With the Heart of a King: Elizabeth I of England, Philip II of Spain, and the Fight for a Nation's Soul and Crown
352
With the Heart of a King: Elizabeth I of England, Philip II of Spain, and the Fight for a Nation's Soul and Crown
352eBookFirst Edition (First Edition)
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Overview
Philip II of Spain, the most powerful monarch in sixteenth-century Europe and a ferocious empire-builder, was matched against the dauntless queen of England, Elizabeth I, determined to defend her country and thwart Philip's ambitions. Philip had been king of England while married to Elizabeth's half-sister, Bloody Mary Tudor, a devout Catholic. After Mary's untimely death, he courted Elizabeth, the new queen, and proposed marriage to her, hoping to build a permanent alliance between his country and hers and return England to the Catholic fold. Lukewarm to the Spanish alliance and resolute against a counterreformation, Elizabeth declined his proposal.
When under her guidance England's maritime power grew to challenge Spain's rule of the sea and threaten its rich commerce, Philip became obsessed with the idea of a conquest of England and the restoration of Catholicism there, by fire and sword. Elizabeth—bold, brilliant, defiantly Protestant—became his worst enemy.
In 1586 Philip began assembling the mighty Spanish Armada, and in May 1588 it sailed from Lisbon. With superior seamanship and strategies, Elizabeth's navy defeated and drove off the Spanish fleet. Forced to retreat around the northern coast of Ireland and Scotland, Philip's ships ran into violent storms that wreaked havoc. It was the rivalry's climactic event.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466858848 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 12/03/2013 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 536 KB |
About the Author
Benton Rain Patterson is a former newspaper and magazine writer and editor. He has worked for The New York Times and the Saturday Evening Post. He is the author of Harold and William: The Battle for England, 1064-1066; Washington and Cornwallis: The Battle for America, 1775-1783; and The Generals: Andrew Jackson, Sir Edward Pakenham, and the Road to the Battle of New Orleans.
Read an Excerpt
With the Heart of a King
Elizabeth I of England, Philip II of Spain, and the Fight for a Nation's Soul and Crown
By Benton Rain Patterson
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2007 Benton Rain PattersonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-5884-8
CHAPTER 1
The Prince
In the year 1527, the most powerful man of the Western world was the Holy Roman emperor, Charles V, emperor of Austria and Germany, king of Spain and Sicily, and lord over a dozen or more other states in Italy and the Netherlands, which included Belgium. A rare confluence of noble family connections had made him sovereign over the largest realm in Europe, made still larger by explorers and conquistadors who had claimed for Spain lands of the vast New World and beyond it as far as the Philippines.
Charles was twenty-seven years old in 1527, not tall but well built, blond and blue eyed, with a long face, aquiline nose, and the thick lower lip that ran in his father's family, the Habsburgs. When single, he had fathered an illegitimate daughter (Margaret of Parma), but now he was married to the beautiful, blond, twenty-four-year-old Portuguese princess Isabel, who was also his cousin (both were grandchildren of the late King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain). He had reneged on an agreement to marry Mary Tudor, the future queen of England, who was only a child at the time, so that he could wed Isabel.
The wedding had been held in Seville on March 10, 1526, and the following August Isabel had become pregnant, a fact over which virtually the entire population of Spain, where the couple resided, apparently rejoiced, the birth of a royal heir being always a huge cause for celebration.
The ninth month of Isabel's pregnancy, May 1527, arrived with the fragrance of orange blossoms in the warm Castilian air but with international problems looming dangerously before Charles. If God in His mercy would grant him a son, a male heir to his empire and kingdoms, that advent would be such glad news to Charles that the gloomy clouds of threats from France and England and the pope might for a time be burst with brightness. Deeply serious about his Catholic faith (though not a friend of the pope), Charles doubtless was earnestly praying that Isabel would deliver a son, a successor, healthy and whole.
About three o'clock in the morning of May 21, 1527, in the royal palace in Valladolid (then Spain's capital), Isabel began a difficult labor, which she stoically endured, telling the midwife who attended her, "I may die, but I will not cry out." Thirteen hours later, at four o'clock that afternoon, Isabel's eagerly awaited baby arrived. Charles, who remained with his wife throughout her ordeal, had received the happy answer to his prayer. He was the father of a son.
