Editing Philip III of Spain (section)

==Legacy==
[[File:EscorialAustria.jpg|thumb|Philip III's tomb, between those of his grandfather, father and son]]
Philip III died in Madrid on 31 March 1621, and was succeeded by his son, [[Philip IV of Spain|Philip IV]], who swiftly removed the last remnants of the Sandoval family regime from court. According to the memoirs of the French ambassador [[François de Bassompierre]], the claim that he was killed by the heat of a ''brasero'' (a pan of hot charcoal), due to the absence of the proper official is a humorous exaggeration of the court etiquette.{{citation needed|date=September 2021}}

Philip has generally left a poor legacy with historians. Three major historians of the period have described an 'undistinguished and insignificant man',<ref name="Wedgwood55"/> a 'miserable monarch',<ref name=Stradling18/> whose 'only virtue appeared to reside in a total absence of vice'.<ref name="Elliott300-301"/> More generally, Philip has largely retained the reputation of 'a weak, dim-witted monarch who preferred hunting and traveling to governing'.<ref name="Sánchez, p.92">{{harvnb|Sánchez|1996|p=92}}</ref>

Unlike Philip IV, whose reputation has improved significantly in the light of recent analysis, Philip III's reign has been relatively unstudied, possibly because of the negative interpretation given to the role of Philip and Lerma during the period.<ref name="Sánchez, p.92"/> Traditionally, the decline of Spain has been placed from the 1590s onwards; [[Historical revisionism|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 Holy Roman Empire, and 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.<ref>{{harvnb|Parker| 1984|page=145}}</ref> Philip's use of Lerma as his ''valido'' has formed one of the key historical and contemporary criticisms against him; recent work{{efn|In particular, Feros (2006) and Williams' (2006) recent extensive studies of the period, and Sánchez's (1996) analysis of the role of powerful women, often under-reported in historical documents, at Philip's court.}} has perhaps begun to present a more nuanced picture of the relationship and the institution that survived for the next forty years in Spanish royal government.