As soon as Philip returned to Madrid, at the end of June 1632, the occasion was celebrated by another great _auto-de-fé_ in the Plaza Mayor, where the King and Queen with the Infante Carlos sat in their balcony from eight in the morning (3rd July 1632) till late in the afternoon, witnessing the indictment, the preaching of prosy sermons, and the reading of legal documents, reciting the errors and heresies of the poor wretches who stood upon the high scaffold in the midst of the square, dressed in sambenitos. The ghastly rejoicing, such as it was, soon turned to mourning. The Infante Carlos had fallen ill on the way home from Barcelona, but had partially recovered on his arrival at Madrid. The summer was the most oppressive that had been experienced for years, and the young Infante--he {260} was only twenty-five--fell ill of fever in Madrid, and died in a few days;[46] and Olivares had one less difficulty to contend with, though the amiable, unambitious young man was of himself inoffensive. [Sidenote: France and Spain] Nor was it long before the other Infante was removed from the path of Olivares. The old Infanta Isabel ended at last her strenuous life in 1633, and Fernando was sent by way of Italy to the States of Flanders to govern the fatal dominion for Spain once more, to Spain's ultimate undoing. Fernando was able and ambitious. From Milan he was to lead a large Spanish force to Flanders. But affairs had gone ill with the imperial cause. Gustavus Adolphus, it is true, had fallen; but in the fight at which he fell he had beaten Wallenstein, with the loss of 12,000 men on the imperialist side. On the appeal of the Emperor, Fernando turned aside, and a critical moment when the imperialists were delivering the attack he arrived before the Protestant city of Nördlingen (September 1634). His presence turned the scale, for a relieving force {261} of Swedes was just approaching, and the ensuing battle, one of the most decisive in the Thirty Years' War, was a crushing defeat to the Swedes and the Protestants. The Cardinal Infante passed on his way triumphant to his new governship, crowned by the laurels of victory and the plaudits of his countrymen. But his active intervention in the war with Spanish Government troops changed the aspect of the war. The Swedes were no longer the leaders of a federation of Protestants against a federation of Catholics. It was clear to Richelieu that unless with the whole force of France he threw himself into the fray against the house of Austria, not only Protestantism in Germany would suffer--for that indeed he cared nothing, but the vital interests of France. And so it happened that when the Cardinal Infante was entering Brussels in pompous triumph, Richelieu had already heavily subsidised the Dutch for an active renewal of their war against him; and within a few months, early in 1635, Spain herself was in the grip of a great national struggle with