I would much rather go and see what I hope very soon to see.’ After much more tender talk of her own land and people, the dying Queen took farewell of her countrymen and prayed awhile with her ghostly comforters: then fell into slumber for a short ten minutes. At midday, ‘she suddenly opened her eyes, bright and sparkling, and it seemed to me as if she wished to tell me something more, for they looked straight at me:[197] and then Isabel of the Peace passed quietly into the world her gentle soul longed for. ‘We left the palace all in tears, for throughout the people of this city there is not one, great or small, that doth not weep; for they all mourn in her the best Queen they have ever had.’ Philip in grief hid himself from the world in the monastery of Saint Jerome; but his task in the world was greater to him even than his sorrow or his love. The hopes of the French alliance to extirpate heresy had failed, failed utterly and completely. England, helping the insurgent Flemings with all her might, had drifted further, and ever further, away from him. In France the reformation was growing, and only two lives—and bad ones—stood between the throne and a Huguenot King. There was no male heir to inherit the thorny inheritance of championing orthodox Christianity throughout the world. Whither could Philip turn for sympathy and a mother for the heir he yearned for? Not to England; not to France, for both had failed him. Where but to his own kin in Austria; to his niece Anna, the betrothed of his dead son Carlos: and on the second anniversary of Isabel’s death Anna of Austria landed in Spain to marry her uncle Philip. Isabel of the Peace politically had lived in vain. BOOK IV I ISABEL OF BOURBON