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Not Just the Tudors
Philip II of Spain, King of England
00:42:44
Was Philip's role as King of England merely ceremonial, or did he wield real power?
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- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad Free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit with a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own recent two part series A World Torn, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward/subscribe.
- [00:32]
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- [01:02]
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- [01:22]
Dr. Gonzalo Valesco Berenga
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- [01:34]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Your shoulders, take a deep breath in.
- [01:40]
Dr. Gonzalo Valesco Berenga
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- [02:08]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the tune Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. If you have a ruler of rulers at home, I'd like you to take it out and look at it now. Now, if it's the same as the one I've got here, it will say for the 16th century Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI. Then it might mention Jane Grey. Mine does not Mary the first Elizabeth I. And what it almost certainly won't say is Philip, but Philip of Spain, husband to Mary I, was King of England from 1554 to 1558. In this episode, first released in October 2021, my guest argues that we should not see Philip's kingship as in any way nominal or ceremonial, nor should we see him as a kind of king consort, but that we need to rehabilitate him as a committed joint monarch with Mary. In short, he calls for a total reconceptualization of our idea of Tudor history. Dr. Gonzalo Valesco Berenga is lecturer in Global Medieval and Early Modern History at the University of Bristol. He's the author of Habsburg Politics and Religion in the Reign of Philip I, 1554-1558, published by Brill. I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and this is not just the Tudors from history hit. Gonzalo, it's an absolute pleasure to see you and to chat with you. Can you introduce us to Philip I of Spain and tell us about his life until the year that he married Mary I?
- [04:16]
Dr. Gonzalo Valesco Berenga
Yes. Philip of Spain is the son of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, and of Isabel of Portugal. And he was born in 1527 in Valladolid. He is the eldest son and eventually only surviving son. So he's the heir to Charles V. He received a very good humanist education at the hands of Juan Martin, Cilicio and other humanists of the time in Spain. He was not the best of students, but he was still someone who loved books. And he had incredible collections, you know, massive library. He learned Spanish and Portuguese, his mom's native tongue, and he could defend himself in French and could understand Latin. And then during his marriage to Mary, he did get some English. He was a very serious person. He was very devout, and he had a profound sense of what his own destiny as king was. He was very aware of the role he had to play as heir of his father. And he had a very strong working ethic. So he's a man who sat for hours at his desk, transacting all sorts of business. He read all the memoranda that his secretaries prepared, even to the tiniest details, like when he becomes king. There's even annotations on the sort of materials used to construct his palace in Aleskoria. So he's someone who's very, very aware and very meticulous about detail. So he's sometimes been called the bureaucratic king, but there's also the period when he's young, a lot of dancing around. He's a Renaissance prince. He likes tournaments. He's very much the humanist prince of the 16th century. So up to his marriage to Mary, he's been married. When he was 16, he marries his first cousin, Maria of Portugal. She dies Two years later giving birth to his first son, Carlos. That is his life. He's been regent of Spain since 1543. So he's already someone who has a political background. He's in touch with how power works. He knows how to be a ruler when he gets to marry mary I in 1554.
- [06:15]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And it's interesting because judgments on him by historians sort of classically in the 19th and 20th centuries have not been that favourable to him. What do you make of their judgments?
- [06:29]
Dr. Gonzalo Valesco Berenga
I think in general there was a strong push against Philip. It has to do with the construction of Protestant narratives. And it's not just in England, it happens in the Low Countries as well. And also detached from the Protestant element, you can see it in some of the Italian states that Philip was King of. And there's this idea that he was a gloomy ogre, someone who enjoyed executing people and always dressed in black. Dressing in black, which the Spanish court did back then, did not have the connotations that it might have had later. It was a sign of being able to afford good materials. This idea, especially in the English speaking historiography, there's been a narrative that says Philip as everything that is anti English, basically. And that stems a lot from the events of the 1580s, the Anglo Spanish War, the Spanish Armada, etc. And I think that a lot of these assessments of Philip forget the events of Philip as King of England are 30 years before the events of the Armada. At the same time he is married to Mary. And Mary has had a really bad press in English speaking historiographies. She's the mythical Bloody Mary intent on burning as many Protestants as she can. And I think that that has had a great effect in the way that historians have viewed the brief marriage with Philip of Spain. Froud said that Mary suffered from hysterical derangement and she was mad and therefore she was controlled by Stephen Gardner, by Poole. So that makes her. She's at the same time a cruel persecutor and she's also a woman with no agency because she's almost a puppet of the men around her. You need to pick one or the other. You can't be a cruel persecutor and at the same time a puppet. So all these things at play here and I guess that that's why a lot of historians like Owen Chadwick and others have said that the marriage to Philip was the greatest mistake that Mary ever made.
