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Article: Books: Heroic hate figure Philip II of Spain does not deserve his black reputation, says John Adamson
- Article from:
- The Sunday Telegraph London
- Article date:
- May 25, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 1997 The Sunday Telegraph London. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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Philip of Spain
by Henry Kamen
Yale, pounds 25, 384 pp
For all his virtues, Philip's escutcheon is not entirely
stain-free
AFTER CALIGULA and Hitler, few European rulers have received a
worse press than Philip II of Spain. Sinister, black-suited, and
reclusive, he is supposedly the author of innumerable crimes:
persecutions of Protestants, "genocide" against the Indians of
Mexico and Peru, not to mention his attempted invasion of England,
the Armada campaign of 1588. And then there was the notorious
Spanish Inquisition, Philip's ecclesiastical Gestapo.
Of course, the Armada was not a PR success. In England, patriotic
Protestants developed a "black legend" of Philip as the archetypal
Catholic ...