the 17th century was more visibly sombre. Castile now had for the first time a stable capital in Madrid, facilitating central government. The Council of State, dominated by grandees, and deliberating on major issues of policy, was more than counterbalanced by the enhanced importance of the royal secretariat, whose diligent jurist-functionaries provided the desk-bound monarch with the bureaucratic tools of rule most congenial to him. Administrative unification of the dynastic patrimonies, however, was not pursued with any consistency. Absolutist reforms were pressed in the Netherlands, where they led to a debacle, and in Italy, where they secured a modest measure of success. In the Iberian peninsula itself, by contrast, no progress in the same direction was even seriously attempted. Portuguese constitutional and legal autonomy was scrupulously respected; no Castilian interference ruffled the traditional order of this Western acquisition. In the Eastern provinces, Aragonese particularism gave truculent provocation to the King by shielding his fugitive secretary Antonio Perez from royal justice with armed riots: an invasion force in 1591 subdued this blatant sedition, but Philip abstained from any permanent occupation of Aragon, or major modification of its constitution.23 The chance of a centralist solution was deliberately foregone. Meanwhile, the economic situation of both monarchy and country was deteriorating ominously by the end of the century. Silver shipments ran at record levels from 1590 to 1600: but war-costs had by now grown so much that a new consumption tax levied essentially on food – the millones – was imposed in Castile, which henceforward became a further heavy burden on the labouring poor in the countryside and the towns. Philip II’s total revenues had more than quadrupled by the end of his reign:24 even so, official bankruptcy overtook him in 1596. Three years later, the worst plague of the epoch descended on Spain, decimating the population of the peninsula.
The accession of Philip III was followed by peace with England (1604), a further bankruptcy (1607), and then by the reluctant signature of a truce with Holland (1609). The new regime was dominated by the Valencian aristocrat Lerma, a frivolous and venal privado who had established his personal ascendancy over the King. Peace brought with it lavish court display, and multiplication of honours; political influence deserted the old secretariat, while the Castilian nobility congregated again towards the now softened centre of the State. Lerma’s only two governmental decisions of note were the systematic use of devaluations to extricate royal finances, by flooding the country with the debased copper vellón, and the mass expulsion of the moriscos from Spain, which merely weakened the Aragonese and Valencian rural economy: price inflation and labour shortages were the inevitable result. Much graver in the long-run, however, was the silent shift that was now occurring in the whole commercial relationship between Spain and America. From about 1600 onwards, the American colonies were becoming increasingly self-sufficient in the primary commodities they had traditionally imported from Spain – grain, oil and wine; coarse cloth was also now starting to be locally produced; ship-building developed rapidly, and inter-colonial trade boomed. These changes coincided with the growth of a Creole aristocracy in the colonies, whose wealth was derived from agriculture rather than mining.25 The mines themselves were subject to a deepening crisis from the second decade of the 17th century onwards. Partly because of a demographic collapse in the Indian labour-force, due to devastating epidemics and super-exploitation in underground gangs, and partly because of lode exhaustion, silver output began to contract. The decline from the peak of the previous century was initially a gradual one. But the composition and direction of trade between the Old and the New World was irreversibly altering, to the detriment of Castile. The colonial import pattern was switching to more sophisticated manufactured goods, which Spain could not supply, brought as contraband by English or Dutch merchants; local capital was being reinvested on the spot rather than transferred to Seville; and native American shipping was increasing its share of Atlantic freightage. The net result was a calamitous decrease in Spanish trade with its American possessions, whose total tonnage fell 60 per cent from 1606–10 to 1646–50.
