Charles I, the ‘Protestant Party,’ the Palatinate and a Franco-Stuart Alliance – 1636-9

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article considers the foreign policy of Charles I towards France between 1636 and 1639. Against the backdrop of the Thirty Years War, Robert Sidney, second earl of Leicester, was dispatched to Paris in May 1636 to negotiate an anti-Habsburg Franco-Stuart alliance to aid in the restitution of the king’s nephew, Charles I Louis, the dispossessed Prince Elector Palatine, to his dignities and lands, which had been lost in the early 1620s. The article argues that, in the second half of the 1630s, Charles I’s foreign policy was pro-French and not pro-Spanish. This necessitates a significant revision of our understanding of Stuart foreign and domestic policy in this period. It greatly enhanced the risk of war with Spain. It was also initially backed by his influential queen, Henriette Marie and, through-out the second half of the 1630s, by the powerful Northumberland-Leicester circle at court, thereby bolstering the king’s Personal Rule.