A few days after this was written, Mariana once more bore a son, a weak, puling infant, that seemed threatened with an early death; but whose birth threw Spain into a whirlwind of rejoicing as extravagant as any that had gone before. But Philip was sunk too deep now into despondency, by witchcraft the people said, to be aroused much, even by the birth of a son; and, as the shadows fell around him, the power of Mariana grew. With her clever German Jesuit confessor and confidant, Father Everard Nithard, she soon managed to drag the unhappy King again into the vortex of imperial politics, that had already well-nigh wrecked Spain, by persuading him to maintain an army to aid Austria and Hungary against the incursions of the Turk. Mazarin had died soon after the peace of the Pyrenees, and the new advisers of Louis XIV. were already inciting him to retaliate for the Austrian _rapprochement_ with Spain by fresh aggression upon Spanish Flanders. Don Juan, bitterly opposed to the new German interest in Spain, retired to his town of Consuegra in disgust and disgrace; the French and English governments assumed a tone of dictatorial haughtiness towards Spain unheard before; and Philip, in declining health and bitter disappointment, could look nowhere now for help and solace: for his minister Haro was dead, and the saintly nun of Agreda, his refuge for so many years, also went to her rest in the spring of 1665. There was no one now at Philip’s side but Mariana, already intriguing for uncontrolled power when her husband should die, and her German confessor Nithard, whose one aim was to use what was left of Spanish resources for the ends of Austria. Others also were on the alert as to what would happen when Philip died, and Sir Richard Fanshawe was sent to Madrid by Charles II., partly to negotiate for the recognition of Portuguese independence; and also: ‘to employ his utmost skill and industry in penetrating and discovering under what model and form his Catholic Majesty designs to leave the government there, when it shall please God that he die, which, considering his great infirmity and weakness, may be presumed is already projected.’[264] When Philip first received Fanshawe in June 1664, he was so weak and weary that he could only ask him to put his speech on paper,[265] and thenceforward all Europe regarded the King as a dying man, whose work in the world was done.