I saw how dupes, that fain would run,
Are caught, their breath and courage spent,
Chased by a foe they cannot shun,
Swift as Inquisitor on scent....
Yet I've a trick to cheat Love's search,
And refuge find too long delay'd;
I'll take the vows of Holy Church,
And seek some reverend cloister's shade."
Among Góngora's followers none is better known than Juan de Tassis y Peralta, the second Conde de Villamediana (1582-1622), whose ancestors came from Bergamo. His great-grandfather, Juan Bautista de Tassis, entered the service of Carlos Quinto; his grandfather, Raimundo de Tassis, was the first of his race to live in Spain, where he married into the illustrious family of Acuña; his father, Juan de Tassis y Acuña, rose to be Ambassador in Paris and Special Envoy in London. Villamediana's tutors were two well-known men of letters: Bartolomé Jiménez Patón, author of Mercurius Trismegistus, and Tribaldos de Toledo, whom we already know as editor of Figueroa and Mendoza. After a short stay at Salamanca, Villamediana was appointed to the King's household, and in 1601 married Ana de Mendoza y de la Cerda, grand-daughter in the fifth generation of Santillana. His reputation as a gambler was of the worst, and his winning thirty thousand gold ducats at a sitting led to his expulsion from court in 1608. He joined the army in Italy, returned to Spain in 1617, and at once launched into epigrams and satires against all and sundry. The court favourites were his special mark—Lerma, Osuna, Uceda, Rodrigo Calderón. In 1618 he was again banished, but returned in 1621 as Lord-in-Waiting to the Queen, Isabel de Bourbon, daughter of Henry of Navarre. At her request Villamediana wrote a masque, La Gloria de Niquea, in which the Queen acted on April 8, 1622, before Lord Bristol. If report speak truly, the performance led him to his death. When the second act opened, an overturned lamp set the theatre ablaze, and as Villamediana seized the Queen in his arms, and carried her out of danger, scandal declared the fire to be his doing, and gave him out as the Queen's lover. There is a well-known story that Felipe IV., stealing up behind the Queen one day, placed his hands on her eyes; whereon "Be quiet, Count," she said, and so unwittingly doomed Villamediana. The tale is even too well known. Brantôme had already told it in Les Dames galantes before Felipe was born, and it really dates from the sixth century. Even so, Villamediana's admiration for the Queen was openly expressed. He appeared at a tournament covered with silver reales, and used the motto, "Mis amores son reales" (My love is royal). The King's confessor, Baltasar de Zúñiga, warned him that his life was in danger, and Villamediana laughed in his face. It was no joke, for he had contrived to make more dangerous enemies in four months than any other man has made in a lifetime. On August 21, 1622, as he was alighting from his coach, a stranger ran him through the body; "¡Jesús! esto es hecho!" ("My God! done for!") said Villamediana, and fell dead. The word was passed round that the assassin, Ignacio Méndez, should go free; tongues that had hitherto wagged were still. It is almost certain that the murder was done by the King's order. If it were so, Felipe IV. had more spirit at seventeen than he ever showed afterwards.
Villamediana had many of Góngora's qualities: his courage, his wit, his sense of form, his preciosity. In his Fábula de Faetón, as in his Fábula de la Fénix, he outdoes his master in eccentricity and verbal foppery: fish become "swimming birds of the cerulean seat," water is "liquid nutriment," time "gnaws statues and digests the marble"; and by hyperbaton and word-juggling he proves himself as culto as he can. But it is fair to say that when it pleases him he is as simple and direct as the early Góngora. It must suffice here to quote Churton's rendering of a sonnet on the proposed marriage of the Infanta Doña María to the Prince of Wales:—