Canterbury, England. Keynote Lecture: The Flip Side: Stuart Politics and the Protestant North, 1603-1639

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This was a Keynote Lecture Early Stuart Politics: The Anglo-Spanish and Anglo-French Marriage Negotiations and their Aftermath, c.1604-1630.A three day conference on the rolle of diplomacy and politics in securing the ambitions of the House of Stuart in the early seventeenth century.

The Flip Side: Stuart Politics and the Protestant North, 1603-1639 The historical debate surrounding later Jacobean and early Carolinian diplomacy usually centres on the Spanish Match and the subsequent French marriage of Charles I. This paper contextualises these events in British diplomatic history by placing them into the milieu of a broader understanding of Stuart alliances, negotiations and interventions in Europe. These included the existing Stuart-Oldenburg alliance (Denmark-Norway) to which England was subsumed in 1603, but also a variety of less formal arrangements with Northern European powers such as Lutheran Sweden. When added to the various protestant leagues which followed Frederick V of the Palatinate’s acceptance of the Bohemian Crown in 1619 (this engaging the House of Stuart due to Frederick’s marriage with Princess Elisabeth), the Catholic marriage negotiations can be better understood. After all, while the subsequent wars with France and Spain collectively engaged some 16000 soldiers and sailors, the Stuart commitment to their other allies saw no less than 100,000 British subjects fight against the Habsburgs as allies alongside the powers of the Protestant North. The diplomatic consequences for the House of Stuart cannot be overstated, especially when the monarchy moved closer to the Catholic powers in the 1630s and numerous veterans of the northern alliances, those of the “Calvinist International”, returned to confront their king at the opening of the British Civil Wars. Through their actions, Stuart and British history would change forever.

Period	11 Apr 2014
Event title	Canterbury, England. Keynote Lecture: The Flip Side: Stuart Politics and the Protestant North, 1603-1639
Event type	Other
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