The Altamira Collection and the history of the Dutch Revolt

. The Altamira Collection, the name by which the exceptional archive accumulated for centuries by the Counts of Altamira is known among Early Modern historians, is one of the most important documentary collections for the study of the Hispanic Monarchy and especially the reign of Philip II. Since, 1868, the ruin of the Casa de Altamira caused the dispersion of the archive, whose papers were acquired by different buyers, including Archer Milton Huntington, founder of “The Hispanic Society of America”. The magnate acquired the collection of books and manuscripts of the Marquis of Jerez de los Caballeros, unique of its kind, and whose papers were largely from Altamira. The Library of the Hispanic Society of America preserves today a significant part of the Altamira documentary collection that constitutes, together with the other collections distributed throughout Europe, a documentary collection of compulsory consultation for historians of the Dutch Revolt.

In the mid-19 th century, José María Osorio de Moscoso y de Carvajal, 14 th Count of Altamira, possessed the most important private collection of manuscripts concerning the history of Habsburg Spain, preserved in the Palacio de Altamira (near the present Plaza de España in central Madrid) 3 . It contained not only the archives of several aristocratic families but also many papers removed from royal archives by the condeduque de Olivares, chief minister of Philip IV between 1622 and 1643.
Two series in the Altamira Archive are of immense importance for those who study the Dutch Revolt: the papers of Philip II's private secretaries Antonio Gracián y Dantisco (1571-76), Mateo Vázquez de Leca, (1573-91), and Jerónimo Gassol (d. 1605); and the papers of Don Luis de Requesens y Zúñiga, governor-general of the Netherlands 1573-76, and his brother Don Juan de Zúñiga y Requesens, Spanish ambassador in Rome 1568-79 and chief minister of Philip II 1583-86. Although the two collections have a different provenance, they overlap: -The private secretaries became responsible for three distinct types of state papers. They handled the holograph billetes exchanged between Philip II and his senior ministers about a wide range of business; they opened the letters and papers received from a wide range of individuals in envelopes addressed "al rey en su mano": and they collected the archives left by many senior ministers when they died (starting with those of Cardinal Espinosa, Philip's principal adviser 1565-72, whom Vázquez had served as private secretary) 4 . The tens of thousands of Philip's holograph billetes in the Altamira Archive reveal more about the king's strategic aims and priorities -as well as about the matters that crossed the royal mind as he wrote-than any other single source. The duke of Sessa acquired these papers on the death of Gassol, but in 1625 he ceded them to Olivares, and they entered the Altamira Archive after the death of the last of the conde-duque's direct descendants in the eighteenth century.
In 1959, Carlos Riba García provided a useful glimpse of this collection when he published some billetes exchanged between Philip II and Mateo Vázquez; but although they covered 436 printed pages, he published only half of one manuscript volume of billetes. The Altamira Archive once held at least 100 similar volumes 5 . -Requesens died in the Netherlands in March 1576. Four months later, on the king's express orders, his officials in the citadel of Antwerp burnt 30 holo- 3 The 14 th count (1828-81) boasted many other titles: duke of Atrisco, Maqueda, Montemar and Sessa; marquis of Aguilar, Astorga, Ayamonte, Elche and Leganés, count of Cabra and Trastámara, and many more. See his entry in the Real Academia de la Historia, Diccionario Biográfico electrónico. The count commissioned Ventura Rodríguez, the most celebrated Spanish architect of his day, to design the Palacio but it remained unfinished and today only the façade survives: calle de la Flor Alta, 8, the Madrid seat of the Istituto Europeo di Design. See Martínez Medina, A.: Palacios madrileños del siglo XVIII, Madrid, Ediciones La Librería, 1997, pp. 61-72. 4 Lovett, A. W.: "A Cardinal's papers: the rise of Mateo Vázquez de Leca", English Historical Review, LXXXVI-II (1973), pp. 241-261, at p. 251, noted the unsuccessful bid of Diego de Ayala, the royal archivist at Simancas, to secure the cardinal's papers after his death. See also José Luis Rodríguez de Diego, "La formación del Archivo de Simancas en el siglo XVI. Función y orden interno", in López-Vidriero, M.ª L. and Cátedra, P. M.ª (eds): El libro antiguo español, IV: Coleccionismo y bibliotecas (siglos XV-XVIII), Salamanca and Madrid, Universidad de Salamanca & Patrimonio Nacional, 1998, pp. 519-57, at pp. 541-43. 5 Riba García, C.: Correspondencia privada de Felipe II con su secretario Mateo Vázquez 1567-91 (Madrid, 1959. The volume, published posthumously, printed only half of the billetes in BL Additional Ms. 28,263. Although entitled "volume 1", no more ever appeared. graph letters from Philip to Requesens and 41 minutes of his replies because (as one of his executors observed) "el Comendador Mayor escribía tan claro a Su Magestad que no conviene que estos papeles queden vivos" 6 . Requesens's brother took charge of his surviving papers, but he already possessed copies of many of them because Zúñiga was his brother's closest confidant: Requesens sent him copies of almost all important letters and papers. Zúñiga thus possessed copies of Requesens's correspondence with the king, which partly compensates for the loss of the burned originals 7 . Zúñiga's papers also include his correspondence as Spanish ambassador in Rome with the king and his ministers: some 800 legajos and registers of documents, perhaps the largest collection of "State Papers" from the reign of Philip II in private hands. After his death in 1586, Zúñiga's executors transferred his papers to Gómez Dávila, 2 nd marquis of Velada, and in 1710 they entered the Altamira Archive with the rest of the Velada papers 8 .
