All this, however, was a mere foretaste of the overwhelming magnificence of the following day, Whit Sunday, the 28th May, for ever memorable in the annals of Valladolid as the greatest day in its long history; for then it was that in solemn majesty, and lavish ostentation without example, there was dedicated to the great task in which his ancestors had failed, a babe with a lily-fair skin and wide open light blue eyes, upon whom were {8} centred the hopes and prayers of a sensitive, devout people, who had seen in a few years their high-strung illusions vanish, their assurance of divine selection grow fainter and fainter, the cause they thought was that of heaven conquered everywhere by the legions of evil, and their own country reduced to chronic penury; burdened with a weight beyond its strength, yet too proud to cast the burden down or to acknowledge its own defeat. The almost despairing cry that constant disaster had wrung from Philip II: "Surely God will in the end make His own cause triumph," still found an echo in thousands of Spanish hearts; and this child of many prayers was greeted as an instrument sent at last from heaven, on the most solemn day in the Christian year, to put all things right when he should grow to be a man.[11] The presence of the "heretic" peace embassy seemed of no good omen, though some men even affected to interpret it as such when Howard knelt before the King and was raised and embraced by him; but, as if to banish every doubt, and mark for all the world that the vocation of the Prince was irrevocably fixed beforehand, there was brought in solemn pomp, from the remote village of Calguera, the {9} crumbling little font in which, five hundred years before, had been baptized the fierce firebrand St. Dominic, scourge of heresy and founder of the Holy Inquisition, whose work it was to make all Christians one, though blood and fire alone might do it. [Sidenote: Philip and the Dominicans]