New perspectives on Anglo-Spanish diplomacy in the early modern era

Óscar Alfredo Ruiz Fernández, England and Spain in the Early Modern Era: Royal Love, Diplomacy, Trade and Naval Relations, 1604–25 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), xi+281 pp., ISBN 978-1-78-453117-1, £81.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781350245303, £26.00 (pbk), ISBN 9781350133426, £21.00 (epub).

Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and Berta Cano-Echevarría (eds), Exile, Diplomacy and Texts: Exchanges between Iberia and the British Isles, 1500–1767, Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture, 74 (Leiden: Brill, 2021), xii+232 pp., ISBN: 9789004273658, €105 (hbk), ISBN: 9789004438040, open access (epub).

Reviewed by: Nathalie Rivere de Carles, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurés, France

Óscar Alfredo Ruiz Fernández’s England and Spain in the Early Modern Era: Royal Love, Diplomacy, Trade and Naval Relations (1604-1625) and Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and Berta Cano-Echevarría’s Exile, Diplomacy and Texts: Exchanges between Iberia and the British Isles, 1500–1767 offer a refreshing look at the relationship of Tudor and Stuart England with Habsburg Spain. In both cases, the prism chosen is that of diplomacy. This steers the conversation from the usual one-sided, sometimes chauvinistic, perspectives on the tempestuous relations between two European power due to an ‘attitude of distrust and demonization of the political and religious “other” [that] has also shaped the scholarly discourse in more recent times’ (Exile, Diplomacy and Texts, p. 1).

Both volumes reconsider the political and religious relations through a thematized micro-history of a wider range of diplomatic stakeholders and economic perspectives. The micro-history is that of diplomatic agents involved in specific political or commercial negotiations and the management of relations between both kingdoms. It relies on writings and visual artefacts of diplomatic and non-diplomatic origins recounting the major milestones of Anglo-Iberian relations such as the 1604 Treaty of London or the failed Spanish match of 1623. These events are reenvisaged in new contexts such as the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance and the maritime and commercial expansion in America and Asia. Sáez-Hidalgo and Cano-Echevarría recall what Robert Muchembled said about conflicts ‘destabilising, [but also creating] a dialectic which contributed to the overall advance of European civilization’. ¹ And this is the perspective of both volumes: they account for the tumultuous Anglo-Iberian relationship by including a realistic assessment of the diplomatic cooperative pragmatism that was at work then.

Ruiz Fernández’s monograph, England and Spain in the Early Modern Era, is a detailed history of Anglo-Spanish relations through the writings of the main ambassadors stationed in England like Don Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, Conde of Gondomar, and Don Pedro de Zúñiga, and sources provided by lesser-knowns agents (diary entries, financial ledgers, and letters to Philip III and Philip IV). The dominant figure of Gondomar is usefully considered against the perspective of the factious divide between Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, Duke of Lerma, and Juan Fernández de Velasco y Tovar, Duke of Frias and Constable of Castille, at the heart of the Spanish political establishment. This provides a revealing counterpoint to the usual focus on English domestic dissensions and shows the structural similitudes of both kingdoms. The volume uses the reference texts of Renaissance diplomacy (Garret Mattingly, Charles Carter, Albert Loomie) then expands to other more recent economic studies (Robert Brenner, Francisco Chacón Jiménez, Kirti Chaudhuri). Yet, Ruiz Fernández breaks with the anglophone historiography and ‘the nineteenth-century idea’ which centred the study of Anglo-Spanish relations on ‘the corruption and decadence’ of the Stuart court (Gardiner) or ‘James’s lack of competence in dealing with foreign policy’ (Hume) (p. 25). He adopts a more factual approach which is that of actual diplomatic practice, trade naval warfare and overseas maritime expansion and relies on both English and Spanish sources.

The book analyses Anglo-Spanish diplomatic relations from 1603 to 1625 from the perspective of the Council of State in Spain (at Valladolid and Madrid), and the Spanish embassy in London, with a specific focus on two periods. The first period is that of the negotiation of the Treaty of London between 1603 and 1605 and the pragmatic favouring of commerce over the question of public tolerance for English Catholics as a condition of peace. The second period spans from the failed match between Prince Charles in 1623 and the Infanta to the disastrous English siege of Cadiz in 1625. Each of the three sections of the book addresses these two periods from a different thematic angle.

