2023-09-21 11:44:13
The lie has been installed to avoid going away in Spanish politics at a time where one lie covers up the next without society having time to digest it. Newly minted politicians like Pedro Sánchez are as capable of demanding one day that the full weight of the law fall on Puigdemont and those involved in the process as they are of saying the next that an amnesty law must be passed to forget it as if nothing had happened. 1-0 happened. However, the mechanisms may be increasingly sophisticated and faster, but the tradition of Spanish liars goes back to the dawn of time. Of Fernando El Católico to Lluís Companysthere have always been rulers of those who affirm that “where I said I say I say Diego.”
Ferdinand the Catholic, a king not at all frank
The Catholic Monarchs were rulers obsessed with propaganda and controlling what was written about them. In the first Castilian courts after taking over the Crown, Isabel increased the salary of the chroniclers by 60% and closely supervised what they wrote about her husband and her. Hence what surprises him is the description that the official chronicler Hernando del Pulgar made of Fernando: «He was of good understanding, very temperate in his eating and drinking, and in the movements of his person, because neither anger nor pleasure “made a great change in him,” said Hernando del Pulgar, who described him as a pious man, “very friendly,” with “singular grace” and good treatment of his servants, but he acknowledged with surprising crudeness for coming from an official chronicler that “We cannot say that he was frank.” More than once and twenty times his left hand ended up doing the opposite behind what his right hand seemed to do in front.
Fernando inherited his father’s icy, reserved, calculating character, but he could not avoid catching a lot of his mother’s sentimental, irritable, and hunched spirit. To reconcile both sides, he learned to present himself to others with a mask, making it difficult to figure out what was going through his head at all times. This made him a master of diplomacy, as he himself recognized. Machiavelli, and a skilled politician with a reputation as a trickster. This attitude ended up annoying his son-in-law, the King of England, Henry VIII, who during a joint operation to attack France from the Pyrenees learned, by surprise, that his father-in-law’s true plans were to invade Navarre.
The British contingent garrisoned in the Basque Country under the command of the Count of Dorset discovered at the same time as the French that Ferdinand’s true objective was on the southern side of the Pyrenees. The Aragonese master of dissimulation took the blame against the English command, who refused to act as chaperone, to calm the anger of his ally and brother-in-law Henry VIII: «Many of us Spaniards have our suspicions, or we are completely sure, that “some people who serve in the English army maintain secret agreements with the French.” The French, Navarrese and English agreed on a single issue: they had all been outwitted by the Aragonese. The British King would punish the Aragonese man’s daughter for her false promises…
The manipulative secretary
Antonio Pérez strove until the last day of his life to earn the dishonor of being one of the great villains in the history of Spain. “He removed the evens from the bills and gave the nones,” Gaspar de Quiroga, the Inquisitor General between 1572 and 1594, once wrote about the complex network of lies and double games maintained by Philip II’s secretary. When he suspected that his former “servant” Juan de Escobedo might reveal his secrets to the King, Pérez convinced Philip II to agree to assassinate him under false accusations. Pérez used manipulation to present the King’s half-brother and his secretary as two conspirators who planned to overthrow him. To do this, the secretary argued that the conversations he had kept secret Don Juan of Austria with the Pope Gregory XIII and with the leader of the French Catholics, the Duke of Guise, they sought to “come to win Spain and drive out his Majesty.” In the opinion of Geoffrey Parker, author of the book ‘Philip II, the definitive biography’, the Monarch, “distrustful by nature”, harbored especially deep suspicions about his brother’s ambitions in Flanders and in England, where he had welcomed a Pope’s plan to attack the islands and marry the Catholic Mary of Stuart. The idea, therefore, did not sound at all implausible to royal ears. Philip II authorized him to be poisoned but he was probably unaware of, and would not have accepted, the brutal plan B of murdering him in the middle of the street in daylight.
The death of Escobedo was the beginning of the end of the all-powerful secretary, who in his flight caused a serious rebellion in Aragon and ended up joining the enemies of the Hispanic Monarchy. In Béarn (the French Basque Country), Pérez published the first edition of his texts ‘Relaciones’, one of the pillars of the black legend against Spain that has lasted for centuries. Later, Pérez moved to England, where he offered secret information for the English attack on Cádiz in 1596. A military operation that caused the sacking of the city and considerable economic losses, and which probably included the presence of Philip II’s former secretary. embarked on one of the English vessels but without command.
