The object lesson to which they could point was a very plain one. Spanish troops were still pouring out their blood upon the battlefields of Europe without benefit to Spain: the distress in the capital itself was appalling; even the King’s household sometimes being without food, or means of obtaining it. On every side ruin had overwhelmed the people. Industry had been crushed by taxation, whole districts were depopulated and derelict, and neither life nor property was safe from the bandits who defied the law in town and country.[275] Spain had almost, though not quite, reached its nadir of decadence: and, though the distress was really the result of long-standing causes described in the earlier pages of this book, the boy monarch was made to believe that it all arose from the mis-government of his mother and Valenzuela; and that Don Juan could remedy all the ills and make Spain strong and happy again. The noble conspirators took care, this time, to neglect no precautions that might ensure success, and obtained (27th December 1676) from the King an order to which Mariana was obliged to consent, for Don Juan to return to Madrid; whilst on various pretexts they kept the Queen as much as possible from influencing her son. Valenzuela was, of course, informed of what was going on, and, recognising that the coalition was strong enough to crush him, had suddenly fled into hiding a few days previously. The night of the 14th January 1677, after the King had retired to his bedchamber in the palace of Madrid, and Mariana doubtless thought that all was safe until the next morning, Charles, accompanied by a single gentleman-in-waiting, escaped by arrangement with the conspirators, down backstairs and through servants doorways, from the old palace to the Buen Retiro, where the nobles and courtiers were assembled. Long before dawn a decree reached Mariana in her bedroom in the palace, ordering her not to leave her apartments without the written permission of the King. Her rage and indignation knew no bounds, and for the rest of the night letters alternately denouncing the undutifulness, and appealing to the affection of her son, showered thick and fast from the Queen in the old Alcazar to the sixteen year old boy with the long white face, who was trying to play the King in the pleasance of the Buen Retiro. None of her letters softened him, if ever they reached him, which is doubtful, and all the next day the antechambers at the Retiro were crowded with courtiers, applauding the King’s stroke of State, whilst in the Alcazar on the cliff the Queen-Mother found herself neglected by flatterers, a prisoner in the palace where she had reigned so long.