History of Civilization in England, Vol. 2 of 3

Such were the circumstances which, in and before the seventh century, secured to the Spanish Church an influence unequalled in any other part of Europe.1186 Early in the eighth century, an event occurred which apparently broke up and dispersed the hierarchy, but which in reality was extremely favourable to them. In 711 the Mohammedans sailed from Africa, landed in the south of Spain, and in the space of three years conquered the whole country, except the almost inaccessible regions of the north-west. The Spaniards, secure in their native mountains,1187 soon recovered heart, rallied their forces, and began in their turn to assail the invaders. A desperate struggle ensued, which lasted nearly eight centuries, and in which, a second time in the history of Spain, a war for independence was also a war for religion; the contest between Arabian Infidels and Spanish Christians, succeeding that formerly carried on between the Trinitarians of France and the Arians of Spain. Slowly, and with infinite difficulty, the Christians fought their way. By the middle of the ninth century, they reached the line of the Douro.1188 Before the close of the eleventh century, they conquered as far as the Tagus, and Toledo, their ancient capital, fell into their hands in 1085.1189 Even then much remained to be done. In the south, the struggle assumed its deadliest form, and there it was prolonged with such obstinacy, that it was not until the capture of Malaga in 1487, and of Granada in 1492, that the Christian empire was re-established, and the old Spanish monarchy finally restored.1190

The effect of all this on the Spanish character was most remarkable. During eight successive centuries, the whole country was engaged in a religious crusade; and those holy wars which other nations occasionally waged, were, in Spain, prolonged and continued for more than twenty generations.1191 The object being not only to regain a territory, but also to re-establish a creed, it naturally happened that the expounders of that creed assumed a prominent and important position. In the camp, and in the council-chamber, the voice of ecclesiastics was heard and obeyed; for as the war aimed at the propagation of Christianity, it seemed right that her ministers should play a conspicuous part in a matter which particularly concerned them.1192 The danger to which the country was exposed being moreover very imminent, those superstitious feelings were excited which danger is apt to provoke, and to which, as I have elsewhere shown,1193 the tropical civilizations owed some of their leading peculiarities. Scarcely were the Spanish Christians driven from their homes and forced to take refuge in the north, when this great principle began to operate. In their mountainous retreat, they preserved a chest filled with relics of the saints, the possession of which they valued as their greatest security.1194 This was to them a national standard, round which they rallied, and by the aid of which they gained miraculous victories over their infidel opponents. Looking upon themselves as soldiers of the cross, their minds became habituated to supernatural considerations to an extent which we can now hardly believe, and which distinguished them in this respect from every other European nation.1195 Their young men saw visions, and their old men dreamed dreams.1196 Strange sights were vouchsafed to them from heaven; on the eve of a battle mysterious portents appeared; and it was observed that whenever the Mohammedans violated the tomb of a Christian saint, thunder and lightning were sent to rebuke the misbelievers, and, if need be, to punish their audacious invasion.1197

Under circumstances like these, the clergy could not fail to extend their influence; or, we may rather say, the course of events extended it for them. The Spanish Christians, pent up for a considerable time in the mountains of Asturias, and deprived of their former resources, quickly degenerated, and soon lost the scanty civilization to which they had attained. Stripped of all their wealth, and confined to what was comparatively a barren region, they relapsed into barbarism, and remained, for at least a century, without arts, or commerce, or literature.1198 As their ignorance increased, so also did their superstition; while this last, in its turn, strengthened the authority of their priests. The order of affairs, therefore, was very natural. The Mohammedan invasion made the Christians poor; poverty caused ignorance; ignorance caused credulity; and credulity, depriving men both of the power and of the desire to investigate for themselves, encouraged a reverential spirit, and confirmed those submissive habits, and that blind obedience to the Church, which form the leading and most unfortunate peculiarity of Spanish history.

From this it appears, that there were three ways in which the Mohammedan invasion strengthened the devotional feelings of the Spanish people. The first way was by promoting a long and obstinate religious war; the second was by the presence of constant and imminent dangers; and the third way was by the poverty, and therefore the ignorance, which it produced among the Christians.

