Favourite

In post-classical and early-modern Europe, among other times and places, the term was used of individuals delegated significant political power by a ruler.

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".

Figures like 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.

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 he was not really a favourite, partly because most of his career was spent away from the monarch.

[8] Olivier le Daim, the barber of Louis XI, acquired a title and important military commands before he was executed on vague charges brought by nobles shortly after his master died, without the knowledge of the new king.

Queen Victoria's John Brown came much too late; the devotion of the monarch and ability to terrorise her household led to hardly any rise in social or economic position.

On the death of Cardinal Mazarin in 1661, the 23-year-old Louis XIV determined that he would rule himself, and he did not allow the delegation of power to ministers that had happened during the previous 40 years.

In Spain under the Habsburgs, when Olivares was succeeded by his nephew Luis Méndez de Haro, the last real valido, the control of government into a single pair of hands had already been weakened.

For princes, in regard of the distance of their fortune from that of their subjects and servants, cannot gather this fruit, except (to make themselves capable thereof) they raise some persons to be, as it were, companions and almost equals to themselves, which many times sorteth to inconvenience.

[15] In 1974 Jean Bérenger published "Pour une enquête européenne, l'histoire du ministeriat au XVIIe siècle" in Annales, a seminal study on the subject.

Elliott and Laurence Brockliss's work (that resulted in the collection of essays The World of the Favourite), undertaken to explore the matter put forward by Bérenger, became the most important comparative treatment of this subject.