- [08:16]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Interestingly though, you argue that Philip's reign in England actually has been pretty widely ignored or it's been really minimized. Why do you think that is?
- [08:30]
Dr. Gonzalo Valesco Berenga
I think it stems from, on the one hand, there's this understanding which I think is understanding that he was not liked by the English, that he was rejected from the beginning, and therefore that there was a very strong effort to deprive him of any potential power that he might have had in England. That's one. And the other, I think, stems from the historiography of Mary is characterized a lot by opposition. So before she was in opposition to her sister, Queen Elizabeth, as in, look at all of Mary's failures and how they compare to all of Elizabeth's achievements. And then when there's been an effort to bring more balance to the study of Mary's figure, it's been at the expense of Philip. So if Mary was successful or successful in some aspects of her reign, that was because Philip was not allowed to have power, because otherwise he would have made England Spanish and that would have been rejected by people. And I think that there is a big misunderstanding here which stems from the title that historians have applied to Philip, which is that of king consort, when, if you look at the documentation of the time, that concept does not exist. It's never something that is contemplated. Philip is a king by marriage, but a king of England. He's not there to be a ceremonial partner to the queen. He's there to be a king as well.
- [09:42]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That's really interesting and does explain part of the problem here. And I suppose also might it be about a question of sources and how sources have been used to talk about Philip's reign?
- [09:54]
Dr. Gonzalo Valesco Berenga
I think that is part of the problem. I think that sometimes there's an emphasis on documents that might be court gossip as conveyed by ambassadors. And there's also a certain problem, I would say, with some translations in the calendars and in other collections of edited volumes of primary sources. At the beginning of when I was doing my doctoral studies, I had been thinking a lot about this quotation that historians insert in biographies of Mary, which is that once Mary's dead, Philip sends a letter to one of his sisters in which he says that upon hearing the news of her death, he felt a reasonable regret. And that has been repeated and repeated and repeated, and it's come to be a metaphor of the reign, almost like Mary faces the opposition of her counselors, of her people, to marry this man. She faces a rebellion, yet he's callous, he abandons her, and then when she finally dies, he says that he felt a reasonable regret. And I just kept thinking, I don't quite see what the original Spanish would be. So I went to the archive of Simancas and I found the letter. And that's not what the letter actually says. Royal Tyler, who was the editor of the Calendar, mistook a couple of Verves and constructions. And what he says is that he felt it as much as it was to be expected. And I think that's a very different take from I felt a reasonable regret, which definitely sounds much more callous. So I think that if we start digging into this document and looking at the reign in its own terms, rather than what we think it was, judging from later events, you know, the Anglo Spanish War, etcetera, I think that's when we get to really understand what the marriage was about.
- [11:34]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, that's a very different translation because as much as could be expected could allow for really capacious understanding of grief, you know, huge amounts of grief. I mean, of course there'll be detractors who will say that you could do something else with that as well. But a reasonable, to use, not intended pun, reasonable reading of that sentence would be actually a great deal. So that's really interesting and is exactly what we found indeed in places elsewhere, looking at some of the 19th century translations. Okay, so let's go back to the beginning, as it were. Why did the couple marry in the first place?
