Iberia (62 page)

 

In recent years much has been written about the Black Legend
and its genesis. A personal enemy of Felipe’s fled Spain and
supported himself for the rest of his life by peddling lurid rumors
involving the Spanish court. William the Silent, of the rebellious
Low Countries, saw a chance to unite his fractious countrymen
by creating in Felipe an object of terror and scorn, so he added
to the rumors and gave them circulation. Protestant apologists
saw in the charges a chance to defame Catholicism, so they added
their inventions, but the worst damage was done by fellow
Catholics, the Italians, who wanted to create a political
counterbalance to Spanish influence in Italy and did so by
spreading existing rumor and creating new. As I read these new
studies deflating the Black Legend, I found that they were directed
at people like me, for I was almost the archetype of the person
corrupted by the legend. It consisted of these postulates: 1.
Catholicism captured Spain and adopted a policy of keeping the
country in darkness. 2. Using Spain as a base, Catholicism
intended to enslave the world. 3. In order to police its conquests,
Spanish Catholicism invented the Inquisition, which it proposed
to install in subdued territories. 4. The archpriest of these evil
designs was King Felipe II. 5. He was personally evil and
committed many crimes in furtherance of his aims.

 

A special emphasis in Spain’s refutation of the Black Legend
has been the charge that it was promulgated in the first place by
a conspiracy among Protestant scholars who had consciously
engineered a campaign to defame Spain and had manipulated
historical facts to do so. Phrases like these were common in
Spanish writing on the subject: ‘una fobia contra España’ (a
phobia against Spain) and ‘un complot contra España’ (a plot
against Spain). Certainly my initial experiences with the legend
supported these Spanish charges, for I became aware not only of
manipulation of fact but also of a phobia against Spain. I did not
come to believe the legend by accident; I was taught it by
professors. I remember how my sixth-grade teacher created in
me a long-lasting ambivalence toward Spain by first teaching us
that western civilization owed Spain much, in that she had saved
Europe by preventing Islam from moving north of the Pyrenees,
and that if she had not done so, we would all now be Muslims.
We then analyzed how horrible life would be in our little town if
we had mosques instead of churches, and it was fifteen years
before I lost my fear of Islam. Shortly, however, this same teacher
showed us how Europe was saved in 1588 by the English fleet that
drove off the Armada. This time we were told, ‘If the English had
not defeated the Spaniards, we would now all be Catholics,’ and
we analyzed what our town would be like under those conditions,
and it was equally bad.

 

My problem was simple: ‘How could Spain have been
civilization’s savior in the fight against Islam and only a few
centuries later the villain in the fight against England?’ The answer
was also simple; ‘Felipe II was an evil man.’ Thus the Black Legend
was promulgated.

 

I was so fascinated by the ominous character of Felipe that I
read all I could find about him, and when the normal histories
were exhausted, a librarian dug up the only book in my life that
I wish I had not read. I once heard a spellbinding gospel preacher
in Colorado shout that as a young man he had read a filthy book
which had so contaminated him, he would gladly cut off his right
hand if he could erase having read the book; I was amused at his
ranting, because I’d read such books and they hadn’t hurt me
much. But I have often wished that I had not as a boy read Rider
Haggard’s
Lysbeth, A Tale of the Dutch
(1901), because it
imprinted on my mind so evil a picture of Spain in the age of
Felipe and the Duque de Alva, who represented him in The
Netherlands, that it was fifteen years before I was able to
counteract it. No other book had so baleful an influence on me,
nor one so permanent, partly because it confirmed what my
teacher had said about Spain, partly because it carried a series of
prejudicial pictures. Two remained with me, as vivid now as when
I first saw them. Two Dutch Protestants were reading the Bible
furtively at night while a spy from the Inquisition peered from
behind a door, and such an air of terror was engendered that I
required to know no more about Spain than that. The second
picture was more direct. One of the leaders of the Protestants was
captured by the Spaniards, and when he refused to betray his
fellow Bible readers, he was locked in a room containing a small
barred window and there starved to death…but not just any room.
This one overlooked the kitchen, whose sights and odors came
to him as he starved. This was so diabolic, so typically Spanish, it
was not until years later that I realized Rider Haggard was merely
a storyteller in need of detail who had invented the room and the
kitchen.

