Of the various times the Fanshawes saw the King or Queen no detailed account need be given here, as the descriptions add nothing to our knowledge; nor is it necessary to dwell upon the accounts given of the Court diversions, which have already been described fully in the earlier pages of this book. Lady Fanshawe's opinions, however, of Spain and Spaniards generally are quaint. She thinks that the usually accepted English idea that Spain is a land of famine is unjust, especially for those who could afford to pay.
"There is not in the Christian world," she says, "better wines than their midland (i.e. southern) wines, especially sherry and canary. Their water tastes like milk, and their wheat makes the sweetest and best bread in the world. Bacon is beyond belief good; the Segovia veal much whiter, larger, and fatter than ours. They have a small bird that lives and fattens on grapes and corn—so fat that it exceeds the quantity of flesh. They have the best partridges I ever ate, and the best sausages, and salmon, pike, and seabream, which they send up in pickle called escabeche in Madrid; and dolphins, which are excellent meat,[[50]] besides carps and many other sorts of fish. The cream called nata is much sweeter and thicker than ever I saw in England. Their eggs much exceed ours; and so all sorts of salads, roots, and fruits.... Besides that, I have ate many sorts of biscuits, cakes, cheese, and excellent sweetmeats.... Their olives, which are nowhere so good. Their perfumes of amber excel all the world in their kind, both for clothes, household stuff, and fumes; and there is no such waters made as at Seville."
The good lady, too, was much enamoured of the courtesy of Spaniards.
"They are civil to all, as their qualities require, with highest respect; so I have seen a grandee and a duke stop his horse, when an ordinary woman passeth over a kennel, because he would not spoil her clothes, and put off his hat to the meanest woman that makes reverence, though it be to their footmen's wives.... They are punctual in visits, men to men and women to women. They visit not together, except their greatest ministers of State to wives of public ministers from Princes.... They are generally pleasant and facetious company, but in this their women exceed, who seldom laugh and never aloud, but are the most witty in repartees and stories and notions in the world.... They work little, but that rarely well, especially in monasteries (i.e. convents). They all paint white and red, from the Queen to the cobbler's wife, old and young, widows excepted, which never go out of close mourning, nor wear gloves nor show their hair after their husband's death, and seldom marry. They delight much in the feasts of bulls and in stage plays, and take great pleasure to see their little children act before them in their own houses, which they will do to perfection.... Until their daughters marry they never stir so much as down stairs, nor marry for no consideration under their quality, which to prevent, if their fortunes will not procure them husbands, they make them nuns. They are very magnificent in their houses, furniture, pictures of the best, jewels, plate, and clothes; most noble in presents, entertainments, and in their equipage."[[51]]
Fanshawe's mission made but slow progress, for the pride of Spain with regard to Portugal still stood in the way, and Philip was hoping against hope that the campaign of the following year, 1665, would restore to him the crown he had lost. He was still straining every nerve to get money; and as a last fatal resource in order to relieve as he hoped the distress of the treasury, he now reduced the value of the silver money to half, so that, as Lady Fanshawe says, "the pistole that was this morning at 82 reals was now proclaimed to go but for 48, which was above £800 loss to my husband."[[52]] At length, in the spring, by such devices as this—seizing all the securities lodged for loans, etc.—another army was got together. Don Juan, by the intrigues of the Austrian faction, was recalled and sent into semi-disgrace to Consuegra; the Count of Caracena, distinguished in the war with the Turks on the frontier of Hungary, being entrusted with the task of reconquering Portugal.
Philip, indeed, at this time, as his health and strength decayed, was surrounded by intrigue, intended, as it did, to drag unhappy Spain once more into the fatal alliance with the Emperor, in which Spain was made the catspaw of Austrian ambition, and the milch-cow of Austrian greed. It was no longer to suppress freedom of conscience in the German States. That had been conceded long ago; and against that alone had it been Spain's traditional policy to fight. The German Queen and her confessor Nithard, with Pöetting, the Austrian ambassador, were all intent now upon obtaining Spanish aid to the wars with the Turk on the Hungarian frontiers.[[53]] Philip still treated it as a question of conscience, and his letters to the nun breathed continual sorrow at having to deplete his own poverty-stricken subjects to help the Emperor. But it never seems to occur to him that he was really under no obligation whatever to do so, and that Spain would not have been seriously affected even if the Turk had been victorious in Hungary.
The nun's last letter
His personal health was now very bad, gallstones and other painful maladies keeping him in almost constant agony. To a letter from the nun, imploring him to care for his health, in March 1665, he answered that he would do so; "but I can assure you that I only want what may be best for God's service, and neither health, nor anything else, but that the divine will should be executed upon me. This is what I wish you to supplicate His Divine Majesty to grant me, and my salvation, which is my main concern." A few weeks after this was written, in March 1665, the nun sent to her royal friend another letter full of goodly counsel and encouragement; and then the pen fell from her hands for ever, and Philip was left utterly alone. His wife, working hard for her future influence, and in favour of the Austrian policy, had no sympathy to spare for the sufferings of the declining old uncle-husband, to whom political ambitions had given her as his wife. The only son who lived to succeed him was a scrofulous degenerate, who presented, even in his infancy, an exaggeration of his inherited type, which made him a monstrosity, a poor creature who never emerged from puerility, and finally died of senile decay at forty.
There was literally no ray of light on earth for Philip, now that Sor Maria was dead. Around him, as he knew and saw, plans and intrigues were anticipating the time when he should be no more. There were those in the Court, looking mostly to Don Juan, who dreaded to see Spain dragged once more at the tail of the Empire; for Louis XIV. was already threatening, and most Spaniards hankered for the closer alliance, meaning peace with France, that seemed so firm on the Isle of Pheasants only five years before; whilst Mariana and the Austrians had gained to their side a large party of nobles, pledged for their own greedy ends to support the Queen when she should succeed to the Regency and hold in her hands the resources of Spain.
The last blow