A man of stronger fibre, nobler character, and far greater achievement was Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, the nephew of the great Chancellor Pero López de Ayala, and the uncle of Santillana. From a worldly point of view, he, too, may be said to have wrecked his career; but the charge of obsequiousness is the last that can be brought against him. He was not of the stuff of which courtiers are made; his haughty temper brought him into collision with Álvaro de Luna, whom he detested; some of his relatives were in arms against Juan II., and this circumstance, together with his uncompromising spirit, threw suspicion on his personal loyalty to the throne. Such a man could not fail to make enemies, and amongst those who intrigued against him we may probably count that inventive busybody Pedro del Corral, whose Crónica Sarrazyna he afterwards described bluntly as a ‘mentira ó trufa paladina.’ After a violent scene with Álvaro de Luna, Pérez de Guzmán was arrested together with many of his sympathisers. On his release, though not much past middle life, he closed the gates of preferment on himself by withdrawing to his estate of Batres, and thenceforth, like Villena, he sought in literature some consolation for his disappointment. He had a most noble passion for fame, and he won it with his pen, when fate compelled him to sheathe his sword.
Any one who takes up the poem entitled Loores de los claros varones de España and lights upon the unhappy passage in which Virgil is condemned for tricking out his wishy-washy stuff with verbose ornament—
la poca é pobre sustancia
con verbosidad ornando—
is likely to be prejudiced against Pérez de Guzmán, and is certain to think poorly of his judgment as a literary critic. It is not as a literary critic that Pérez de Guzmán excels, nor is he a poet of any striking distinction; but as a painter of historical portraits he has rarely been surpassed. In the first place, he can see; in the second, he writes with a pen, and not with a stick. He is an excellent judge of character and motive, and he is no respecter of persons—a greater thing to say than you might think, for as a rule it is not till long after kings and statesmen are in their graves that the whole truth about them is set down. And it is the truthfulness of the record which makes Pérez de Guzmán’s Generaciones y Semblanzas at once so impressive and entertaining. There is no touch of sentimentalism in his nature; rank and sex form no claim to his indulgence; he is naturally prone to crush the mighty and to spare the weak. If a queen is unseemly in her habits, he notes the fact laconically; if a Constable of Castile foolishly consults soothsayers, this weakness is recorded side by side with his good qualities; if an [66] Archbishop of Toledo favours his relatives in little matters of ecclesiastical preferment, this amiable family feeling is set off against other characteristics more congruous to his position; if an Adelantado Mayor has a bright bald head and pulls the long bow when he drops into anecdotage, these peculiarities are not forgotten when he comes up for sentence. There is no rhetoric, no waste: the person concerned is brought forward at the right moment, described in a few trenchant words, and discharged with a stain on his character. The Generaciones y Semblanzas is not the work of an ‘impersonal’ historian who is most often a sophist arguing, for the sake of argument, that black is not so unlike white as the plain man imagines. Pérez de Guzmán goes with his party, has his prejudices, his likes and dislikes, and he makes no attempt to dissemble them; but he is never deliberately unfair. The worst you can say of him is that he is a hanging judge. He may be: but the phrase in which he sums up is always memorable for picturesque vigour.
He is believed to have died in 1460 at about the age of eighty-four, and in any case he outlived his nephew Íñigo López de Mendoza, who is always spoken of as the Marqués de Santillana, a title conferred on him after the battle of Olmedo in 1445. In 1414, being then a boy of eighteen, Santillana first comes into sight at the jochs florals over which Villena presided when Fernando de Antequera was crowned King of Aragón; and thenceforward, till his death in 1458, Santillana is a prominent figure on the stage of history. His father was Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Lord High Admiral of Castile; his mother was Leonor de la Vega, superior to most men of her time, or of any time, in ability, courage and determination. On both sides, he inherited position, wealth, and literary traditions, and he utilised to the utmost his advantages. He was no absent-minded dreamer: even in practical matters his success was striking. During his long minority, his mother’s crafty bravery had protected much of his estate from predatory relatives. Santillana increased it, timing his political variations with a perfect opportuneness. Beginning public life as a supporter of the Infantes of Aragón, he deserted to Juan II. in 1429, and, when the property of the Infantes was confiscated some five years later, he shared in the spoil. Alienated by Álvaro de Luna’s methods, he veered round again in 1441, and took the field against Juan II.; once more he was reconciled, and his services at Olmedo were rewarded by a marquessate and further grants of land. Apparently his nearest approach to a political conviction was a hatred of Álvaro de Luna in whose ruin he was actively concerned; but Santillana was always on the safe side, and, before declaring openly against Luna, he provided against failure by marrying his eldest son to the Constable’s niece.
Baldly told, and without the extenuating pleas which partisanship can furnish, the story of those profitable manoeuvres leaves an unfavourable impression, which is deepened by Santillana’s vindictive exultation over Álvaro de Luna in the Doctrinal de privados. But we cannot expect generosity from a politician who has felt for years that his head was not safe upon his shoulders. Yet Santillana’s personality was engaging; he illustrated the old Spanish proverb which he himself records: ‘Lance never blunted pen, nor pen lance.’ He made comparatively few enemies while he lived, and all the world has combined to praise him since his death in 1458. The slippery intriguer is forgotten; the figure of the knight who appeared in the lists with Ave Maria on his shield has grown dim. But as a poet, as a patron of literature, as the friend of Mena, as a type of the lettered noble during the early Renaissance in Spain, Santillana is remembered as he deserves to be.
He had a taste for the dignity as well as for the pomps of life. If he entertained the King and arranged tourneys, he was careful to surround himself with men of letters. His chaplain, Pedro Díaz de Toledo, translated the Phaedo; his secretary, Diego de Burgos, was a poet who imitated Santillana, and commemorated him in the Triunfo del Marqués. But Santillana was not a scholar, and made no pretension to be one. He knew no Greek, and he says that he never learned Latin. This is not mock-modesty, for his statement is corroborated by his contemporary, Juan de Lucena. He tried to make good his deficiencies, airs a Latin quotation now and then, and must have spelled his way through Horace, for he has left a pleasing version of the ode Beatus ille. Late in life, he is thought to have read part of Homer in a Spanish translation probably made (through a Latin rendering) by his son Pedro González de Mendoza, the ‘Gran Cardenal de España,’ the Tertius Rex who ruled almost on terms of equality with Ferdinand and Isabel. Whatever his shortcomings, Santillana’s admiration for classic authors was complete. He caused translations to be made of Virgil, Ovid and Seneca, and records his view that the word ‘sublime’ should be applied solely to ‘those who wrote their works in Greek or Latin metres.’ His interest in learning and his wide general culture are beyond dispute. His library contained the Roman de la Rose, the works of Guillaume de Machault, of Oton de Granson, and of Alain Chartier whom he singles out for special praise as the author of La Belle dame sans merci and the Reveil Matin—‘por çierto cosas assaz fermosas é plaçientes de oyr.’ He appeals to the authority of Raimon Vidal, to Jaufré de Foixá’s continuation of Vidal, and to the rules laid down by the Consistory of the Gay Science; and, if we may believe the lively Coplas de la Panadera, he carried his liking for all things French so far as to appear on the battlefield of Olmedo
armado como francés.
He had a still deeper admiration for the great Italian masters. In the preface to his Comedieta de Ponza, which describes the rout of the allied fleets of Castile and Aragón by the Genoese in 1435, Boccaccio is one of the interlocutors. There is a patent resemblance between Santillana’s Triunphete de Amor and the Trionfi of Petrarch, who is mentioned in the first quatrain of the poem:—