THE KING'S HYBRID INTERIORITYTop

In 1632, Francisco de Quevedo gave to the press his translation of Virgilio Malvezzi's best-selling biography Il Romulo. In his preface, Quevedo greeted Malvezzi's book, originally published in Bologna in 1629, as a milestone in the study of interiority. With a sharp and insightful wit, Malvezzi had penetrated “the unknown interior” of Rome's first king, deciphering intentions where earlier historians had seen only actions. “Those who came before were historians of his life, our author [is] a historian of his soul”. Quevedo's conclusion is straightforward: “The Marquis writes of the prince, the others of the man” (Quevedo, 1993: 109; see Blanco, 2004; Delage, 2013).

Quevedo's preface performs as a manifesto of the genre of politically oriented biographies (or vidas particulares) for which Malvezzi's book opened a path. It equates the king's “unknown interior” with a space inhabited by intentions and policies that succeed as long as they remain concealed from the outside.

A few years later, a pamphlet usually attributed to Quevedo himself represented the interiority of Cardinal Richelieu, the favorite of Louis XIII of France, as a machine that unceasingly regurgitates sedition, plots and policies. Visita y anatomía de la cabeza del eminentísimo cardenal Armando Richeleu (published in Riandière La Roche, 2010) reports the exploration of the favorite's head by the famous anatomist Andrea Vesalio. To perform the dissection of Richelieu's mind, he “dismembers ... the mental processes that constitute the most intimate part of the individual” (Fernández, 2003: 216). Richelieu's “cavernous interiority” contains exclusively the works of the statesman (229). It is made up of a series of infernal chambers where all the humors have mounted to the head, releasing a chain of connected arguments, aimed at deposing the king and occupying the throne.

Quevedo's two examples make us wonder whether or not there is anything other than politics in the king's (or the favorite's) “unknown interior”. In a majority of cases, the answer is affirmative, and the dual nature (that is, political and private) of king and favorite becomes central to seventeenth-century literature on privanza.

A manuscript of unknown author dating back to the early days of Philip IV's reign, entitled Discurso sobre los privados y cómo ha de gobernarse el príncipe con ellos, discerned two personae in the king, one public, the other private. The author (who witnessed with suspicion the preeminence of a single man by the king's side) pointed out that different kinds of privados existed according to whether they established friendship with the public or the private persona in the sovereign.[4] The same distinction had been evoked some years earlier when Luis de Zapata differentiated Charles V's secretary and “friend of the king”, Francisco de los Cobos, from “the man's friend”, Luis de Ávila (Zapata, 1859: 185; also Feros, 1995: 32). As friends, both were “half of [the emperor's] heart”, and had a part in his secrets. However, it seems plausible to think that the two of them had access to slightly different aspects of the emperor's interior, and that his secrets were not the same for the one and for the other. In 1621, Philip IV started reigning with the same division of privanza. Baltasar de Zúñiga dispatched business, while his nephew, Olivares, held a more private stance, intent only, as Matías de Novoa scornfully laid it at the time, on dressing and undressing the king (Tomás y Valiente, 1982: 12). Upon Zúñiga's death, which took place some months later, Olivares became a favorite of the two sorts.[5] Olivares certainly portrayed himself as a minister and a facilitator of business (Vincent-Cassy, 2010: 40-41, 49). However, when the royal preacher and Jesuit Agustín de Castro encouraged Olivares' nephew and future successor Luis Méndez de Haro to take the position of privado left vacant in 1643, he meant access “not only to [the position] of the minister, but to the grace and the personal favor with His Majesty” (Negredo del Cerro, 2006: 115).

José Laínez, Augustinian, royal preacher, and a panegyrist of Olivares, wrote in El privado christiano (published in 1641, but probably written two decades earlier; see Negredo del Cerro, 2006: 180-181) that “the superior minister has to be one”, for friendship, much like love, cannot be shared (Laínez, 1641: 56; Malvezzi, 2013: 293 for the same point). The boundaries between public and private were far less distinct in early modern courts than they are today (Feros, 1995: 28). In the worlds of Lerma, Uceda and Olivares, the sovereign was not only the head of the body politic, but also the source of the chain of “dependence”, from which favor and rewards flowed down the pipes (caños) of different individuals, linked to one another by relations of clientelism (Sieber, 1998: passim). Seeking advancement (“pretender”) defined the path in politics' cursus honorum, and this happened thanks to the familiarity or privanza with someone in a position of power, which involved becoming his or her dependent, hopefully finding someone who would in turn depend upon us. When in 1587 Alonso de Barros' Filosofía cortesana moralizada transformed the court and “the matter of pretender“ (Barros, 1588: 10) into a table game, the player falling in the square marked as “the death of the protector” was condemned to start anew (38; see also Feros, 1998: 24). If politics was played at a personal level, privanza took place “at the threshold of the private and the public sphere” (Bravo, 2012: n. p.). The intersection between personal attachment and interest accounts for the displacement from the ideal friendship conceptualized in Marcus T. Cicero's De amicitia or Michel de Montaigne's De l'amitié to “the common friendship” between patron and client described in Baldassare Castiglione's Book of the Courtier (Feros, 1995: 28-29).[6] Blurring the distinction just evoked, the notion of privanza pervaded the entire spectrum of social relations. As noted in 1609 by Giulio Antonio Brancalasso's book on courtly life, it might take place between husband and wife, between lord and vassal, or between God and the king (Brancalasso, 1609a: 83).

