Spin doctor of conscience? The royal confessor and the Christian prince

Abstract

This article examines the role of royal confessors as counsellors in early modern France and Spain. The starting point is the normative concept of the confessor within Bellarmine's theory of the Principe Christiano, which draws a model for the confessor as anti‐courtier or prophet. After examining how the understanding of royal sins developed in the theological and political context of sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century Catholicism, the article focuses on the practical involvement of confessors in political counselling. It argues that in the long run the participation of ecclesiastics in political councils did not lead to a ‘theologization’ of politics, but rather to a secularization of the ecclesiastics. The confessor as a person of confidence is finally examined in competition with another important counsellor of early modern monarchs: the favourite. On account of their self‐understanding rooted in Bellarmine's model, confessors tended to become part of the opposition to royal favourites. Finally, I demonstrate the reasons for the confessor's decline as a counsellor from 1650 onwards. This was the result of a material and methodological uncertainty crisis in moral theology as well as of a gradual tendency towards the privatization of (the monarch's) conscience rooted in Augustinian and Jansenism.