Disaster struck the Altamira Archive shortly after Spain's "Glorious Revolution" of 1868. The 14 th count, heavily in debt, had married the Infanta María Luisa Teresa de Borbón, sister of the King Consort, and the deposition and flight of Queen Isabel II and her consort removed all hope of protection against his creditors. He therefore decided to flee to France and sold his possessions to pay his debts. A Paris book dealer acquired more than 7.000 rare books, shipped them to France, and sold them there in three auctions in 1870. In Madrid, the count's agents auctioned his works of art (including 1.300 paintings); and they sold his manuscript collection, including numerous Philip II holographs: "Unas 200 arrobas fueron vendidos a ocho reales arroba a un librero muy conocido de los bibliófilos, llamado Pereda", who began to sell it as wrapping paper 9 . 6 March, J. M.ª: El Comendador Mayor de Castilla, Don Luis de Requesens, en el Gobierno de Milan 1571-1573, 2nd edn, Madrid, Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, 1946, 26 note 4, Don Guillén de San Clemente to Requesens's widow, Antwerp, 8 May 1576. Archivo General de Simancas (AGS) Estado 542/160 is the inventory of Requesens's papers, made in Antwerp citadel on 29 April 1576, summarized in Gachard, L. P.: Correspondance de Philippe II sur les affaires des Pays-Bas, IV, Brussels, 1861, pp. 114-18. 7 For example Bibliotèque publique et universitaire de Genève (BPU) Ms Favre 30/30-74 contains copies of Philip's holograph letters to Requesens dated 30 January, 5 April, 21 June, 14 August and 30 October 1573, all deploying a combination of bribes and threats to make him accept appointment as governor-general of the Netherlands. Although the originals perished in Antwerp in 1576, these copies sent to Zúñiga survive. In the first, the king declared that finding an immediate and permanent solution to the Dutch revolt had become "el mayor negocio y de mayor importancia que he tenido ni podré tener", and immodestly expressed the hope that "spero en Dios [ …] que os dará mucha salud y vida, pues se empleara en su servicio y en el mío, que es lo mismo" (BPU Ms Favre 30/30. AGRB [Archives Générales du Royaume. Brussels] Manuscrit Divers 5480/15-16 is another copy, amde by Cardinal Granvelle). Requesens also sent his brother copies of his replies to the king, and they are today in Instituto de Valencia de Don Juan, Madrid (IVdeDJ) 67. On this episode see Versele, J.: "Las razones de la elección de don Luis de Requesens como gobernador de los Países Bajos tras la retirada del duque de Alba (1573)", Studia Historica / Historia Moderna, XXVIII (2006), 259-76. 8 For an overview of the Zúñiga archive in its prime, see Bouza, F. J.: "Guardar papeles -y quemarlos-en tiempos de Felipe II. La documentación de Juan de Zúñiga", Reales Sitios, CXXIX (1996) Poleró, V.: "Colección de pinturas que reunió en su palacio el marqués de Leganés, D. Diego Felipe de Guzmán (siglo XVII)", Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, Sección de Bellas Artes, VI (1898-9), pp. 122-34, at pp. 122-3. "Pereda" was Manuel Pereda, who ran a bookstore frequented by many bibliophiles in calle de José Sancho Rayón (1830Rayón ( -1900, one of the foremost book and manuscript collectors of his day, heard of this and "durante un mes fue expurgando y entresacando cuidadosamente de los deshechos legajos esparcidos en el sótano de un almacén de comestibles, cuyo dueño los adquirió del citado librero [Pereda] sin saber éste lo que vendía ni aquel lo que compraba" 10 . At much the same time (according to a charming anecdote) Juan Bautista Crooke, count of Valencia de Don Juan, learned of the auction while walking the streets of Madrid one day, when the call of nature forced him to use the toilet of a sympathetic shopkeeper. He found that the only "papel higiénico" available consisted of 16 th -century manuscripts, and when he re-entered the shop he asked its owner about its provenance. The shopkeeper replied: "Procedían de la venta del archivo de Sessa, comprados al peso; muchos habían sido destruidos ya…" 11 .
The count hastened to save as many Altamira papers as possible from the posteriors of madrileños, and thus preserve them for posterity. He was not alone: perhaps a dozen other collectors acquired some manuscripts 12 .