The foundation of public life on inherently private relations of privanza made it difficult for political writers to separate the ruler from the man. Despite their efforts to demarcate categories, when Lerma became privado of Philip III, he was seen as a friend of both the king and the individual.[7] Like Uceda and Olivares after him, Lerma appeared to many as someone who was admitted to secrets that escaped everyone else—and this at a time in which secrecy's role in government was openly acknowledged (Stolleis, 1980: 5-6).

Despite the general agreement about the dual interiority of political agents, we hardly find two identical visions of the friendship between king and privado, and, consequently, of the access to one another's interiority. The emphasis on political or on personal issues, and the critical or propagandistic position of each author are only some of the variables that define widely diverging conceptions of the intimacy that takes place at the peak of the pyramid of government. As a result, the inner self of both king and favorite becomes variably relevant, and differently imagined.

SPIES OF THE KING'S HEART AND SOULTop

Celebrated as the king's friend, the favorite appears to the eyes of some authors as fortunate in the possession of his heart. Yet, not everyone conceived for king and privado a relation of flawless sincerity, in the awareness that hybrid and composite individualities such as those in power did not easily lend themselves to act without precaution—not even among friends. In line with this, Fernando Rodríguez de la Flor branded claims of absolute transparency and trust among the hearts of individuals as characteristic of earlier days of “naïf humanism”, and utterly alien to the days of Lerma or Olivares (Rodríguez de la Flor, 2005: 23).

The varying degree of resistance signified by political writings when it comes to concede that the favorite may see into the heart of the king is worth consideration. It results, for the most part, from different ways of understanding the interplay of friendship and politics according to authors who hold conflicting ideas on the way human beings interrelate in a given community, especially when holding office.

The favorite or privado is “the one with the keys of [the king's] heart”, asserted the Augustinian friar Pedro de Maldonado in his Tratado del perfecto privado (1609).[8] Laínez, who partly plagiarized Maldonado's treatise, used similar terms (Laínez, 1641: 9, 40), adding that the favorite is “a half of the king's heart” (4; for the plagiarism, see Tomás y Valiente, 1982: 124).

Laínez claimed that favorites were sent by God (Laínez, 1619: ¶^7v). Relentless in his defense of Olivares, in El privado cristiano (1641) and El Daniel cortesano (1644) he described the biblical characters of Joseph and Daniel as paradigms of privanza. Never could a king rule without a favorite with whom he had “familiarity”, performing as “the key to his mysteries, and the archive of his secrets” (Laínez, 1641: 9). Laínez pictured a king who shared everything with his favorite. There were no barriers between him and the man whom he admitted to his mysteries –and who protected them, in turn, from the sight of others. Covarrubias' 1611 dictionary defined “misterio” as a secret. In origin, mysteries were secrets of a sacred kind (sacrum arcanum). However, they became soon a common way to refer to the secrets of the state, and appear defined, generally speaking, as “anything locked under a veil—of a factual kind, or made with words, or with another kind of signs” (Covarrubias, 1611: 551r).

Occasionally, a favorite might find no other way to the king's mysteries than deciphering the signs he leaves behind. This was partially the case described in Tratado del privado perfecto, a work by Baltasar de Zúñiga's chaplain Matteo Renzi, dated 1622 (for the attribution, see García García, 1997: 119). While for Laínez the king did not need to be seduced, ready as he was to simply welcome the favorite as a gift from God, Renzi was highly concerned about the unsteadiness of the favorite's access to the king's love and interiority. Renzi's privado resembles that of Laínez when he is described as “a sort of treasury of [the king's] secrets” and the one “whom always reaches the notice of [the king's] soul and deliberations”. Yet, such stage represents only the instable end of a process that also involved, in a less optimistic tone, a fierce struggle to penetrate the king's interior in search of his mood and feelings. The favorite, Renzi writes, obtains his lord's affection by “carving [favor] into his soul and his heart” through sleepless nights in which he will relieve the king of business or concern. He will need to study the king's psyche.[9] It is as though the king opened his heart to the one who not only showed willingness to help, but who also had the ability to guess his inner thoughts and feelings from the outside in the first place. To obtain (and to maintain) the privilege of privanza and receive his confessions, a search into the king's interiority has to come first.

