Don Francisco de Quevedo | Page 5

the official list of members of the
Asociación de Escritores y Artistas, and his domicile is given as 45
Calle de Atocha. The men that knew him in the closing years of his life
agree that he dragged out a miserable existence in the utmost poverty,
dependent upon the generosity of his friends. They speak highly of his
moral integrity, deploring at the same time the weakness of character
which prevented his realizing the promise of his early years. He died
April 29, 1881, and was buried in the cemetery of San Lorenzo.

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION
When Philip IV became king of Spain in 1621 he inherited a kingdom
whose resources had been recklessly wasted. His father, Philip III, had
been ruled by the most inept of ministers, the Duke of Lerma. Great
sums of money, wrung from the productive lower classes, had been
spent to carry on a fruitless war in the Netherlands, to provide
amusement for an idle, frivolous court, and to fill the pockets of the
minister's creatures. Government was in the hands of a bureaucracy of
parasites. The collective conscience of the governing class had
withered and died. The office-holders in this bureaucracy had come to
regard the acquisition of riches at the expense of the state as one of
their official privileges.
If Spain were to maintain her preëminent position as the greatest power
in Europe the most radical economic reform was necessary. Stimulus
must be given to the productive activity of the country by relief from
oppressive taxation, and expenditure must be wisely restrained and
administered.
The situation demanded a man of exceptional keenness of vision, great
energy, and absolute integrity. There were not lacking men who
foresaw the disaster that threatened, men who still kept some of that

energy and fearlessness that had made America a Spanish dependency,
but such individuals were silenced as menaces rather than encouraged
as helpers. In Philip himself the mental vigor and physical stamina of
the Spanish Hapsburgs had been greatly diminished. The
consanguineous marriages of his immediate ancestors had weakened
the stock. There can be no doubt that he loved his people in his own
pitiful, ineffectual way, but he was hopelessly weak; lacking in the
ability and even the will to rule, he delegated government to Don
Gaspar de Guzmán, Count of Olivares and soon to be the first Duke of
San Lúcar.
Here, on the other hand, was a man of undoubted energy and courage.
Yet his weakness was his utter lack of vision and his inability to profit
by the mistakes of his predecessors. He had many a lesson to learn in
the failure of the reigns of Philip II and Philip III; he should have seen
that the reason for the disasters of the former was the continuance of a
hopeless war in the Netherlands for the sake of an ideal of religious
unity which the progress of the sixteenth century had made impossible;
above all he should have realized the economic folly of a system of
taxation and industrial repression that was choking the nation.
Olivares himself was to blame for the initial appearance in the
machinery of the State of only a few vital weaknesses, for at the
beginning of his administration many fatal tendencies were already at
work. But because he failed to check those tendencies he must ever be
the scapegoat. To be sure he signalized his arrival by a few months of
rigid economy, but he did not cut deep enough. He soon realized the
futility of saving where there was nothing to save. Then, either because
he failed to see the source of the evil or because he lacked the
constructive ability to attack it, he went to the extreme of lavish
expenditure. As the situation grew more and more hopeless he
temporized, striving to hide the internal decay beneath a gilded exterior
of ostentatious wealth. As he plunged deeper his critics grew bolder,
and to silence them his rule became more barbarously arbitrary.
Moreover, he found himself face to face with the great Richelieu at the
head of a rich and well-administered France. Under him France was to

become organized and to extend her dominions to her natural physical
boundaries--at the expense of Spain. Olivares ruled Spain from 1621
until 1643, Richelieu ruled France from 1622 until 1642; it was a
life-long duel between the two ministers. Richelieu laid the foundation
for the greatness of Louis XIV, while Olivares made inevitable the
abject impotence of Spain under Charles II.
The culminating disasters began to arrive in 1640 with the rebellion of
Catalonia. The determination of the Catalans in 1626 to grant Philip no
more arbitrary taxes marks the beginning of the revolt that ended with
the entire loss of Catalonia. Olivares could never forget its opposition
to his