In September 1654 it was announced that Mariana was again pregnant. ‘God grant that it may be so,’ wrote a courtier: ‘but if it is going to be a girl it is of no use to us. We do not want any of them. There are plenty of women already.’[245] The King’s hopes rose that a son would at last be born to him, and Mariana insisted upon accompanying him everywhere; for in the intervals of her merrymaking she was a prey to deep melancholy, increased when a girl infant was born only to die a few days afterwards. The prognostications of astrologers and quacks decided in the summer of 1655 that the prayed for son was now really on the way; and as time went on unheard of preparations were made for the event. The Marquis of Heliche had twenty-two new comedies written ready for representation in the coming festivities, and large sums of money were spent in decorations beforehand. Mariana’s lightest caprice was law, and Philip hardly left her side. The old palace depressed her, and the Buen Retiro became her permanent abode; Don Juan of Austria sent from Flanders the most wonderful tapestries, and bed and bed furniture ever seen, with a vast bedstead of gilt bronze which cost a fortune; the bedroom furniture being a mass of seed pearl and gold embroidery upon satin. ‘There is no getting the Queen out of the Retiro, for she frets in the palace. She passes the mornings amongst her flowers, the days in feastings, and the nights in farces. All this goes on incessantly, and I do not know how so much pleasure does not pall upon her.’[246] But again the prophets were wrong, for in December another epileptic girl child was born and died: ‘Saint Gaetano notwithstanding.’[247] Mariana fell gravely ill after this, and a slight stroke of paralysis, amongst other ailments, kept her for many weeks hovering between life and death. Philip did his best to raise her spirits, and when the Cortes petitioned him to have his elder daughter Maria Theresa acknowledged as heiress, he refused, in order not to distress his wife, who, he said, would be sure to have an heir directly. His letters to the nun show that he, at this period, was himself in the depths of black despair, overborne by his troubles; for Cromwell had seized Jamaica, and Spain was at war by sea and land with England and France together. Whilst Philip was gratifying his young wife by such entertainments as looking on from concealed boxes in a theatre crowded with women, whilst a hundred rats were surreptitiously let loose upon the floor;[248] he was a prey to a morbid misery closely akin to madness, anticipating an early death, weeping for the utter ruin that enveloped him and Spain, and the absence of a male heir.