Philip IV - TV Tropes
- ️Tue Sep 26 2023
Philip IV of Spain (8 April 1605 – 17 September 1665), from the House of Habsburg, called "Philip the Great" and El Rey Planeta ("The Planet King"), was King of Spain, Naples, Sardinia and Sicily, as well as of Portugal until 1640, and also Count of Barcelona, Duke of Milan, Lord of the Netherlands and other titles. The fourth monarch in the Spanish branch of the Habsburgs, his 44-year reign was the longest of his dynasty and third longest of any king of Spain, which means many things happened with him as a monarch, both good and bad.
As it is usual among the Spanish Habsburgs, it is difficult to draw a profile of him in few words. Being one of the "Lesser Austrias" in spite of his nickname, pop culture has traditionally considered him a second Philip III, a disaster of a ruler who trusted his duties to untrustworthy ministers while he was away drinking and whoring, and only recently he has been acknowledged to be substantially distinct from that description. He seems to have been a person of many contradictions — publicly inscrutable yet personally lively, ambitious yet profligate, dependant on political advice yet having his own ideas — but certainly not an untalented or unwilling monarch like his father. He was characterized by his complex relationship to his prime minister the Count-Duke of Olivares, who held much influence over his reign and has caused historians to debate for generations whether he was The Svengali, a Hypercompetent Sidekick, or both at once. With his dubious help, Philip attempted to stop the national decline that had been brought by their predecessor's decisions, yet he was ultimately unsuccessful and only managed to propel the Spanish Empire into utter ruin, causing its definitive separation from Portugal and the rise of his rival son-in-law Louis XIV of France.
Philip himself was married to the princess of France, Elisabeth of Bourbon, back when they were still children. Around this time, the throughly corrupt prime minister or valido of his father, the Duke of Lerma, was finally caught and expelled, letting his absence in the court be filled by the new sensation, Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares. Although the young Philip did not initially trust him, rightfully believing him to be a political animal, he eventually warmed up to him and handpicked him as his own valido after ascending to the throne as a teenager. Olivares certainly delighted Philip at first, bringing a cartful of promising reforms ahead of their time to curb all the corruption and mismanagement of the late Philip III's reign, but they found a hard obstacle in the form of political resistance and just plain cultural inertia. Philip and Olivares wanted to unify the varied tax systems and impose equitable taxes across the Spanish Empire, but those domains who paid less did not want to pay more. The king and the duke also wanted to unify the distinct imperial armies and create a Unión de Armas, but those domains who were sending no soldiers did not want to send any. They also wanted noblemen to undergo military training from zero before being put to command armies, but the noblemen believed themselves too cool for school. They also wanted to regulate public customs, but people doesn't like to be regulated. You get the picture.
Adding to their toils and labours, Olivares and the Queen Elisabeth simply could not be in the same room, each accusing the other to be some kind of evil conspirator, and this led to the Count-Duke to slander her to the king, advising Philip to be unfaithful to her and helping organize the whole thing only to spite Elisabeth. The scheme resulted in the king, who was a bit too fond of women and for what we know might have perfectly been a true clinical sex addict, achieving a list of over 40 lovers and producing about 30 illegitimate children, even if he never really neglected his increasingly jealous queen and also produced a dozen of children with her.note Despite those impressively virile numbers (a later nickname for him was the "Hercules of the Pleasure"), he acknowledged only one of his bastards, Juan José, the son of his favorite lover, stage actress María Calderón. He and Olivares attempted to extend this generativity to Spain by increasing its population, for which they banned emigration, promoted immigration, and not without irony, tried to banish prostitution.
Far from thinking solely with his nether regions, however, Philip was an equally gigantic patron of the arts. He loved theater and literature, in especial his favorites Lope de Vega, Pedro Calderón de la Barca and Baltasar Gracián, and even dabbled bit in poetry and theater himself, as well as making his own translations from Latin (he spoke multiple languages, unlike his father and grandfather). He was not less devout of painting, striking an Interclass Friendship with Diego Velázquez and his black slave-turned-apprentice Juan Pareja,note and ordered art pieces to be obtained from across Europe until developing a 4,000-work personal collection that astonished monarchs from his time (art historians entertain that half of the current Museo del Prado in Madrid, one of the world's greatest collections of European art, came directly from his own). He also built the new palace of Buen Retiro to serve as a center for artists and writers, having its own theatre, ballroom, galleries, bull ring, gardens, and artificial lakes. His subjects didn't always like that he spent so much money in matters that didn't directly help the state of the empire, although part of his goal might have been project the cultural power of the Spanish Empire and at least make it look like they were not in a steep decline. Indeed, his choices created a vogue, with many other noblemen and kings initiating their own libraries and galleries in order not to be any less cultured.
Against the doubts of the more peaceful Philip, Olivares strongly promoted an aggressive foreign policy in a time in which Spain had still not recovered from Philip II's military multitasking. With the empire already knee-deep in the Thirty Years' War, Olivares ordered to reinvigorate the war in the Netherlands in 1621 in order to reduce the power of the Dutch Republic, which had grown immensely with the previous Twelve Years' Truce. The King and the Count-Duke expanded their navy in order to counter their Dutch and English rivals, and combined with their maverick general, Ambrogio Spinola, who scored a generational victory in Breda, they executed a plan to economically isolate the Dutch. This intially worked at first, but the crown's participation with other conflicts missed a big chance to finish it. The enthroning of Charles I of England brought another war in 1625, which came after a failed attempt to marry Philip's sister Maria Anna to Charles (and hopefully convert him to Catholicism). Although Spain prevailed, which threw the English into a political crisis, yet another war came with the War of Mantuan Succession, a proxy war against King Louis XIII of France whose results only set back the Habsburgs' interests. In sum: success and failure were coming in even numbers from Olivares' policy, and meanwhile the money wound kept bleeding.
