Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares

Spanish prime minister

• Born: January 6, 1587
• Birthplace: Rome, Papal States (now in Italy)
• Died: July 22, 1645
• Place of death: Toro, Spain

Olivares was one of the great statesmen of seventeenth century Europe, the driving force behind the attempt to unify a Spanish nation and of a final effort in the 1620’s and 1630’s to maintain Spain’s dominant position on the Continent and around the world.

Early Life

Born in the Spanish embassy in Rome and named Gaspar de Guzmán y Pimental, Olivares (oh-lee-VAH-rays) was the third son of the Spanish ambassador to Rome, Enrique de Guzmán, and María Pimental Fonseca, who was from a Castilian noble family. María died when Olivares was seven, so he was raised thereafter by his authoritarian father. They remained in Italy until 1600, when Enrique returned to Spain from his ambassadorship to Rome and Naples. With Olivares’s eldest brother in line to inherit the family properties, Enrique earmarked Olivares for the Church, sending him to the University of Salamanca, where he studied canon law. His fellow students elected him rector in 1603. Both of his older brothers died unexpectedly, leaving Olivares in 1604 as heir to the family’s estates and title. Three years later, in 1607, his father died, and Olivares became a count.

Eager to establish himself at court and hopeful of gaining a grandeeship, the count spent grandiosely and married his own cousin and one of Queen Margaret’s ladies-in-waiting, Inés de Zúñiga y Velasco. Inés bore three children, but only daughter María survived to adulthood. Disappointed at his failure to persuade King Philip III or his chief minister, Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, the duke of Lerma, to make him a grandee, Olivares moved to Seville, where he remained from 1607 to 1615. He held the largely honorific title of governor of the Alcázar (royal palace/fortress). These were not wasted years, however, as Olivares busied himself building one of the greatest private libraries in Europe and acting as one of Andalusia’s chief patrons of the arts. He displayed great energy, and his intellectual curiosity showed in his participation in literary and philosophical circles.

Life’s Work

In 1615, Olivares obtained an appointment as a member of the crown prince’s chamber. This made him a figure at court, in the service of the future Philip IV , born in 1605. Olivares assiduously courted the prince, both from personal ambition and out of a desire to improve his education and capacity for government when the time came. Eager to impress the prince with his loyalty, Olivares even kissed Philip’s chamber pot in a famous example of obsequiousness. The boy’s frivolous father, Philip III, displayed neither ability nor interest in ruling and turned the government over to his venal royal favorite (valido), Lerma.

When the king died unexpectedly in 1621 and the sixteen-year-old prince rose to the throne, the count of Olivares found himself ideally placed to wield political power through his influence over Philip IV. Popular sentiment opposed the young king having his own valido, and Olivares and others vying for power had to proceed cautiously. Philip IV was too young, inexperienced, and inconstant, however, to govern himself. His need for assistance made Olivares more and more essential.

Olivares and Baltazar (Balthasar) de Zúñiga, his uncle and mentor, outmaneuvered their rivals for influence over Philip and surprised onlookers by their refusal to participate in the corruption that characterized the Lerma period. They saw themselves as the king’s tutors and had reform of the monarchy as one of their goals. When Zúñiga died in late 1621, Olivares became Philip’s chief mentor. In many ways he was well suited to the task: He was prudent, intelligent, cautious, diligent, and meticulous, characteristics never used to describe the despised Lerma. Olivares, also, was to spend the next two decades, sometimes with the king’s active participation and sometimes without it, in a prolonged attempt to reform and strengthen Spain and the monarchy.

The challenges were daunting. Royal revenues from the Americas had begun to decline, and Castile, where royal power was strongest, was increasingly impoverished by the burden of empire. The empire itself was a collection of individual kingdoms rather than a monarchy with unified political and fiscal structures. Among Philip’s subjects, the Portuguese and Catalans were especially resentful of their subjection to Madrid. In central Europe, the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) had erupted, and the Austrian Habsburgs pressed their Spanish cousins for support. Perhaps worst of all, Spain’s long, costly war with the Dutch flared up again in 1621.

