Chapter XVII: Book IV (2)

The Prince fled to Barcelona, where Nithard was especially hated and the Madrid government always unpopular, and there nobles and people received Don Juan with enthusiasm. Messages of support came to him from all parts of Spain, and French money and sympathy powerfully aided his propaganda, so that by the end of the year 1668 affairs looked dangerous for Mariana and her confessor. The Queen and her Camarilla took fright and tried conciliation, but Don Juan knew that he had the whip hand, and in a letter written in November to Mariana peremptorily demanded the dismissal of Nithard within fifteen days. Mariana’s friends on the Council of Regency voted for the impeachment of Don Juan for high treason; and for a time vigorous measures against him were like to be taken. But the Council of Castile, the supreme judicial authority, through its most influential member, warned the Queen that in a controversy between the King’s brother and a foreign Jesuit Spaniards must necessarily be on the side of the former, and the Queen must be cautious or she would alienate the country from her. Mariana thereupon wrote softly to Don Juan inviting him to approach Madrid that a conference of conciliation might be held. But the prince would not trust Nithard, who, he said, had planned his murder, and he declined to risk coming to the capital except in his own time and way.

Early in February 1669, Don Juan, with a fine bodyguard of two hundred horse, rode out of Barcelona, and through Catalonia and Aragon towards Madrid. Mariana had sent strict orders throughout the country that no honours were to be paid to him, but his journey in spite of her was a triumphal progress, and as he entered Saragossa in state the whole populace received him with shouts of: ‘Long live Don Juan of Austria, and Death to the Jesuit Nithard.’ A regiment of infantry was added by Aragon to the Prince’s force, and on the 24th February Mariana and her friend in the palace of Madrid were horrified to learn that Don Juan was at the gates of the capital with an armed body stronger than any at their prompt disposal. Whilst they made such hasty preparations as they could to resist, all Madrid was in open jubilation at the approach of their favourite prince. Don Juan’s force grew from hour to hour, and with it grew his haughtiness towards the ruling authority. Mariana, in alarm, tried every means. The Nuncio endeavoured to soften Don Juan’s heart; the higher nobles in the Queen’s household wrote to him deprecating violence; and, finally, the Queen herself wrote a letter of kindly welcome. But to all blandishments Don Juan stood firm: Father Nithard must go for good, and at once; whilst the Council of Castile also demanded the Jesuit’s expulsion.

On the morning of 25th February, whilst Mariana was still in bed, the courtyards of the palace filled with gentlemen and officials in groups, who openly declared for Don Juan and the expulsion of Nithard. The Dukes of Infantado and Pastrana sought an interview with the Queen, for the purpose of informing her of the general resolution, but were refused admittance into her bedchamber. They then charged her secretary, Loyola, to inform her, that unless she instantly signed a decree expelling Nithard they themselves would take measures against him, as Madrid was in a turmoil and order imperilled. Mariana with tears of rage swore that she would not be coerced; and Nithard himself refused to stir. A hasty meeting of the Council of Regency assembled in the forenoon, which Nithard abstained from attending only upon the entreaty of the Nuncio, where a decree of expulsion was drafted in the mildest form possible, and laid before the Queen for signature as soon as she had dined.

Mariana was at the end of her tether. The Court, the populace, and the soldiery were all against her favourite, and she was forced to sign the decree. But, though she did it, she never forgave Don Juan for the humiliation, and thenceforward it was war to the knife between them. Cardinal Nithard, with rich grants and gifts from the Queen, was with difficulty saved from the cursing multitude that surrounded his coach as he slunk out of the capital; and Don Juan, triumphant, begged for permission to come and salute the Queen in thanks for his expulsion. This, haughty Mariana coldly refused to allow, and Don Juan retorted by demanding a thorough reform in the administration of the government, a re-adjustment of taxation and many other innovations which he alleged that Nithard alone had prevented. The Spanish nobles, however, were no lovers of reform, and Don Juan’s drastic demands were regarded askance by many. A long acrimonious correspondence was carried on by the Queen at Madrid and Don Juan at Guadalajara, in the course of which some financial amendments were promised by the former: but in the meantime Mariana’s friends were raising an armed force as a bodyguard for her and her son, which afterwards became famous as the _Chambergo_ regiment, because the uniform was copied from those worn by the troops of Marshal Schomberg. The formation of this standing force was bitterly resented by the citizens of Madrid, and aroused new sympathy for Don Juan. At length a semi-reconciliation was effected by the appointment of Don Juan as Viceroy of Aragon in June 1669; and for several years thereafter the Prince was piling up funds from his rich offices to strike a more effectual blow when the time should come.

