The Spanish Match

Prince Charles's Journey to Madrid, 1623

Alexander Samson, Alexander Samson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351881654
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

In the spring of 1623 Charles, Prince of Wales, the young heir to the English and Scottish thrones donned a false wig and beard and slipped out of England under the assumed name of John Smith in order to journey to Madrid and secure for himself the hand of the King of Spain's daughter. His father James I and VI had been toying with the idea of a Spanish match for his son since as early as 1605, despite the profoundly divisive ramifications such a policy would have in the face of the determined 'Puritan' opposition in parliament, committed to combatting the forces of international Catholicism at every opportunity. With the Spanish ambassador, the machiavellian Count of Gondomar's encouragement to 'mount' Spain, Charles impetuously took matters into his own hands and as the negotiations stalled he departed secretly in the guise of Mr Smith to win with his romantic and foolhardy daring what his father could not achieve through diplomacy. The eventual failure and public humiliation that followed his journey to Madrid has been cited as a major influence on Charles's subsequent development and policies as king. Until now, there has been no attempt to systematically explore the failure of the Spanish match from an interdisciplinary perspective, including what it reveals about the practice of diplomacy, the taste, art, and dress of the period, its literature and the long-term consequences for Anglo-Spanish relations. In this volume leading scholars from a variety of disciplines analyse the reactions and representations of Charles's romantic escapade and offer their insights into the affair. In doing so many traditional assumptions about the trip are overturned. By taking into account the political, social, religious and international dimensions of the event, and examining historical, literary and artistic evidence, this volume paints a rounded, lively and vivid portrait of one of the most remarkable episodes of the Jacobean age.

Chapter 1

Buying the Renaissance: Prince Charles’s Art Purchases in Madrid, 1623

Jerry Brotton, Queen Mary, University of London

The impact of Prince Charles’s visit on the political and diplomatic world of late Jacobean politics has been debated at some length, both in this volume and elsewhere.¹ In this essay I want to consider the impact that Charles’s acquisition of art had on the cultural life of the period. It is one of the many fascinating aspects of the visit that it is impossible to separate art from politics, aesthetics from diplomacy and courtiers from connoisseurs at a time when visual culture (painting, sculpture and drawing) was often the modality through which politics was expressed. In what follows I want to complicate the established argument that Charles had very little understanding of art prior to his visit, and that his experience of the art collection of King Philip IV transformed his appreciation of painting.² The paintings, statues and drawings that Charles bought, commissioned and received in the form of gifts did have a significant impact upon the future of connoisseurship in later seventeenth-century England. However, many of the exchanges of art were circumscribed by the fluctuating state of diplomatic negotiations concerning the proposed marriage between Charles and the Infanta María. This was also a defining moment where Charles’s team of artistic advisers (Buckingham, Balthazar Gerbier, Endymion Porter and others) brokered a series of deals on the prince’s behalf that established a pattern for the future development of the royal collection. Ultimately, although the visit was an aesthetic success, it masked diplomatic disaster and a level of political ineptitude that would continue to define Charles’s foreign policy for the rest of his reign.

Before exploring Charles’s acquisitions in Madrid, it is necessary to consider the status of English collecting prior to the visit. Nearly three years earlier, from the winter of 1620 and spring 1621, Charles was involved in trying to buy pictures by Rubens to adorn the newly designed Banqueting House, which, as Per Palme has argued, was designed in anticipation of an Anglo-Spanish marriage.³ Charles’s agent was the English Ambassador to The Hague, Sir Dudley Carleton, who carried out protracted negotiation with Rubens, ostensibly on behalf of Henry, Lord Danvers, Earl of Danby. The proposed picture represented a lion hunt, but it appears that it was a studio piece that Rubens barely touched. When the picture arrived in London in March, Danvers was unimpressed, and wrote to Carleton via his intermediary, Thomas Locke, who protested:

… the picture had bin shewed to men of skill, who said that it was forced and slighted, and that he [Rubens] had not shewed his greatest skill in it, and for that cause my Lord would have him make a better if he could and he should have this againe, and be pleased for the other what he would have this againe … for seeing the Prince hath none of Rewbens work but one peece of Judith & Holofernes, which Rewbens disavoweth, therefore he would have a good one or none, as for this he said he that he had not yet set it amongst the Princes pictures, neither would untill it were avowed from Rewben to be a master-peece.⁴

