Writing to the King: Women’s Petitions and Politics in the Spanish Empire

As Geoffrey Parker and others have noted, the Habsburg kings relied heavily on writing to rule the Spanish empire. The petition system was an important feature of this written dimension of politics. Far from absent monarchs, the petition system allowed the Habsburg kings to hear and address the needs of their people from across the globe. This paper will examine the petition that Leocadia de Illescas, a Spanish widow living in the Philippines, sent to Philip IV in 1634. As the widow of a soldier, Illescas was entitled to her husband’s pension in the form of one-thousand shares of indigenous tribute. As Illescas described in her petition to the king, however, the governor of the island had taken four hundred of her laborers to carry out work for the king. Although Philip could have easily dismissed Illescas’s petition, he did not. He asked the governor for further information on the widow’s circumstances. Indeed, in a world where Spanish political thinkers framed the king’s legitimacy in opposition to Machiavelli’s rigid and secular prince, Philip could not ignore letters from his subjects. Doing so would go against his role as a merciful and Christian king. Accordingly, although social dictates discouraged women from traveling outside of their communities and prevented their involvement in political matters, the petition system allowed women to project themselves to the royal court in Madrid, trusting that his duties as good ruler would compel the king to listen to them as his subjects. In this way, women were able to use their petitions to leave an imprint on the politics of the Spanish empire.