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Patrick Williams, Felipe II y Francia (1559-1598): Política, Religión y Razón de Estado, The English Historical Review, Volume CXXII, Issue 498, September 2007, Pages 1037–1038, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cem231
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Extract
IT is appropriate that Pierre Chaunu should have written a preface to this book, for Valentín Vázquez de Prada spent three of his formative years as a historian (1952–5) working in the Annales school, and it is surely not fanciful to see in his book the influence of the Annales—and especially of Fernand Braudel himself—here, for this is history on the grand scale, though written in compact and free-standing short essays. Philip II (1556–98) was extraordinarily fortunate in that French internal divisions meant that until the mid-1590s he did not have to confront the full power of the only state that had the resources to challenge Spanish hegemony on the European mainland. For nearly thirty years, Philip dealt with a weakened French monarchy under a queen-regent, Catherine de' Medici, who tried endlessly to balance religious and aristocratic factions so that she could retain the throne for her sons. Philip trod cautiously, but when the last of Catherine's sons died in 1589 he found himself confronted, in Henry of Bourbon, by a younger and more vigorous king of almost infinite resourcefulness and a man who was, moreover, a Protestant.
