CONFERENCE REPORT
1623: The Journey of Prince Charles to Madrid to negotiate marriage
with the Spanish Infanta, and his return to London
The Shakespeare Centre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 3 - 4 May 2003
Organiser: Dr Alexander Samson (UCL)
This two-day conference held at the Shakespeare Centre in Stratfordupon-Avon generated some of the liveliest debate I have witnessed at a
conference, as delegates remapped consecrated narratives of 1623. The
interdisciplinarity of the papers provided some fascinating new perspectives
on issues from Charles’ awakening connoisseurship to literary
representations of mixed religious marriages. The major players were
introduced in an excellent slide show based on the Sale of the Century
exhibition materials by Sir John H. Elliott. Traditionally, the Spanish match
of 1623 has been explained in specific relation to the loss of the Palatinate
by James I and VI’s son-in-law Frederick. New evidence presented by Glyn
Redworth (Manchester), however, demonstrated that the concerns it sought
to address had little to do with what was already seen as a lost cause by the
Stuarts. Instead its purpose needs to be understood in relation to domestic
politics. The match was a counterweight to ‘antimonarchical’ forces at work
in Britain, in the shape of a ‘Puritan’ party in parliament. This contentious
term has been rehabilitated as the best contemporary description of the
faction, which saw James’ pacific policy as a betrayal of the Anglican
Church. Charles set out on his unprecedented journey in the mistaken
belief that the match was a fait accompli. After only a couple of months in
Madrid, the desperation of the English party to leave was apparent from the
secret articles sworn to by James and Charles, which would have signalled
the repeal of anti-Catholic legislation and creation of a religiously tolerant
state. The Spanish, on the other hand, had never had any intention of
concluding the match, unless perhaps Charles himself had converted to
Catholicism. The bait had been an integral part of their foreign policy, since
1612, when serious negotiations had begun, if not since 1605, when the idea
had first been proposed to Charles Howard, Earl of Nottingham by the
Duke of Lerma, in the course of lavish festival entertainments laid on to
celebrate the birth of Philip IV.
In the second session, two complementary papers looked at the
Parisian stopover of the royal travellers, when they witnessed the princess,
whom Charles would eventually marry, Henriette Marie, performing as Iris
in Anne of Austria’s Grand Balet de la Reyne representant les Festes de Junon la
Nopciere. Marie-Claude Canova-Green (Goldsmiths) focused on reportage in
Le Mercure françois and the allegorical rewriting of history in Abraham Rémy's
poem La Galatée, ou les aventures du prince Astiagès, which was published shortly
after the conclusion of the French marriage. Karen Britland (Leeds)
examined how the fiction of the Caroline romance, his infatuation with
Henriette at the ballet leading him to break off his engagement to the
Infanta, was picked up on in England particularly through the work of the
court poet Boisrobert and influenced the royal couple’s self-presentation in
the court masque and poetry of the 1630s.
Alistair Malcolm (Limerick) and Roberta Andersen (Bath Spa)
provided an assessment of dynastic politics in the seventeenth century.
Both commented on the constant succession of possible matches proposed
by the Habsburgs in the pursuit of their European policy. Although
marriages were clearly political as well as personal, they remained the
personal prerogative of the sovereign, who often excluded councillors from
negotiations. In this way they remained firmly under the control of the king,
his favourites and ambassadors. Michael Questier (Queen Mary) and Peter
Lake (Princeton) gave a fascinating paper on the religious disputations,
which sprung up around the country between Anglicans and Catholics in the
light of expectations that with the match would come both de facto toleration
and the possibility of an irenic ecumenicism. In the heady days following
his return there was a rampant cross-confessionalism in England. Tom
Cogswell (California, Riverside) examined the aftermath of the failure of the
match and unpacked the two competing explanations for what had gone
wrong. John Digby, the ambassador, was arrested on his return, at
Buckingham’s instigation, possibly to prevent him from talking about
Buckingham’s louche behaviour. The Duke was accused of being a Spanish
stooge, who had plotted with Gondomar and the pope to lure Charles to
Madrid, with the end of converting him. From various sources it is evident
that Charles and Buckingham did go a long way to convince the Spanish of
their growing closeness to Rome, genuflecting before the sacrament on
public occasions and visiting a beata on their way home, a fact omitted from
the English translation of Andrés de Almansa y Mendoza’s relación.
