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an air of arrogant bravado that came to be thought of throughout the
rest of Europe as typical of Spaniards. The grim, silent, somewhat sinis-
ter but undoubtedly efficient aura projected by Philip II had given way
to a far less impressive tendency to threaten and bluster.
Although freedom from the distractions of war was what his county
most needed, the late king had permitted Spain to become involved in
renewed conflict with the Dutch Republic and in the adjacent territory
of the Holy Roman Empire. Philip IV lacked the good sense to extricate
himself from these commitments and, indeed, became even more
entangled in them during the 1630s. Olivares, recognizing the damage
done by political corruption and administrative extravagance under
Lerma, had made a sincere effort to implement reforms during the first
five years of his ministry. A flurry of decrees abolished this office, for-
bade that practice, and, in general, conveyed an impression of a new
broom sweeping clean. Although he succeeded in replacing the power
of the archaic council system by creating a series of committees (juntas)
under his personal supervision to manage various aspects of govern-
ment business, most of his efforts at reform failed. Lacking the follow-
up necessary to prevent backsliding, the decrees were allowed to
become almost dead letters, and the offenders soon returned to the cor-
rupt practices of the past. By 1626 Olivares was concentrating on new,
grander schemes of rescuing Spain from its difficulties. Inevitably these
involved ingenious methods of raising taxes to cover the ever-increas-
ing cost of war. But Olivares also grasped the underlying reality that
Spain had never attained complete unity.
In a memorandum addressed to Philip in 1626 Olivares warned his
master that he would never succeed in his purposes unless he truly
became king of Spain, rather than king of Aragon, prince of Catalonia,
king of Portugal, Naples, and the rest. While all of these realms had
been brought under Castilian overlordship during the previous century,
they had, in fact, separate constitutional arrangements, administrative
structures, fiscal peculiarities, and, perhaps most serious of all, a strong
sense of their own traditional identities. Olivares maintained that unless
the tensions between the Castilian center and the other lands of which
Philip was overlord could be assuaged, the Spanish Empire could not
be made to work as a coherent whole. There is much truth to this per-
ception, and Olivares was not the first to arrive at it. While the other
two centralized despotic monarchies that emerged during the Renais-
sance—France and England—also suffered from problems of consolida-
tion and restlessness in their outlying territories, Spain's problems in
this regard were far more serious and persistent. Regionalism within
Spain herself—even after the imperial realms had been lost—would
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