The introspection of the king's soul may be a source of anxiety for those aspiring to privanza. Renzi suggested that acuity and a keen eye were of no avail when the king was so voluble that, as it was the case with Perseus of Macedon, “not even himself could get a grasp of his thought”.[10] Generally speaking, however, in order to know “the nature and habits of princes”, and grasp what they had in mind, there were some signs (algunas señales) that might allow the favorite to detect the inner motions of the soul.[11] The favorite does as physicians do. “Unable to see the secret humors that are inside the human body, they get to know them from the outside thanks to the heartbeats, the urine, and the effects that result from the illness”.[12] It was a method that (much like medicine) looked for causes in the light of symptoms or effects. Renzi's program had precedents. It was reminiscent of Baltasar Álamos de Barrientos' “contingency-based science” (ciencia de contingentes), offered to Lerma in Álamos' Tácito español, a book partly written in the days of Philip II but only published in 1614. For Álamos (following Francesco Guicciardini and Justus Lipsius) the ability to infer intentions from actions and behavior (as with a doctor who sees the illness in the symptoms it produces) was the talent that made Tacitus the greatest historian. He wrote “with such great knowledge of human inclinations and nature” that “there is no effect or result originating in the soul that he fails to find out” (Álamos de Barrientos, 1614: †1r-†5v). Álamos' method is fairly representative of the fashion of “Tacitism” popularized in late sixteenth-century European political and social theory, interested in looking “inside” political actors in search of answers. For Álamos, “psychological penetration is the key to prudence ... and Tacitus epitomizes it” (Davis, 2001: 70). Juan Antonio de Vera y Zúñiga (a reader of Lipsius and Álamos, soon to become Olivares' hechura, his friend and protégé) summarized the importance of studying the interior of others in his successful handbook for ambassadors, published in 1620, in which he stated that the world had always governed itself following the same principles and that, if one compared several cases separated by millennia, these would appear “different in times and names, but not in cunning” (Vera y Zúñiga, 1620: 94r). Seventeenth-century courts such as Madrid, or Valladolid for the period 1601-1606, were populated by what Jerónimo Alonso de Salas Barbadillo called in 1634 “judges”, “speculative wits who, stopping for contemplation of the exterior, and visible works, become curious spies of human hearts and souls”. For them, “every man is a book ... and the most insignificant movement in a face becomes eloquent speech” (Salas Barbadillo, 1753: 1-2).[13]

Devoted to deciphering the king's every thought and feeling, Renzi's privado has been qualified of “Tacitist construct” (Elliott, 1999b: 11). In fact, he remained only a refined version of the spy of souls evoked by Salas Barbadillo. According to Renzi, the favorite is expected to peep into the soul of the king as he tries to know how to please him in order to secure his friendship. He reminds us of the individuals that Baltasar Gracián's Oráculo manual (1647) portrayed as water diviners or zahoríes, who measure as though through a sounding line the depths of everyone else's interiority (Gracián, 1995: 122, 129, 200). The instability of the king's love for his favorite becomes evident when we see Renzi's privado, who had been admitted to the secret of his lord, reminded some lines below that the price of privanza is to continuously attempt to please the one who loves us.[14] Friendship, understood as a lack of barriers between hearts, was certainly the notion that helped seventeenth-century witnesses conceptualize in a positive light the relationship between king and privado; yet, even for Renzi, who appears ambiguous, but generally favorable to the figure of the favorite, friendship was a concept that revealed itself unable to encompass all the nuances present in the way the favorite and the king related to one another.

The uncertainty concerning the access to the king's heart escalated even further in El privado christiano, published in 1626 by the Augustinian Enrique de Mendoza with a dedication to Olivares. As with Renzi, Mendoza's favorite was someone who, “as a friend, [is] able to read [the king's] heart” (Mendoza, 1626: 23r) and who deserves respect “as the archive of the intention and the heart of the prince” (40r). However, for all the sweetness that the favorite parades to the eyes of others, when considered from within (“en lo interior”), the experience of privanza is reduced to “a study of the taste and the pleasure of someone else”, so as to “like whatever he likes, however painful” in order to conform to it (7r-v). In 1609, Brancalasso had offered a similar piece of advice (Brancalasso, 1609b: 4). In both cases, it might be objected, such pattern of behavior describes the friend as much as the flatterer. However, not even after the hardship endured to reach “the happy possession of the heart, and the will of the prince” (6v) will the favorite be able to rest, still afraid “lest the prince may have looked at [him] askance” (7r). It is the same idea that José de Pellicer would repeat in 1638 in a text that I will revisit later, where he stated that the favorite had to remain vigilant of the tyranny of the king's demeanors (semblantes), watchful not to lose sight of his lord's pleasure or disgust (Pellicer, 1638: 21v). Mendoza concluded his rant with a colorful etymology of the term “privado”: “One may infer that the etymology of 'privado' refers to the fact that one is perpetually deprived (privado) of his own will and taste” (Mendoza, 1626: 8r; for a precedent of Mendoza's interpretation of the word, see Brancalasso, 1609a: 10). It seems that, even when it is taken seriously and not from the viewpoint of libel or satire, life at court made it difficult for the king and his privado to inhabit the realm of ideal friendship that, sometimes, had been projected for them.

As it might be expected, the emphasis on duplicity gets pride of place in authors who disapprove of a single man enjoying privanza with the sovereign. The diplomat Diego de Saavedra Fajardo exemplified the relation between the king and his favorite with the wiles of Lucius Aelius Sejanus under the emperor Tiberius (Saavedra Fajardo, 1999: 194-197). Sejanus was the example of the evil favorite and was anti-exemplary enough that José de Pellicer entitled precisely El Seyano germánico (1639) a biography of what he characterized as a contemporary traitor. Sejanus had been condemned in Tacitus' Annals, and more recently in Pierre Mathieu's Histoire d'Aelius Séjanus (1617), translated into Spanish by Vicencio Squarçafigo (1621) and, subsequently, by Juan Pablo Mártir Rizo (1625) with the title Vida del dichoso desdichado. Sejanus' failure to qualify as a friend of the emperor becomes obvious in the latter. Matthieu, who writes that “Tiberius, who mistrusted everyone, did not mistrust Sejanus, nor did he have any secret for him” (Squarçafigo, 1621: 3), ends up concluding that the emperor and his alleged friend actually did entertain secrets –precisely against each other (Squarçafigo, 1621: 11). Sejanus practiced in a paradigmatic way the kind of introspection that, by penetrating anyone else's feelings and tastes, makes it easy to simulate conformity in order to gain his or her affection. This was a principle of flattery that Renzi had left open for the favorite to exert, and which Mendoza considered expected. According to Matthieu, Sejanus “knew Tiberius' temper so well, and made himself so akin to it that their hearts seemed to share the same beat” (Squarçafigo, 1621: 3). However different in his aims and ethics, Mendoza's favorite undoubtedly borrowed from the evil favorite's technique, and despite a tradition stemming from Plutarch, and even earlier, which aimed at distinguishing the fiend from the flatterer, contiguity with power made it almost impossible to leave simulation and dissimulation out of sight even in the most positive and well-intentioned portraits of the relationship between king and privado.

