Marriage had come to be one of the political resources of Louis XIV. Another matrimonial alliance, still more important, had been concluded a few months previously. It has been said that Don John of Austria, the uncle and minister of the king of Spain, hoped to find in France a support against his rival, the king’s mother, who was upheld by the court at Vienna. Don John had caused the negotiations undertaken by the queen-mother for uniting the Catholic king with a daughter of the emperor to be broken off, and had solicited for Charles II the hand of Marie Louise of Orléans, a niece of Louis XIV and daughter of the duke of Orléans by his first wife Henrietta of England. It can be imagined with what eagerness this proposition was received, since it was supposed that it would establish the diplomatic preponderance of France at Madrid.

The contract was signed on the 30th of August, 1679, to the great joy of Louis XIV, but to the still greater sorrow of the bride. It was only with despair that the poor young girl left the paradise of Versailles to bury herself in the tomb of the Escorial, at the side of that strange husband who was only the shadow of a king, only the shadow of a man. For a whole month she saddened the court and wounded the national susceptibilities of the Spanish ambassadors by the violence of her grief. She seemed to have a presentiment of her sad fate. She had not yet started when the protector she was to meet on the other side of the mountains expired and her natural enemy the queen-mother seized again from the dying hands of Don John the power she had lost. Marie Louise found on foreign soil only long hours of weariness, and implacable persecutions which were terminated by a prolonged agony and perhaps by a crime. She was one of the most pathetic victims of the cruel policy of dynasties. The sacrifice, however, was useless; the young queen acquired no influence at Madrid and, the anti-French policy having gotten the upper hand together with the queen-mother, by the intervention of the prince of Orange, a rapprochement was brought about between Spain and England, the effects of which Louis XIV fought with greater success at Windsor than at the Escorial.l

Dunlopk gives many details of the journey of the young bride to her imbecile husband. To the natural homesickness so peculiarly characteristic of the French, she added a complete ignorance of the Spanish language and a nature rebellious to the unusual formality of Spanish court etiquette. The royal bridegroom into whose arms she was driven was, as a result of the Austrian marriages, not only weak-minded but also repulsive physically; his chin was so huge that he could not masticate and his tongue so large that his speech could hardly be understood. He was treated as a baby till he was ten and was almost illiterate; his amusements were those of a lascivious boy and he died in the decay of old age when he was not yet forty.

An incident of Charles II’s reign was the renewal of the inquisitional fury, and one of the fêtes of the young queen was the privilege of watching fifty wretches led out to torture and execution; one beautiful Jewess appealed to the queen who was helpless to save her.

The queen was very charitable and yet was left on a stinted allowance irregularly paid. Her reputation suffered slander—as what queen’s has not?—and Humej calls her a pagan; but Dunlop says that her character was untainted. She found congenial friends naturally among the people of her own country, but these were eventually forbidden her presence. Sunny as her nature was, it is small wonder that she pined and did not make headway against the thick plots against her. She died in February, 1689—of cholera morbus it was claimed, though poison was of course alleged.

Dunlopk well says, “Of all political queens, the fate of Louise d’Orléans is perhaps the most to be pitied.” Her life had been vain; she had not satisfied her uncle Louis XIV by fastening French influence on the court; she had not satisfied Spanish hopes by bearing an heir to the monstrosity she had been forced to wed; and she had not even been happy.a

LAST YEARS OF CHARLES II

Omitting the detail of obscure wars—obscure at least to the Spaniards—which almost uniformly turned to their prejudice, on the death of Marie Louise, in 1689, the French monarch again poured the storm of war over the frontier of Catalonia. What most heightened his resentment was the immediate marriage of the widowed Charles with a princess of the house of Austria; to that house he had always been a mortal enemy, and he feared lest the king, who was hitherto childless, should at length have an heir. For some time, indeed, the efforts of the invaders, owing to their insignificant numbers, were often repulsed, or neutralised by subsequent reverses; but, in 1691, Urgel was taken by the duke of Noailles; Barcelona and Alicante were severely bombarded by sea. Two years afterwards Palemos and Rosas capitulated; the following year the Spaniards were defeated in a considerable battle; the victors took Gerona; Hostalric, and other places, followed the example, and Barcelona itself was threatened. Destitute of money and of troops, the efforts of the cabinet to raise both were but partially successful, and the time which should have been spent in vigorous hostilities was thus wasted in almost useless preparation. After a short suspension of hostilities, Barcelona fell into the power of Vendôme.

