The Sun Over Breda

To the soldier, wounds are but misery,adding nothing to his true fame,nor does serving add glory to his name:naught but a chimera to warm his reverie….

Although, what can I say about these things, esteemed captain, that Y.M. does not recognize to the fullest extent.May God keep you in his care always, my friend.Yours,

Fran. de Quevedo Villegas

P.S. You are sorely missed on the steps of San Felipe and at performances of Lope’s plays. I also forgot to tell you that I received a letter from a certain lad whom you may remember, the last of an unfortunate family. Apparently, after attending, in his way, to unfinished matters in Madrid, he was able to make his way to the Indies under an assumed name. I imagined that you might be pleased to hear that news.

3. THE MUTINY

Later, after the bull had bolted from the pen, there was great tattle and prattling about whether anyone had seen it coming, but the pure truth is that no one did anything to prevent it. The spark that set everything off was not the Flanders winter, which was not especially severe that year. There was no frost or snow, although the rains were a major hardship aggravated by the lack of food, the diminished population in the villages, and our responsibilities around Breda. But those things all come with the profession, and Spanish troops could endure the travails of war with patience. Wages, however, were a different matter. Many veterans had known poverty following their discharge and the reforms brought about by the Twelve Years’ Truce with the Dutch; they knew in their bones that service in the name of our lord and king demanded a high price when it came to dying and offered little reward when it came to surviving. And I have already noted on this subject that more than a few soldiers, whether they were old, mutilated, or with long campaign records stashed in the tubular containers they carried, had to beg in the streets and squares of our mean-spirited Spain, where again and again the same people amassed wealth while those who had given their health, blood, and life to preserve the true religion, the estates, and the wealth of our monarch remained buried and forgotten. There was hunger in Europe, in Spain, and in the military. The tercios had been waging war against the entire world for a long century and were beginning to not know precisely why, whether it was to defend indulgences or to enable the Court of Madrid to continue believing, amidst its balls and soirées, that it still ruled the world.

These men no longer had even the comfort of considering themselves professional because they weren’t being paid, and there is nothing like hunger to undercut discipline and conscience. So the matter of arrears complicated the situation in Flanders; for if that winter some tercios, including those of allied nations, twice received half their wages, the Cartagena tercio never saw so much as an escudo. The reasons for that are not within my ken, although at the time it was attributed to bad administration of the finances of our colonel, don Pedro de la Daga, and to some obscure affair of lost or appropriated monies. The reality is that several of the fifteen Spanish, Italian, Burgundian, Walloon, and German tercios maintaining the tight circle around Breda under the direct supervision of don Ambrosio Spínola had some incentive, some hope, but ours, scattered in small advance postings outside the city, counted itself among the troops placed on a long financial fast by the king. It was creating a dangerous atmosphere, for as Lope wrote in El asalto de Mastrique (“The Attack on Maastricht”):

As long as a man is not yet deadalways give him drink and bread;is there naught but plodding onendlessly, with all hope gone?I have honored that tattered banner,But no man should suffer in this manner,So, for God or king, hear what I say,I’ll not go hungry another day!