Feros, Antonio

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  • Publication
    Governance (Spain)
    (2014-01-01) Feros, Antonio
  • Publication
    Lerma y Olivares: La Práctica del Valimiento en la Primera Mitad del Seiscientos
    (1990) Feros, Antonio
    A estas alturas, podria resultar paradojico sefialar que detras de esta cita de Gonzalez Davila se encuentra una de las razones -explicitada de forma natural por el autor- que explicaria, en ultima instancia, los cambios que se produjeron en el reinado de Felipe III: el caracter personal de la Monarquia Hispana. Desde esta perspectiva la entronizacion de un nuevo monarca se convirtio -al igual que en reinados anteriores y posteriores- en el momento politico clave, en la ocasion para la introducion de novedades y de exaltacion de personajes hasta esos momentos oscuros. Parece claro, en este sentido, que la personalidad y las actitudes del nuevo monarca fueron elementos fundamentales en todo este proceso. Sin embargo, estos no eran los unicos que condicionaban el comportamiento de los gobernantes hispanos. A finales del quinientos, la Monarquia Hispana se caracterizaba por la plena consolidacion de una estructura gubernativa basada en los órganos consultivos que conformaban la Hamada polisinodia. Pero, ademas, los ultimos afios del reinado de Felipe II vieron surgir una serie de iniciativas politicas que habrian de influir -en mayor medida de lo que suele admitirse- en la actuacion de los reyes y los validos, que dominarian la escena politica de la primera mitad del siglo XVII.
  • Publication
    El Viejo Monarca y Los Nuevos Favoritos: Los Discursos Sobre La Privanza en El Reinado de Felipe II / The old Monarch and the new Favorites: Discourses on the Privanza During Philip II's Reign
    (1997) Feros, Antonio
    RESUMEN: Durante el reinado de Felipe II, y especialmente desde comienzos de la década de 1580, se desarrollan una serie de iniciativas por parte del monarca que supondrían la aparición no sólo de nuevas prácticas políticas, sino también la introducción de cambios importantes en los discursos políticos dominantes. Estas iniciativas políticas promovidas durante los últimos años del reinado de Felipe II fueron en parte inspirados por el llamado "nuevo humanismo", el cual asociado a las teorías de la "razón de estado" tenía como punto central de su discurso la necesidad de promover la capacidad de acción independiente de la monarquía, frente a los obstáculos legales y administrativos impuestos por otros miembros del cuerpo político —consejos reales y Cortes—. Algunas de estas iniciativas políticas se basaban en experiencias anteriores (la creación de Juntas, por ejemplo) pero otras eran decididamente nuevas, como lo era el intento de evitar la presencia de facciones cortesanas enfrentadas. Elemento central en este proceso fue la creciente participación en la gobernación cotidiana de la monarquía de los llamados "favoritos del rey", quienes promovieron las teorías y prácticas políticas definidas con anterioridad. Del mismo modo, con la presencia de estos "nuevos favoritos" se inició el desarrollo de un discurso en el cual los favoritos reales aparecían representados como "ministros" del monarca, un discurso que sería plenamente desarrollado en las primeras décadas del siglo XVII bajo las privanzas del Duque de Lerma y el Conde Duque de Olivares. ABSTRACT: During the 1580s and 1590s, Philip II and his close counselors implemented political initiatives which resulted in important changes in the royalist political discourse and in the ways in which politics were conducted. These changes were in part inspired by the political philosophy of reason of state, promoted by the "new humanists", whose central political premise was the need to consolidate and expand the monarchy's right for independent action free of the legal and administrative constrains imposed by other members of the body politic, e.g. royal councils and Cortes. Although Philip II continued to advance initiatives began in the early years of his reign (such as the creation of committees ad hoc, or Juntas), towards the end of his rule he undertook others that were radically new (such as Philip's attempts to avoid the division of the court into conflicting factions). Throughout this period the king's favorites also played an increasing role in the everyday ruling of the monarchy. The merging of what contemporaries believed was a new type of royal favorite encouraged the surge of a political discourse portraying the favorite as the king's minister, and later as the king's principal minister. These developments led to a theoretical revolution which culminated during the first decades of the seventeenth century under the "privanzas" of Lerma and Olivares.
