The Procurator General of the Castilian Assembly of the Clergy, 1592-1741

In early modern Europe, princes regularly convened representative institutions to obtain financial contributions. Some of these institutions, such as the Iberian Cortes, the English Parliament, or the French Estates General, were constitutional (i.e., they were sovereign representative bodies having their origin in the fundamental laws of the kingdom), whileothers, such as assemblies of the clergy or the Assembly of Notables, were extra-constitutional (i.e., they were not sovereign bodies and did not "represent" the kingdom but rather an estate or privileged group). In either case, rulers negotiated with representatives to determine the size of specific contributions and the period of payment. In turn, rulers generally made some concessions to these representatives. Once all the give and take was finished, princes dissolved the representative bodies and generally did not convene them again until the contribution just granted expired or a new contribution was necessary. Although these negotiations were often contentious, we should not automatically assume that kings and representative institutions were natural adversaries.¹ More importantly, the fact that several years often passed between assemblies should not lead scholars to equate the infrequency of meetings to the demise of representative politics. Otherwise, scholarship will be limited by entrenched views about the decline of representative institutions in early modern Europe and the victory of the centralizing state.² Such views suggest too narrow a sense of representation—one that many early modern Europeans would disagree with—and make the state into the political actor and not just one political actor among many (e.g., representative institutions, standing committees of representative bodies, cities, nobles, and clergy).³ To avoid these pitfalls, it might be best to examine how politics proceeded with and without formal meetings of representative institutions to understand the political developments in this period better. The state-building model, for example, does not explain why representatives themselves often opposed convening and how local institutions negotiated with the crown in lieu of an assembly. The Castilian kings clearly preferred negotiating directly with local institutions instead of national bodies, and, after 1666, most Castilians apparently preferred this method of negotiation as well.⁴ This shift from national to local institutions changed the form of constitutional and extra-constitutional interrelations in Castile, but it did not obviate the need for interlocutors between the crown and the people (whether nobles, corporate bodies, or cities).⁵

This paper focuses on how politics proceeded without formal meetings of representative institutions. Many representative bodies, such as the Iberian Cortes and the Bavarian parliament, established standing committees or permanent representatives at court.⁶ So even though they were not always in session, these representative institutions did not lack "representation" or the ability to safeguard their interests. Unfortunately, historians have often overlooked these permanent representatives and their role in the political process. To help fill in the gap in the historiography, I will examine the permanent representative or Procurator General of the Castilian Assembly of the Clergy. The office of Procurator General offers historians a new angle to examine the intertwining of politics, finance, and religion in early modern Castile. In particular, I will look at the creation of the position, the election of its holders, the duties of the Procurator General in Madrid, and his ability to represent the ecclesiastical estate.

By the early sixteenth century, the Castilian Assembly of the Clergy had become an important political institution in Castile. It met almost as often as the Cortes (parliament), and it provided the crown with just over 6% of royal income (670,000 ducados out of a total annual income of 10,750,000 ducados in 1621).⁷ The Assembly, therefore, was an institution that the crown depended on. The Assembly dates back to the Great Schism (1378-1415). Henry II (1369-1379) convened the bishops and cathedral chapters to sanction his political decision to break with Rome and to recognize the...