In 1567 Toledo died and was succeeded by Juan de Herrera, who enlarged the convent and added a bell-tower to the building. In 1574 the temporary _Panteon_, or royal burying-place, situated under the high altar of the church, was completed, and to this vault the remains of Charles V. were transferred in 1574. The solemn service with which they were received was terminated by a terrific storm which broke over the monastery and made a wreck of the gorgeous dais that had been erected for the ceremony. During another storm which visited the district, when the construction of the edifice was almost finished, a lightning stroke set fire to the fabric, destroying the fine belfry and its costly peal of bells and doing much other damage. In 1582 an epidemic, which carried off the queen, attacked the king, and for a while his life was despaired of. But Philip survived to see the completion of his initial plans, and two years later he took formal possession of his royal home which had cost the then enormous sum of £660,000. Here for fourteen years he lived, half monarch and half monk, exercising alternately the powers of a tyrant and the self-sacrificing humiliations of a saint, and boasting that, from the foot of a mountain, he governed both the old and new world with two inches of paper. In the first stages of his fatal illness in 1598, Philip desired to be removed from Madrid to his beloved Escorial. The distance is only eight leagues, but the king was so weak that six days were consumed by the journey. It was his wish to inspect every part of the huge building before he died, and during the fifty days in which his tortured body held death at bay his last desire was gratified. He died on the same day of the same month on which the Escorial was completed. Proudest among monarchs and the most devout among monks, his gift to posterity is a convent having the proportions of a palace, and a palace revealing the austerity of a convent--a structure which is at once the first and largest Spanish edifice into which the Græco-Roman element was cast. But although Philip had gratified his ambition, had built monastery, church, and palace, and had established a court and a college in this Castilian highland, had laid out gardens and planted elms brought from England, the royal burying-place at his death was nothing more than a plain vault. Philip III., in accordance with his father’s wishes, commenced to enrich the chamber, and the present gorgeous sepulchre was finished in 1654 by Philip IV. ‘No monarchs of the earth,’ it has been written, ‘have a mausoleum comparable to this of the Escorial, which, to the glory of Spain, was conceived by Charles V., undertaken by Philip II., carried on by Philip III., and completed by Philip IV.’ Thus it was more than a century after the death of the emperor that his remains were laid to rest in the sepulchre which he had commanded to be built for the princes of his house.