H-Diplo Article Review 549 on “A Kingdom for a Catholic? Pope Clement VIII, King James VI/I, and the English Succession in International Diplomacy (1592-1605).”

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H-Diplo H-Diplo Article Review 549 on “A Kingdom for a Catholic? Pope Clement VIII, King James VI/I, and the English Succession in International Diplomacy (1592-1605).”

Discussion published by George Fujii on Tuesday, September 15, 2015

H-Diplo Article Reviews No. 549 Published on 15 September 2015

H-Diplo Article Review Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse Web and Production Editor: George Fujii Commissioned for H-Diplo by Thomas Maddux

Christian Schneider. “A Kingdom for a Catholic? Pope Clement VIII, King James VI/I, and the English Succession in International Diplomacy (1592-1605).” The International History Review 37:1 (2015): 119-141. DOI: 10.1080/07075332.2013.852121. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2013.852121

URL: http://tiny.cc/AR549

Introduction by Charles Keenan, Northwestern University

In this article the author examines the papacy’s response to the accession of King James I of England in 1603. As the author rightly points out, most studies on this topic have been conducted from a British point of view and using British sources. Here Schneider wants to call our attention to events on the continent, and accordingly turns to the diplomatic correspondence of Spain, the papacy, and France to examine how Pope Clement VIII (r. 1592-1605) viewed the question of the English succession both before and immediately after Queen Elizabeth I’s death in 1603.

Schneider suggests that historians’ previous reliance on British sources has distorted our picture of Clement and his policy toward England, depicting the Pope as passively – perhaps out of delusion – hoping for James’s conversion to Catholicism. Instead, the author argues that “the Pontiff followed a flexible policy which aimed at more than merely restoring the Catholic Church in England. Trying to prevent James VI from acceding to the English throne and, after his accession, to safeguard him from any potential attempts at dethronement, only constituted a change of tactics in a much wider papal strategy of saving the Catholic faith in Europe” (120-121). Schneider underlines the papacy’s view of itself as a ‘supranational’ institution, and, similar to historians like Thomas M. McCoog, the author insists that religious issues in England were entangled with those on the continent, especially in [1] France and the Low Countries.

Citation: George Fujii. H-Diplo Article Review 549 on “A Kingdom for a Catholic? Pope Clement VIII, King James VI/I, and the English Succession in International Diplomacy (1592-1605).”. H-Diplo. 09-15-2015. https://networks.h-net.org/node/GROUP_NID/discussions/82075/h-diplo-article-review-549-%E2%80%9C-kingdom-catholic-pope-clemen t-viii Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Diplo

The body of the article traces the pressures placed on Clement VIII to select and support a candidate for the English throne beginning in the 1590s, as well as the Pope’s reluctance to move too quickly. Contrary to earlier treatments of this topic, Schneider’s article insists that Clement “did not blindly believe in the conversion of James” and was instead cautious in his approach both towards the succession and to James’s faith (128). Drawing on a variety of diplomatic sources, the author describes Spanish efforts to place one of their own on the English throne, favoring the Infanta, Isabella Clara Eugenia, and the Duke of Parma, Ranuccio Farnese, at various points. The author suggests that Clement VIII was driven by a desire to further the interests of his own family, the Aldobrandini, and that this explains why Ranuccio Farnese was seen as an ideal candidate in Rome for a time, since Ranuccio was married to Clement’s grandneice, Margherita Aldobrandini (125).

Schneider also describes Clement VIII’s desire that Philip III of Spain and Henry IV of France work together in agreeing to a single candidate for the English throne, linking this desire to Clement’s larger goal of making peace in Europe at the turn of the seventeenth century, as seen in the papal mediation of the Peace of Vervins (1598) and the Peace of Lyons (1601). The Pope did not want to break the fragile peace between France and Spain, nor did he want to encourage unrest against the new King James after his accession in 1603. This, Schneider suggests, helps explain the papacy’s general caution in addressing the English succession, and why the Pope did not favor military action against England. This article concludes that Clement VIII was a realist, one who weighed many different political concerns and constraints when formulating policy.

