Philip III of Spain - Legacy

Legacy

Philip III died in Madrid on 31 March 1621, succeeded by his son, Philip IV, who rapidly completed the process of removing the last elements of the Sandoval family regime from court. The story told in the memoirs of the French ambassador Bassompierre, that he was killed by the heat of a brasero (a pan of hot charcoal), because the proper official to take it away was not at hand, is a humorous exaggeration of the formal etiquette of the court.

Philip has generally left a poor legacy with historians. Three major historians of the period have described an 'undistinguished and insignificant man', a 'miserable monarch', whose 'only virtue appeared to reside in a total absence of vice'. More generally, Philip has largely retained the reputation of 'a weak, dim-witted monarch who preferred hunting and travelling to governing'. Unlike Philip IV, whose reputation has improved significantly in the light of recent analysis, Philip III's reign has however been relatively unstudied, possibly because of the negative interpretation given to the role of Philip and Lerma during the period. Traditionally, the decline of Spain has been placed from the 1590s onwards; revisionist historians from the 1960s, however, presented an alternative analysis, arguing that in many ways Philip III's Spain of 1621 – reinforced with new territories in Alsace, at peace with France, dominant in the Empire, about to begin a successful campaign against the Dutch – was in a much stronger position than in 1598, despite the poor personal performance of her king during the period. Philip's use of Lerma as his valido has formed one of the key historical and contemporary criticisms against him; recent work has perhaps begun to present a more nuanced picture of the relationship and the institution which survived for the next forty years in Spanish royal government.