The Empress, the Queen, and the Nun: Women and Power at the Court of Philip III of Spain.
Jago, Charles J.
The Empress, the Queen, and the Nun: Women and Power at the Court
of Philip III of Spain, by Magdalena S. Sachez. Baltimore, Maryland,
John Hopkins University Press, 1998. xii, 267 pp. $39.95 U.S.
The common understanding of a period of history, especially a
period so understudied as the reign of Philip III of Spain (1598-1621),
tends to the reductionist. Hence Philip III has gone down in history as
a pious and ineffectual monarch, thoroughly dominated by his wastrel privado, the Duke of Lerma, who squandered the wealth and prestige of
the great empire bequeathed to him by his Habsburg predecessors, the
Emperor Charles V and Philip II.
Magdalena Sanchez does little to challenge this portrayal of Philip
III, but she does provide more insight into the style and functioning of
his court, and particularly into the political role played by royal
women. Her three protagonists are the Empress Maria of Austria
(1528-1603), daughter of Charles V, wife of the Emperor Maximilian II of
Austria, and Philip III's aunt; Margaret of the Cross, her
daughter; and Margaret of Austria (1584-1611) from the Styrian branch of
the Habsburg family who married Philip III at age fifteen and died at
age twenty-six after having borne him eight children, including the
future Philip IV. It is the author's contention that historians
have been so fixated on the Duke of Lerma's domination over Philip
III and by the role of male-controlled royal councils in the development
of government policy that they have been guilty of overlooking the
political importance of these royal women. Furthermore, she argues that
their influence was sufficiently potent to gradually tilt Spain toward
the pro-Austrian policy that emerged in 1618, on the occasion of the
revolt in Bohemia, the commencement of the Thirty Years War. In short,
their influence gradually eroded Lerma's control over Philip III
and undermined his policy of Spanish isolationism and peace with France.
Her thesis, while suggestive, remains largely unproved. It is
obviously a stretch of standard historical logic to think that the
influence of an Empress aunt who died in 1603, and of a wife who died in
1611, had a determining influence on the decisions made by a king in
1618, years later, when geopolitical circumstances had significantly
changed. The evidence adduced by Sanchez to persuade her reader to this
point is quite thin, not to mention disjointed. But in her defence, the
author would contend that the very thinness of the evidence reinforces
the significance of her findings. Because women exercised their power
indirectly, through informal channels, in ways that were both overlooked
by contemporary male commentators and largely invisible to subsequent
historians using traditional investigative techniques, their political
importance has been ignored and their complex personalities overly
simplified if not misunderstood.
Her study, consequently, focuses on the ways in which these three
royal women exercised their influence on the king. By being with him at
prayer, by occupying him during his frequent visits to their convents,
by working through intermediaries -- particularly their confessors, by
advocating family interests, by exploiting his concern and sympathy when
they were ill, in these and other ways they brought their issues to
Philip's attention. Indeed Sanchez maintains that these women and
their supporters were so effective as to constitute a kind of anti-Lerma
faction, or "personal network" (p.38) that persistently eroded
the privado's power. And she finds the proof of their power in
Lerma's various strategies to control and monitor their activities.
As interesting as these insights are, it is hardly a revelation
that court women, even those described by their hagiographers as pious
and other-worldly, had political interests and concerns, especially
during an age when monarchies were dynastic and politics were familial.
Sanchez provides a very useful service in shedding light on how and
through whom these three particular women influenced politics, but in
this reviewer's opinion she overstates both the significance of
their influence and the significance of her research findings.
In the introduction to her book, the author notes that several
chapters have appeared before as separate publications. The chapters are
thematic and tend to stand very well on their own as interesting studies
of the role of women in court politics. However, when knit together in
this book, they give rise to much repetition of fact and of argument. A
shorter book, more tightly organized around the theme of these three
Austrian women operating in the court of Philip III as effective
counterweights to Lerma's power, would have been more compelling
and perhaps more convincing also.
Charles J. Jago
The University of Northern British Columbia