The first section focuses on the debates and dilemmas of Spanish foreign policy and pits them against the economic situation of both kingdoms as well as comparing the similar factious atmosphere at both courts. The parallel portraits of Philip III and James VI and I, then of Philip IV and Charles I, offer interesting insights into the similar domestic rumours and errors impacting foreign policy. The second section deals with the embassy accounts of 1603–1625 and analyses the extent of the Spanish king’s wealth. It follows the money, on whom it was spent and by whom. It shows that ‘the king’s money was the centre wheel that moved the Spanish embassy and was essential for diplomacy’ (p. 28). Finally, the last section brings in the freshest perspective as it observes the activities of the Spanish embassy about the Dutch question from a military and commercial point of view. It recontextualises Anglo-Spanish relations in the dynamic of extension of Spanish and English world trade and the question of piracy (at the time when Grotius released his seminal discussion of maritime law). Broadening the perspective beyond Europe shows the impact of commercial preoccupations in conflicts between Spain and the Dutch. Ruiz Fernández notes: ‘there is a parallelism between the years 1603–7 and 1621–5 regarding the displaying of the Spanish might in Northern Europe. In both periods there was peace with England, which allowed Spain to focus on fighting the Dutch’ (p. 34). He also ascribes the end of both favourable periods for Spain to ‘the bankruptcies of the Spanish royal finances in 1607 and 1627’ (p. 34). If Anglo-Spanish relations are still ‘one of the reasons for the collision between the [English] crown and the successive English parliaments’ (p. 245), Ruiz Fernández disproves the ‘black legend’ which is evoked and debunked in Sáez-Hidalgo and Cano-Echevarría’s opus. He shows instead the doctrinal coherence of the Spanish diplomacy which ‘had three major objectives that can be summarized under three concepts: neutrality, tolerance and control’ (p. 277).

Besides navigation glitches in the electronic version, which may lead a reader to favour the print version instead, and the sometimes destabilising chronological to-and-fro movements characterising each section, the book remains a strong reference book on the history of Anglo-Spanish relations. It offers an excellent historical background to the 1604 Treaty of London and the infamous Spanish Match of 1623. Ruiz Fernández’s analysis of the correspondence and the material culture partaking of or representing the events is a most welcome discussive historical work on these events. Especially noteworthy is the enlightening historical perspective on the famous painting of the Somerset House conference (1604) through micro-portraits of each commissioner under the tutelage of both Velasco and Cecil as master choreographers of the conference (pp. 53–8). Our understanding of the macro-history of events is enhanced by Ruiz Fernández’s micro-histories of the diplomatic agents and the economic assessment of their mission and of both kingdoms’ treasuries. Where other recent examination of the Spanish match limited their scope to reprints of famous early modern agonistic pamphlets, Ruiz Fernández offers a strategic overview of the Spanish Match, unveiling the (intentional) causes and consequences of its failure.

Likewise, Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and Berta Cano-Echevarría’s collection of essays, Exile, Diplomacy and Texts, offers new practical perspectives on Anglo-Spanish, or rather Anglo-Iberian, relationships by focusing on ‘the dynamics of [religious, political and diplomatic] exchange[s] resulting from early modern geographical mobility’ (p. 3). Like Ruiz Fernández, they chose the prism of material, economic and literary sources as not only illustrating but also shaping and implementing Anglo-Iberian relations. What is at stake here is the actual diplomatic agency of ambassadors and more particularly of British Catholic networks. Based on Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham’s approach of the circulation of information and networks, and Jyotsna Singh’s to the mobility of material goods, the collection moves away from binary discussions of international relations. It discusses Anglo-Iberian relations through ‘the dynamics of the diverse communities of British and Irish people in the Iberian Peninsula, and of Spanish and Portuguese “others” travelling to Britain and Ireland’ (p. 3).

The collection aims to understand the nature of the exchanges between rivals and to move beyond the one-dimensional view of a permanent and pervasive hostility. The contributors use accounts of political manoeuvring between other players (Ireland and Portugal) and rely on (sometimes annotated) ‘manuscript letters, pamphlets or reports of soldiers and prisoners, inventories of libraries, visual artefacts with narrative value, textual accounts of events and their performances and fictionalized travellers’ accounts’ (p. 3). Besides the religious angle, the diplomatic trope is the other common feature of these sources: ‘diplomats and their missions are not only vehicles of transmission but become themselves the focus of attention and the protagonists of accounts, poems, chronicles and texts’ (p. 5). As in Ruiz Fernández’s opus, the authors establish connections between micro-histories and the macro-history of early modern Anglo-Iberian relations. Thus they deconstruct ‘the myth of the “Black Legend”’ (p. 4) which had been preventing rational factual observations of the actual relations between England and Spain for the past century or so. To this end, the collection is divided in three sections, each presenting ‘instances of interaction with the “other”: the encounter, the narration and the reading’ (p. 5). This efficient structure enables the reader to fully understand the circulation of ideas in the early modern era and offers a methodological prism to be used beyond the thematic scope of the volume.