In the days of Lerma, the ultimate consequences of this process still lay hidden in the future. But the relative decline of Spain on the seas, and the rise of the Protestant powers of England and Holland at its expense, were already visible. The reconquest of the Dutch Republic and the invasion of England had both failed in the 16th century. But since that date Spain’s two maritime enemies had grown more prosperous and powerful, while the Reformed religion continued to advance in Central Europe. The cessation of hostilities for a decade under Lerma thus merely convinced the new generation of imperialist generals and diplomats – Zuñiga, Gondomar, Osuña, Bedmar, Fuentes – that, if war was expensive, Spain could not afford peace. The accession of Philip IV, bringing the masterful Conde-Duque de Olivares to chief power in Madrid, coincided with the upheaval in the Bohemian lands of the Austrian branch of the Habsburg family: the chance to crush Protestantism in Germany and settle accounts with Holland – an inter-related goal, because of the strategic need to command the corridor through the Rhineland for troop movements between Italy and Flanders – now appeared before them. European war was thus unleashed once again, by proxy through Vienna, but at the initiative of Madrid, in the 1620’s. The course of the Thirty Years’ War curiously reversed the pattern of the two great bouts of Habsburg arms in the previous century. Whereas Charles V and Philip II had scored initial victories in the South of Europe and suffered eventual defeat in the North, Philip IV’s forces achieved early successes in the North only to experience ultimate disasters in the South. The size of the Spanish mobilization for this third and last general engagement was formidable: in 1625 Philip IV claimed 300,000 under his orders.26 The Bohemian Estates were crushed at the Battle of the White Mountain, with the aid of Hispanic subsidies and veterans, and the cause of Protestantism permanently beaten in the Czech lands. The Dutch were forced backwards by Spinola, with the capture of Breda. The Swedish counterattack in Germany, after defeating Austrian or Leaguer armies, was undone by Spanish tercios under the Cardinal-Infante at Nordlingen. But it was precisely these victories which finally forced France into hostilities, tipping the military balance decisively against Spain: the reaction of Paris to Nordlingen in 1634 was Richelieu’s declaration of war in 1635. The results were soon evident. Breda was retaken by the Dutch in 1637. A year later, Breisach – the key to the roads into Flanders – had fallen. Within another year, the bulk of the Spanish fleet was sent to the bottom at the Downs – a far worse blow to the Habsburg navy than the fate of the Armada. Finally, in 1643, the French army ended the supremacy of the tercios at Rocroi. Military intervention by Bourbon France had proved a very different matter from the Valois contests of the previous century; it was the new nature and weight of French Absolutism which was now to encompass the downfall of Spanish imperial power in Europe. For whereas in the 16th century, Charles V and Philip II had both profited from the internal weakness of the French State, by utilizing provincial disaffections to invade France itself, the boot was now on the other foot: a maturing French Absolutism was able to exploit aristocratic sedition and regional separatism in the Iberian peninsula to invade Spain. In the 1520’s Spanish troops had marched into Provence, in the 1590’s into Languedoc, Brittany and the He de France, with the alliance or welcome of local dissidents. In the 1640’s, French soldiers and ships were fighting together with anti-Habsburg rebels in Catalonia, Portugal and Naples: Spanish Absolutism was at bay on its own soil.
For the long strain of the international conflict in the North eventually told in the Iberian peninsula itself. State bankruptcy had to be declared again in 1627; the vellón was devalued by 50 per cent in 1628; a sharp drop in transatlantic trade followed in 1629–31; the silver fleet failed to arrive in 1640.27 The huge war costs led to new taxes on consumption, contributions from the clergy, confiscations of interest on public bonds, seizure of private bullion shipments, swelling sales of honours and – especially – seigneurial jurisdictions to the nobility. All these devices, however, remained inadequate to raise the sums needed for the pursuit of the struggle; for its costs were still borne virtually alone by Castile. Portugal yielded no revenues whatever to Madrid, since local subsidies were confined to defense purposes in the Portuguese colonies. Flanders was chronically deficitary. Naples and Sicily had contributed a modest but respectable surplus to the central treasury, in the previous century. Now, however, the cost of covering Milan and maintaining the presidios in Tuscany absorbed all their revenues, despite increased taxes, sale of offices and alienations of land: Italy continued to provide invaluable manpower, but no
