The Select Council of Philip I: A Spanish Institution in Tudor England, 1555–1558^*

Abstract

On 20 July 1554, Prince Philip of Spain and a large cortège of European noblemen, clerics, soldiers and other retainers landed in Southampton. As the prince moved by stages to Winchester, where he was to marry Mary I, queen of England and Ireland, he was received with enthusiasm and great displays of pageantry in the towns through which he passed.¹ On 25 July, the wedding took place and the royal couple moved cheerfully towards London—with a stop, among other places, at Windsor, where Philip was installed, in his capacity as king of England, as the new master of the Order of the Garter.² Although Philip has traditionally been considered a king consort, the role did not exist, and Philip, Mary and their court conceived the reign as a joint monarchy, modelled in the image of that of Ferdinand (r. 1479–1516) and Isabel (r. 1474–1504) in Spain.³ Once installed in the capital, Philip eagerly began to transact business, negotiating the reconciliation of the kingdom with Rome, which took place in November 1554, and showing himself regularly to his English subjects in London.⁴

The king resided in England a total of eighteen months—a first stay between July 1554 and September 1555 would be followed by a shorter one between March and July 1557. The rest of his time as king of England, until Mary’s death on 17 November 1558, he spent in the Low Countries, where he arrived in September 1555 to be with his father, Emperor Charles V, as the latter—tired, infirm and depressed—was preparing to abdicate his extensive dominions in favour of his only legitimate son. Charles first relinquished the Low Countries in an emotionally charged and tearful ceremony in Brussels in October 1555, followed by a more private abdication of the rest of his dominions in Europe, Africa and America in January 1556.⁵ Philip’s responsibilities as the ruler of the vast Spanish Monarchy had multiplied, which meant that it would be difficult for him to rule England in person with Mary as he had done between 1554 and 1555. However, Philip was by then a seasoned prince, having been regent of Spain twice (in 1543–8 and 1551–4). When he departed London for Brussels in September 1555, he left behind not only a team of experienced courtiers and theologians, including the influential Dominican Bartolomé de Carranza, but also a new institution, created on 29 August 1555, that he referred to as the consejo escogido, the select council.⁶ This was to serve as an advisory board, akin to the English privy council, that would report directly to the king while he was abroad, a measure Philip had intended since his arrival in England. Although historians have surveyed some of Philip’s interventions in English politics, the select council remains one of the most underexplored aspects of the reign.⁷

Historians of Spain have virtually ignored the existence of the select council, and the historiography in English has dismissed it as superfluous, ineffective or fanciful. This neglect and misunderstanding stems from the assumption that the privy council under Mary was chaotic and inefficacious, a reflection of the alleged ‘decline of good government’ during her reign; the creation of a new advisory body could, it is assumed, only have worsened the situation.⁸ After Henry VIII’s death in 1547, the growth of the privy council—the official body charged with providing advice to the monarch in England—has been interpreted as proof that the regimes of Edward VI (with forty-seven privy councillors) and of Philip and Mary (fifty) were structurally less powerful and more faction-ridden than those of Henry VIII (nineteen) and Elizabeth I (thirteen in 1601).⁹ The composition of the Marian privy council was drawn from two different pools: first, Catholics who had either been part of Mary’s household as princess or had rallied to her cause during the succession struggle against Lady Jane Grey in 1553—supporters such as Sir Robert Rochester, Sir Francis Englefield, Sir Edward Waldegrave and Sir John Bourne—and second, those who had served under Henry VIII and Edward VI but had turned their backs on Lady Jane and the Duke of Northumberland—men such as Lord Paget, the Earls of Arundel and Pembroke, and Master Secretary Sir William Petre.¹⁰ This membership has been interpreted in the past as a breach of the traditional pattern of court politics, portraying Mary in isolation with the staunch supporters who formed her household against a group of ‘professional politicians’ not particularly inclined towards Catholicism. This situation rendered Mary, if not powerless against the privy council, at least out of touch with its procedures of policy-making and almost defenceless against court faction.¹¹

In 1986, Dale Hoak granted that the privy council had been more manageable than hitherto recognised, but only because ‘the likes of Rochester, Waldegrave, and Bourne’ had been neutralised by the politiques who had served under previous regimes.¹² Furthermore, Hoak added that the new consultative body, the select council, never worked separately from the privy council and was therefore an illusion sustained to satisfy Philip’s ego as king of England. ‘Only the Spanish believed in the separate existence of a “select council”’, he concluded.¹³ Glyn Redworth strongly argued against these views in 1997, suggesting that there is indeed a distinction to be made between the privy and the select councils and that the latter represented a ‘constitutional innovation’ that may have derived from the Castilian experience.¹⁴ This point is crucial, as it clearly shows that it is problematic to study the Tudor period in isolation or from a purely Anglocentric perspective, as previous historiographical approaches had tended to do. This is especially true for the reign of Philip and Mary, when England and Ireland were consciously integrated within a wider political entity, the Spanish Monarchy, whose subjects were scattered around the globe and populated territories in Europe, Africa and America (and soon enough in Asia, too), from Naples and Oran all the way to Lima and Mexico City. An in-depth exploration of the select council provides new insights into the political and diplomatic resources available to the Spanish Monarchy in an increasingly globalised age and charts the entanglement of England with other territories in Philip’s dominions, not as allies or competitors, but as partners and members of the same political entity.