The extreme debility of the boy King, who in 1670 was thought to be moribund, was already dividing the courtiers, and indeed all Spain and Europe, into two camps. If Charles II. died without issue, as seemed probable, his elder sister Maria Theresa, wife of Louis XIV., would be his natural successor, but for the act of renunciation signed at the time of her marriage; an act which from the first the French had minimised and disputed, and Philip himself had characterised as an ‘old wife’s tale.’ It was evident that Louis XIV., daily growing in power and ambition, had no intention of allowing the renunciation to stand in the way of his wife’s claims if her brother died childless; and all of Mariana’s enemies in Spain, and they were many, were ready to stand by the claims of the elder Infanta Maria Teresa, daughter of the beloved Isabel of Bourbon, if the succession fell into dispute.

On the other hand, Mariana, naturally championed the cause of her own daughter, the Infanta Margaret, married to the Emperor Leopold, and upheld the validity of Maria Theresa’s formal renunciation of the succession on her marriage. The Austrian connection had brought nothing but trouble to Spain, and the brilliant progress of France, even though it was to the detriment of their country, had gained many Spanish admirers of the modern spirit that pervaded the methods of Louis XIV. Mariana, therefore, to most Spaniards, represented, with her pronounced Austrian leanings, an attempt to tie the country to the bad old times, as well as to pass over the legitimate rights of the elder Infanta for the benefit of her own less popular daughter the Empress Margaret.

The Queen-Mother, well aware of the strong party against her, and that her prime enemy, Don Juan, was only awaiting his time to strike at her, employed all the resources she could scrape together in providing for her own defence against her domestic opponents, leaving the frontier fortresses divested of troops and means for repelling attack from France; whilst, on the other hand, she provoked Louis by sending a Spanish contingent to co-operate with the Emperor’s troops in aiding the Dutch in their war with France; and, later, in 1673, she formed a regular alliance with the Emperor and Holland against Louis XIV. Nothing could have been more imprudent than this in the circumstances, for Spain was in a worse condition of exhaustion than ever, and the hope of beating France by force had long ago proved fallacious. The ancient appanage of Burgundy, the Franche Comté, promptly passed for ever from the dominion of Spain to that of France; and whilst the fighting in Flanders and the Catalan frontier was progressing in 1674, a new trouble assailed Mariana’s government. The island of Sicily revolted, and invited the French to assume the sovereignty, an invitation that was promptly accepted. Thirty-seven years before, when he was a mere stripling, Don Juan had recovered Naples for Spain in similar circumstances; and Mariana, almost in despair, could only beseech her enemy to leave his government at Saragossa, and take command of the Spanish-Dutch forces to attack the French in Sicily. But Don Juan, knowing her desire to get him out of the way, was determined not to allow himself to be sent far from the centre of affairs, and refused to accept the position.

His reasons were well founded, for events were passing in Mariana’s palace that rendered her more unpopular than ever; and, by the will of Philip IV., her regency would come to an end when her son attained his fifteenth year late in the next year 1675. It had been hoped that with the banishment of Nithard and the absence from the capital of Don Juan, the factions that divided the Court would have held their peace during the few years the regency lasted; and possibly this would have been the case if the Queen had been prudent. Her unwise favour to Nithard had already made her extremely unpopular, for foreign Queens in Spain were always suspect; but she had learned nothing from her favourite’s ignominious expulsion; and soon a confidant, less worthy far than Nithard, had completely captured the good graces of the Queen. This was a young gentleman of no fortune named Fernando de Valenzuela. He was one of those facile, plausible, Andaluces, a native of Ronda, who had figured so brilliantly in the Court of Philip IV. and Mariana, where the accomplishment of deftly turning amorous verse, improvising a dramatic interlude, or contriving a stinging epigram, opened a way to fortune. He had been a member of the household of the Duke of Infantado, and upon the death of the latter, had attached himself to Father Nithard, who needed the aid of such men.

