If there is such a thing as an “average” British person in the early twenty-first century, they are likely not to be aware that, between July 1554 and November 1558, England, Wales, and Ireland had a Spanish king, Philip I, who reigned alongside Henry VIII's older daughter, Mary I: she had seized the throne in July 1553 and is herself more commonly known as “Mary Tudor” or just “Bloody Mary.” This has happened despite the fact that the parliamentary rolls and legal records of the period are correctly inscribed with the regnal years of “Philip and Mary,” and coins survive that show husband and wife facing each other in profile, with Henry VIII's “imperial” crown floating, as it were, above and between them. The persistent historical blanking of all this, which up to now has largely confined knowledge and discussion of Philip's time as king of England, which began before he became king of Spain and its overseas territories in 1556, to academic specialists, owes its origins and explanation, as Alexander Samson argues in Mary and Philip: The Marriage of Tudor England and Habsburg Spain, to a combination of English nationalism and the consequences of Henry VIII's decision to separate the church in his dominions from the Catholic Church of Rome. Until recently, even Spanish historians have, for the most part, largely or entirely ignored their “Felipe Segundo's” spell as English monarch, as though it was an embarrassing bump on the road to Spanish imperial greatness in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

As far as Mary is concerned, by the 1980s, a fairly impermeable orthodoxy had developed, beginning in the seventeenth century and reaching its apogee in the twentieth-century work of A. F. Pollard, Geoffrey Elton, A. G. Dickens, and even, to some extent, their successor, David Loades. Loades's powerful scholarship and numerous publications remain an essential port of call for anyone interested in the two brief reigns of Edward VI (1547–1553) and Mary I, which have so often been regarded as tiresome and largely unsuccessful interludes between the lengthier spells under the two “great Tudors,” Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. In this interpretation, Mary appears as a sad, even unintelligent Catholic bigot, who not only failed to make England (the other parts of her realm are normally ignored, except as virtual, or not so virtual, colonies) “great again,” but, crucially, she also remained childless. As for her husband Philip, not only was he a Catholic and a Spaniard, neither of which is usually a recommendation from this historical viewpoint, but he also failed to do anything effective during his English “reign”—not even managing to get himself crowned. In the last few decades, however, this interpretation, which is still all too influential in the media and parts of academe, has been increasingly questioned and even changed. Samson's vigorous and scholarly study attempts to redress the balance in favor of both monarchs, in the process debunking another hoary myth that retains considerable social and political power in the present day, this being that there is, and always has been, a natural antipathy between British (for which normally read English) people and mainland Europeans.

Samson's book is thoroughly annotated and laced with relevant, and often highly revealing, quotations from primary sources; he has made full use of his expertise in both Spanish and English literature in surveying and analyzing a wide range of aspects of the marriage of Mary and Philip, as well as its implications, both at the time and subsequently, for both their countries. Although his account is chronologically, and thus historically, based, following events from Mary's dramatic accession to the English throne in 1553 to her premature death on 17 November 1558 and the succession of her half-sister, Elizabeth, he ranges widely in its consideration of Anglo-Spanish relations in that period. There is a justifiable concentration (chapters 1–5) on the successive events leading up to Philip's arrival in England, but chapter 6 covers the vexed question of English xenophobia against Spain and Spaniards, which is such a beloved theme of traditional Marian historiography, while chapter 7 places the ending and “failure” of Philip and Mary's regime in their broader European historical context. On the basis of a wide range of English and foreign manuscript and printed sources, some of which have been little used, often misinterpreted, and in some cases not used at all by earlier authors, Samson draws a rich and colorful picture of the long-standing ties, both dynastic and economic, between England and the Iberian Peninsula, going back at least to the twelfth century. He readily admits that these bonds were tested, not only by Henry VIII's break with Rome but also by Philip's arrival in London in the summer of 1554, with a Spanish entourage that, like all immigrant groups in the City, both before then and later, found themselves in scrapes from time to time. However, Samson balances this evidence with the fullest available picture of Philip's efforts to act as a “proper” monarch in England, for example, by organizing jousts and the Spanish mounted war games known as juegos de cañas (cane games) and distributing Spanish pensions to prominent Englishmen. He also delves more deeply than is customary into the king's truly influential role in English government, by means of the Select Council that reported to him and his vain attempt to organize a proper defense of Calais when it was attacked by Henry II of France in December 1557.

This is a book full of learning, one that entertains as much as it enlightens, and it should be read and considered by anyone involved in the growing field of Marian—and now also Philippine—studies.