ALONE WITH THE KINGTop

The first question that the majority of writings on privanza seek to answer has to do with whether the king needs someone by his side in the first place. Under the weight of business waiting to be handled in a monarchy that stretched through all the continents, Habsburg monarchs certainly benefited from someone who might relieve them from part of the work. After all, this had been a task traditionally assigned to a body of counselors and secretaries. Some authors, however, depicted the favorite as someone who also addressed the needs of the king as a private, rather than a public person. When, for instance, Laínez referred to the privado as sharing the king's “cuidado” (Laínez, 1641: 4), the term was ambiguous enough as to refer to the dispatch of business, while leaving the door open to the consideration of emotional needs.[15] However, there were also instances in which the friendship between king and privado referred unambiguously to a relation that was not directly connected with politics.

In the days of Lerma, Maldonado's influential Tratado del perfecto privado depicted the intimacy of the favorite and the king considered as a man. Maldonado played crucially in connecting friendship and privanza, and defined the latter as “paying love with love”.[16] He declared:

We call privado a man with whom one communicates alone and in private (a solas y particularmente), with whom there is no secret, and who has been chosen from among everyone else in order to be with him in a certain sort of equality, founded on love and perfect friendship.[17]

The term “in private” designates a space for king and favorite to relate with one another at the level of the individual, far from the kingdom's consejos and other institutions of government. Inspired or not by Maldonado, Juan Pablo Mártir Rizo also spoke of “comunicación particular” in Norte de príncipes, published in 1626 (Mártir Rizo, 1626b: 74r). A few months later, we find Rizo disserting on friendship in a biography of Maecenas modeled after the genre epitomized by Matthieu's life of Sejanus. If Sejanus exemplified the evil favorite, Maecenas, who had been counselor to emperor Augustus, was the good one. Rizo's narrator stated that “it is not fair if I dissimulate (que me recate) with a friend. It is only fitting that, when we are together, I consider myself to be alone” (Mártir Rizo, 1626a: 8r). A friend is someone with whom the king remains, in private, as a man. This, in turn, accounts for the reference to transparency and absence of secrecy in Maldonado's quote, in stark contrast to the doubts expressed by Renzi and, especially, by Mendoza.

Maldonado imagined the king as a man in search of company: “It is out of question that a private person is allowed to have someone who is his privado and particular friend”.[18] To those who adduced the fifteenth-century precedent of Álvaro de Luna, favorite of John II of Castile, as a proof of the ruin inherent in privanza, Maldonado answered that friendship “is founded on human nature, of which kings cannot be ripped off. Why then should we deny the afflicted heart of a king the right to a particular friend?”[19]

To erase any ambiguity that Maldonado is speaking about someone with access not only to the ruler, but also the man within the king, he evokes the distinction between political and particular privados mentioned above, reminding his reader that Christ had Peter as his vicar, but it was John, the typical example of the favorite in the literature about privanza, who was “the one he privately loved” (su querido en particular).[20]

As Maldonado's privado shares the loneliness of the king, he seems to enjoy access to a kind of interiority that went beyond the secrets of state.[21] He certainly relieves his lord of “hardships”, and administers advice about “doubts” of government, but he also makes him aware of “his faults” (las faltas propias).[22] It is difficult to discern whether this expression points at a labor of introspection into the king's self or just to specific political actions. However, in contrast with Mendoza's privado, Maldonado's description conclusively separates the friend from the flatterer, transforming the favorite into the aid of the king as he learns to know himself. Examining one's interior was a central principle of Neo-Stoic philosophy, and one inherent to the wisdom related with the survival at the court, summarized by a swan that sings nosce te ipsum with a trumpet in the initial square of the table game contained in the aforementioned Filosofía cortesana moralizada by Alonso de Barros (1588: 20-21). Maldonado instructs the favorite to become for the king what glasses (anteojos) are for the sight, allowing him to see things (and, especially, his own actions) the way they actually are.[23] Before Maldonado turns to more practical and political considerations, his insistence on knowledge and acquaintance with the man in the king (his virtues and errors) seems to point to something intrinsic.[24]

Mendoza suggests that it is of great help that the king and his favorite have “some sympathy in the condition” (Mendoza, 1626: 13v). While the abovementioned Discurso sobre los privados y cómo ha de gobernarse el príncipe con ellos underscored the affinity of character and habits as the characteristic of “familiar”, as opposed to “political”, favorites, Mendoza seems to consider, much like Maldonado and Renzi, that the distinction between the friend of the king and that of the man had become largely obsolete in the world he lived in. As Laínez would say, the one who was familiar with the king and was “of one heart” with him was expected to serve, too, as “his oracle” in deliberation (Laínez, 1641: 9). It was a friend, and not only a minister (but that too) that the king would choose as favorite (Mártir Rizo, 1626b: 77r).

