He was also jure uxoris King of England and Ireland from his marriage to Queen Mary I in until her death in The son of Emperor Charles V and Isabella of Portugal , Philip inherited his father's Spanish Empire in , and succeeded to the Portuguese throne in following a dynastic crisis. Under Philip II, Spain reached the height of its influence and power, sometimes called the Spanish Golden Age , and ruled territories in every continent then known to Europeans.
Philip led a highly debt-leveraged regime , seeing state defaults in , , , , and This policy was partly the cause of the declaration of independence that created the Dutch Republic in Philip finished building the royal palace El Escorial in In , Philip signed the Treaty of Joinville , funding the French Catholic League over the following decade in its civil war against the French Huguenots. In , he sent an armada to invade Protestant England, with the strategic aim of overthrowing Elizabeth I and re-establishing Catholicism there, but his fleet was defeated in a skirmish at Gravelines northern France and then destroyed by storms as it circled the British Isles to return to Spain.
The following year Philip's naval power was able to recover after the failed invasion of the English Armada into Spain. Two more Spanish armadas unsuccessfully tried to invade England in and The Anglo-Spanish War carried on until , six years after Philip's death. Under Philip, an average of about 9, soldiers were recruited from Spain each year, rising to as many as 20, in crisis years. Between and , nearly 43, men left Spain to fight in Italy and the Low Countries modern-day Belgium , Luxembourg , and the Netherlands.
The culture and courtly life of Castile were an important influence in his early life. Philip displayed reasonable aptitude in arts and letters alike. Though Philip had good command over Latin , Spanish, and Portuguese, he never managed to equal his father as a polyglot. The feeling was mutual. Philip felt himself to be culturally Spanish; he had been born in Castile and raised in the Castilian court, his native language was Spanish, and he preferred to live in the Spanish kingdoms.
This ultimately impeded his succession to the imperial throne. In April , when Philip was eleven months old, he received the oath of allegiance as heir to the crown from the Cortes of Castile. Philip was present at the Siege of Perpignan in but did not see action as the Spanish army under Alba decisively defeated the besieging French forces under the Dauphin of France.
