The previous chapters have discussed how the king was expected to consecrate his life to achieve peace in his realm and concord among vassals: in this task, he is presented as the guarantor of social and political harmony in his kingdom. This chapter, however, argues that when the monarch died, the state he ruled symbolically transformed itself into chaos and, at the same time, the whole Firmament mourned and became dissonant through the ‘general discord of the elements’, a universal topic in accounts of royal funerals.

As seen in previous chapters, the Spanish Habsburgs frequently adopted the Sun as a key symbol of their official propaganda and were identified with it by political writers of all tendencies. Identification with the main astral body recreated the idea of the divine order of the heavenly spheres, and especially the need of updating and preserving it within the state in consonance with God's plan. The sacralization of the king that took place in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain also expressed the idea that the ruler guarantees the harmonic relationship between human society and supernatural powers. In this conception, the machinery of the state comes to life with a dynamism similar to that of heaven: everything revolves around the king as the celestial bodies revolve around the Sun.