Today, five locations house major collections of papers of the reign of Philip II from the Altamira Archive: two in Madrid, and one each in London, Geneva and New York. Fortunately, at least some of the bound volumes in the collection have survived intact 13 . Unfortunately, many loose documents have become separated so that the various billetes exchanged between Philip II and his secretaries each day, Preciados, 59. Gonzalo Sánchez-Molero, J. L.: La Epístola a Mateo Vázquez: historia de una polémica literaria en torno a Cervantes, Alcalá de Henares, Centro de Estudios Cervantinos, 2010, introduction, provides the best account of the sale in 1869 -but it was not the first. In 1826, the National Library of Scotland (NLS), Edinburgh, purchased 3,617 books from the Altamira collection: Loudon, J. M.: "The Astorga Collection of Spanish Books now in the National Library of Scotland", Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos, LXX/1-2 (1962), pp. 179-85. The books (NLS Shelfmark G) are now catalogued online. 10 Poleró, op. cit. (note 9), p. 123. Andrés, G. de: "La dispersión de la valiosa colección bibliográfica y documental de la Casa de Altamira." Hispania, XLVI (1986), pp. 587-635, thoroughly documents the Paris book sales. See also Cátedra, P. M.ª: Nobleza y lectura en tiempos de Felipe II: la biblioteca de don Alonso Osorio, Marqués de Astorga, Valladolid, Junta de Castilla y León, 2002. 11 The story first appeared in González de Amezúa y Mayo, A.: Epistolario de Lope de Vega Carpio, III, Madrid, Real Academia Española, 1941, p. XXIX note 46. It is, as journalists say, a story that is "too good to check". 12 The Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE) and the Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN), both in Madrid, the library of the Monasterio de San Lorenzo el Real de El Escorial, the Biblioteca Menéndez y Pelayo (Santander), and the NLS, among others, all acquired fragments of the Altamira collection. For more on the dispersal of manuscripts, see Andrés, op. cit. (note 9), pp. 616-26; Bouza, F.: Corre manuscrito. Una historia cultural del Siglo de Oro, Madrid, Marcial Pons, 2001, pp. 260-88;and Martínez Hernández, op. cit. (note 8), pp. 571-89 (a survey of the present location of the documents of one of the noble houses included in the Altamira Collection, which reveals the problems caused by their dispersion). See also http://pares.mcu.es/ParesBusquedas20/catalogo/description/4019099 for a description of 3 cajas and 503 manuscripts from the Altamira Archive now in Archivo Histórico de la Nobleza, (AHNOB, Toledo) 15. Archivo de los condes de Altamira. 13 For example, consider the two enormous bound volumes of billetes exchanged between Philip II and Antonio Pérez: British Library (BL) Additional Ms. 28,262 (668 folios) and IVdeDJ envío 60 (385 folios and 16 inserts). Although now separated by over 1,000 kilometres, the two volumes almost certainly came from the same archive because the original binding of both volumes is similar, and they have similar titles ("Villetes del Secretario Antonio Pérez a Su Magestad del Rey Don Philippe 2º, nuestro señor, respondidos de su real mano" and "Billetes de Antonio Pérez respondidos por el Rey" respectively). Pérez himself probably assembled the volumes in 1590, after he escaped from prison in Madrid and fled to Zaragoza, where his secretary Diego de Bustamente watched him burn billetes exchanged with Philip until "de cinco mazos de papeles que eran los redució a dos": Colección de Documentos Inéditos para la historia de España, XV, Madrid, Imprenta de la viuda de Calero, 1849, p. 466, "Declaración de Diego de Bustamente", January 1591. The two "mazos" presumably entered the royal archive when Pérez fled from Zaragoza to France, leaving his papers behind him, and were later removed by the conde-duque de Olivares. and the documents that they discussed, are now scattered between several manuscript collections. Thus a letter from an individual, or a consulta from a royal council, addressed to the king may today be in Geneva, while Mateo Vázquez's cover note is in London, and Philip's rescript is in Madrid or New York. Many related documents have been lost; others have migrated to other locations that acquired Altamira materials; others still remain in the state archives such as the Archivo General de Simancas (AGS).
The documents in Simancas remained closed to foreign researchers until the 1820s, when two priests from the English College in Valladolid "rode westwards" to transcribe and summarize for the historian John Lingard documents concerning the relations between Spain and England in the 16 th century. So little was then known about the archive that Lingard "had to explain the spelling and meaning of the word 'Simancas'" to his publisher 14 . Twenty years later, Louis Prosper Gachard (head of the Algemeen Rijksarchief/Archives Générales du Royaume in Brussels: AGRB), and Joseph Melchior Tirán (representing the French government), both received permission to carry out research in Simancas. Gachard examined more than 10,000 documents from the reign of Philip II and commissioned transcripts of more than 1,500 of them; he then published French summaries of his transcripts, together with documents from some other archives, down to 1577 in Correspondance de Philippe II sur les affaires des Pays-Bas, 5 vols. (Brussels, 1848-79). Between 1940 and 1960, Joseph Lefèvre published four more volumes of summaries (all of them short) based on Gachard's transcripts covering the years 1577-1598. 15 One of his contemporaries called Gachard, with only slight exaggeration (and perhaps a hint of envy), "emperor of the archives", and the immense volume of his transcripts and publications may have given some the impression that he had surveyed all the relevant Spanish sources concerning the Dutch Revolt. Nevertheless, Gachard apparently never entered the Palacio de Altamira 16 .
The same was true of Maurice van Durme, who followed in Gachard's footsteps. The Koninklijke Commissie voor Geschiedenis/Commission royale d'Histoire sent him on several prolonged missions to Spain between 1957 and 1985 to find and ca 14 Jones, E.: "John Lingard and the Simancas archives", The historical journal, X (1967), pp. 57-76, quotation from a letter from Lingard to his publisher, Douglas Mawman, in 1820. The two priests were Alexander Cameron and Thomas Sherburne; Lingard used their transcripts, most of them gathered in 1823, in his History of England. Richard Kagan reminded me that in 1830 the American Obadiah Rich received special permission from the king of Spain to gather materials in Simancas for his Bibliotheca Americana.
talogue manuscripts related to the history of the Low Countries. The initial fruits of his work appeared in Les archives de Simancas et l'histoire de la Belgique, IXe -XIXe siècles, 4 vols (Brussels, 1964-73), which described folio-by-folio the contents of countless legajos in the series Negociación de Estado (Flandes and Roma) and Secretarías provinciales. "Don Mauricio" (as he was affectionately known in Spain, to archivists and other researchers alike) also sought out relevant material in several Madrid archives, both public (the Archivo Histórico Nacional, the Biblioteca Nacional) and private (the Real Academia de la Historia and the Biblioteca Real in the Palacio de Oriente); but it remains unpublished. Don Mauricio, like Gachard, included no Altamira material. 17 The lack of a modern concordance of the Altamira Archive is perhaps the greatest obstacle that today faces historians of the Spanish Habsburgs, including those who study the Dutch Revolt. Until we have such a concordance, historians must recreate the original paper trail for themselves; so here are some signposts to the Altamira papers in each of the five major repositories, and on their provenance, with special reference to documents concerning relations between Spain and the Netherlands.
