Favourite - Rises and Falls of Favourites

Rises and Falls of Favourites

Favourites inevitably tended to incur the envy and loathing of the rest of the nobility, and monarchs were sometimes obliged by political pressure to dismiss or execute them; in the Middle Ages nobles often rebelled in order to seize and kill a favourite. Too close a relationship between monarch and favourite was seen as a breach of the natural order and hierarchy of society. Since many favourites had flamboyant "over-reaching" personalities, they often led the way to their own downfall with their rash behaviour. As the opinions of the gentry and bourgeoisie grew in importance, they too often strongly disliked favourites. Dislike from all classes could be especially intense in the case of favourites who were elevated from humble, or at least minor, backgrounds by royal favour. Titles and estates were usually given lavishly to favourites, who were compared to mushrooms because they sprang up suddenly overnight, from a bed of excrement. The King's favourite Piers Gaveston is a "night-grown mushrump" (mushroom) to his enemies in Christopher Marlowe's Edward II.

Their falls could be even more sudden, although after about 1650, executions tended to give way to quiet retirement. Favourites who came from the higher nobility, such as Leicester, Lerma, Olivares, and Oxenstierna, were often less resented and lasted longer. Successful minister-favourites also usually needed networks of their own favourites and relatives to help them carry out the work of government - Richelieu had his "créatures" and Olivares his "hechuras". Oxenstierna and William Cecil, who both died in office, successfully trained their sons to succeed them.

The favourite can often not be easily distinguished from the successful royal administrator, who at the top of the tree certainly needed the favour of the monarch, but the term is generally used of those who first came into contact with the monarch through the social life of the court, rather than the business of politics or administration. Figures like Thomas More, William Cecil and Jean-Baptiste Colbert, whose accelerated rise through the administrative ranks owed much to their personal relations with the monarch, but who did not attempt to behave like grandees of the nobility, were also often successful. Cardinal Wolsey was one figure who rose through the administrative hierarchy, but then lived extremely ostentatiously, before falling suddenly from power. In the Middle Ages in particular, many royal favourites were promoted in the church, English examples including Saints Dunstan and Thomas Becket; Bishops William Waynflete, Robert Burnell and Walter Reynolds. Cardinal Granvelle, like his father, was a trusted Habsburg minister who lived grandly, but not really a favourite, not least because his career was mostly spent away from the monarch.

Some favourites came from very humble backgrounds: Archibald Armstrong, jester to James I of England infuriated everyone else at court but managed to retire a wealthy man, unlike Robert Cochrane, a stonemason (probably a senior one, more like an architect than an artisan) who became Earl of Mar before the Scottish nobles revolted against him, and hanged him and other "low-born" favourites of James III of Scotland. Olivier le Daim, the barber of Louis XI, acquired a title and important military commands before being executed on vague charges brought by nobles shortly after his master died, without the knowledge of the new king. It has been claimed that le Daim's career was the origin of the term, as favori (the French word) first appears around the time of his death in 1484. Privado in Spanish was older, but was later partly replaced by the term valido; in Spanish both terms were less derogatory than in French and English.

Such rises from "menial" positions became progressively harder as the centuries progressed; one of the last families able to jump the widening chasm between servants and nobility was that of Louis XIV's valet, Alexandre Bontemps, whose descendants, holding the office for a further three generations, married into many great families, even eventually including the extended royal family itself. Queen Victoria's John Brown came much too late; the devotion of the monarch and ability to terrorize her household led to hardly any rise in social or economic position.