To ascertain the true influence and role of the select council, I focus, in the first instance, on its place in the conciliar traditions of Spain and England and the select council’s foundation as an English institution of the Spanish Monarchy. This is followed by an analysis of the business transacted and the communications established between the king and his newly created institutional body. A third section of the article deals with the extra-epistolary activities that sustained the council’s functions and cemented its relationship with Philip, mainly through the sending of envoys charged with special tasks that went beyond the immediate preoccupations of the English councillors. These tasks show that the newly created consultative body was one of many such advisory resources employed by King Philip I of England and II of Spain. Disagreements between king and councillors have been interpreted as an inevitable clash between Spanish and English interests. However, disputes over policy between King Philip and his Spanish councillors were not uncommon either. Therefore, if we are to understand the significance of the creation of this new institution, we must put aside Anglocentric understandings of the functioning of the English court in this period and instead insert the episode within the wider picture of the composite Spanish Monarchy. Through such an analysis, I offer a re-evaluation that shows not only that the select council was a perfectly viable and functioning body, but also that it worked well and placed England firmly—albeit briefly—within the orbit of the Spanish Monarchy.

I

Political culture, in England as in Spain, sustained the symbiotic relationship between imperium (dominion) and consilium (counsel), whereby the defects and biases of a ruler could be redirected by the good ‘counsel’ of others.¹⁵ The lines separating the terms ‘counsel’, as the process of seeking and receiving advice, and ‘council’, as the institutional setting for such an exchange, were constructed upon a blurred and ambiguous etymology: even though the Latin word concilium referred to an advisory board, the word consilium, meaning both ‘counsel’ and ‘council’, was more widely used. In this framework, rulers were not required to seek counsel, but it was a moral obligation of the monarch to do so, following the Aristotelian notion that those who provided well-intentioned advice were exercising ‘political friendship’ (politike philia).¹⁶ In the early modern period, policy-making and the art of ruling ultimately rested in the hands of the monarch. However, monarchs were always to count on the suggestions and advice of their councillors, and both monarch and councillor were supposed to be motivated by this kind of political friendship.

The royal council, an institution common to most European monarchies, had a long tradition in England and the Spanish kingdoms. Although England had a conciliar tradition that went back to the Anglo-Saxon witenagemot, it was the Norman curia regis, established after the Conquest in 1066, from which the privy council stemmed. The curia regis or aula regia possessed executive, judiciary and legislative powers and it also served as an advisory board. Initially divided into two assemblies, one large and one small, it gradually evolved into the different institutions that served the English monarchy: parliament, the exchequer, and the courts of King’s Bench, Common Pleas and others.¹⁷ The privy council evolved from the smaller assembly and its influence was greatly enhanced during the minority of King Richard II (r. 1377–99), when a ‘continual council’ was first established to advise the king in matters pertaining to government, finance and war, with a membership including prelates, noblemen and gentlemen.¹⁸ Although it was sidelined when Richard assumed power in 1380, it became increasingly prominent after 1389 and was a permanent institution by the reign of Henry V (r. 1413–22).¹⁹

In Spain, although similar bodies had proliferated since the Visigothic era (the most important of which was also called aula regia), the Jesuit father Juan de Mariana (1536–1624), writing in the late sixteenth century, ascribed the origins of the contemporary council of Castile to the reign of St Ferdinand III, king of Castile and Leon (r. 1217–52), when a regular meeting of twelve jurists was first established to aid the king in judiciary matters.²⁰ This nascent council progressively took on the role of an advisory board with broad competencies, and by the reign of Sancho IV (r. 1284–95) the word consejo was frequently used in this sense.²¹ However, the royal council of Castile (consejo real de Castilla) was not officially constituted until the Valladolid Ordinances of 1385, promulgated by King John I of Castile (r. 1379–90), which made the council an almost exact contemporary of Richard II’s ‘continual council’.²² Through these Ordinances, King John ordered the foundation of a continuous council to be composed of ‘twelve persons, namely, four prelates, four noblemen and four citizens’. There was, therefore, an even spread among its members from the three dominant groups of medieval society: the clergy, the nobility and the urban patriciate. Such a council, the Ordinances specified, was to remain with the king even ‘when we are at war’. It had been said that the king did ‘things out of our own head and without counsel’, which John claimed to be untrue. To prove this, the King of Castile announced the official creation of an advisory board, a step that would ‘end the slanders, for they will understand that that which we do, we do with counsel’.²³

By not making decisions solely ‘out of our own head’, but after appropriate consultation with the representatives of the republic over which he ruled, the king made sure that his regime would not result in tyranny. This foundational aspect of the royal council of Castile would permeate the understanding that early modern contemporaries had of the functions of a royal council. In Spain, as we shall see, the need for a council to aid the monarch would become even more apparent after the union of Castile and Aragon under Ferdinand and Isabel, and after the accession of Charles I and V (r. 1516–56), with the incorporation of his European inheritance and the conquests that his subjects continued to make in America. By the time Philip became king of Naples and England in 1554, and of Spain in 1556, the need for an elaborate conciliar system was well established in Spanish political thought.

In 1556, Felipe de la Torre, a Master of Theology based in the University of Louvain, published an influential treatise dedicated to Philip, ‘by divine grace king of Spain, England, France, etc.’, in which he explored the education, virtues and qualities that should adorn a good Christian prince. Torre belonged to the circle of theologians from Seville who were to be persecuted for heresy after 1557 and which included Juan Pérez de Pineda, Doctor Egidio, Casiodoro de Reina, Cirpiano de Valera and others. Torre’s work, intensely biblical and Christocentric, has been interpreted by some scholars as ‘crypto-Calvinist’, although he avoided inquisitorial scrutiny and retained Philip’s favour. He even became his chaplain in the midst of the Protestant crisis in Valladolid and Seville, and the process against Carranza in the late 1550s.²⁴ In his Institución de un rey christiano, Torre explained that ‘the king on his own cannot provide for all the needs of the republic and much less can he be everywhere’. For that reason, he needed help to aid him in the good government of his territories. This help materialised in the persons of all those ‘faithful officers’—councillors, governors and others—with whose assistance kings, ‘whether absent or present, may with good counsel govern the people whom God has entrusted to them and keep them in peace and obedience’. He then reminded his readers of the badly chosen counsellors who advised King Rehoboam of Israel, and how they had caused the great calamities and disasters that befell God’s people and the republic of Israel.²⁵