- [12:14]
Dr. Gonzalo Valesco Berenga
Again, this is something that has been read backwards almost, and it's seen as Mary being hot headed and just wanting to do this, even though it will alienate her counselors, her population of England. And I think if we look at 1554, it makes perfect sense. England and Spain have been allies for the better part of the 16th century. There's a moment of tension when Henry VIII divorces Catherine of Aragon. But that's a very tiny amount of time in the first half of the 16th century. And as soon as Catherine is dead, Henry VIII and Charles V become allies again. So England and Spain are steadfast allies for most of the 16th century. And when Edward VI dies and Mary becomes Queen, there's two parts which come into play. One of them is the importance of the Low Countries. So Philip of Spain, as the son of Charles V, is the heir to the Low Countries. So what is the modern Netherlands and modern Belgium? And not only do the Low Countries have a strong alliance and commercial links with England, but they also have them with Castile. So again, it's this triangle which since the 15th century, they've had a very, very strong alliance. It's almost like all the pieces are getting together to allow for that alliance to become stronger. And of course there's the part that Mary is half Spanish, so she's always had an inclination towards her Spanish family. So that's also there. But the importance of the Low Countries should never be minimized because that is the main point really of the marriage. And the other part, I think, which is very significant is the way in which Spanish monarchs conceive their power. And that is the concept of monarch universalis. Now, monarch universalis means universal monarchy. And it's even though the Holy Roman Emperor is supposed to be the ruler of the whole world in Spain, there is also because of the struggle that Christian kingdoms had against Islamic polities in Spain, there's also a sense that Spain possesses its own imperial power. And when Charles V, king of Spain, becomes Holy Roman Emperor, that idea that the king of Spain is going to become the ruler of the whole world becomes more apparent to some, not to everyone, but to a lot of people. And I think that's the way in which, from the Spanish point of view, the marriage with Mary is conceived in those terms. It's a way of integrated England into the composite monarchy of the Spanish kings.
- [14:48]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Now, you've mentioned that one idea that comes up in some of the history books is that the English disliked foreigners. And you also mentioned the fact that there's the so called Wyatt Rebellion that is used as evidence of how deeply the English were opposed to this match with a Spanish king. Do you think that's what's really going on?
- [15:10]
Dr. Gonzalo Valesco Berenga
The English dislike foreigners and that definitely happens. And there's plenty of evidence that once the Spanish arrive, you know, there's lots of fights, there's murders, there's robberies. Some of the Spanish courtiers say that the English are the roughest people that we've ever seen. And they say things like, if you're in Flanders, you're at war with the French because Spain was at war with France at the time. Here we're at war with pretended friends because they're not our actual friends. So there's a lot of that going on. But at the same time, all of those episodes of violence that have been used to portray this almost ubiquitous dislike for the foreigner, you also see that some of these people who are robbing and murdering are Spaniards and Englishmen working together. So you think maybe it's not so much about a xenophobic dislike, but just with Philip come to England, a lot of rich foreigners, so it's a good opportunity for wrongdoers to be naughty, to steal, to fight. There's a lot of soldiers, so there's going to be drunkenness. So sometimes it has been overplayed. And with regards to Wyatt's rebellion, we call it the wild rebellion because Thomas Wyatt was the rebel that managed to get to London. And it was quite a frightening situation, but it was actually a fourfold rebellion. The Duke of Suffolk was supposed to take forward the rebellion in Leicestershire, and Croft was supposed to rebel to get Herfordshire up in arms. Peter Carew was supposed to get the area of Devon to revolt. But none of those rebellions has any degree of success other than Wyatt's. And the rebels always claim that they are against a foreign king because they think that the laws and customs of England are going to be altered, even though the marriage treaty had already put things in place to curtail this or to tell Philip, you cannot give offices of the realm to people who are not native of England. But still they want to get people to rebel against this idea of foreigners coming in. Now, that has been the prevailing narrative of the rebellion, and that's been the most successful narrative until very recently. But now what I studied was I went into the religious affiliations of all these rebels, and I found that there was not a single Catholic among them. All of them are Protestants. All of them have either benefited from being prominent protestants during Edward VI's reign or have been promoters of Protestantism. So the idea is that with the marriage of Philip and Mary, it's the end of the hopes to either bully Mary into keeping the supreme headship of the church or rebelling against her and trying to get a Protestant. It's like the last opportunity to get a Protestant regime to stay in England. And I think that's what they recognize, and that's why it's very clear that the marriage is going ahead. That's when they have to rebel. So the implications are, yes, the xenophobia, but that's very, very much linked to an anti Catholic sentiment, which a lot of historians have tried to separate from the rebellion, but which I think once you get into who these men were who were rebelling, it's very clear that it's as much an anti Spanish as it is an anti Catholic rebellion.
