I've now finished reading the Philip V bio, Philip V of Spain: The King Who Reigned Twice, by Henry Kamen (1997), and here are my findings.
French Throne Remember when I said I wasn't sure if Philip would have claimed the French throne, just because there were people in France and Spain who thought he should? And then I read further and reported that he had pamphlets printed and distributed in France asserting his claims? It gets even better: any time young Louis XV was sick, Philip hopped out of his depression sickbed and started preparing to rush to France to claim the throne and assert himself against that upstart Philippe d'Orleans.
Yeeeeah. There would have been a war if Louis had died. Good job, Madame de Ventadour!
His obsession with ruling France was so well-known that people speculated that the reason he abdicated the crown of Spain was that he wanted to be free to claim the French throne. Kamen argues that there's no evidence for this and that it needs to be kept in mind that this is unknowable.
Languages He did learn some Spanish, and apparently could handle paperwork in Spanish. But he always spoke French with his family, his ministers, his generals, and his confessor.
Mental Health The author (Henry Kamen) does a good job of destigmatizing mental illness. He repeatedly refers to Philip's "neurobiological disorder" and refutes claims that Philip was "lazy" or "weak"; if he spent all day in bed and couldn't rule his kingdom, those were symptoms of his illness. The 1997 publication date no doubt helps tremendously.
Where I'm more hesitant is over the diagnosis. Kamen asserts that Philip was bipolar, because he veered between bedridden (depressed) and energetic (manic). I'm less certain that the episodes of activity fit the clinical criteria for mania. I think I would need to see a lot more primary sources to look for evidence.
Two things make me suspicious. One, that these "manic" episodes seem to only hit when there's a war to be fought or a kingdom to be claimed. I.e., the triggers seem purely external. Two, that his "symptoms" don't seem to impair his ability to do what needs to be done; this seems to be when he actually gets stuff done. It's quite possible that his passion for war and for claiming France gave him a burst of adrenaline that afforded him temporary relief from the depression, but that what he had was straight-up major depression, whose intensity fluctuated.
The one thing that makes me think of mania were the occasional episodes where he talked a lot, and very fast. That sounds like an actual symptom. Risk-taking may be one of the standard symptoms of mania, but I don't accept Philip's risking his life in battle as a symptom by itself; there's too much cultural context for that. He had a love of warfare, and we might just be seeing that and calling it mania because it contrasts with the depression.
So I'm ready to say he had depression, but I'm agnostic on bipolar.
Abdication So, Philip definitely had a lot of guilt, anxiety, and self-esteem issues that are part and parcel of his depression, and which fed into his pathological piety. He flagellated himself, despite not being encouraged to do so by his confessor.
In one scribbled note to the confessor, the king wrote, 'Father, as this evening is my day for discipline [i.e. flagellation], please let me know what I should do, if I can say a Miserere in its place, and if you can relieve me of the obligation'; The confessor wrote back: 'Sire, Your Majesty has no obligation to do the discipline, or to say the Miserere, or to do anything in its place. I relieve you of the need to do anything.'
But Philip continues to obsess over saving his soul. He becomes convinced he can only do this by retiring to a place of complete tranquility. As early as 1720, he and Isabella sign their first vow to someday abdicate. 1720 is key because it's right after the 1718-1720 war of the Quadruple Alliance, where Spain tried to regain territory lost in the War of the Spanish Succession, and France, England, Austria, and the Netherlands ganged up on them and made them give it back. France invaded Spain, which was deeply traumatic for Philip, who was still kinda-sorta French at heart. (Remember when I said the Duke of Berwick really didn't want to invade Spain and fight against the king he'd fought *on behalf of* for over 10 years? Berwick's son was actually in Philip's service! It was tough for everyone.)
So that was depressing, and Philip got worse and started thinking about abdication. He and Isabella repeated this vow in writing in 1721, 1722, and 1723. Finally, in 1724, when their oldest son reached his majority, Philip abdicated. The reasons he gave are:
Having for the last four years considered, and reflected deeply and profoundly on, the miseries of this life, through the illnesses, wars and upheavals that God has seen fit to send me in the twenty-three years of my reign... [and now that my son is old enough to rule, I'm abdicating.]
Any other reasons, like wanting to rule France, are speculation. So then Philip and Isabella stepped down and went to live in their palace retreat.
...Where they held court and told their son what to do from afar and just generally couldn't give up power.
Then the new king died, seven months later, from smallpox. His brother was only 11 and not ready to rule. There was debate over what to do. Philip V ended up reclaiming the crown, but there were those who thought he could only legally become regent.
