Introducing fresh archival evidence, author Lisa Banner here demonstrates how Francisco G? de Sandoval y Rojas, first Duke of Lerma, served as a vital link in Habsburg architectural patronage. She traces Lerma's trajectory as, beginning with the ancient royal city of Valladolid, he embarked on a career of renovating or building religious foundations in various towns and cities around seventeenth-century Spain. The unintended consequence of his architectural patronage and involvement was to proliferate the distinctive royal architectural style developed under Philip II, which connected the foundations of Lerma indelibly with the traditions of noble patronage in Habsburg Spain.

The acclaimed author of Duchess and Royal Harlot returns with the unforgettable story of a king's last love and London's darling? BRNell Gwyn has never been a lady, nor does she pretend to be. Blessed with impudent wit and saucy beauty, she swiftly rises from the poverty of Covent Garden to become a sensation in the theater. Still in her teens, she catches the eye of King Charles II, and trades the stage for Whitehall Palace-and the role of royal mistress. Even though she delights the king, she must learn to negotiate the cutthroat royal court, where ambition and lust for power rule the hearts of all around her. For beneath her charm and light-heartedness, Nell has her own ambition-to become no less than the king's favorite.

Staging Favorites explores theatrical representations of royal favorites in Spanish, French, and English dramatic production during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During this time, the courts of Spain, France, and England were dominated by all-powerful ministers who enjoyed royal favor. The politics of royal favoritism gave rise to a significant group of plays which constitutes the subject of this book. While scholars have studied this group partially and separately in national context, Staging Favorites approaches these "dramas about favorites" from a wider European point of view, and performs comparative analyses of a number of plays – including La paciencia en la fortuna; Le Favori, ou la Coquette; and Sejanus His Fall – and adds new detail and differentiation to the early modern perception and representation of the royal favorite. This book will appeal to scholars and students interested in early modern literature, history of theater, and cultural history.

Introducing fresh archival evidence, author Lisa Banner here demonstrates how Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, first Duke of Lerma, served as a vital link in Habsburg architectural patronage. She traces how Lerma embarked on a career of renovating or building religious foundations in seventeenth-century Spain; and shows how his architectural patronage and involvement connected the foundations of Lerma indelibly with the traditions of noble patronage in Habsburg Spain.

A reappraisal of the reign of Philip III of Spain (1598-1621), and the king's favourite, first published in 2000.

The children of Philip III of Spain (1578--1621) and Margarita de Austria (1584--1611) inherited great potential power: the abilities to declare war or make peace, to advocate religious doctrine, and to exert lasting influence over art, culture, and taste. The leadership provided by this generation raises the question of how royal families learned the roles they played in court, country, and on the international stage. In Raised to Rule, Hoffman presents a deeply researched and stimulating study of the formative experiences of children in the royal households of early modern Spain. Five of the eight children born to the royal couple survived to adulthood: the future king Philip IV; the future queen regent of France, Anne of Austria; the Cardinal-Infante Fernando, who rose to international fame as a general during the Thirty Years' War; the future Empress María, briefly known as the princess of England during Charles Stuart's 1623 pursuit of a "Spanish match"; and the Infante Carlos, the constant companion of Philip IV and his heir-presumptive for nearly a decade, who was named governor of Portugal but died before he could serve. Hoffman elucidates the formal instruction and informal training that prepared these individuals to shape the history of their country and influence all of Europe. For the heirs of Philip and Margarita, developmental experiences took place within the social structures and patronage systems of the royal court -- a place that proved to be influential and precarious, where public and private relationships overlapped and political metaphors of family relationships reflected the reality of public service based on personal ties. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including palace rulebooks, chronicles, household accounts, a journal of the royal chapel, diplomatic and personal correspondence, published and unpublished advice to kings, and treatises on the education of princes, Hoffman illustrates the formation of the leadership of Spain and early modern perceptions of the proper education and function of royalty. Hoffman's Raised to Rule provides an insightful account of the education of the Spanish Habsburgs from 1601 to 1634. Her work fills a significant historiographical gap and offers new revelations into a previously neglected aspect of royal life.

In Italy, the powerful Borromeo family of Milan have long been held up as a rare example of paternalist aristocrats who withstood the temptations of self-enrichment so many of their peers succumbed to during the period of Spanish rule. Aristocratic Power in the Spanish Monarchy, the first major study of the family in the seventeenth century, challenges this myth and explains how it came about. Based on research in the previously inaccessible Borromeo private papers, the volume details the Borromeo's increasing involvement with, and dependence on, the patronage of the kings of Spain. At the center of the analysis are the ways in which one family sought to rationalize and conceal this controversial relationship in the face of popular opposition to their methods of buying their way into political power. As their self-seeking behavior came under scrutiny, the clients of successive minister-favorites reinvented themselves as paternalist courtiers committed to delivering good governance for the subject populations under their rule. In doing so, the book offers new perspectives on broader questions: through a case study of three brothers from a representative noble family, it explains a major shift in aristocratic power in the seventeenth century, uncovering how dissimulation and subterfuge became central to the preservation of social privilege in an age of unprecedented threats to established power from below. Steeped in sociological and anthropological research on elite power, this captivating story from seventeenth-century Italy tells us much about the reproduction of social inequality in our own times.