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 incredibly complex relationship to his 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. In any case, Philip attempted to stop the decline of Spain that had been brought by their predecessor's decisions, yet he was ultimately unsuccessful and instead had to witness the beginning of the rise of France, ruled by his own son-in-law Louis XIV.
Philip himself was married to the princess of France, Elisabeth of Bourbon, back when they were still children. Around this time, the throughly corrupt 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, mismanagement and systemic chaos 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, Philip's personal life was also affected. 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. Despite those impressively virile numbers (a popular 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. There is also a certain story where Philip was caught red-handed seducing the Duchess of Albuquerque and subsequently beaten up by the Duke under the mutual Plausible Deniability of him being a thief. His generativity extended to his reign, as he and Olivares attempted to strengthen Spain by increasing its population, for which they banned emigration, promoted immigration, and in a supreme irony, tried to banish prostitution.
Far from thinking solely with his nether regions, however, Philip also became 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, bringing Diego Velázquez to the court and striking an Interclass Friendship with him, 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 Spain already knee-deep in the Thirty Years' War, Olivares ordered to reinvigorate the Eighty Years one and keep trying to force the Dutch Republic to a favorable treaty. The King and the Count-Duke had worked to expand 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 realized a plan to economically isolate the Dutch — only that the crown's characteristically lousy execution of their grand plans missed a chance to potentially finish the Dutch. The enthroning of Charles I of England brought an additional war, which came after a failed and crazy attempt to marry Philip's sister Maria Anna to Charles (and hopefully convert him to Catholicism), but unlike the previous, Spain this time defeated the English, even recovering small territories previously lost. Then a proxy war against King Louis XIII of France exploded in Mantua, with its result only setting back the Habsburgs' interest in the Thirty Years War. Success and failure came in even numbers, and meanwhile the money wound kept bleeding.
With the deployment of his brother, the brilliant Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand, things seemed to be improving. Making a grand entry in the Thirty Years War, Ferdinand stopped the rising Sweden 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, around this time Olivares revealed to be an incredibly jealous man who tried to destroy everyone who could overshadow him, and this turned him against Ferdinand and Fadrique de Toledo Osorio, Philip's talented admiral, bringing much infighting. To further beautify things, the Hispanic Monarchy then entered a Super-Power Meltdown, nicknamed the "1640 Crisis": tired of being entangled in wars they wanted nothing of and being mismanaged by generations, rebellions started exploding one after another in Catalonia, Portugal, Andalusia, Aragon and Naples, and as if this was a minor inconvenience, Ferdinand died of illness 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. Things would turn so incredibly, overwhelmingly bad that the possibility of the nobility of Castile forcing Philip to abdicate became real.
Philip finally heeded the public opinion and, firing the bellicose 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, and managed to quell them down except by a piece of Catalonia that got lost 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. The increasingly troubled generals in the Spanish Netherlands were instructed to accept any peace possible, finally ending the Eighty and Thirty Years War with the Peace of Westphalia at the cost of Spain taking multiple territorial losses. The positions against France stood firm a few years more, but when England teamed up with France and tipped sharply the tide against the Spaniards, 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 not survived to different illnesses, and he 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 now found himself surrounded of bloody corpses and smoking ruins. 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, and now came to believe God had instead punished the empire for his sins and personal failures. After Olivares' banishment, the king 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 now was coming for him. With the Portuguese rebellion 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
Literature- 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.
