Don Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, better known as the Duke of Lerma, is not a familiar name to those interested in the annals of power and politics. The Duke of Lerma, the favorite (El Favorito o Valido) and unofficial prime minister of Philip III of Spain from 1598 to 1618, was, however, in his own time, both in Spain and throughout Europe, quite famous. And infamous. He was respected, feared, attacked, satirized, gossiped about, eulogized, and even dramatized in plays such as The Great Favourite or the Duke of Lerma, written in 1668 by the English playwright Sir Robert Howard

Feros, Antonio

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University of PennsylvaniaScholarlyCommonsDepartmental Papers (History) Department of History3-2008The King’s FavoriteAntonio FerosUniversity of Pennsylvania, aferos@sas.upenn.eduFollow this and additional works at: http://repository.upenn.edu/history_papersPart of the European History Commons, and the History of Art, Architecture, and ArchaeologyCommonsThis paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. http://repository.upenn.edu/history_papers/4For more information, please contact repository@pobox.upenn.edu.Recommended CitationFeros, A. (2008). The King’s Favorite. Humanities, 29 (2), Retrieved from http://repository.upenn.edu/history_papers/4The King’s FavoriteAbstractDon Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, better known as the Duke of Lerma, is not a familiar name tothose interested in the annals of power and politics. The Duke of Lerma, the favorite (El Favorito o Valido)and unofficial prime minister of Philip III of Spain from 1598 to 1618, was, however, in his own time, both inSpain and throughout Europe, quite famous. And infamous. He was respected, feared, attacked, satirized,gossiped about, eulogized, and even dramatized in plays such as The Great Favourite or the Duke of Lerma,written in 1668 by the English playwright Sir Robert Howard.KeywordsArt History, Machiavelli, Medieval Spain, Politics, Seventeenth Century, The PrinceDisciplinesEuropean History | History | History of Art, Architecture, and ArchaeologyThis journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/history_papers/4https://www.neh.gov/print/3432 1/5Published on National Endowment for the Humanities (https://www.neh.gov)Home > Humanities > Back Issues > March/April 2008 > Printer-friendlyThe King’s FavoriteBy Antonio FerosDon Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, better known as the Duke of Lerma, is not a familiarname to those interested in the annals of power and politics. The Duke of Lerma, the favorite (ElFavorito o Valido) and unofﬁcial prime minister of Philip III of Spain from 1598 to 1618, was,however, in his own time, both in Spain and throughout Europe, quite famous. And infamous. Hewas respected, feared, attacked, satirized, gossiped about, eulogized, and even dramatized in playssuch as The Great Favourite or the Duke of Lerma, written in 1668 by the English playwright SirRobert Howard.A major patron of the arts (his patronage is reﬂected in “El Greco to Velazquez: Art During the Reignof Philip III” this spring at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and this fall at the Nasher Museum atDuke University) as well as a major political ﬁgure, Lerma transformed the way politics, power, andart merged. Although he did not have a brilliant political mind, his strategies for attaining,conserving, and exercising power were imitated by many of his most famous contemporaries: theDuke of Buckingham in England, Cardinal Richelieu in France, and the Count Duke of Olivares inSpain.During his ascendancy, the government implemented a series of measures aimed at consolidatingthe power of the king, reforming the institutional machinery, and confronting the disastrous ﬁnancialsituation that Philip III had inherited from his father. Like many of his contemporaries, Lerma realizedthat the monarchy was ﬁnancially exhausted after decades of international war and, consequently,unable to maintain its role as Europe’s policeman. He encouraged the prudent adoption of a paciﬁstinternational outlook, which translated into the consolidation of peace with France in 1598, a peacetreaty with England in 1604, and a twelve-year truce with the Dutch Republic in 1609. Notably,Lerma is associated with the most notorious policy of his time: the expulsion from the Iberianpeninsula of approximately 300,000 Moriscos, the Spanish population of Arab descent, between1609 and 1614.The other major point of biographical interest is that Lerma changed the way royal favorites wereviewed. And his example continues to shed light on the debate over who truly rules—the monarch orThe King’s Favoritehttps://www.neh.gov/print/3432 2/5the one who has his ear.In 1528, the famous sixteenth-century Italian writer