These events being preceded by the great Arian war, and being accompanied and perpetually reinforced by those physical phenomena which I have indicated as tending in the same direction, worked with such combined and accumulative energy, that in Spain the theological element became not so much a component of the national character, but rather the character itself. The ablest and most ambitious of the Spanish kings were compelled to follow in the general wake; and, despots though they were, they succumbed to that pressure of opinions which they believed they were controlling. The war with Granada, late in the fifteenth century, was theological far more than temporal; and Isabella, who made the greatest sacrifices in order to conduct it, and who in capacity as well as in honesty was superior to Ferdinand, had for her object not so much the acquisition of territory as the propagation of the Christian faith.1199 Indeed, any doubts which could be entertained respecting the purpose of the contest must have been dissipated by subsequent events. For, scarcely was the war brought to a close, when Ferdinand and Isabella issued a decree expelling from the country every Jew who refused to deny his faith; so that the soil of Spain might be no longer polluted by the presence of unbelievers.1200 To make them Christians, or, failing in that, to exterminate them, was the business of the Inquisition, which was established in the same reign, and which before the end of the fifteenth century was in full operation.1201 During the sixteenth century, the throne was occupied by two princes of eminent ability, who pursued a similar course. Charles V., who succeeded Ferdinand in 1516, governed Spain for forty years, and the general character of his administration was the same as that of his predecessors. In regard to his foreign policy, his three principal wars were against France, against the German princes, and against Turkey. Of these, the first was secular; but the two last were essentially religious. In the German war, he defended the church against innovation; and at the battle of Muhlberg, he so completely humbled the Protestant princes, as to retard for some time the progress of the Reformation.1202 In his other great war, he, as the champion of Christianity against Mohammedanism, consummated what his grandfather Ferdinand had begun. Charles defeated and dislodged the Mohammedans in the east, just as Ferdinand had done in the west; the repulse of the Turks before Vienna being to the sixteenth century what the conquest of the Arabs of Granada was to the fifteenth.1203 It was, therefore, with reason that Charles, at the close of his career, could boast that he had always preferred his creed to his country, and that the first object of his ambition had been to maintain the interests of Christianity.1204 The zeal with which he struggled for the faith, also appears in his exertions against heresy in the Low Countries. According to contemporary and competent authorities, from fifty thousand to a hundred thousand persons were put to death in the Netherlands during his reign on account of their religious opinions.1205 Later inquirers have doubted the accuracy of this statement,1206 which is probably exaggerated; but we know that, between 1520 and 1550, he published a series of laws, to the effect that those who were convicted of heresy should be beheaded, or burned alive, or buried alive. The penalties were thus various, to meet the circumstances of each case. Capital punishment, however, was always to be inflicted on whoever bought an heretical book, or sold it, or even copied it for his own use.1207 His last advice to his son, well accorded with these measures. Only a few days before his death, he signed a codicil to his will, recommending that no favour should ever be shown to heretics; that they should all be put to death; and that care should be taken to uphold the Inquisition, as the best means of accomplishing so desirable an end.1208

This barbarous policy is to be ascribed, not to the vices, nor to the temperament of the individual ruler, but to the operation of large general causes, which acted upon the individual, and impelled him to the course he pursued. Charles was by no means a vindictive man; his natural disposition was to mercy rather than to rigour; his sincerity is unquestionable; he performed what he believed to be his duty; and he was so kind a friend, that those who knew him best were precisely those who loved him most.1209 Little, however, could all that avail in shaping his public conduct. He was obliged to obey the tendencies of the age and country in which he lived. And what those tendencies were, appeared still more clearly after his death, when the throne of Spain was occupied upwards of forty years by a prince who inherited it in the prime of life, and whose reign is particularly interesting as a symptom and a consequence of the disposition of the people over whom he ruled.

