Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (31 page)

Much has been made of Philip’s apparently growing reluctance to make the journey to England, after seeing the terms of the treaty and perhaps shaken by the events of Wyatt’s revolt. The evidence in Simancas suggests that another explanation is equally credible. Philip initially insisted that the marriage be concluded “per verba de praesenti” before he set sail. However, when his father (or one of his representatives) asked him to ratify the “capitulación” (a term used in Ferdinand and Isabel’s agreement), with two powers, one carrying out the espousal “de presente” [in the present] and the other “de futuro” [in the future], Philip duly agreed. Although he was informed that “it seems they are still set on this last” (i.e., the future), Mary “confidently assures us that it will be done in secret according to our wish, and we hold it to be certain.”
²⁸
In his reply of January 21 Philip duly ratified the espousal and playfully signed himself “yo el rey.” On February 16 he was “determined not to wait for anyone” and (not as the 
Calendar of State Papers
 has it: “trust myself to them as if I were an Englishman born”) but to:

be served by and trust them and do them favours as if I were natural born, in which they can see the confidence that I place in them and go and place myself in that kingdom and their power with no more company than I have said and my people are the principal cause that moves me not to take a greater household because it will be ruled and accommodate itself so much better to the customs of the natives which we must hold for our own.29

A day later the duke of Alba wrote to Francisco de Eraso, Charles’ principal secretary: “Few stir themselves to accompany his highness on this business and I believe that besides his household you can count them on the fingers of one hand.”
³⁰
He then worried about whether to take the duchess with him. In the end, she did accompany him, despite an initial suggestion not to allow women to travel to England. Their eventual inclusion in the train suggests that the Spanish were not as fearful as is sometimes suggested.

The delay in Philip’s departure is explained more credibly in relation to the monotonous repetition of demands for one million ducats by Mary of Hungary, who was then effectively in charge of imperial government, following Charles’ total mental collapse in the autumn. In September, Francisco Duarte reported that the Emperor spent “frequently periods of time crying so bitterly and with such shedding of tears as if he were a small child” and “he will not listen to or dispatch business, occupying himself instead night and day in adjusting and setting his clocks, which are numerous, and which are the most important thing to him now.”
³¹
In one letter Mary of Hungary repeated her demand eight times for the money to be sent immediately. Philip’s departure also involved extracting his recently widowed sister, who had just given birth to her first child, from the very country whose Infanta he had just spurned, in order for her to act as his regent in the Spanish kingdoms in his absence.

The interpretation of the famous 
ad cautelam
 document as an expression of Philip’s belief that the marriage arrangements were a betrayal fails to appreciate its legalistic framing and context.
³²
Although the contract had exclusively been negotiated by Charles’ ambassadors, probably under instruction from Mary of Hungary, its concessions were entirely unsurprising. The attempt to unburden his conscience from any future breach of the treaty’s terms, by attributing his agreement to obedience to his father, was a highly paradoxical and contradictory gesture. On the one hand, it enshrined respect for the legal basis of the treaty, marriage contract and its terms, and on the other rejected it in another secretly witnessed legal document. This is the Spanish equivalent of the “Act for the Queen’s Regal Power,” whose purpose was to restrain the queen’s allegedly unlimited power (or shore up the uncertain authority of a queen regnant) within a statute law that named only kings by granting her kingly authority.33

Philip’s success in conforming to native customs on his arrival in England, in accordance with his intention to consider English ways his own, was reflected by the assertion of his English servants that “he is English.” As the Spanish observer noted, “The English spread abroad their great happiness at having seen and worked with the king and accordingly they say that he is English and not Spanish.”
³⁴
The utopian sensibility feeding Habsburg dynastic politics was both vindicated and exposed by this appropriation of Philip as “Ingles y no español.” Their universalist aspirations and vision of unlimited empire depended in part on the possibility of such negotiations of national particularities. However, the dark underside of this internationalist ideology was the de facto tension between his two households, which produced a struggle for control and possession of his person. The definition of Philip’s identity as king of England externalized problems implicit in the conceptualization of the treaty.

