Mary and Philip

The marriage of Tudor England and Habsburg Spain

Alexander Samson

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781526142238
• eBook ISBN: 9781526142252
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The co-monarchy of Mary I and Philip II put England at the heart of early modern Europe. This positive reassessment of their joint reign counters a series of parochial, misogynist and anti-Catholic assumptions, correcting the many myths that have grown up around the marriage and explaining the reasons for its persistent marginalisation in the historiography of sixteenth-century England. Using new archival discoveries and original sources, the book argues for Mary as a great Catholic queen, while fleshing out Philip's important contributions as king of England. It demonstrates the many positive achievements of this dynastic union in everything from culture, music and art to cartography, commerce and exploration. An important corrective for anyone interested in the history of Tudor England and Habsburg Spain.

1

Prenuptial

Economic exchange

The longevity and significance of trade and economic relations between England and Spain leading up to the early modern period can be gauged from the large volume of treaties in the British Library’s Cottonian collection. Dating back to an agreement between Henry III and Castile in 1252 that preceded the marriage of Edward I and Eleanor of Castile, half-sister of Alfonso X ‘el Sabio’ (the Wise), the collection contains successive confirmations of English merchants’ privileges in Castile in 1351, 1362, 1366, 1391 and 1409, and in Aragón in 1374 and 1387. The volume culminates with the Treaty of Medina del Campo of 1484 and the commercial agreement reached by the Catholic Monarchs and Henry VII in 1489; preliminary to the ‘Tractatus matrimonii inter Arthurum principem Wallice et Catherinam filiam Ferdinandi regis Castiliae Ferdinandus et Helizabet’ of 1^st October 1497. Dynastic marriages bound shared economic interests with ties of blood and kinship, from Eleanor of England and Alfonso VIII in 1170 to Edward I and Eleanor of Castile in 1254 to Arthur and Catherine of Aragón in 1501. In February 1496, the year the Spanish Infanta Juana married Philip the Handsome, a major treaty for commerce, the ‘Intercursus Magnus’, had been concluded between England and the Netherlands, closing the circle of shared commercial interests. All three trade agreements were renewed under the treaties with which the volume closes; the ‘Amicitia inter Henricum et Phillippum’ of 1505 and ‘Tractatus inter Henricum Septimum Regem Angliae et Phillipum regem Castilae’ of the following year.¹ English merchants had possessed equal terms of trade with Castilian subjects since Edward IV’s alliance with Castile in 1467, which had also extended the protection of subject status to Castilians in England. A treaty of 1482 with Guipúzcoa made depredation subject to compensation; a provision prefiguring Medina del Campo, which attempted to make international trade agreements binding with pre-agreed sanctions for breaking their terms. Medina del Campo stated that individual infractions were not to undermine the treaty itself (clause 14) and that letters of marque were only to be issued if redress from the relevant sovereign was refused (clause 15). Henry VII established a guild in the precincts of Blackfriars, specifically for ‘strangers corvyours’ from Spain or the Low Countries, ‘The Fellowship of the Blessed Trinity’. When Henry VIII passed an act in 1513 against alien cordwainers buying uncurried leather, within a year ‘The Fellowship’, with whom Charles V stayed during his visit to England in 1522, managed to procure an act excepting those born in the realms of the emperor and prince of Castile.²

Mercantile exchange between England and the Iberian peninsula had cultural and technological, as well as economic aspects. The Henrician court poet John Rastell, adapter of Fernando de Rojas’ La Celestina (1499),³ was a friend of the most prominent English merchants trading out of Seville: the brothers Robert and Nicholas Thorne, and Roger Barlow, who had accompanied Sebastian Cabot on the first voyage to the River Plate in 1526,⁴ and included his experiences in the first English translation of a Spanish navigational treatise, Martín Fernández Encisco’s Suma de Geographia (1519), dedicated to Henry VIII around 1541.⁵ Barlow’s approach to the king aimed to secure backing for an expedition to find the Northwest Passage to the Spice Islands, the Moluccas; a dream that Martin Frobisher followed in his three voyages in 1576, 1583 and 1585. English merchants enjoyed privileges in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, along with official protection from the dukes of Medina Sidonia, for most of the sixteenth century.⁶ Men like Thomas Malliard, Robert Thorne, Barlow and Thomas Bridges were all well established in Seville by the early 1520s, enriched by their involvement in sugar refining, the Indies trade, local viticulture and soap manufacturing. After Malliard’s death in 1522 his Spanish mistress Beatriz challenged his will, which left the bulk of the estate to a brother living in England. By claiming to be his wife, she persuaded a court to replace his executor, Roger Barlow, with Pedro López de Herrera, whose kinsman Sancho de Herrera was supposed to have married Malliard and Beatriz’s daughter, Ana. Pedro and Sancho were members of a local family that owned the four smaller Canary Islands. To meet a legal requirement and be allowed to participate in the Indies trade Roger Barlow had worked with a Spanish merchant, Luis Fernández, in exports to Santo Domingo, while he and Robert Thorne used another man, Juan de Marcia, trading soap, wine, tallow and flour with the colonies. English involvement in the Atlantic slave trade dated back to at least 1490, but it was their share in the soap factory of Triana that was probably central to the financial success of this group.⁷ Robert Thorne’s will, like Malliard’s, sought to bypass a Spanish mistress, Ana García and their son Vicente, by leaving her £50 on condition that she renounced their claim to the rest.⁸

