Irish Clerics in Madrid, 1598-1665* Enrique García Hernán
Irish clerics in Madrid, 1598-1665* Enrique García Hernán Artículo tomado de O’Connor, Thomas & Lyons, Mary Ann (Editors). Irish Communities in Early-Modern Europe. Dublin: Four Courts Press.Ireland. 2006. 267-293 pp. [A] variety of nations who assist at this court, who find themselves content there and who think of it as their fatherland, in order to combine well-being, pleasure, happiness, good temperament, honour, benefit and, above all, the miracle of people living together on good terms.1 These words of the Madrid historian, Gil González Dávila (1570-1658), written in 1623, express an aspiration more than a reality. Certainly when the court was at Madrid from 1561 it necessarily had to receive all those who sought royal favour, among them many Irish, some of whom took up residence in the capital where they lived like other subjects of the king. In this essay the concentration will be primarily on the activities of Irish clerics in Madrid. Attention will focus on those who made a mark by their short-term presence as well as those who stayed permanently with the objective of helping, as much as possible, the Irish community resident in the capital and at the court. The documents used for this study derive from the archives in Simancas, the protocols archive in Madrid, and from the collections of Fernando Álcarez de Toledo, third duke of Alba (1507-82), the Archive Histórico de Loyola, the Real Academia de la Historia and the National Library in Madrid. When Philip II (1527-98) died in 1598 he left his son with a problem.
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