It is as well to begin by saying what this book is not. It is not an institutional study of Philip II’s Secretary of War nor of his Secretariat.1 It is what can best be described as an “inter-generational biography”, the biography of three consecutive generations of the Delgado family. It is, of course, not irrelevant that the first of those generations was a senior official at the Court of Philip II, not least because it was my close acquaintance with Juan Delgado as Secretary of War in my earliest days at Simancas which nearly sixty years ago led me to begin looking into the more personal aspects of his life and family in his home city of Palencia. It is, therefore, not a study of the Secretary but of Juan Delgado, and his son and grandson. It is an attempt, insofar as it has been possible, to uncover their personalities and personal relations, their getting and spending, their attitudes and beliefs. At that level, therefore, it is simply a contribution to the study of group identities in 16th- and 17thcentury Spain, specifically those of Service, Military, and Oligarchy. But it has also something to contribute to the historiography of the Family. The family of a royal official of the likes of Delgado is a rather special type of family, the distinctive characteristics of which have received little consideration in the “History of the Family” genre. Finally, it is a study in the broader issue of social mobility, and, more specifically, in the under-explored processes of downward social mobility, the decline of one family in wealth, in importance and in name.
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