- [18:19]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That's fascinating. So it doesn't give us a picture of what an ordinary English man or woman felt about the match. It tells us what a specific group of Protestants felt about it. And I suppose, actually, if you think about the numbers involved in the rebellion, that's also quite telling, isn't is?
- [18:38]
Dr. Gonzalo Valesco Berenga
It's telling us what a particular group of fortisans thought about their marriage. And Not a very numerous one, judging by the numbers that they managed to raise. I mentioned that there's three rebellions that are supposed to be going on at the same time. They all fail. One of them is led by the Duke of Suffolk, the father of Lady Jane Grey, who had been Queen of England briefly before Mary came to the throne. He's a great lord, he's a great magnet, and he only manages to raise 140 horsemen, which is not a bad number. But if you're trying to build a big rebellion, that's not much. Wyatt, who is a leader of the rebellion in Kent, which is the one that has more success, he raises 3,000 men, or around 3,000. Some people take it up to 4,000, but it's something in between. And if you compare it with other rebellions of the Tudor period, such as the Pilgrimage of Grace, which was in 1536, or the Praeru Rebellion in 1549, or the Northern Rebellion in 1569, the numbers are much bigger. So the Pilgrimage of Grace against Henry VIII was 30 to 40,000 people. The Praerburg Rebellion had something around 6,000. The Northern Rebellion was 5,400. So 3,000. Significantly smaller than those figures which were rebellions which were in favor of Catholicism or at least a more conservative form of religion. So it's not the determining factor. Like, I don't think we can assess how the entire population felt about the marriage, but it definitely is telling. We're talking about Kent and London, which are the hotbeds of Protestantism at the time, and they only managed to raise 3,000 rebels. Not determining, but definitely a significant number to take into account.
- [20:18]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you said you think we should jettison the term king consort. So if we think about the marriage treaty that was set up between them, what instead should we think about? The terms agree, then the terms, they.
- [20:32]
Dr. Gonzalo Valesco Berenga
Agree initially, you could say that they are to Philip's disadvantage in a way. They don't give him any English patrimony, so he's going to have to fund everything from his own pockets, basically. He's not going to have access for patronage directly from the English treasury. Once Mary dies, he loses all rights to the throne. So he won't inherit the throne from Mary, if you like. There's also a provision in the treaty that says that he will try to keep peace between England and France. That's something that has always been interpreted as he will not get England into the war of the Habsburgs with France. But that's not what the treaty says. It says that in any possible measure, he will try to avoid drawing England into war. So there are some things that try to limit his power. But at the same time, the treaty very clearly says that he will aid in the government of England. So he's not just a ceremonial figure in the English constitutional system. He's someone who's going to aid in the government very specifically. And also I think that there's another aspect, which is that Mary is described as being included into the society of Philip's patrimonial inheritance. So she becomes part of that. So we're talking about a society between Philip and Mary. And I think that first the king concert. The title doesn't exist. It's not something that anyone contemplates. And you see English ambassadors like Nicholas Wootton, who is the ambassador in France, he's writing to an Englishman in London, and he says, when the king arrives, you'll have to explain how we're going to behave from now on. He says, novus rex novalex. When there's a new king, there is a new law. So even the English political figures understand the marriage as a very different thing. This is not just a man who comes to be a ceremonial concert to the queen. He is a king as much as Mary is. It's much more helpful to picture it from the point of view of the example provided by Ferdinand and Isabel, king and queen of Spain, who were Mary's grandparents and Philip's great grandparents. Ferdinand was king of Aragon. Isabella was Castile. They had reigned together. And I think that is a much more helpful and valuable point of departure to understand Philip and Mary's reign than to say, you know, compare it to Queen Anne of Great Britain and George of Denmark, or Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, in which those queen's husbands were prince consorts. They were people who were there to support in the ceremonial roles. But Philip is very much a king of England. He appears in coinage if you go to the House of Lords. He even has his own portrait between Mary and Elizabeth in the T gallery of portraits. So there's all these indications that Philip was not a king consort. He was actually king of England for the four years that he was married to Queen Mary.
