But these dispositions were transient. The Spanish priesthood early obtained control of the king’s mind. In one of the sieges of Barcelona, during the War of the Succession, he was induced to consult an image of the Virgin, and to avow afterwards, very solemnly, that she had given him a miraculous promise of the fidelity of the Catalonians,--a promise, it should be added, such as would be likely to insure its own fulfilment. The death of the queen, in 1714, which plunged him into a deep melancholy, further contributed to give power to the clergy who surrounded him; and, a year afterwards, when the Inquisition took firm ground against Macanaz and the royal prerogative, the king yielded, and Macanaz fled to France. And finally, when, in 1724, after a few months of abdication, Philip resumed the reins of government, which he should never have laid down, no small part of the increased energy, with which he fulfilled the duties of his high place, was inspired by the influence of the Church. As he grew older, he grew more bigoted; and in his last years, when the accumulated power placed in his hands by the destruction of the few remaining privileges of Aragon and Catalonia had made him a more absolute monarch than ever before sat on the Spanish throne, he seemed to rejoice, as much as any of his predecessors, in devoting the whole of his prerogatives to advance the interests of the priesthood.[312] [312] Mahon, War of the Succession, 1832, p. 180. Tapia, Historia, Tom. IV. p. 32. San Phelipe, Comentarios, Lib. XIV.