Spain

Spain and Europe

Neither Philip III nor Lerma was emotionally or intellectually capable of the fundamental reappraisal of foreign policy that Philip II’s failures required. Very few even of the arbitristas had seen this need sufficiently clearly. The court, the nobility, and, above all, the clergy and the king’s confessors remained caught in the now-hardening tradition of Spanish imperialism, simplistically interpreted as the cause of God. This attitude caused a serious misjudgment of the political forces in England, leading to the absurd hope of placing the infanta Isabella on the English throne upon the death of Elizabeth I. In 1601 a small Spanish force was disembarked at Kinsale, in Ireland, to cooperate with the Irish rebels. The English army had no difficulty in forcing it to surrender.

Fortunately for Spain, the new government of James I was anxious for peace. On the Spanish side, the Treaty of London (1604), which ended 16 years of Anglo-Spanish war, was negotiated on the initiative of Philip II’s son-in-law, the archduke Albert, to whom Philip II in his last year had handed over the nominal sovereignty of the Spanish Netherlands. Albert and his Genoese general, Ambrogio Spinola, also urged the Spanish government to negotiate with the Dutch rebels. Between 1604 and 1607, Spain sent unprecedentedly large sums to Flanders. Spinola captured Ostend (on the coast of present-day Belgium) and won victories in Friesland (northern Holland). But, he wrote to Madrid, it would take 300,000 ducats a month to continue the war successfully. After the moratorium of 1607, Philip III was in no position to raise such sums. He and Lerma, but not the Castilian grandees in the Council of State, were prepared to recognize Dutch independence, but they insisted that the Dutch withdraw from their recent conquests in America and the East Indies. The Dutch refused to accept this as well as an alternative Spanish condition, the toleration of Roman Catholics in their state. As a compromise, the two sides concluded a 12-year truce, beginning in 1609.

In 1610 a new war with France threatened, but the French king Henry IV was assassinated, and for almost 20 years France, Spain’s most formidable opponent in Europe, became preoccupied with its internal problems. The years from 1610 to 1630 were the last period in which Spain clearly dominated Europe. For the first of these two decades Europe enjoyed a kind of Pax Hispanica. Spanish armies controlled Italy, Flanders, and parts of the Rhineland. Spanish and Spanish-inclined Jesuits were confessors at the courts of the Austrian Habsburgs, Poland, Bavaria, and some of the minor German and Italian princes. Spanish subsidies, pensions, and bribes made clients even of Protestant politicians in England, Holland, and the Swiss cantons (although much less effectively so than Madrid hoped); and Spanish-paid spies fed the governments of Madrid and Brussels with valuable, if not always accurate, information about potential enemies in the United Provinces (Holland), England, and France. Yet, to a much greater degree than most contemporaries realized, this Spanish domination of Europe rested on default: the disunity and temporary weakness of Spain’s political and religious opponents. The psychological effects of this position on Spain were wholly disastrous, for it confirmed the Castilian ruling classes in their imperialist attitudes.

For Philip III and Lerma this attitude led, for reasons of both finance and temperament, to a largely defensive stance, though its effect was quite the opposite for the Spanish representatives abroad. In the absence of an effective lead from Madrid, the Spanish grandees who were the king’s viceroys and ambassadors in Europe took it upon themselves to advance Spanish interests as they saw them—that is, in terms of Spanish power. They fortified the route from Milan to the Tirol (western Austria) through the Valtellina, the vital link with the Austrian Habsburgs; they annexed several small Italian lordships; they enticed Dalmatian pirates (operating from the eastern shore of the Adriatic), the Uskoks, to prey on the trade of Venice, and they even seem to have plotted the complete overthrow of that republic.

More fateful still were their activities in Prague and Brussels. At the courts of the emperors Rudolf II and Matthias, the ambassador Baltazar de Zúñiga organized an effective “Spanish” party. His successor, the conde de Oñate, negotiated the secret Treaty of Graz (1617) by which the Jesuit-educated archduke Ferdinand of Styria (later Emperor Ferdinand II) was designated as heir to Matthias. In return for giving up Philip III’s claims to the Austrian succession, which Madrid had never seriously pursued in any case, Oñate obtained the promise of full Spanish sovereignty of the Tirol and Alsace (now in eastern France), the two German pillars of the “Spanish Road” between Italy and the Netherlands. At the same time, the “Spanish” party in Prague managed the preelection of Ferdinand as king of Bohemia in case of Matthias’s death. Zúñiga and Oñate had undoubtedly strengthened Spain’s strategic position in central Europe, but they had also, for the first time since the abdication of Charles V, involved Spain again in the local politics of the Holy Roman Empire. For Philip IV this involvement turned out to be even more disastrous than it had for Charles V. Spanish leadership, as practiced by the self-willed Castilian grandees abroad, had proved to be energetic and clever, but it was ultimately as devoid of true statesmanship as the slackness of the king and his privado.

In 1618 Lerma’s enemies at court finally managed to overthrow him. Zúñiga returned to Madrid and became the leading advocate of aggressive policies. Alonso de la Cueva, marqués de Bedmar, former Spanish ambassador to Venice and the organizer of the anti-Venetian conspiracy, went as ambassador to Brussels and immediately began to press for the reopening of the war against the United Provinces. In 1621 Philip III died, and with him disappeared the last restraints on the neoimperialists. Only 16 years of age, Philip IV left the effective powers of kingship in the hands of his former gentleman of the chamber, the conde-duque de Olivares. Olivares shared the political views of his uncle, Zúñiga, and he soon dominated the Council of State.