and diplomat Baldassare Castiglione published abook that became an immediate best seller and an enduring political text, Il cortegiano (TheCourtier). Castiglione’s book concerns many topics, but his main goal was to help courtiers beeffective inside increasingly sophisticated royal courts. Early European political power was won andmaintained by arms. Monarchs constantly needed to defend their dynastic rights and to controlarmed factions that opposed their rule.In the new monarchies of the Renaissance, however, power and inﬂuence could be obtained bybecoming—to use an Italian saying of the time—“patrone della orecchia del re” (patron of the king’sear). In order to exploit such power, courtiers needed all the virtues and qualities discussed inCastiglione’s book. These included excellent lineage, external beauty, good appearance andmanners, education, and so on. With these weapons at his disposal, the new courtier was ready todevote himself entirely to the service of his king.A perfect courtier, Castiglione wrote, should “love and adore the prince he serves over all humans,using all his will, virtues and arts to please his master.” But all his qualities and loyalty were fornothing if the courtier was not able “to gain the love of his prince” and by doing so “to become hisfavorite” and main adviser.Lerma was a masterful practitioner of Castiglione’s teachings. Born in the 1550s, Don FranciscoGómez de Sandoval y Rojas belonged to a family that from the ﬁfteenth century had occupied a lowplace in the hierarchy of nobles. During the reigns of Charles V (who reigned from 1516 to 1556)and Philip II (1556 to 1598), the Sandoval family attempted to get as close as possible to thereigning monarchs by ﬁlling various ofﬁces in the royal household. As reward, they hoped forsubstantial properties to compensate them for lands lost several generations back. Their successwas very limited. By the 1570s, Lerma, the family’s main heir, possessed one house and estate, agreat deal of debt, and little inﬂuence.The opportunity to change his status came in the 1580s when Prince Philip, the future Philip III,began to assert his role in court politics. From this time on, Don Francisco de Rojas perfectlyunderstood what to do to gain the favor and love of his young master: “visit, serve, suffer, makehimself visible, and persevere,” as the Spanish humanist Antonio de Guevara wrote in 1539. Thesame writer urged would-be courtiers “to ﬁnd out the prince’s inclinations. A courtier needs to knowif the prince likes music, hunting, ﬁshing, and the style of his riding, and once he discovers theprince’s preferences he himself must love what the prince loves and follow what the prince follows.”These shared preferences are vitally important, Guevara insisted, because princes are human and“sometimes love more those courtiers who share their own preferences than those who labor hardon their behalf.” Guevara’s advice left no room for misunderstanding: “Wise Castilians should keepin mind the following principle: everything the king likes should be considered good, while everythinghe dislikes should be considered bad.”Lerma pursued this strategy with numerous gifts and unending adulation, often relying on assistancefrom key servants of Prince Philip. Despite attempts by other courtiers to thwart his advances,Lerma demonstrated a remarkable ability to overcome obstruction and a facility for arranging secretcommunication with the prince and ﬁnding ways to place himself in his presence. The success ofLerma’s strategy became clear as soon as Philip III inherited the crown in 1598, and publicly namedLerma his most trusted counselor and favorite.Lerma thus became the ﬁrst of the so-called “great favorites” who, during the seventeenth century,dominated the political scenes in Spain, France, England, and the Dutch Republic. He was the defacto prime minister of Philip III of Spain, and he retained his prestige until October 1618, anastonishingly long period compared with the tenure enjoyed by previous favorites. Only a few ﬁguresof inﬂuence—the Count Duke of Olivares in Spain (the royal favorite between 1621 and 1643) andThe King’s Favoritehttps://www.neh.gov/print/3432 3/5Cardinal Richelieu in France (Louis XIII’s favorite between 1623 and 1640)—matched Lerma’sendurance.But in order to transform the king’s favor into power, inﬂuence, and wealth, Lerma and his allies hadto challenge contemporary perceptions of royal favorites. Writers like Castiglione viewed favorites asbeneﬁcial to the entire court. Others felt they were dangerous to both the monarch and thecommunity at large.According to this line of thought, the requisite of peace and stability was a strong monarch who ruledby himself. Strong monarchs were, or should be, natural leaders who were not reluctant, indeedwere determined, to be in full control of the decision-making process. They consulted, perhaps, withtheir loyal advisers, but always took control of their own destiny and that of their subjects. Famously,Niccolò Machiavelli insisted that strong and durable states could only be created by strong masters.