page_title: Spanish match
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Spanish match / Background
caption_attribution_description: Portrait of Princess Elizabeth Stuart, later Queen of Bohemia, called the Winter Queen. Elizabeth's standing collar of reticella is worked with the Royal coat of arms with its lion and unicorn supporters. She wears a gown of Italian silk brocade. The black armband is thought to be a sign of mourning for her brother Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales who died in 1612. (Notes after Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England, Yale, 2005.)
context_page_description: The Spanish match was a proposed marriage between Prince Charles, the son of King James I of Great Britain, and Infanta Maria Anna of Spain, the daughter of Philip III of Spain. Negotiations took place over the period 1614 to 1623, and during this time became closely related to aspects of British foreign and religious policy, before breaking down completely.
  The policy, unpopular with England's Protestant House of Commons, where the recent Anglo-Spanish War had not been forgotten, was initiated during the embassy to England of Gondomar, who arrived in London in 1614 with the offer that Spain would not interfere with James's troubled rule in Ireland if James would restrain the English "privateers" in Spanish American waters. Further, he proposed a marriage alliance, offering a dowry of £500,000, which seemed especially attractive to James after the failure of the Parliament of 1614 to provide him with the financial subsidies he requested.
context_section_description: A Spanish marriage for Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, Charles's elder brother who had died in 1612, had been proposed by his mother Anne of Denmark. After his death she supported the idea of a Spanish marriage for her daughter Elizabeth, but in 1613 Elizabeth married a prominent Protestant prince. For her second son Charles, there were candidate marriages mooted from Savoie and Tuscany, as well as Spain and France. From 1614 to her own death in 1619, Queen Anne gave some support to a Spanish match, preferring at times a French marriage, and recognising that the Spanish proposals were entirely based on self-interest. A point brought up against it in 1620 was that the previous "Spanish matches", those that had brought Catherine of Aragon to England, and Philip II of Spain to marry Queen Mary, had in the popular memory turned out badly.
caption: Portrait of Princess Elizabeth Stuart, later Queen of Bohemia, called the Winter Queen. The black armband is thought to be a sign of mourning for her brother Henry Frederick
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