He found the tone in his palace very different from when he had left it. There were four women, all of whom had Philip’s ear, and who hated Olivares. The Queen, Anna of Austria, Queen of France, Philip’s sister, the Duchess of Mantua (Margaret of Savoy), his cousin, who had been his viceroy in Portugal, and who rightly blamed the minister for the loss of the country; she, moreover, being kept in semi-imprisonment at Ocaña by the minister’s orders, and Doña Anna de Guevara, the King’s old nurse, who was also forbidden at Court by the same influence. These ladies were all in communication with each other and with the nobles who were Olivares’ enemies, led by the Counts of Paredes and Castrillo. ‘My good intentions and my son’s innocence,’ Isabel told Paredes, ‘must for once serve the King for eyes: for if he sees through those of the Count Duke much longer, my son will be reduced to a poor King of Castile.’
A week or two after the King’s return, Isabel struck her blow at the tottering favourite. The first sign of the event was the escape of the King’s Savoy cousin, the Duchess of Mantua, from Ocaña, and her arrival at Madrid late at night, after a ride of forty miles through a storm of sleet. Olivares was furious, and kept her waiting for four hours before he assigned her two wretched rooms in one of the royal convents. But Isabel received her in the palace with open arms the next morning. Then the banished nurse, Anna de Guevara, appeared in the palace in defiance of Olivares. That afternoon Philip visited his wife’s room, and she, kneeling before him, with little Baltasar in her arms, implored him for the sake of their son to dismiss his evil minister before it was too late to rescue the realms his ineptitude had lost. In a torrent of words Isabel poured forth the pent-up complaints of years; the wars that had ruined the country, the starving people, the lost provinces, the waste and frivolity that had been the rule of their lives, the insults and slights which she, personally, had suffered at the hands of Olivares and his wife, and the shame that a king, into whose hands God had confided so sacred a task, should delegate it to others.
Philip was deeply moved, though he said nothing; but as he left his wife’s chamber, he was confronted in the corridor by the kneeling figure of his beloved foster-mother, Anna de Guevara. She, too, formed her impeachment of Olivares in impassioned words, and Philip could only reply, ‘You have spoken the truth.’ Then for two hours the Queen and the Duchess of Mantua were closeted with the King, and the victory was won.[[228]] That night, 17th January 1643, Olivares was dismissed. He struggled for days to regain his influence over the King, but tried in vain; for Philip, like most weak men, was obstinate when once his mind was made up, and so, ruined and degraded, the Count Duke turned his back upon the Court he had ruled, and went to madness and death, leaving Isabel of Bourbon, the mistress of the situation, the ‘King’s only minister,’ as he said soon after, when he asked the nuns of shoeless Carmelites to pray for his ‘minister.’
Madrid went wild with joy at Olivares’ fall. ‘Isabels have always saved Spain,’ the people cried, as the King and Queen with the Duchess of Mantua went to the convent church of the barefoots to give thanks; ‘Philip is King of Spain, at last, and will save his country.’ But it needed much more than shouting to save Spain. Philip, spurred by his wife, plucked up more energy than ever before. He would be his own minister in future, and would take the field as soon as spring came, and wrest Catalonia from the French. Before that could be done, Philip’s army met in Flanders with the greatest defeat it had ever sustained, a blow from which the reputation of the famous Spanish infantry never recovered. His young brother, Cardinal Ferdinand, had died two years before, and his place in Flanders had been taken by the Portuguese noble Mello. He was a good soldier; but Condé, young as he was, out-generalled him: and the defeat of Rocroy made it certain that France, and not Spain, would in future lead Europe. But yet the soil of Spain itself must be redeemed from the French invaders: and again, through the summer of 1643, Philip struggled manfully to regain his lost dominion; whilst Isabel, as Regent in Madrid, organised, directed, and encouraged, with a spirit and energy that won for her the fervent love of her husband’s loyal subjects. Some success attended him, for he captured Lerida from the French: but the war was a terrible drain, and in the campaign of the following year, 1644, failure followed failure.
The poor, weary, King’s heart was almost breaking under his many troubles, when he was brought into contact with the saintly woman, who until the end was his one refuge and solace, the Venerable nun, Maria de Agreda, whose exhortations and prayers sustained him in his hardest trials, which were yet to come. Philip was in Saragossa at the beginning of October when news came to him that his wife was ill. Sending his new favourite—for his good resolves in that respect had soon failed—Luis de Haro, to the front, to acquaint the army of the King’s reason for leaving, he started at once for Madrid.