- [23:39]
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- [24:09]
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- [25:38]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So this is really a joint monarchy is the way we should think about it. But what does that mean for, I guess, how we think about Mary? I mean, one of the things that's often said about Elizabeth I is that because she's a woman, she will have to submit to the power of her husband. How does that change how we think about Mary's power, given that she does become a wife and they think that wives need to submit at this time?
- [26:01]
Dr. Gonzalo Valesco Berenga
Yeah, I guess those patriarchal values are there when the marriage is negotiated and then affected. And Mary does write a letter in which she says that she will be obedient to her husband, but that she will not permit any encroachment. Basically, she's saying, I will not admit any breaking of the marriage treaty. She's still very much the Queen of England, so it's about them being partners. And I think that again, it's useful to think about Ferdinand and Isabel because Isabelle is also a queen in her own right. But she shows independence. She reigns with her husband and not under the control of her husband. And also, it's convenient to remember that the Habsburgs and the Spanish monarchy in general is very unlike the English crown. They are very used to female power, not only through Isabel, but also Charles of it has his aunt be the governor of the Low Countries. And when his aunt Margaret of Austria dies, it's his sister Mary, Dowager Queen of Hungary. Philip leaves his two sisters as regents of Spain. So they're very used to this idea that women of the royal family are there to govern with the male members of the family. So I think that's also useful to remember. And third, I think that we should remember that Mary never stops being the queen and that Philip is away from England for long parts of time. So when he's away, it is Mary who is the one who is in England and who's dealing with councillors and who's dealing with policymaking, who's dealing with religious policies. The thing is also that they had a good political relationship and they tended to be in agreement most of the time. There's only one aspect of the reign in which they clashed and in which Mary said, right, that's it, I'm not hearing any more of it. And that was the marriage of Elizabeth. Philip II wanted to marry Elizabeth off to his cousin, the Duke of Savoy, and Mary refused. Elizabeth refused, but Mary could have had the power to force her into the marriage, but she refuses to do so. And that's the only disagreement between Philip and Mary that was not solved in one way or the other. Well, it was solved because Mary decided not to marrying Elizabeth.
- [28:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I think there might be something to be considered or studied about the difference of culture, a sort of Spanish environment in which women are used to having power. The French, where there's a law to stop women gaining power, and the English, where there's this shift over the century from seeing it as an impossibility to becoming something that actually could happen. But I suppose to ask the question the other way around, you gave a very good answer and very full answer. But does that mean in practice, if Mary can ultimately say no to something in the kind of partnership of the joint monarchy they've got going on, do we see any evidence of Philip wielding power, or does he treat his role in England as something essentially ceremonial?
- [28:54]
Dr. Gonzalo Valesco Berenga
No, he definitely wields power in England. And from the very beginning, he is. There's been accusations by previous historiographical trends that he is disinterested, he is reluctant to be in England, that as soon as he can, he leaves and he shows himself to the people of England. You know, he rides around London, sometimes with Mary, sometimes without Mary. He participates openly in tournaments. So he's fulfilling that ceremonial role of a king. He's the Master of the Order of the Garter, so he's the one in charge of the order during his time as King of England. But he also has practical power, so he is the one who brokers the issue of church property. So a lot of noblemen or prominent people in England purchased a lot of church property from the Crown during the dissolution of the monasteries. And when it's clear that Philip and Mary are going to reconcile with Rome, the English nobles are very anxious about this, because even the ones who are the most Catholic of them all, they still want to keep the lands and the houses that they have purchased. And Philip is the one who brokers with the papacy, those possessions will remain in English hands. He also brokers the reconciliation with Rome and to the point that in the opening of Parliament in 1554, it is Philip who delivers the opening address, in which he calls all the representatives of the realm to give obedience to the Holy See and to ask for absolution for having been in religious schism for so long. We don't know exactly whether he delivered the address himself in Latin, and then it was delivered in English by Stephen Gardiner. We know that Stephen Gardiner, Lord Chancellor and Bishop of Winchester, is the one who speaks for Philip, but we don't know exactly how it happened. We just know that the opening address to Parliament in November 1554 was delivered by Philip. If that is not being a true king of England, I don't know what is.
