Spain's Planet King was said to have laughed in public only three times
Philip IV ruled the largest empire on Earth, some 12.2 million square kilometres, and was coached to appear so solemn that foreigners compared him to a statue. In private he loved the theatre, witty literary salons and a joke, and his court painter Velázquez pinpointed his flaw: he trusted others more than himself.
Born in Valladolid on 8 April 1605, the eldest son of Philip III, he was married at 10 to the 13-year-old Elisabeth of France. He inherited the throne in 1621 at sixteen, and also reigned over Portugal until the Iberian Union broke apart in 1640. His nickname, the Planet King, matched the pomp of Baroque kingship that he embodied. He was a fine rider, an enthusiastic hunter and a devotee of bullfighting, all essential parts of royal display.
Power in his early reign flowed through Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares. The young king warmed to him slowly, but soon ordered every paper needing a royal signature to pass through Olivares first, and kept him as chief minister for two decades. Their portraits even hung side by side at the Buen Retiro Palace, something unheard of in Europe. Some suspect Olivares kept Philip apart from his queen and nudged him towards mistresses; the king is known to have fathered at least 30 children outside marriage. Elisabeth helped engineer Olivares's removal in 1643.
Family tragedy shaped his later years. Of his ten children with Elisabeth, the only son, Balthasar Charles, died at sixteen in 1646, a loss that devastated him. In 1649, at 44, he married his 14-year-old niece Mariana of Austria to cement ties with the Austrian Habsburgs. Only two of their five children reached adulthood, among them the sickly future Charles II, whose frailty left the succession in doubt.
Judgements of Philip have swung widely. Victorian writers cast him as weak and his court as debauched, even blaming his heir's death on vice, though doctors at the time diagnosed smallpox and modern scholars suspect appendicitis. Twentieth-century historians were kinder, finding him more energetic than his father and at times a conscientious policymaker. From the 1640s he corresponded with the cloistered abbess Sor María de Ágreda. He died on 17 September 1665, leaving an empire at its territorial peak but in decline.
Source: Philip IV of Spain