Spain trembled to her most distant extremities; and she could scarcely believe in the reality of her good fortune when, at the Peace of Ryswick, in 1697, Louis restored all his conquests. She was too much confounded by this display of magnanimity to divine the cause; yet that cause was not insufficient. From his niece, Marie Louise, the French monarch had learned to suspect the impotency of Charles; the sterility of the recent marriage confirmed the suspicion; and as he aspired in consequence to place a prince of his family on the throne of Castile, he did not wish to diminish the value of the inheritance by its dismemberment.

In 1698 the health of Charles, which had always been indifferent, began so visibly to decline that all hope of issue was abandoned. On his demise three chief claimants could aspire to his throne: first, the dauphin of France, as the eldest son of Maria Theresa, eldest daughter of Philip IV; secondly, the emperor Leopold, who not only descended from Ferdinand, brother of Charles V, but whose mother was the daughter of Philip III; thirdly, the electoral prince of Bavaria, whose mother was the only daughter of the infanta Margarita, a young daughter of Philip IV. Of these claims, that of the dauphin was evidently the strongest, since his mother was the eldest sister of Charles. It is true that she had renounced for her issue all claim to the crown of Spain; but this renunciation had been demanded by the Spaniards, from a fear lest the two crowns should fall on the same brow. To such a union Europe would never have consented; and the objection was almost equally strong to the union of Spain with Germany. Hence the hostility to the pretensions both of the dauphin, as heir of the French monarchy, and of the emperor Leopold. Hence, too, the celebrated, and infamous as celebrated, treaty of partition, which, in October, 1698, was signed at the Hague by the plenipotentiaries of England, Holland, and France. By it Naples and Sicily, with Guipuzcoa, San Sebastian, and Fuenterrabia were ceded to the dauphin; Spain and the Indies to the Prince of Bavaria; while, for the third party, Charles, second son of Leopold, and the representative of his rights, Milan only was reserved. The death of the Bavarian prince destroyed this beautiful scheme of spoliation; but its authors did not long delay in framing another, which gave Spain, the Indies, and Netherlands to Charles, and which amplified the original portion of the dauphin.

But Louis XIV had no intention to renounce the splendid inheritance; if he could not procure it for the dauphin, or, which would ultimately be the same, for the eldest son of the dauphin, there was a second son, Philip, duke of Anjou, who would be less the object of jealousy to the European powers. With the same view, Leopold was willing that his own rights, and those of his eldest son, should devolve on the archduke Charles the youngest. Both princes sent their emissaries to the court of Charles II, to besiege his sick-bed, and to procure a testamentary declaration in favour of their respective pretensions. The intrigues which continued for so many months to distract the court and kingdom, to embitter rival animosity, and to disturb the last hours of the king, are too endless to be detailed.

The duke of Anjou’s ablest support was Cardinal Portocarrero, archbishop of Toledo. The cardinal terrified Charles’ conscience by a representation of the civil wars which must inevitably follow the uncertainty of succession, and, above all, by frightening him with the responsibility of the consequent bloodshed. On a mind so religious as the king’s, these representations made a deep effect; he observed that, however near the ties of blood, his salvation was still nearer; and after a long, a bitter struggle, he signed the testament which called the duke d’Anjou to the undivided sovereignty of the Spanish dominions. As he subscribed the momentous instrument, his heart still clung to his family, the tears ran from his eyes, while, with a faltering voice, he sorrowfully exclaimed, “God is the disposer of kingdoms!”

