Philip V of Spain: The King who Reigned Twice.

Henry Kamen. Philip V of Spain: The King who Reigned Twice.

New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001. viii + 277 pp. + 10 b/w pls. index. append. illus. map. bibl. $29.95. ISBN: 0-300-08718-7.

Philip V (1683-1746), grandson of Louis XIV and first Bourbon king of Spain, has attracted only modest scholarly interest, and this is the first modern biography in English. Henry Kamen aims to rehabilitate the reputation of the king, who has been variously dismissed as lazy, inept, and dominated by his queens. He succeeds in sketching a more fully-rounded portrait of Philip V, without quite showing him to have been an effective or admirable monarch.

For Kamen, proper appreciation of Philip begins with recognizing his long struggle with a bipolar disorder (manic depression). Already in 1701, as he took up his new kingdom, Philip was incapacitated by depression, and the symptoms recurred throughout his life, worsening from his mid-thirties. From the late 1720s until his death, the king seems to have been almost continually impaired: he adopted a schedule that reversed day and night, so that ambassadors and ministers of the crown had to transact business with the king in the predawn hours; for extended periods, he was bedridden and mute, or else prone to fits of piteous howling or bulimia; unsurprisingly, he was often filthy and disheveled, with long matted hair and untrimmed nails. Philip was often delusional. His 1724 abdication in favor of his short-lived son Luis I was impelled by the king's "obsession that he could save his soul only in an atmosphere of complete tranquillity" (142). Although Philip returned to the throne after Luis' death, it required the constant vigilance of the queen, Elizabeth Farnese, to keep him from abdicating anew. Some of the royal humors were more comical, as when the king spent summer nights in 1730 "angling" in a large bowl stocked with fish by his servants. At other times, Philip succumbed to violent impulses, beating his wife and physically abusing his ministers.

Kamen is generally persuasive in linking the king's behavior to the rhythms and manifestations of severe bipolar disorder, though his attempt to blame Philip's sudden death on this condition seems dubious -- the symptoms described suggest instead a stroke or severe allergic reaction. He also demonstrates that the prospect of war or dynastic aggrandizement could dispel Philip's depression and spur a phase of manic activity, misperceived by contemporaries as a return to normal health. Much less convincing, however, are Kamen's assertions that the king's dementia somehow did not impair his clarity of thought, or that Elizabeth Farnese ruled simply as her husband's faithful mouthpiece rather than pursuing an agenda of her own, one favoring her sons' advancement over the interests of the crown prince Ferdinand or of Spain itself. Despite Kamen's repeated insistence, it is difficult to credit that, contrary to much contemporary and historiographical wisdom, Elizabeth Farnese was not the true ruler for much of the reign, but instead "always followed, both in public and in private, the ideas and wishes of her husband" (176). Odder is his statement that the queen "took direct charge of the diplomacy during that crucial summer [of 1731], since the king, though perfectly lucid, was in no condition to carry out his duties" (185). This follows a description of Philip in those same months suffering intolerable insomnia and wandering the halls of the palace "with his mouth open and his tongue hanging out" (185).

Kamen calls his book "a short, personal biography" and disclaims the ambition "to offer a history of the reign" (viii). Nonetheless, this biography does provide an overview of the war and diplomacy of the period, and of the incipient Bourbon reorganization of Spanish government. Kamen concludes with a chapter offering a largely positive evaluation of the reign as an era of economic stability and burgeoning intellectual life, and--without downplaying the tensions that would arise from the abolition of regional privileges in Catalonia and elsewhere--as a crucial stage in the development of the Spanish state.

Both as biography and history, Philip V might have benefited from greater authorial and editorial care. For example, readers will not be able to ascertain from Kamen's conflicting assertions whether Philip ever learned to speak Spanish (e.g., 9, 219). His discussion of Bourbon governmental reforms never clarifies whether the Habsburg conciliar structure was suppressed or simply weakened and made redundant. Some authorial judgments are startling, and indefensible without further elaboration, as when he argues that eighteenth-century naval reforms meant that "for the first time in its entire history the country [Spain] was now a serious military power" (174), a conclusion that would have surprised the king's Bourbon ancestors, among others. Elsewhere the analysis is contradictory and confusing: on page 231 we learn that Philip V's wars "had the positive consequence of stimulating the economy," in part because they were "paid for ... without raising exceptional taxation"; five pages later, by contrast, Kamen cit es with approval the contemporary criticisms of Cardinal Belluga, that "the war policies of the government had raised taxes and worsened the economic situation of the country" (236). Despite its frustrating flaws, though, this book provides the best English account of the life of a troubled king who ruled--or attempted to rule--Spain for nearly half a century.