Volume 44, Number 14 · September 25, 1997
The Enigma of Philip II
By J.H. Elliott
Philip of Spain
by Henry Kamen
Yale University Press, 384 pp., $35.00
'If Philip possessed a single virtue it has eluded the conscientious research of the writer of these pages. If there are vices—as possibly there are—from which he was exempt, it is because it is not permitted to human nature to attain perfection even in evil.' John Lothrop Motley's indictment of Philip II of Spain in his History of the United Netherlands[1] remains one of the classic historical denunciations of all time. It has continued to reverberate through the historical literature on sixteenth-century Europe, and one of the great historians of our own century, Dom David Knowles, used it in an Inaugural Lecture delivered in 1954 on 'The Historian and Character,' in support of his argument that 'the historian is not a judge, still less a hanging judge.'[2]
Review, 5108 words
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