Exile, Diplomacy and Texts: Exchanges between Iberia and the British Isles, 1500–1767 ed. by Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and Berta Cano-Echevarría (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Exile, Diplomacy and Texts: Exchanges between Iberia and the British Isles, 1500–1767 ed. by Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and Berta Cano-Echevarría Andrew Hiscock Exile, Diplomacy and Texts: Exchanges between Iberia and the British Isles, 1500–1767. Ed. by Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and Berta Cano-Echevarría. (Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture, 74) Leiden: Brill. 2021 232 pp. €105; $126. ISBN 978–90–04–27365–8. This 74th instalment in Brill's Intersections series is endlessly fascinating from start to finish. It constitutes yet another valuable contribution to early modern studies designed to urge Anglophone audiences to look more ambitiously among the documentary evidence from continental Europe to gain a richer understanding of the island nations during the Tudor and Stuart centuries. The editors' Introduction establishes the critical mood for the whole volume iii both signalling received thinking concerning sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Anglo-Spanish relations and then proceeding to complicate, to nuance, and finally to unsettle long-standing assumptions. The volume's quarry remains matters religious, political, and diplomatic in the chosen period and recruits not only British and Spanish lines of vision on the subject, but also notably those of Irish and Portuguese witness. One of the key emphases of the volume is to challenge lazy critical formulations of 'the Other' when approaching this area of study, and this ambition is amply fulfilled in the discussions which follow. Glyn Redworth draws upon sketches of Antoon Van Den Wijngaerde in the first chapter to re-evaluate the presence of Tudor military forces at the 1557 siege of Saint Quentin (as well the capture of the fortress town of Ham). Mary Tudor would send a force of 4000 foot soldiers, 1000 cavalry, and 1500 military engineers and sappers to support her husband Philip II's war against France. Red-worth demonstrates that Anglophone assessments of this engagement have been [End Page 581] repeatedly governed by expectations of reluctance and marginality (and by critical neglect), concluding persuasively that 'to assume that negative comments must outweigh all praise is to normalise an already tainted view of this war' (p. 17). In all, the Spanish-led force would number as many as 50,000 men (or more) and Redworth draws innovatively on engravings of Wijngaerde's sketches circulating shortly after the Saint Quentin victory to explore new perspectives on the profile and engagement of Mary's forces. In the next discussion, Susanna Oliveira considers Portuguese diplomatic relations with the Tudor realm, most particularly in the context of Thomas Wilson's mission to England's oldest ally in 1567. The name of Thomas Wilson may be best known to those engaged in early modern studies in the context of his published discussion of rhetorical practice. However, here Oliveira unveils a polyglot diplomat who would be the first envoy that Elizabeth sent to Portugal after a series of ambassadorial missions from the Iberian nation in the 1560s: of all the languages at his disposal, however, Wilson did not speak Portuguese and recourse was made to Latin, Spanish, and Italian during this mission, as the occasion required. Oliveira convincingly urges readers to nuance their readings of relations between the two European states, drawing attention to rifts and setbacks in exchanges concerning trade disagreements, wavering political allegiances, and indeed piracy: 'England […] maintained an ambiguous policy, declaring the prohibition of the English trade in the territories under Portuguese rule, while simultaneously issuing Letters Patent as in the case of Captain William Winter' (p. 40). Oliveira indicates intriguingly that the English were the largest foreign community in sixteenth-century Portugal (mostly owing to commercial interests there, but also to the presence of Catholic exiles). More generally, Oliveira underlines the need to revisit this rich field of enquiry most especially when trade contacts were maintained while Portugal ceased its diplomatic representation in England from 1581 (establishment of the Iberian Union and Philip II's recognition as Philip I of Portugal) until 1641. Thomas O'Connor offers yet another innovative insight into Anglo-Spanish relations in this period with his account of Irish captives in the British and Spanish Mediterranean 1580–1760. Clearly, the corpus of materials relating to...