Philip himself often felt this. He was tormented over whether he had the right to be king, after having abdicated. As we've seen, he dealt with this by trying to abdicate; then, when Isabella foiled that, by refusing to talk, or refusing to talk to anyone but her (or one time his valet). Can't talk, can't rule!
Btw, just as I'm sometimes left thinking, "Did Voltaire really design a war chariot or can I not read German as well as I think I can?" or "Is German 'Kickboxer' a false friend and it actually means something else??" I've spent the last couple days worried that I misread or misremembered, and it didn't actually say that he thought he was a frog and I've misled everyone... Nope, I'm staring at the page again, and it does say: "At one time in July he believed that he was a frog."
So that happened.
In the end, Philip reigned just short of 46 years, minus the 7 months of unofficially ruling from his retreat.
Relationship with Isabella So it appears that reports of Isabella's dominance may have been exaggerated. Young Philip V was shy and insecure, and Louis XIV, through his ministers, and then increasingly Marie Louise, made the decisions. But the older he got, the more he seems to have had his own opinions. He apparently felt especially strongly on matters of foreign policy.
Like Marie Louise, Isabella was his main emotional support. And he definitely had much worse depression during his second marriage than his first. Quite possibly because war had a therapeutic effect on him, and Marie Louise died just at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession. Isabella got him during a mixture of peacetime and wartime, so she got to see the worst episodes. It's also likely that since he wasn't getting actual therapy, his mental health continued deteriorating as he got older. Since, you know, war isn't *actually* therapeutic and the guy clearly needed real therapy.
When he was bedridden, he and Isabella were inseparable. She seems to have worn herself out trying to live a normal life and also meet all of his needs, including the nocturnal schedule. It was impossible for ambassadors to meet with one of them alone; it was always both of them, and in fact, she stayed so close to him, that you basically couldn't catch either of them alone.
During audiences, he would listen and refuse to talk, and she would do all the talking. And when he was really badly off, she wouldn't let anyone see him. This led contemporaries to believe she was making all the decisions. A conclusion that was made all the easier by the fact that when you don't like the decision, it's easier to blame the bad advisor than the king, and especially when the decision-maker is a woman, which goes against the laws of nature! As we've discussed, Contemporaries concluded that he was sexually dependent, and that she dominated him because of her sexual hold on him. Nonsense, says Kamen, he was mentally ill, and their relationship just didn't fit into the contemporary worldview.
When it came to politics, Kamen argues that Philip was making the decisions, communicating them to her in private, and she was just enforcing them. His take on Isabella is that she basically molded herself to be whatever her husband needed. She nursed him, was his therapist, was his first minister, and implemented all his ideas without having any of her own.
The problem here is that some of his evidence is Isabella asserting that she was just carrying out Philip's ideas and that she had no wishes apart from his. And Kamen just refutes all the ambassadors' claims and uncritically accepts hers.
Whereas I would submit that maybe an unpopular woman whose power derived from her husband might actually feel the need to say that. Maybe she was doing a Caroline of Ansbach with George II, convincing her husband that her ideas originated with him!
If you step away from what they say and look at what they *do*, this is what I see:
- Isabella's first act on arriving is to dismiss the Princess d'Ursins for being insolent, and then say to Philip, upon meeting him, "Hope you don't mind I got rid of your late wife's advisor who's either been or been perceived the dominant power in Spain for the last decade and a half."
- When Philip abdicates the first time, Isabella goes along with it. After he returns to the throne, she does everything in her power to stop him, from keeping him under lock and guard, to having her messenger burst in on the council meeting and tear up the paper Philip wrote.
- Philip has opinions of his own when he's not laid up with depression, and he devotes himself to ruling, and I don't see a strong reversal of policy when he's incapacitated and Isabella's doing the talking.
What I see here is the royal couple working as a team and presenting a united front. On the one hand, I don't see evidence that Isabella has no ideas that diverge from his. It seems like she's the kind of person who's willing to take the initiative when she feels strongly. Which means that she's probably got strong feelings about other things as well, we just don't see her fighting Philip unless she can't get him to agree with her using milder means.
On the other hand, given his level of activity when he's not incapacitated, and given the continuity in some of his opinions between his first marriage and second, it does seem like he was doing at least some of the ruling. So Isabella's dominance may well have been overestimated, because she was an obvious scapegoat.
