In the autumn of 1580, as Spanish forces moved to secure the crown of Portugal, Anna of Austria, the wife of King Philip II of Spain, traveled with the court. Soon after arriving in Badajoz, she fell gravely ill, and on October 26th, she died just days before her thirty-first birthday. She was the fourth queen to share Philip’s crown, and like the three before her, she did not survive him. The most powerful monarch in the world had outlived every woman he married.
Philip II was born on March 21st, 1527, in Valladolid, the eldest son of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Isabella of Portugal. Through his father, he belonged to the Habsburg dynasty, a family whose political influence and financial power had secured Charles’s election as emperor in 1519. Charles ruled Spain, controlled large parts of Italy, held the Low Countries, and presided over the first truly global empire, with vast domains in the Americas and later the Philippines. The gold and silver flowing from the New World made Spain the wealthiest nation on Earth.
As heir to this colossal inheritance, Philip received the finest education available, and he grew into a serious, disciplined young man known for his sense of order and duty. Every royal family in Europe was eager to marry a daughter to him. His first bride was Maria Manuela of Portugal, born in October 1527, five months after Philip. She was the daughter of King John III of Portugal and Catherine of Spain, who was Charles V’s sister.
Philip’s mother, Isabella of Portugal, was John III’s sister, which meant Philip and Maria were double first cousins. Their union was seen as a way to bind the two rising Iberian powers closer together and keep wealth and influence within the family. They married at just sixteen years old on November 12th, 1543, in an opulent ceremony in Salamanca. The marriage was short-lived.
In the winter of 1544, Maria became pregnant, and on July 8th, 1545, she gave birth to a son, Carlos. But she suffered severe complications after the birth and began to hemorrhage. She died four days later, only seventeen years old. Philip had secured an heir at a devastating cost.
He did not remarry for ten years, though he took lovers during that time. When he finally chose a second wife, the match was far more powerful and controversial than anyone could have expected. He married Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. Mary had been born on February 18th, 1516, at the Palace of Placentia in Greenwich, a princess of great promise, well-educated and confident.
But her world collapsed when she was still young. By the time she was ten, Henry VIII was infatuated with Anne Boleyn and desperate for a male heir. When Pope Clement VII refused to annul his marriage to Catherine, Henry broke with Rome, divorced Catherine in 1533, and declared Mary illegitimate. Cast aside and separated from her mother, she was later forced to serve in the household of her younger half-sister, Elizabeth, and pressured to accept her father’s religious reforms.
The experience left her deeply committed to the Catholic faith and closely tied to her Spanish heritage. In 1536, she reconciled with her father and returned to court, but various marriage negotiations came to nothing. After Henry VIII died in 1547 and her half-brother Edward VI became king, she was restored to the line of succession, though she remained officially illegitimate. When Edward VI lay dying in 1553, he attempted to remove her from the succession because he knew she would reverse the Protestant reforms of his reign.
That attempt failed, and Mary became Queen of England and Ireland in July 1553. Now thirty-seven years old, Mary faced mounting pressure to secure her throne and produce an heir before her half-sister Elizabeth could succeed her. Convinced that her position depended on a powerful alliance, she turned to the Habsburgs and chose Philip. They married at Winchester Cathedral on July 25th, 1554, just days after their first meeting.
He was twenty-seven; she was thirty-eight, an unusual reversal in royal marriages of the time. They shared no common language and communicated through a mixture of Spanish, French, and Latin. They were also cousins: Mary’s mother, Catherine of Aragon, was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, whose marriage had united Spain in the late fifteenth century, and Philip was their great-grandson. Before the wedding, an unusual arrangement was reached: Philip and Mary would be co-rulers of England.
Philip became king regnant, not merely a consort, a position deeply controversial in England, where nobles and politicians feared the kingdom would be swallowed by Spain’s growing empire. The marriage was troubled in other ways. Mary appeared to become pregnant shortly after marrying Philip, but then lost the child, if she had ever been pregnant at all. Historians still do not know exactly what occurred in 1555, but the most likely explanation is that she experienced a phantom pregnancy.
Soon after this humiliation, Philip left England, departing for Flanders to command his armies against France. As his father Charles V began to relinquish his vast dominions, Philip’s attention shifted toward Spain and the Low Countries. Whatever personal bond had existed quickly faded. For Philip, the marriage had always been political, a means to draw England into Spain’s orbit and restore Catholic rule.
For Mary, it was deeply personal. She was utterly devoted to her husband, longing for the loving family life that had been denied to her in youth. One contemporary observed that she was extraordinarily in love with him. That devotion went unreturned.
By May 1558, Mary had grown weak and increasingly ill, in constant pain, likely from ovarian cysts or uterine cancer. On November 17th, 1558, at St. James’s Palace, she died at forty-two, her hopes for an heir and a lasting marriage unfulfilled. Far away in Brussels, Philip received the news and wrote to his sister, Joanna of Austria, that he felt a reasonable regret at her passing.
Because they had no children, the throne passed to Elizabeth I, who promptly restored Protestantism as the state religion. The plan to keep England in the Catholic fold had failed completely. Philip still sent a proposal of marriage to Elizabeth, but she delayed her answer, and in that time he learned Philip was entertaining other options. Just months earlier, in September 1558, Charles V had died, passing his vast dominions to his son.
At thirty-three, Philip II of Spain became the most powerful monarch in the world, but his dynasty remained dangerously fragile. He had only one surviving heir, Don Carlos, the son from his first marriage, who was mentally unstable. Philip turned to marriage again, this time not just for alliance but for survival. Seven months after Mary’s death, he married Elizabeth of Valois, daughter of King Henry II of France and Catherine de Medici.