The first section, entitled ‘Encountering the Other’, explores occurrences of transnational relations through the prism of military cooperation, commercial relations and the role of Irish prisoners in war on land and at sea. Glyn Redworth’s chapter offers a fresh perspective on the actual relations of England and Spain during the reign of Mary Tudor and debunks recurring narratives of ‘English national independence’ in geopolitical terms. The analysis of the battle of Saint Quentin (1557) is contrasted with Antoon Van der Wijngaerde’s sketches. This study confirms the essential part played by the English troops in the siege and discredits the myth of an English reluctance. What emerges from the study is a successful cooperative experience and ‘perhaps the unpalatable truth for some that 500 years ago, the English were prepared to accept a European destiny’ (p. 30).

Following in Redworth’s footsteps, Susana Oliveira offers a fascinating study of the Portuguese connections of Thomas Wilson, the diplomat, statesman and diplomat, ‘author of the Arte of Logique (1551), Arte of Rhetorique (1553), […] in addition to his English translation of Three Orations of Demosthenes (1570)’, which he actually dedicated to Cecil (p. 37). Oliveira’s choice of a figure at the heart of the Elizabethan political system allows her to discuss the Elizabethan position as ‘ambiguous policy’ (p. 40) – as defined in Early Modern Diplomacy, Theatre and Soft Power (2016). Wilson had to tread a very fine line between the Portuguese sense of maritime monopoly and English and French privateering. The networks established or furthered by Wilson helped to end the seven-year period during which England and Portugal had put their political and economic alliance on hold. She thus concludes on the role of the ambassador as ‘essential on the political stage, as the diplomatic skills and services had become indispensable in (re)establishing and maintaining the peace’ (p. 49), even if the latter was far from being an absolute.

Thomas O’Connor’s chapter focuses on third-party agents acting as unexpected mediators in Anglo-Spanish relations: Irish captives in the Mediterranean between 1580 and 1760. The perspective shifts here towards unofficial intermediaries at the heart of unexpected forms of cooperation. Reprising the concept of ambiguity, O’Connor explains that ‘it was within the interlocking English and Spanish spheres in particular, that the Irish learned to play on the ambiguities of their identity as (generally) Catholic subjects of a Protestant monarch’ (p. 55). Analysing the stories of Irish captives in the Maghreb, O’Connor emphasises the role of prisoners as unofficial diplomatic agents or negotiators that was often dramatised in some of Cervantes' plays. Based on their skills, the Irish were in turn used as tutors, soldiers or slaves, and were characterised by a ‘trans-imperial agency’ (p. 65). They constitute ‘an intriguing instance of the triangular traffic between the English, Spanish and Moorish spheres’ (p. 69) in spite of the violent context of their experiences. Cooperation is perceived in deeply realistic terms as born from coercive contingencies.

The second section, devoted to ‘Narrating the Other’, brings together three manners of representing the Other. Berta Cano-Echevarría furthers the study of religious exiles in her analysis of English Catholicism in Spain from a literary perspective. She discusses Cervantes’ The Spanish Lady which was published in 1613 but composed around 1605, a few months after the London Treaty of 1604, and possibly commissioned by the treaty negotiators to promote Anglo-Spanish friendship. Besides the soft power angle, Cano focuses on the accuracy of Cervantes’ portrayal of English Catholics’ lives in England as a prism for the distribution of news about England in Spain. Her hypothesis is that the dearth of information about England in Spain derived ‘from a certain political convenience that suited both the Spanish authorities and the English exile community in order to promote an image of England as a primarily Catholic country subjected to a temporary Protestant rule that would necessarily end, an image that very often was based on mis/disinformation’ (p. 80). She posits that it constitutes a sort of ‘white legend’ contrasting with the previously evoked ‘black legend’ (p. 1).