He took the infant in his arms, praying as he held him: "May our Lord God make you a good Christian. I beg our Lord God to give you His grace. May it please our Lord God to enlighten you, that you may know how to govern the Kingdom you shall inherit."
As news of the baby's birth rippled out from the palace, church bells pealed in gleeful annunication, first in Valladolid, then in nearby towns and villages, then throughout the land. In Castile's protective forts, cannons were fired in thunderous salute to the blessed event. Many of the country's important persons, members of the royal court, noblemen, government officials, and high-ranking clergy, began making their way to the Valladolid palace to offer their congratulations and join the celebration.
Charles, meanwhile, in a pouring rain that had come sweeping through Valladolid, made his way on foot from the palace to the Church of Saint Paul (San Pablo) to give thanks for the prayed-for blessing that God had bestowed upon him.
Two weeks later, on Sunday, June 2, the royal infant was carried from the palace to the Church of Saint Paul, along a path scattered with rose petals and lemon and orange blossoms, to be baptized according to the Catholic tradition and to receive his name, one that history would forever remember. According to one account, many of those close to Charles wanted him to name the boy Fernando (Ferdinand), after the child's famous great-grandfather. One of those closest to Charles, the duke of Alba, while standing at the baptismal font during the ceremony, went so far as to insist that Charles name him Fernando.
Charles, however, had already made up his mind about what his son would be called and he couldn't be dissuaded. The infant prince would be named for Charles's father. He would be Philip, grandson of Philip the Handsome. And so was he baptized by the primate of Spain, the archbishop of Toledo, Don Alonso de Fonseca, who drew the baptismal water from a large silver font and pronounced the baby's name. The child's godparents were the duke of Bejar, who cradled the baby in his arms during the ceremony, and Charles's older sister Eleanor, queen of France. Upon the infant's baptism, a royal herald announced to the onlookers, w "Oyd, oyd, oyd, Don Philipe, principe de Castilla por la gracia de Dios!"
That solemn ceremony having been concluded, the joyous celebrations began, nights of banquets and days of feasts, celebratory bullfights and tournaments, jousts that featured some two hundred knights. Members of the royal court put aside other concerns and gave themselves to the celebration. "There is consequently a great lull in politics," the ambassador from Bohemia wrote in an official report, "and the courtiers think of nothing save the rejoicings."
Within days, however, the festivities were abruptly aborted on receipt of alarming news from Italy. An army of Pope Clement VII, who had allied himself with the French king, Francis I, Charles's hostile brother-in-law, had challenged Charles's forces based in Milan. Charles's army had brushed aside the challenge and, marching south on Rome, had assaulted the Vatican on May 6, 1527, and had sent the pope and his cardinals fleeing for their lives, the pope narrowly escaping capture or worse. Out of control after their commander had been killed in the assault, Charles's troops, many of them German mercenaries, had, according to one report, slaughtered some six to eight thousand men of Rome and had sacked the city, leaving much of it in ruins. News of the peril to the pope and the atrocities committed against the capital of Christendom ignited a firestorm of outrage throughout Western Europe.
Charles learned of the events about the middle of June and, persuaded that the festive mood was now inappropriate, he called off the celebrations of his son's birth. Strong reaction to the atrocities in Rome had burst through Spain as it had done elsewhere in Europe. Defiantly denouncing Charles from their pulpits, many Spanish priests had demanded an end to the celebrations, and many of the members of Charles's Spanish court who had been joyfully celebrating went into mourning over the deeds of their sovereign's army.
For the newborn prince it was an inauspicious beginning to his public life, which officially began when at age one year he was, on May 10, 1528, recognized as heir to the throne of Castile, Spain's major province, by Castile's legislature, the Cortes. The Cortes then also recognized Philip's mother, the Empress Isabel, as regent whenever Charles was out of the country, which he soon would be. Isabel was likely thinking little about becoming regent, however. She was then pregnant with a second child, who was born on June 21, 1528, in Madrid and was named Maria.
Deciding that he could no longer stay in Spain, that he needed to take charge of developing events in other parts of his realm, Charles set sail from Barcelona on July 27, 1529, when Philip was two years old. It was the last the boy would see of his father for nearly four years.