Before the signature of this important act, the health and strength of the king had visibly declined; in fact he exhibited in himself a mere shadow of existence. His deplorable, and as it appeared, extraordinary state, one alike of pain, of mental vacuity, and even of half consciousness, gave rise to a report that he was bewitched. He prepared for his end; appointed a council of regency, headed by Cardinal Portocarrero, until the duke of d’Anjou should arrive in Spain; and on the morning of November 1st, 1700, bade adieu to his worldly sorrows, after one of the most disastrous reigns on record.c

THE DISTRESSES OF SPAIN

Thus, at length, terminated the long but inglorious sway of Charles II, in the thirty-ninth year of his age, and the thirty-sixth of his unfortunate reign. His character is written in the events of his clouded life. He was mild and conscientious; suspicious and distrustful from diffidence in his own powers and talents; timid, inconstant, and irresolute, from the influence of hypochondriac affections; chaste from temperament; ignorant from total want of instruction; superstitious from habit and education; he was utterly destitute of discernment, energy, or skill; he was but a ghost even of his grandsire Philip III, and in his premature decay formed no unfit emblem of the declining kingdom over which he reigned.

Charles, indeed, was not wholly responsible for the state of degradation to which Spain was reduced when he closed his fatal career. The administrations of Lerma and Olivares had prepared the way for a long train of losses, humiliations, and disasters; but the wavering and fluctuating counsels of Charles completed the ruin of his country. Spain, which contained twenty millions of inhabitants in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, had only eight millions at the close of the reign of Charles II. Moncada, an author of the beginning of the seventeenth century, estimated the population of its capital at 400,000; and Uztariz, who wrote immediately after the accession of the Bourbons, calculated it at only 180,000, so that it may be rated that it had diminished by one-half during the reigns of Philip IV and his son. Except, indeed, from courtesy and custom, and the extreme interest excited by the question of the succession, Spain, at the end of the reign of Charles, would scarcely have been reckoned among the powers of Europe.

Her finances were in a state of most frightful disorder. The revenues of the crown were absorbed by those agents or farmers, on whom the urgent necessities of government reduced it to depend for supplies; and, at the same time, the people, both in the capital and provinces, were loaded with every species of extortion and monopoly. The ample treasures of the New World were still worse administered; the viceroys, after defrauding the crown and oppressing the subject, were suffered to return from their governments and to enjoy, with impunity, the produce of peculation. The harbours of Spain contained but ten or twelve rotten frigates; the arsenals for the navy were neglected, and even the art of shipbuilding had fallen into oblivion. Her army amounted to not more than twenty thousand men, without discipline, pay, or clothing. Her forts and citadels had crumbled into ruins. Even the breaches made into the walls of Barcelona during the Catalan insurrection continued open, and at the other chief fortresses there were neither guns mounted nor garrisons maintained. Such was the want of vigour in the laws, and remissness in the officers of justice, that reins had been given to every species of licentiousness. The slightest rise in the price of provisions excited tumult and alarm. Madrid had become the rendezvous of robbers and the asylum of assassins, who haunted even the palaces of the grandees or the churches, unmolested and unpunished. Its squares and streets were filled with discarded domestics and famishing artisans, without occupation or the means of subsistence. Those establishments destined to maintain the respect due to royalty had sunk into empty form, and were insufficient to protect the king from mortifying insults, both to his authority and person. The responsible ministry were without intelligence or skill in the science of government: the real influence was in the officers of the household—the king’s confessor, the prelates, and the inquisitors of the realm. The private and bitter jealousies of the grandees, the enmity of the provinces towards each other, and the rigid adherence to ancient forms and usages, however inapplicable to modern circumstances, all conspired to prevent a cordial co-operation in any useful or national object, and completed, in the last year of the seventeenth century and at the end of the Austrian dynasty, the picture of Spain.

Yet the sway, no doubt, of the imbecile Charles may have appeared more feeble from the contrast it presented to the energy and skill of the other governments of Europe, which, at the close of this century, were ruled by the ablest monarchs who had ever appeared, at one era, since the first rise of its states on the wreck of the Western Empire. The energies both of Holland and England were wielded by William III; Louis XIV reigned in France, the prudent Pedro in Portugal, John Sobieski in Poland, Charles XII in Sweden, and in Muscovy Peter the Great—the immortal czar.k

FOOTNOTES