Queer Places:
Il Palazzo del Bo, Via 8 Febbraio 1848, 2, 35122 Padua PD
Couvent des Célestins
Paris, City of Paris, Île-de-France, France
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Antonio Pérez (1534–1611) was a Spanish statesman and secretary of king Philip II of Spain.
He was said to have organised the murder of Juan de Escobedo. Attempts to prosecute Perez led to riots and disorder. He eventually fled Spain after being liberated from prison by his supporters, and spent most of his remaining years in France.
While practically unknown today, Pérez was well-known in late sixteenth century. He is important in the fields of Elizabethan and Shakespearean studies because of his relationships with the kings of Spain and France--Philip II and Henri IV--and with
Queen Elizabeth, the Earl of Essex, and
Francis Bacon. Of special interest are his many letters to Essex, Southampton, Burghley, and others.
Antonio Perez was born in Madrid in 1534. In 1542 he was legalized as a son of Gonzalo Pérez, Secretary of the Council of State of king Charles I of Spain (Holy Roman Emperor Charles V). Most probably Antonio was indeed the son of Gonzalo Pérez but conceived while Gonzalo was a cleric. Even though Antonio was born in Madrid his attachment was to Aragon where his father was from and where his family was most influential. His followers and supporters were all from Aragon and later in life, he would flee to Aragon to find support for himself and protection from the king's persecution.
Antonio Pérez was raised in Val de Concha, Guadalajara, in the lands of Ruy Gomez de Silva, Prince of Eboli and leader of one of the political factions of the time, of which Gonzalo Pérez was part. (The other faction was that of the Duke of Alba.) Antonio later attended the most prestigious universities such as Alcalá de Henares, Salamanca, Leuven, Venice and Padua. His father introduced and trained him in matters of State.
In 1543, Gonzalo Pérez was appointed secretary of Prince (later king) Philip. In 1556, Charles abdicated his Spanish kingdoms to his son who became king Philip of the several Spanish kingdoms (Castile, Aragon, etc.) and Gonzalo Pérez continued as secretary of the new king. Gonzalo Pérez died in 1566 and his son Antonio was made Secretary of State of Castile a year later.
During his first ten years as secretary, Antonio Pérez had great influence over king Philip who valued his advice. With the death of the Prince of Eboli in 1573, Antonio Pérez became the leader of that faction in accord with the widow, Ana de Mendoza, the one-eyed Princess of Éboli.
In 1567, Antonio Pérez married Juana de Coello with whom he had several sons.
Charming, ambitious, witty, bisexual, unscrupulous, and always extravagantly dressed Don Antonio Perez,
as secretary to King Philip II in 1567, and later secretary of state, was at the center of numerous court intrigues. In 1573 Perez became the leader of the faction of Ana de Mendoza, Princess of Eboli, reputedly one of the King's mistresses. Ana was put into close relationship with Elisabeth de Valois, the Queen, to spy upon her for Philip; but the two women became fast friends. Elisabeth de Valois was the love of Philip II's life, and he had a reputation throughout Europe for his intense jealousy. Courtiers had been afraid "... to raise their eyes to the Queen's face," for fear of arousing the King's suspicions. This situation is very similar to that of Othello, Desdemona and Emilia in Othello.
Newly-translated letters to members of the Elizabethan court from Don
Antonio Perez, support the one-hundred-year-old claim that he was openly
parodied as Don Armado in Love's Labor's Lost. Moreover, his reports of
intrigues in the Spanish court were clearly the source of several dramatic
details in the plot of Othello, and Perez seems to have been vilified as Iago,
an observation made in 1924 by Lilian Winstanley, and repeated by Dorothy and
Charlton Ogburn.
King Philip died in 1598; and the wife and children of Antonio Pérez, who were still imprisoned in Madrid, were set free.
In 1611, Antonio Pérez died in Paris and was interred in a convent, but his remains were lost during the desecrations of the French Revolution.
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