- [30:46]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Absolutely. And what about the fact that Philip was not crowned? Does that matter?
- [30:51]
Dr. Gonzalo Valesco Berenga
Well, I think it does matter in the sense that it mattered to the English. So coronations are the ceremony through which kings and queens are acknowledged to be God's anointed. But at the same time, England already has an anointed queen who is Mary. And a lot has been made of the lack of a coronation. But if you look into the contemporary documents, that anxiety comes more from foreign ambassadors than it does from either Philip or his Spanish counselors. And I think the explanation for that is that in the Spanish kingdoms, they didn't have the sacralized ceremonies of coronation of the English and French French monarchies. It's more of a proclamation. It's a proclamation in a martial atmosphere. So the king is proclaimed and the people basically give a cent to that proclaimed king, rather than having a ritualized ceremony. And I think that's part of it. You can see that in Simon Renard, who is the Imperial Ambassador in England. He's very anxious about it and he writes letters to Charles V saying, oh, we really need to make sure that he's crowned. And Charles Van himself says, well, I'm sure that would give greater authority to Philip. But he's almost saying, it's a nice to have. If we don't have a coronation, it's not the end of the world. And Philip seems to have been in the same position in 1556. He even cancels Mary not to bring up the topic in Parliament unless she's completely sure that she's going to be able to carry the bill, because he thinks that otherwise it's going to result in a loss of reputation. And he already feels confident enough that he doesn't need to be crowned in order to continue his role as King of England effectively.
- [32:31]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So maybe let's have a chat about what we have in terms of visual evidence about the couple. Can we learn anything from the way that Mary and Philip are depicted together?
- [32:43]
Dr. Gonzalo Valesco Berenga
Yeah, we definitely can. Initially, when the couple are first married, there are a lot of stratagems devised to show that Philip is inferior in England with regards to Mary. So Philip is placed on wedding ceremony, court ceremonies as well. He's placed on the left hand side. Now this is very interesting because the left hand side is usually reserved for Queen's consort. So in a sense you can see that they're trying to, in line with that idea that he was a King consort to put him on the place previously reserved for Queen's concert, traditionally. So on the left hand side of the monarch, at times, Mary is sat on a chair which is higher than Philip's chair. This happens at the beginning of the marriage. As soon as Philip gets more comfortable in his role as King of England, that changes immediately. And in the parliamentary sessions of November 1554, Philip is already on the right hand side of Mary. So already he is occupying again the place of the proprietary King, even before he becomes King of Spain in 1556. If you look at portraits, he also tends to appear on the right. There's this beautiful illuminations in King's Bench in the National Archives where the COVID of the King's Bench rose. They always depict the English monarch sat on a throne with the sword of justice and the scepter of authority. And you see that at the beginning of the reign, Philippi sat on the left hand side. But as the reign progresses, there is a shift in the first depictions. They each have A crown. And later on they have crowns that hover over them. And at one point in around 1555, 1556, Philip starts to be depicted on the right hand side. So again, both in his physical position, in court ceremonies and in visual presentations, he's occupying his place as English monarch on the right hand side. But at the same time, they are depicted as joint monarchs because he tends to hold the sword of justice, which has more of a relation to the dispenser of justice, the one who wields the sword against the enemies of the people. And Mary holds the scepter of authority. So sometimes they are depicted both holding the orb. So that shows that they have joined dominion.
- [35:02]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That's fascinating because it does suggest that in the dissemination of information about them from the kind of central bureaucracy of the English government at the time, there's obviously a decision made to shift Philip into that primary place in accordance with his gender. And very much that contradicts this consort idea that we have. And that's really fascinating stuff.
- [35:43]
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Dr. Gonzalo Valesco Berenga
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- [36:53]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
The other question is, apart from how they're depicted, what do we know about the nature of their relationship?