On the 28th September 1644, Isabel had suffered from some sort of choleraic attack with much fever. She was copiously bled in the arms, and seemed to improve, but was soon seen to be suffering from violent erysipelas in the face; the disease soon spreading to the throat, which was almost closed, as if by diphtheria. The patient was bled eight times more, but still the inflammation grew; and, as usual with Spanish doctors, when bleeding failed, the charms of the church were resorted to. On the 4th October the last sacrament was administered, and the dead body of Saint Isidore was brought to the sick chamber. This having failed to effect a cure, the more sacred relic still, the miraculous image of the Virgin of Atocha was brought in procession from its shrine into the convent of St. Thomas, at Madrid, with the intention of placing it for adoration by the Queen’s bed. When Isabel’s permission was asked, she said that she was unworthy of the honour of such a visit, and Prince Baltasar visited the image instead, to implore upon his knees that his mother’s life might be spared. ‘There was no church nor convent in Madrid that did not bring out in procession its crucifixes and most sacred images in prayer for the Queen’s health, and the whole people wailed fervently their prayers and rogations that her life might be granted.’[[229]]
On the 5th of October, the dying woman tried to make her new will; but she was too weak, and only left verbal authority before witnesses to the King to carry out her intentions. At noon on that day she sent for a fleur de lys, which formed one of the ornaments in the crown, and in which was encased a fragment of the true cross. This she worshipped fervently. Her two children were brought to her, Baltasar and the girl Maria Theresa, but she would not let them approach her for fear of contagion, though she blessed them fervently from afar. ‘There are plenty of Queens for Spain,’ she sighed, but princes and princesses are scarce. The next day, as the great clock of the palace marked a quarter past four in the afternoon, Isabel of Bourbon breathed her last, aged forty-one. Garbed as a Franciscan nun, the body was carried that night to the royal convent of barefoots; and thence the day after in a leaden coffin, encased in another of brocade, it was borne back to the palace to lie in state amidst blazing tapers, nodding plumes, and all the pomp and circumstance of royal mourning.
In the meanwhile, Philip was hurrying from Aragon, a prey to the keenest anxiety. At Maranchon, about fifty miles from the capital, where the King had alighted at a wretched inn, the news came that the Queen was dead. The ministers and courtiers around the King forbore to tell him for a time, out of mere pity; for the journey and anxiety had told upon him ‘and he had only just dined.’ But a few miles further on, at Almadrones, the news was broken to him in his carriage by those who accompanied him. A terrible burst of grief, and an order that he might be left alone in his sorrow, proved that Philip, for all his faithlessness, was fond of his wife; and then, rather than enter the city where the Queen’s body lay, he turned aside and sought solitude at the Pardo,[[230]] where he was soon joined by his son Baltasar, whilst, with the usual heavy pomp at dead of night, the body of Isabel was carried across the bleak Castilian tableland to the new jasper vault in the Escorial, which, from very dread, she had never dared to enter in her lifetime.
Three days after Isabel’s death, the sainted mystic of Agreda saw, as she asserted, the phantom of the Queen before her, asking for the prayers of the godly to liberate her from the pains she was suffering in purgatory, for the vain splendour of her attire during her life.[[231]] To the nun Philip’s cry of pain went up, whilst to all the rest of the world he turned a leaden face. On the 15th November he wrote—‘Since the Lord was pleased to take from me to himself the Queen, who is now in heaven, I have wanted to write to you, but the great distress I am in, and the business with which I am overwhelmed, have hitherto prevented me from doing so. I find myself more oppressed with sorrow than seems bearable, for I have lost in one person alone all that I can lose in this world: and if it were not that I know, according to the faith I hold, that God sends to us that which is best and wisest, I know not what would become of me. But this thought, and this alone, makes me suffer my grief with utter resignation to the will of God; and I must confess to you that I have needed much help from on high to bring me to bear this cross patiently. I wanted to ask you to pray to God very earnestly for me in this dire trouble, and to aid me in asking Him to grant me grace to offer up this sorrow to Him, and take advantage of it for my own salvation.’[[232]]
A yet more terrible trial for him came two years later; and a yet more heartbroken appeal to the nun for prayers, and to God to save him from rebellion against his hard fate, burst from the King’s breaking heart when his only son died in his budding manhood, and left Philip, aged by suffering, to face matrimony again for the sake of leaving an heir to the crown of sorrow that was weighing him down.