Philip II of Spain

Philip II was king of Spain from 1556 to 1598 and, from 1580, of Portugal as well, ruling the largest empire the world had yet seen, with lands in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. A tireless, secretive bureaucrat who governed by paperwork from his palace of El Escorial, he saw himself as the defender of Catholic Christendom. His reign brought a great victory over the Ottomans at Lepanto, but also the revolt of the Netherlands, the failure of the Armada against England, and repeated state bankruptcies.

Philip was born in Valladolid on 21 May 1527, the son of Emperor Charles V and Isabella of Portugal. Unlike his father, who had grown up in Flanders and spoke several languages, Philip was raised in Castile and remained Spanish in language, taste and outlook all his life. Charles trained him carefully, giving him written instructions that stressed piety, patience and distrust of advisers, and from 1543, when Philip was sixteen, left him as regent of Spain during his long absences. That year Philip married his cousin Maria Manuela of Portugal, who died in 1545 after giving birth to their son, Don Carlos.

In 1554 Philip married Mary I, the Catholic queen of England, eleven years his senior, and took the title of king of England for the length of the marriage. The match was unpopular with the English and produced no child; when Mary died in 1558 his English crown lapsed, and her half-sister Elizabeth I became queen.

Charles V abdicated in stages in 1555–1556. His brother Ferdinand took the Austrian lands and the imperial title, while Philip received Spain and its American empire, the Netherlands, Milan, Naples and Sicily. His armies defeated the French at St Quentin in 1557, and the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis of 1559 ended the long Italian Wars in Spain's favour. To seal the peace he married the French princess Elisabeth of Valois. In 1561 he settled his court permanently in Madrid, which from then on was Spain's capital.

Philip ruled his scattered realms through a system of councils, reading and annotating an enormous volume of reports himself. This earned him the name "the Prudent" but also a reputation for slowness. His great monument was El Escorial, a combined monastery, palace and royal mausoleum in the mountains north-west of Madrid, built between 1563 and 1584.

The Spanish Empire was a union of separate kingdoms, each with its own laws, and Philip often had to bargain with local assemblies. When Aragon resisted him in 1591 over the case of his fugitive former secretary Antonio Pérez, he sent in an army and had the kingdom's chief justice executed. Spain's wars were paid for by Castilian taxes and American silver, but expenses outran both, and the crown suspended payments to its bankers in 1557, 1560, 1575 and 1596.

His family life was marked by tragedy. His heir Don Carlos became mentally unstable and hostile to his father; Philip had him confined in 1568, and he died in custody that summer, which later gave rise to legends that the king had him killed. Elisabeth of Valois died the same year. His fourth wife, his niece Anna of Austria, bore the son who would succeed him as Philip III.

Philip treated the defence of Catholicism as the central purpose of his rule. The Inquisition was used against the small Protestant circles found in Spain in the late 1550s. In the former kingdom of Granada, measures against the customs and language of the Moriscos, Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity, provoked a great revolt in 1568, which was crushed by 1571; tens of thousands of Moriscos were then forcibly resettled across Castile.

In the Mediterranean he fought the Ottoman Empire and its North African allies. In 1571 a Holy League fleet of Spain, Venice and the papacy under his half-brother Don John of Austria destroyed most of the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto. The victory did not end Ottoman power, but it checked its advance at sea.

The Netherlands, rich and increasingly Protestant, resented Philip's heavy taxes, his persecution of heresy and his reliance on Spanish officials. After a wave of iconoclastic riots in 1566 he sent the Duke of Alba with an army; Alba's Council of Troubles condemned over a thousand people to death, including the counts of Egmont and Horn. Revolt broke out in 1568 under William of Orange and spread after 1572. Unpaid Spanish troops sacked Antwerp in 1576. In 1581 the northern provinces formally renounced Philip as their ruler, laying the foundations of the Dutch Republic. Philip had put a price on William's head, and in 1584 William was assassinated. The southern provinces were largely reconquered by Alessandro Farnese, but the war went on long after Philip's death.

When the young King Sebastian of Portugal died in Morocco in 1578 and his elderly successor followed in 1580, Philip, son of a Portuguese princess, claimed the throne. His army under Alba defeated the rival claimant at Alcântara and entered Lisbon, and the Portuguese Cortes accepted him as king in 1581. The union of the two crowns brought the Portuguese empire under his rule as well and lasted until 1640. On the other side of the world, the Philippines, named after him in the 1540s, were conquered from 1565, and Manila was founded in 1571.

Relations with England broke down over English support for the Dutch rebels, raids by English privateers on Spanish shipping, and the execution of the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1587. In 1588 Philip sent the Armada, about 130 ships, to escort an invasion army from the Netherlands across the Channel. English fireships and gunnery broke up its formation off Gravelines, the invasion never sailed, and storms wrecked many ships on the voyage home around Scotland and Ireland. Further armadas in 1596 and 1597 were also scattered by weather. In his last decade Philip also intervened in the French Wars of Religion against the Protestant Henry IV, with little result.

Philip died at El Escorial on 13 September 1598 after a long, painful illness, and was buried there. He left a vast but heavily indebted monarchy that remained the strongest power in Europe for several more decades. Protestant and Dutch propaganda painted him as a cruel fanatic, a picture that fed the "Black Legend" of Spanish cruelty; Spanish tradition remembered him as a devout and dutiful king. Historians today stress his diligence and the scale of the problems he faced, while recognising that his religious intolerance and overstretched ambitions contributed to the troubles of Spain in the century after him.