For all his short sight and clubbed feet, he was ever too ready with his rapier. On Maundy Thursday, 1611, he witnessed a scuffle between a man and woman during Tenebræ in St. Martin's Church. He intervened, the argument was continued outside, swords were crossed, and Quevedo's opponent fell mortally wounded. As the man was a noble, Quevedo prudently escaped from possible consequences to Sicily. He returned to his estate, La Torre de Juan Abad, in 1612, but soon wearied of country life, and was sent on diplomatic missions to Genoa, Milan, Venice, and Rome. On Osuna's promotion to Naples, Quevedo became Finance Minister, proving himself a capable administrator. In 1618 he meddled in the Spanish plot which forms the motive of Otway's _Venice Preserved_, and, disguised as a beggar, escaped from the bravos told off to murder him. His public career ended at this time, for his subsequent appointment as Felipe IV.'s secretary was merely nominal. In 1627 he shared in a furious polemic. Santa Teresa was canonised in 1622, and, at the joint instance of Carmelites and Jesuits, was made co-patron of Spain with Santiago. The Papal Bull (July 31, 1627) divided Spain into two camps. Quevedo, who was of the Order of Santiago—"red with the blood of the brave"—took up the cudgels for St. James, was branded a "hypocritical blackguard" by one party, and was extolled by the other as the "Captain of Combat," "the Ensign of the Apostle." He shamed Pope, King, Olivares, the religious, and half the laity, and the Bull was withdrawn (June 28, 1630). The victory cost him a year's exile, and when Olivares offered him the embassy at Genoa, he refused it, on the ground that he did not wish to have his mouth thus closed. After his unlucky marriage to Esperanza de Mendoza, widow of Juan Fernández de Heredia, he began a campaign against the royal favourite. Olivares' turn came in December 1639, when the King found by his plate a copy of verses urging him to cease his extravagance and to dismiss his incapable ministers. Quevedo was—perhaps rightly—suspected of writing these lines, was arrested at midnight, and was whisked away, half dressed, to the monastery of St. Mark in León. For four years he was imprisoned in a cell below the level of the river, and, when released after Olivares' fall in 1643, his health was broken. A flash of his old humour appears in his reply to the priest who begged him to arrange for music at his funeral:—"Nay, let them pay that hear it."