The next day news came that Don Juan, with a great armed escort and household, had arrived at Hita, thirty-five miles from the capital; and there the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo and a crowd of grandees met him with a message from the King, asking him to dismiss his armed men and come to Court for the purpose of taking the direction of affairs. But Don Juan had his conditions to make first, and he refused to enter the capital until Mariana had left it, Valenzuela made a prisoner, and the hated Chambergo regiment disbanded. He had his way in all things, and the same night, with rage in her heart, Mariana rode out of the capital for her banishment at Toledo; the Chambergos were hurried away for shipment to Sicily; and then came the question where was Valenzuela. Reluctantly, and bit by bit, it was drawn from the King that he himself had contrived the flight of his mother’s favourite, and knew where he was hidden amongst the friars of the palace-monastery of the Escorial. From his windows overlooking the bleak Sierra of Guadarrama the fugitive favourite gazed in the gathering dusk of the 17th January 1677 in fancied security; when, to his dismay, a large body of cavalry trotted into the courtyard and dominated the palace. Amongst them the alarmed Valenzuela descried his enemy the Duke of Medina Sidonia, and a group of other grandees. Flying for refuge within the consecrated precincts, he besought the prior to save him; and when the doors of the monastery had been closed the prior greeted the troops and nobles in the courtyard and demanded their pleasure. ‘We want nothing,’ they replied, ‘but that you will deliver to us the traitor Valenzuela.’ ‘Have you an order from his Majesty?’ asked the prior. ‘Only a verbal one,’ replied Don Antonio de Toledo, son of the Duke of Alba, who took the lead. ‘In that case,’ replied the monk, supported by a murmur of approval from his brethren behind, ‘we will not surrender him, except to main force; for we shelter him by written warrant of the King.’ Threats and insults failed to move the monks, and an attempt at arrangement was at last made by means of an interview in the church between Valenzuela himself and the Duke of Medina Sidonia and Toledo. Owing mainly to the violence of the latter the interview had no result; and, as the prior saw that the soldiery were preparing to force the sanctuary, Valenzuela was hidden in a secret room contrived for such eventualities where he might defy discovery. The enraged nobles and soldiery, balked of their prey, ransacked the enormous place, room by room, for three days, overturning altars, insulting and violating the privacy of the monks, and committing sacrilege undreamt of in Spain for centuries, for which they were smartly punished afterwards by the ecclesiastical authority.[276]