1. The Archivo y Biblioteca Francisco de Zabálburu (ABZ), sometimes known as the Archivo de la Casa de la Condesa Viuda de Heredía Spínola), Calle Marqués del Duero, 7, Madrid: the mansion built in the 1870s by Zabálburu and his brothers 18 .
The brothers appointed Sancho Rayón as their librarian, and he sorted, identified and labelled the manuscripts acquired from the Altamira and other collections. In 1889, Sancho Rayón purchased some special cajas in which he placed those manuscripts, arranged in carpetas. Between 1995 and 1999 the entire collection was digitized, though still ordered via the cajas and folios created by Sancho Rayón: see Mercedes Noviembre Martínez (who oversaw the digitization project), "La Biblioteca de Francisco de Zabálburu: del siglo XIX al XXI", Pliegos de Bibliofilia, VI (1999), pp. 19-32; and María Teresa Llera Llorente, La Biblioteca Francisco de Zabálburu. Adquisición de fondos y estudio catalográfico, 2 vols (Mérida, Editora Regional de Extremadura, 2007).
17 Van Durme published a preliminary guide to the Granvelle collection in the Biblioteca Real: see "Notes sur la correspondance de Granvelle conservée à Madrid", Handelingen van de Koninklijke Commissie voor Geschiedenis / Bulletin de la Commission Royale d 'Histoire, CXXI (1956), 25-83. One day in the 1970s, Don Maurizio showed me a "cahier" he had compiled in the AHN, which included a reference that I treasure: AHN Inquisición (espontáneos) libro 1150/24-26, the investigation of Francisco López in February 1608. López, born in Spain, had grown up in the Netherlands and joined a Spanish tercio in the Army of Flanders; in the 1590s his unit mutinied for its pay, and afterwards he deserted to the Dutch army in which he served for about five years. After hostilities ceased, he returned to Spain and denounced himself to the Inquisition for having attended Calvinist services (hence his life story appeared in the series "Espontáneos": those who denounced themselves). His punishment? The inquisitors placed him under the guidance of a Franciscan friar for a year. After van Durme's death in 2009, his personal archive -including material for further volumes of Les archives de Belgique, including the documents he had found in AHN-was deposited in the university library of Leuven University. See Janssens, G.: "In memoriam dr. Maurice Van Durme", Handelingen van de Koninklijke Commissie voor Geschiedenis / Bulletin de la Commission Royale d'Histoire, CLXXVI (2010), 219-21. 18 The archive and the mansion passed from Francisco de Zabálburu to his only daughter, who married the count of Heredía Spínola. After she died in 1964, the archive was closed to researchers because of litigation between various claimants (who in 1980 tried unsuccessfully to sell it to a foreign buyer), but it re-opened its doors in 1987.
-Cajas 96-103, 105, 106 and 108 contain the correspondence of Requesens as Capitángeneral del Ejército de Flandes, 15736, mostly with army officers. -Caja 144 contains a fascinating series of billetes exchanged between Philip II and Mateo Vázquez from 1574, mostly about the bad news sent by Requesens and others in the Netherlands.
2. The Instituto de Valencia de Don Juan (IVdeDJ), Calle Fortuny, 43, Madrid: the magnificent mansion in the mudéjar style constructed in the 1870s for Guillermo de Osma y Scull, count consort of Valencia de Don Juan.
Between 1912 and 1915 Osma sent his manuscript collection in instalments ("envíos") to the noted archivist Antonio Paz y Meliá who prepared a detailed catalogue of each envío of documents received from the Instituto -hence the organization of the collection into envíos, some with separate carpetas containing related groups of documents in chronological order. Gregorio de Andrés, librarian of the Instituto between 1974 and 1996, updated and annotated the catalogue and the fichero of the collection; and his successors both digitized and prepared an online index of the entire manuscript collection, which greatly facilitates consultation-albeit currently this can only take place in the Instituto itself. 19 -Envíos 67 and 68 contain over 1,000 documents from Requesens's years as governor-general of the Netherlands, not counting Envío 68 folio 285: a register of almost 400 pages containing copies of orders to troops and bankers signed by Requesens between January 1575 and March 1576 20 .
3. The British Library (BL, until 1973 the British Museum Library), Department of Western Manuscripts, 96 Euston Road, London: an ugly modernist building opened in 1997.