The king did try to avoid unnecessary conflict, but it was useless. Only one year after their return to the Netherlands, the First Kongo-Portuguese War exploded in the African branch of the empire, caused by overzealous governor João Correia intruding in the succession of King Pedro II of Kongo, which ruined diplomatic relations. The ruckus was drowned, but war moved to the Kingdom of Ndongo, as the next governor attempted to depose the famous Queen Nzinga due to her ill disposition towards the Portuguese, even although Nzinga had previously tried to surrender before becoming queen only for them to reject the chance. Although they initially defeated Nzinga, they failed at replacing her with the African vassal Filipe Hari, as many Africans rejected Hari due to his low origins, and Nzinga eventually went From Nobody to Nightmare: she married the mercenary chieftain Kasanje, conquered the nearby kingdom of Matamba, and built a slave trade empire that went to form ties with the Dutch, forcing the Portuguese to accept a tentative peace in 1639. Create Your Own Villain seems ubiquitous for Iberians through history.
With the deployment of Philip's brother in 1634, the brilliant Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand, things seemed to be improving. Making a grand entry in the Thirty Years War, Ferdinand stopped the rising Swedes in their tracks, scored goals on the Dutch, and when Cardinal Richelieu made France declare war on Spain, he came stomping against them and forced them to evacuate Paris. However, Olivares revealed to be an incredibly jealous man who tried to destroy everyone who could overshadow him, even to the kingdom's expense, and this turned him not only against Ferdinand, but also and Fadrique de Toledo Osorio, Philip's talented grand admiral, bringing much infighting. His flaws were highlighted more than ever: although the Count-Duke was no doubt a source of great ideas, these either came with bad timing or were badly implemented due to his arrogance and pettiness. His Unión de Armas, a sound concept which would have multiplied their military resources, could have been persuassively established in peacetime, but during Olivares' aggressive period, it was rejected due to people's unwillingness to being dragged to the wars that were starving Castile to death. When the Catalonians refused to cooperate with this policy even while they were being invaded by France, the Count-Duke ordered to repress them by force.
And so, the Hispanic Monarchy could simply take it not more, and entered a Super-Power Meltdown, nicknamed the "1640 Crisis": tired of being entangled to various degrees in wars they wanted nothing of and being mismanaged by generations of megalomaniacs, rebellions started exploding one after another in multiple domains of the Spanish Habsburgs: Catalonia, Portugal, Andalusia, Aragon, Navarre, Naples and Sicily. As if it was little, Ferdinand died of illness, leaving the European wars without his strength in the worst possible moment, which shattered Philip to the point that the king, who was even infamous for his stoicism and exaggerated dignity, utterly broke down. His successor, the untalented Francisco de Melo, lost to the French in Rocroi, a battle which might have been probably easy to win by most of their previous generals and was propagandized to no end. Bad crops, inflation and lack of manpower threatened to stop all the gears in the empire. In a OOC Moment for a king who had befriended a black slave, he temporally forbad blacks and mulattos from joining the army, paranoid of yet another rebellion on their part, which naturally fixed nothing.note Things turned so incredibly, overwhelmingly bad that the possibility of Philip being forced to abdicate by the Council of Castile became very real.
Philip finally heeded public opinion and, firing Olivares and replacing him by the more sensible Luis de Haro (he initially promised not to take another valido, but he was surpassed by the state of things), focused on putting out the fires. His bastard son and general Juan José de Austria was sent to drown the rebellions, some of which were backed by France and England; he managed to quell them down, but lost a piece of Catalonia and, much worse, the whole of Portugal, which remained warring and would secede in the future, taking its African and Asian empire in its way out. For their part, the increasingly troubled lieutenants in the Spanish Netherlands were instructed to accept any peace possible, finally ending the Eighty and Thirty Years War (anticlimactically so) with the Peace of Westphalia at the cost of Spain taking multiple minor territorial losses. The positions against France stood firm a few years more, but when England teamed up with France, Philip saw it was useless to keep trying and ended it too with the marriage of his daughter Maria Theresa to the new King of France, Louis XIV, in 1659. By this point, his own wife Elisabet and not less than ten of his dozen legitimate children had died to different illnesses, so Philip had to undergo an emergency marriage with his niece Mariana in order to produce more heirs.
The king never really recovered. He had reached the throne desiring to avoid the disastrous mistakes of his predecessors and to refloat Spain to the glory of the Greater Austrias, and instead he had committed much worse ones and sunk it deeper than ever in its entire history. A fervent, providentialist Catholic, he had always believed God would be firmly in Spain's side after so much campaigning for the glory of Catholicism during The Protestant Reformation, yet he now came to believe God had instead punished the empire for his sins and personal failures. After Olivares' banishment, Philip had struck an Odd Friendship by letter with the mystic nun Mary of Jesus of Ágreda, known by her supposed miracles, but not even she could bring him enough advice and consolation, and he became more and more obsessed with death, which had already taken all of his close relatives and was now coming for him. With the war with Portugal still raging, the Planet King died 1665, leaving the throne to his similarly sickly son Charles II of Spain and hoping for God to at least show mercy on him. The hegemony of the House of Habsburg in Europe died with Philip, and Louis XIV soon ascended to the glory Philip had always sought to restore.
In fiction
- He is played by Simon Cohen in the Alatriste film.
- A standard negative portrayal of him appears in Arturo Pérez-Reverte's Alatriste.
- He is an important character in later seasons of Águila Roja, where he's played by Xabier Elorriaga.
- He's played by Daniel Alonso in the Alatriste TV series.
- Comedian Edu Soto plays him in The Ministry of Time.