The historian John H. Elliott, who died this Thursday at the age of 91, unbreakably sealed his work and his life to the Spanish Golden Age, a period that at the beginning of his research in the fifties of the last century received little attention and he imagined one of the darkest moments of an already dark story. The British, as a prominent member of his generation of Hispanists, knew how to remove the cobwebs and clichés from imperial Spain, taking advantage of the opportunities offered by almost wild archives. « It was virgin land before us. We had a unique opportunity to move around and look for discoveries”, recalled the historian earlier this year with
occasion of the sad death of his “dear and admired colleague” Jonathan Brown.
A story of discovery following abandonment
The starting point for Elliott’s history of Spain was the rebellion that took place in the 17th century in Catalonia once morest the monarchy of Felipe IV and whose investigations he captured in ‘The Revolt of the Catalans’ (‘The revolt of the Catalans’), a work published in 1963 with great difficulty in circumventing Franco’s censorship. Under the influence of his mentor in Barcelona, Jaume Vicens Vives, the Briton never stopped fighting the myths with which Catalan nationalism, which took over from Francoism in tripping up historians, has wrapped the past episodes of this region. A concern for the truth that had a kind of epilogue with his last published book ‘Catalans and Scottish. Union and discord’ (2018).
From the war in Catalonia, Elliott jumped to the court of Felipe IV, and from there to the missing palace that this King built in what is now the Retiro Park. Along with the art historian Jonathan Brown, published in 1980 ‘A palace for a king’, a monumental study on the Palacio del Buen Retiro and its historical and artistic context. Since then, both began a media and political campaign to evoke the Hall of Kingdoms, the sentimental epicenter of this palace, through a complete rehabilitation of this space adjacent to the Prado Museum.
The battle between this British Sancho and this British Quixote (it would be difficult to distinguish which of the two was more Sancho and which was more Quixote) achieved great progress in this sense and was received with many promises by the cultural authorities. However, for economic and logistical reasons, among other things an international pandemic, the rehabilitation of the old palace has been postponed and neither of them (Brown died two months ago) has been able to fulfill their last wish. “I hope I’m still alive by then, because I would very much like to be present at the inauguration, at the culmination of a campaign of so many years of my life. It is a story of discovery following abandonment,” he assured. Hispanist John Elliott in the last interview to ABC.
“A Story of Missed Opportunities”
Beyond the palace, the undisputed focus of Elliott’s academic life was the Count-Duke of Olivares, the almighty favorite of Philip IV who had the ambition to lift the Spanish empire to the top, but had to settle for saving the furniture of a monarchy in the process of imploding. The dissection he made of the character was not only collected in the books ‘Richelieu contra Olivares’ (1984) or ‘El Conde Duque de Olivares (1986), but also in a healthy historiographical obsession for which the historian has spent fifty years trying to understand what went through the head of the Spanish politician.
«I have spent decades trying to get into Olivares’ shoes, which is very difficult. I have always felt that something was missing. Because you have to admit that he is not a nice person… And to put yourself in someone’s shoes, you first need a certain empathy. The stage of Olivares is a story of lost opportunities, disappointed hopes and enormous sacrifices for the Spanish people and the rest of the empire, who paid enormous taxes and were asked for men and more men. It is a tragedy that is better understood the more we know regarding the character”, he told ABC just one year ago, the date on which he sponsored the edition of the second volume of ‘Memorials and letters of the Count-Duke of Olivares’ (Marcial Pons), focused on the correspondence between the minister and Cardinal Infante Fernando during his time in Flanders.
Other important works by Elliott, Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences in 1996, were dedicated to comparing the Spanish presence in America with that of the Anglo-Saxon neighbors to the north, ‘Empires of the Atlantic world: Spain and Great Britain in America, 1492-1830 ‘ (Taurus. 2011), to the crisis suffered throughout Europe in the mid-seventeenth century, ‘La Europa Divided: 1559-1598’, and to explain the history of Habsburg Spain from different demystifying perspectives. Among his latest works was the intellectual autobiography ‘Making history’ (Taurus, 2012) regarding the historian’s trade and his great love story with Spain.