Pascual de Gayangos, Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Spanish Language in the British Museum, 4 vols (London, 1877-1893), provided a folio-by-folio analysis of almost all the 200 volumes containing documents acquired from the Altamira Archive, but organized in five themes ("Classes"), rather than in numerical order. This complicates consultation, because the printed version lacks an index. Nevertheless, thanks to digitization by Google, each of Gayangos's four volumes can now be found online, downloaded and "searched", making it possible to locate every document (for example) to, from, or about Requesens. In addition, Gayangos prepared thousands of handwritten index cards, currently pasted into huge volumes on the shelves of the Manuscript Reading Room in the British Library (in the past, some librarians have denied this but I swear to you that they are available to the persistent researcher). 19 Osma, G. de: Instituto de Valencia de Don Juan. Memoria 1916(Madrid, Imprenta Ibérica, 1916, provided details on his Foundation, including the provision that if money for its maintenance could not be found in Spain, it should go to the university of Oxford. See also Andrés, G. de: La fundación del Instituto y Museo de Valencia de Don Juan, Instituto de Estudios Madrileños del CSIC, Madrid, 1984. 20 IVdeDJ Envío 68/285, a register of 197 folios lacking its title page and first folio, was originally entitled "In diversorum III", similar to the "Registres aux Ordres" that contain similar orders issued between 1582 and 1682 in AGRB, In 1906, Édouard Favre inherited some 10,000 documents from the Altamira Archive after the death of his friend Paul Chapuy, and not only donated them to the BPU but also paid for them to be repaired and bound into 82 volumes. Léopold Micheli of the BPU provided a folio-by-folio description, modelled on the one prepared by Gayangos for the similar documents in London: Micheli, L.: "Inventaire de la collection Édouard Favre", Bulletin Hispanique, XI (1909), pp. 295-322;XII (1910), 49-70, 2:140-162, 3:317-26;XIII (1911), 61-74, 195-204 and 337-47;XIV (1912) 77-95. Micheli's catalogue also appeared posthumously as a separate volume, together with a preface by Alfred Morel-Fatio and an invaluable index: Micheli, Inventaire de la collection Édouard Favre (Archives de la maison d'Altamira) (Bordeaux, 1914). Some additional papers from the collection, and some that were incomplete or undated, later became BPU Collection Édouard Favre, Vol. 83, "Pièces diverses" (341 folios 5. The Library of the Hispanic Society of America (HSA), "Altamira Papers", 613 West 155 th Street, New York: a handsome purposebuilt edifice opened on Audubon Terrace in 1908.
The 32 boxes of HSA "Altamira Papers" contain some 3,000 documents from the Altamira Archive dating from the 1490s to the 1820s, the majority in Spanish but with some items in Arabic, Dutch, English, French, Italian, Latin and Portuguese. Thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in 2012 and 2013 Bethany Aram, Rachael Ball and Geoffrey Parker, assisted by John O'Neill (Curator of manuscripts and rare books at the HSA), sorted, identified and catalogued all the Altamira papers (except for about 20 documents in Arabic: the only language that none of us could read). We then arranged the contents of each box in separate carpetas that contained related groups of documents in chronological order, and created a searchable online catalogue (currently available only in the HSA Library). Here are a few highlights concerning relations between Spain and the Netherlands: No doubt realizing that this, too, was impossible, Requesens ended with a plea "que me saque de Flandes, y no para otro cargo, que no pretendo del rrey otro merced; y quando me hiziese todas las del mundo, no la tendré en nada negándome esta" 22 .
-HSA Altamira Papers 3-II-12, Cardinal Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle to Juan de Zúñiga, Naples, 6 December 1573, copy. Writing just after Requesens arrived in the Netherlands, the Cardinal stressed the need to win over the hearts and minds of its inhabitants because "aunque su magestad quiera, no podrá proveerse sumas tan grandes que basten para supplir lo que se deve, especialmente a la gente de guerra". Even then, the Cardinal felt profoundly pessimistic. "Conozco el umor de la tierra: que aunque viene Christo a governarlos, no dexaran de murmurar y de decir lo que se les antojara". Parker The current location of these five major portions of the Altamira Collection, though scattered, is not random. Paul Chapuy, from whom Édouard Favre inherited the collection of Spanish manuscripts now in the BPU, had served not only as Swiss consul-general in Madrid but also, between 1861 and 1871, as librarian and tutor of the count of Altamira 26 . As Micheli stated coyly in his Inventaire, "how these documents came into the possession of [Chapuy] is not known"; but he revealed that, after he spirited them out of Spain, Chapuy tried to sell them to the duke of Aumale. Because the duke declined, the collection came to Favre instead of to the Musée Condé at Chantilly. 27 Sancho Rayón met Chapuy soon after he had rescued some of the collection from "el sótano de un almacén de comestibles". In 1872 he persuaded the bankers Juan, Mariano and Francisco de Zabálburu to accept rare books and manuscripts from the Altamira Archive as repayment of the substantial debt owed to them by the count. The brothers asked Sancho Rayón to select the best items for their library, but each time he and Francisco de Zabálburu tried to do so, Chapuy "nos recibió como a un perro en misa" and refused to let them in -no doubt because Chapuy intended to add the best manuscripts to his own collection and feared that Sancho Rayón would use his expert knowledge pre-empt him 28 .
Although Sancho Rayón eventually secured many priceless items for the Zabálburu library, Chapuy managed to remove from Spain a substantial portion of the Altamira Archive (the future "Collection Édouard Favre" at BPU). He was not the first to do so: the count of Valencia de Don Juan had begun the process in 1870.
According to his son-in-law Guillermo de Osma, writing in 1915, after the count discovered that the Altamira Archive contained numerous documents written by important luminaries of Golden Age Spain, "comenzó a hojear somerisimamente y a separar legajos que en tal concepto le habían de interesar". Then, on hearing that Sancho Rayón was doing the same, "y deseando mi suegro adquirir de una vez todo el resto de aquel archivo, hubo de acudir a su cuñado, el señor Disdier, quien invirtió en tal adquisición determinada cantidad". Osma recalled that, "entonces, no ya por legajos que previamente se repasaban, sino en montón y cargados en coches, se llevó el resto del archivo." And "en montón y cargados en coches", the count promptly and clandestinely shipped some of his most valuable acquisitions to London 29 .
