While much has been written about British support for Republican Spain during the Spanish Civil War, this thesis offers a novel framework through which to consider this topic. It explores the popular humanitarian response to ‘Spain’ within the context of Britain’s bourgeoning civil society and popular political culture, following the advent of mass democracy in 1928. There has perhaps been a recent tendency amongst historians to underplay the breadth of British support for the Spanish Republic, and to suggest that the humanitarian character of this support was, very often, indicative of a detached and apolitical response. This thesis asks why the Spanish Republic had the unique appeal that it did, examining how people in Britain framed the conflict in Spain, and exploring what they did in practice in terms of raising humanitarian aid for, and awareness about, the Republican cause. In particular it does this by considering the response to ‘Spain’ within the peace movement, Co-operative movement and amongst British Christians. The thesis challenges the idea that many of those involved with the humanitarian campaigns saw Spain as a distant country and that they were detached from events there. It argues that, while political interpretations of the Spanish conflict were far from uniform, the plight and cause of the Republic resonated with notions of British identity in the 1930s, and with the crises that different groups and individuals perceived to be threatening their world order. It explores how the topic of non-intervention was debated within civil society and argues that support for this policy was not necessarily indicative of isolationism. It suggests that support for Republican Spain, even where it was largely ‘humanitarian’ in character, went alongside interest in the issues surrounding the conflict and is illustrative of a degree of both democratic engagement and popular internationalism within 1930s Britain.

A marriage between the English Prince and the Spanish Infanta was deemed desirable following the signing of the Anglo-Spanish peace treaty in London in 1604. After several years of tortuous negotiations, the match failed in 1624 and England declared war on Spain the following year. This thesis addresses the end of the Anglo-Spanish Match negotiations in the period 1617-1624 by placing reasons for its failure in the global context of European diplomacy and dynastic politics in the early seventeenth century. Traditional historiography has considered the failure of the marriage diplomacy as the inevitable consequence of religious differences and cultural misunderstandings between England and Spain. Consequently, scholars have only looked within Europe when investigating the end of the union. My research, however, depicts a more composite picture not only by expanding the geographical boundaries of the investigation but also by demonstrating the extent to which new imperial rivalries played a much greater role in the marriage diplomacy than has previously been recognised. In the first chapter, I discuss the notion of reason of state in the relationship between England and Spain at the beginning of the seventeenth century and I investigate the way in which the choice politically and/or economically most favourable was often taken regardless of religious considerations and increasingly in response to extra-European concerns. The body of the thesis is then dedicated to a few episodes when the imperial rivalry between England and the Iberian Peninsula influenced the end of the negotiations. In the second chapter, I look at Walter Raleigh’s second expedition to Guyana and the actions of the Spanish ambassador in London, Count of Gondomar, who asked that Raleigh should receive an exemplary punishment in order to maintain the marriage agreement after the English explorer had attacked Spanish settlements. In the following chapter, I move towards the East and analyse the taking of the Portuguese port of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf by the English East India Company in 1622. In doing so, I outline the complex dynamics underlying the union of the Iberian crowns (1580-1640) as well as the specific repercussions of this episode on the Infanta’s dowry to be given by Spain to England. The fourth chapter introduces a further key player in both European diplomacy and the imperial rivalry between Spain and England, which is to say the Dutch. By looking at the ‘massacre’ at Amboyna in 1623, I prove that the rivalry with the Dutch in the Spice Islands, and especially the executions at Amboyna, initially pushed King James to pursue the marriage alliance with the Spanish Habsburgs with even greater commitment. In the last chapter, I look back at Europe to discuss how the two composite monarchies reacted to the arrival at their respective courts of the news of recent episodes of conflict in the West and East Indies. This concluding chapter argues that the awareness in Madrid and London of what had happened in the Indies put additional burdens onto the already deteriorating marriage negotiations and fundamentally contributed to their failure. Thus, the thesis sheds light on a well-known episode of Anglo-Spanish relations by observing it through a new lens. As a result, I improve our traditional understanding of the end of Anglo-Spanish Match as well as of global connectedness in the early seventeenth century.