Christmas Every Day

1556

Accession of Philip II of Spain.

“I will not be the king of heretics”, proclaimed Philip Habsburg (1527-98), in his time King of Spain, Portugal, England and Ireland (briefly), the Netherlands, southern Italy, North and South America, trading ports in Africa, India and East Asia and the Philippine Islands. Ruler of a vastly wealthy empire, he spent his country into bankruptcy trying to exterminate Protestantism in Europe and drive Muslim navies out of the Mediterranean.

Born the son of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor who confronted Martin Luther, Philip was raised in Spain as a devoted Catholic. He was highly intelligent, cautious and suspicious, growing to manhood during the European religious wars when he did his utmost to confront Protestantism in all his realms and among his neighbours as well. After his first marriage to a Portuguese princess ended in her death, Philip was persuaded in 1554 to marry a cousin, Mary I of England, despite her being a decade older than he. The marriage produced no children, engendered a good deal of anti-Spanish sentiment and cost England its last remaining continental possession, Calais. When Mary died in 1558 Philip’s authority in England ended; his courtship of Mary’s sister Elizabeth was deftly avoided by the new queen.

In 1555 Charles V retired and divided his holdings between his brother Ferdinand and Philip. Ferdinand received the Holy Roman Empire and promptly agreed to a religious truce with German Protestants; Philip received the rest of Charles’s lands and vowed to wipe out Protestantism wherever he found it. This resulted in expensive wars in France where he sided with the Catholic League against the Valois kings, against England ( a war fought largely at sea), and against the Dutch Calvinist rebels and their German supporters. In the Mediterranean Philip’s navies battled Islamic pirate lords along the Barbary coast and their Turkish masters, Suleiman the Magnificent and his successors.

Philip failed to halt Protestantism in either England, against which he launched three great armadas, or the Netherlands where war raged for 80 years. He was a proponent of state-sponsored assassination and offered bounties for the death of his heretic enemies. His policy in France was not a total failure; though the Catholic League was defeated, the Protestant victor Henry of Navarre felt obliged to convert to Catholicism. Philip’s war on Islam was as unrelenting. At home he forced the descendants of Moorish converts to leave Spain, rendering the country purer in religion but poorer economically. In the Mediterranean, he lost some North African holdings but contributed to significant Turkish losses at Malta (1565) and Lepanto (1571). All this was accomplished at enormous financial cost to Spain which began a century of decline after Philip’s death.