A work by the Valencian humanist Fadrique Furió Ceriol (1527–92), El Concejo, i Consejeros del Príncipe, published in 1559 but written during Philip’s reign as king of England, was one of the most incisive explorations of the conciliar system in Spanish intellectual thought. Furió noticed the etymological confusion between the terms concejo and consejo (inherited from the confusion between the terms concilium and consilium mentioned above) and settled on the former, even though he acknowledged that, through common usage, both terms could be used to signify the same thing and were, therefore, equally valid ways to refer to a council.²⁶ He defined royal councils in the following terms, which Philip and other early modern European monarchs would surely have recognised:

The prince’s council is a congregation or assembly of persons selected to counsel him in all circumstances in times of peace and war. They will do so in the manner that will best and most easily aid him to remember the past, understand the present, provide for the future, attain success in his undertakings, avoid obstacles and ensure that the latter, when unavoidable, produce as little damage as possible.²⁷

Drawing from the metaphor of the king’s two bodies (politic and natural), a long-standing tradition in European political and intellectual thought, Furió emphasised that a good council was to serve the prince as ‘his senses, his good judgement, his memory, his eyes, his ears, his voice, his feet and his hands’. In this capacity, the council would be ‘father, tutor and guardian’ of the people and, thus, both prince and council would act as ‘good and loyal ministers of God’.²⁸ In contrast, a bad council—or bad counsel—meant the utter destruction of the people and both prince and council would become rebels against God and ‘vassals and slaves of the devil’.²⁹ Furió further explained that the council was to be one body, the prince at its head and each member with their own role to play, just as in a natural body. The prince would have to decide how many councils were necessary for the good government of his dominions and, in each of these councils, how many councillors, presidents, secretaries and notaries were needed.³⁰

Approaches to the number and membership of councils may have varied, but the general outlines of what a council was, as enunciated by Torre and Furió, were prevalent in early modern political thought and echoed the motives given by John I of Castile for the creation of his royal council in 1385. These outlines had also been the guiding principle behind the growing complexity of the Spanish conciliar system after the union of the crowns of Aragon and Castile. The changes effected during this period responded to the demands of an expanding composite monarchy and reflected the realities imposed by the Spanish monarchical experience. To the initial council of Castile, the Catholic Monarchs added four more: the councils of Aragon (1481), Holy Inquisition (1483), orders (1495) and crusade (1495). After Charles’s accession in 1516, with the acquisition of the Burgundian inheritance, the expansion of an increasingly international court and the American conquests, the new monarch created six more councils that were directly subordinate to that of Castile and were designed to accommodate the king’s new responsibilities: cámara (1518), state (1523), Indies (1524), war (1525), finance (1525) and, finally, the junta (committee) of works and forests (1545), established during Philip’s regency.³¹

Such an intricate conciliar system could not have been expected to function effectively with the number of councillors that the regime of Henry VIII had employed (or that that of Elizabeth I would later employ). As soon as Philip arrived in England in the summer of 1554, he envisaged the creation of a new consultative body.³² This should not be understood, however, as a criticism of the functioning or effectiveness of Mary’s large privy council. Indeed, it must be noted that its Spanish counterpart, the royal council of Castile, had a membership of fifty-three in 1562, that of Aragon had thirty-nine, that of the Indies had twenty-five and the council of finance, the largest, had a membership of seventy-nine.³³ Not all councillors were expected to contribute equally and there were inevitably leading voices in every council (as was the case in the privy council of England), but these were highly diversified institutions in which Philip employed university-trained jurists to provide the best possible advice. The large council of finance, for instance, was subdivided into different sections, with specific councillors in charge of each. These sub-groups physically occupied different rooms to transact their business. To ease their workload, some of the leading councillors employed secretaries and other members of staff under their supervision to prepare briefs and memoranda of business.³⁴

In addition, each of the kingdoms and territories of the Monarchy had retained their local native councils, which, either directly or through the territory’s governor or viceroy, also counselled the king. In the Low Countries, Philip could count on the advice of the council of state (raad van state), the privy council (conseil privé) and the council of finance (raad van financiën); in Navarre, that of the royal council (consejo real); in Naples, he had the sacred royal council (sacro regio consiglio) and the collateral council (consiglio collaterale).³⁵ In America, the real audiencia (high court) of each kingdom acted as de facto councils, and their members bore the title of councillors to the king (consejeros de su Majestad).³⁶ It was undoubtedly with this international conciliar infrastructure in mind that Philip devised and created the select council in England. It must also be remembered that, since Henry VIII’s elevation of the lordship of Ireland into a kingdom in 1542, the Tudor crown had itself become a composite monarchy in its own right.³⁷ This elevation had caused some friction, since Ireland was a papal fief that had been granted by Pope Adrian IV (r. 1154–9) to Henry II of England (r. 1154–89), but its status as a kingdom was respected by Mary at her accession and by Philip after the marriage, and was finally confirmed by Pope Paul IV (r. 1555–9) in the bull Illius, per quem reges regnant of June 1555.³⁸ Since England and Ireland were now members of the Spanish monarchical body, Philip immediately saw the need to have a second advisory board, distinct from the privy council and reporting directly to him.