 

I had read
Lysbeth
fifty years ago and wanted to check whether
it was as virulently anti-Spanish as I remembered, but I was unable
to find a copy of the book; in its day it had been widely read but
was no longer in print or on library shelves. However, my town
librarian located a copy in Minneapolis and borrowed it for me,
and in the introduction I came upon the first phrase I
remembered: ‘By an example of the trials, adventures, and
victories of a burgher family of the generation of Philip II and
William the Silent, the author strives to set before readers of
to-day something of the life of those who lived through perhaps
the most fearful tyranny that the western world has known.’ I
found the book as intemperate now as it had been terrifying half
a century ago; the Spanish were real villains, especially the clergy:
‘Before he answered the priest threw off his dripping hooded
cape…revealing a coarse, wicked face, red and blear-eyed from
intemperance.’ The Dutch were invariably heroic: ‘This was
William of Orange, called the Silent, one of the greatest and most
noble of human beings who ever lived in any age; the man called
forth by God to whom Holland owes its liberties, and who forever
broke the hideous yoke of religious fanaticism…’

 

The story was well plotted and contained two figures whom I
still remembered with fascination, a hideous witch called Martha
the Mare and a giant red-bearded Frisian named Red Martin. The
purpose of the plot was to provide opportunities for Spaniards
to demonstrate how cruel they were. The sin of the Dutch
stemmed from their Bible reading:

‘What has he done?’ asked Lysbeth in a low voice.

 

‘Done? My dear lady, it is almost too dreadful to tell you.
This misguided and unfortunate young man, with another person
whom the witnesses have not been able to identify, was seen at
midnight reading the Bible.’

 

‘The Bible! Why should that be wrong?’

 

‘Hush! Are you also a heretic?’

One of the highlights of the yarn came when the hideous Mare
climbed into a pulpit and disclosed the infamy of the man who
had made her look the way she now did:

‘You call me the Mare,’ she went on. ‘Do you know how I got
that name? They gave it me after they had shrivelled up my lips
and marred the beauty of my face with irons. And do you know
what they made me do? They made me carry my husband to the
stake upon my back because they said that a horse must be ridden.
And do you know who said this? THAT PRIEST WHO STANDS
BEFORE YOU.’

As the mob surged toward the culprit she reminded the cowering
priest who she was: ‘I was once called the Lily of Brussels. Look
at him now. He remembers the Lily of Brussels. He remembers
her husband and her son also, for he burned them.’ The crime so
infuriated the Dutchmen that they hanged the priest, preparing
the way for the central paragraph of the book;

Thus ended the life of the Abbé Dominic at the hands of
avenging men. Without a doubt they were fierce and
bloody-minded, for the reader must not suppose that all the
wickedness of those days lies on the heads of the Inquisition and
the Spaniards. The adherents of the New Religion did evil things
also, things that sound dreadful in our ears. In excuse of them,
however, this can be urged, that, compared to those of their
oppressors, they were as single trees to a forest full; also that they
who worked them had been maddened by their sufferings. If our
fathers, husbands and brothers had been burned at the stake, or
done to death under the name of Jesus in the dens of the
Inquisition, or slaughtered by thousands in the sack of towns; if
our wives and daughters had been shamed, if our houses had been
burned, our goods taken, our liberties trampled upon, and our
homes made a desolation, then, my reader, is it not possible that
even in these different days you and I might have been cruel when
our hour came? God knows alone, and God be thanked that so
far as we can foresee, except under the pressure, perhaps, of
invasion by semi-barbarian hordes, or of dreadful and sudden
social revolutions, civilized human nature will never be put to
such a test again.

