The Poetics of Diplomatic Appeasement in the Early Modern Era

Abstract

The portrait of Queen Elizabeth receiving Dutch ambassadors in 1585¹ illustrates both the complex form and content of early modern diplomacy and its conception of peace. The ambassadors had come to negotiate England’s help against Spanish rule in the Netherlands. Elizabeth was offered election as countess of Holland and was thus faced with the possibility of an open diplomatic and military conflict with Spain. Although Elizabeth did not altogether dismiss the Dutch embassy, she opted for a peace mediation with Spain instead.² As John Watkins and Carole Levin explain, Elizabeth was still influenced by ‘an older diplomatic model, in which all Europeans were imagined to be capable of working toward peace in common hope of salvation.’³ Such commitment to European peace is illustrated by Elizabeth opting for the ‘Burgundian solution’ which guaranteed Spanish rule over the Netherlands, minus Spain’s military presence there, while preserving Dutch traditional liberties and, more particularly, liberty of conscience.⁴ The painting and the decades of diplomatic negotiations that it illustrates testify to the Elizabethan attempt at preserving the consensus christianus, a pursuit prolonged in the Jacobean policy of appeasement. Monarchs, ambassadors, diplomatic figures of all creeds and nationalities struggled with fostering, or simply maintaining, peace. However, the opening years of the seventeenth century were faced with a daunting, and sadly familiar, threat: the rejection of the European consensus.