the Inquisition. had risen still higher. In 1691, a Swiss Protestant whom Stanhope had taken into his service was carried away prisoner by orders of the Inquisition, and everybody told the English envoy that he could have no remedy. Three years later, he tried to intercede for some French Protestants without any success. The King himself told Stanhope that he never meddled in any proceedings relating to matters of religion, even if instituted against his own domestics. At Palma in Majorca three autos de fé took place in the course of one week in 1691, Jews and heretics being the victims. They were the richest men of the island, and of course their property was forfeited. The fanaticism of the people against all Protestants was boundless. "It is a hard matter," writes Stanhope, "for a heretic to learn any truth among them, when they think the cause of their religion concerned." In 1691 the body of Stanhope's chaplain, after being buried with the utmost secrecy, was torn out of its grave and mutilated.

376

Depopulation and distress

[1665-1700

Since, in 1609, the Church in Spain had won her greatest triumph by the expulsion of the Moriscos, the industrious descendants of the Moors, the wealth of the Spanish nation had constantly been declining. The Moriscos had been the best agriculturalists in Spain; they had been the principal cultivators of rice, cotton and sugar; in their hands lay the manufacture of silk and paper. The products of their energy were all but entirely destroyed, as were some other branches of manufacture that had flourished in the sixteenth century. Industry and commerce were reduced to the narrowest conceivable scale. Populous and wealthy cities became thinly peopled and poor. Madrid, in the course of the seventeenth century, lost half the total of its inhabitants. Still greater was the ruin of the ancient wealth and the reduction of the population at Seville and Toledo, at Segovia and Burgos. In several parts of Spain wide districts were totally deserted. James Stanhope, travelling from Madrid to the east coast, found Aranjuez, where the Court resided, as pleasant a place as any in Europe. But after quitting it he made no stay anywhere till he reached Alicante, "there being not one good town or good inn in all the road; and we went sometimes above forty English miles without meeting with so much as one house except a wretched venta." Poverty and misery increased in Spain from year to year. The total ruin of the nation seemed the inevitable result of the system of administration under Charles II. The scarcity of corn more than once led to a famine. In 1699 the common people were reduced to the utmost extremity. The British Minister could only with difficulty procure the bread required for his table. His secretary saw five poor women suffocated by the pressure of the crowd before a bakehouse; and 20,000 beggars from the country flocked into the capital, in order to be saved from starvation. It was this want of bread that caused two dangerous risings in Madrid and Valladolid, the earlier of which was of the highest political importance, since it brought about the fall of the Minister Oropesa, and the rise of the French party at Court. The rabble assembled before the royal palace, and forced the ailing monarch to appear before them and promise the change of Government for which they clamoured.

"The hinge on which the whole reign of Louis XIV was turning," is the phrase applied by the French historian Mignet to the great question of the Spanish Succession. This question originated in the fact that the two mightiest dynasties on the Continent simultaneously laid claim to the inheritance of the Spanish kings of the House of Habsburg. Two daughters of Philip III had been married to Princes of the Houses of Bourbon and Austria; the elder becoming the wife of King Louis XIII of France, the younger of the Emperor Ferdinand III. The marriage contract signed in 1660 by the Ministers of France and Spain contained several articles, concerning the intended marriage between Louis XIV, King of France, and Maria Teresa, daughter of Philip IV, King of Spain.

1665-97]

