But this mighty Spanish power came to an end with the monarch in whom it was represented.  The sources of Spanish strength had been drying up for a century, but the personal character of the successive monarchs, and vast foreign acquisitions, had disguised the fact from the world.  Philip died in 1598, and in reality left his empire but a skeleton to his son, a youth of feeble mind, but under whose rule a change of policy was effected, not, as has been sometimes supposed, from any deep views on the part of the Count-Duke Lerma, but because it was impossible for Spain to maintain the place she had held under Philip II.  Even had Philip III. been as able a man as his father, or his grandfather, he could not have preserved the ascendency of Spain,—­that country having changed much, and Europe more.  Every European nation, with the exception of Turkey,—­and the Turks were only encamped in Europe,—­had advanced during the sixteenth century, except Spain, which had declined.  Thus had she become weak, positively and relatively.  Rest was necessary to her, and under the rule of Lerma she obtained it.  He supported the peace policy of that old aristocratical party of which Ruy Gomez had been the chief, but which had been hardly heard of in the last twenty years of Philip II.’s reign.  That monarch, on his death-bed, regretted that “to his grace in bestowing on him so great a realm, God had not been pleased to add the grace of granting him a successor capable of continuing to rule it”; but had his son been all that the most unreasonable parent could have desired, he could not have pursued his father’s policy.  Lerma did but act as he was forced to act.  The circumstance that the Catholic Reaction had triumphed was alone sufficient to make a change necessary.  Spanish greatness was no longer the leading political interest of the Church, and Rome was at liberty to have some regard to the new powers that were growing up in Europe.  Pacific ideas prevailed.  Spain ceased to make war in every direction, and husbanded her resources, and began to renew her native strength.  The skeleton bequeathed by Philip II. became clothed with flesh, and sinewy.  Could this policy have been continued for a generation, Spanish history might have been made to read differently from the melancholy text it now presents.  But the process of rehabilitation was not allowed to go on.  There had always been a strong party opposed to Lerma, and that statesman’s friendliness to the English and the Dutch made him liable to the charge of favoring heresy,—­a charge that was the heaviest that could be brought against any one in the estimation of Philip III., who was as bigoted as his father.  The Catholic and warlike policy of Idiaquez, Granvella, and Moura was revived.  The two branches of the Austrian family were again brought into the closest alliance, and at a time when the German branch had become even more Catholic than the elder branch.  Spain stepped once more into the European arena, and her generals