Underlining the private and familiar side of privanza, the sergeant major of Mallorca Vicente Mut stated in his life of the emperor Justinian, published in 1640, that “lonely authority” is necessarily incomplete, and that (in a sort of gloss on Aristotle's Politics) only “civil company” is capable of “putting a remedy to the faults of nature” (Mut, 1640: 10). Mut's argument becomes more idiosyncratic when, in a digression on Justinian's favorite Belisarius, he praises friendship as a basis for the choice of privado:

What the common people call privados, I call friends: for privados, in fact, ought to be friends. And a prince may trust more easily, and will live safer with a friend than with someone who becomes privado just because of his merits. For he who has deserved to be a favorite will work for the common good, whereas the friend will look for that of the prince (Mut, 1640: 10).

In a context otherwise deprived of any irony, what seems to be a selfish, nonpolitical notion of privanza works as a reminder of the humanity of the king, who needs someone by his side. In fact, in a different passage Mut delves into the importance of friendship not as the alternative, but as the source of politics. Men did not seek company in order to find protection; rather, they became united after they started loving, and wanted to protect those they loved (Mut, 1640: 29-30). If it was the love of others that led to politics, it is to a certain extent paradoxical that Mut could think of friendship in terms of a force directed against the good of the community.

In fact, Mut's apparently inappropriate remark about prioritizing friendship over merit contested positions such as the one expressed by Maldonado, who had argued that the king never finds conflict between his desire and the common good. “For the king (according to Maldonado), temporal and spiritual wellness have the same boundaries, which are delimited by the common good; for the king is happy in the temporal world when all the kingdom thrives, and is in peace and ruled with justice”. Maldonado's was, as he put it, “a saintly king”, who loved his favorite and also the good of his kingdom, but was never tempted by desires of any other kind (for the conflicts between friendship and faithfulness to the state, see Feros, 1995: 30).[25] Mut's passage concerning friendship depicted a conception of privanza that problematized the psyche of the king. If he is a man, and if he is able to love (and, if he has a friend, he certainly is), he might also be able to love in ways that deviate from the common good. For Mut, the king needs to face the hardships of life in the company of “someone attached, devoted, loyal and faithful”, for “even God, who suffices to himself, has different persons in His unity. He has communication, and undivided division” (1640: 10). Through the parallel between the union of king and favorite and the persons in God's Holy Trinity, Mut not only targeted the explanation of the existence of a favorite as a result of the king's inability. It suggested even more directly that at the head of the state there was unity despite the accusations (reported by Matías de Novoa at the start of Lerma's privanza, but repeated in pamphlets well until the fall of Olivares) that there were too many kings, too many idols sharing the government (Tomás y Valiente, 1982: 120; see Feros, 1995: 39; and 1999: 299 for the criticism that, with more than one head, any government is monstrous or heretical).[26]

The parallel with religion did not stop there. Christ, the mirror of all princes, “allowed one of his disciples to touch his side, and his chest. For in many respects it is helpful to let someone meddle with (manosear) royal hearts” (Mut, 1640: 10). As with the case of Christ, the existence of a favorite who attends by the king's side and finds his heart open acts as a guarantee that the sovereign is a living human being. While it seems hyperbolic to claim that this needs proof, Mut's emphasis is not entirely beside the point. Much ink has been spilled about the change of ceremonial and etiquette that resulted from the adoption, in the time of Charles V, of a model that was originally Burgundian. Antonio Feros has shown that the definition of royal palace found in Alphonse X's thirteenth-century Partidas, as a place in which the king listens and speaks to his subjects, was inadequate to early seventeenth-century politics. A model of publicity and visibility had yielded to the notion that government takes place secretly in the ruler's retreat or retrete. The retreat designated the king's chamber, a space in which only those who were closest to him, and especially his favorite, could enter (Feros, 1995: 33-38; 2002: 160-165).[27] While the king still governed with the aid of the synods or consejos, the secretary Jerónimo de Ortega y Robles eloquently noted in his treatise El despertador que avisa a un príncipe católico (1647): “The prince might have undisclosed business that needs remedy. The consejo is a public place: it would be absurd to publicize there secrets like these” (Ortega y Robles, 1647: 12r).[28] Spain's Habsburgs displayed a behavior that surprised foreigners as being marked by “invisibility” and “sheer inaccessibility” (Elliott, 1989: 148). Juan Fernández de Medrano stated that things rarely seen received greater respect and veneration; it was according to reason of state that the king's isolation and retreat helped avoiding chances that he might show his faults to those who would idealize him while unable to see him (Fernández de Medrano, 1602: 32; see Feros, 2002: 165).[29] Mut's recommendation seeks to nuance such policy of seclusion, and it does so through the suggestion that admitting someone to the secrets of the king might reassure those who still doubt whether or not he actually belongs to the same species as his subjects.

