BEFORE I take up other men of great name in litera-
ture, who won their chief laurels during the reign of
Philip III, I must say a word or two of the Duke of
Lerma, for he and not Philip was the real sovereign.
Not since the days of Don Alvaro de Luna had a
subject ruled the king, and now Lerma begins again
a shameful list of Spanish favorites. Philip himself
was a poor creature, timid, lazy, superstitious (el
Piadoso), and a wastrel. The one praise vouchsafed
him is that he was a good dancer. Too slothful to
attend to business, he handed over the government
to the Duke of Lerma, whose deficiencies, though of a
different sort, were as great as his own. The Duke,
a man of very agreeable manners, was avaricious,
incapable, and corrupt. His only care was to make
parade of his power, and to fill his own pockets and
those of his followers. Although the kingdom was
exhausted by foreign wars, the Duke squandered
money in fêtes, in gifts, in superfluous salaries; and
worse than his wastefulness were the financial meas-
ures he devised to counteract the waste. He first
had a plan to lay hold of all the silver vessels in
the country, but the outcry from the Church fright-
ened him off. He then went begging from door to
door for alms to replenish the King's treasury; I speak
literally -- every parish was assigned to royal so-

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