Finally, I regret to report, when his mental health plummeted, Philip was known to fight with Isabella and hit her hard enough on at least one occasion that she had to explain the scratches and bruises to Rottembourg (pretty sure "the French ambassador" is him), thus moving him off the "candidate for decent marriage" list and into the "no no no" list for me. Plus there's the whole requiring my non-stop attendance on him all night while he refuses to bathe or dress and is soiling the bed. I'm not sure running Spain is worth it.
Music therapy By popular demand, Kamen's account of the Farinelli episode!
In 1737, Farinelli's in London, where he's had a contract since 1734. Isabella invites him to Spain. On his way, he performs for Louis XV. When he arrives in Spain, Philip is depressed and not attending the royal concert. But...
As the clear tones of his voice rose into the air, they penetrated to the bedroom where the afflicted Philip lay. The divine voice immediately resuscitated the king, who snapped out of his depression and began to attend once more to his work routine. Astonished by the therapeutic effects of Farinelli's music, the king and queen demanded that he sing for them every day.
He finds the workload, especially the nocturnal part, demanding, but he uses his position to introduce Italian opera to Spain, where it's a big hit, and in general create closer cultural ties between Italy and Spain. He writes, 'my achievement is that I am considered not as mere Farinelli, but as ambassador Farinelli.'
It was said by many that Philip only wanted to hear the same handful of arias, but that's slander, says Kamen. If you look at Farinelli's own papers, he had to sing hundreds of different pieces.
Through Farinelli, the king had discovered at last, after many years of suffering, a satisfactory therapy for his disorder.
That said, "satisfactory therapy" isn't the same thing as "immediate cure"; he continues to struggle with depression for the rest of his life. He dies in 1746.
Death It was very quick: he woke up at noon, felt suddenly sick at 1:30, and was dead three minutes later. He was 62.
Interestingly, while Kamen says his sudden death was the result of long-term deterioration of mind and body, and Spanish Wikipedia says he died of a stroke, the actual symptoms Kamen gives (Wiki gives none) suggest something very different to me:
At 1:30, he said to Elizabeth [Isabella] that he thought he was going to vomit. She immediately called for a doctor, but was told that the king's physician was out at lunch. Philip's throat started swelling, as did his tongue, and he fell back on the bed. Within seconds he was dead. It had been three minutes from the moment that he mentioned vomiting.
That sounds like anaphylaxis to me: the swelling, the nausea, and the speed of the attack. Whatever he was allergic to, he might have died of it no matter how healthy he'd been.
Philip V: The Later Years
French Throne
Remember when I said I wasn't sure if Philip would have claimed the French throne, just because there were people in France and Spain who thought he should? And then I read further and reported that he had pamphlets printed and distributed in France asserting his claims? It gets even better: any time young Louis XV was sick, Philip hopped out of his depression sickbed and started preparing to rush to France to claim the throne and assert himself against that upstart Philippe d'Orleans.
Yeeeeah. There would have been a war if Louis had died. Good job, Madame de Ventadour!
His obsession with ruling France was so well-known that people speculated that the reason he abdicated the crown of Spain was that he wanted to be free to claim the French throne. Kamen argues that there's no evidence for this and that it needs to be kept in mind that this is unknowable.
Languages
He did learn some Spanish, and apparently could handle paperwork in Spanish. But he always spoke French with his family, his ministers, his generals, and his confessor.
Mental Health
The author (Henry Kamen) does a good job of destigmatizing mental illness. He repeatedly refers to Philip's "neurobiological disorder" and refutes claims that Philip was "lazy" or "weak"; if he spent all day in bed and couldn't rule his kingdom, those were symptoms of his illness. The 1997 publication date no doubt helps tremendously.
Where I'm more hesitant is over the diagnosis. Kamen asserts that Philip was bipolar, because he veered between bedridden (depressed) and energetic (manic). I'm less certain that the episodes of activity fit the clinical criteria for mania. I think I would need to see a lot more primary sources to look for evidence.
Two things make me suspicious. One, that these "manic" episodes seem to only hit when there's a war to be fought or a kingdom to be claimed. I.e., the triggers seem purely external. Two, that his "symptoms" don't seem to impair his ability to do what needs to be done; this seems to be when he actually gets stuff done. It's quite possible that his passion for war and for claiming France gave him a burst of adrenaline that afforded him temporary relief from the depression, but that what he had was straight-up major depression, whose intensity fluctuated.
The one thing that makes me think of mania were the occasional episodes where he talked a lot, and very fast. That sounds like an actual symptom. Risk-taking may be one of the standard symptoms of mania, but I don't accept Philip's risking his life in battle as a symptom by itself; there's too much cultural context for that. He had a love of warfare, and we might just be seeing that and calling it mania because it contrasts with the depression.