Manuel Godoy
Liar and treacherous was the invalid of Charles IV. Don Manuel Godoy, with as many titles as territories the Hispanic Empire maintained at the time – and most of them, given by the grace of the monarchs – was a body guard who had come to the fore who, according to the tunes, enjoyed giving ‘ajipedobes’ (read it backwards) to the queen Maria Luisa of Parma. His majesties showered him with noble titles to justify his closeness; And he did not come from a noble family. Thanks to this, Manolito amassed a real estate asset that took the hiccups in prestigious places such as El Escorial and Aranjuez. In addition to the fact that, in just under two decades, he collected a thousand paintings.
His greatest betrayal (or lie) occurred shortly after, and out of self-interest. In 1807, the small Corsican had the idea of taking over Portugal to put pressure, in turn, on Great Britain. «On October 27, 1807, the Treaty of Fontainebleau with Napoleon Bonaparte. It was established that the conquest of Portugal would be carried out by the Spanish and French armies to, once the Portuguese kingdom was occupied, make the continental blockade of the English effective,” explains historian Luis Suárez Fernández in his work ‘General History of Spain. and America’. Godoy allowed the Gallic armies to pass west in exchange for a portion of land in the Portuguese country and prevented, at least during the first moments, the army from taking to the streets to defend itself from the invasion.
Lluís Companys
October 6, 1934 is a key date for Catalan secessionism, the same one whose flag was flown at the time. Carles Puigdemont encouraged by a CUP eager to proclaim illegitimate independence as soon as possible. For this politician, the events that occurred that sad day – in which ‘president’ Lluís Companys, of Esquerra Republicana, illegally proclaimed the ‘Estat Catalá’ from the balcony of the Generalitat – are both justification and an example of courage. Nothing is further from reality.
That fleeting republic forged by treason – it was proclaimed during the general riots of October 1934 – lasted less than a breath. Exactly how long it took Domingo Batet (captain general of Catalonia born in Tarragona) to contact the central government, position his men in front of the Generalitat building, force the few Mossos d’Esquadra that defended it to surrender, and put the rebels behind bars. Companys, defeated, escaped from the building through the sewers to avoid the Second Republic’s sentence. Sad escape after taking a stab at the Government of the day in a time of social turbulence.
Fernando VII, lying to everyone
Ferdinand VII deceived his parents, Europe and Napoleon. To his mentors and friends. To his wives. To the liberals and, so that they would not be envious, also to the absolutists at the end of his life. Not once, but many times. The son of Charles IV challenged that maxim—attributed to Abraham Lincoln— that you can fool everyone some of the time, you can fool some all the time, but you can’t fool everyone all the time. He achieved this while also retaining the consideration of the Spanish people, who saw him as an innocent and virtuous monarch until almost the last days of his life.
How he managed to fool so many people and for so long is one of the great mysteries of humanity, along with how the great pyramids of Egypt were built or why Socrates was denied permission to set up a daycare center. The closest answer points to the difficulty of demolishing a myth when so much blood has been invested to erect it and to an ability of the sovereign that is not sufficiently valued. Unlike other devious people, Fernando did not assume a reserved or ambiguous attitude just in case, but he preferred to act mentally handicapped with the people he had just met. He preferred to be taken for a fool than to be considered smart.
Ferdinand VII ABC
Playing it cool was the favorite weapon of this master of dissimulation, along with his habit of leaving between his words and his last decisions an unbearable margin of maneuver so that his will could change at the opportune moment. Upon his return to Spain he told the liberals that he would swear by the Constitution, while promising the absolutists to reestablish the Inquisition and the French to facilitate his return. He was fooling some of them, if not all of them. Napoleon, who boasted of knowing human nature well, completely failed in his judgment of Ferdinand, for whom lying was like breathing: «As for the Prince of Asturias, he is a man who inspires little interest. He is stupid, to the point that I haven’t been able to get a word out of him. He does not respond to anything that is said to him; Even if you rebuke him or compliment him, he never changes his face.
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