The judges evidently knew their man. He went through the form of retreating to Valencia, but he had no intention of hiding his talent under a bushel in the provinces. His next step was astounding in its insolence: he returned to Madrid, and thence eloped with Isabel de Urbina y Cortinas, daughter of a king-at-arms. The police were at once in hot pursuit, but failed to overtake the culprit. He parted from the lady, was married to her by proxy on May 10, 1588, and nineteen days later was out of range on the San Juan, one of the vessels of the Invincible Armada. Lope took part in the famous expedition of the ‘sad Intelligencing Tyrant’ when, as Milton puts it, ‘the very maw of Hell was ransacked, and made to give up her concealed destruction, ere she could vent it in that terrible and damned blast.’ Returning from this disastrous adventure, during which he found time to write the greater part of La Hermosura de Angélica, an epic consisting of eleven thousand lines, Lope settled at Valencia, and joined the household of the fifth Duke of Alba. It was the custom of the time for a poor Spanish gentleman, who would have been disgraced by the adoption of a trade or business, to serve as secretary to some rich noble: the duties were various, indefinite and not always dignified, but they involved no social degradation. Lope’s versatile talents were thus utilised in succession by the Marqués de Malpica and the Marqués de Sarriá, afterwards Conde de Lemos (the son-in-law of Lerma, and in later years the patron of Cervantes).
His introduction to aristocratic society enlarged Lope’s sphere of observation: it did nothing to improve his morals, which were not naturally austere. During this period he was writing incessantly for the stage, and the Spanish stage was not then a school of asceticism. His wife died about the year 1595, and the last restraint was gone. Lope was straightway entangled in a series of scandalous amours. He was prosecuted for criminal conversation with Antonia Trillo de Armenta in 1596, and in 1597 began a love-affair with Micaela de Luján, the Camila Lucinda of his sonnets, and the mother of his brilliant children, Lope Félix del Carpio y Luján and Marcela, who inherited no small share of her father’s improvising genius. It is impossible to palliate Lope’s misconduct, and the persistent effort to keep it from public knowledge has damaged him more than the attacks of all his enemies; but it is fair to remember that he lived in the most corrupt circles of a corrupt age, that he suffered such temptations as few men undergo, and that he repeatedly strove to extricate himself from the mesh of circumstance.
In 1598 he published his patriotic epic, the Dragontea, as well as a pastoral novel entitled the Arcadia, and in this same year he married Juana de Guardo, daughter of a wealthy but frugal man who had made a fortune by selling pork. Shakespeare was the son of a butcher, but the fact was not thrown in his teeth: Lope was less fortunate, and his second marriage was the subject of a derisive sonnet by Góngora. So far as can be judged, Lope’s marriage with Juana de Guardo was one of affection, and the reflections cast upon him were absolutely unjust. But the stage had him in its grip, and he could not break with his past, try as he might. He strove without ceasing to make a reputation in other fields of literature: a poem on St. Isidore, the patron-saint of Madrid, the Hermosura de Angélica with a mass of supplementary sonnets, the prose romance entitled El Peregrino en su patria, the epic Jerusalén conquistada written in emulation of Tasso—these diverse works were produced in rapid succession between 1599 and 1609. Meanwhile Lope had been enrolled as a Familiar of the Holy Office, but the vague terror attaching to this sinister post did not prevent an attack being made on his life in 1611. He may have enlisted in the ranks of the Inquisition from mixed motives; yet we cannot doubt that he was passing through a pietistic phase at this time, for between 1609 and 1611 he joined three religious confraternities. This was no blind, no hypocritical attempt to affect a virtue which he had not. He was even too regardless of appearances all his life long.
The death of his son Carlos Félix was quickly followed by the death of his wife, and his devotional mood deepened. He now made an irreparable mistake by entering holy orders. No man was less fitted to be a minister of religion, and his private correspondence discloses no sign of a religious spirit, or of anything resembling a religious vocation: on the contrary, it reveals him as frequenting loose company, and cracking unseemly jokes at a most solemn moment. The pendulum had already begun to swing before his ordination, and for some years afterwards he was prominent as an unscrupulous libertine. No one as successful as Lope could fail to make many enemies: he had now delivered himself into their hands, and assuredly they did not spare him. In the Preface to the Second Part of Don Quixote Cervantes, though he does not mention Lope de Vega by name, indulges in an unmistakable allusion to him as a Familiar of the Inquisition notorious for his ‘virtuous occupation.’ Yes! a ‘virtuous occupation’ which was an intolerable public scandal. From 1605 onwards Lope had been on intimate terms with the Duke of Sesa, and his correspondence with the Duke is his condemnation. But his conscience was not dead. Among his letters to Sesa many are stained with tears of shame and of remorse. They reveal him in every mood. He protests against being made the intermediary of the Duke’s vulgar gallantries; he forms resolutions to amend, yet falls, and falls again.
In his fifty-fifth year he conceived an insane passion for Marta de Nevares Santoyo. On the details of this lamentable intrigue nothing need be said here. Once more Samson was in the hands of the Philistines. Led on by Góngora, they showed him no mercy, but he survived their onset. His plays were acted on every stage in Spain; the people who flocked to the theatre were spell-bound by his dramatic creations, his dexterity, grace and wit; his name was used as a synonym for matchless excellence; and he strengthened his position with the more learned public by a mass of non-dramatic work. He seldom reaches such a height as in the Pastores de Belén—a perfect gem of devotion and of art—but the adaptability of his talent is amazing in prose and verse dealing with subjects as diverse as the triumphs of faith in Japan and the fate of Mary Queen of Scots. The short stories in the Filomena and Circe represent him at his weakest, but the Dorotea, a work that had lain by him for many years, is an absorbing fragment of autobiography which exhibits Lope as a master of graceful and colloquial diction.
In one of his agonies of repentance he exclaimed: ‘A curse on all unhallowed love!’ But the punishment of his own transgressions was long delayed. Marta, indeed, died blind and mad; but Lope still had his children, and, with all his faults, he was a fond and devoted father. We may well imagine that none of his own innumerable triumphs thrilled him with a more rapturous delight than the success of his son Lope Félix at the poetic jousts in honour of St. Isidore. Strengthened by the domestic happiness which he now enjoyed, Lope underwent a striking change. He wrote more copiously than ever for the stage, but yielded no longer to its temptations; his stormy passions lay behind him—part of a past which all were eager to forget. In 1628 he became chaplain to the congregation of St. Peter, and was a model of pious zeal. It was an astonishing metamorphosis, and there may have been an unconscious histrionic touch in Lope’s rendering of a virtuous rôle. But the transformation was no mere pose. Lope was too frank to be a Pharisee, and too human to be a saint; but whatever he did, he did with all his might, and he became a hardworking priest, punctual in the discharge of his sacred office. Towards the close he occupied an unexampled pre-eminence. Urban VIII. conferred on him a papal order; though not a favourite at court, he was invited by Olivares to exercise his ingenious fantasy for the entertainment of Philip IV., who was assuming the airs and graces of a patron of the drama. With the crowd Lope’s popularity knew no bounds. Visitors hovered about to catch a glimpse of him as he threaded his way through the streets: his fellow-townsmen gloried in his glory. There is nothing in history comparable to his position.
Blessings and prayers, a nobler retinue
Than sceptred king or laurelled conqueror knows,
Followed this wondrous potentate.
No man of letters has ever received such visible proofs of his own celebrity, and none has retained it so long. For something like half a century Lope had contrived to fascinate his countrymen, but even he began to grow old at last. Yet the change was not so much in him as in the rising generation.