On the 5th of October, the dying woman tried to make her new will; but she was too weak, and only left verbal authority before witnesses to the King to carry out her intentions. At noon on that day she sent for a _fleur de lys_, which formed one of the ornaments in the crown, and in which was encased a fragment of the true cross. This she worshipped fervently. Her two children were brought to her, Baltasar and the girl Maria Theresa, but she would not let them approach her for fear of contagion, though she blessed them fervently from afar. ‘There are plenty of Queens for Spain,’ she sighed, but princes and princesses are scarce. The next day, as the great clock of the palace marked a quarter past four in the afternoon, Isabel of Bourbon breathed her last, aged forty-one. Garbed as a Franciscan nun, the body was carried that night to the royal convent of barefoots; and thence the day after in a leaden coffin, encased in another of brocade, it was borne back to the palace to lie in state amidst blazing tapers, nodding plumes, and all the pomp and circumstance of royal mourning. In the meanwhile, Philip was hurrying from Aragon, a prey to the keenest anxiety. At Maranchon, about fifty miles from the capital, where the King had alighted at a wretched inn, the news came that the Queen was dead. The ministers and courtiers around the King forbore to tell him for a time, out of mere pity; for the journey and anxiety had told upon him ‘and he had only just dined.’ But a few miles further on, at Almadrones, the news was broken to him in his carriage by those who accompanied him. A terrible burst of grief, and an order that he might be left alone in his sorrow, proved that Philip, for all his faithlessness, was fond of his wife; and then, rather than enter the city where the Queen’s body lay, he turned aside and sought solitude at the Pardo,[230] where he was soon joined by his son Baltasar, whilst, with the usual heavy pomp at dead of night, the body of Isabel was carried across the bleak Castilian tableland to the new jasper vault in the Escorial, which, from very dread, she had never dared to enter in her lifetime.