The difficulties the treaty gestured toward resolving, inherent in the inconvenience of a “diversity of nations,” were played out as a symbolic household drama, with stabbings taking place within the confines of the court itself. The resulting deaths and seriousness of the situation led Philip to set up a special commission headed by Sir Thomas Holcrofte and Briviesca de Muñatones to investigate incidents and impose the death penalty should there be any further recurrences.
³⁵
The discontented amongst Philip’s followers over the English servants “waiting for us at Southampton who did not wish to let us serve” had provoked “enormous confusion.”
³⁶
In spite of the assertion that “with the intercession” of Philip it was being assuaged such that “all would be contented,” the solution discriminated between his “Spanish” and English households.
³⁷
By relegating the latter for the most part to service exclusively in the outer chambers, he had underlined the hierarchy of trust and confidence that favored his “Spanish” intimates over 
outsiders
 who, in not possessing the same access to and intimacy with him, could not claim to represent him as fully. Philip’s solutions might have been divisive, moving Azevedo from Lord Chamberlain to Master of the Horse, but it is difficult to see what other compromise was possible. Azevedo made way for men like James Basset, originally secretary to Stephen Gardiner, to become Mary’s private secretary and Chief Gentleman of Philip’s privy chamber. Similarly, Bishop Day fulfilled the role of Almoner in both Philip and Mary’s households.38

Whether or not Philip eventually played a significant role in the government of England has produced radically divergent opinions. Some assert that he obtained “actual power...to determine the course of events within the realm and with respect to foreign policy,”
³⁹
while others claim that he “was baffled at every turn in his search for an effective role in English government” and that as “king of England there is no doubt that Philip was a failure.”
⁴⁰
Still others have argued that, by marrying, Mary “announced herself as subject in both her persons—as woman and as queen—to the authority of male superiors: her husband and king, Philip II of Spain; and the head of the universal church and vicar of Christ, the Pope.”
⁴¹
Her ability to ignore her husband’s advice and wishes when it suited her, for example, in religious policy or England’s war with France, suggests that the negotiation of their co-monarchy involved a conscious manipulation of gender expectations by a seasoned and politically aware Mary whose independence had been fostered by the isolation suffered under her father’s and brother’s regimes. As she had told Renard as early as October 1553, “If he wished to encroach in the government of the kingdom, she would be unable to permit it.”
⁴²
It is well known that, before Philip’s arrival, Mary ordered that he be apprised of all relevant business
⁴³
and that he should attend privy council meetings on Tuesdays and Fridays.
⁴⁴
The alleged Habsburg Select Council was an illusion created by Petre’s dispatches of business to him. On August 13, 1554, the duke of Alba wrote to the imperial secretary Eraso from Richmond to report that “Business as far as I understand will not be dealt with in any other language than our own and that is what is happening.” He concluded by saying that the king was “very well and most beloved by all the people here; pray God it may continue.”
⁴⁵
John Guy has written that the Philip of this period was a Renaissance prince, not the Counter-Reformation fundamentalist of legend. The evidence presented here supports this vision of a pragmatic and tolerant ruler, sensitive to the problems presented by cultural difference. Mary, if anything, was the more intransigent and less pragmatic of the two.46

Although Philip’s attempts to blend distinctive cultural forms such as the joust and Spanish 
juego de cañas
 together might have been a failure, giving rise to slighting comments about its unmanliness, in other ways there was a successful synthesis. Defending Habsburg dominions provided significant opportunities for the English nobility to test their mettle in a way that they were later to feel nostalgia for. Many soldiers continued to fight for Philip on the continent long into Elizabeth’s reign.
⁴⁷

The duke of Alba encouraged Philip to appoint his own choice as Lord Chancellor after the death of Gardiner and the king vetoed appointments contrary to the stipulations of the marriage contract.
⁴⁸
Alba observed in April 1555 that Philip’s

way of negotiating and dispatching business is very good: may Your Majesty, for the love of God, want to be lord of that kingdom, nothing is lacking for you to become it, the most absolute that it has ever had, that loving it and showing them that is it and that it must be so, because that is what they all want apart from that handful of ill-favoured contradictors of your will.
⁴⁹