Olivares hoped to overcome all these problems by radical reform, which he portrayed as a return to the good government of the age of Philip II, when Spain clearly dominated Europe. His plan to unify the empire militarily and fiscally portended a clear break with the Spanish Habsburgs’ traditional respect for the laws and taxes of the individual kingdoms. In simple terms, the plan was to relieve Castile of the cost of protecting the other kingdoms by forcing them to supply money and troops for the common defense, but the Catalans, Portuguese, and others saw the plan, which became known as the Union of Arms (1620’s), as a violation of their traditional rights. They protested against having to pay with higher taxes and greater military levies for policies devised in Madrid for the benefit of Castilian interests.

Some Spanish ministers urged that Philip IV make peace with the Dutch to stop the war’s horrendous drain on Spanish resources, but Olivares was optimistic that with imposition of his reforms, the empire could prevail. Other factors perhaps heightened his optimism. In 1625, for example, the king made him the duke of Sanlúcar. One of his most cherished dreams was thus satisfied: As the count-duke he was a grandee, in the highest rank of Spanish nobility. The following year, though, the first of a string of disasters hit Olivares. In 1626, his only surviving child, María, died in childbirth, eliminating any hope of passing his titles and estates to a direct heir. With his daughter’s death, Olivares seemed morose and fatalistic. In 1628, Olivares intervened in a succession dispute in Mantua, which had the fatal effect of provoking open warfare between Spain and France, a conflict that lasted until the Treaty of the Pyrenees was signed in 1659, recognizing Spanish defeat. Also in 1628, a Dutch squadron commanded by Piet Hein captured the entire treasure fleet returning from the New World and touched off a great fiscal crisis.

Despite his wide-ranging abilities as a statesman, Olivares failed to make Spanish policies conform to the realities of the monarchy’s straitened circumstances. The Union of Arms, rather than strengthening imperial defenses and unifying the empire, provoked dangerous rebellion in Catalonia and Portugal. Spain could not subdue the Dutch rebels. Income from the Americas continued to decline. By 1640, Olivares was undoubtedly the most hated man in Spain, even more than Lerma had been. The pressures undermined his physical health, and, in 1642, he displayed growing signs of mental instability. Olivares worried that because of his own weaknesses and sins, God was punishing Philip and Spain. On January 17, 1643, Philip IV removed Olivares from power, and he spent the remainder of his life in exile at Toro. Olivares died there, his mind gone, on July 22, 1645.

Significance

That Olivares failed, ultimately, was not surprising, in retrospect. Spain’s political and military might was illusory, dependent upon outmoded constitutional restraints within the empire and upon a France temporarily weakened by its religious wars. Neither could Castile and Olivares depend permanently on the windfall of silver from the Americas to underwrite a grandiose imperial strategy. For years Olivares carried on with tremendous determination and energy, and he nearly prevailed. As his foremost biographer, J. H. Elliott, concluded, Olivares placed too much faith in Spain’s ultimate triumph, that after great struggle time would eventually give him and the monarchy their victory.

Bibliography

Brown, Jonathan, and J. H. Elliot. A Palace for a King: The Buen Retiro and the Court of Philip IV. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993. Built in the 1630’s for Philip IV, the Buen Retiro Palace reflected the grandeur of Spanish political and cultural life during the Olivares period.

Darby, Graham. “Lerma Before Olivares.” History Today 45, no. 7 (1995): 30-36. The author credits Lerma with having a more farsighted foreign policy than Olivares, given Lerma’s willingness to negotiate a truce with the Dutch. Olivares wanted to pursue war.

Elliott, J. H. The Count Duke of Olivares: The Statesman in an Age of Decline. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986. The monumental biography of Olivares by one of the greatest historians of early modern Europe. An indispensable read for those interested in the Spain of the first half of the seventeenth century.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Imperial Spain, 1469-1716. New York: Penguin, 1990. Originally published in 1963, this work has seen many editions and is a still-perceptive survey of the two long centuries that witnessed Spain’s rise to dominance in Europe and its subsequent decline. Olivares plays a prominent role.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Richelieu and Olivares. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. A fascinating comparison of the two great ministers who directed the war efforts of France and Spain as they struggled for supremacy.

Gonzales de Leon, Fernando. “Aristocratic Draft-dodgers in Seventeenth-Century Spain.” History Today 46, no. 7 (1996): 14-21. The author analyzes the mounting opposition to Olivares’s policies within Spain itself, even opposition among the elite.

Lynch, John. Spain Under the Habsburgs. 2d ed. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. The second volume of this text contains considerable information on Olivares, and the second edition is updated with the scholarship of scholar Elliott and others.