Alas! for Philip; he had the doggedness but not the genius of his father. Meanwhile the times were changing, and he did not know it. Despotism, whether religious or political, no longer was to go unquestioned. What the Netherlands had endured from Charles they refused to submit to from his son. The more so that, while his father had chastised them with whips, he, in the person of the unspeakable Alva, chastised them with scorpions. The United Provinces revolted and the rest of Philip’s life was spent in a vain effort to crush the Dutch patriots and the English who had more or less espoused their cause. Meanwhile the fleets of both countries were sweeping the Spaniards from the high seas. When Philip died in 1598, he left to his son, Philip III, the legacy of a fruitless foreign war, a ruined commerce, and an impoverished treasury. As an enduring monument of himself he left the Escoriál. The decline of Spanish prestige and prosperity was accelerated by Philip III, an easy-going person, who even refused to take any active part in the selection of his own wife. He languidly continued the embellishment of the palaces which his father had built, and posed mildly as a patron of the arts. Under his feeble rule the power of the crown declined, while that of the nobility correspondingly increased; and to them probably more than to the king himself must be attributed the crime and economical blunder of the final expulsion of the Morescoes. An adventitious lustre is added to the reign of this king and his father by the genius of Cervantes, Lope de Vega, the dramatist, and the great artist, El Greco. Succeeding to the crown at the age of seventeen, Philip IV resigned the government to his favorite and prime-minister, the Count-Duke Olivares, whose idea of statesmanship was to keep his royal master as far as possible in ignorance of the impending ruin of the kingdom. To this end he renewed the war in Holland, which had been interrupted by a twelve years’ truce, and, with no decisive result except the squandering of revenue, prolonged it until the final recognition of Dutch Independence in 1648. Over eighty years had been expended in endeavoring to set back the clock to the principles and methods of the Middle Ages and in the process the proud empire, inaugurated by the Catholic Kings, Ferdinand and Isabella, had been drained of its vitality. The colonial possessions began to fall one by one into the hands of foreigners and Spain herself was enfeebled and demoralised. Meanwhile Philip played the part of a Maecenas in what proved to be the Golden Age of Spanish literature and art.