The select council was created on 29 August 1555, just before Philip departed for Flanders; its creation was, in fact, labelled by the secretary who filed the document as ‘the last commission’. This was not the first conciliar institution that Philip founded during his stay in London for, in the summer of 1554, he had created a junta to treat Italian affairs, a body of councillors that would in time evolve into the consejo de Italia.³⁹ The foundational document of the select council, written in Latin in secretarial hand, is a unique document that opens by declaring why such a step was necessary.⁴⁰ Philip explained that, ‘for a better and more expeditious deliberation’, he had selected ‘from those among our council who transact business’ several men who were to be charged with ‘the special care of all matters of state, [as well as] of financial and other grave matters of the kingdom’. It is important to note that the king was making the clear distinction that the new councillors were to be drawn from the privy council (‘in ijs quæ in Consilio nostro agenda sunt’), to which they would still belong. The only one who did not formally belong to the privy council was Cardinal Reginald Pole, who was established as the principal councillor—in a role analogous to that of the president in Spanish councils—to deal with ‘great matters when he wishes to do so and conveniently can’. Philip chose a further eight men: Stephen Gardiner, Lord Chancellor and bishop of Winchester (replaced after his death in November 1555 by his successor in the chancellorship, Nicholas Heath, archbishop of York); William Paulet, Lord Treasurer and marquess of Winchester; Henry Fitzalan, earl of Arundel; William Herbert, earl of Pembroke; Thomas Thirlby, bishop of Ely; William, Lord Paget; Sir Robert Rochester, Comptroller of the Household and Sir William Petre, Secretary of State.⁴¹

Philip commanded them to be ‘present together at court’ and to transact business relating to ‘all matters of state, all financial matters, state possessions, debts and rents’, and anything else relating to ‘the honour, dignity and state of the Crown’. To the end that they would provide ‘the best possible counsel’, the king exhorted them to quell all discord ‘amicably among themselves’ and advised them to speak their minds honestly about matters that could ‘redound in the glory of God as well as in the honour and service of ourselves and of our kingdoms’. There could be no clearer statement of Philip’s conception of England and Ireland as integrated members of the Spanish Monarchy than the use of the plural when referring to his kingdoms. The select councillors were now to understand English and Irish affairs from the new perspective of their inclusion in the Spanish composite monarchy. In his directions to maintain amicable relations, Philip’s instructions linked directly to the Aristotelian notion of politike philia, which stressed the importance given to friendship in political endeavours in the early modern period. The king also wished for his new council to inform him of their deliberations when occasion arose, and asked that, at least once a week, they update him on their discussions. They were charged with the deliberation of parliamentary issues and with delivering the results of such discussions to Philip before the beginning of parliament. With a degree of repetition, the king further ordered his councillors to meet in person every Sunday and to share with him the outcome of those meetings. Finally, he entrusted them with ‘the resolution of debts, abatements and expenses’, as well as with ‘prudent government and the collection of revenues, the possession of lands, taxes and the administration of justice’.

Apart from revealing that the council would report directly to Philip, rather than to Mary, this crucial document also makes clear that this separate council was to have similar responsibilities and functions to the privy council but was to have a sharper focus. It would also mirror similar institutions already extant in the other territories of the Spanish Monarchy. In particular, the select council was modelled after the Spanish council of state, subordinate to the royal council of Castile but separate from it, and this becomes apparent if we take a closer look at the composition of the new English institution and its Spanish counterpart. As has been mentioned, the select council was to be headed by Pole (when ‘convenient’ to him) and was to include two other prelates (Thirlby and Gardiner), four temporal lords (Arundel, Pembroke, Paulet and Paget), an expert in finance and land revenue (Comptroller Rochester) and a master secretary (Petre).⁴² This was in line, as we have seen, with the guiding principle of the conciliar system in Castile since the Ordinances of Valladolid (1385), which included members of the three estates—the clergy, the nobility and the citizenry.⁴³ The backgrounds of the members of the select council were also almost identical to those of Philip’s council of state when he left Spain in the summer of 1554. The king had reorganised its composition while waiting to depart from A Coruña and its members were two spiritual lords, of whom one was to be the president (Antonio de Fonseca, patriarch of the Indies and also president of the royal council of Castile, and Fernando Valdés, Grand Inquisitor and archbishop of Seville), four noblemen (Luis Hurtado de Mendoza, marquis of Mondéjar; Pedro de Navarra, marquis of Cortes; Antonio de Rojas and García de Toledo) and one secretary (Juan Vázquez de Molina). The king also instructed them to meet twice a week and recommended specific tasks to them, in a manner similar to the one he would employ a year later in England.⁴⁴ With the new council thus founded and ready, Philip left Dover for Flanders in early September 1555, and it is to the workings, scope and business of the select council that we must now turn our attention.

II

The select council’s business commenced straight away following Philip’s departure from London.⁴⁵ At some point before the end of August 1555, Queen Mary asked Pole for advice on what should be communicated to the privy council about the matter of the select council, and Pole set down his impressions in his own handwriting. First, the cardinal legate advised the queen to remind them ‘of the charge the kyngs highnes gaue them at hys dep[ar]ting’ and he recommended that the articles put in writing by the king—that is, the foundation of the new council—be ‘rehersid and geuen vnto them wyth exhortation to employe al ther diligence for the dewe execution therof’.⁴⁶ So far, it might seem, as some historians have believed, that the English never made a distinction between the two councils, but the rest of the document leaves no doubt that they were very much aware of one.

Pole advised the queen that those councillors named in Philip’s document should observe the king’s exhortation to be ‘al present in the cowrte’, because of ‘the [weyghte of the] mattres that be now in hond’. Pole also recommended that, since it was the king’s pleasure that such matters should be debated and sent over to him for resolution before the opening of parliament, Mary should entreat the select councillors to transact this business with no delay and ‘to haue of them thys day to send wyth all spede to the kyngs highnes’. He then added:

And bycause the most ordynarie & iuste way tochyng the provision of money to pay your hignes detts is to call yn your own detts, wych charge … is principally considered & renewed in the writing the kyngs highnes left tochyng such affayres that hys consel shold presently attend vnto wherbe ther names also shal haue the charge specyall therfore your majeste shal do wel thys day to charge them wyth the same that wyth all diligence they attend to the prosecution therof[.]⁴⁷

The possessive in the passage where Pole refers to the king’s council (‘hys consel’) is an unmistakable confirmation not only that the select council was conceived as a separate entity from the privy council, even if its councillors would fill ranks in both, but also that it was dependent on Philip’s authority even if Mary, as co-monarch and proprietary sovereign of England and Ireland, was perfectly entitled to deal with the select council directly and to recommend specific tasks.