The letter offers a fascinating insight into the carefully organised world of Whitehall connoisseurship upon which Rubens had stumbled in his attempt to pass off a studio piece as his own hand. Once the derivative quality of the picture was obvious, Locke reveals that Danvers was acting as the middleman for Charles, and that a team of experts were on hand to judge the artistic merit of the picture (this probably included Inigo Jones, Arundel’s artistic adviser, and Balthazar Gerbier, Buckingham’s agent). In May Danvers wrote to Carleton informing him in no uncertain terms that, ‘the Prince will not admit the picture into his galerye’, adding that a better picture was required, adding rather dryly that ‘these Lions shall be safely sent him back for tamer beasts better made’.⁵

Realising his mistake, and that his client was in fact heir to the English throne, Rubens hastily wrote back, offering a ‘new picture to be entirely of my own hand’, adding that:

I shall be very glad that this picture be located in a place so eminent as the Gallery of H.R.H. The Prince of Wales, and I will do everything in my power to make it superior in design to that of Holofernes … I have almost finished a large picture entirely by my own hand, and in my opinion one of my best, representing a Hunt of Lions: the figures as large as life. It is an order of My Lord Ambassador Digby [Bristol] to be presented, as I am given to understand to the Marquis of Hamilton … As to His Majesty and H.R.H. The Prince of Wales, I shall always be very pleased to receive the honour of their commands, and with respect to the Hall in the New Palace, I confess myself to be, by a natural instinct, better fitted to execute works of the largest size rather than little curiosities.⁶

Rubens is prepared to sacrifice another commission for Hamilton, ordered by Digby, the future Lord Bristol, based on the possibility of a much larger commission in Whitehall. In one transaction, Charles is revealed to stand at the centre of the carefully constituted body of agents and nobles who would play a crucial part in the diplomatic and artistic negotiations in Madrid two years later, all vying for possession of original works by Rubens. As Rubens sees it, Charles is also responsible for presiding over an ambitious but unrealised architectural and artistic redesign of Whitehall, represented in the idealised architectural landscape that takes up such a large part of Hendrick van Steenwijk the Younger’s portrait, Charles I as Prince of Wales, c.1620 (Plate 1).

This particular transaction focussed on a specific group of connoisseurs – Arundel, Hamilton, Digby, Jones and Danvers. However, Charles’s Spanish travelling companion, Buckingham, was also involved in the pursuit of art. In the summer of 1621 he was financing his own private art dealer, Balthazar Gerbier, on a buying trip across Italy.⁷ Gerbier visited the palaces and collections of Rome and Venice, spending the money provided by Buckingham on Tintorettos, Guido Renis, Bassanos and Raphael copies.⁸ But his biggest coup was the acquisition of Titian’s Ecce Homo. Bought in Venice for a staggering £275, it was one of the first Titian paintings to enter a private English collection, and its purchase established Gerbier’s reputation back in London.⁹

The activities of both groups of collectors established a clear aesthetic precedent for what the English party would experience once they reached Spain. Charles also made one final, but often overlooked artistic investment prior to his departure for Madrid on 18 January. Sir Francis Crane, head of the Mortlake tapestry factory, claimed that ‘[t]he Prince gave me order to send to Genoa for certain drawings of Raphael of Urbino, which were designs for tapestries made for Pope Leo X and for which there is £300 to be paid, besides their charge for bringing home’.¹⁰ The ‘certain drawings’ were Raphael’s cartoons portraying the Acts of the Apostles. Pope Leo X had commissioned them from Raphael in Rome in 1515¹¹ and the result was a series of brilliantly illusionistic cartoons specifically designed for a huge cycle of ten tapestries depicting scenes from the lives of St Peter and Paul. The cartoons were a vivid restatement of the supreme authority of the papacy by making an explicit connection between Leo and St Peter as the founder of the Catholic Church in Rome. Copies of the tapestries were circulated throughout the courts of Europe, including the Gonzaga in Mantua, the Habsburgs in Spain and King Henry VIII in London, self-styled ‘Defender of the Faith’, prior to his split from Rome and the foundation of the Church of England.

