The Spanish Match 1

Dear Colleagues,

Inspired by José’s post from earlier this week, I wanted to share a few ideas that I have been turning over in my head since our meeting last August. What follows is, in part, a response to the readings from José, but also a proposal for how I think London could fit into the overall picture.  I would greatly appreciate any feedback you may have to offer.

I plan to focus my work for our project around Prince Charles’ trip to Spain in 1623. This trip is of particular interest to my research on early modern news culture because, more than any other single event, it galvanized the popular interest necessary to maintain the regularized weekly production of periodical texts such as corantos and newsbooks. In addition, the story of the Prince’s trip to Spain (and the story of the story) is a very interesting and instructive conversion narrative.

Charles went to Spain in hopes of marrying the Infanta Maria, sister of Felipe IV, a match that would—in theory—create grounds for a peaceful resolution to the religious conflict underlying the Thirty Years’ War. From the outset of negotiations, however, the Spanish court insisted that the marriage would be impossible unless the Prince converted to Catholicism. In England, the prospect of (yet another) royal conversion, and the national consequences it might bring to bear, was the focus of a great deal of interest and anxiety. On this note, it is important to keep in mind that, in the short time between 1530 and 1560, England had swung from Catholicism to Protestantism, back to Catholicism, and then back to Protestantism again, leaving the country in a state of heightened religious sensitivity by the end of the sixteenth century.

This brings me to cities as theatres of conversion.  Breezing over a great deal of important historical detail, the point that I want to get to is that the story of the Prince’s trip to Spain (also known as the ‘Spanish Match’) played out—not only in texts—but across a civic landscape.  The following are a few key examples to note in this regard.

1. Bells and Bonfires. Charles’ homecoming elicited widespread jubilation across England. The bells at Cambridge rang for three days straight, and hundreds of celebratory bonfires burned throughout London… I have been thinking about bells in relation to civic theatricality ever since Iain noted the importance of non-elite forms of music during our group discussion. Bells are particularly important in this regard because they speak to an entire city. In the case of the Spanish Match, they helped to tell a story: ‘Charles is back’. They also helped to make an expression of communally felt emotion manifest: ‘We are happy he did not marry the Infanta’. (I note with interest that bells also come up in two of the texts that José asked us to read: Arguedas and Jouve Martin). On a similar note, a bonfire chain is a non-textual narrative form that summons the attention of the population in general. Like bells, it speaks to the entire city, and the story it tells plays out across a civic landscape. There is, of course, a long tradition in England of using bonfires for various ceremonial purposes and to transmit messages quickly across vast distances. I have noted a few articles below for those who may want to look into this issue more closely.

2. Civic pageantry. The Spanish Match prompted a good deal of civic pageantry along the same lines as the performances described by De Motolinía and Jouve Martin. These spectacles took place primarily in Madrid, but also in London. Much of what we now know about the Madrid pageantry comes from corantos written by the extraordinary Spanish journalist, Andreas Almansa y Mendoza. Inexpensive translations of his reports were among the bestselling books on the English print market in 1623… In the same year, the Drapers Guild of London produced a Lord Mayor’s show on the Thames entitled The Triumphs of the Golden Fleece. Written by the dramatist Anthony Munday, the show depicted “Prince” Jason’s triumphant return from Colchos after resisting the “rare arte of Medea the Enchantresse” (a thinly veiled allusion to Charles’ return from the Spanish court).