The literature on privanza generally agreed that the king shares with his favorite the loneliness of his retreat, where they communicated in private. However, there was some concern that, as the king opened himself to someone else, he might be left, so to speak, altered inside. The majority of writers saw such possibility with suspicion, as when the anonymous author of a series of Apuntamientos políticos addressed to Baltasar de Zúñiga in 1621 pondered on the mark or “impression” that the favorite might leave on the king's soul.[30] “The infection of such contagion” was a real danger in case he should become familiar with someone inadequate.[31] If Mut was concerned lest the king might not appear human enough, at stake now seemed to be the fear that he might be too much so, and succumb to the spell of those who enjoy access to his thoughts and desires. The idea of a spell was hardly more than a metaphor when Rizo described flattery as a form of enchantment (Mártir Rizo, 1625: 21). However, it would become only too literal as the rumor disseminated through the court that Olivares had bewitched king Phillip IV in order to remain his privado (Elliott, 1999a: 165).[32]

Some authors described the favorite as the body that the kingdom was allowed to see, while the king himself remained in his retreat. Admitted to the king's interiority, the privado served as a threshold through which the outside world manifested itself to the sovereign. Mendoza's treatise labeled the favorite the aqueduct (el atanor y arcaduz) conveying the king's majesty to his vassals (Mendoza, 1626: 21v), while Maldonado described him as un medianero between kingdom and king, and cautiously warned that a pipe might alter the quality of the water flowing through it.[33] Malvezzi's Ritratto of Olivares, which I will discuss below, asserted that “the notice of actions (even the great ones) does not arrive at the king. Distance disperses them, and, should they arrive, they do so by means of the favorite, and appear to belong to the one who tells them rather than to the agent” (Malvezzi, 2013: 291-292). Malvezzi's account amplifies the king's isolation, with the result that the privado became the ruler's sight and hearing. Malvezzi seems to have had in mind something different from, and more radical than Maldonado's aforementioned idea that the favorite performed as the glasses that corrected the king's perceptions of his own actions altered by flattery.[34] Malvezzi's Olivares appears as the means of communication for a blind and deaf king who apparently has no other means to speak to the world that lies outside his retreat. Francisco Fernández de Caso's Oración gratulatoria in the celebration of Lerma's cardinalship (1618) portrays the favorite as the senses of a sovereign who, in turn, is identified with the soul, as the exterior is to the interior. According to Caso, “the king, who is the soul of everything, functions according to the quality of the privado, who is the senses with which the king perceives things, and the hands he uses to perform them” (Caso, 1618: 1-2). Usage referred to someone's soul and conscience as his or her retreat (see, for instance, Mut 1640: 33), and seventeenth-century political writers used language that was generally consistent with this, metaphorically referring as “the soul” to the part played by the king, as opposed to the favorite, who was “the body”.[35]

The dynamics between in and outside the king regulated not only the flow of information that entered, but also that which left. Mendoza considered the king's love for the favorite as a result of the latter's ability to keep secrets, a behavior that sealed the reciprocity between one another. According to Mendoza, Alexander the Great told his favorite Ephestion: “As a friend, you can read the heart, yet, also as one, whatever you read should be sealed in yours” (Mendoza, 1626: 22v-23r). Admission to the king's retreat entailed a pledge, which in Mendoza's terms reads as follows:

He who enters, and lives within the doors with the king, and has ears to hear, and eyes to see should have no tongue to speak with ... If the prince, as a man, should have a favored or private friend (since he will necessarily be only one), the latter should be such that he ... faithfully keeps secrets (Mendoza, 1626: 23v).

No one knew the king better than his favorite. Closeness and asistencia, or continuous presence and service at the king's side, guaranteed, especially in pro-privanza literature, acquaintance with one another's thoughts. “Thanks to his closeness to the king”, Laínez writes, the favorite is “aware of his mysteries” (Laínez, 1641: 13). However, the reverse was also true. When a retired Olivares replied in his Nicandro (1643) to the charges that Andrés de Mena had directed against him, he defended himself from the accusation that he had concealed some things from Philip IV by objecting that no one knew him better than the king with whom he had lived so closely together. The allegation that he might have acted without the king knowing it was therefore absurd (Elliott et al., 2013: 402). The favorite's asistencia resulted in “particular communication” with the king. For some supporters of privanza, this meant that privado and sovereign were respectively the exterior and the interior, the body and the soul of a composite individual, to speak with a metaphor that enjoyed great fortune. Yet, as some observers rapidly pointed out, this could entail, in turn, a transformation in the privado's own self.

THE FAVORITE'S INTERIORITYTop

As a vessel for secrets, the favorite embodied the threshold that kept the king simultaneously connected to and separated from the world. Renzi describes him specifically as “a chest and a receptacle for the king's sacraments”. As with the case of “mysteries”, discussed above, Renzi's reference extended, once more, the parallel between politics and religion, and culminated the analogy, proposed by the same author, between the favorite and the monstrance or custodia that keeps the sacred host, here identified with the king's soul and secrets. Needless to say, to guard the treasure it is necessary for the favorite to “punctually remain near the king's presence as the shadow does to the body”.[36]