Art historians have tended to ignore Charles’s interest in the Raphael cartoons, but they were one of his earliest and finest investments. Cromwell was so impressed he removed them from the Commonwealth Sale after Charles’s execution in 1649 and reserved them for his own use. It might seem peculiar for an Anglican heir to the English throne to order a set of drawings portraying the righteousness of papal supremacy, but Charles was also on the verge of travelling to Spain to marry the Infanta. He now seemed convinced that the marriage was the only way to solve his father’s financial worries and unify the religious divisions threatening to destroy England and the rest of Europe. Charles intended to use the cartoons to commission tapestries from the Mortlake tapestry factory. These would then adorn Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House at the marriage of Charles and the Infanta.¹²

Charles and Buckingham arrived in Madrid on 7 March 1623. Their highly choreographed entrance into the city the following Sunday 16 March was characterised by the calculated display of Catholic images and icons. According to one witness, ‘all the streets were adorned, in some places with rich hangings, in others with curious pictures’.¹³ King Philip’s royal palaces also held one of the largest and finest art collections in seventeenth-century Europe, holding approximately 2,000 paintings by Spanish and Italian artists, over 1,000 of which could be seen at El Escorial.¹⁴ It is one of the many ironies of the visit of Charles and Buckingham that both had spent the last four years scouring Europe for sixteenth-century Italian art and they now found themselves in the midst of one of the greatest imperial art collections in Europe.

As diplomatic negotiations began, Charles and Buckingham’s art agents also went to work. A week after Charles’s public entry, Buckingham’s representatives began to buy pictures. Sir Francis Cottington’s accounts of the trip record that Buckingham bought an unspecified number of pictures for 12,650 reales.¹⁵ At the prevailing exchange rate this was a substantial investment of nearly £350. As a result of Gerbier’s visit to Italy, Buckingham already owned paintings by Bassano, Tintoretto and Titian – all artists represented in the Spanish royal collection. In contrast Prince Charles’s small collection back in St James’s Palace was primarily composed of older, unfashionable northern European artists like Holbein, Hilliard, Miereveld and Van Somer, many originally owned by his dead brother Henry.¹⁶

Charles’s first artistic initiative was not concerned with pictures seen in Madrid, but with his outstanding order for the Raphael cartoons of the Acts of the Apostles. On 28 March he wrote to Sir Francis Crane authorising their purchase as a matter of urgency, even though their price had more than doubled to ‘near upon the point of seven hundred pounds’.¹⁷ Charles’s renewed interest in the cartoons needs to be seen in the context of the early stages of the diplomatic negotiations concerning his marriage to the Infanta. The marriage treaty was awaiting ratification from a papal dispensation, which the Spanish required to sanction a marriage between a Catholic princess and a Protestant prince. On 10 March, three days after their arrival in Madrid, Charles and Buckingham wrote to James to clarify the extent to which they could accept the Pope’s authority:

… the Pope will be very loath to grant a dispensation, which, if he will not do, then we would gladly have your direction how far we may engage you in the acknowledgement of the Pope’s special power; for we almost find, if you will be contented to acknowledge the Pope chief head under Christ, that the match will be made without him.¹⁸

King James’s response was significant for what it revealed about the theological dimension of the marriage negotiations. It also provided an insight into why Charles was so eager to acquire the Raphael cartoons. ‘I know not what ye mean by my acknowledging the Pope’s spiritual supremacy’ wrote James on 25 March, continuing:

… all I can guess at your meaning is that it may be ye have an allusion to a passage in my book against Bellarmine, where I offer, if the Pope would quit his godhead and usurping over kings, to acknowledge him for the chief bishop, to whom all appeals of churchmen ought to lie en dernier resort. The very words I send you here enclosed.¹⁹

It was a classic piece of Jacobean pedantry, the king quoting himself back to his son and favourite, but his enclosure provided a further insight into James’s attitude towards papal authority:

And for myself, if that were yet the question, I would with all my heart give my consent that the Bishop of Rome should have the first seat. I, being a western king, would go with the patriarch of the west. And for his temporal principality over the seignory of Rome, I do not quarrel it neither. Let him, in God’s name, be primus episcopus inter omnes episcopos et princeps episcoporum [first bishop among all bishops and chief of the bishops], so it be no other ways, but as S. Peter was princeps apostolurum [Chief of the apostles].²⁰

James was prepared to accept papal authority over spiritual matters, as long as this did not question his own secular authority over his subjects. As far as James was concerned, St Peter was first and foremost an Apostle, not the harbinger of the unity of church and state, which is what Pope Leo X had assumed when commissioning Raphael’s cartoons depicting Paul and Peter. James’s carefully argued distinctions sought to denude the pope of any religious or secular power, as James effectively retained his authority to make decisions over religious observance (a crucial issue in the negotiations over the Anglo-Spanish marriage).

The exchange of letters concerning papal authority and their evocation of the Apostles provides a clear context for Charles’s desire to buy the Raphael cartoons. Taking his cue from his f...