The Count-Duke of Olivares: The Statesman in an Age of Decline PDF
Preview The Count-Duke of Olivares: The Statesman in an Age of Decline
THE COUNT—DUKE OF OLIVARES 1. Diego de Velâzquez, Count-Duke oj Olivares on Horseback. THE COUNT—DUKE OF OLIVARES The Statesman in an Age of Decline J. H. ELLIOTT YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN AND LONDON • 1986 Copyright © 1986 by Yale University All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Designed by Gillian Malpass Set in Linotron Bembo and printed in Great Britain by The Bath Press, Avon Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Elliott, John Huxtable. The Count-Duke of Olivares Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1 . Olivares, Gaspar de Guzman, conde-duque de, 1587-1645. 2. Statesmen—Spain—Biography. 3. Spain— Politics and government—1621-1665. I. Title. DP185.9.06E45 1986 946'.05'0924 [b] 85-26450 ISBN 0-300-03390-7 CONTENTS Preface ix List of Illustrations, Tables and Maps xvii Maps xx List of Abbreviations xxvii PART I THE INHERITANCE (1587-1622) Prologue 3 I The Guzmán Inheritance 7 The House of Guzman 7 / The early years 15 'Now everything is mine’ 30 II The Zuniga Inheritance 47 The burden of Atlas 47 The end of the pax hispánica 55 Spain at war 65 The legacy of Zuniga 80 III The Reformist Inheritance 85 The ills of Castile 85 The pressure for reform 94 The new golden age? 101 The Junta Grande 115 PART II REFORM AND REPUTATION (1622-1627) IV Power and Resistance 131 The making of the Olivares regime 131 The resistance of the cities 146 The Count-Duke 162 vi CONTENTS V A Programme for Renewal 169 The rise of the ‘planet king9 169 Instruction in government 178 A programme for unity 191 VI ‘Philip the Great’ 203 The English dilemma 203 Alliance-building (1624—5) 214 The annus mirabilis (1625) 226 VII The Union of Arms 244 The project unveiled 244 \/The Crown of Aragon 255 The extension of the Union 266 VIII The First Minister 278 The new Spanish Seneca 278 The struggle with the system 295 The king's illness 308 PART III THE FAILURE OF REFORM (1627-1635) IX The Options Open 323 Grand designs 323 The Mantuan affair 337 Olivares and Spinola 346 X The Options Closed (1629-1631) 359 The French intervention 359 The Count-Duke at bay 372 Flanders and Italy 386 XI A Regime under Pressure 409 The great depression (1629-1631) 409 X Church, state and Cortes (1631-1632) 425 J Provincial disobedience (1632) 442 XII The Confrontation with France 457 Reopening the road 457 The brink of war 472 War aims and aspirations 486 CONTENTS vii PART IV THE LOSS OF REPUTATION (1635-1645) XIII Minister for War 499 Organizing for victory 499 Trouble in Portugal (1637) 519 The war in the balance (1638-1639) 532 XIV 1640 553 Malaise in the Monarchy 553 A 'general rebellion’ 571 The hand of God? 585 XV Foundering 600 A question of survival 600 Plots and counter-plots 613 The king on campaign 622 XVI Shipwreck 640 Fall from power 640 The defence of a ministry 651 The death of a tyrant 663 Epilogue 674 Bibliography 686 Index 709 PREFACE I first became aware of the Count-Duke of Olivares when, as a Cambridge undergraduate on my first visit to Spain, I came face to face with the great equestrian portrait by Velazquez in the Prado Museum. That imperious figure with his commanding manner, his swirling mustachios, his wary eyes, is not easy to ignore. Yet when I later came to consult the standard historical literature on seven teenth-century Europe, it seemed that I was wrong. References tended to be cursory and unilluminating, and he was given little more than a walk-on part in studies of the Thirty Years’ War. For a man in command of the destinies of Spain and its empire in the 1620’s and 1630’s, during its last two decades as the dominant world power, this looked a rather ungenerous treatment, even allowing foMhe fact that his career ended in failure and defeat. Subsequent inspection of works written by Spanish historians sug gested that he had fared little better at the hands of his compatriots. The seventeenth century, as the Golden Age of Spanish literature and art, has always attracted the attention of scholars, and has inspired work of high quality. But Spain’s other seventeenth century—the century of military defeat, political disaster and economic decline— has received on the whole a meagre treatment by the standards of the best European historical scholarship, and remains to this day rela tively unknown. Olivares, although Spain’s outstanding statesman of the century, shared this neglect. In the later nineteenth century Antonio Canovas del Castillo, the great statesman of Restoration Spain, discussed his career with intelligence and mounting sympathy in three works on Spain under the House of Austria,1 but was unable to do much more than suggest that his ideas and actions had all too often been misunderstood, and deserved more serious attention than they had yet been given. It took some fifty years for Cánovas’ call to be heeded. In 1936 the Count-Duke received his first and only biography to date. This 1 Historia de la decadencia española (Madrid, 1854), Bosquejo histórico de la Casa de Austria (Madrid, 1869), and Estudios del reinado de Eelipe IV, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1888). PREFACE X was the work, not of a trained historian, but of a brilliant physician and man of letters, Gregorio Marañón. His book, El Conde-Duque de Olivares, was essentially concerned with Olivares the man, and treated only summarily his ministerial policies and career. These were depicted as reflections of a personality whose dominant characteristic was la pasión de mandar—the passion to command—and in turn the personality was seen as the prisoner of a biological organism which Dr. Marañón dissected with professional skill. It is doubtful whether the particular psychoanalytical approach adopted by Marañón would now command very wide support, but his book remains a fascinating and often suggestive examination of a complex character, based on a range of archival and printed sources which place all future historians of the period in the author’s debt. Dr. Marañón’s Olivares, however, is primarily a psychoanalytical case-history that happens to have a seventeenth-century background, and it displays little awareness of the political and social realities of the age. It therefore seemed to me that there was room for a closer scrutiny of Olivares in his role as a Spanish and European statesman, and as the principal minister for twenty-two years of Philip IV of Spain. At the time when I first began historical research, I planned to devote myself to his reform programme of the 1620’s and his confrontation with what has come to be known in European historio graphy as the ‘decline of Spain’. This original plan was frustrated by the belated discovery that the Olivares archive had been destroyed by fire in the eighteenth century, and that the surviving documen tation appeared inadequate to undertake the kind of study I had in mind. I therefore turned instead to one of the most significant domes tic events during his tenure of power, the revolution of Catalonia in 1640 against his government, hoping in this way to illuminate at least one aspect of his political programme and the reactions that it provoked. In the resulting book, The Revolt of the Catalans, I suggested that the destruction or disappearance of the bulk of Olivares’ personal papers made it unlikely that he could ever be given the kind of detailed study that had been accorded his great, and ultimately successful, rival, Cardinal Richelieu. While engaged on other things, however, I continued to keep my eyes open for documentation on the Count- Duke and his period in office, in the feeling that he was a sufficiently important figure in the history of Spain and of Europe to deserve more comprehensive study. Spain’s great national archive at Simancas in fact contains a vast amount of documentation on Spanish foreign policy during the Olivares years, including many policy discussions by the Count-Duke himself. Since a substantial part of his time was occupied by foreign affairs, it seemed to me that this documentation
The list of books you might like
