Interactions et transferts ent Diplomacy and the religious quest The paper examines the dilemmas of two leaders of different faiths, who negotiated with each other despite their religious differences, and who ultimately achieved a sometimes tense but nonetheless workable alliance. As such, it offers a case-study of the issues and challenges that faced cross-cultural and cross-confessional diplomacy in mid-seventeenth-century Europe. I am very grateful to all the participants on those two occasions, especially Bernard Cottret and Lauric Henneton, for their helpful comments, and also to the two anonymous readers for E-rea for their valuable suggestions.
I will examine in particular the dilemma of two leaders of different faiths, who negotiated with each other despite their religious differences, and who ultimately achieved an alliance. This involved overcoming, or at least neutralising, particular issues of concern, such as English treatment of Catholics, and French treatment of Huguenots, and focusing instead on areas of shared strategic interest, especially the benefits of an alliance against Spain.
How, in short, were two such apparently contrasted powers as a Catholic monarchy recovering from the Frondes, and a Protestant republic created in the wake of the execution of Charles I, able to make common cause? The great narratives of S. Gardiner Gardiner ; and C. Firth Firth ; contain extensive accounts of the relations between Cromwell and Mazarin, but over the course of the twentieth century, as diplomatic history fell more and more out of fashion, research in this area has been fitful at best.
In recent work on the Cromwellian Protectorate, foreign policy remains the least well covered aspect Coward; Little. When it has been discussed, the primary focus has usually been on examining the formulation of foreign policy, and the motives that lay behind it, rather than on the conduct of diplomacy Little and Smith; Pincus; Crabtree; Prestwich; Jones. The fullest accounts in English are by Philip A. Knachel, Charles P.
Korr and Timothy Venning: however, none of these works looks in detail at the negotiations leading up to the treaties of and , or at the political and religious difficulties that beset them Knachel; Korr; Venning. This article thus has a twofold purpose: to explore an area that is relatively understudied in the existing scholarly literature, and to examine these negotiations as a case-study of Anglo-French interactions during the period of the ascendancies of Mazarin and Cromwell.