Jerry Brotton (Queen Mary) analysed the impact of the visit on
Charles buying into a particular version of the Italian Renaissance as evinced
in the impressive royal collections belonging to Philip IV. It was a decisive
moment in the history of the royal collections and perhaps also said
something about Charles’ romantic fantasies at the time concerning the
Infanta. Several delegates alluded to the gift of Titian’s Charles V with hound
as akin to offering someone the prize photograph from the family album.
Jeremy Robbins (Edinburgh) gave an excellent summary of the literary
outpouring in Spain, inspired by the visit, from Calderón’s Amor, honor y
poder to Quevedo, Mira de Amescua, Gongora and Alarcón. All of the
major writers of the time got involved whether attacking each other or
eulogising the prince in some of the most lamentable verse produced in the
early modern period. Emma Rhattigan (Oxford), meanwhile, examined the
representation of the Spanish Infanta in a manuscript collection of John
Donne’s sermons. His systematically ambiguous allusions to the issue of
religious toleration, when read against comments about mixed-race
marriages, make it clear that Donne was exercised with how to comment on
the crisis without sinking to ‘the impotencye of Satyricall humour’.
The second day kicked off with Henry Ettinghausen’s (Southampton)
assessment of coverage of the event in the Spanish press. The interest it
generated led to the printing of an unexpectedly large number of editions of
relaciónes, which contained accounts of everything from the bullfights and
festival entertainments to descriptions of the clothing of those involved and
comments on the ill-advised nature of the Paris leg of the journey. There
was then a session with three papers dealing with the inflection of the match
in English court culture, particularly the Jonsonian masque, Neptune’s
Triumph for the Return of Albion. Anna Maria Cataldi Palombi (Naples)
uncovered the political strategies employed by the authors of court masques
to read the journey as a triumph, in spite of the failure of the match. Martin
Butler (Leeds) analysed how the rewriting of Neptune’s Triumph responded to
the crisis, as well as the genesis of its imagery in encyclopaedias and in the
paintings of Balthazar Gerbier, a client of Buckingham. Finally, Claire
Wilkeley (Southampton) examined the representation of Archibald
Armstrong, Charles’ fool and a visitor to Madrid in the train of the prince, in
the work of John Taylor, who also published the seemingly apolitical
‘Princes Charles his Welcome from Spain’. The conference ended with a
session on political drama. Claire Jowitt (Aberystwyth) presented on
Massinger’s The Renegado and its exploration of the theme of mixed religious
marriages, as well as the curiously positive presentation of the Jesuit
Francisco. Trudi Darby (King’s College) commented on the difficulty critics
have had with Middleton's A Game at Chesse, arguing that it needs to be read
as an ‘antifestival’, an antidote to the festivities with which Charles had been
embraced in Madrid by Catholic Spain. My own small contribution
(Alexander Samson, UCL), brought the conference to a conclusion with a
detailed comparison between one of the Almansa y Mendoza relaciónes and
its English translation published almost immediately afterwards, listing
significant alterations and omissions.
This conference brought together a diverse group of scholars from
different disciplines and engendered lively and fruitful exchanges across
borders. The breadth of the content and differences of approach worked
extremely well by being tightly grouped around such a specific theme.
‘1623’ is a testament to the difficulties of true interdisciplinarity. It showed
that sometimes the left hand does not know what the right is doing and
proved how much can be achieved when scholars do step out of the box to
work hand in hand.
Alexander Samson
University College London