Historians C. V. Wedgwood, R. Stradling and J. H. Elliott have described him, respectively, as an "undistinguished and insignificant man,"[2] a "miserable monarch,"[3] and a "pallid, anonymous creature, whose only virtue appeared to reside in a total absence of vice.

[6] Philip's education was to follow the model for royal princes laid down by Father Juan de Mariana, focusing on the imposition of restraints and encouragement to form the personality of the individual at an early age, aiming to deliver a king who was neither tyrannical nor excessively under the influence of his courtiers.

[6] Prince Philip appears to have been generally liked by his contemporaries: "dynamic, good-natured and earnest" suitably pious, having a "lively body and a peaceful disposition" albeit with a relatively weak constitution.

[7] The comparison with the memory of the disobedient and ultimately insane Carlos was usually a positive one, although some commented that Prince Philip appeared less intelligent and politically competent than his late brother.

[17] As a matter of policy, Philip had tried to avoid appointing grandees to major positions of power within his government and relied heavily on the lesser nobles, the so-called 'service' nobility.

[7] In his Republica Mista, Tomás Fernández de Medrano advised Philip III of Spain that withdrawing from his subjects might be regarded as 'a form of religion', drawing a comparison between the king's limited interaction with his people and the reverence shown to the consecrated Eucharist.

He drastically limited daily access to himself, granting it almost exclusively to his royal favorite, the Duke of Lerma, who managed most audiences to maintain the king's unseen presence.

[23] Writers such as Girolamo Frachetta, who became a particular favourite of Philip, had propagated a conservative definition of 'reason of state' which centred on exercising a princely prudence and a strict obedience to the laws and customs of the country that one ruled.

[34] Lerma responded by further limiting his public visibility in politics, avoiding signing and writing documents personally,[35] and constantly stressing that he was, humbly, only working on behalf of his master, Philip III.

In the Netherlands, his father Philip II had bequeathed his remaining territories in the Low Countries to his daughter Isabella of Spain and her husband, Archduke Albert, under the condition that if she died without heirs, the province would return to the Spanish Crown.

Pedro Henriquez de Acevedo, Count of Fuentes, as governor of the Duchy of Milan, exploited the lack of guidance from Madrid to pursue his own highly interventionist policy across north Italy, including making independent offers to support the Papacy by invading the Venetian Republic in 1607.

Pedro Téllez-Girón, 3rd Duke of Osuna, who had married into the Sandoval family as a close ally of Lerma, again showed significant independence as the Viceroy of Naples towards the end of Philip's reign.

In conjunction with the Spanish ambassador to Venice, the influential Alfonso de la Cueva, 1st Marquis of Bedmar, Osuna pursued a policy of raising an extensive army, intercepting Venetian shipping and imposing sufficiently high taxes that threats of a revolt began to emerge.

Lerma fell to an alliance of interests—Uceda, his son, led the attack, aiming to protect his future interests, allied with Baltasar de Zúñiga, a well-connected noble with a background in diplomacy across Europe, whose nephew, Olivares was close to the heir to the throne, Prince Philip.

[45] The challenge for such a ruler was that these territories were, in legal reality, separate bodies, different entities bound together in personal union through the royal institutions of the Spanish crown, utilising Castilian nobility as a ruling class.

[48] The Moriscos were the descendants of those Muslims that had converted to Christianity during the Reconquista of the previous centuries; despite their conversion, they retained a distinctive culture, including many Islamic practices.

[49] Philip II had made the elimination of the Morisco threat a key part of his domestic strategy in the south, attempting an assimilation campaign in the 1560s, which had resulted in the revolt that concluded in 1570.

[49] The idea of completely cleansing Spain of the Moriscos was proposed by Juan de Ribera, the Archbishop and Viceroy of Valencia, whose views were influential with Philip III.

Financially, the royal treasury stood to gain by seizing the assets of the removed peoples, while in due course those close to the crown would benefit from cheap land or gifts of estates.

[55] Mateo Alemán, one of the first modern novelists in Europe, captured the despondent mood of the period, describing 'the plague that came down from Castile and the famine that rose from Andalusia' to grip the country.

He had inherited huge debts from his father, Philip II, and an unhelpful tradition that the Crown of Castile bore the brunt of royal taxation—Castile carried 65% of total imperial costs by 1616.

[63] These different voices focused heavily on the political economy of Spain—the rural depopulation, the diverse and bureaucratic administrative methods, the social hierarchies and corruption, offering numerous, if often contradictory, solutions.

[66] Under the incoming administration, including the reformist Baltasar de Zúñiga, this committee ground on, but would only deliver substantial, if ill-fated results, when rejuvenated under Philip IV's reign.

[67] In the Netherlands, a new war strategy resulted in a re-establishment of Spanish power on the north side of the great rivers Meuse and Rhine, stepping up the military pressure on the rebel provinces.

Philip III turned to peace negotiations instead; with the accession to the throne of James I of England it became possible to terminate both the war and English support to the Dutch, with the signature in 1604 of the Treaty of London.

To secure the connection between Milan and the Netherlands a new route for the Spanish Road was opened through Valtellina, then part of the independent state of the Three Leagues (the present-day canton of Graubünden, Switzerland), and in 1618 the plot of Venice occurred in which the authorities engaged in the persecution of pro-Spanish agents.

[72] Finally, by the Oñate treaty of 29 July 1617, Ferdinand made a successful appeal to Philip's self-interest by promising Spain the Habsburg lands in Alsace in return for Spanish support for his election.

[74] The Spanish troops headed by Spinola in the Palatinate and by Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly in Bohemia achieved a decisive victory against the Czechs in the Battle of White Mountain in 1620.

The story told in the memoirs of the French ambassador François de Bassompierre, that he was killed by the heat of a brasero (a pan of hot charcoal), because the proper official to take it away was not at hand, is a humorous exaggeration of the formal etiquette of the court.

[87] Philip's use of Lerma as his valido has formed one of the key historical and contemporary criticisms against him; recent work[b] 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.