The niece wife of Philip II. bore him many children, of whom one weakling alone survived to inherit the oppressive crown of his father. Anna was a homely, devout soul, submissive and obedient to her husband, ever busy with her needle and her household cares; and, like the other members of her house, overpowered with the vastness and majesty of the mission confided by heaven to its chief.[198] On the voyage to Portugal in 1580 Philip fell ill at Badajoz, and when his life was despaired of Anna fervently prayed that he might be saved, even if she had to be sacrificed instead. Her prayer was heard; and as the husband of fifty-three recovered the wife of thirty sickened and died, leaving Philip broken and lonely to live the rest of his weary life for his work alone. The struggle to prevent the victory of reform in France, which occupied Philip’s later years, and consummated the ruin of his country, rendered impossible a renewal of the idea of a French and Spanish coalition, except, indeed, by the conquest of France by Philip, which many years of fruitless war proved to be impossible, whilst the gallant cynic, Henry of Navarre, could hold up the national banner of France as a rally point against the foreign invader. Once Philip, in sheer despair, turned, when it was too late, to England again in the hope of bringing it into his system by force, if intrigue and subornation of conspiracy and murder failed: but with the defeat of the Armada that hope fled too; and again there was no possible bride but an Austrian cousin for Philip’s heir, Philip III., and no feasible policy from Philip’s point of view but a continuance of the close family alliance with the German Habsburg descendants of Joan the Mad. The Emperor, it is true, was forced to tolerate his Lutheran princes; but he and his house made common cause with the Philips when the French cast greedy eyes towards Catholic Flanders or Italy. Margaret of Austria brought to sickly, scrofulous Philip III. an anæmic body and a stunted mind to rear his children. She implored her mother passionately to save her from the terrifying honour of sharing the gloomy throne of her cousin, for in her Styrian home she lived the life of a nun, devoted only to the humble care of the poor and sick of her own land: but she was sternly told that all must be sacrificed to the supreme duty that was hers; and thenceforward she, too, lived in the awestricken atmosphere of religious abnegation, which was the mark of her Spanish kindred.[199] In besotted, conventual devotion, and frivolous trifling in turns, her monkish husband and she passed their lives; their children, of whom they had several, all bloodless decadents of low vitality, with big mumbling jaws and lack-lustre eyes, brought up in the same pathetic tradition that to them and Spain—poor, ruined, desolated Spain now—was confided the sacred duty and honour of upholding religious orthodoxy throughout the world at any cost or sacrifice.