“It is an infallible rule,” he wrote in The Prince, “that a prince who is not himself wise cannot besoundly advised unless he happens to put himself in the hands of a man who is very able andcontrols everything. Then he could certainly be well advised, but he would not last long becausesuch a governor would soon deprive him of his state.”Machiavelli understood politics as a zero-sum game and the political world as a dramatic,sometimes tragic, combination of conspiracy and violent confrontation. The king who had a favoritewould thus give the impression that he was not fully in control, a situation that could only result inthe fall, sometimes the death, of the king or his favorite, or of both of them. The sixteenth-centuryEnglish playwright Christopher Marlowe displayed complete understanding of the Machiavellianpolitical perspective in his vigorous and tragic drama Edward II, written in the same decade in whichLerma rose to power.Many other sixteenth-century political commentators—the French Jean Bodin, the Flemish JustusLipsius, and the Spanish Juan de Mariana, among others—emphasized the dangers posed by aroyal favorite, the “king’s shadow” as he was referred to at the time. According to these authors, theking’s subjects would never accept a monarch who depended on a single counselor. The very logicof monarchy forbade such favoritism. “For as the supreme God,” wrote Bodin, “cannot make anotherGod equal to himself . . . so we may also say that the prince, who is for us God’s image, cannotmake a subject equal to himself.”Then, as now, the goal of public ofﬁce was service to the well-being of the community. From thisperspective, a majority of political commentators believed that participation in decision-makingshould be reserved for those with clearly deﬁned ofﬁcial roles. Public ofﬁcials—even the monarchhimself—should have a clear set of political and moral responsibilities as well as limits to theirauthority. Anyone with informal power would be uncontrollable, politically unaccountable, andtherefore dangerous. Worse, given their closeness to the king, royal favorites might very wellconvince the king that his power to decide matters of state and his power over his subjects wereunlimited. Royal favorites, it was feared, would persuade the king, as Juan de Mariana wrote, that“royal power is greater than the laws and the community, that the king is the owner of his subjects’property, and that everything, including the law, depends only on the monarch’s will.”From the beginning, Lerma and his allies attempted to counter these anxious criticisms. Theyinsisted that a royal favorite would beneﬁt both the monarch and the community. Lerma became anew kind of favorite and inaugurated a new type of favoritism. Though he, like previous favorites,owed his preeminence to the king’s personal favor, Lerma was careful to present himself as a“public ofﬁcial.”Lerma justiﬁed his role and his power as an opportunity to remedy a political system showing signsof institutional and political sclerosis. Spain’s acquisition of new territories and the increasingconfrontations with other European powers meant that the monarch had many more responsibilitiesthan he could possibly attend to. Lerma was not alone in claiming that a man in the king’sThe King’s Favoritehttps://www.neh.gov/print/3432 4/5conﬁdence, a favorite, could help his master manage public affairs, serve as the king’srepresentative to other institutions and to the various kingdoms, and protect the monarch from hissubjects’ inevitable complaints.All of the evidence indicates that Lerma and his successors played a truly political role, and that—contrary to Machiavelli’s predictions—they did not try to weaken or usurp the king’s powers. Fewexplained better than the French monarch Louis XIV the complexities associated with the role of afavorite as de facto prime minister. In his Memoirs, the king conﬁrmed the old view of the favorite asa threat to the king’s ability and capacity to rule. “As to the persons who were to support me in mywork,” he wrote, “I resolved above all not to have a prime minister, and if my successors take myadvice, my son, the name will forever be abolished in France, there being nothing more shamefulthan to see on the one hand all the functions and on the other the mere title of king.”Elsewhere, however, Louis XIV took a stance similar to the one defended by Lerma and hisassociates: “If he [the prime minister] despoils you of part of your glory,” at the same time “heunburdens you of your thorniest cares. The interest of his own greatness engages him to sustainyours. He