So I'm ready to say he had depression, but I'm agnostic on bipolar.
Abdication
So, Philip definitely had a lot of guilt, anxiety, and self-esteem issues that are part and parcel of his depression, and which fed into his pathological piety. He flagellated himself, despite not being encouraged to do so by his confessor.
In one scribbled note to the confessor, the king wrote, 'Father, as this evening is my day for discipline [i.e. flagellation], please let me know what I should do, if I can say a Miserere in its place, and if you can relieve me of the obligation'; The confessor wrote back: 'Sire, Your Majesty has no obligation to do the discipline, or to say the Miserere, or to do anything in its place. I relieve you of the need to do anything.'
But Philip continues to obsess over saving his soul. He becomes convinced he can only do this by retiring to a place of complete tranquility. As early as 1720, he and Isabella sign their first vow to someday abdicate. 1720 is key because it's right after the 1718-1720 war of the Quadruple Alliance, where Spain tried to regain territory lost in the War of the Spanish Succession, and France, England, Austria, and the Netherlands ganged up on them and made them give it back. France invaded Spain, which was deeply traumatic for Philip, who was still kinda-sorta French at heart. (Remember when I said the Duke of Berwick really didn't want to invade Spain and fight against the king he'd fought *on behalf of* for over 10 years? Berwick's son was actually in Philip's service! It was tough for everyone.)
So that was depressing, and Philip got worse and started thinking about abdication. He and Isabella repeated this vow in writing in 1721, 1722, and 1723. Finally, in 1724, when their oldest son reached his majority, Philip abdicated. The reasons he gave are:
Having for the last four years considered, and reflected deeply and profoundly on, the miseries of this life, through the illnesses, wars and upheavals that God has seen fit to send me in the twenty-three years of my reign... [and now that my son is old enough to rule, I'm abdicating.]
Any other reasons, like wanting to rule France, are speculation. So then Philip and Isabella stepped down and went to live in their palace retreat.
...Where they held court and told their son what to do from afar and just generally couldn't give up power.
Then the new king died, seven months later, from smallpox. His brother was only 11 and not ready to rule. There was debate over what to do. Philip V ended up reclaiming the crown, but there were those who thought he could only legally become regent.
Philip himself often felt this. He was tormented over whether he had the right to be king, after having abdicated. As we've seen, he dealt with this by trying to abdicate; then, when Isabella foiled that, by refusing to talk, or refusing to talk to anyone but her (or one time his valet). Can't talk, can't rule!
Btw, just as I'm sometimes left thinking, "Did Voltaire really design a war chariot or can I not read German as well as I think I can?" or "Is German 'Kickboxer' a false friend and it actually means something else??" I've spent the last couple days worried that I misread or misremembered, and it didn't actually say that he thought he was a frog and I've misled everyone...
Nope, I'm staring at the page again, and it does say: "At one time in July he believed that he was a frog."
So that happened.
In the end, Philip reigned just short of 46 years, minus the 7 months of unofficially ruling from his retreat.
Relationship with Isabella
So it appears that reports of Isabella's dominance may have been exaggerated. Young Philip V was shy and insecure, and Louis XIV, through his ministers, and then increasingly Marie Louise, made the decisions. But the older he got, the more he seems to have had his own opinions. He apparently felt especially strongly on matters of foreign policy.
Like Marie Louise, Isabella was his main emotional support. And he definitely had much worse depression during his second marriage than his first. Quite possibly because war had a therapeutic effect on him, and Marie Louise died just at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession. Isabella got him during a mixture of peacetime and wartime, so she got to see the worst episodes. It's also likely that since he wasn't getting actual therapy, his mental health continued deteriorating as he got older. Since, you know, war isn't *actually* therapeutic and the guy clearly needed real therapy.
When he was bedridden, he and Isabella were inseparable. She seems to have worn herself out trying to live a normal life and also meet all of his needs, including the nocturnal schedule. It was impossible for ambassadors to meet with one of them alone; it was always both of them, and in fact, she stayed so close to him, that you basically couldn't catch either of them alone.
During audiences, he would listen and refuse to talk, and she would do all the talking. And when he was really badly off, she wouldn't let anyone see him. This led contemporaries to believe she was making all the decisions. A conclusion that was made all the easier by the fact that when you don't like the decision, it's easier to blame the bad advisor than the king, and especially when the decision-maker is a woman, which goes against the laws of nature! As we've discussed, Contemporaries concluded that he was sexually dependent, and that she dominated him because of her sexual hold on him. Nonsense, says Kamen, he was mentally ill, and their relationship just didn't fit into the contemporary worldview.
