Pure Renaissance
`Antonio Perez. By Gregorio Marafion. (Hollis and Carter. 42s.)
THERE is no better lesson in Spanish history than a visit to the .scorial, that great, gloomy, faintly dilapidated mausoleum of the later kings of Spain, where still an occasjonal modern offering (an iron laurel wreath, six feet across, for instance, from the Duce to the paviour of the Spanish people) is stowed below among those often tasteless tombstones ; that glory of the Counter-Reformation that is yet, as Marafion points ,out, the most Calvinist building in all Spain. Even the rather severe custodians and the lovely but neglected gardens, where that over-used word `nostalgic' seems appropriate, recall the unsympathetic though not vicious figure of Philip II, to many Englishmen not much more than the unloving husband of our own counter-reforming queen, Mary Tudor. Heir to the greatest empire of his day, the source not only of all power but of life itself, so that men banished the court died of grief for it, Philip's position was—without imagery—close to god-like ; for an act of his could no more be called evil than a natural disaster could be called an evil of God's, and the removal of his favour was, in every worldly but not only material sense, like a hell envisaged as the turning away of God. Yet, though no one saw it at the time ;:--except, with hopeful malice rather than political acumen, the English after the Armadas–under him began the" rapid disintegration inevitable in so vast and (except byan ever more strangling bureaucracy) insufficiently knit an empire, and in the moral ruin brought weekly by the ships of American gold. Tangled with this elaborate theory of kingship, and the noose-like government of a finicking king who maddeningly remembered every detail, was the fact of the Renaissance and the men it bred. True, much of Philip's kingship has been called Machiavellian, but there was this difference between his justification of immoral means for the good of the state and the purely political morality of II Principe, that to Philip his sanction was divine and he not only king but, with the Inquisition behind him and at times even beyond the jurisdiction of the Pope, God's chosen instrument to enforce the Counter- Reformation. At that odd court where the theatre was frowned on, and even the great Alba banished for a love affair of his son's, this missionary spirit was, not mixed, for it never compromised, but entwined with the spirit of the Renaissance," a passion for sensuality," as Marafion calls it, "a pagan love for the beauty of life, and a total lade of scruples to achieve these objectives."
'Pure Renaissance,' and educated at its centre, Italy, Antonio Perez, son of a cleric or, it was rumoured, of Philip's close friend the Prince of Eboli, was for ten years, as Secretary of State and Philip's confidant, the most powerful man in the empire ; until suddenly one night he and his supposed mistress, the one-eyed, black-patched and fascinating Princess of Eboli, were arrested. La Eboli spent the rest of her days in prison, but Perez, after being tortured, tried and condemned to death for a remarkable list of crimes that included the blackest of
for it was a direct affront to God—betrayal of the king's state secret0, escaped to spend the rest of his life intriguing to return. Henry I1 supported him for years, Elizabeth received him warily but well enough, Essex and the Bacons with enthusiasm. There is some evidence that he may have got into Love's Labour's Lost as Doh Adriano de Armado, and his misfortunes in the king's service inspired Lope de Vega's most famous and, to those interested in the Spanish notions of kingship, most interesting play, La Estrella de Sevilla. Today, liar, spy to right and left, unrepentant murderer, "the incarnation of Renaissance morality," says Marafion, "down to the last detail," his interest lies in the contrast between his consistency in purely personal ambition, and the consistency of his master, as detailed and as ruthless, in the struggle for Spain and for the dominance of the Catholic church.
Dr. Marafion, historian and physician, has given an immensely rich account of Spain at the crest—the breaking crest—of its fortunes. Documenting carefully, and using a great deal of so far unused material, he rejects a number of widely-held theories (that Pere; was in fact La Eboli's lover, for instance), and keeps always that historical perspective that sees even in the detail of the past reason if not justification for the future. That future, from a Spain now empireless but with no less of a counter-reforming zeal, and hardly less personal and absolute a ruler, he is admirably competent to judge. Most interesting is his analysis or Philip (shy, weak, and shuffling, rather than the prudent enigma of history), and his extra- ordinarily acute sighting of the beginnings of so much of the decadence of Spain since ; and most moving is his treatment of political exile for that, though back now in Spain as Perez never got back, he has known, and in the same places as Perez, at first hand.
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