- [37:00]
Dr. Gonzalo Valesco Berenga
We don't know much. And we don't know much because he married four times and with all his wives. Whenever one of his wives died, he burnt the correspondence. All of it. And when mary dies in 1558, he asks the Count of Fedia, who is one of his closest friends, and he's there to represent him. He asks him to burn all of his correspondence with Mary. So of all four wives of Philip, we only have two existing letters addressed to him, and those two are from Mary. They're in draft form, so we don't know much about how they write to each other, but we do know from the existing evidence that there was a great deal of respect. Philip always is very respectful towards her in the way that he refers to her. He always refers to her as aunt. And he refers to her as aunt because she is his father's cousin. And in the Spanish family naming system, you don't have first cousins once removed, which is what she would be to him by generation. So for him, Mary was his second aunt, if you see what I mean, because she was his father's cousin. So he always talks about her as my lady wife and aunt. So it's a very respectful way of referring to her.
- [38:14]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Is that not all problematic that he refers to his wife as his aunt?
- [38:18]
Dr. Gonzalo Valesco Berenga
That's what she was. It's like his parents were first cousins, and that was a very common occurrence back then. So I think that it's a bit strange for us, but I think that back then was not estranged for royal families. So what do we know from contemporaries about how they refer to each other? So we know that the first encounter is just before the marriage, and we know that he speaks in Spanish and she replies in French, because Mary has lost her Spanish through not practicing, basically, as we know, it happens with languages. And Philip understands French and he can more or less talk in it, but he's not comfortable. So because she understands Spanish, he understands French, those are the languages they talk to each other in. And we know that there's a very curious anecdote of when he's saying goodbye and he asks Mary how to say goodnight in English. And so she tells him, and he says it to the English noblemen and noble ladies gathered in the room. And we know that Mary was very taken by Philip ever since she saw the portrait. She was quite looking forward to meeting him. And once they get married, everyone says that she's very happy with him, but they also say that Philip is happy with her. And one of Philip's best friends, Rigo Methe Silva, who's very, very close to the King, he talks about how he finds Mary very unattractive. And he's something that he keeps making a point of. So he keeps saying that she's very old, that she's very thin, you know, he makes remarks which are not very nice. He even says at one point that Mary is a difficult couple to swallow, as in, she's not very attractive. But at the same time, it does say that Philip and Mary are quite happy together, that the King entertains her very well. He says those are her words, and that at one point he says them being alone, she uttered love words to him and he corresponded in like fashion. So we can see that Philip is definitely being respectful to her. Did they have a loving relationship? We don't know, but there's no way of knowing because there's no written evidence. All we know is they have quite similar characters. They were both very devout, they were both people who had a very strong working ethic, because they both stay up working at their desks until the early hours of the morning sometimes. And this is something that both Mary and Philip will do. And of course they have this Spanish element in common. And also at this stage when they get married, she's 37, he's 26, they love dancing, they've both received a humanist education. Even if Rigo Mate Silva made disparaging and not very charitable comments about her, there is no evidence that Philip and Mary did not have a good personal relationship.
- [41:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Now, whilst he is in England, one of the things you've looked at is his Select Counsel, and your research has well disproved the charge that Philip was uninterested in English affairs. Could you tell us what you found?
