Free Empire of Blue Water by Stephan Talty

to power, the giveback seemed inadvisable. Merchants were doing a busy trade with Jamaica, and they were furious that he’d think of returning the island to the Spanish. From an island full of renegades and drunks, Charles began to see Jamaica in a new light: as “the navel of the West Indies,” “a window on the power of Spain.” Philip, on the other hand, kept bidding up the price for the return of it; he was desperate to regain his inheritance.
    But the Portuguese bribe, and the promise of more to come, won the day. Charles would keep Jamaica and accept Catherine; in 1662 he announced his engagement. Catherine brought not only her plain and retiring person but also Bombay, Tangier, and £300,000 (approximately $61.5 million in today’s dollars) to the union. The announcement caused a “great passion” in Madrid; the breach with England was now official. There were even rumors that the fleet Charles sent to retrieve his bride would double the insult by intercepting the galleons from the Americas and ransacking them. It wasn’t true, but the gossip only pointed up Spain’s nervousness. The empire seemed under attack on every front.
    Having decided on holding Jamaica, for the next ten years Charles did little to govern it. When the Council of Jamaica shipped back a copy of its new laws for approval, the document was mislaid—for a decade. The “fit of absent mind” continued; policies often shifted with the winds and with whether a pro-or anti-Spanish adviser was in favor in Charles’s court. The pirates and their Jamaican allies would have a relatively free hand to roam the Caribbean, with one edgy eye on London but with a remarkably free hand to strike at will.

    Charles’s snatching back of the Jamaican offer was another disappointment for Philip IV. His torments only intensified as he grew older and in 1661 were capped by one overriding concern: a male heir. If he did not produce one, on his death Europe would be plunged into a war of succession and his empire would be carved up by his enemies, his family’s legacy scattered to the winds. Philip felt that by denying him a son, God was mocking him, the great seducer, the man who had illegitimate children stashed all over Madrid. How better to illustrate that fact than the fates of the royal sons, starting with Baltasar Carlos, who had died one after the other? How could his bastard sons thrive while his heirs withered and died? It was clearly a message: God would not allow any product of Philip’s legitimate pleasures to survive, as punishment for his darker ones. To say, as one writer has, that Philip was “possessed of the greatest capacity for sexual pleasure recorded of any modern monarch” is unprovable, but he’d certainly rank high—and yet not one of his heirs had made it to adulthood. In 1661 his last surviving legitimate son lay dying.
    In the early days of that January, the monarchy was desperately striving to save the last boy, three-year-old Felipe Próspero. One religious leader had led a pilgrimage of devout Spaniards to the convent of the Barefoot Nuns, praying for the boy’s survival. The bodies of revered saints were moved from sacred site to sacred site in an attempt to appease God; the incorruptible corpse of San Isidro, whose body miraculously had never decayed, was laid beside Felipe’s crib, as were the ashes of San Diego Alcalá. But it was all in vain. On January 11, the boy passed away and plunged his father into fresh despair. Philip wrote to a friend, his mind divided between two calamities:
                      
    I assure you that what has most exhausted me, much more than the loss of my son, is to see clearly that I have vexed God and that he sent this punishment to castigate my sins. Pray to Our Lord that He may open my eyes, that I may perform His holy will in all things…. There is nothing new in the English situation.
                      
    There was only one hope left: Months before,