Perez, ANTONIO, minister of Philip II. of Spain, was born in Aragon in 1539. His reputed father was an ecclesiastic who was secretary to Charles V. and Philip II., and he himself was appointed to this office when only twenty-five years of age, and acquired the entire confidence of the king. Don John of Austria having sent his confidant, Juan de Escovedo, to Spain, to solicit aid against the party of Orange, and Escovedo having rendered himself an object of suspicion to the king as an abettor of Don John's ambitious schemes, Philip resolved to put him out of the way by murder, and entrusted Perez with the accomplishment of this design, which Perez accomplished accordingly, 31st March 1578. The family of Escovedo denounced Perez as the murderer, and all his enemies joined against him. The king at first sought to shield him; but in July 1581 he was arrested, and by torture forced to confess. He succeeded, however, in making his escape to Aragon, where he put himself under protection of its fueros, which secured a trial in open court. The king, charging him with heresy, now applied for aid in May 1591 to the Inquisition, and the Aragonese court delivered him up to its agents; but the people rose in tumult and liberated him. This happened repeatedly; and at last, in September 1591, Philip II. entered Aragon with an army powerful enough to subdue all opposition, and abolished the old constitutional privileges of the country. Perez, however, made his escape, was condemned in Spain as a heretic, but was treated with great kindness in Paris and in London, where he was the intimate of Bacon and the Earl of Essex. He spent the later years of his life in Paris, and died there, 3d November 1611, in great poverty. Perez wrote Relaciones (1598), which some recent writers have regarded as lying fabrications.
See Mignet's monograph (5th ed. 1881); Morel-Fatio, L'Espagne au XVI. et au XVII. Siècle (1878); also Froude in The Spanish Story of the Armada (1892); and works cited at PHILIP II.