Valenzuela was not only keen and clever, but extremely handsome, in the black-eyed Moorish style of beauty, for which the people of Ronda are famous, and he soon managed to gain the full confidence of both Nithard and the Queen, whom he served as a go-between and messenger, a function which he continued after the Jesuit had been expelled. He had married the Queen’s favourite half-German maid, and had been appointed a royal equerry; both of which circumstances gave a pretext for his continual presence in the palace; and at the time of the agitation against Nithard, and afterwards, he had been extremely useful in conveying to the Queen all the comments that could be picked up by sharp ears in the Calle Mayor and Liars’ Parade (the peristyle of the Church of St. Philip). It was noticed that those who spoke incautiously of the Queen in public were promptly denounced and brought to trouble, and the gossips soon pitched upon Valenzuela as the spy, calling him in consequence by the nickname, by which he was generally known, of the ‘fairy of the palace.’ The man was bold, ambitious, and unscrupulous, and soon more than occupied the place left vacant by Nithard.

Jealous nobles and courtiers looked with indignation at the rapid rise of a mere provincial adventurer to the highest places in the State. Not only was a marquisate and high commands and offices conferred upon him, but at a time when Spain was in the midst of a great international war that ended in the remodelling of the map of Europe at her expense, this favourite, without special aptitude or experience, was appointed by Mariana her universal minister for all affairs; and Valenzuela was the most powerful man in Spain. He manfully did his best though unsuccessfully, for he was cordially detested, to win popularity in an impossible position, by multiplying in Madrid the feasts and diversions its inhabitants loved, by writing comedies himself, full of wit and malice, for gratis representation in the theatres, by re-building public edifices, and generally beautifying the capital. He was surrounded, moreover, by a great crowd of parasites, mostly nobodies, like himself, who sang his praises for the plunder he could pour upon them.

But his rise was too rapid, and his origin too obscure to be easily forgiven, and a perfect deluge of satires, verses, pamphlets and flying sheets, full of gross libels upon him and the Queen, came from the secret presses and circulated throughout Spain. The general opinion was that he was the Queen’s lover as well as her minister; but Madrid was always a hotbed of scandal, and, although this may well have been true, it must be regarded as non-proven. As a specimen of the view taken of the connection by contemporaries the following description of a broad-sheet, found one morning posted on the walls of the palace, may be given. A portrait of the Queen is represented with her hand pointing to her heart, with the printed legend, ‘This is given;’ whilst Valenzuela is portrayed standing close by her side, pointing to the insignias and emblems of his many high offices, and saying, ‘These are sold.’ The favourite himself seems to have been anxious to strengthen the rumour that assigned to him the amorous affection of the widowed Queen, for at two of the Court festivals, of which he promoted many, he bore as his devices, ‘I alone have licence,’ and ‘To me alone is it allowed.’[273]

The unrestrained favour extended by the Queen to such an upstart as this gave hosts of new adherents to Don Juan; and such of them as had access to the young King, now rapidly approaching his legal majority, took care to paint the wretched condition of the country in the blackest colours, and to ascribe the trouble to the Queen’s bad minister. The boy, though nearly fifteen, was still a child; backward and, at best, almost an idiot. He could hardly read or write, for the weakness of his wits and the degeneracy of his physique had caused his education to be entirely neglected, and he was, even in his mature age, grossly ignorant of the simplest facts. But, like his father, he was gentle, kind and good-hearted, and his compassion was easily aroused by the sad stories told him of the sufferings of his people, especially when they came from the lips of his father confessor, Montenegro, and his trusted tutor Ramos del Manzano.

They, and the great nobles who prompted them, understood that the moment had come for action when, in the late autumn of 1675, Mariana and Valenzuela ordered Don Juan to sail in Ruyter’s fleet to Sicily and eject the French; and what to them was just as important, leave them with no rivals near them when the King came of age. Charles was persuaded by his confessor, and without the knowledge of his mother, to sign a letter recalling his half-brother to Madrid; and with this in his hand Don Juan could refuse, as he did, to sail for Sicily. On the morning of 6th November 1675, the day that Charles reached his fifteenth year and the regency ended, Madrid was astir early to see the shows that were to celebrate the new reign, though the country, in its utter exhaustion and misery, was in no spirit to rejoice now.