  • Publication
    Images of Evil, Images of Kings: The Contrasting Faces of the Royal Favourite and the Prime Minister in Early Modern European Political Literature, c. 1580-c. 1650
    (1999) Feros, Antonio
    Some three decades years ago, Leicester Bradner examined two distinct views held by seventeenth-century English and Spanish dramatists when writing about royal favourites. Spanish playwrights, Bradner noted, sought to 'arouse sympathy for the king and the friend he loves', while the English stressed 'the issues of good and bad government' by presenting the royal favourite as an evil counsellor and a usurper, and the monarch who let him prosper as a weak ruler. Why these disparate treatments of the royal favourite? This query is particularly poignant when we consider that the English and Spanish dramatists believed that they were confronting a similar political phenomenon. Both knew that the rise of the favourite depended on the monarch's whim and that the favourite's fate was determined by the inexorable turn of the wheel of fortune. And, in both monarchies, playwrights used similar examples to portray the favourite, examples taken from the Old and New Testaments (Joseph, Haman and John the Evangelist), Roman history (Sejanus) and the past of their own countries (favcston in England and Alvaro de Luna in Spain).
  • Publication
    Vicedioses, Pero Humanos: El Drama del Rey
    (1993) Feros, Antonio
  • Publication
  • Publication
    Review of Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World
    (2003-05-01) Feros, Antonio
    In a plenary session of the Spanish Royal Academy of History (April 1776), Francisco Jose Viana y Teran lectured his colleagues about the type of history that the Academy should promote and the role history should play in vindicating the Spanish nation’s past, especially at a time when many European scholars and philosophers were claiming that the Iberian peninsula had isolated itself to prevent the penetration of Enlightened ideas. For Viana, and undoubtedly for many of his colleagues, the vindication of their nation, “unfairly calumniated by foreigners,” required something other than propaganda and apologies. It called for a comprehensive national history proving that Spain had always belonged to a select group of civilized nations and, therefore, was entitled to political autonomy and intellectual respect. The history promoted by the Academy could no longer be the one favored in previous centuries–the recording of the rulers’ exploits. Instead, historians should study “peoples’ customs and mores, the inconstancy of the laws, the influence of the government, the phases of national progress, the vices and preoccupations that made possible our national decline, and what we have to do in order to restore the nation to its previous glory.”
  • Publication
    The King’s Favorite
    (2008-03-01) Feros, Antonio
    Don Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, better known as the Duke of Lerma, is not a familiar name to those interested in the annals of power and politics. The Duke of Lerma, the favorite (El Favorito o Valido) and unofficial prime minister of Philip III of Spain from 1598 to 1618, was, however, in his own time, both in Spain and throughout Europe, quite famous. And infamous. He was respected, feared, attacked, satirized, gossiped about, eulogized, and even dramatized in plays such as The Great Favourite or the Duke of Lerma, written in 1668 by the English playwright Sir Robert Howard.
  • Publication
  • Publication
    Review of Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Apogee of Empire: Spain and New Spain in the Age of Charles III,1759–1789
    (2006-03-01) Feros, Antonio
    Although most eighteenth-century Europeans still considered Spain to be one of the most powerful polities on the continent, by the time Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations (1776), views about Spain and its empire, then headed by Charles III, seemed to have become unconditionally negative. Despite the size of its population, its terri-tories and the silver mines under Spanish jurisdiction, and its monopoly over the commercial trade with its American colonies, Smith and his contemporaries viewed Spain as one of the poorest nations in Europe. Spain’s economic backwardness was inevitably linked to its rather traditional political system. Smith, for example, believed that Spain remained a quasi-feudal state and that its colonies were ruled by an “absolute govern-ment . . . arbitrary and violent.” The predicament of the Spanish empire, according to eighteenth-century Europeans, stemmed from what many believed to be the mediocre character of Spain’s rulers and citizens. A nation that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seemed to represent the virtues of a learned, vigorous, and expanding Europe was now seen as culturally deprived and isolated, dominated by religious fanatics, and ruled by second-rate monarchs and self-interested elites. For many decades historians have debated the merits of these views—whether they in fact reflected the political and economic realities of eighteenth-century Spain or whether they were sim-ply a part of the ideological trashing that accompanies all international struggles for world power. The loss of its American colonies in the early nineteenth century, the political instability that characterized Spain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and its inability to industrialize until recent times have seemed to many historians sufficient proof that Smith and his contemporaries were essentially right. This view of Spain in time became the interpretative paradigm used to explain an empire that, despite its power, was never able to “modernize” economically and politically.