However, in Renzi's view this was clearly not enough. It was also necessary for the privado to abandon any feeling or will, so as to create a void in the self, capable of welcoming the king's soul. To accept the interiority of the king, the favorite needed to start by renouncing to what he had inside. Renzi's privado

needs to be like a body without feeling. He will lack desire, choice and freedom for any thing whatsoever, as well as any pleasure that might drive him to look for things and to pursue them ... His privanza constrains him to perpetual attendance and retreat, and never to leave the presence of his prince. It is convenient that, with all his heart and a simple will, he renounces to himself on behalf of the will of his prince ... tempered according to the prince's pleasure.[37]

As mentioned above, what Renzi left ambiguous became disingenuous in Mendoza's version. As the latter referred to the favorite's “humility, and apparent surrender”, privanza plunged deep into the realms of dissimulation. The fabrication of appearances seems to accompany the process that makes the favorite suitable to welcome and subsequently protect the king's secrets (Mendoza, 1626: 7v-8v, my emphasis). That friendship is a problematic paradigm in Mendoza's theory obtains confirmation when he contrasts the favorite's sweet language with “the bitter gall of impatience and rage that dwells in the most intimate part of [his] heart”. While the evils that assault the favorite have to do with the envy that other courtiers direct to him, rather than with anything related to the king (Mendoza, 1626: 7r-v), Mendoza's insistence on the favorite's mortification in the service of the kingdom and God contains a reference to duplicity as much as self-denial (40v).[38] Self-evidently, Mendoza insinuates, the favorite's attitude should never be malicious. However, his relation with the king (allegedly a friend) is also affected by the need, more often than not, to simulate outward appearances that conceal his true state of mind from the view of the sovereign. He is expected to model himself after the image that the king would like to see in order to keep his love (7r-8v). Encircled by dissimulation and deeply enmeshed in it, Mendoza's privado floated on more dangerous and unpleasant waters than the one depicted by Maldonado.

In the antipodes of Mendoza's reticence, Virgilio Malvezzi described in Ritratto del privato politico christiano (1635) a favorite who emptied himself to become one with the soul of his lord and friend. Malvezzi's narrative took as point of departure a set of notes handed to him by Juan Antonio de Vera y Zúñiga, Philip IV's ambassador in Venice. Mediating for Olivares, Vera commissioned from Malvezzi a work with obviously propagandistic ends, which earned the latter a position as royal chronicler in Madrid (for the correspondence between Vera and Malvezzi, see Colomer, 2005).

Vera's notes or Fragmentos históricos described his protector Olivares as God's attempt at creating a minister “free of any passion”. According to him, Olivares became “perfect” as a result of “having gone through the ultimate misfortune of being neither dead nor of the number of the living”. Vera's reference is to the death of Olivares' daughter in 1626, which caused the favorite to achieve the absence of that desire and that feeling that mark one as a human being. He compared the event with the sacrifice of Iphigenia, which relieved the Greeks in the same way that the death of the favorite's daughter would save the monarchy of Spain by making Olivares reach the perfection of privanza.[39]

In Malvezzi's version of Vera's notes, the death of Olivares' daughter becomes a turning point in the favorite's career: “the Count-Duke (and may he excuse me for this) did not embody the privado's perfect idea until the death of his daughter”. This is so because “he who has children loves them ... and he who loves his things fails to satisfy the obligations of the true privado“. Malvezzi explains that the love that is due to a king is a complex one, composed of every good feeling variously experienced by human beings, including “the tenderness that we feel for children, the reverence that is due to a father, the cordiality with which we love a friend and the nature with which we love ourselves”. It follows that a favorite should have no children, no father, no friend, and, ultimately (to be consistent) no himself: “He who is not himself transformed into his lord is unworthy of having his lord's heart” (Malvezzi, 2013: 314).[40]

Malvezzi concludes with a striking version of Mendoza's etymology of privado, now engrafted into a new and decidedly partisan conception of privanza in terms of unconditional love and friendship to the king. Reflecting on the anxiety experienced by Olivares at Philip IV's illness in 1627, Malvezzi wrote:

The favorite is called privado because he needs to be deprived of his own will, of all of his feelings and passions, and to be transformed into the service of God and of his lord ... I am positive that, should the king had died, the Count-Duke would have died with him as well—if not in the world, at least he would die to the world ... God wanted to form in him a minister without feeling (Malvezzi, 2013: 315).

Malvezzi repurposed the transformation of one's soul into that of the friend, typical of Ciceronian ideas of amicitia. In doing so, he replied to the concern that the abyss separating the social status of king and privado made friendship impossible for them. Malvezzi's solution was to suggest that only the favorite freed himself from any content that might hinder his soul from admitting, or being transformed into, that of the king.[41] The notion of ideal friendship between particulars yielded to one of unbalance and perfect obedience. If Maldonado had modeled “a saintly king”, Malvezzi's privado appears to us scarcely less saintly.