To the surprise of most was seen a royal travelling carriage rapidly approach the Buen Retiro palace, and the escort that surrounded it proclaimed that the occupant of the coach was no other than Don Juan. All was prepared for the coup d’etat. The prince hurried, unknown to Mariana, to the young King’s apartment, and kneeling, kissed the boy’s hand; whilst a decree, already drafted, was presented to the King, appointing his half-brother the universal minister of the crown. Mariana had passed the night at the palace a mile away, but the coming of her enemy to the Buen Retiro had been announced to her before he alighted. Without losing a moment she flew to the Retiro and reached her son’s room just as the decree that would have ruined her was about to be signed. She was an imperious woman, and had been Queen-Regent of Spain for over ten years: her control of her feeble son had been supreme whilst she was with him, and her angry orders that the room should be cleared might not be gainsaid. Left alone with her son, she led him to a private room and, with tears and indignant reproaches, reduced the poor lad to a condition of abject submission to her will.

The president of the Council of Castile had already told her, that as Don Juan had come by the King’s warrant, the same authority alone could send him back, and Charles was induced to sign a decree commanding the prince to return forthwith to his government in Aragon and remain there till further orders. Now was the time when boldness on the part of Don Juan would have won the day; for the nobles, court and people, were mostly on his side against Valenzuela and the Queen, whose means did not allow them to bribe everybody. But Don Juan was as vain and empty as he was ambitious and failed to rise to the occasion. The sacrosanct character of the King of Castile, moreover, was still a strong tradition, and Don Juan, who knew his fellow-countrymen well, dared not aim at ruling instead of the King, but through the King. So that night Don Juan and his supporters met in conclave, and weakly decided to obey the King’s new command without protest, instead of making another attempt to override Mariana’s influence upon her son; and the prince returned to Aragon overwhelmed with confusion and disappointment.[274]

The triumph of Mariana was complete, and she took no pains to conceal her joy when she attended that night in state the theatre of the Buen Retiro, in celebration of the King’s coming of age. In a few days all those who had had a hand in the futile conspiracy were on their way to exile; and, to keep up appearances, Valenzuela himself was given the rich post of Admiral of the Andalucian coast, with another rich marquisate, as an excuse for his absence from the capital during the first few weeks of the King’s majority. He was soon back again, collecting new honours from the feeble King at the instance of Mariana, and to the indignation of the other nobles. The great post of Master of the Horse, usually held by one of the first magnates of Spain, was given to Valenzuela; and when the jealous grandees remonstrated he was made a grandee of Spain of the first class to match his new dignity. All this, and the fact that Don Juan had been deprived of his viceroyalty, though banished from Court, may testify to Mariana’s determination and boldness, but says little for her prudence; for all Spain, high and low, was against her, and Valenzuela was a weak reed to depend upon in the face of so powerful an opposition.

In the meanwhile the conspiracy against Mariana grew in strength. Don Juan amongst his faithful Aragonese could plot with impunity, whilst the nobles in Madrid were working incessantly to the same ends, namely, the banishment of Mariana and the impeachment and punishment of Valenzuela. In February 1676 all the principal grandees signed a mutual pledge to stand together until these objects were attained; and as, in virtue of their position, they had unrestrained access to the King, who was now nominally his own master, the result of their efforts was soon seen.

The object lesson to which they could point was a very plain one. Spanish troops were still pouring out their blood upon the battlefields of Europe without benefit to Spain: the distress in the capital itself was appalling; even the King’s household sometimes being without food, or means of obtaining it. On every side ruin had overwhelmed the people. Industry had been crushed by taxation, whole districts were depopulated and derelict, and neither life nor property was safe from the bandits who defied the law in town and country.[275] Spain had almost, though not quite, reached its nadir of decadence: and, though the distress was really the result of long-standing causes described in the earlier pages of this book, the boy monarch was made to believe that it all arose from the mis-government of his mother and Valenzuela; and that Don Juan could remedy all the ills and make Spain strong and happy again.

The noble conspirators took care, this time, to neglect no precautions that might ensure success, and obtained (27th December 1676) from the King an order to which Mariana was obliged to consent, for Don Juan to return to Madrid; whilst on various pretexts they kept the Queen as much as possible from influencing her son. Valenzuela was, of course, informed of what was going on, and, recognising that the coalition was strong enough to crush him, had suddenly fled into hiding a few days previously. The night of the 14th January 1677, after the King had retired to his bedchamber in the palace of Madrid, and Mariana doubtless thought that all was safe until the next morning, Charles, accompanied by a single gentleman-in-waiting, escaped by arrangement with the conspirators, down backstairs and through servants doorways, from the old palace to the Buen Retiro, where the nobles and courtiers were assembled. Long before dawn a decree reached Mariana in her bedroom in the palace, ordering her not to leave her apartments without the written permission of the King. Her rage and indignation knew no bounds, and for the rest of the night letters alternately denouncing the undutifulness, and appealing to the affection of her son, showered thick and fast from the Queen in the old Alcazar to the sixteen year old boy with the long white face, who was trying to play the King in the pleasance of the Buen Retiro. None of her letters softened him, if ever they reached him, which is doubtful, and all the next day the antechambers at the Retiro were crowded with courtiers, applauding the King’s stroke of State, whilst in the Alcazar on the cliff the Queen-Mother found herself neglected by flatterers, a prisoner in the palace where she had reigned so long.