When it came to politics, Kamen argues that Philip was making the decisions, communicating them to her in private, and she was just enforcing them. His take on Isabella is that she basically molded herself to be whatever her husband needed. She nursed him, was his therapist, was his first minister, and implemented all his ideas without having any of her own.
The problem here is that some of his evidence is Isabella asserting that she was just carrying out Philip's ideas and that she had no wishes apart from his. And Kamen just refutes all the ambassadors' claims and uncritically accepts hers.
Whereas I would submit that maybe an unpopular woman whose power derived from her husband might actually feel the need to say that. Maybe she was doing a Caroline of Ansbach with George II, convincing her husband that her ideas originated with him!
If you step away from what they say and look at what they *do*, this is what I see:
- Isabella's first act on arriving is to dismiss the Princess d'Ursins for being insolent, and then say to Philip, upon meeting him, "Hope you don't mind I got rid of your late wife's advisor who's either been or been perceived the dominant power in Spain for the last decade and a half."
- When Philip abdicates the first time, Isabella goes along with it. After he returns to the throne, she does everything in her power to stop him, from keeping him under lock and guard, to having her messenger burst in on the council meeting and tear up the paper Philip wrote.
- Philip has opinions of his own when he's not laid up with depression, and he devotes himself to ruling, and I don't see a strong reversal of policy when he's incapacitated and Isabella's doing the talking.
What I see here is the royal couple working as a team and presenting a united front. On the one hand, I don't see evidence that Isabella has no ideas that diverge from his. It seems like she's the kind of person who's willing to take the initiative when she feels strongly. Which means that she's probably got strong feelings about other things as well, we just don't see her fighting Philip unless she can't get him to agree with her using milder means.
On the other hand, given his level of activity when he's not incapacitated, and given the continuity in some of his opinions between his first marriage and second, it does seem like he was doing at least some of the ruling. So Isabella's dominance may well have been overestimated, because she was an obvious scapegoat.
Finally, I regret to report, when his mental health plummeted, Philip was known to fight with Isabella and hit her hard enough on at least one occasion that she had to explain the scratches and bruises to Rottembourg (pretty sure "the French ambassador" is him), thus moving him off the "candidate for decent marriage" list and into the "no no no" list for me. Plus there's the whole requiring my non-stop attendance on him all night while he refuses to bathe or dress and is soiling the bed. I'm not sure running Spain is worth it.
Music therapy
By popular demand, Kamen's account of the Farinelli episode!
In 1737, Farinelli's in London, where he's had a contract since 1734. Isabella invites him to Spain. On his way, he performs for Louis XV. When he arrives in Spain, Philip is depressed and not attending the royal concert. But...
As the clear tones of his voice rose into the air, they penetrated to the bedroom where the afflicted Philip lay. The divine voice immediately resuscitated the king, who snapped out of his depression and began to attend once more to his work routine. Astonished by the therapeutic effects of Farinelli's music, the king and queen demanded that he sing for them every day.
He finds the workload, especially the nocturnal part, demanding, but he uses his position to introduce Italian opera to Spain, where it's a big hit, and in general create closer cultural ties between Italy and Spain. He writes, 'my achievement is that I am considered not as mere Farinelli, but as ambassador Farinelli.'
It was said by many that Philip only wanted to hear the same handful of arias, but that's slander, says Kamen. If you look at Farinelli's own papers, he had to sing hundreds of different pieces.
Through Farinelli, the king had discovered at last, after many years of suffering, a satisfactory therapy for his disorder.
That said, "satisfactory therapy" isn't the same thing as "immediate cure"; he continues to struggle with depression for the rest of his life. He dies in 1746.
Death
It was very quick: he woke up at noon, felt suddenly sick at 1:30, and was dead three minutes later. He was 62.
Interestingly, while Kamen says his sudden death was the result of long-term deterioration of mind and body, and Spanish Wikipedia says he died of a stroke, the actual symptoms Kamen gives (Wiki gives none) suggest something very different to me:
At 1:30, he said to Elizabeth [Isabella] that he thought he was going to vomit. She immediately called for a doctor, but was told that the king's physician was out at lunch. Philip's throat started swelling, as did his tongue, and he fell back on the bed. Within seconds he was dead. It had been three minutes from the moment that he mentioned vomiting.
That sounds like anaphylaxis to me: the swelling, the nausea, and the speed of the attack. Whatever he was allergic to, he might have died of it no matter how healthy he'd been.