The judges evidently knew their man. He went through the form of retreating to Valencia, but he had no intention of hiding his talent under a bushel in the provinces. His next step was astounding in its insolence: he returned to Madrid, and thence eloped with Isabel de Urbina y Cortinas, daughter of a king-at-arms. The police were at once in hot pursuit, but failed to overtake the culprit. He parted from the lady, was married to her by proxy on May 10, 1588, and nineteen days later was out of range on the _San Juan_, one of the vessels of the Invincible Armada. Lope took part in the famous expedition of the ‘sad Intelligencing Tyrant’ when, as Milton puts it, ‘the very maw of Hell was ransacked, and made to give up her concealed destruction, ere she could vent it in that terrible and damned blast.’ Returning from this disastrous adventure, during which he found time to write the greater part of _La Hermosura de Angélica_, an epic consisting of eleven thousand lines, Lope settled at Valencia, and joined the household of the fifth Duke of Alba. It was the custom of the time for a poor Spanish gentleman, who would have been disgraced by the adoption of a trade or business, to serve as secretary to some rich noble: the duties were various, indefinite and not always dignified, but they involved no social degradation. Lope’s versatile talents were thus utilised in succession by the Marqués de Malpica and the Marqués de Sarriá, afterwards Conde de Lemos (the son-in-law of Lerma, and in later years the patron of Cervantes). His introduction to aristocratic society enlarged Lope’s sphere of observation: it did nothing to improve his morals, which were not naturally austere. During this period he was writing incessantly for the stage, and the Spanish stage was not then a school of asceticism. His wife died about the year 1595, and the last restraint was gone. Lope was straightway entangled in a series of scandalous amours. He was prosecuted for criminal conversation with Antonia Trillo de Armenta in 1596, and in 1597 began a love-affair with Micaela de Luján, the Camila Lucinda of his sonnets, and the mother of his brilliant children, Lope Félix del Carpio y Luján and Marcela, who inherited no small share of her father’s improvising genius. It is impossible to palliate Lope’s misconduct, and the persistent effort to keep it from public knowledge has damaged him more than the attacks of all his enemies; but it is fair to remember that he lived in the most corrupt circles of a corrupt age, that he suffered such temptations as few men undergo, and that he repeatedly strove to extricate himself from the mesh of circumstance.