The amount and frequency of business transacted by the select council must also be explored. Previous assessments of the council’s activity counted only twenty-four letters and it has been claimed that the correspondence between Philip and his newly created council, scarce to begin with, disappeared altogether after December 1556.⁴⁸ In fact, a total of forty-eight documents—comprising annotated memoranda and letters—survive scattered across English, Spanish and Belgian archives and libraries.⁴⁹ These communications were exchanged between 31 August 1555, after Philip left London for the first time, and as late as 6 November 1558, when the select council sent its last known letter to Philip as their king, only eleven days before the death of Queen Mary. If we discount the first seven documents identified, which are memoranda and reports produced by the council and annotated by the king, we have a total of forty-one letters exchanged between them. Of these, twenty-one letters were from Philip to the select council and the select council reciprocated with another twenty letters (although not always in exact alternation), which makes for an equal balance of activity. After discounting the four months that Philip spent in England in 1557, we have an average of 1.2 letters per month for the thirty-four months during which the king was absent from the realm between 1555 and 1558, a ratio that hardly suggests a lack of interest or the disappearance of epistolary exchanges, especially considering that the English realm was one of many that Philip had to attend to in absentia. To this channel of communication, we should add Philip’s private correspondence with Mary and members of the select and privy councils (the majority of which is now lost) and the sending of envoys (Juan de Figueroa, Christophe d’Assonleville and Gómez Suárez de Figueroa, count of Feria) to represent him directly in 1557 and 1558, when the king communicated with the select council only through them. In addition, we know that a ship carrying part of Philip’s English archive sank in the Channel in 1559 on her way back to Spain, and among the documents on board there may well have been further records relating to this matter.⁵⁰ Finally, we should not dismiss the possibility that further letters will emerge in other archives in the future. What can be concluded with certainty is that the King of England had regular communications with his English select councillors and kept himself informed about the latest English affairs.

In terms of the scope of business transacted, commercial and diplomatic matters seem to have been prevalent in the correspondence between king and councillors, although the military, naval and internal affairs of the kingdom appear frequently too.⁵¹ To a lesser extent, but still noticeably in the letters, Philip also dealt with personal petitions and courtly affairs. Although not entirely absent, references to religious matters are scarce. Conciliar activity began in earnest as soon as Philip left London, taking with him the Earls of Arundel and Pembroke, an action which suggests that he saw benefits in providing his councillors from across the Monarchy with a privileged look into how government worked in his different kingdoms. The first five—undated—exchanges that have survived are not letters, but memoranda prepared by the council, including its subsequent decisions and annotations by Philip’s secretaries, which mean that the exchanges must have taken place between Philip’s departure from court and his embarking from Dover for Flanders a few weeks later. In the first surviving memorandum, we learn that on 31 August 1555, when Philip had already left London, the select councillors met in Pole’s chambers and agreed to summon parliament to Westminster for 21 October, a decision which the queen communicated ‘to the rest of the councillors’ (‘reliquis consiliarijs’) the following day. A marginal annotation by the king states that all seemed to him ‘prudently deliberated’.⁵²

Another matter debated in the early days was the state of the fleet, which the select council reported to Philip was not in a good condition, as some of the ships were ‘so damaged and battered by wind and tempests that they cannot be kept longer at sea without imminent peril’. They had therefore agreed to lead them back to the Thames to be repaired quickly and to crew and provision those that were still intact and place them in the passage between Dover and Calais.⁵³ Philip had demanded these measures to ensure that English ships would escort his father on his return to Spain, which was scheduled—erroneously, as it turned out—for the autumn. The king agreed with the decision to repair the damaged ships on the Thames, but he was not so convinced about the second decision. He explained that ‘the defence of the kingdom of England consists in her ships being always ready and in good order so that they can serve for the protection of the kingdom in any invasion’.⁵⁴ So that they would be ready, he commanded that those ships already in good condition be positioned at Portsmouth to facilitate their egress, as the passage out of the Thames was a difficult one.⁵⁵ The urgency of this task diminished as it became apparent that Charles V would not be sailing to Spain immediately, but when the final order about the ships was at last given in March 1556 and enacted by the privy council, it was ordered that the ships that were in the Thames were ‘to go fromhensse [sic] to Portesmouthe, and there to remayne for a tyme’.⁵⁶

Most of the business transacted by the select council was not recorded in the acts of the privy council, which confirms that the two councils were not only conceived as separate entities but also worked as such. In other instances, business transacted by the select council was recorded by the privy council when a decision had already been reached by Philip in consultation with the select council and all that was needed was an operational follow-up. Such is the case, for instance, with the commercial and diplomatic disagreement concerning English trade in the Portuguese enclave of São Jorge da Mina, also known as Elmina, in West Africa. English merchants had been, of their own accord, trading in São Jorge da Mina since the reign of Edward VI. King John III of Portugal (r. 1521–57), Philip’s maternal uncle and Mary’s first cousin, objected to English trade in Elmina, and in the autumn of 1555, he sent envoys to both Spain and England to demand that English ships be banned from trading there. If they nevertheless trespassed on Portuguese jurisdiction, they could expect to be bombarded by the coastal defences.⁵⁷ On 27 October 1555, the select council wrote to the King of England to tell him that the Portuguese representative had remonstrated with them again. They accused the ambassador of pursuing the cause over-zealously and felt that he had ‘presented no proof that the merchants should not trade where they have already begun to do’. The English traders, the select council explained, were ready to depart for Africa and, having prepared everything ‘in good faith’, they had asked the councillors to intercede with the king and queen. The select council sought the king’s views on the matter and warned that hindering the merchants’ voyages would ‘injure the fortune of many distinguished merchants of your city of London’. They also requested that, for this time only and until an agreement could be reached, they should be suffered to depart.⁵⁸

