The Empress, the Queen, and the Nun: Women and Power at the Court of Philip III of Spain (review)

The Empress, the Queen, and the Nun: Women and Power at the Court of Philip III of Spain. By Magdalena S. Sánchez (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) 268 pp. $39.95.

According to Sánchez, the Austrian Habsburgs possessed effective advocates at the Spanish court of Philip III in the persons of María, the dowager empress, her daughter--the professed nun Margaret of the Cross (by virtue of that special Habsburg marital magic, both first cousin and aunt to the king of Spain)--and Margaret of Austria, Philip's queen. No less real for being wielded under the guises of familial devotion and piety, female influence at the court moved the king toward the closer alliance with his Austrian cousins that led, by 1618, to Spanish intervention in the Empire. Traditionally Baltasar de Zúñiga has been seen as the principal promoter of this Central European policy, and Sánchez does not disagree. But she argues that the empress, the queen, and the nun paved the way for Zúñiga's success by keeping before the king a diplomatic agenda counter to the preferred policies of the Duke of Lerma, his favorite. She relies heavily on García García in depicting Lerma as a partisan of disengagement from broader European commitments to allow retrenchment in the monarchy's Mediterranean heartland. ¹ For Sánchez, the opposition of the Habsburg women to Lerma went beyond disagreements about diplomacy to encompass alarm at the privado's domination of Philip III and disgust at the corruption of his regime. She recasts the factional alignment of the court to place her protagonists at the heart of conflict with Lerma and his placemen.

That Sánchez's argument is broadly persuasive is testimony to her success in delineating the interpersonal strategies used by the Habsburg women to sway decision makers, and in locating the physical spaces where they could operate politically. She argues that the topography of the court must be extended to include the convents (notably the Descalzas Reales, home to Empress María and Margaret of the Cross) visited almost daily by the pious king and queen. Family ties entitled these women to speak, and their evident religious devotion lent their words extra weight. Nor did they shrink from psychological manipulation; in an ingenious chapter, Sánchez demonstrates that the Habsburg women exploited to political ends the concerned attention they received during pregnancy, illness, or bouts of melancholy. Disproving the notion that these were mere feminine wiles rather than the maneuvers of political virtuosi, Sánchez notes that Lerma, too, was notorious for conveniently timed depressions and, when ill, for extorting gifts from well-wishers.

Her direct evidence of political influence is necessarily less convincing. The Habsburg women were empowered by familial access, not official position. They communicated their views, for the most part, through conversation or through male intermediaries--like Juan de Borja, Empress María's mayordomo, or Hans Khevenhüller, the imperial ambassador--rather than in the written consultas amd memoranda of councillors. When Sánchez does have clear documentary evidence, she tends to overuse it, leading to a certain redundancy in the text. For example, she twice recounts Margaret of the Cross' precise knowledge of Spanish subsidies to her brother the Archduke Matthias, and also repeats her account of the nun's links to a book critical of Lerma's regime (108, 123; 109-110, 148). Sometimes she is forced to proceed by assertion rather than proof--for instance, when she argues that the queen herself, rather than Richard Haller, her confessor, was the prime instigator of opposition to Lerma in Margaret of Austria's household (103, 143-144). In fact, despite her undoubted access to Philip III, the queen is the least convincing political actor among Sánchez's protagonists...