The Religious Patronage of the Duke of Lerma, 1598-1621 (review)

This is an admirable and important book. Lisa Banner has written a detailed study of the ecclesiastical patronage of the duke of Lerma, favorite (valido) of King Philip III of Spain (1598-1621) during the years 1598 to 1618. This contribution is especially important, because historians have tended too often to concentrate on the secular and courtly roles of royal favorites and have neglected the importance of religion to them. Banner brings us back to base: Religion mattered deeply to most of these men, and they can, accordingly, be fully understood only if we understand that it did so. The dazzling brilliance with which Lerma mastered king and court and manipulated the royal grace for his own purposes is only part of the achievement of this extraordinary politician. It was not accidental that Lerma finished his life as a cardinal, for he was the most religious of all the major European favorites of the seventeenth century, and he was also perhaps the greatest lay patron of the Church in Spanish history. In reminding us of the centrality of the religious impetus to Lerma's exercise of courtly power, Banner performs a service of prime importance. Her book will be indispensable to everyone interested in Lerma himself or in the phenomenon of the royal favorites of the seventeenth century, and it will hopefully serve to bring about an adjustment of historical perspective.

Banner has made use of a variety of documents—letters, memorials, architectural plans, and the like. Her treatment is methodical and judicious. She is one of the few historians to build upon the work of Luis Cervera Vera, who in the years 1967-91 produced an extraordinary—and extraordinarily important—series of studies on Lerma's buildings, most notably his incomparable Conjunto Palacial de la villa de Lerma (Valencia, 1967). In doing so, Banner demonstrates how Lerma planned and built his churches and conventual houses and then furnished them with missals and sacred vessels, pictures and statues, and the like. Her analysis is well constructed and focused, particularly because she deals with the development of Lerma's patronage in a broadly chronological manner. Certainly, her insistence that Lerma accomplished all this patronage because he was Comendador Mayor de Castilla in the Military Order of Santiago will not find universal favor: Family traditions and personal ambitions were much more important to Lerma than his obligations as a comendador, while the income of 12,000 ducats a year as Comendador Mayor would not have scratched the surface of his expenditure on his ecclesiastical projects (which sometimes amounted to more than 50,000 to 80,000 ducats annually). Nevertheless, it is valuable to be reminded how important it was for leading noblemen to patronize the Church as an expression of their knightly rank. Lerma built his churches, monasteries, and convents, and he patronized virtually every major religious order—Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians, Jesuits, and so forth—because he was profoundly religious and also—it must be admitted—because he wished to guarantee his own passage into what he revealingly termed "the celestial court." Indeed, part of his insurance policy against a fall from power was to convert the lavish grants that he wheedled from Philip III into buildings precisely because these could not be confiscated from his family. Banner's study will be fundamental to all future assessments of Lerma and will help to reassert the importance of religion in the life of early-modern Europe; she is to be congratulated on her achievement.