Philip II, King of Spain

PHILIP II, King of Spain. - B. at Valladolid on 21 May 1527 to Charles V and Elizabeth of Portugal.

Besides his own mother, he had as teachers d. Juan de Zuniga and d. Juan Martínez Siliceo; from his father he received his political and diplomatic education, in which he made his first attempts when, in 1543, he took over the government during an absence of Charles V. In 1554 he went to England to marry Queen Mary the Catholic; but this marriage did not have the lasting political effect that the Emperor expected, because F. had no child by Mary, and the English succession fell, as is well known, to Elizabeth (1558). In 1556, when Charles V abdicated, F. had already been invested with the duchy of Milan, the Kingdom of Naples and Flanders. The separation of the Spanish crown from the imperial one initially eased the very grave tasks inherited from his father, all the more so since the German princes had never been willing to recognize him as king of the Romans. With the peace of Cateau-Cambrésis the duel between France and Spain came to an end, and to the latter fell the tasks of a preponderant power. But if this situation reached its climax with the annexation of Portugal in 1580, its very weight was later to make it collapse. F. moved the court and with it the center of all his affairs to Madrid; indeed in 1561 he had construction of the Escorial begun, and from that sort of palace-monastery he regulated his many affairs; the administration was based on eleven councils; but the king, who never took part in them, then examined everything with meticulous zeal and exhausting activity, and consequently with a slowness often harmful to the dispatch of business.

F. II regarded his sovereignty as a mission entrusted to him by God for the good of his peoples and the defense of Catholicism, of which he considered himself the most disinterested champion. He was seconded in this by the conviction of the Spanish clergy, which had remained immune to the contamination of the new doctrines that had broken the spiritual unity of Europe; indeed it regarded its own nation as the only one that had remained faithful to traditional Catholicism and was capable, once political unity had been restored, of providing for a new ordering of Europe, for which political power was to check and overcome the overbearing position attained by the Protestants.

A sincere believer, F. II could not but be a convinced supporter of the Catholic reform, and he demonstrated this in particular during the third period of the Council of Trent, intervening to direct the activity of his bishops in this sense. Likewise he concerned himself with the spread of Catholicism in the overseas countries over which Spanish sovereignty extended. For example, in 1567 he asked St. Francis Borgia for Jesuit missionaries for Peru and provided for them with very great liberality; he did the same in 1571 with the Jesuits sent to Mexico. To Francisco Toledo, in 1568 viceroy of Peru, F. II effectively entrusted « la doctrina y conversion de los naturales »; he did not, however, accept Gregory XIII's proposal to establish an apostolic nuncio for the Spanish possessions in America, wishing to maintain his own exclusive control over those regions. F. II showed a similar interest in the missions in the East, patronizing the bishopric erected by Sixtus V in Japan in 1588 and promoting the missions of the Dominicans and Franciscans in the Philippines. Convinced that in Rome the work of reform was not being provided for with due zeal and that his political directives were not sufficiently appreciated, he did not at times refrain from decided opposition to the measures of the Holy See; while the latter did not intend to yield its own rights, and this was seen particularly on the occasion of the controversies regarding Bartolomé Carranza, archbishop of Toledo, tried by the Spanish Inquisition supported by the king, when Rome reserved the sentence to itself and F. II was even threatened with excommunication. Another dangerous dispute between Spain and the Holy See was the one that arose over the attitude of the governor of Milan, duke of Albuquerque, toward St. Charles Borromeo in matters of jurisdiction. But the most serious cause of conflict was the one that arose following the promulgation of the bull In coena Domini (1568), which stirred up very fierce questions in the kingdom of Naples because of the refusal of the exequatur appended to it by the Collateral Council. These jurisdictional disputes nearly compromised the expedition then being prepared against the Turks. Fortunately the anti-Ottoman problem prevailed, and the enterprise was carried out, culminating in the battle of Lepanto (7 Oct. 1571).

But alongside this victory the reign of F. II also saw defeats. The revolt of the Netherlands, rebelling against Spain's fiscal and religious policy, was never again to give the king peace, not even after Alexander Farnese had resubjugated the southern provinces; for the seven northern provinces, joined in the Union of Utrecht (1579), were to continue the struggle under the leadership of the Orange (until their independence was recognized).

While this exhausting duel continued, F. II tried to interfere in the religious wars that agitated France, in order to secure, through Catholic victory, an influence beyond the Pyrenees. In like manner he clashed with England. The quarrel reached its most dramatic phase when the question of Mary Stuart led him to take the field. But the Spanish fleet destined to sail up the Thames and violate the English capital, the famous armada invencible, composed of 130 ships, was destroyed first by the storm and then by the enemy (27 June 1588), and it was instead Cadiz's lot to suffer the shame and damage of the destructions caused there by the English fleet. Meanwhile, once the long religious crisis in France had been resolved by Henry of Bourbon, F. was forced to recognize the new state of affairs and to accept the peace of Vervins (2 May 1598). The king's constitution held out a few months longer against the immense exhaustion to which it had been subjected. He died at the Escorial on 13 Sept. 1598 (Clement VIII, in the allocution of 9 Oct. 1598, recalled his services to Catholicism).

The agitated life of this long reign is entirely connected with the grave demands that its structure imposed. Immense in extent, it was weakened by the dispersion of its parts; while mastery of the seas was contested by the new and overbearing English advance, and, in the Mediterranean, by the Turks. In Spain, to all this was added that economic and social crisis which would grow under his successors. Add to this the turbulence of Aragon, which never tolerated the king's Castilian policy. Yet this beginning of decline was accompanied, besides the splendor of the court, by intellectual and artistic brilliance, and there clearly took shape, on a European politico-religious plane, one of the most solid fulcrums of the Catholic counter-offensive against the Protestant world. - See plate LXXXVI.

Carlo De Frede