wishes to preserve your rights as a possession that he enjoys in your name, and if heshares your diadem with you, he at least works to leave it intact to your descendants.”Royal favorites in general, and Lerma in particular, did indeed “share” the royal diadem, or crown,with their masters by becoming actors in the mise-en-scène of the monarchy, guiding the royal andcourtly ceremonials, and playing a pivotal part in the celebration and promotion of the arts. BeforeLerma, other than royalty, there were few signiﬁcant art collectors, and few enjoyed prominence inthe royal ceremonies that took place at court and in a nation’s capital cities. During the reign ofPhilip II, royal ceremonials lacked splendor or continuity. Philip II held no regard for the power ofceremonies and public representation, displays which he viewed as inconsequential. Philip III was amore public king. During the ﬁrst ﬁfteen years of his reign, there were more masques, royal entries,and public ceremonies celebrating the king and the monarchy than in the entire forty-two years ofPhilip II’s reign.The presentation of the king as a commanding and sacred personage, the epitome of royal power,consumed the energies of Philip III’s intimate servants from the beginning of his reign, andespecially the energies of Lerma, who became a kind of modern “minister of culture.” According toone of his contemporaries, Lerma inaugurated “a new style of grandeur" by employing art, pomp,and pageantry to display his own power and position. At the same time, he did not fail to emphasizethe power of his master and the importance of the monarchical system.Lerma inaugurated a historical trend in Europe that resulted in the transformation of the favorite intoa prominent cultural and artistic patron. He became the most important artistic patron of his time,surpassing all others at the Spanish court, including the king himself. Lerma undertook an immenseprogram of palace-building, both for his own family and for the king. His activities were by no meanslimited to art and architecture; he also became an important patron of letters and the most importantpatron of the theater during the ﬁrst decades of the seventeenth century.More important still, following the example set by Spanish and other European monarchs, Lermacollected approximately ﬁfteen hundred paintings between 1599 and 1611, making his collection oneof the largest ever assembled. It also made Lerma the ﬁrst ever nonroyal art collector of note inearly modern Europe. Many of the paintings, sculptures, and objects of art he collected orcommissioned he donated to the royal collections, to convents, and to churches throughout Spain.Lerma’s tenure as prime minister was not without problems or free of critics. He and some of hismost prominent allies (“los favoritos del favorito” or the “favorite’s favorites,” as they were known),men like Alonso Ramírez de Prado, Pedro Franqueza, and Rodrigo Calderón, were accused ofcorruption, of using their power and ofﬁces to enrich themselves, their relatives, and theirassociates. Lerma and his associates were also criticized for their failure to solve the ﬁnancial andThe King’s Favoritehttps://www.neh.gov/print/3432 5/5economic crisis of the monarchy: In 1607, Philip III declared the monarchy bankrupt. Furthermore,between 1598 and 1618, despite the cessation of major international conﬂict, the public debtdoubled. Lerma’s critics attacked his paciﬁst stance, claiming that Spain had been weakened andwas now an easy target for its many enemies.More damaging still, Lerma was accused of usurping the king’s power and authority, of subvertingpublic authority and using it as a tool to serve himself, his relatives, and his allies. In October 1618,the mounting criticism resulted in his fall from power and his expulsion from the court. After 1621,Lerma, who had risen to such distinction that in 1618 he’d been appointed a cardinal, had to endurea steady campaign of denigration as well as the loss of all the rents, possessions, and many of thetitles he had received during the reign of Philip III. On May 17, 1625, he died in his house inValladolid, impoverished and viliﬁed, accused by some of his contemporaries and modern historiansof initiating Spain’s decline.Source URL: https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2008/marchapril/feature/the-king%E2%80%99s-favoriteLinks:[1] https://www.neh.gov/humanities/author/antonio-feros[2] https://www.neh.gov/ﬁles/humanities/articles/peter_paul_rubens_duke_of_lerma.jpg[3] https://www.neh.gov/humanities/tag/art-history[4] https://www.neh.gov/tags/machiavelli[5] https://www.neh.gov/tags/medieval-spain[6] https://www.neh.gov/humanities/tag/politics[7] https://www.neh.gov/humanities/tag/seventeenth-century[8] https://www.neh.gov/tags/the-prince

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