King Philip II - a fishy tale

I chanced upon a post about King Philip II and his pursuit of ornamental fish for his gardens - of he was an enthusiastic creator at his Spanish palaces.

In the Anglophone world King Philip has not had a good reputation, seen too often just as a sinister manipulative and fanatical despot in opposition to his one-time sister-in-law Queen Elizabeth I. Modern studies such as Henry Kamen’s Philip of Spain and Geoffrey Parker’s Imprudent King: A new life of Philip II have revealed a complex man who was also often pedestrian and boring, self-doubting as well as dogmatic, obsessed with his sense of duty, and like many other such people often sad and isolated. A man who dominated great swathes of the globe and who insisted on deciding the most minute matters and who was, in consequence, so often in danger of being overwhelmed by the paperwork he demanded and generated - a martyr to conscientious. Reading those biographies, and in particular that by Parker, I wondered if, in addition to the risks posed by his ancestry from close dynastic intermarriage, he suffered from a form of functional autism with its frequently emotionless obsession with minutiae and detail. This might well have been reinforced by his fathers’s doubtless well-meant but rather lugubrious advice about the duties and requirements of kingship. What emerges is perhaps typical of many of his Habsburg family  - stolid, dutiful, fulfilling an obligation to rule with a perhaps less than optimistic outlook, but still something he had been called to do.

Something of these traits can be seen in an article from the BBC Future website about the King’s quest for ornamental fish - one to which he brought a continuing interest and acquired knowledge over many years. It is the man rather than the king at what is his most endearing and, doubtless, most infuriating to his staff. It can be seen at Did Philip II bring invasive fish to Spain?

I would certainly recommend the two biographies I have mentioned above by Kamen and by Parker. Unlike most of his contemporaries as rulers King Philip II confided his most trivial and mundane thoughts to paper as letters or marginalia and, in consequence, revealed much more about himself that is now a golden resource for biographers. A lot of it might be dull and prosaic, but it is also a record of a dutiful life.