The Low Countries were Spain and England’s biggest wool export market and Spanish merchants often returned to the Iberian peninsula through London, Southampton or Bristol with English cloth, wheat and cereals.⁹ The greatest threat to this trade was French and Scottish privateering. A petition by Antwerp merchants on 7^th September 1551 estimated that their losses to pirates during the previous eight to ten years stood at 1.6 million Holland pounds.¹⁰ Piracy was an occupational hazard; however, its intensity and victims often followed the fault lines of underlying political tensions. By 1534, the Reformation in England had begun to have a measurable impact on commercial relations. John Mason, later secretary to the older Sir Thomas Wyatt and then William Paget, noted in a letter from Valladolid to Thomas Starkey at Padua:

ii marchawnts browght hyther off lat a follyshe booke agaynst the Pope and wer taken therewith, and thers goodds all confiskyd, and theyr bodyes in dawnger off buraning, if we had not made for them great frinds and intreatance.¹¹

He described the people as ‘tractable inowgh’. In 1539, the merchant Thomas Pery did public penance along with four other English merchants (John Robyns, Harry Hollande, Robert Asorgante[?] and William Alcat) in Triana (site of the soap factory), after a visit from a priest who had spotted a church bell amid a recently-arrived cargo from England in the warehouse he used in Ayamonte on the banks of Guadiana. Interrogated in Seville by the magistrate, Pero Díaz, Pery countered the accusation that he and his king were not good Christians asserting ‘hys grace hym selfe dowthe dayly here masse and praise gode within hyse owyn chapill… and confissyth hym self and recevyth hys makr yerly acording to the laws and costom of awr holly mother churche’: pressed further over whether he thought it good that Henry ‘is pope within his ryme’, the merchant reasoned ‘many other docters which be taking for gret lernyde men and they do declare that all that hys grace hathe downe he maye do hit be the atoryte of holly scryptuore’.¹² The merchant’s naivety, attempting to exculpate himself by engaging in theological debate, led him to be tortured. Central to the Spanish attitude to Henry’s actions was the notion that he was a ‘tyrant’ acting from his own ‘will’ rather than conscience. By this point Henry VIII had reversed the theological experiments of the previous six years with his restatement of his church’s doctrinal orthodoxy in the Act of Six Articles.

Earlier in the 1530s, in the context of the Boleyn marriage, the imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys had counselled Charles V against mistreating English merchants in Spain and the Low Countries: ‘for they will be instrumental in maintaining and fostering the goodwill and affection of the people to Your Majesty’.¹³ He argued against prohibiting England’s trade with Spain or the Low Countries: such a confiscation of English merchants’ goods would be counterproductive, whereas a papal interdict against Henry would turn the Council and people against the Boleyns. Spanish merchants and artisans in London were uniquely exempted from the assessment of a contribution towards the costs of Anne Boleyn’s coronation and from swearing the oath of obedience to the Succession Act which made it law.¹⁴ The deterioration of Anglo-Habsburg commercial relations after the Boleyn marriage was halted by a treaty in June 1542, which renewed the exemption of English merchants from a prohibition on the export of goods from Spain in foreign ships when Spanish vessels were available; an exemption originally granted at the time of Henry’s betrothal to Catherine. It had been suspended by Mary of Hungary in retaliation against Henry VIII’s Navigation Act of 1540, which had made rates for aliens and subjects the same only if they transported goods on English ships.¹⁵ Nevertheless new duties and depredations continued to spark conflict. Deteriorating Anglo-Spanish trading relations culminated in the despoliation of the ship San Salvador returning from Santo Domingo laden with silver, gold, pearls and sugar by Robert Reneger in 1545. In retaliation Philip seized English merchants’ goods in Andalusia, breaking the terms of Medina del Campo that insisted on prior arbitration (clause 12), a provision that had been reiterated only a year or so earlier by Charles V and Henry VIII in an agreement signed in February 1543.¹⁶ This agreement was explicitly renewed by the marital alliance of Philip and Mary in 1554. The treaties between the Low Countries and England of 1543 and 1546 served as templates for the commercial aspects of the later marital alliance.¹⁷ One of the most important aspects of these agreements was the establishment of direct travel between England and Spain by sea, without the need to travel overland through France.¹⁸

The Reneger incident is revealing about the importance of Anglo-Spanish commerce and good political relations to both sides. A letter from the customs house in Seville (Casa de la Contratación) to Philip, echoing Chapuys’ earlier appeal, outlined their opposition to any confiscation of English goods:

if they embargo goods, the English will not come to trade as they are accustomed to because it was they who principally bought the greater part of the wines and oils from these towns and if they do not do it great damage will ensue not only for the royal revenues but also for the subjects and people of these regions who live and survive from their harvests so if your majesty were well served you might order the suspension of the embargo.¹⁹

Since the English were the biggest buyers in the region, reprisals were damaging ultimately to Spain’s own interests. By the 1560s 40,000 of the 60,000 butts of wine produced in the Sanlúcar region were being exported to England and the Nethe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of plates
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Prenuptial
• 2 Contracting matrimony
• 3 Wyatt and the queen’s regal power
• 4 A marriage made in Heaven?
• 5 Royal entry: London, 18 August 1554
• 6 Anti-Spanish sentiment in early modern England
• 7 Spanish Tudor/English Habsburg
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• Plates