Philip II of Spain



Philip II (1527-1598) was King of Spain from 1556 until his death in 1598. In his lifetime he was married four times, though he never divorced; his second wife was English Queen Mary Tudor. During his marriage to Mary, he briefly held the title King of England.

Philip, a member of the Hapsburg Royal Family, was devoutly and militantly Catholic. He spent his career mostly attempting to contain and defeat the spread of Protestantism in Europe, though he became involved in wars against the Catholic kingdoms of France and Portugal and the Islamic sultanate of Turkey.

Philip built up a considerable empire for Spain in his career, one which encompassed much of the New World as well as the Netherlands, where Spain was engaged in an ongoing war against an intractable Protestant and Dutch nationalist resistance. In 1585, support for the rebels by English Queen Elizabeth gave Philip a causus belli against England. He dispatched the Spanish Armada three years later; the Armada defeated the English fleet, relieved a second Spanish fleet which had been hemmed in by a Dutch blockade, and landed a Spanish army on English soil (thus earning Philip a million gold ducats from the Vatican treasury, a sum promised to him by Pope Gregory XIII in exchange for overthrowing Elizabeth and paid by Gregory's successor, Pope Sixtus V). The Spanish army defeated its amateur English counterpart and deposed Elizabeth, imprisoning her in the Tower of London. Philip ordered that Elizabeth be kept alive, but made it clear that he did so out of mercy, that he would be justified in killing Elizabeth as vengeance for her own execution of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots.

Philip installed his daughter, Isabella, and her husband and cousin, Albert, as Queen and King of England. He maintained a large Spanish military presence in England to support this Hapsburg dynasty throughout his life.

He died in 1598 and was succeeded by his son, Philip III. The English playwright William Shakespeare had been contracted to write an English language play called King Philip to glorify his life and achievements and inspire loyalty to the Spanish Empire on the part of its English subjects. However, Shakespeare instead performed the English nationalistic play Boudicca, which inspired his English audience to overthrow Isabella and Albert and expel Spanish forces from England.