There was no question of Isabel and the children going with Charles. Nine years earlier, in 1520, there had been a widespread rebellion in Spain against Charles, who was born and raised in Flanders and whom a great many in Spain considered an outsider. He had made some concessions to the rebels in the course of bringing the revolt to an end. The rebels, called comuneros, had asked Charles to spend more time in Castile and less time in other parts of his empire. They had also asked him to learn to speak Spanish. Further, they had asked him to marry a Portuguese princess. All of those things he had done. They had also asked that whatever children he had with the princess be brought up as Spaniards and be educated in Spain. Now, no doubt remembering the comunero revolt and the promises made, Charles left his young son and baby daughter in Spain with his wife as he sailed away to attend to his affairs outside Spain.
Little Philip, fair skinned, blond haired, and blue eyed, was turned over by his mother to the care of a Portuguese nurse, Leonor Mascarenhas, for whom Philip developed a lasting affection. He managed to survive several childhood illnesses, all of which his mother, who kept a watchful eye on him, fretted over. "The prince my son is ill with fever," she wrote to a friend during one of Philip's sicknesses, "and though the illness is not dangerous it has me very worried and anxious." Philip recovered, but three weeks later he fell sick again. "I'm very anxious," Isabel wrote to her absent husband.
The doings of the royal siblings were reported to their father in letters. "The infanta [Maria] grows bigger and fatter by the day," the boy's governor, Pedro González de Mendoza, wrote to Charles, "and the prince entertains her like a genteel gallant." The prince also had other moments. "He is so mischievous that sometimes Her Majesty gets really angry," another report reads. "She spanks him, and the women weep to see such severity."
When Philip was seven years old, Charles appointed a tutor for him, forty-eight-year-old Juan Martínez Siliceo, a priest who was a professor at the University of Salamanca. He was described by one of Philip's biographers as "a man of piety and learning and of an accommodating temper, too accommodating ... for the good of his pupil." The result of the tutor's easygoing attitude, Charles believed, was that young Philip was not absorbing all the learning that was available from Siliceo.
In 1535, when Philip was eight years old, his father appointed a new governor for him, Juan de Zúñiga, one of Charles's close associates, and Zúñiga and Siliceo mapped out the prince's education, Siliceo handling the book learning and Zúñiga handling the extracurricular activities, such as riding and hunting, as well as character building.
Philip progressed through basic reading and writing and began to take on more difficult assignments. "He has made a lot of progress in reading and learning prayers in Latin and Spanish," Siliceo wrote to Charles in February 1536, and during the following September Siliceo reported that Philip "knows the [Latin] conjugations and some other principles; soon he will start to study authors, the first of whom is Cato." Other subjects that he studied, however assiduously, included mathematics, science, French, Italian, art, and the principles of architecture. Though he did well enough with Latin, learning to speak and write it acceptably, which he often did in later years, he didn't do as well with Italian or French. Science and math he liked, and over the years he acquired such a knowledge of architecture, painting, and sculpture that he became a credible critic of them.
Philip also learned to appreciate music. Luis Narvaez, a composer from Granada, was appointed Philip's music tutor, and he taught the prince to play the guitar. The boy was said to be a talented musician, though he had not much of a singing voice. He developed such a fondness for organ music, which was played for him in his private chapel, as well as for music in general, that when he traveled, he took with him an organ, an organist, and a choir, so that he could always have good-listening music.
He was showing increased interest in extracurricular activities, too. "Though hunting is at present what he is most inclined to, he doesn't neglect his studies a bit," Siliceo wrote reassuringly to Charles. And aware of the boy's advancing adolescence, the tutor-priest observed that "we have to be grateful that at this age of fourteen when the weakness of the flesh begins to assert itself, God has given the prince such a passion for hunting that he spends most of his time in this and in his studies."
The time the prince was spending hunting was more of a concern to Zúñiga than it was to Siliceo. "He went on horseback into the hills for a good six hours," Zúñiga told Charles. "It only seemed like two hours to him, but it seemed more than twelve to me. ... His only real pastime is shooting game with the crossbow." The game he shot included rabbits, deer, wolves, and bears, and he became so skilled at shooting them that restrictions were imposed lest he overkill his father's game.