Malvezzi's program seems a variant of Neo-Stoic injunctions to get rid of anything that might affect the soul from the outside. If Francisco Sánchez's famous and often reprinted commentary of Epictetus' Encheiridion, first published in 1600, recommended “getting naked from feelings and passions” as a method to happiness (Sánchez de las Brozas, 1612: ¶4^r, 62), the same advice became, for Malvezzi, a path towards service and submission to the king.[42]

José de Pellicer had questioned in his panegyric of Olivares, Templo de la fama, that friendship, a relation among peers, might bridge the distance between king and privado (Tomás y Valiente, 1982: 121). Pellicer's La constancia christiana, also dedicated to Olivares in 1638, provided the favorite with a perspective to help him manage the relation between his inside and outside. For him, getting naked of feelings and passions is no longer a requirement in order to adopt the king's affections (as it was for Malvezzi), but the key lesson in a handbook intended for the survival of privados in the labyrinth of the court. Adolfo Carrasco has described Pellicer's Neo-Stoic treatise in terms of a version of Justus Lipsius' De Con-stantia for privados (Carrasco, 2015: 254), in which (transforming Malvezzi's reference to emptiness, and bringing Mendoza's mistrust one step further) renunciation to one's interiority becomes a political skill rather than a consequence of love and friendship.[43] The application of Neo-Stoicism to the ideas on privanza that we find in Pellicer had a precedent in 1627, when Pedro Fernández Navarrete described Olivares as a sort of “new Christian Seneca”, and complimented him for overcoming desire through the use of reason. Olivares reached, as a result, and in Carrasco's formulation, “a state of freedom of action that allow[ed] him to concentrate all his strengths in the good of the state” (Carrasco, 2015: 254).

Pellicer depicted the favorite threatened by the three-headed monster of envy, slander and gossip, escorted by a woman who responded to the names of “irony, dissimulation and duplicity” (Pellicer, 1638: 19r-20r). Such bestiary has taught courtiers to move away from the perfection of simplicity and instead embrace the chameleon's example (20r-21r). Embodying flattery, the chameleon puts on the aspect that he deems convenient, regardless of what he holds inside. This reminds of the favorite of Mendoza's treatise, who tries to show himself suitable for the mood and will of the king (for more on the chameleon, see, for instance, Mártir Rizo, 1626a: 64).[44]

When Pellicer depicted the favorite incessantly pending on the king's looks and mood, “guessing mysteries in some actions, presuming sacraments in others” (Pellicer, 1638: 21v), it was hard not to see there a relation of exteriority in which the favorite, rather than admitted to the king's heart, remained eternally hunting for signs. These, of course, are not related to the secrets of state, of which the favorite was the master. They are of a rather personal and emotional nature. For Pellicer, constancy is the antidote or contrayerba that the favorite should use (21r).[45] Instead of the absolute transparency suggested by friendship, the favorite encounters, between the king and himself, a wall built with bricks of the same material of mistrust and instability that separates him from competitors for the king's favor. Pellicer never recommends that the favorite use duplicity as a weapon, and implies that he should not keep inside the bitter gall, as Mendoza's privado did, but rather get over it.[46]

If Pellicer, and especially Mendoza, evoke to us a world in which the tools of flattery are difficult to avoid even from the perspective of well-intentioned and virtuous behavior, they also present the favorite's interiority as a locus where one might imagine some degree of dissidence to become possible. If Malvezzi depicts a favorite who transforms himself into the king by creating a void within his soul for his sovereign to occupy, the model of Ritratto seems to have been rather exceptional. For one thing, it differs widely from Pellicer's, even though both share Neo-Stoic overtones. Similar to Torquato Accetto's treatise Della dissimulazione onesta, published in Naples in 1641, Pellicer's program rejects Malvezzi's focus on submission to the king and emphasizes instead the hardships of the court, responding to concerns that were perceptible between the lines in Renzi's treatise, and even more in Mendoza's. Rosario Villari has argued for the significance of dissimulation as a weapon in seventeenth-century politics (Villari, 1987: passim). Pellicer's Neo-Stoic view of privanza provides a valuable alternative to Malvezzi's proposal of a favorite who replaces his humanity with that of the king. Pellicer's favorite keeps the commitments of friendship with the king at a distance. He does not seek the self-annihilation that results from Malvezzi's story. Free of feelings and passions, Pellicer's favorite transforms his heart, now cleaned of the distress of Mendoza's “bitter gall”, into a place from which he can perform his duty while holding for, and within himself, what he actually thinks of the world he can see before his eyes. This coincides with a deep and intense reflection on the possibility of withholding opinions and perspectives, which some identified with the natural way of politics, as Martínez de Herrera did in Naples in 1631. The people (much like the favorite devised by Mendoza and then by Pellicer) often judge “in secret”, and “in the heart's retreat”. Without hope or fear of the result, “the silence of the soul”, Herrera writes, performs as “a supreme court, where human judgment condemns, or approves of the actions of princes with greater discretion” (Martínez de Herrera, 1631: 2-3).

The preceding survey of literature on privanza illuminates the complexities inherent in the views on interiority characteristic of a crucial province of seventeenth-century Spanish political thought. The paradigm of friendship between king and privado reveals itself useful yet insufficient in order to account for the way different authors understood the intimacy that actually existed between the parts. The intersection of friendship with dissimulation and forms of duplicity that were ultimately unavoidable at the court is clearly a topic in need of further investigation, for it was there that writers on privanza located, explicitly or not, a spot of tightest tension.

The various and even opposite ways in which different authors appropriated Neo-Stoic principles provides another strand that might helps us to gain a fuller grasp of the conflicts and doubts that seventeenth-century authors projected into the conscience of royal favorites. In a majority of writings, the range of behaviors associated with privanza cannot be reduced to either mere flattery or submission. They embody, in contrast, a series of ideas and desires covering the entire spectrum between the devotion characteristic of ideal friendship and the exploitation of one's interiority as a space to resist the evils of a world populated by power and deceit.