The reader should be wary of certain minor issues with this article. The papal nuncio in Flanders, Ottavio Mirto Frangipani, is incorrectly called “Giovanni” (121), and one might draw more attention to the two systems of dating in use at the time, such that Elizabeth’s death on “24 March 1603” is given according to the Julian calendar, not the Gregorian one that would have been employed by Catholic diplomats on the continent.

The larger issue, in my opinion, is how the author approaches diplomatic correspondence as evidence. While Schneider calls attention to how Clement VIII worked for the good of his own family, we do not see that same complexity in the author’s treatment of the diplomats in this article, whose dispatches seem to be presented as neutral and reliable reports. For example, Schneider states that in July 1600, “Frangipani transmitted the opinion of the English refugees that the Pope should ensure them a Catholic sovereign; if the Pontiff united England, Scotland, and Ireland under one crown, he would force Spain and France to make an enduring peace due to their fear of the power of this monarch” (121). It could be that the Nuncio did, in fact, relay information to Rome directly from the English refugees in the Low Countries, but could it not also be the case that Frangipani put his own words in their mouths? Or that he altered their words in some significant way, for his own motives?

His uncle, Fabio Mirto Frangipani, was also a papal diplomat and had a reputation for deviating from instructions that were given to him, leading some historians to describe Fabio as an “independent- [2] minded nuncio.” I would suggest that Ottavio, like his uncle, was equally likely to deviate from his orders, and there is some evidence that the Roman curia was not always satisfied with Frangipani’s conduct. Pietro Aldobrandini dismissed the Nuncio as old and in ill health in one dispatch, and the Cardinal-nephew was also unhappy when he learned Frangipani had elected, on his own initiative, to send an informant to England in 1603, especially because Aldobrandini only discovered this after the [3] fact from the Nuncio in France, Innocenzo Del Bufalo. Thus, although Schneider succeeds in showing the complexity and subtlety of Clement VIII’s thought, he does not add any depth to the character or motivations of the ambassadors around whom this article focuses – Frangipani, Del Bufalo, the Duke of Sessa, and Maximilien and Philippe de Béthune. More skepticism might lead us to reconsider their reports and add still more nuance to this story.

Still, the author has helped open the conversation and pushed us to reconsider how we approach British history. Anyone interested in Anglo-papal relations or the history of early modern diplomacy will find much to consider in this article.

Charles Keenan completed his Ph.D. at Northwestern University in 2015, with a dissertation entitled “The Lesser Evil: Papal Diplomacy and the Politics of Toleration in Early Modern Europe.” He will be an inaugural fellow at the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College for the 2015-2016 academic year. He published a book chapter entitled, “Polish Religious Toleration and Its Opponents: The Catholic Church and the Warsaw Confederation of 1573,” inPolish Culture in the Renaissance: Studies in the Arts, Humanism and Political Thought, eds. Danilo Facca and Valentina Lepri (Firenze University Press, 2013), 37-51, and contributed seventeen entries toThe Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Jesuits. An article, “Paolo Sarpi, Caesar Baronius, and the Political Possibilities of Ecclesiastical History,” is forthcoming with the journal Church History.

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Notes

[1] Thomas M. McCoog, The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England 1541-1588: “Our Way

Of Proceeding?” (Leiden: Brill, 1996); idem, The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England, 1589-1597: Building the Faith of Saint Peter upon the King of Spain’s Monarchy (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012).

[2] F. Lynn Martin and A. Lynn Martin, “Fabio Mirto Frangipani and Papal Policy in France: The Case of an Independent-Minded Nuncio,” Archivum Historiae Pontificiae 17 (1979): 197-240.

[3] Aldobrandini to Del Bufalo, Rome, 25 August and 17 November 1603: in Correspondance du nonce en France: Innocenzo del Bufalo, évêque de Camerino (1601-1604), ed. Bernard Barbiche [Acta Nuntiaturae Gallicae IV] (Rome: Presses de l’Université Gregorienne, 1964), 545, 598.