This is a fine collection of scholarly and well-written essays. The title suggests that it is about diplomatic history, but it also contributes valuably to many other fields, including British political history, and the history of British and European foreign policy and international relations in the early modern period.
The book is organized into six parts, though there is much overlap between the subject matter of many of these. Each part concerns marriage and another topic. The six topics are the court, politics, war, news, continental Europe, and ceremony. In the introduction, the editors, Valentina Caldari and Sara Wolfson, along with Michael Questier emphasize that the contributors approach early modern British matters from “from a European and global angle” (2), and they express the hope “that this volume proves that the European turn—as far as early modern British history is concerned—is still the future” (10).
In a well-researched opening essay, R. Malcolm Smuts discusses “The French Match and Court Politics.” The French match was the marriage between Charles I and the French princess Henrietta Maria, which took place in 1625. Not long before this marriage, Charles had wooed the Spanish infanta María Ana, and in 1623 he (along with the Duke of Buckingham) had traveled to Spain incognito to press his suit in person, romantically but ineffectively. Many of the essays in this volume focus on Charles's two proposed marriages, to the infanta and to the princess. Smuts concentrates on the French connection, but also talks about the Spanish match, and entertainingly notes that Charles's father James I at one point expressed the wish concerning his son that the Spanish would “salt him and eat him” (15). British history might have been very different if that had happened. Thomas Cogswell's excellent essay discusses the aftermath of the Spanish match, arguing that the attempt by Parliament to impeach Buckingham in 1626 was to a considerable extent the work of Hispanophiles who blamed the duke for the failure of the Spanish match. He notes that one commentator observed in 1626 that people who had earlier supported Buckingham now sought “‘to tear him piecemeal and eat him raw with salt’” (29). In fact, he was merely stabbed to death. Wolfson's fine essay completes the first part of the book with an interesting discussion of the religious consequences of the French match, when a Catholic queen was allowed to introduce Counterreformation practices at the Caroline court.
An important feature of this volume is that it contains a number of contributions that view relations between European states from a non-British (and especially from a Spanish) perspective, and it employs source materials from outside Britain (and most of all from Spain). Robert Cross impressively uses Spanish archives to illuminate Anglo-Spanish negotiations from 1596 to 1625. Caldari valuably employs Spanish sources to document how people in Spain saw the dissolution of the 1621 parliament in England. Porfirio Sanz Camañes discusses Anglo-Spanish diplomacy. Manuel Rivero Rodríguez places Spanish ideas about foreign policy in the context of debates between secularists and papalists in Spain and Spanish Italy. José Eloy Hortal Muñoz analyzes changes in attitude of the authorities at Brussels in the Spanish Netherlands. Rubén González Cuerva emphasizes the importance of long negotiations between the Austrian and Spanish branches of the house of Habsburg for the hand of María Ana, who married not Charles I but her multiple relative the Emperor Ferdinand III.
The book includes interesting essays on how marriage negotiations were reported by the press in the Dutch Republic (by Helmer Helmers) and in the Spanish Netherlands (by Paul Arblaster). David Coast talks illuminatingly about the ways in which James, Charles, and Buckingham tried and failed to control British debate on the Spanish and French matches. Andrea de Meo Arbore ends the volume with an illustrated contribution about the Catholic chapel at St. James's palace at Westminster that Inigo Jones designed for the infanta in 1623. This is in the sixth part of the book, which concerns ceremony, but has relatively little to say about literal ceremonies. Melinda J. Gough compellingly notes that overtures for marriages—or ceremonial gestures preceding marriage negotiations—sometimes served purposes different from leading to weddings: for instance, as tokens of friendship, and as instruments for dividing rival countries. Though the essays are overwhelmingly European in focus, two stimulating exceptions are Kelsey Flynn's chapter on the reactions of Spain to the beginnings of British expansion into America, and the chapter by Edmond Smith on the East India Company.
The book is overtly about Stuart marriage diplomacy between 1604 and 1630, but in fact contains a fair amount of earlier and later material. The Spanish and French matches receive most attention, but a third marriage also features, and perhaps deserves more attention than it receives. That was the wedding of Charles's sister Elizabeth to Frederick of the Palatinate in 1613 (all British monarchs from 1714 onward are descended from this union). Peter H. Wilson's important essay places this marriage in the context of German politics and the Thirty Years’ War. Steve Murdoch's fine chapter notes that Scottish loyalty to Elizabeth and her husband, whose Calvinist faith was an important reason for their expulsion from Germany by Catholics early in that war, played a significant role in the opposition to Charles I of the Scottish Covenanters in the years before 1642. Murdoch and Adam Marks interestingly observe that a large number of Britons—100,000—took part in the Thirty Years’ War, and that their attitudes were important in shaping the actions of the Danes, Swedes, and French. The volume might also have discussed the marriage of Charles's daughter Mary to the Dutch prince William of Orange in 1641—of which William III was the issue. But this interesting and wide-ranging collection deserves a wide readership.