In February 1870 William Steet, "chancelier of the Spanish Consulate General" in London, informed Edward Bond, keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum, that he had received from the count of Valencia de Don Juan a collection of 22 holograph letters sent by Philip II in 1557 and 1558 to Duke Emanuel-Philibert of Savoy, 26 A brief obituary in 1905 described Paul Chapuy as "a likeable and erudite man. He lived in Geneva, where he was born, and reached a great age, living in almost total seclusion": Gazette de Lausanne et Journal Suisse, 11 February 1905, page 2. On Édouard Favre (1855-1942, who devoted his life to scholarship and the support of missionary activity in Africa, see the obituary in Zeitschrift für Schweizerische Geschichte, XXIII (1943), pp. 279-282. 27 Micheli, "Inventaire de la collection Édouard Favre", 2. http://pares.mcu.es/ParesBusquedas20/catalogo/description/4019099 is less coy: "No se sabe si esta fracción documental le fue entregada como donación, compra o a cambio de su sueldo impagado". 28 Gonzalo Sánchez-Molero, op. cit. (note 9), pp. 61-63. 29 Andrés, op. cit. (note 10), p. 618, quoting a "Nota" prepared by Osma in 1915 and deposited in IVdeDJ. Don Gregorio consulted the correspondence in the British Library regarding the acquisition of its Altamira documents in 1870, and quoted from it at pp. 619-623 of his excellent article; but my reading of the correspondence differs somewhat from his. In addition, Don Gregorio appears to have overlooked the correspondence from 1871. governor-general of the Netherlands and commander of the royal army at the battle of St Quentin. Steet stated that the count had authorized him to offer the letters "for sale on behalf of their owner (who has recently acquired them from the House of Altamira, in which they have been preserved since the time of Mateo Vázquez, an ancestor [!], and one of that king's ministers.)" 30 In fact Antonio Gracián, not Vázquez, acquired these letters in 1570 upon the death of the royal chronicler Dr Juan Páez de Castro; and he placed them "en un legajo cerrado y sellado." From there they entered the royal archive and then passed to that of the duke of Sessa, and so to the count-duke of Olivares and the Altamira Archive. 31 Steet indicated that if the British Museum would pay £200 for these letters, the count would "offer them a most interesting collection of papers of the same epoch, many of them relating to the Great Armada of Philip II", as well as 41 letters from Don Juan de Austria to Cardinal Espinosa during the war of Granada (1569-1571), and a "volume in folio four inches thick of letters from Antonio Pérez to Philip II concerning all sorts of state affairs". He offered these three items, containing a total of 800 letters, for £650. In April 1870, Bond recommended that the Trustees of the British Museum pay £400 for them. The count accepted the lower price, though stipulating that "of course the sale must be effected in the name of Mr F. Disdier and not in mine." They became BL Additional Manuscripts 28.262-28.264 32 .
Thus began an elaborate minuet between Bond, Steet, the count, and Federico Disdier (married to the count's sister Julia Crooke). Although the count handled all the negotiations, he insisted that the documents acquired by Disdier and himself were completely separate, and in May 1870 he warned that if Bond declined, Disdier's "aim is to sell them… in Paris, Brussels or anywhere else where he can get the best price". In the same letter the count announced that he had packed into three chests a consignment from his own collection of Altamira documents, to be delivered to Steet. "Son 191 volúmenes numerados y un legajo de papeles sueltos," and he offered them to the British Museum for £1250 -although he again insisted that the transaction be made in the name of Disdier. At one point Bond became suspicious and asked why the papers were not in the Archivo General de Simancas (perhaps worrying that they had been stolen), but the count suavely asserted that the ancestors of the illustrious House of Altamira included Mateo Vázquez (a priest) and Diego de Espinosa (a cardinal), as well as Requesens, Zúñiga, and numerous aristocrats who had served Philip II. Reassured, Bond again recommended purchase to the Trustees "to prevent the dispersion of the collection, and to secure documents which disclose so authentically the method of government and the actual relations of the king [Philip II] with his principal ministers and officers." The Trustees agreed, and upon payment of £900 the volumes became Additional  In January 1871, the count was back. Through Steet, he offered to sell Bond thirteen more volumes and a bundle of 390 billetes exchanged between Philip and Vázquez for £350. Yet again, the count used Disdier as cover, and Steet informed Bond that (underlining in the original): What I have particularly to request, on behalf of the C. de V. [Conde de Valencia de Don Juan], is that the slips of paper with a few words in his hand-writing which are placed in some of the volumes should be carefully removed and destroyed… The Count earnestly desires that his name should not appear in the negotiation.
