Philip II., king of Spain, the only son of the Emperor Charles V. and Isabella of Portugal, was born at Valladolid, 21st May 1527. He was brought up in Spain, and carefully educated for his destiny, but grew up distrustful and reserved; cold and austere, without being virtuous; haughty and bigoted, yet without real respect for honour or religion. In 1543 he married Mary of Portugal, who died three years later, after bearing a son, the ill-fated Don Carlos. In 1548 he went to join his father at Brussels, and made a decidedly unfavourable impression upon his future subjects. Three years later he returned to Spain, and in 1554 he made a marriage of policy with Mary Tudor, Queen of England. During his fourteen months' stay in England he laboured hard but unsuccessfully at the uncongenial task of ingratiating himself with his wife's subjects. His failure, together with the vexatious jealousy of a wife who was plain, spare, nearly forty, and likely to be childless, prompted him to leave England and return to Brussels (September 1555). In the next half-year he became by the abdication of his father the most powerful prince in Europe, having under his sway Spain, the Two Sicilies, the Milanese, the Low Countries, Franche Comté, Mexico, and Peru; with the best disciplined and officered army of the age. The treasury alone was deficient, having been drained by the enormous expenditure of his father's wars. The first danger he had to face was a league formed between Henry II. of France and the Neapolitan pope Paul IV. to deprive him of his Italian dominions. Alva soon overran the territories of the pope, while Philip's army under Philibert of Savoy defeated the French at St Quentin (August 10, 1557) and Gravelines (July 13, 1558). These reverses forced Henry II. to agree to terms of peace at Cateau Cambrésis (April 2, 1559). In January 1558 the French had captured Calais, and Mary Tudor's death followed eleven months later. Her husband, after an unsuccessful attempt to obtain the hand of Queen Elizabeth, married Isabella of France (June 24, 1559) and returned to Spain, where he lived the rest of his life.
The main object of his domestic policy was to concentrate all power in himself, and to this end he laboured to destroy everything resembling free institutions in any of his dominions. He ostentatiously put himself at the head of the Catholic party in Europe, but the interests of the church in his eyes were ever identical with his own. He found the Inquisition the best engine of his tyranny in Spain, but its effect in the Low Countries was a formidable revolt, which ended in 1579 with the northern part, the Seven United Provinces, achieving independence. In this conflict the resources of Spain were exhausted, and to replenish his treasury Philip exacted enormous contributions from his subjects, abolishing all the ancient special communal or provincial privileges of Spain, and suppressing all insurrection and discontent by force of arms or the Inquisition. His son, Don Carlos, whom he hated, died in prison in 1568, and all that can be said in the father's justification is that at least he did not directly murder him. His pride did not disdain the aid of cowardly murder in the pursuit of his policy, and the tragic death of William the Silent (1584) and the relentless persecution of Antonio Perez show how pitiless and how persistent was his hatred of an enemy. He married in 1570 as his fourth wife his niece, Anne of Austria, whose sole surviving son afterwards became Philip III.
The one great triumph of his reign was the famous naval victory of Lepanto (September 16, 1571), won by his half-brother, Don John of Austria, over the Turks. In 1580, the direct male line of Portugal having become extinct, Philip laid claim to the throne, and despatched Alva to occupy the kingdom. But his attempt to conquer England recoiled upon himself in hopeless disaster, as the ships of the great Armada were swept to destruction before the northern tempests and the irresistible valour of the English seamen. His intrigues against Henry of Navarre were foiled by his antagonist's courage, aided by the death (1592) of his own general Alexander Farnese and Henry's politic change of his religion. The stubborn heroism of the Netherlands and the exasperating ravages of the English cruisers on the Spanish Main, added to financial distress at home, embittered the last years of Philip, and he died of a lingering and peculiarly loathsome disease, in the Escorial at Madrid, on 13th September 1598, under the shadow of that failure which had followed all his greatest undertakings. Philip II. possessed great abilities, but little political wisdom, and he engaged in so many vast enterprises at once as to overtask his resources without leading to any profitable result. A fanatical and gloomy bigot in religion, sullen and jealous in temper, he persecuted all heretics through the Inquisition with relentless cruelty, and at the same time dealt a fatal blow to Spain by crushing that ancient, proud, and chivalrous spirit which had been the secret of its strength, as well as by cutting off the commerce of the country by oppressive exactions and by a bitter persecution of the industrious Moriscos. There is hardly a more unlovable figure in history than this sullen and solitary bigot whom historians with unusual unanimity have united to condemn.
See the articles ALVA, ARMADA, CHARLES V., CARLOS, MARY, HOLLAND, and SPAIN; the Histories of Prescott, Motley, and Froude; Mignet's Antonio Perez et Philippe II. (5th ed. 1881); Forneron's Histoire de Philippe II. (3d ed. 4 vols. 1887); Gachard's two books on Don Carlos, and his editions of the correspondence of Philip (1848-89). The many good points of Philip's character are brought out in Froude's Spanish Story of the Armada (1892) and Martin Hume's monograph on Philip (1897).