The next day news came that Don Juan, with a great armed escort and household, had arrived at Hita, thirty-five miles from the capital; and there the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo and a crowd of grandees met him with a message from the King, asking him to dismiss his armed men and come to Court for the purpose of taking the direction of affairs. But Don Juan had his conditions to make first, and he refused to enter the capital until Mariana had left it, Valenzuela made a prisoner, and the hated Chambergo regiment disbanded. He had his way in all things, and the same night, with rage in her heart, Mariana rode out of the capital for her banishment at Toledo; the Chambergos were hurried away for shipment to Sicily; and then came the question where was Valenzuela. Reluctantly, and bit by bit, it was drawn from the King that he himself had contrived the flight of his mother’s favourite, and knew where he was hidden amongst the friars of the palace-monastery of the Escorial.

From his windows overlooking the bleak Sierra of Guadarrama the fugitive favourite gazed in the gathering dusk of the 17th January 1677 in fancied security; when, to his dismay, a large body of cavalry trotted into the courtyard and dominated the palace. Amongst them the alarmed Valenzuela descried his enemy the Duke of Medina Sidonia, and a group of other grandees. Flying for refuge within the consecrated precincts, he besought the prior to save him; and when the doors of the monastery had been closed the prior greeted the troops and nobles in the courtyard and demanded their pleasure. ‘We want nothing,’ they replied, ‘but that you will deliver to us the traitor Valenzuela.’ ‘Have you an order from his Majesty?’ asked the prior. ‘Only a verbal one,’ replied Don Antonio de Toledo, son of the Duke of Alba, who took the lead. ‘In that case,’ replied the monk, supported by a murmur of approval from his brethren behind, ‘we will not surrender him, except to main force; for we shelter him by written warrant of the King.’ Threats and insults failed to move the monks, and an attempt at arrangement was at last made by means of an interview in the church between Valenzuela himself and the Duke of Medina Sidonia and Toledo. Owing mainly to the violence of the latter the interview had no result; and, as the prior saw that the soldiery were preparing to force the sanctuary, Valenzuela was hidden in a secret room contrived for such eventualities where he might defy discovery. The enraged nobles and soldiery, balked of their prey, ransacked the enormous place, room by room, for three days, overturning altars, insulting and violating the privacy of the monks, and committing sacrilege undreamt of in Spain for centuries, for which they were smartly punished afterwards by the ecclesiastical authority.[276]

At length, on the night of 21st January, Valenzuela took fright at some voices near, and foolishly let himself down by his twisted sheets from the window of his safe retreat; and, though one sentry let him go, and the monks made desperate attempts to keep him hidden, he was captured on the 22nd January and carried with every circumstance of ignominy to close confinement in Don Juan’s fortress of Consuegra; then after terrible sufferings and stripped of all his honours and possessions, he was imprisoned in Manila, and afterwards taken to Mexico to die; whilst his unfortunate wife, treated with atrocious brutality by Toledo, was reduced to beg from door to door for charity, until her troubles drove her mad.[277] No sooner was Valenzuela safe behind the bars at Consuegra than Don Juan of Austria entered Madrid in state on the 23rd January, acclaimed by the populace as the saviour of Spain, and welcomed by the King as the heaven-sent minister who was to make his reign brilliant and successful. Don Juan’s vengeance knew no limit, as his soul knew no generosity. Whatever may have been Mariana’s faults as a Queen of Spain, or her errors as a diplomatist, the ignominy to which she was now subjected by order of her son, at the instance of Don Juan, shows the lack of generosity of the latter and the miserable weakness of the former. Mariana’s turn was to come again by and bye, but with her banishment to Toledo her life as ruling Queen of Spain came to an end. She lived nearly twenty years afterwards, but her vicissitudes during that time may be told more fittingly in connection with the lives of her two successors, the wives of her afflicted son.