Philip’s reply has not survived, but his decision can be gauged from the select council’s letter of 18 December, which informed him that, after due deliberation, they had ordered that the merchants be restrained from departing. The goods which could only be sold in São Jorge da Mina were to be confiscated and given to a judge for arbitration.⁵⁹ The first reference to the episode in the acts of the privy council does not appear until twelve days later, when the merchants Edward Castlyn, Jeffrey Allen, Rowland Fox and Richard Stockbridge were summoned before the privy council, commanded not to pursue their intended voyage to Elmina and told that ‘the wares that they have provided for Mina, not being vendible in any other place’, were to be delivered to the queen, who would recompense them for the goods.⁶⁰ On the same day, the select council sent a report to the king in which they told him about the latest developments and added that they had appointed two commissioners, one Spanish and one English, to receive the merchants’ goods ‘in your majesties’ names’, a decision not recorded in the minutes of the privy council and therefore made by the select council.⁶¹

Although we lack Philip’s responses in this exchange, three conclusions can be drawn from the episode. First, despite some initial resistance on the part of the select councillors, they finally aligned themselves with Philip’s decision to disallow English trade in Elmina. This was in line with the ethos of the conciliar system: councillors would provide advice to the monarch, who would weigh their considerations carefully, but was under no obligation to take them. Second, the select and privy councils were working separately even if they collaborated closely when business demanded, which was perfectly consistent with the way councils worked in Spain. Finally, by refusing to allow English merchants in São Jorge da Mina, what Philip had done was to apply the same rules that he applied to the rest of his kingdoms—that is, he was respecting the Treaty of Tordesillas, signed between the Crowns of Spain and Portugal in 1494, which divided the two monarchies’ territorial spheres of influence and rights of conquest and settlement along an imaginary line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands. In this respect, the prohibition on trade in Elmina applied to English merchants in the same way that it applied to their Castilian, Aragonese, Flemish or Neapolitan counterparts.

Occasionally, the king would involve his select council in private petitions, the outcomes of which are unclear but which were certainly not passed before the privy council. This practice again highlights the distinction between the two bodies and underscores Philip’s active patronage as king of England and Ireland. On 13 November 1555, for example, Philip exhorted the select council to entreat the queen to write to the Lord Deputy of Ireland about the restoration of lands belonging to Edward and Christopher Plunket, Irishmen who had petitioned him directly—an episode which casts doubt on claims that the kingly patronage exerted by Philip during his reign was negligible.⁶² On 9 May 1556, the king intervened on behalf of the oblate Matteo Minali, who complained that ships loaded with printed copies of his newly published book had been captured by ‘infidel pirates’, and commanded the select council to give justice to Minali’s complaints (‘expeditam iustitiam administrari faciatis’).⁶³ He clearly took an interest in things that were not necessarily matters of state but were related in some way to his English and Irish kingdoms. In such cases, Philip used his select council not for advice, but to carry out a decision he had already made. The council was employed as a conduit of the absentee king’s authority and patronage in England.

Philip also intervened in domestic affairs that touched upon the very dignity of the royal family, as is evidenced by the delicate issue which arose in the summer of 1556 concerning the household of Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII’s fourth wife, who had lived comfortably in England since her divorce in 1540.⁶⁴ On 5 August 1556, her brother William, duke of Cleves, sent a letter to Queen Mary requesting that three of Anne’s servants be removed from her household, as they were damaging her reputation. These servants were Otto Wylick, Jasper Brockhausen and the latter’s wife, Gertrude, whom William accused of driving his sister mad ‘by her marvellous impostures and incantations’.⁶⁵ In a letter of 10 August, the select council informed Philip of the situation, which the queen wanted them to handle with ‘special care’. They were already making deliberations about how best to fulfil the duke’s wishes with ‘as little offence to Lady Anne as may be’. They hoped to have resolved the matter in a few days.⁶⁶ The king replied from Ghent on 13 September and told his council that their report about Anne of Cleves’s situation had been ‘pleasing’. This time he chose to follow their advice, and desired them to settle the matter themselves.⁶⁷ The case then passed to the privy council, again showing that the select council would sometimes delegate to it affairs which required operational decisions. The privy council summoned Anne of Cleves’s servants on 14 September and on the seventeenth, presumably with Philip’s letter in hand, they proceeded to announce to the Brockhausens and Wylick that they were to leave the Lady of Cleves’s household and the kingdom, never to return.⁶⁸

King Philip was clearly interested in the affairs of England (and Ireland, as the Plunket case shows), and expressed this through regular communications with his select council. That the select and privy councils sometimes worked together should come as no surprise, and should not be interpreted as a blurring of the lines that separated them or as a charade to sustain an illusion that only the Spanish believed in. It was not only logical, but also practical, for councillors who sat on both councils to transact business in both, and we know that this was common practice in the Spanish conciliar system.⁶⁹ The considerable number of matters that were discussed by Philip and the select council, but not by the privy council, proves that that distinction was very real.

III

A decrease in epistolary exchanges between the king and his select council can only be identified for periods when Philip was in London (March to July 1557) or when he sent over envoys to deal with business directly, a decision that he would always announce to his councillors.⁷⁰ There seem to be no extant records of Philip’s activity with the select council while in England in 1557, but the processes followed by the advisory board, the royal envoys and the king can be gauged from the surviving documentation. In this section, these processes are analysed by taking a close look at negotiations surrounding the privileges of the Hansa and at Anglo-Scottish relations during the war with France and the papacy.

