There were thirty-two thousand Dominican and Franciscan
friars. In the diocese of Seville alone there were fourteen thousand
chaplains. There was a panic in the land. Every one was rushing to get
into holy orders. The Church had all the bread. Men must be monks or
starve. Zelus domus tuae come-dit me, writes the British ambassador,
detailing these facts.
We must remember that this was the age when the vast modern movement of
inquiry and investigation was beginning. Bacon was laying in England the
foundations of philosophy, casting with his prophetic intelligence the
horoscope of unborn sciences. Descartes was opening new vistas of
thought to the world. But in Spain, while the greatest names of her
literature occur at this time, they aimed at no higher object than to
amuse their betters. Cervantes wrote Quixote, but he died in a monk's
hood; and Lope de Vega was a familiar of the Inquisition. The sad story
of the mind of Spain in this momentous period may be written in one
word, - everybody believed and nobody inquired.
The country sank fast into famine and anarchy. The madness of the monks
and the folly of the king expelled the Moors in 1609, and the loss of a
million of the best mechanics and farmers of Spain struck the nation
with a torpor like that of death. In 1650 Sir Edward Hyde wrote that
"affairs were in huge disorder." People murdered each other for a loaf
of bread. The marine perished for want of sailors. In the stricken land
nothing flourished but the rabble of monks and the royal authority.
This is the curious fact. The Church and the Crown had brought them to
this misery, yet better than their lives the Spaniards loved the Church
and the Crown. A word against either would have cost any man his life in
those days. The old alliance still hung together firmly. The Church
bullied and dragooned the king in private, but it valued his despotic
power too highly ever to slight it in public. There was something
superhuman about the faith and veneration with which the people, and the
aristocracy as well, regarded the person of the king. There was somewhat
of gloomy and ferocious dignity about Philip II. which might easily
bring a courtier to his knees; but how can we account for the equal
reverence that was paid to the ninny Philip III., the debauched trifler
Philip IV., and the drivelling idiot Charles II.?
Yet all of these were invested with the same attributes of the divine.
Their hands, like those of Midas, had the gift of making anything they
touched too precious for mortal use. A horse they had mounted could
never be ridden again. A woman they had loved must enter a nunnery when
they were tired of her.