As I approached the climax of the story, where the Spanish
villain was about to condemn the Dutch hero to death by
starvation, the horror that I had experienced at first reading came
back to me:

‘Now might I trouble you so far as to look out of this little
window? What do you see in front of you? A kitchen? Quite so;
always a homely and pleasant sight in the eyes of an excellent
housewife like yourself. And—do you mind bending forward a
little? What do you see up there? A small barred window? Well,
let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that a hungry man, a
man who grows hungrier and hungrier, sat behind that window,
watching the cooks at their work and seeing the meat carried into
this kitchen, to come out an hour or two later as hot, steaming,
savory joints, while he wasted, wasted, wasted, and starved, starved,
starved. Don’t you think, my dear lady, that this would be a very
unpleasant experience for that man?’

‘Are you a devil?’ gasped Lysbeth.

But as I finished the passage a strange thing happened. I looked
for the illustration, so indelible in my mind, and it was not there.
It had never been there. The verbal description of Spanish perfidy
had been so real to me that I had imagined the illustration; I can
see it yet in perfect detail, yet it never existed. Nothing could better
exemplify the persistence of the Black Legend and its deleterious
effect on the rest of the world’s relations with Spain. If the average
educated American wanted to approach Spain afresh, he would
have to cleanse his mind of many illustrations imbedded there
without reason.

Felipe II has suffered much from the embroidery of the Black
Legend, and not all the wrong can be charged to aliens. One
nineteenth-century Spanish dramatist summarized Felipe thus:
‘Cowardly where his father was brave, cruel where the other was
generous, and fanatical where Carlos was religious, no crime
frightened Felipe when it was a matter of his security, his revenge,
or the misunderstood interests of his religion.’ His reputation
was especially damaged by Friedrich Schiller’s poetic drama

Don
Carlos
(1785), which portrays him as an insanely jealous king
who orders the murder of his own son because he thinks the boy
not only is turning Protestant but also is involved in an incestuous
relationship with his stepmother, Felipe’s third wife, Elizabeth of
Valois. Felipe comes out of this play poorly, and no better from
Verdi’s operatic version,
Don Carlos
(1867), in which he again
orders the murder of his son and a bloody auto-da-fé to celebrate
the death. But bit by bit the truth regarding Felipe is coming to
the fore. He did not launch the Inquisition, nor was his version
of it as harsh as that of his predecessors. He was a good husband
to Queen Mary of England, who was eleven years older than he
and his full cousin, and he did not adopt covert or immoral
strategies to trick England into becoming part of Spain. He was
a devout Catholic and naturally he tried to convert the people of
the Low Countries to his religion in accordance with the principle
of
cuius regio, eius religio
(whose country, his religion), and if the
Armada had been victorious he would surely have tried to bring
England back to the religion from which under Henry VIII and
Elizabeth I it had strayed. There is now grave doubt that Felipe
murdered his son out of sexual jealousy or suspicion of the boy’s
incipient Protestantism. Nor is there any proof that he ordered
the poisoning of his half brother, Don Juan of Austria, for fear of
dynastic rivalry; on the contrary, it was Felipe who generously
rescued his much younger brother from obscurity and gave him
positions of command. The other murders charged against him
do not withstand investigation, and he seems on balance to have
been a pedestrian but capable administrator, a just ruler and a
king who sought peace more often than war.

The one charge that can truly be laid against him is one which
the Black Legend did not make. Felipe ruined Spain. When he
was through with it the once-great kingdom was finished, and
over the sprawling empire lay the seal of death. The trouble started
with Carlos V and his siphoning off of Spain’s wealth into
bottomless European adventures, though if one had told the old
man this when he was pottering about the monastery at Yuste,
he would not have understood. ‘Look at the territory I have
brought Spain,’ he would have said, and the new map of Europe
would have borne him out; but what he should have been looking
at was manufacturing in Spain, agriculture, the decline of the
army, the encrustation of incompetence. That balance sheet was
dreadfully against him. He knew that something had gone wrong,
but he blamed the wrong forces. From Yuste he wrote: ‘Of all the
goods that arrive from the Americas at the port of Sevilla, ninety
percent goes into contraband that does the nation no good.’
Smugglers had not stolen Spain into poverty; Carlos himself had
done the job.