In one of his reports to Charles, Zúñiga said that Philip was happiest when he was outdoors. He was content to do almost anything "provided he could do it in the countryside," Zúñiga wrote. The boy had developed a love of nature and he collected birds that he kept in cages, so many of them that a mule was needed to transport them when Philip's household was moved periodically. Indoors, he played with toy soldiers and played cards and quoits. He also painted pictures in a large book of blank pages.
In 1539 Philip suffered the most tragic event of his young life, the death of his mother. She had had a miscarriage in late April and died on May 1, three weeks before Philip's twelfth birthday. Becoming ill while he walked in the funeral procession, Philip returned to his rooms and was put to bed. His mother's body was taken to Granada and buried in the royal tombs, where King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella were buried. Charles was so stricken with grief that he isolated himself in mourning for the next seven weeks.
Following his mother's death, Philip spent two years in official mourning, wearing only black, unadorned with jewelry. In May 1541 Charles let him begin wearing colorful clothing again and gave him permission to wear gold jewelry.
The loss of his mother deprived Philip of nearly all expressions of parental love, and he grew through his teenage years largely dependent on his sisters, Maria and Juana (born to Isabel on June 24, 1535, two years before her death), for mutual feelings of affection.
Ever since he was seven years old, Philip had been living in his own separate quarters. He was being attended by his own servants and receiving guidance from his own advisers. He also had his own friends, or special companions, all of them selected for him. His six-year-old cousin Maximilian, son of Charles's brother Ferdinand, was brought from Vienna to be tutored with Philip. The two boys played and studied together, although Maximilian never became one of Philip's best friends. He and Philip's other companions, or pages, most of them the sons of noble families, formed a sort of boys' court, over which Philip presided, rehearsing the role of his future. By 1540 the members of Philip's household totaled 191, including 51 pages, 8 chaplains, a physician, a crew of kitchen workers, plus miscellaneous maids, grooms, stable workers, and others who kept the boy's mansion humming and maintained and the prince himself well served. In 1541 he was given his own personal secretary, Gonzalo Pérez, a somewhat imperious priest who ended up serving Philip for the next twenty-four years.
Charles was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with Siliceo as the boy's main tutor. He wrote to Philip to prepare him for Siliceo's dismissal. "[He] has not been nor is the most suitable teacher for you; he has given in to you too much." (Later Philip would choose the priest Siliceo, to whom he felt close, as his official confessor. On learning of the choice, Charles wrote to his son: "I hope he will not want to appease you as much in matters of conscience as he did in matters of study.") In 1541, the year that Philip made his first communion, Charles appointed three new tutors for Philip, one to teach Latin and Greek, one to teach math and architecture, and another to teach geography and history. Charles may have given up on the likelihood that his son could learn modern languages, for he appointed no tutor to make further attempts at teaching them to Philip.
The new tutors, who also taught Philip's pages, were provided funds to acquire a library for the prince. Over time the books of Philip's library included works by Aquinas, Boccacio, Copernicus, Dante, Dürer, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Petrarch, Savonarola, Sophocles, Virgil, and Vitruvio. The book collection assembled by his tutors, some of which he undoubtedly read, at least in part, apparently inspired Philip to add his own eclectic selections to his library. They included books on art, architecture, music, theology, warfare, and magic.
Discipline, which once had been administered to the prince by his mother, was now the responsibility of the boy's governor, Zúñiga, whose strictness Philip protested to his absent father. Charles, however, thought Zúñiga's rigor was just what the boy needed. "If he gave in to your every caprice," Charles wrote to his son, "you would be like the rest of mankind and would have no one to tell you the truth."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from With the Heart of a King by Benton Rain Patterson. Copyright © 2007 Benton Rain Patterson. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
1. The Prince,
2. The Princess,
3. The Preparation for a Crown,
4. The Bloody Queen,
5. The Suspect Princess,
6. The New Spanish King,
7. The End OF Reign,
8. The New Queen,
9. The New Proposal,
10. The Religious Divide,
11. The Catholic Rival,
12. The Tragedies and Triumphs,
13. The Netherlands Revolt,
14. The Hostilities,
15. The Preparation for Conquest,
16. The Defenders,
17. The Grand Armada,
18. The Rulers of the Sea,
19. The Ruin and the Renewal,
20. The Final Defeat,
Epilogue,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Acknowledgments,
Index,
Also by Benton Rain Patterson,
Copyright,