Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II by Geoffrey Parker, and: World without End: The Global Empire of Philip II by Hugh Thomas (review)

By some coincidence, these two substantial books on Spain’s best-known sixteenth-century king were published in the same year and cover all the important aspects of Philip II’s international policies. The study by Parker, a leading expert on the king’s military policies, is backed up by over fifty pages of learned references and is essentially a shortened version of a massive volume he published in Spanish in 2010. Readers will find in it not only a superbly informed narrative of Philip II’s long career as Europe’s most powerful king but also a highly negative interpretation of the king’s personality and policies. Parker considers Philip to have been directly responsible for everything that went wrong during his reign. In particular, he holds the king personally responsible for murder and mass bloodshed: “The king’s decision to renew the war in the Netherlands caused the death of tens of thousands of men, women and children.” In his final chapter, Parker dedicates a three-page discussion to the theories of Sigmund Freud, enabling him to arrive at his conclusion, about Philip II, that “people with obsessional personalities are poorly equipped as leaders.” Some readers may find the hostility to the king a bit excessive, if only because most other historians do not read the evidence in the same way, but if readers can overlook it they will find in these pages a very readable and for the most part reliable account of Philip II’s politics.

Hugh Thomas’s study is the last volume in a trilogy about the Spanish empire that he began in 2003, with Rivers of Gold, and continued in 2010, with The Golden Age. Like the preceding volumes, it is traditional history based on the theme of “Spanish conquistadors and conquered Indians,” where the bands of explorers are presented as successful colonizers of the American continent and even of the far-flung Philippines. The emphasis throughout is on how the Spaniards did things, and Thomas pays special attention to the civilizing mission of their clergy. He draws heavily on studies done by recent writers, giving an illuminating and at times entertaining outline of aspects of Spanish activity. The common reader, at whom the volume is clearly aimed, will find much to enjoy in these pages, though historians will miss some of the research perspectives on empire that scholars have been taking in recent years.