reached Badajoz, on the frontier. Here he fell ill of the mysterious disease we call influenza, which was afflicting Europe at the time. His devoted fourth wife, Anne, who accompanied him, prayed that her life might be taken for his. Her prayer was heard. She died (October 25) and Philip lived, but the loss deepened his gloom, and in the two years that he was away from Madrid his yellow beard turned nearly white, and he came back an old and broken man. How his icy heart turned to his children at the time may be seen by the letters he constantly wrote to his elder girls during his absence, full of love and tenderness. However weary and sad he might be, no courier was allowed to leave without playful accounts of his adventures, and kindly little messages to the three orphan children of his last wife. Soon two out of the three followed their mother to the grave, and only three-year-old Philip was left as his father’s heir. Relentlessly Alba swept down upon Lisbon, as years before he had pounced upon the Netherlands, and crushed the life out of Portuguese patriotism. There was no question of creed to stiffen men’s backs here, no William of Orange to organise and lead them. The yielding Portuguese were made of different stuff from the stubborn “beggars of the sea,” and Alba rode roughshod over them with but little resistance. King Antonio was soon a fugitive, hunted from town to town, holding out for a few weeks in one fortress, only to be starved into another, proclaimed a bastard and a rebel, with a great price upon his head; and yet he wandered for eight months amongst the mountains, safe from betrayal by the peasants whose native king he was. In the meanwhile Philip was solemnly accepted as king by the Portuguese Cortes at Thomar (April 3, 1581) with all the pomp of ancient ceremonial. He was in the deep mourning which he wore for the rest of his life, and he tells his little girls in a letter at the time how his heart turned away from the finery which accompanied him. Then slowly he came to Lisbon to be crowned, whilst the defeated Antonio fled to France and thence to England, to be a thorn in his side for the rest of his life.