Philip II., who succeeded Charles V. in 1555, was indeed eminently a creature of the time, and the ablest of his biographers aptly terms him the most perfect type of the national character.1210 His favourite maxim, which forms the key to his policy, was, ‘That it is better not to reign at all than to reign over heretics.’1211 Armed with supreme power, he bent all his energies towards carrying this principle into effect. Directly that he heard that the Protestants were making converts in Spain, he strained every nerve to stifle the heresy;1212 and so admirably was he seconded by the general temper of the people, that he was able without risk to suppress opinions which convulsed every other part of Europe. In Spain, the Reformation, after a short struggle, died completely away, and in about ten years the last vestige of it disappeared.1213 The Dutch wished to adopt, and in many instances did adopt, the reformed doctrine; therefore Philip waged against them a cruel war, which lasted thirty years, and which he continued till his death, because he was resolved to extirpate the new creed.1214 He ordered that every heretic who refused to recant should be burned. If the heretic did recant, some indulgence was granted; but having once been tainted, he must die. Instead of being burned, he was therefore to be executed.1215 Of the number of those who actually suffered in the Low Countries, we have no precise information;1216 but Alva triumphantly boasted that, in the five or six years of his administration, he had put to death in cold blood more than eighteen thousand, besides a still greater number whom he had slain on the field of battle.1217 This, even during his short tenure of power, would make about forty thousand victims; an estimate probably not far from the truth, since we know, from other sources, that in one year more than eight thousand were either executed or burned.1218 Such measures were the result of instructions issued by Philip, and formed a necessary part of his general scheme.1219 The desire paramount in his mind, and to which he sacrificed all other considerations, was to put down the new creed, and to reinstate the old one. To this, even his immense ambition and his inordinate love of power were subordinate. He aimed at the empire of Europe, because he longed to restore the authority of the Church.1220 All his policy, all his negotiations, all his wars, pointed to this one end. Soon after his accession, he concluded an ignominious treaty with the Pope, that it might not be said that he bore arms against the head of the Christian world.1221 And his last great enterprise, in some respects the most important of all, was to fit out, at an incredible cost, that famous Armada with which he hoped to humble England, and to nip the heresy of Europe in its bud, by depriving the Protestants of their principal support, and of the only asylum where they were sure to find safe and honourable refuge.1222

While Philip, following the course of his predecessors, was wasting the blood and treasure of Spain in order to propagate religious opinions,1223 the people, instead of rebelling against so monstrous a system, acquiesced in it, and cordially sanctioned it. Indeed, they not only sanctioned it, but they almost worshipped the man by whom it was enforced. There probably never lived a prince who, during so long a period, and amid so many vicissitudes of fortune, was adored by his subjects as Philip II. was. In evil report, and in good report, the Spaniards clung to him with unshaken loyalty. Their affection was not lessened, either by his reverses, or by his forbidding deportment, or by his cruelty, or by his grievous exactions. In spite of all, they loved him to the last. Such was his absurd arrogance, that he allowed none, not even the most powerful nobles, to address him, except on their knees, and, in return, he only spoke in half sentences, leaving them to guess the rest, and to fulfil his commands as best they might.1224 And ready enough they were to obey his slightest wishes. A contemporary of Philip, struck by the universal homage which he received, says that the Spanish did ‘not merely love, not merely reverence, but absolutely adore him, and deem his commands so sacred, that they could not be violated without offence to God.’1225

That a man like Philip II., who never possessed a friend, and whose usual demeanour was of the most repulsive kind, a harsh master, a brutal parent, a bloody and remorseless ruler, – that he should be thus reverenced by a nation among whom he lived, and who had their eyes constantly on his actions; that this should have happened, is surely one of the most surprising, and, at first sight, one of the most inexplicable facts in modern history. Here we have a king who, though afflicted by every quality most calculated to excite terror and disgust, is loved far more than he is feared, and is the idol of a very great people during a very long reign. This is so remarkable as to deserve our serious attention; and in order to clear up the difficulty, it will be necessary to inquire into the causes of that spirit of loyalty which, during several centuries, has distinguished the Spaniards above every other European people.

