Raised to Rule: Educating Royalty at the Court of the Spanish Habsburgs, 1601–1634

07 "El Principe Instruido"

184 tRansitions to adulthood but he could wield a considerable amount of power independently and mold the form of government, as seen in the varying degrees to which Spanish kings relied on councils, juntas, nobles, ministers, secretaries, or favorites, according to their tastes and particular circumstances. His notion of kingship consciously and unconsciously included elements that would shape his image through political , religious, and cultural patronage and through public display. In navigating the different issues of kingship, Philip had a variety of authors willing to advise him. A long tradition of mirrors of princes had established central questions concerning the nature of kingly rule. As monarchs in the late medieval period consolidated power, so that the idea of an all-powerful king seemed attainable, treatises began to reflect the desire to contain royal power through structures such as councils and through more subtle arguments asserting the necessity of individual morality and other personal qualities in a king. Over the generations, one can see the development of political thought in the works published during the formative years of the monarch or in times of particular crisis. Treatises such as Martín de Córdoba’s Jardín de nobles doncellas , written for Isabel the Catholic, and Erasmus’s Institutio principis christiani, written for the future emperor Charles V, offered both an outline of moral formation and practical advice, while the royal preacher and speechwriter Antonio de Guevara found popular as well as scholarly and royal audiences for his Libro aureo del emperador Marco Aurelio and Relox de príncipes and further works that examined both the good qualities of princes and the nature of the royal court and the favorite.2 During the reign of Philip II, such works as Fadrique Furió Ceriol’s Consejo y consejeros del príncipe, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda’s De rego et rego officio, and Bartolomé Felipe’s Tratado del consejo y de los consejeros de los príncipes emphasized the structure of government and the choice of advisers. Treatises also increasingly recognized that the king should earn the confidence and devotion of the people. Earlier works tended to consider this a question of the king showing himself to his people in public acts, whether in dispensing justice and demonstrating piety or in dancing and horsemanship, thus building his reputation and gaining admiration of his person. Later thought evolved to acknowledge the manipulation of image through literature, arts, and public display. Through these acts, the king reaffirmed the aura of majesty as a separate quality that placed him above other sorts of persons, thus conceding him the right to rule. The majesty of display also gave way to its opposite, the majesty of distance, 185 “el PRínCiPe instRuido” which allowed the concept of the king to permeate events when the king himself could not be seen, a style of kingship that historians have described as the “invisible king.”3 Associated in Spain with the desire of an individual, Philip II, for solitude, this conceptualization of kingship used ceremony and ideology to set the king apart from other persons, relying on his office and reputation rather than his person to command public respect. While royal practice moved in this direction, theorists did not necessarily accept this separation of the king’s two persons. They continued to argue that the king should be seen and understood the public actions of the king not just as a way to win the affection of the people but also as an instruction to them.4 Another branch of theorists focused on the person rather than the image of the king, emphasizing the king’s religion as a guarantor both of good rule and of the Catholicism of the nation. The Jesuit Pedro de Rivadeneira’s Tratado de la religión y virtudes que debe tener el príncipe cristiano (1595), written when Philip III was in his mid-teens, continued the tradition of directing such treatises to a prince during his adolescence.5 Unlike Erasmus, Rivadeneira did not take “Christian prince” as a general assumption, but as a blueprint for government based on Christian thought as opposed to ideas of expedience and reason of state associated with Machiavelli. He dismissed the idea of using religion to fool people and presented a vision of a king who could not rule a moral people unless he himself was moral. Rivadeneira also offered advice on a variety of...