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Philip sailed for England and married the unprepossessing Mary, by then aged thirty-seven, in Winchester Cathedral, becoming king of England and Ireland. ‘Once you’ve celebrated and consummated your marriage with the queen,’ ordered Charles, ‘leave her after six or eight days.’ Philip was uninspired by Mary’s looks – ‘It will take a great God to drink this cup,’ sighed his best friend – but he manfully consummated the marriage to the extent that a delighted queen required four days in bed recovering. Then, to Mary’s dismay, Philip escaped to Brussels to attend his father’s abdication.

Departure is one of the tests of political acumen; few know when or how to do it. Succession is the great test of a system; few manage it well. Paternal acceptance of filial independence is a test of any family’s solidarity. Charles succeeded in all three. In October 1555, Charles, leaning on the shoulder of his Dutch favourite, William the Silent, prince of Orange, addressed his grandees. ‘I had great hopes – only a few have been fulfilled,’ he said, ‘and only a few remain to me: and at the cost of what effort! It ultimately made me tired and sick …’ Few leaders ever have the courage to confess: ‘I know I made many mistakes, big mistakes, first because of my youth, then because of human error and because of my passions, and finally because of tiredness. But I did no deliberate wrong to anyone, whoever it was.’ He then handed over the Spanish realm to Philip. Accompanied by his beloved sister Eleanor and his Titian paintings, especially the portrait of the long-dead Isabella, and his clocks, Charles retired to a monastery at Yuste in Spain where he prayed and tinkered with timepieces, dying at fifty-eight.

Mary persecuted Protestant heretics, burning 283 at the stake, and placed her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth under house arrest. But she was ailing; Philip enjoyed being king of England and Ireland but dreaded his marital duties. The poor queen so craved a child that in September 1554 her stomach swelled, she was sick every morning and her periods stopped. But Philip doubted her and gradually her courtiers realized it was a false pregnancy.

Philip was pale, fair-haired, slight with ice-cold blue eyes, his slight Habsburg jaw concealed in a fair beard. He was intelligent and meticulous, with the acumen to make decisions across a global empire, an excellent memory, the stamina to put in hours of work and the sangfroid necessary to order wars and killings. The young king could be charming, he liked dancing and women, appreciated art and had a sense of humour, enjoying pushing his pet elephant into the cells of po-faced monks; later he proved a loving husband and indulgent father to his daughters. Yet he shared his father’s messianic mission without his winning humility and, as a courtier recalled, ‘He had a smile cut with a sword.’

Philip desperately needed a family – and a healthy heir. At the heart of his court lurked the problem of his son, who from early on was torturing animals, blinding horses and whipping servant girls. Don Carlos, prince of Asturias, whose Portuguese mother had died four days after his birth, may have been damaged by lack of oxygen; he was hunchbacked, lame and violent. An only child, he was certainly emotionally neglected, his father absent for years at a time; but his major problem was his deficient gene pool.^* Inbreeding had gathered a world empire, but the very policy designed to strengthen it had weakened it fatally.

Philip, ruling fifty million people in four continents, from Asia to America and Europe, was, like his father, perpetually at war – against France, the pope, the Ottomans – and that was before he faced heretical challenges on every side.

This messianic imperialist believed God would perform miracles for him; anything seemed possible. ‘The world is not enough’ was his motto. The flow of paperwork was endless, but he acted as his own secretary – ‘They’re killing me with work by day which means I’m worn out by night.’ One evening he wrote, ‘It’s 10 p.m., I feel shattered and I’m dying of hunger.’ His single-mindedness led to mistakes and delusions. The predicament of prodigious power is that it exceeds a single human’s ability to wield it. ‘His Majesty has been working even more than usual,’ wrote an aide, ‘reading and writing papers until they come out of his backside (may your lordship forgive me) because on Saturday morning at 3 a.m. he had terrible diarrhoea.’ He decided everything. Autocracy grants the consistency that democracy lacks but replaces it with rigidity petrified by delusion and drowned in detail.