She was born in April 1546 at Château de Fontainebleau. In 1550, her father had opened negotiations to betroth her to Edward VI of England, but Edward died in 1553 while she was still a child. By 1559, negotiations were underway between Spain and France to end the long Italian Wars, which had raged since 1494. The Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis was signed in April of that year, securing peace between the two great rivals.
Plans were made for Elizabeth to marry Don Carlos, but those plans were suddenly abandoned, and instead Elizabeth married Philip himself, sealing the peace between the two empires. The proxy marriage took place on June 22nd, 1559, when she was fourteen and he was thirty-two. The formal ceremony was held in Spain the following spring. Ironically, Henry II was killed in a jousting accident during festivities in Paris celebrating the peace treaty, just three weeks after the proxy wedding.
Uniquely among Philip’s four wives, Elizabeth was not his cousin. Their marriage proved unexpectedly warm, and Philip even renounced having mistresses for several years in the mid-1560s. Elizabeth grew genuinely fond of her husband, and he took pleasure in entertaining her with tourneys. She also formed a close bond with her stepson, Don Carlos, the very prince she had originally been intended to marry.
As Carlos’s behavior grew increasingly unstable, he treated Elizabeth with unusual gentleness, and she met him with patience and grace. Elizabeth’s life was troubled in other ways. She had a difficult history of childbirth: a stillbirth late in 1560, when she was fourteen, and a miscarriage of twin daughters four years later. In 1566, she gave birth to Isabella Clara Eugenia, and the couple rejoiced at a healthy daughter.
She was followed by another healthy child, Catalina Micaela. Then on October 3rd, 1568, Elizabeth gave birth to another daughter named Joanna. Both mother and infant died that day from complications. Elizabeth was only twenty-two.
Catherine de Medici offered Philip her younger daughter Margaret as a bride, but he declined. Instead, he turned once again to his own family. His fourth wife was Anna of Austria, born on November 2nd, 1549, at Cigales near Valladolid. Her father was the future Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II, and her mother was Maria of Austria, Philip’s sister.
Anna spent her earliest years at the Spanish court, then moved to Vienna at age four, where she was raised and educated. She was the eldest of her parents’ sixteen children and her father’s favorite. Plans were made for her to wed her first cousin Don Carlos, Philip’s only surviving son and heir. Not only were they close in age, they were politically and personally well matched.
But in 1567, Don Carlos began showing clear signs of severe psychological instability. By his early twenties, he was notorious for violent outbursts and erratic behavior. Alarmed, Philip placed him under confinement, and in July 1568, Carlos was dead, giving rise to rumors of starvation, poisoning, and darker secrets within the Spanish court. Elizabeth was still alive at that point, but she died only a few months later.
Philip had lost both his heir and his wife. In a desperate position, Philip made a shocking proposal: since Anna could no longer marry his son, perhaps she should marry him. The match defied convention and drew the objections of Pope Pius V, who was appalled. Not only was Anna twenty-three years younger than Philip, but she was also his niece: her grandfather was Ferdinand I, Philip’s uncle, while her mother, Maria, was Philip’s sister.
Despite this, Anna’s father agreed, and the twenty-year-old Anna married her forty-two-year-old uncle by proxy in May 1570 while still in Vienna. She arrived in Spain on October 3rd, 1570, and adapted to court life with surprising ease. Bright and cheerful, she softened the rigid formality of the court and became Philip’s most beloved wife. Diplomats noted that the king was genuinely devoted to her, visiting her chambers daily, and the two shared a close and affectionate bond.
Soon she was pregnant. In December 1571, the hoped-for son arrived, but he died from dysentery in 1578. Another son, Charles, died a few weeks before his second birthday in 1575. Two further sons, Diego Felix and Philip, were born in 1575 and 1578.
In 1580, Anna gave birth to their only daughter, Maria. That same year, the dynastic crisis in Portugal opened the door for Philip to press his claim to the Portuguese throne, and Anna traveled with the court, only to fall ill and die in Badajoz on October 26th, 1580. Now fifty-three, Philip felt his duty to provide an heir was done. He chose not to marry again, trading the busy life of the court for the quiet stone halls of El Escorial.
He spent his later years living almost like a monk, obsessed with the paperwork of his massive empire. From his desk, he launched the Spanish Armada and fought religious wars across Europe, working tirelessly until his health began to fail. Of all his children, only a few survived him. Isabella Clara Eugenia, his daughter from Elizabeth of Valois, was meant to marry her cousin Rudolf II of the Austrian branch, but the eccentric Rudolf remained a bachelor.
She instead married Archduke Albert and ruled the Spanish Netherlands between 1598 and Albert’s death in 1621. She was the longest-lived of his children, dying in 1633 at sixty-seven, though she had no children. Catalina Micaela married Charles Emmanuel I, Duke of Savoy, in 1585 and was almost continuously pregnant for twelve years. Nearly all her children survived to adulthood, but she died in childbirth in 1597 during her tenth pregnancy, at thirty years old.
Several of Philip’s sons from his marriage to Anna predeceased him. Diego died in 1582, and his daughter Maria passed away the next year. At the end of four marriages, all his hopes for a stable succession rested on his youngest and only surviving son, Prince Philip. One of his daughters could have succeeded him, but his own grandmother’s succession as queen at the start of the sixteenth century had created a royal crisis, something Philip wished to avoid.
Prince Philip survived. During his final years, King Philip lived simply but remained the most powerful man in the world until the end. On September 13th, 1598, at the great monastery palace of El Escorial, Philip II of Spain died after a long and agonizing illness, likely cancer. He was seventy-one years old.
He was succeeded by his twenty-year-old son, Philip III, who inherited a vast empire spanning continents, rich in power yet dangerously strained by debt and war. His son and grandson, Philip IV and Carlos II, held the throne down to 1700, when the Spanish Habsburg line came to an end.