One of the leading causes was undoubtedly the immense influence possessed by the clergy. For the maxims inculcated by that powerful body have a natural tendency to make the people reverence their princes more than they would otherwise do. And that there is a real and practical connexion between loyalty and superstition, appears from the historical fact that the two feelings have nearly always flourished together and decayed together. Indeed, this is what we should expect on mere speculative grounds, seeing that both feelings are the product of those habits of veneration which make men submissive in their conduct and credulous in their belief.1226 Experience, therefore, as well as reason, points to this as a general law of the mind, which, in its operation, may be occasionally disturbed, but which holds good in a large majority of cases. Probably the only instance in which the principle fails is, when a despotic government so misunderstands its own interests as to offend the clergy, and separate itself from them. Whenever this is done, a struggle will arise between loyalty and superstition; the first being upheld by the political classes, the other by the spiritual classes. Such a warfare was exhibited in Scotland; but history does not afford many examples of it, and certainly it never took place in Spain, where, on the contrary, several circumstances occurred to cement the union between the Crown and the Church, and to accustom the people to look up to both with almost equal reverence.

By far the most important of these circumstances was the great Arab invasion, which drove the Christians into a corner of Spain, and reduced them to such extremities, that nothing but the strictest discipline, and the most unhesitating obedience to their leaders, could have enabled them to make head against their enemies. Loyalty to their princes became not merely expedient, but necessary; for if the Spaniards had been disunited, they would, in the face of the fearful odds against which they fought, have had no chance of preserving their national existence. The long war which ensued, being both political and religious, caused an intimate alliance between the political and religious classes, since the kings and the clergy had an equal interest in driving the Mohammedans from Spain. During nearly eight centuries, this compact between Church and State was a necessity forced upon the Spaniards by the peculiarities of their position; and, after the necessity had subsided, it naturally happened that the association of ideas survived the original danger, and that an impression had been made upon the popular mind which it was hardly possible to efface.

Evidence of this impression, and of the unrivalled loyalty it produced, crowds upon us at every turn. In no other country are the old ballads so numerous and so intimately connected with the national history. It has, however, been observed, that their leading characteristic is the zeal with which they inculcate obedience and devotion to princes, and that from this source, even more than from military achievements, they draw their most favourite examples of virtue.1227 In literature the first great manifestation of the Spanish mind was the poem of The Cid, written at the end of the twelfth century, in which we find fresh proof of that extraordinary loyalty which circumstances had forced upon the people.1228 The ecclesiastical councils display a similar tendency; for, notwithstanding a few exceptions, no other church has been equally eager in upholding the rights of kings.1229 In civil legislation, we see the same principle at work; it being asserted, on high authority, that in no system of laws is loyalty carried to such extreme height as in the Spanish codes.1230 Even their dramatic writers were unwilling to represent an act of rebellion on the stage, lest they should appear to countenance what, in the eyes of every good Spaniard, was one of the most heinous of all offences.1231 Whatever the king came in contact with, was in some degree hallowed by his touch. No one might mount a horse which he had ridden;1232 no one might marry a mistress whom he had deserted.1233 Horse and mistress alike were sacred, and it would have been impious for any subject to meddle with what had been honoured by the Lord's anointed. Nor were such rules confined to the prince actually reigning. On the contrary, they survived him, and, working with a sort of posthumous force, forbade any woman whom he had taken as a wife, to marry, even after he was dead. She had been chosen by the king; such choice had already raised her above the rest of mortals; and the least she could do was to retire to a convent, and spend her life mourning over her irreparable loss. These regulations were enforced by custom rather than by law.1234 They were upheld by the popular will, and were the result of the excessive loyalty of the Spanish nation. Of that loyalty their writers often boast, and with good reason, since it was certainly matchless, and nothing seemed able to shake it. To bad kings and to good kings it equally applied. It was in full strength amid the glory of Spain in the sixteenth century; it was conspicuous when the nation was decaying in the seventeenth century; and it survived the shock of civil wars early in the eighteenth.1235 Indeed, the feeling had so worked itself into the traditions of the country, as to become not only a national passion, but almost an article of national faith. Clarendon, in his History of that great English Rebellion, the like of which, as he well knew, could never have happened in Spain, makes on this subject a just and pertinent remark. He says that a want of respect for kings is regarded by the Spaniards as a ‘monstrous crime;’ ‘submissive reverence to their princes being a vital part of their religion.’1236

