[1591-1611 A.D.]
Hated by the people while his influence with Philip II lasted, Antonio Perez became eminently popular as soon as his sufferings began. The secretary of state had commenced his brilliant career with a careful education, a vast knowledge, and an experience superior to his years. His handsome appearance won him the attention and favour of high-born women; his easy and agreeable manner gave him the highest place at the splendid court; his great ability, intelligence, and skill in business, his courtier-like cleverness had promptly won him his king’s affection.
The highest offices were heaped upon him, country-seats, palaces, carriages, horses, banquets, magnificent furniture, gold, and precious stones, all that his century could bestow, the delights of luxury, the pleasures of riches, the adulation of a high position—all was within his reach, and he abused all without limit or restraint. What could he not promise himself? What could he not hope for? Nevertheless the scene completely changed for the dazzled favourite; the hour of misfortune roused him from the soft sleep of his sybaritic delights, of his ambitious hopes, and imprisonment, tortures, the most violent and painful sufferings put his rich nature to the proof, exhausted the resources of his character, humbled his pride, and effacing the grievous errors of his prosperity, repeatedly poured into his ardent and pleasure-loving soul the balsam of resignation and the consolations of melancholy.
Having taken refuge in Paris by the side of Henry IV, he employed the rest of his life in defending the acts of his administration, and in vindicating his name from the grave accusations weighing on him. It was then he wrote his voluminous work entitled Memoirs and Letters of Antonio Perez, a book now well-nigh forgotten, but which in its time won the highest fame for its author. And this fame was just. All his writings in France, all his labours in England, had but the one exclusive aim—his defence; while he excited the interest of powerful foreigners won by the attraction of his cultured conversation, his graceful manners, and his flowery and witty letters. By this means his life and defence gained the highest popularity, his book made the greatest sensation in Paris, and numerous editions, translations, and extracts followed in quick succession to satisfy the public eagerness. The attentions of interest, the praise of admiration everywhere followed Perez, and while people believed his word and compassionated his dramatic misfortunes, they anathematised with horror the memory of his persecutor, the son of the victorious emperor, the eternal enemy of French influence.
An extraordinary coincidence kept the memory of his misfortunes ripe in Spain. His last persecution is intimately connected with the abolition of Aragonese fueros, when, a fugitive from prison, Antonio Perez presented himself in Saragossa, imploring the aid of the country’s laws, and appealed to the magistrates of the town, and his personal friends watched that no harm should come to his person. Provocations on one side, excesses and disorders on the other, brought about a revolution; and when the king’s troops presented themselves before the gates of Saragossa, the people neither knew how to calm down nor to resist them, and Aragonese liberty came to perish on the scaffold of Lanuza. The remembrance of their lost privileges, the memory of their sufferings, lasted many years in Aragon, and the natives of the country loved and defended the person of the luckless being who was the occasion rather than the motive of their rising. The name of Antonio Perez has become therefore strangely involved with the fueros of his native land, and both causes have been handed down to posterity united in a common misfortune and a common love.
But it is unworthy of the learning of the age to judge the first of Spanish kings by the light of the deceptive rays reflecting from his political and religious enemies, from the point of view of the philosophical prejudices of the eighteenth century. By the blunders of his administration, the violence of his passions, the exaggeration of his character the son of Charles V has given sufficient food for censure, without heaping on his head false crimes and imaginary faults. When, trusting to appearances or to partisan reports, one judges Philip II in his dealings with Antonio Perez, one’s natural feeling is to absolve the favourite and condemn the king, but if one has the curiosity to examine contemporary documents, if one investigates the private or public interests which suddenly changed the condescending friendship of the king into hatred and persecution, one certainly deplores the misfortune of the fallen minister and the inexorable anger of his sovereign, but the extravagant admiration for the victim will slightly decrease, and the abhorrence for the man who abandoned him to the implacable hatred of his enemies will be less intense.
His life is a lasting example to proud courtiers that the favour of princes is inconstant as the calmness of the sea; speedily the tempest comes and lashes the waves. As the famous duke of Alva said to the prince of Eboli: “Kings are wont to prove men like children with personal favours, and bait them like fishes.”
The life of Antonio Perez is an example of the inconstancy of fortune and the vanity of worldly desires; and there is a warning in the fate of the magnate who, having drained all the pleasures of riches and seductions of vanity, dazzled by the height of his position fell into such affliction and misery that his contemporaries considered him worthy of the title—“fortune’s freak.”[m]
THE DEATH OF PHILIP
[1597-1598 A.D.]