On the 20th June 1665 the terrible news had to be broken to the King, that his forlorn hope had been defeated. Count Caracena, from whom so much had been hoped, had been utterly crushed by the Portuguese and their English auxiliaries. Eight hours of carnage had reduced the Spanish army from 15,000 men to 7000, and all the guns had been lost. Philip could, in very truth, do no more. To raise this army every means, legal and illegal, had been resorted to; private property had been violated, pledges had been broken, injustice had been perpetrated, and suffering had been inflicted upon poor people already sorely oppressed. To this had the great dream come at last: that the King who was held to be the proudest and wealthiest in Christendom was unable to hold even his own territory. For the first time Philip broke down in the sight of men; for Sor Maria was dead, and to none could he turn now for comfort. Heart-broken, he cast himself upon the ground in a paroxysm of grief, and sobbed out the formula that was his only refuge, "Oh God! Thy will be done," almost the same words as those which his grandfather uttered when he received the news of the catastrophe that had overtaken his great Armada. But Philip IV.'s case was worse, by far, than that of Philip II. Behind the latter there was still a nation full of faith in its divine selection to dominate the world for the glory of God and His chosen King: behind Philip IV., himself aged and worn with sickness of body and disillusion of spirit, there was a people who had lost all confidence in themselves and their mission, ready to scoff and spit upon the idols that had failed them; a people whom sloth, vanity, and epicureanism had robbed for a time of their nobleness, and who yet had to pass through the consummation of their woe before, cleansed in the fires of suffering, they should arise again.

Philip knew it; and, looking back over his long reign, he must have cursed the fate that condemned him from his birth to the performance of an almost impossible task with utterly inadequate means. He had been dedicated at his baptism to the Dominican ideal of a Christian church purged of dissent at any cost; and yet, from the time when the Protestant ambassadors of England were the honoured guests at his christening, until now in his despairing age Fanshawe was reminding him daily of his impotence both on land and sea, he had been obliged to woo heretics, and to fight a great Catholic Power which was bent upon the final humiliation of his house. Thus, with bitter irony, some mightier power, with ends incomprehensible to men, mocked at the great designs of those who thought that they and theirs were but junior partners with providence, the chosen agents of the Almighty; and Philip, in whose days the scales had fallen from the nation's eyes, ascribed the agonised awakening, and the ruin it disclosed, to the vengeance of an offended deity for his own puny sins.

Philip bewitched

Philip was tired of the struggle, weary of the sordid intrigues around him, and he fell into gloomy despondency that banished from him all interest in life. His bodily sufferings were intense, for the malady that afflicted him was a cruel one. Again the rumour ran that the King was bewitched, and that the late Inquisitor-General had been arranging means to remove the spell when he died. The great ecclesiastics in attendance were convinced that Satan was at the bottom of the King's troubles; and asked Philip's permission to proceed in their incantations to defeat the evil one who was thus persecuting him. There were those at Court who sneered at the absurdity of attempting to cure a physical malady by such means;[[54]] but the Inquisition insisted, and took over the management of the case. The acting Inquisitor-General, Gonzalez, accompanied by Philip's confessor, Juan Martinez, went to the patient and asked him for a little bag of relics which he always wore around his neck, for they feared some evil charm might be amongst them. Then to the Dominican monastery of the Atocha they solemnly carried "an old book of sorcery, some prints of his Majesty transfixed with pins," and other rubbish, all of which they solemnly burnt with much sacred mummery.

This did the King no good, and then the doctors tried their hand with a sweet conserve of mallow leaves, not, one would think, a sovereign remedy for gall-stones. On Monday, 14th September, the physicians confessed themselves hopeless. The hemorrhage was very great, and the patient utterly exhausted with frequent paroxysms of fever, in one of which he was thought to be dead, and the news spread through the capital that he was so. When he was restored to consciousness, he summoned the new Secretary of State, Loyola, and entrusted him with official papers and his will for Queen Mariana, and then demanded the last sacrament. When the friars brought the viaticum and told the dying man that all hope was gone, he was resigned; though the Holy Virgin of the Atocha was taken in procession past his windows, and the body of St. Diego, with scores of other grisly remains, were kept in the sick-room itself, in the hope that good would come of them. Mariana and her two children came to say good-bye to the dying man on Monday afternoon, and, with tears in his eyes, Philip sighed to the five-year-old weakling who was to succeed him: "God make you happier than He has made me."[[55]] He took an affecting leave, too, of the Duke of Medina de las Torres, and the other nobles who were attached to him; pardoned the Marquis of Heliche for the attempt to blow up the Retiro, and granted many titles and knighthoods to his gentlemen-in-waiting. Count Castrillo, always self-seeking, had the bad taste to pester the King, both personally and through the friars, that he should be made Grandee, but Philip angrily referred him to the Queen.