The Trustees acquired them for £270 "which Mr Bond considers very reasonable" -as indeed it was, since the bound volumes included the register of Cardinal Espinosa's letters for 1565-1572 (now BL Additional Ms. 28.704) as well as the 390 holograph billetes (now BL Additional Ms. 28.699 and 28.700). 34 Perhaps the count intended the proceeds of these sales to pay off the loan from Disdier that had enabled him to purchase a larger share of the Altamira Archive, because he now informed Steet that he would sell no more. Instead, he intended to retain the papers that "yo he adquirido para mi estudio y recreo" -adding provocatively: "Mi colección es cuando menos 2 veces más numerosa que la de Mr D[isdier]" 35 . We now know that the count's personal collection consisted of some 30.000 documents, mostly in loose bundles. In 1888 his only child, Adelaida Crooke, married Guillermo de Osma, an avid connoisseur and collector of art, and in 1904 she inherited all her father's property and papers. Since the couple remained childless, in 1915 they created the "Instituto de Valencia de Don Juan" as a permanent private foundation "to make [their] collections available for study, basing its organization upon that of the Hispanic Society [of America]." As a colleague wrote after Osma's sudden death in 1922: "No history of the time of Philip II can be effectively undertaken without an examination of the material there." That remains true today 36 . The provenance of the two other major portions of the Altamira Archive is also connected. As already noted, José Sancho Rayón competed with the count of Valencia de Don Juan in acquiring as many Altamira papers as possible, first encouraging the Zabálburu brothers to accept documents as repayment for their loan and then helping them to select and to catalogue them -but he also retained some documents for himself. This explains why the contents of six volumes of the correspondence of Requesens and Zúñiga, published by Sancho Rayón and financed by Francisco de Zabálburu, included not only documents from ABZ but some from the HSA "Altamira Papers" as well. The latter later travelled from Madrid to New York via Seville. 37 Sancho Rayón began buying and selling books and manuscripts in 1855, sometimes working with Pascual de Gayangos and after 1877 with Zabálburu. He also served as co-director of two major series of documentary publications: the Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de España (CODOIN), and the Colección de libros raros y curiosos. The Yale University Hispanist, William Knapp, edited a volume in Sancho's second series, and in 1892 he served as paid scholarly companion when Archer Milton Huntington, son of a wealthy railroad magnate, visited Spain for the first time. When Huntington returned six years later, he visited the mansion of Manuel Pérez de Guzmán y Boza, Marquis of Jerez de los Caballeros (18521929), who by then owned the finest collection of Spanish rare books outside the Biblioteca Nacional. Huntington attended a literary discussion held in the marquis's library, and immediately fell in love with its contents. He told his mother "I feel like an old-time gold-miner who has run upon a pocket of nuggets in a sluggish stream and, my soul, but they do shine!" 38 They soon shone even brighter. Shortly after Huntington's visit, the marquis acquired the entire library of Sancho Rayón, including "algunos paquetes de papeles viejos". The disorder of Sancho Rayón's collection was legendary -the marquis's brother used to say of a complex situation: "¡eso está más enrevesado que la casa de don José Sancho!" -and there was no time to sort through the "paquetes de papeles viejos" before the marquis decided to make a bid to enter the Spanish Senate. To raise money for this, in September 1901 he offered to sell to Huntington his entire collection of rare books and manuscripts, including those just acquired from Sancho Rayón, for a million pesetas. He and Huntington signed the sale contract in January 1902 39 . 37 CODOIN, CII, Madrid, 1892, "Correspondencia de Felipe II con los hermanos Don Luis de Requesens y Don Juan de Zúñiga", and Nueva CODOIN, 5 vols, Madrid, 1892-1894: "Correspondencia de don Luis de Requesens y don Juan de Zúñiga con Felipe II, con el Cardenal Granvela, con don Diego de Zúñiga, y otros". The six volumes cover the period January 1573 to October 1574. The marquis asked a local bibliophile, Francisco Rodríguez Marín, to prepare his library for shipment, despite the latter's furious condemnation of the sale: "¡Qué gran desgracia! ¡Como si se hubiera tragado el mar ese tesoro; peor aún, pues que irá a parar en Nueva York!", he wrote to Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, who had just become Director of the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid. "Tener dinero es tenerlo todo, y somos pobres y los yanquis son ricos", Rodríguez Marín raged. "¡Más daño nos ha hecho Mister Huntington solo que todos sus paisanos!" in the Spanish-American War. Menéndez y Pelayo agreed with this extravagant comparison -"la venta de la biblioteca del Marqués significa una pérdida mayor que la de las colonias"-and he expressed special regret at the loss of the rare books and "preciosos manuscritos" that had belonged to Sancho Rayón. Rodríguez Marín spent the next month packing the library into chests ready for shipment and "todos los días me he pasado en su casa 3 o 4 horas tomando notas y apuntes, y aun copiando lo que me parecía más interesante". As he did so, he gradually realized the immense value of Sancho Rayón's "paquetes de papeles viejos". We now know that Rodríguez Marín never sent this "curiosísima" correspondence to New York, but instead kept it for himself. In 1927, now Director of the Biblioteca Nacional, he gave a public lecture entitled Felipe II y la Alquimia, justifying his choice of topics because "soy poseedor de ciertos billetes originales del secretario Pedro de Hoyo, respondidos al margen por Felipe II". Rodríguez Marín provided a partial transcript of eight billetes written in January and February 1567, adding some facsimiles to the printed text (proving that he had kept the originals, instead of making copies). He informed his readers that the papers had belonged to Sancho Rayón; he did not say that he had stolen them 41 .
Rodríguez Marín's lecture may have left some of his audience disappointed, because (as he noted at several points) "puede que falten algunos" billetes in the series, and so he did not know the end of the story. He apparently did not realize that the eight billetes that "separé" in Seville had themselves been separated by Sancho Rayón from the 128 similar billetes exchanged between the king and Hoyo, now in ABZ Caja 146; or that other billetes from the same series, once in the Altamira Archive, are now in IVdeDJ Envío 61 (409 billetes and 87 attachments), acquired by the count of Valencia de Don Juan 43 . The count also included a bundle of 173 more billetes in the large consignment he sold to the British Library in 1870 (now BL, Additional Ms. 28.350). Five more billetes are today among the HSA "Altamira Papers". 44 Still more billetes may be found in AGS, Casas y Sitios Reales. After his death in 1953, Rodríguez Marín's eight billetes passed with the rest of his archive to the Biblioteca Tomás Navarro Tomás of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Madrid 45 .
