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Anti-Hispanicism and the Construction of Late Eighteenth-century British Patriotism: Watson's History of the Reign of Philip the Second

The History of the Reign of Philip the Second, King of Spain, published in 1777 by Robert Watson, clergyman and professor in the University of St Andrews, deserves much better than the obscurity into which it has fallen. For nearly a century it was the most popular biographical work on the Spanish monarch who was, and remains today, best-known to the anglophone world. It was also the first authoritative scholarly study of its subject to appear in the English language. As a result, until the publication of William Hickling Prescott’s identically-titled History of the Reign of Philip the Second, King of Spain (1855–59), it stood unchallenged, admired so much by other nations that it was rapidly translated into French, German, Dutch and—eventually—Spanish.1 It had also accumulated six new editions by 1812, an achievement only possible because Watson’s was so widely credited by contemporaries as the definitive work of its kind. The author’s success rested to some extent, as we shall see, upon the