. . Quevedo was born on 14 September 1580 in
Madrid into a family of
hidalgos from the village of
Vejorís, located in the northern mountainous region of
Cantabria. His family was descended from the
Castilian nobility. Quevedo's father, Francisco Gómez de Quevedo, was secretary to
Maria of Spain, daughter of emperor
Charles V and wife of
Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor, and his mother,
Madrid-born María de Santibáñez, was
lady-in-waiting to the queen. Quevedo matured surrounded by dignitaries and nobility at the royal court. Intellectually gifted, Quevedo was physically handicapped with a
club foot, and
myopia. Since he always wore
pince-nez, his name in the plural,
quevedos, came to mean "pince-nez" in the Spanish language. Orphaned by the age of six, he was able to attend the
Imperial School run by the
Jesuits in Madrid. He then attended university at
Alcalá de Henares from 1596 to 1600. By his own account, he made independent studies in philosophy, classical languages, Arabic, Hebrew, French and Italian. In 1601, Quevedo, as a member of the Court, moved to
Valladolid, where the Court had been transferred by the King's minister, the
Duke of Lerma. There he studied theology, a subject that would become a lifelong interest, and on which in later life he would compose the treatise
Providencia de Dios (''God's Providence'') against atheism. By this time, he was becoming noted as both a poet and a prose writer. Some of his poetry was collected in a 1605 generational anthology by Pedro Espinosa entitled
Flores de Poetas Ilustres (
Flowers by Illustrious Poets). We can also date back to this time the first draft of his
picaresque novel Vida del Buscón – apparently written as an exercise in courtly wit – and a few satirical pamphlets that made him famous among his fellow students and which he would later disown as juvenile pranks. Around this time, he began a very erudite exchange of letters with the humanist
Justus Lipsius, in which Quevedo deplored the wars that were ravaging Europe. The Court returned to Madrid in 1606, and Quevedo followed, remaining till 1611. By then, he was a well-known and accomplished man-of-letters. He befriended and was praised by
Miguel de Cervantes and
Lope de Vega, the premier playwright of the age. Between 1616–1622, Quevedo attended the
Medrano Academy (Poetic Academy of Madrid) founded by Dr.
Sebastián Francisco de Medrano.
Enemies Quevedo's enemies included, among others, the dramatist
Juan Ruiz de Alarcón for, despite his own physical handicaps, Quevedo found Alarcón's
redheaded and
hunchbacked physique a source of amusement. Quevedo also attacked
Juan Pérez de Montalbán, the son of a bookseller with whom he had quarrelled, satirizing him in
La Perinola (
The Teetotum), a piece against Montalbán's book
Para todos (
For Everyone). In 1608, being a skilled swordsman himself aside from a writer (
las armas y las letras), Quevedo supposedly duelled with the author and
fencing master
Luis Pacheco de Narváez as a result of Quevedo criticizing one of Pacheco's works. Quevedo took off Pacheco's hat in the first encounter. They remained enemies all their lives. In Quevedo's
Buscón, this duel was parodied with a fencer relying on mathematical calculations having to run away from a duel with an experienced soldier. Quevedo could be impulsive. He was present at the
church of San Martín in Madrid when a woman praying there was slapped on the cheek by another man who had rushed up to her. Quevedo seized the man, dragging him outside the church. The two men drew swords, and Quevedo ran his opponent through. The man, who died of his wounds some time later, was someone of importance. Quevedo thus retired temporarily to the palace of his friend and patron,
Pedro Téllez-Girón, 3rd Duke of Osuna. The preferred object of his fury and ridicule, however, was the poet
Góngora, whom, in a series of scathing satires, he accused of being an unworthy priest, a homosexual, a gambler, and a writer of indecent verse who used a purposefully obscure language. Quevedo lampooned his rival by writing a
sonnet,
Aguja de navegar cultos, which listed words from Góngora's
lexicon: "He who would like to be a
culto poet in just one day, / must the following jargon learn: /
Fulgores, arrogar, joven, presiente / candor, construye, métrica, armonía..." Quevedo satirized Góngora's physique, particularly his prominent nose in the sonnet
A una nariz, (
To a Nose). It begins with the lines:
Érase un hombre a una nariz pegado, / érase una nariz superlativa, / érase una nariz sayón y escriba, / érase un peje espada muy barbado. (There was a man glued to a nose, / there was a superlative nose, / there was a nose that was an official and a scribe, / there was a bearded
swordfish.)
