This book takes a closer look at an episode in Anglo-Spanish relation that was completely unknown to me, but is obviously familiar enough to historians to earn the epithet of the Spanish Match with capital letters. I assume the “cultural politics” of the subtitle refers to the mutual misunderstandings which marred and finally scuppered the negotiations. It is not really evident from the text, which requires intimate knowledge of the history of Stuart England and Habsburg Spain to be appreciated fully.
Most of his arguments are based on original documents, letters and state papers. There’s one odd blank, though: we learn virtually nothing about the Infanta. Redworth says once or twice that she opposed the proposed match, but he provides no source for it, only hearsay. I assume that she had little say over the matter, but I still find it odd that no documents revealing her stance on the affair are quoted. Are there none?
Still, I gained quite a lot of useful information from it. But I found the author’s judgments frequently over the top: four words in English as a salutation in a letter do not constitute sufficient evidence to characterise a Spaniard’s English as “erratic” (misspelling friend as freind is something that quite a lot of native speakers do, too, to this very day); there are other instances of this sort of remark. They left a bit of an unpleasant aftertaste.
ETA ( )