In spite of the distrust of Philip’s intentions and the rumors disseminated by anti-Marian propagandists, his attitude in a letter to his father written on November 16, 1554 was far from Machiavellian: “I am anxious to show the whole world by my actions that I am not trying to acquire other peoples’ states, and your Majesty I would convince of this not by my actions only, but by my very thoughts.”
⁵⁰
Philip’s behavior in England as king exemplified that of the ideal courtier and the trope of courtesy surfaces constantly in the accounts. One of his biographers described how Philip “won them [the English] over with his wisdom, affability, honours and favour...with these things and the courtesy of his family.”
⁵¹
This reception did not weaken over time. On April 13, 1557 he wrote to his father about the goodwill he found on his return there: “I arrived here well and thus have I found the Queen thanks be to God, and I have begun to despatch the business that corresponds to me and I find such good will in all those in this kingdom that they do not differ from anything that I desire.”
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Two weeks later he continued in a similar vein: “the Queen and I are well, and the business here all goes very well.”
⁵³
If there was implacable opposition to his authority or if his attempts to govern were ineffectual, it does not show in the accounts he wrote to his father.

IV

In his 1619 history of Philip, Luis de Cabrera y Córdoba reflected a feature shared by contemporary and later Spanish accounts of the co-monarchy: a detailed understanding of the precise nature of its terms and what it enshrined in relation to Philip’s power, a grudging understanding that foreigners were “intolerable to any nation” and could “tyrannise,” despite their necessity in the face of a queen regnant because “it was unhappy and dangerous for a kingdom to come into gynaecocracy against natural law.”
⁵⁴
Cabrera y Córdoba knew that “Philip and Mary are equal and of one quality: but the queen solely and alone enjoys supreme authority over those kingdoms, without the Prince being able to enjoy it by means of the courtesy of England.”
⁵⁵
This recognition of the exact status Philip had enjoyed in English law, even half a century after Mary’s death, reflects the nuanced political understanding in Spain—one that is hard to believe Philip did not share.

While expressions of anti-Spanish sentiment in the Elizabethan period generally focused on the “insufferable lust,” pride, arrogance, and cruelty of the Spanish, the anonymous but surprisingly popular and cryptic 1594 poem 
Willobie His Avisa
 contained an allegorical commentary on Philip’s courtship of Elizabeth even before the death of Mary in 1558. The poem viewed Philip in contradistinction to Spanish-style seduction. The heroine Avisa (a mask for Elizabeth if we accept that the poem refers to 1558), at first a “modest maide” then “chast and constant wife,” is the subject of five attempted seductions. Her second suitor—the significantly named Caveilero—argues that she cannot “fare so well at home” for although a “stranger” he can offer “great store of wealth.” She spurns his advances, telling him to spend his cash on his “queanes” for “Your wannie cheekes, your shaggy lockes, / Would rather move my mind to grudge, / To feare the piles, or else the pockes.”
⁵⁶
In the preface, the pseudonymous Hadrian Dorrell asserts that the author of the poem had “out of Cornelius Agrippa, drawen the several dispositions of the Italian, the Spanyard, the Frenchman, the German, and the English man, and how they were affected in love,” the Spaniard being, according to Agrippa, “unpatient in burning love, very mad with troubled lasciviousnesse, he runneth furiously, and with pittyful complaintes, bewailing his fervent desire, doth call upon his Lady, and worshippeth her, but having obtained his purpose maketh her common to all men.”
⁵⁷
The figure Caveilero, taken to represent Philip, however, does not exemplify these qualities; rather they are embodied in her final suitor, an Italo-Spaniard, while Caveilero is courteous, calculating, and even forlorn, despite Avisa’s accusations about his wenching. Alternative views of Philip to those peddled initially by anti-Marian propagandists and later under Elizabeth by the anti-Spanish party went on surfacing into James’ reign.
⁵⁸
Two years later, in 1596, Sir John Harrington referred to Philip in his 
Apology
 as “a beggerly, thridbare Kavalliero, like Lazorelloes maister.”
⁵⁹
The wealth that Philip had brought to England in 1554, like so much else, had dissipated in the face of constantly having “new warres in hand,” as Avisa says to him in her opening lines.60