The Spanish Succession question

377 The future Queen of France had to renounce all her hereditary rights on the dominions of her father; she and her descendants male and female were never to succeed in the kingdoms and other territories under the sceptre of his Catholic Majesty. She had to profess this for her own part by two formal acts of renunciation. It might still have been doubtful how far the rights of her descendants were in reality annulled by such a declaration; and the French Court at least was resolved not to acknowledge that the renunciation possessed such a force. The Spanish consort of Louis XIII had signed a similar renunciation, which nevertheless had not been considered in France as a matter of great consequence. However, this question seemed not to be very urgent at the time of Philip's death in 1665. For he left a son, born to him four years before, by his second wife. This son was Charles II, the last scion of the Habsburg dynasty in Spain. He married twice, but had no children. Thus, after the renunciation of the eldest, it was the second surviving daughter of Philip IV, Margaret, in whose person would be embodied the rights to the Spanish throne after the death of Charles II. This was expressly stated in the testament of Philip IV. Margaret became in 1666 the wife of the Emperor Leopold I. Of her children only one daughter grew up, Maria Antonia, who married Maximilian Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria. It was the only son of this couple, the Electoral Prince Joseph Ferdinand, whose title to the succession to the Spanish throne, derived by him from his grandmother, Margaret, and restricted by no act of renunciation, was the most valid and therefore seemed to have the best chance of being generally acknowledged. Maria Antonia, indeed, had likewise been induced by her father, the Emperor Leopold, to transfer her Spanish claims to himself and to his sons by another marriage; but the force of such a resignation was more than doubtful, and certainly it could not touch the rights of her own posterity. Thus, midway between the French and the Austrian pretensions, stood, superior to both, the claim of the Electoral Prince Joseph Ferdinand. This claim was likely to be neglected so long as the great military Powers of France and Austria were each of them inclined to lay its hand on the whole inheritance for a member of their respective dynasties; but it was not less likely to come to the front and meet with general acceptance, if at any time either of these two Powers despaired of entering into possession of the inheritance in defiance of the rival claimant.

However, there were not only the diverging claims of three European dynasties which had to be settled. What made the question of the Spanish Succession really difficult, was the interest which the Maritime Powers took in its solution. The English and the Dutch, who had been rivals in their commercial enterprises for a hundred years, who had at different times fought each other as open enemies since the days of Oliver Cromwell these two nations nevertheless stood together in the common

378

English and Dutch commercial interests [1660-97

interest of their commercial policy. Both of them wished to exclude French competition from the trade they carried on with the Spanish monarchy. Thus they were both alarmed at the prospect of the change that would occur in the economic condition of Spain, when the rule over the monarchy of Philip II should pass from the weak tenure of her present King, to be placed in the hands of the mightiest Prince in Europe.

"The preservation of the commerce between the kingdoms of Great Britain and Spain was one of the chief motives that induced our two royal predecessors to enter into the late long, expensive war, and one of the principal benefits expected by our people from the conclusion of a peace after such a glorious and uninterrupted course of successes, and is of the greatest importance to the interest of our subjects, and to the riches of our dominions." These words occur in the instructions given in 1716 to Paul Methuen, the first British Minister accredited at Madrid after the close of the War of the Spanish Succession. They were intended to express the purpose which England had followed throughout all the successive stages of the Spanish question, both in peace and in war.

The commercial intercourse which England and Holland maintained with Spain and her dependencies was indeed highly important. Yet, for the reasons indicated above, the industry of Spain had never reached any very considerable height - not even, as some believe, in the sixteenth century, when her influence in European politics had attained to its highest point. It was therefore only natural that an enormous amount of foreign manufactures was imported into Spain. England, Holland and France were the principal nations trading in the many articles of European industry. Especially between England and Holland there was constant emulation as to their respective shares in the commerce with Spain and her colonies. During the whole of the seventeenth century,

it had been doubtful which of the two Maritime Powers would derive the greater advantage from this trade. Before the English Civil War, the competition of the Dutch having ceased in consequence of their war with Spain, the English had become, as Roger Coke said, "proprietors of the trade with Spain and by consequence great sharers in the wealth of the West Indies." But, when Oliver's breach with Spain followed, the relation between the two nations seemed altogether inverted; the English trade to Spain stopped, while the Dutch, having made their peace, were the masters of the Spanish commerce. After the Restoration, however, the English Government succeeded in restoring the trade on the ancient basis. The old privileges were renewed; the English merchants were enabled to take up their old position in Spanish commerce, and held it in competition with the Dutch through the lifetime of Charles II of Spain.

Looking back to the time before the War of the Spanish Succession, William Wood, in his Survey of Trade, states that the goods exported