Philip IV at the age of 55.
From a portrait by Valazquez in the National Gallery, London.
The Court of
Philip IV.
SPAIN IN DECADENCE
BY
MARTIN HUME
EDITOR OF THE CALENDARS OF SPANISH STATE PAPERS
(PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE)
LECTURER IN SPANISH HISTORY AND LITERATURE
PEMBROKE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.
Vuestras augustisinas Soberanias vivan, O GRAN
FELIPE, inclitamente triunfantes, gravadas en los Anales
de la Fama, pues sois sólida columna y mobil Atlante de
la Fe, unica defensa di la iglesia, y bien universal de
vuestras invencibles reinos
LONDON
EVELEIGH NASH
1907
PREFACE
"I lighted upon great files andheaps of papers and writings of allsorts.... In searching and turningover whereof, whilst I laboured till Isweat again, covered all over with dust,to gather fit matter together ... thatnoble Lord died, and my industry beganto flag and wax cold in the business."
Thus wrote William Camden with referenceto his projected life of Lord Burghley, which wasnever written; and the words may be appliednot inappropriately to the present book and itswriter. Some years ago I passed many laboriousmonths in archives and libraries at home andabroad, searching and transcribing contemporarypapers for what I hoped to make a completehistory of the long reign of Philip IV., duringwhich the final seal of decline was stamped indeliblyupon the proud Spanish empire handed down bythe great Charles V. to his descendants. I haddreamed of writing a book which should not onlybe a social review of the period signalised by thetriumph of French over Spanish influence in thecivilisation of Europe, but also a political historyof the wane and final disappearance of theprodigious national imposture that had enabled Spain,aided by the rivalries between other nations, todominate the world for a century by moral forceunsupported by any proportionate material power.
The sources to be studied for such a historywere enormous in bulk and widely scattered, andI worked very hard at my self-set task. But atlength I, too, began to wax faint-hearted; not,indeed, because my "noble Lord had died";for no individual lord, noble or ignoble, has everdone, or I suppose ever will do, anything for me ormy books; but because I was told by those whosebusiness it is to study his moods, that the only"noble Lord" to whom I look for patronage,namely the sympathetic public in England andthe United States that buys and reads my books,had somewhat changed his tastes. He wantedto know and understand, I was told, more aboutthe human beings who personified the eventsof history, than about the plans of the battles theyfought. He wanted to draw aside the impersonalveil which historians had interposed between himand the men and women whose lives made up theworld of long ago; to see the great ones in theirhabits as they lived, to witness their sports, tolisten to their words, to read their private letters,and with these advantages to obtain the key totheir hearts and to get behind their minds; and soto learn history through the human ac