Relationships with the Duke of Osuna About that time, Quevedo grew very close to
Pedro Téllez-Girón, 3rd Duke of Osuna, one of the great statesmen and generals of the age, whom he accompanied as secretary to Italy in 1613, carrying out a number of missions for him which took him to
Nice, Venice, and finally back to Madrid. There he engaged in all manner of courtly intrigue to get the
viceroyalty of
Kingdom of Naples for Osuna, an effort that finally bore fruit in 1616. He then returned to Italy in the Duke's entourage, where he was entrusted with putting in order the Viceroyalty's finances, and sent on several espionage-related missions to the rival
Republic of Venice, although it is now believed these did not involve him personally. He was rewarded for his efforts with a knighthood in the
order of Santiago in 1618.
Temporary exile and retirement . With the fall from favor of Osuna in 1620, Quevedo lost his patron and protector and was exiled to
Torre de Juan Abad (
Ciudad Real), whose fiefdom his mother had purchased for him. His supposed vassals, however, refused to acknowledge him, forcing Quevedo into an interminable legal battle with the town's
council that would not be won until after his death. Quevedo would write some of his better poetry in this retirement, such as the sonnet
Retirado a la paz de estos desiertos... or
Son las torres de Joray.... He found consolation to his failed ambitions as a courtier in the
Stoicism of
Seneca, his study and commentary turning him into one of the main exponents of Spanish
Neostoicism. The elevation of
Philip IV to the throne in 1621 meant the end of Quevedo's exile, and his return to Court and politics, now under the influence of the new minister, the
Count-Duke of Olivares. Quevedo accompanied the young king in trips to
Andalusia and
Aragon, recounting some of its various incidents in interesting letters. At this time he decided to denounce to the
Spanish Inquisition his own works, published without his consent by profiteering
booksellers. It was a move to frighten off the booksellers and regain control over his writings, with a view to a definitive edition of his work that was not to come in his lifetime. He became known for a disorderly lifestyle: he was a heavy
smoker, a frequent visitor to
brothels and taverns, and cohabited with a woman only known as
Ledesma. Góngora derided him as a drunkard in a satirical poem as
Don Francisco de Quebebo (a play on his name that can be roughly translated as
Don Francisco of Drinksalot.) None of this put a stop to his career at court, perhaps because the king had an equally rowdy reputation. In fact, in 1632 he would become secretary to the king, thus reaching the apex of his political career. His friend
Antonio Juan de la Cerda, the
Duke de Medinaceli, forced Quevedo to marry against his will with Doña Esperanza de Aragón, a widow with children. The marriage, made in 1634, barely lasted three months. Quevedo filled these years with febrile creative activity. In 1634 he published
La cuna y la sepultura (
The Cradle and the Sepulchre) and the translation of
La introducción a la vida devota (
Introduction to a Life of Devotion) of
Francis of Sales; between 1633 and 1635 he completed works like
De los remedios de cualquier fortuna (
On the Remedies of Any Fortune), the
Epicteto,
Virtud Militante,
Los cuatro fantasmas (
The Four Ghosts), the second part of
Política de Dios (
The Politics of God),
Visita y anatomía de la cabeza del cardenal Richelieu (
Visit and Anatomy of the Head of Cardinal Richelieu) or
Carta a Luis XIII (
Letter to Louis XIII). In 1635 there appeared in
Valencia the most important of the numerous
libels destined to defame him,
El tribunal de la justa venganza, erigido contra los escritos de Francisco de Quevedo, maestro de errores, doctor en desvergüenzas, licenciado en bufonerías, bachiller en suciedades, catedrático de vicios y protodiablo entre los hombres. (
The Court of the rightful revenge, erected against the writings of Francisco de Quevedo, teacher of errors, doctor in shamelessness, licensed in buffoonery, bachelor in dirt, university professor of vices and proto-devil among men.)
Arrest and exile . In 1639, he was arrested. His books were confiscated. The authorities, hardly giving Quevedo time to get dressed, took the poet to the
convent of
San Marcos in
León. In the monastery Quevedo dedicated himself to reading, as recounted in his
Carta moral e instructiva (
Moral and instructive letter), written to his friend, Adán de la Parra, depicting hour by hour his prison life ("From ten to eleven, I spend my time in prayer and devotions, and from eleven to noon I read good and bad authors; because there is no book, despicable as it can be, that does not contain something good..."). Quevedo, who was frail and very ill when he left from his confinement in 1643, resigned from royal court definitively to retire at Torre de Juan Abad. He died in the
Dominican convent of
Villanueva de los Infantes, on 8 September 1645. One tale tells that his tomb was pillaged days later by a gentleman who wished to have the gold
spurs with which Quevedo had been buried. == Style ==