Geoffrey Parker (1) (1943–)

If you grew up in northern Europe, Philip II has to count as one of the most indispensable bogeymen in history. What would we do without the little shiver that goes down our spines whenever someone uses the words "inquisition" or "armada"? Who else came as close to reversing the reformation in England and the northern Netherlands? Who else was implicated in so many secret assassination plots at home and abroad?

But Philip is also the first ruler who can claim to have had an empire "on which show more the sun never sets", with a global spread of dominions and a length of time in power that comes pretty close to rivalling even Queen Victoria. Admittedly, he did even less to deserve it than she did - most of the hard work was done for him by his Hapsburg ancestors industriously marrying their cousins for generation after generation until there was practically nothing they weren't in line to inherit. Fortunately for everyone, Philip's one serious attempt to extend his realms by marriage himself was nullified by the early death of Mary Tudor. As Parker points out, if she'd lived as long as her sister did, or if she'd managed to produce children with Philip, that really would have been the end of the reformation in England, and probably in the Netherlands as well.

The interesting question, of course, is how someone who seems to have been an intelligent, well-educated (by the standards of princes) and cultivated ruler, and who had the vast resources of the Americas to draw on, as well as some of Europe's most sophisticated bureaucracies and intelligence networks and its most powerful army, managed to lose so many wars, to bankrupt his country twice and leave it depopulated and impoverished, and to fail so completely in his prime strategic goal of suppressing protestantism.

Parker looks in detail at the way Philip worked - his correspondence and daily routine, the committees he dealt with, the orders he sent and the reports he received, and so on - and seems to have come to the conclusion that he was essentially a middle-manager promoted above his level of competence. Philip wasted endless amounts of time on settling the detail of minor matters (and on his own pet projects, especially the Escorial) but didn't give clear policy direction on the big things, and hated delegating responsibility to the people he had appointed to run things on the spot. Despite 16th century postal delays, he was constantly trying to interfere with day-to-day matters in Brussels or Lisbon, resulting in confusion and delay and discouraging those around him from using their own initiative. And above all, he was convinced that he was doing God's work, so he was not particularly open to considering the possibility of failure or putting in place a "plan B". All of which sometimes means that this book starts reading like a 21st century management textbook instead of 16th century history...

But there's still plenty of period atmosphere around as well. There's a lot about Philip's relations with his father, his four wives, and his children (but the Don Carlos tragedy turns out to be less romantic than in Schiller's version!), there's a whole chapter on the murder of Juan de Escobedo and the subsequent cover-up, and more on the various plots to assassinate or marry Queen Elizabeth of England. Not much on culture, though - we have to be content with a couple of passing mentions of Cervantes. Philip doesn't seem to have been much interested in the arts much, apart from architecture, and anyway he obviously wouldn't have been a very good patron of the arts, since he always knew better than the experts...

This is Parker's third go at a biography of Philip II - the first one, which came out in 1978, remained in print in various editions until quite recently; then, in 2010 there was a colossal new scholarly life in Spanish, aptly titled Felipe II: la biografía definitiva and incorporating the fruits of vast amounts of digging in additional collections of state papers that had become accessible since the 70s; Imprudent King is essentially an abridged translation of the Spanish book, cut down to around 375 pages of narrative text (plus about 75 of notes and appendices), but it still contains more than enough detail for all but the most obsessive of general readers, and it's a very readable, pleasantly unacademic kind of a book to deal with. show less

My rating may drop upon further reflection, as the epilogue goes out of its way to spoil its own triumphant party. The Philip who emerges in Palmer's study is a man both austere and ambitious, someone always a bit uncomfortable in their own skin. Inheriting a global empire, Philip was an uber bureaucrat, perpetually drowning in a sea of memos and contracts. He delegated, forming committees, but micromanaged their findings and recommendations. Philip felt he was chosen by God to act as a show more steward.

Consanguinity is never a good plan for the long game. The monarch in question suffered from the practice, even if its political consequences provided a measured stability. There remains a virtual stadium of skeletons in these royal closets. Much as his father Charles V locked away his own mentally ill mother, Philip II imprisoned his own son and heir Don Carlos for similar instability.

Just after his second wife Mary Tudor died, he asked her half sister Elizabeth if she was interested. There are doubtless political and religious incentives to consider, but the palpable consequences of such maneuvering are uncomfortable. Oh, Philip also married his niece. The big events of the time are afforded context; we go from Lepanto to the Armada with Philip pondering the meaning of manifest destiny and whether he still enjoys divine favor.

Philip left the world an old man. The Spain he left was broke from his eternal wars. He burned heretics and had political enemies killed, he was insecure but felt his course and cause to be the just one. show less

Over the years I've been a great enthusiast for the writings of Geoffrey Parker, but for assorted reasons I didn't get to this work until more than 10 years after it was published. Call this a commentary on how it seemed more logical to read Parker's biograph of Charles V first, a certain lack of availability in Northern Virginia where I've been living until recently (ca. 2023), and an unwillingness to make this book an inter-library loan.

So, having finally gotten around to putting in the show more effort, I think this is a good study, but perhaps not a great one. What Parker does best is illustrating how Philip's character and upbringing did not produce a man who was really up to the task at hand; that is running a polity which required lots of hands-on interaction in regards to only those jobs that Philip could do as monarch, and then ruthlessly delegating everything else. Even in his lifetime Philip was notorious for becoming bogged down in the minutia of his job, a commentary on what Parker sees as a man possessed of obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Still, one might also see an intelligent man who realized that he had an unmanageable task, and who embraced hope as a strategy.

Playing with counter-factuals though, Parker believes that Philip did have a chance of buying time for the conglomeration of lands chance had stuck him with. For one, it's unfortunate from the Habsburg perspective that Charles V did not make the Low Countries the problem of the Holy Roman Empire, leaving Philip with the Mediterranean World and the lands across the ocean as his brief. Two, when events in England and said Low Countries really required Philip's hands-on presence, the man was nowhere to be found. The one key point in Parker's view is that Philip needed Mary Tudor to live 5-10 years more and, barring that, to have better stage-managed Elizabeth Tudor's enthronement, and making sure she appreciated that marriage to an appropriate heir was a condition of ascension to being monarch.

I also have to note that this book is an abridgement of a much-longer book written in Spanish, and there are times when it really does feel like an abridgement. Still well-worth reading though. show less

About the only reason why I don't give this work top marks is that, despite the wealth of information of information that we have on the man, I'm not sure that the author quite achieved his ends. That is, to establish whether Charles' empire was an essentially impossible project, or whether Charles should essentially be regarded as being undone by his own mistakes. In the end, Parker concludes that success is a relative condition and that, while this empire was something of a fluke of show more circumstance, Charles made more good decisions than bad, while probably having more than his share of good luck.

A big part of the issue is that the game changed very rapidly over the course of Charles' active years of power, in that to contest France in Italy, defend the traditional lands of what was Burgundy, hold back the Ottoman empire, and contain Protestantism, there were simply too many factors in play. Not to mention adding the complexities of military and fiscal revolutions to the mix. The end result being that, despite the failures of policy and character, the author ends this work with a great deal of respect for the man.

Realistically speaking, this should not be the first book you read on Charles. Despite being rather old-school history, you might be better of reading "Four Princes" by John Julius Norwich, than try Parker's work. show less