He found the tone in his palace very different from when he had left it. There were four women, all of whom had Philip’s ear, and who hated Olivares. The Queen, Anna of Austria, Queen of France, Philip’s sister, the Duchess of Mantua (Margaret of Savoy), his cousin, who had been his viceroy in Portugal, and who rightly blamed the minister for the loss of the country; she, moreover, being kept in semi-imprisonment at Ocaña by the minister’s orders, and Doña Anna de Guevara, the King’s old nurse, who was also forbidden at Court by the same influence. These ladies were all in communication with each other and with the nobles who were Olivares’ enemies, led by the Counts of Paredes and Castrillo. ‘My good intentions and my son’s innocence,’ Isabel told Paredes, ‘must for once serve the King for eyes: for if he sees through those of the Count Duke much longer, my son will be reduced to a poor King of Castile.’ A week or two after the King’s return, Isabel struck her blow at the tottering favourite. The first sign of the event was the escape of the King’s Savoy cousin, the Duchess of Mantua, from Ocaña, and her arrival at Madrid late at night, after a ride of forty miles through a storm of sleet. Olivares was furious, and kept her waiting for four hours before he assigned her two wretched rooms in one of the royal convents. But Isabel received her in the palace with open arms the next morning. Then the banished nurse, Anna de Guevara, appeared in the palace in defiance of Olivares. That afternoon Philip visited his wife’s room, and she, kneeling before him, with little Baltasar in her arms, implored him for the sake of their son to dismiss his evil minister before it was too late to rescue the realms his ineptitude had lost. In a torrent of words Isabel poured forth the pent-up complaints of years; the wars that had ruined the country, the starving people, the lost provinces, the waste and frivolity that had been the rule of their lives, the insults and slights which she, personally, had suffered at the hands of Olivares and his wife, and the shame that a king, into whose hands God had confided so sacred a task, should delegate it to others.