The merchants of the Hanseatic League had been granted special privileges in England, allowing them free trade and exempting them from certain tolls, rights which they had enjoyed with little variation since the fourteenth century, including the setting up of kontore (trading posts) in the Steelyard in London, in King’s Lynn and in Ipswich.⁷¹ The centuries-old privileges of the Hansa had been revoked by Edward VI in 1553 and, although Queen Mary restored them soon after her accession, the merchants of the Hansa claimed that they were finding it hard to ensure their privileges were observed.⁷² A problem arose when the Merchant Venturers successfully requested in 1555 that the Hanseatic League pay a tax on products imported from the East into England, ‘as other foreigners are bound’.⁷³ Philip was keen to restore the privileges of the League, but the select council explained to him on 1 May 1558 that the Hansa wanted to import merchandise into England without paying the prescribed customs and excise duties and that they were not sure that this could be done without prejudice to English merchants.⁷⁴ In the instructions he drew up for his envoy, the Count of Feria, at the end of the same month, the king thanked him for the reassurances he had given the League’s representatives, as it was convenient ‘to keep them in our friendship and devotion’. Philip thought that what the select council intended to reply to the Hansa, as per their letter of 1 May, was ‘somewhat dry’, but he believed it would constrain (‘que sea torcedor’) the League’s representatives to seek favour directly through himself. Feria was to suggest to them that they write to the king with their suggestions, so that the demands of the League could be granted with as little damage to ‘those of that kingdom’ (the English) as possible. Philip added that he ‘would not make any resolutions, nor grant anything without communicating it to them [the select council] first and considering their thoughts’ on the matter. He was confident that they would agree with him in granting the privileges, ‘as they will see that my aim in this is the benefit of that kingdom and to maintain the friendship with the [Hanseatic] cities’.⁷⁵ On 29 May, Philip wrote to the select council, commending how ‘prudently’ they had deliberated about the matter, informing them of Feria’s instructions and urging them to consider the benefits that a full restoration of the League’s privileges would entail. It would be, he added, ‘most useful to that kingdom, and most pleasing to us’.⁷⁶

In the end, the matter was left unresolved because the privileges that were finally granted were deemed insufficient by the Hanseatic representatives; in any case, the queen died a few months later. Although the episode has been interpreted as showing a lack of mutual understanding between king and council, the negotiation of policy from abroad could also be difficult for Philip in his relations with Spain; it was not an English peculiarity.⁷⁷ As M.J. Rodríguez-Salgado has shown, Philip’s clashes with the regency government and council of his sister Juana in Spain, especially concerning Castilian taxes, were frequent and often acrimonious during this period.⁷⁸ Taking into account the conciliar nature of the Spanish Monarchy, it was not uncommon for the king to have to deal with stubborn councillors or governors while he was away. It is only with hindsight that clashes such as these can appear as an inevitable foundering of relations between king and councillors. Furthermore, the fact that none of these exchanges were recorded in the acts of the privy council confirms, again, that the select council was functioning as a distinct consultative body.

Another means employed by Philip to make his voice heard in England was the sending of envoys to deal with English matters directly. During the war against France and the papacy, which commenced in 1556 and reached its apex in 1557, the Scots launched a series of attacks against the English around Berwick. Queen Mary, appealing to the treaties of mutual aid signed by Charles V and Henry VIII in 1543 and 1546, requested that Philip’s kingdoms declare war against Scotland.⁷⁹ Philip, anxious about the war and the funds he needed to carry it out, preferred peace, and decided to send his Flemish councillor, Christophe d’Assonleville, to London and Scotland for negotiations with the regents, Mary of Guise, dowager queen of Scots, and James Hamilton, earl of Arran. In his instructions, Philip protested that his only aims were ‘the tranquillity of the Christian republic and of our subjects’ and the maintenance of peace and friendship with all Christian princes, especially with the Scottish kingdom because of the ‘proximity’ and trading links between the latter and the Low Countries. As king of Spain and prince of the Low Countries, but also as king of England by marriage, Philip instructed D’Assonleville to demand from the Scots the cessation of hostilities and restitution for damages caused. Otherwise, by virtue of the treaties between Charles and Henry, and in his position as king of England, he would have no choice but to treat the Scots as his enemies.⁸⁰ As Philip’s representative, D’Assonleville first conferred about the instruction with Juan de Figueroa, who resided in England as Philip’s deputy on Spanish matters, and the following day, on 3 October 1557, he dined with Chancellor Heath, Paulet, Paget, Ely and ‘other principals of her council’. Mary granted D’Assonleville an audience after dinner and, seeming satisfied with the king’s instructions, retired to bed after commanding the group to repair to Pole’s chambers for a more detailed discussion of each item in the memorandum. The following day, the same English councillors met D’Assonleville and Figueroa and told them that the actions of the Scots demanded a firmer response.⁸¹ They were at loggerheads, but, despite D’Assonleville’s specifically calling them Mary’s councillors, it is clear that the crisis was being dealt with through the select, not the privy council. Although there is no way of knowing who those ‘other principals’ were, the fact that Heath, Paulet, Paget and Ely were all members of the select council, and Pole was its president, seems to clarify this. Certainly, none of these conversations were recorded in the acts of the privy council.

The incident soon involved the council of state of the Low Countries, which deliberated on the matter on 20 October 1557 and concluded, unsurprisingly, that it was better to try gentle means before declaring war on Scotland. It was necessary too, they cautioned, to consult jurists and theologians to determine whether there was enough justification for war, for princes who declared wars, and those who counselled in favour of such a step, had to answer before God for any atrocities committed against the ‘poor people’.⁸² Philip also sought the opinions of his most trusted Flemish and Dutch councillors. The Count of Hornes thought that it would be better to avoid war, but advised that, should the English persist in demanding it, a declaration would eventually have to be made, for ‘if England and we were to be disjointed even once, it would be of great disadvantage to all of his Majesty’s affairs’.⁸³ William of Orange concluded that if war was to be declared against Scotland, the English should clarify whether they would be willing to ‘declare against France sincerely, by virtue of the past treaties’, a criticism of the way in which the English had declared war—not to honour the treaties but as a response to Sir Thomas Stafford’s taking of Scarborough Castle, seemingly with French funds.⁸⁴ The Count of Egmont expressed concern about the disadvantages that would result from the declaration for the inhabitants of Flanders, Holland, Zeeland and the maritime coasts, and Viglius, president of the council, put together a list of pros and cons.⁸⁵ All sides were trying to protect their interests. England wished to retrieve honour and cause damage to an old enemy; the Flemish and the Dutch sought to maintain trade with Scotland and their right to use the Scottish fisheries. The exchange between D’Assonleville, the English councillors and the king went on for a few months before Philip finally ordered his Flemish envoy to travel to Scotland.⁸⁶ The desired effect was obtained on 10 February 1558, when Mary of Guise wrote a letter of apology to Philip. Although she claimed that ‘injury’ had also been inflicted by the English, Mary rejoiced that ‘friendship and peace’ (‘amicitia et pace’) had been restored.⁸⁷ Upon D’Assonleville’s return to London, however, Feria thought that, despite the Scots’ fair words, it was all a ploy to win time and prepare their next move.⁸⁸ In April, the matter was still hotly debated even though the Scots had removed their forces from the borders. Feria explained that the queen and the English were waiting for Philip to make his final decision, but he believed that Mary and the councillors were right and that it would eventually be necessary to declare war against Scotland.⁸⁹