The dispersion of the billetes exchanged between Hoyo and the king, once preserved in a single series that spanned the years 1560 to 1568, epitomizes the obstacles that face historians who seek to study documents once housed in the Altamira Archive. 42 Ibidem, pp. 18-28, quotations from the eight billetes. Another document from the Altamira archive recorded the direct cost of Alba's march to the Real Hacienda: BL, Additional Ms 28.386/27-31, stating the expenditure of Francisco de Lixalde (866.833 escudos) and Hieronimo de Curiel (191,500 escudos), forwarded by Alba on 23 October 1567 (ibidem, f. 75). This total, although huge, did not include indirect costs such as expenditure by the communities along Alba's route (soon known as the "Camino de los Españoles"). Consider some examples from Franche Comté, which boasts excellent surviving archives. Archives Départementales du Doubs, Besançon (ADD) Archives anciennes 2B 1512, is a 411 folio register listing the victuals provided by each community in Franche-Comté to Alba's troops as they passed through (most claims seem to have been settled by deducting the cost of the victuals from the community's tax liability). ADD Archives anciennes, Fonds des États, carton supplémentaire 57, recorded local taxes diverted to prepare for the duke's approach (e.g. to build bridges), or unpaid because of damage done by the troops. ADD Archives anciennes B 1920, accounts of the town of Dôle for 1567-1568, included a claim from December 1567 by the local carters who had supplied Alba's troops with vehicles to transport their weapons, but never saw their carts again. Archives Départementales de la Haute Saône (Vesoul), Archives anciennes E282 Supplément 110 (=Archives communales de Gy), CC 5, cahier 4, accounts for 1567, recorded numerous expenditures by the small town of Gy arising from Alba's odyssey, some chargeable (wood for the duke's campfires; preparing roads and bridges) others gifts (free claret for the commissioners sent in advance by the duke to inspect the roads and bridges). Taken together, the total cost of Philip II's decision to send Alba and his army to the Netherlands must have exceeded two million escudos -and of course his mission failed. 43 Íñiguez Almech, F.: Casas reales y jardines de Felipe II, Madrid, CSIC, 1952, pp. 177-207, printed in a single chronological order extracts from 52 billetes in ABZ, IVdeDJ and AGS exchanged between Philip II and Hoyo concerning the royal palaces and gardens. Andrés, G. de: "Inventario de documentos del siglo XVI sobre El Escorial que se conservan en el Archivo del Instituto Valencia de Don Juan", Ciudad de Dios, CXCIV (1981), pp. 511-95, printed extracts of the billetes that discussed work at the pharaonic mausoleum and monastic complex. 44 Cano de Gardoquí García, J. L. and Pérez de Tudela Gabaldón, A.: La correspondencia de Felipe II con su secretario Pedro de Hoyo conservada en la British Library de Londres (1560Londres ( -1568, Valladolid, Universidad de Valladolid, 2017, printed not only all the billetes in the BL but also the five in HSA. 45 Herrera Tejada, C.: Inventario del Archivo de Francisco Rodríguez Marín, Madrid, CSIC, 1996, p. 89: Caja 85/2 "Billetes de Pedro de Hoyo". It is unlikely that Huntington noticed the absence of the eight billetes in 1902 when the 15.000 books and manuscripts sorted and packed by Rodríguez Marín arrived in New York, because the manuscripts went into his private vault at the Hispanic Society of America. Since they remained unsorted, although Huntington "had a friendly rivalry" with Osma when it came to collecting Spanish items, he never knew that he too had acquired part of the Altamira Archive. 46 The contents of his private vault officially entered the Society's collection only after Huntington's death in 1955 and the manuscripts, stacked in piles, remained unsorted. Subsequently, various scholars went through the piles and extracted manuscripts related to the Society's other collections: Antonio Rodríguez-Moñino for poetry; Charles Faulhaber for medieval manuscripts: and Arnold Reichenberger and José Regueiro for Golden Age drama collections. Cataloguing the remaining manuscripts acquired in 1902 from Sancho Rayón and Jerez de los Caballeros revealed connections with some of the material previously extracted. To give just one example, HSA Ms B2401 contains several letters by and about Francisco de Quevedo Villegas (15801645), without any note of provenance; but examination of the HSA "Altamira Papers" proved that the letters in Ms B2401 had been plucked from the manuscripts received from Seville in 1902.
When Menéndez y Pelayo heard a rumour in 1900 that the marquis of Jerez de los Caballeros was about to sell to Huntington "su singular y maravillosa colección" of books and manuscripts he predicted "mayor desastre y más irremediable sería este que los de Cavite y Santiago de Cuba". His antipathy towards Huntington only softened when the Biblioteca Nacional began to receive complimentary copies of the facsimiles produced by the HSA that "me han parecido de una perfección tipográfica insuperable". "Al fin, del lobo un pelo", he commented wryly to Rodríguez Marín: "Si [Huntington] nos da reproducido algo de lo que se ha llevado, eso iremos ganando". In 1986 Gregorio de Andrés, librarian of the IVdeDJ, was more generous when he concluded his brilliant account of the dispersion of the Altamira Archive: "Sírvanos de consuelo que, aunque la mitad [de dicha colección] está fuera de España, todos los poseedores actuales conservan con esmero y cuidado sus colecciones". Moreover -unlike Rodríguez Marín and the eight billetes that "separé" from the Altamira documents purchased by Huntington-those foreign owners have made them available "al estudio de los investigadores, después de haberlas salvado de una cierta destrucción en 1869, por lo que merecen nuestro agradecimiento" 47 .