ABSTRACT
Despite the centuries-long historical, political, and commercial ties between Spain and England, their relationship in the last decades of Philip II’s reign had become increasingly contentious.1 By contrast, Spain and France’s relations, continuously disruptive, stabilized through the marriages in 1615 of Philip III’s children, Ana Mauricia of Austria and Philip IV, to Henri IV’s children, Louis XIII and Isabel of Borbón. These marital unions not only affected international politics, but also had a lasting effect upon the culture of the two countries. As several essays in this collection point out, the move by the Spanish Infanta to France and by Isabel of Borbón to Spain enriched the theatrical repertoires of both countries through the exchange of artists, musicians, playwrights, and actors.2 Anglo-Spanish dealings instead deteriorated, impelled by England’s support of the Dutch rebels, its privateering in the New World, Spain’s series of armadas-the most notorious, in 1588-and the various plots against James I. Both countries became bogged down in conflicts by proxy after James I’s coronation, and the aftermath of the dramatic and controversial “Spanish match”—the ill-fated attempt to establish closer ties between the two countries in the early 1620s through the marriage of the Infanta Maria Anna of Spain with England’s Prince Charles-caused serious concern on both sides.3 As late as 1656, Oliver Cromwell summed up the two nations’ mutual feelings to Parliament: “Your great enemy is the Spaniard . . . He is a natural enemy, he is naturally so.”4
