Philip’s system had brought him to this. He could not defend his own harbours, much less avenge the injuries done to him. Henry IV. had beaten him in France, the Nassaus had beaten him in Holland, the English had beaten him on the sea. He was utterly bankrupt, his country ruined, his dream of the universal predominance of Catholicism, and the omnipotence of Spain proved to be a chimera. He was old and weary, suffering incessant bodily agony, and yet with all this he never lost his faith in his divine mission and the final success of his cause. “Thy will, God, be done, not mine,” says an eye-witness of his last days, were the words constantly on his lips. During the spring of 1598 the king was almost unable to move from gout, but still continued his work at his papers. At the end of June he was carried to the Escorial in a litter, and soon afterwards malignant tumours broke out in various parts of his limbs. The pain of his malady was so intense that he could not even endure a cloth to touch the parts, and he lay slowly rotting to death for fifty-three dreadful days, without a change of garments or the proper cleansing of his sores. Through all the repulsive and pitiful circumstances that accompanied his last illness his patience and serenity never left him. His awful sufferings were borne without a plaint, and his constant words were those of resignation and assurance of divine forgiveness for his sins. Night and day, ceaselessly around him, went on the propitiatory offices of his Church; through the weary hours of pain the eyes of the dying king were fixed in ecstasy on the holy emblems, and often in his anguish of devotion he would bite and worry the coarse crucifix which never left him, the same crucifix that had been grasped by the dying hands of the emperor. On August 16 the nuncio brought him the papal blessing and plenary absolution. Philip by this time was incapable of moving, a mere mass of vermin and repulsive wounds, but his spirit conquered the frailty of the flesh, and he fervently repeated his immovable faith in the Church and the cause to which he had devoted his life. On September 1, in the presence of his son and daughter Isabel, the extreme unction for the dying was administered, and although he had hitherto been so weak as to be inaudible, he suddenly surprised the priests by himself reading in a loud voice the last office of the Church. When the administrant, fearing to tire him, said that it was unnecessary to repeat the office when the sacrament was administered, the dying man objected: “Oh yes, say it again and again, for it is very good.”