Similarly focusing on the context of the 160–1605 peace negotiations between England, the Netherlands and Spain, Rui Carvalho Homem opts for a side-view through the study of Tomé Pinheiro da Veiga’s Fastigínia. The latter text is the account by a ‘Portuguese visitor to Valladolid at the time (1605) of the celebrations of the birth of the future Philip IV of Spain (and third of Portugal), and of the arrival and sojourn of an English embassy mandated to confirm the Anglo-Spanish peace’ (p. 103). Echoing Oliveira and O’Connor’s use of the concept of diplomatic ambiguity, Carvalho Homem explores the ‘cultivated uncertainties’ of the Fastigínia starting with the unwillingness of the authorial persona to admit authority. He cleverly shows the Fastigínia is ‘a hybrid (literary, political) artefact, and one that provides a solid argument for the constitutive mutuality of text and event’ (p. 104).

Such fundamental premise in the study of diplomatic relations takes a new dimension when it comes to the writing of history as examined by Tamara Pérez-Fernández. Her study switches to the historical chronicles of the fall of Granada by Edward Hall (1548) and Raphael Holinshed (1577 and 1587 editions). It focuses on the ‘process of incorporating this episode and its national celebration in historiographical accounts after the Protestant Reformation’ (p. 8). It stresses Hall’s reliance on Spanish propagandist sources and opens the historiographical debates about sourcing. In many cases, Hall served as source for Holinshed, and sometimes erroneous facts passed on from one historian to another, eventually reaching the creative history reader and thus helping to create and propagate white or black legends.

The final section entitled ‘Reading the Other’ includes three chapters with a particular focus on ‘material objects’ and the spaces where they were kept and ‘theatrical interpretation emanating from narratives of diplomatic encounters’ (p. 8). Sáez-Hidalgo analyses ‘the co-existence of orthodox and heterodox material in a copy of The Second Part of Christian Exercise now at the Royal Library of El Escorial, in Spain’ (p. 157). The marginalia help us to understand the reception of English books in Spain and how they were disseminated. In an unprecedented study, Sáez-Hidalgo shows ‘how Catholics in exile dealt with their difficult circumstances by repurposing such texts as came to hand, not only Catholic, but also Protestant texts’ (p. 157).

Similarly, Marta Revilla-Rivas’s piece focuses on the impact of Robert Persons through the books of the English College of St Alban’s in Valladolid, founded by Persons in 1589. The seminary aimed at reconverting England and Wales to Catholicism and the books were instrumental in training the missionaries. Revilla-Riva reverts to the original inventories of the College to draw an exact picture of the circulation of books in early modern Spain. Studying the provenance and the circulation of these books as well as their final destinations and readers, Revilla Riva unveils their multiple purposes. They were tools for the young missionary priests at the earliest stages of the mission. They provided spiritual nourishment in their own language and means to form relationships in social contexts. Most of all they created a sense of belonging to this network of European Catholics (p. 201).

Mark Hutchings’s brilliant concluding chapter offers a methodological coda to the entire volume explaining to contemporary readers how to read certain diplomatic accounts based on the experience of early modern spectators and readers. His fascinating study of Robert Treswell’s A Relation of Svch Things, the Journey of the right Honourable Charles Earle of Nottingham […] Ambassadour to the King of Spaine (1605) reflects on the frequently noted theatricality of diplomatic ceremony from a different perspective: that of a writer who is also a choreographer of diplomatic encounters. Raising the issue of interdisciplinarity in the study of diplomacy, Hutchings asks, crucially: ‘what might it mean to treat accounts of diplomatic activity as documents of performance?’ (p. 208). Using Russian formalists’ concepts of Haupttext (main dramatic text or dialogue) and Nebentext (stage directions), Hutchings convincingly posits that diplomatic relations (especially the ones written by masters of ceremonies such as Treswell) were actual ‘textual reperformance[s]’ (p. 212). Hutchings urges us to ‘attend to these texts not simply or solely as sources of evidence for the performance of diplomatic ceremonial in early modern Europe but as evidence of how diplomacy was framed and shaped for a nonelite (if not popular) audience through the medium of print’ (p. 226)

Both Ruiz Fernández’s and Sáez-Hidalgo and Cano-Echevarría’s volumes are invaluable addenda to the historiography of early modern Anglo-Iberian relations. They raise essential questions about sourcing when it comes to studying or reporting on events (a valuable lesson for contemporary writers of all trades). They provide their readers with essential tools and methods to read geopolitical events and their textual and visual representations. They also play an essential part in bringing past history to the fore in a factual way, showing that besides conflicts, cooperation existed in ways that still have bearings on and may even inspire our contemporary world. To paraphrase Glyn Redworth, this might be an ‘unpalatable truth’ for those seeking to rekindle ancient wars, but it is a fundamental touchstone of the discussion of local and global socio-political interactions.