After Egmont’s decisive victory against the French at Gravelines on 13 July 1558, Philip had more flexibility to calm English fears. He instructed D’Assonleville to tell the queen and council that, despite the disadvantages that would ensue, he was ready to declare war if the English would abide by the treaty of 1543 and come to the aid of the Low Countries should they require it.⁹⁰ When Philip sent these instructions he was fully aware that peace negotiations with France would soon commence—as they duly did in September—and therefore that the declaration would not be made. In the meantime, he had prevented the English from acting independently and making a unilaterial declaration of war against Scotland. Despite his English councillors’ protestations, and their understandable desire to be supported by their king in the age-old conflict with Scotland, Philip had managed to avoid opening up another warfront on the Anglo-Scottish border, he had convinced the Scots to withdraw their forces—even if Feria, Mary and the English were right that their intention had only been to do so temporarily—and he had protected his Flemish and Dutch subjects from the negative economic effects that war against Scotland would have entailed. At the same time, he had highlighted to his English subjects that international support came at a cost, and that the Flemish and Dutch could not be expected to abide by the treaties of the 1540s if the English were not ready to do the same.

IV

England and Spain had long possessed political cultures that enabled royal councils to advise the monarch, a practice that had crystallised in the political systems of both crowns in the fourteenth century. By virtue of the Spanish Crown’s expansion under Ferdinand and Isabel, and later under Charles V, the Spanish conciliar system had become a much more complex one than the English; a reflection of the intricate nature of the composite monarchy that Philip had inherited, and of which England became a part after his marriage to Queen Mary I. Yet, however different the systems had become, they still shared the same raison d’être. Both ascribed importance to the councillors’ assumed politike philia, which the king ought to reciprocate, and to the principle that councils should include members of the three sections of society that knew what was best for the body politic: the clergy, the nobility and the urban patriciate, as thinkers such as Felipe de la Torre and Fadrique Furió Ceriol emphasised. All these elements were present in the foundation of the select council by Philip in the late summer of 1555, and the creation of this new body was immediately acknowledged by both Queen Mary and her principal adviser, Cardinal Pole. The select council was not a fanciful stratagem to satisfy King Philip’s ego, but a very real change in the processes of policy-making in the kingdom of England. It was, indeed, in Glyn Redworth’s phrase, a substantial ‘constitutional innovation’, modelled after the Castilian council of state.

The epistolary activity of the king and his council amply demonstrates this. Their exchanges were frequent and significant, part of Philip’s wider network of communications with the territories he ruled in absentia. It is important to remember that in the late 1550s these included the kingdoms of Spain too. Most of the business discussed by the king and his English councillors related to commercial and diplomatic issues—essential components of Philip and Mary’s monarchical project—but Philip also intervened in more practical matters, such as the state of the English fleet, or in affairs that directly affected the reputation of the English Crown—and, therefore, Philip’s—such as the dismissal of Anne of Cleves’s wayward servants. The fact that most of these matters were either not handled by the privy council, or reached the latter only when operational tasks were necessary, clarifies the essential role that the select council played during Philip’s reign and its strategic importance to the government of England. It is also proof not only that Philip was interested in English affairs, but also that he kept abreast of the latest developments in the kingdom. There are indications, as the Plunket case seems to suggest, that he took a personal interest in Irish affairs too.

Disagreements, misunderstandings and royal rejection of the council’s advice should not be interpreted as failure, but as demonstrations of the role that the select council was supposed to play. It was the councillors’ business to exercise political friendship by advising Philip, who, reciprocating such politike philia, was obliged by the venerable principles of the conciliar system to listen to and appreciate their advice, even if not necessarily to take it. The unresolved matter of the privileges of the Hansa shows as much. In a composite monarchy, the interests of England were not the only interests to be taken into account. The king’s refusal to allow English commercial ventures in São Jorge da Mina, in contravention of the Treaty of Tordesillas, and his handling of Anglo-Scottish hostilities both bring to light the role of councils as advisory boards and fora for debate, but they also place England and Ireland firmly within the increasingly globalised Spanish Monarchy. Not only did Philip send Spanish and Flemish envoys to deal with political matters in England and Scotland, he also sought the advice of councillors from three of his territories—England, the Low Countries and Spain—to disentangle the conflict with the Scots. It was an unmistakable statement of the integration of England into the conciliar structure of the composite Spanish Monarchy.

Footnotes

Appendix I

The Foundational Document of the Select Council (British Library, Cotton Titus B. II, fo. 160r)

Appendix II

Communications between King Philip and the Select Council

N.B. The letters preserved in the National Archives are mostly fair copies and do not specify the name of the council. The letters preserved in the Archivo General de Simancas, however, are marked as being to or from the ‘consejo escogido’, which shows that the distinction between the select and the privy councils was clearly established.