- [41:15]
Dr. Gonzalo Valesco Berenga
Yes, of course. The Select Council is, I think, one of the most interesting aspects of Philip's reign as King of England. It's very interesting because it's something that first historians have ignored or have not really paid that much attention to, and also because it really is a constitutional invasion. Those are the words of Glyn Redworth, who first identified that this might be an important aspect to look into. It's a constitutional innovation in England, which is based on the Spanish experience. The Select Council is a small council of advices that Philip creates in the summer of 1555, just before he goes to Brussels. So the first time he leaves England. And the president is Cardinal Reginald Poole. And then it has a mixture of noblemen, prominent councillors and then a couple of administrators. So someone who is good with finance and a secretary. So it's very similar. It's modelled after the Council of State in Castile. It has more or less the same membership. He asks them to confer together and to send him updates on business in England. And then Philip replies with his decisions, with his views, how to change things. So that is the nature of the Select Council. Now, historians have seen it as something that didn't really work separately from the Privy Council and wasn't really a functional council. It was just sustained to satisfy Philip's ego. Asking of England. If you look at the documents, you see that the ratio of Communications between the king and the select councillors is around once a month. We need to take into account how long communications take. And also that England is just one of the many kingdoms that Philip has to think about. And it's not only about the amount of business they transact, but it's also the contents of it. So they talk about things which either the Privy Council does not discuss, or when they discuss it, it's weeks after the Select Council has received a letter from Philip. So it is very much an advisory board which is writing to Philip separately from the Privy Council. And they look at things which are very different. So sometimes Philip will intervene in private requests. So we have the case of two Irishmen who write directly to Philip as king of England and Ireland. So there's two Irishmen who write to Philip, who's in Brussels, so that they can be restored lands that had been taken from them. And he writes specifically to the Select Council about this. So you can see that he's exerting patronage as a proper king of England and Ireland. Also, there's an episode in which the English merchants want to do trade in Mina, which is Portuguese enclave in West African coastal. Philip disallows it. And the English merchants are very upset about this, and they ask the Select Council to intercede with Philip. And the Select Council writes to Philip and says, why not? They're ready. They have all the goods they want to sell. We don't have Philip's reply to that. But the Select Council ends up disallowing the trade. And that is because Philip is aligning England within the Spanish monarchy with the treaties that he has with Portugal. And the treaty that he has with Portugal, which is the Treaty of tardesillas of 1494, stipulates that trade in the respective parts of the world which are allocated to the Spanish and the Portuguese monarchy, can only be developed by natives of the kingdom. So what Philip is doing there is telling the Select Council, English traders cannot trade in Mina because that is a Portuguese territory, not a Spanish territory. So you can really see how the notions of the Spanish monarchy are at play here. So the Select Council, definitely. And it works until the end of the reign. Like, the last communication that the Select Council sends to Philip is from the 6th of November of 1558, and Mary died on the 17th. So it's very much there at the end of the reign.
- [45:08]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So let's try and recap what it is that will set the record straight, particularly when it comes to Philip as we think about him.
- [45:15]
Dr. Gonzalo Valesco Berenga
I think the first thing we need to do is stop seeing it as an anomaly, almost a glitch in English history. I think we need to avoid that, because the more logical direction was the direction that Mary was taking. It was to continue the friendship with Spain, to go back to Catholicism, which was still very popular throughout England. And that's something that the record shows quite clearly. The success of the Elizabethan Reformation is still in the future. So to think that Philip and Mary's regime was an anomaly, that it was, you know, a glitch, is to read events backwards. That's one thing. That's in general, in terms of the marriage, I think in terms of understanding Philip's figure is to try to detach the received knowledge of the Armada, Philip as the gloomy ogre of Protestant imagery, and instead see Philip as the most powerful monarch in the early modern period and someone who was not a king consort of England, but very much an English king. So he's the king of England, the king of Ireland, and he behaves as such. And the union of the crowns was not seen as just a nice alliance, or it's seen as a union of the crowns. So the idea was that in one way or the other, the Spanish and the English crowns would remain united in some form. So if they had had a child, it would have been through that child's inheritance of England and the Low Countries. If Philip's son Carlos had died, it would have been as part of the Spanish Empire. But it wasn't seen as just a normal alliance between two kingdoms. It is seen as a proper union of the crowns. And Philip is not a king consort. He is a king of England. And I think that is the way that we should be looking at the reign from now on.
- [47:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That's wonderful. So, Philip, King of England, let us remember him as part of our lineup of monarchs and put him back in that proper place as someone who did wield power, who did care about English affairs, and who was pictured on coins and in all sorts of materials as Mary's joint monarch. Gonfalo, thank you so much for giving up your time and sharing with us your important and groundbreaking research. Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tudors and to my researcher, Alice Smith and my producer, Rob Weinberg. And do join me, Professor Susannah Lipscomb, next time for another episode of Not Just the Tudors from History. Hit.
- [47:51]
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