The Court of Philip IV.: Spain in Decadence

David Hume · en
And still the frenzy of waste and magnificence in all classes went on,
for no men saw fully yet that ruin was the inevitable result of a state
of society in which luxurious idleness, or the pretence of it, was
alone regarded as honourable, and where the honey was seized by the
drones of the hive before workers had stored it.  On the 13th January
1608 the ceremony of swearing allegiance to the child Philip as heir to
the Crown of Spain was celebrated in the church of St. Geronimo in
Madrid,[24] with a lavishness that almost rivalled that of his baptism.
Once more the King, in white satin and spangles and overloaded with
gems, walked in procession with the fair-haired fragile Queen, even
more splendidly bedight than he;[25] once more the lavish Lerma led the
baby Prince as sponsor, and the courtiers who followed vied with the
favourite in the magnificence of their attire; once more Cardinal
Sandoval de Rojas with a crowd of prelates invested the act with all
the solemn state of which the Church was capable, and in the courtly
fashion of his house substituted a kiss for the canonical blow in the
ceremony of confirmation.[26]  Madrid was {27} ablaze with light, and
the ball in the palace at night surpassed anything that the now deposed
Valladolid could show; but over all the glitter the black cloud
hovered, and even whilst the ceremony of homage was being celebrated,
the Council of State, despairing now of the conversion of the Moriscos
by softer methods, and alarmed at the prospects of a great invasion
from Morocco, practically decided to clear the soil of Spain of the
descendants of its former conquerors.

Of the details of the expulsion this is not the place to speak.  We are
principally concerned with it here to show that Philip IV.  was bound
from his earliest infancy to an inherited policy, and that the seeds of
social and national decadence were sown before his time.  He was no
Hercules to root them out, but was forced with bitter anguish to
witness the riches and power of his realms choked and destroyed by the
noxious growth which grew to maturity in his time: whilst he wept and
prayed for the miraculous remedy that never comes, or sought
forgetfulness in vicious indulgence that added private remorse to his
public sorrow.

[Sidenote: Philip's childhood]