As the inheritor of divine rights, Philip could do no wrong, and as the greatest king of the greatest kingdom of the world, he always rose superior to personal or national calamity. His arms suffered overwhelming reverses in the Netherlands; he retaliated with massacre and extermination, and was deaf to entreaty. The defeat of his ‘invincible’ Armada was the death-blow to his hopes of converting England to the true faith, but he heard the news of this crowning catastrophe of his life without suffering his ‘marble serenity’ to be ruffled. Into his dying ears was poured the story of the dire devastation of Cadiz by the English fleet, but he only gnawed his rude crucifix and resigned himself the more devoutly to the will of God. This was the man who in the leisure of thirty years of his life stamped his individuality upon the Royal Palace and Monastery of the Escorial, and fashioned this mighty pile to be a monument to his power and a revelation of his mind--a mind diseased with that virus of morbidity which turned from the contemplation of mercy, charity, and love to ponder on the awful and retributive side of religion. The man explains the edifice, and the edifice is the picture of the man. The granite towers, resting on deep massive foundations, rise boldly into the heavens--lofty, aspiring, severe, like the prayers his stern heart sent up to God. The spacious halls and lofty corridors, all leading finally to the church and the altar, have been likened to the avenues of his mind. In 1557, two years before Philip first showed himself to his people as champion of the purity of the faith, the meeting between the Spanish and the French arms at St. Quentin credited Spain with a decisive and sorely needed victory. The battle involved the destruction of a church dedicated to St. Lawrence, and Philip, who had spent the day invoking the aid of the martyred saint, bound himself by an oath to found a monastery to his name. He had also been bound under the will of Charles V. to provide a royal burial-place for the reception of his father’s remains, and Philip was probably actuated by a desire to fulfil both these obligations in building the monastery of the Escorial. In the ‘Carta de Dotacion,’ which appears in Cabrera’s _Vida de Felipe II._, the king explains his reasons as follows:--