3. Middleton’s ‘A Game at Chess’.  In August of 1624, The King’s Men produced a play that portrayed the Prince’s trip to Spain as a chess match, with white pieces representing England and black pieces representing Spain. This play—A Game at Chess—was the biggest theatrical success story of the era, much more popular, by far, than anything Shakespeare or Jonson ever wrote. During the course of a nine-day run, it attracted some thirty thousand spectators, or a seventh of London’s adult population. For perspective on these figures, consider that the average rate of attendance for all of London’s theatres combined was somewhere around 2,500 visits per week.  Resisting the urge to go on about A Game at Chess in further detail, I want to point out that—like bells, bonfires, and civic pageantry—the play spoke to London at large. Contemporary documentation suggests the crowd at the Globe operated something like a friendly riot, a collective expression of enthusiasm that escalated in a spontaneous, organic fashion, growing in size and intensity as it attracted more and more people who simply wanted to share in the excitement. At a certain point, it seems that a significant, if not primary, source of attraction became the crowd itself—Game-the-event superseded the significance of Game-the-play. Consider, for example, the report from the Spanish ambassador, Don Carlos Coloma: “there were more than 3000 persons there on the day that the audience was smallest. There was such merriment, hubbub and applause that even if I had been many leagues away it would not have been possible for me not to have taken notice of it.” Coloma’s emphasis on the size and noise of the crowd recurs throughout contemporary records. Three other documents note the extraordinary number of people in attendance, and two mention the applause, which Coloma says was audible from “many leagues” away. “Many leagues” is obviously a rough estimate, and probably an exaggeration as well, but even if the noise carried over a radius of a single ‘league’ (which usually referred to a distance of approximately three miles), people would have heard it throughout most of London. Game-the-play spoke to an audience of thousands, but Game-the-event spoke to an entire city.

In closing, I want to share some thoughts about London in general that will hopefully push us toward a finer-grained articulation of our object of study. First, like Cuzco, Tlaxcalla, and Lima, the civic landscape of 17^th century London was coming to grips with a massive recoding that played out in conjunction with a process of religious and cultural conversion. The key distinction, of course, is that England was the subject of a state-imposed conversion (the Reformation), rather than a conversion imposed by colonization. Nevertheless, there are some important similarities to attend to. As José Maria Arguedas very brilliantly suggests in Deep Rivers, the converted city is always a palimpsest, not a tabula rasa, and the vestiges of the pre-converted city maintain a dialectical relation to the city in its post-conversion form.

For a concrete example, consider the massive project of physical restructuring that occurred in the decade following the Reformation. By official order, Reformers tore down altarpieces, removed statuary, and generally cleaned out all evidence of Catholic iconography. On a similar note, the ossuaries housing a significant element of London’s psychic population (thousands of deceased relatives consigned to purgatory) suddenly became obsolete, and were unceremoniously evacuated overnight.  As Peter Marshall pointed out to me in August, however, the specific objective of these actions was not so much to erase the Catholic symbolic structure, but to efface it—to destroy it in a way that left a lasting record of the destruction. For example, if you go to the Church of the Holy Trinity in Stratford-Upon-Avon today, you can still see spots where the faces of angels and demons have been scratched off of the pews and mason work. By effacing rather than completely erasing, Reformers intended to project the same sort of message communicated by a corpse hanging on the London Bridge: ‘Error!’  I wonder, however, if the effaced remnants might have continued to speak to the city in ways that the Reformers did not anticipate—not unlike the Inca stones in Cuzco.

Okay, that’s all for now! Thank-you again for any feedback you may have to offer.

I’m reluctant to put anything more on the reading list before everyone has had a chance to digest the items for José, but the following may be of interest to some of you:

Cressy, David. Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989. [On bonfires and bells].

Ettinghausen, Henry. “The Greatest News Since the Resurrection? Andres de Almansa y

Mendoza’s Coverage of Prince Charles’ Spanish Trip.” The Spanish Match: Prince Charles’s Journey to Madrid, 1623. Ed. Samson, Alexander. London: Ashgate Publications, 2006. 75-90. [On Mendoza’s coverage of the Spanish Match].

-Woolf, Daniel. “News, history and the construction of the present in early modern England.” The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe. Eds. Brendan M. Dooley and Sabrina A. Baron. London: Routledge, 2001. 80-118. [On bonfires, bells, and various other means for transmitting news in early modern England].