Since dynastic alliances always required negotiations between two royal courts, we can understand them only by adopting a dual perspective. This is particularly challenging in the case of the Anglo-French alliance of 1625 because the politics of both kingdoms had recently become unsettled, producing fluid situations in which religious ideology and calculations of national interest interacted with manoeuvres over power. Biases in contemporary sources and oversimplifications by later historians also cloud perspectives. Historians have too often interpreted the period through reference to fixed ideological positions and overarching narratives, involving Stuart conflicts with parliament or the state-building of Cardinal Richelieu, without paying sufficient attention to constantly changing circumstances and tactical political calculations. Although recent revisionist studies have considerably complicated understandings of both French and British history in the 1620s, integrating this new scholarship with original research to produce fresh interpretations of international relations presents a daunting challenge.

In this chapter I propose to plunge into the thicket of court politics in both London and Paris in the mid 1620s, in an effort to explain how a marriage alliance was negotiated and why it collapsed in less than two years. But it will first be necessary to set the stage by briefly reviewing Stuart relations with both Spain and France during the previous fifteen years. James I's diplomacy, particularly in the years 1618–23, has traditionally been interpreted as a reflection of his ideological commitment to peace, belief in monarchical legitimacy and pro-Spanish instincts. Although this view, which has roots in critical contemporary comments, contains elements of truth, it seriously oversimplifies. James preferred peace to war and would have welcomed a marriage alliance with Europe's mightiest dynasty and the fat Spanish dowry that it promised to bring. But his aversion to conflict with the Habsburgs can be exaggerated. In 1618, the year in which negotiations for the Spanish match commenced, he supported the more warlike Calvinist party at the Synod of Dort in the Netherlands, encouraged an alliance between Venice, Savoy and the Dutch to counter Habsburg power in Italy, and toyed with schemes to back alternative candidates to the Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand in the next election of a Holy Roman Emperor.

LIKE most historians, those who specialise in past cultures must normally rely primarily on written and printed sources. Although works of art and music, archaeological remains and other forms of material evidence can be pressed into service, most of our documents normally consist of texts and often especially of poems, plays and other works of ‘literature’. Through this material we try to reconstruct beliefs and practices that, in most cases, depended far less on writing and print than performances, rituals, oral discussions and other transient events that we can no longer directly witness. Faced with this predicament it is natural to hope that if we only read carefully and ingeniously enough, we can somehow gain access to every aspect of a vanished culture through words on a page. Especially if the work under examination is a rich and compelling one, and the scholar studying it a trained and dexterous reader, the range of latent historical meanings can seem almost boundless. Social customs, ideologies and even deep economic structures can all be discovered embedded within the text, allowing a total history to be reconstructed on the basis of literary analysis.

There is nothing intrinsically illegitimate about this methodology, which resembles all forms of historical scholarship in its attempt to extrapolate over-arching interpretations from patchy and incomplete bodies of documentary evidence. Works of literature always refer beyond themselves to a larger cultural universe that originally surrounded them. As Stephen Greenblatt has rightly argued, authors never truly create texts out of some mysterious inner quality of genius. They appropriate and manipulate materials borrowed from their surroundings, including language itself as well as meanings latent within material objects, political institutions and social customs. By examining these appropriations we can approach a text as a repository of past cultural attitudes and point of entry into the world that its writer and his original audience once inhabited.

But although valid in principle, the enterprise of reconstructing history through textual analysis raises several vexing methodological issues. To begin with, the perspective offered by a literary source may be incomplete, biased or misleading in significant ways, and unless we have some independent basis for controlling such distortions we risk being seriously misled.