These, then, were the two great elements of which the Spanish character was compounded. Loyalty and superstition; reverence for their kings and reverence for their clergy were the leading principles which influenced the Spanish mind, and governed the march of Spanish history. The peculiar and unexampled circumstances under which they arose, have been just indicated; and having seen their origin, we will now endeavour to trace their consequences. Such an examination of results will be the more important, not only because nowhere else in Europe have these feelings been so strong, so permanent, and so unmixed, but also because Spain, being seated at the further extremity of the Continent, from which it is cut off by the Pyrenees, has, from physical causes, as well as from moral ones, come little into contact with other nations.1237 The course of affairs being, therefore, undisturbed by foreign habits, it becomes easier to discover the pure and natural consequences of superstition and loyalty, two of the most powerful and disinterested feelings which have ever occupied the human heart, and to whose united action we may clearly trace the leading events in the history of Spain.

The results of this combination were, during a considerable period, apparently beneficial, and certainly magnificent. For, the church and the crown making common cause with each other, and being inspirited by the cordial support of the people, threw their whole soul into their enterprises, and displayed an ardour which could hardly fail to insure success. Gradually advancing from the north of Spain, the Christians, fighting their way inch by inch, pressed on till they reached the southern extremity, completely subdued the Mohammedans, and brought the whole country under one rule and one creed. This great result was achieved late in the fifteenth century, and it cast an extraordinary lustre on the Spanish name.1238 Spain, long occupied by her own religious wars, had hitherto been little noticed by foreign powers, and had possessed little leisure to notice them. Now, however, she formed a compact and undivided monarchy, and at once assumed an important position in European affairs.1239 During the next hundred years, her power advanced with a speed of which the world had seen no example since the days of the Roman Empire. So late as 1478 Spain was still broken up into independent and often hostile states; Granada was possessed by the Mohammedans; the throne of Castile was occupied by one prince, the throne of Aragon by another. Before the year 1590, not only were these fragments firmly consolidated into one kingdom, but acquisitions were made abroad so rapidly as to endanger the independence of Europe. The history of Spain, during this period, is the history of one long and uninterrupted success. That country, recently torn by civil wars, and distracted by hostile creeds, was able in three generations to annex to her territory the whole of Portugal, Navarre, and Roussillon. By diplomacy, or by force of arms, she acquired Artois and Franche Comté, and the Netherlands; also the Milanese, Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, the Balearic Islands, and the Canaries. One of her kings was emperor of Germany; while his son influenced the councils of England, whose queen he married. The Turkish power, then one of the most formidable in the world, was broken and beaten back on every side. The French monarchy was humbled. French armies were constantly worsted; Paris was once in imminent jeopardy; and a king of France, after being defeated on the field, was taken captive, and led prisoner to Madrid. Out of Europe, the deeds of Spain were equally wonderful. In America, the Spaniards became possessed of territories which covered sixty degrees of latitude, and included both the tropics. Besides Mexico, Central America, Venezuela, New Granada, Peru, and Chili, they conquered Cuba, San Domingo, Jamaica, and other islands. In Africa, they obtained Ceuta, Melilla, Oran, Bougiah, and Tunis, and overawed the whole coast of Barbary. In Asia, they had settlements on each side of the Deccan; they held part of Malacca; and they established themselves in the Spice Islands. Finally, by the conquest of the noble archipelago of the Philippines, they connected their most distant acquisitions, and secured a communication between every part of that enormous empire which girdled the world.