For three days the King lingered on in suffering, confessing again and again and receiving absolution; never for long abandoning his hold upon the rough crucifix that had comforted the last moments of his saintly predecessors on the throne. The jealous friars and confessors about him quarrelled so violently in the death chamber on one occasion, about administering the last sacrament again, that the Marquis of Aytona turned the King's confessor out of the room and forbade his return. On Wednesday, Castrillo came in full of the great news that Don Juan had presented himself at the palace, and Philip, disturbed and unhappy at the trouble that this portended, sternly sent orders for the Prince to return instantly; for this, he said, was only the time for him to die, not to enter into mundane disputes.

Death of Philip IV.

All that night the King was delirious, until he suddenly recovered consciousness just before dawn on Thursday, 17th September 1665, and then quietly passed away. He had been beloved by those around him, and had been prodigal all his life of favour to the men who served him; but Mariana and her son were the source of bounty now, and human nature showed its baseness at such a crisis, as it is wont to do in palaces; for, as my eye-witness authority avers,[[56]] "Of all his Majesty's household, the Marquis of Aytona and two other servants alone wept for the death of their King and master; and in all the rest of the capital there was not one person who shed a tear." The Marquis of Malpica, captain of the Guard, came from the death chamber first to the anteroom filled with guards on duty, and announced the King's passing by shouting: "Now, comrades, your duty is to go upstairs[[57]] and guard his Majesty King Charles." Courtiers were too busy thence-forward looking towards the future to care much for the unhappy Planet King who had laid down his heavy burden. The reading of the will which made Mariana Regent, the constant meetings, and the coming and going of the ministers, kept the palace astir from morning till night; but a few faithful souls dressed the poor remains of the King in a musk-coloured velvet suit, embroidered with silver, placed a silver sword by his side, a diamond cross in his hands folded upon his breast, which was embroidered with the great red dagger of Santiago, and covered the head with a beaver hat. And so, garbed and enclosed in gorgeous silver and red velvet coffins, he was placed high upon a dais under a canopy illumined by great wax torches, surrounded with the insignia of imperial majesty, and guarded by the faithful halberdiers of Espinosa; whilst friars chanted and prayed around the bier hour after hour. The hall in which the body of Philip lay thus in deathly state was that which had seen so many gay hours of his hopeful youth; for it was the room devoted to the stage-plays that he had loved not wisely but too well.

Lady Fanshawe, like the rest of the great people in Madrid, went to see the sight, and thus records her impressions—

"The body of Philip IV. lay exposed from the 18th September, Friday morning, till the night of Saturday the 19th, in a great room in his palace, in which they used to act plays. The room was hung with fourteen pieces of the King's best hangings, and over them rich pictures round about, all of one size placed close together. At the upper end of the room was raised a throne of three steps, upon which there was placed a bedstead raised at the head. The throne was covered with a rich Persian carpet, and the bottom of the bedstead with a counterpoint of cloth of gold. The bedstead was of silver, the valance and headcloth of gold wrought in flowers with crimson silk. Over the bedstead was placed a cloth of state of the same as the valance and headcloth of the bedstead, upon which stood a silver gilt coffin raised a foot or more at the head than at the feet, and in the coffin lay Philip IV. with his head on a pillow, upon it a white beaver hat, his hair combed, his beard trimmed, his face and hands painted. He was clothed in a musk-coloured silk suit embroidered with gold, a golilla about his neck, cuffs on his hands, which were clasped on his breast, holding a globe and a cross therein. His cloak was of the same, with his sword on his side; stockings, shoe-strings, and garters of the same, and a pair of white shoes upon his feet."