the recent successes in Flanders might perhaps make the voyage unnecessary. In any case, they begged the King not to undertake the matter lightly. Philip made the best of this halting dissent, replying that he accepted the advice as to not going for the moment, but ordered that everything should be made ready for his going at twenty days' notice if it became necessary.[25] [Sidenote: Continued decadence] In the meanwhile the never-ending trivial show of Madrid went on. The idlers still paraded up {299} and down the Calle Mayor or gossiped on Liars' Walk for the greater part of the day. Philip issued ferocious but ineffective pragmatics against extravagance in dress and household appointments;[26] both the public playhouses were filled, and the comedies applauded by eager crowds as usual. But, on the other hand, famine had laid its grisly hand everywhere on the arid lands of Castile, the excise had been increased until even in the capital itself starvation was not a threat but a reality; the ecclesiastical revenues were drained as they had never been drained before, and salaries, pensions, and State debts were either not paid at all or else ruinously curtailed. In Madrid, penury was now evident even amongst the better classes;[27] and Philip, who always lived frugally in his own person, was obliged to write to his brother Fernando, begging him to save to the utmost: not to allow his household to wear other than plain cloth, and not to spend a ducat unnecessarily. Spanish troops were fighting under the Infante {300} for the preservation of Flanders, in Germany, in Italy, in the Valtelline, wherever the enemies of the faith or the allies of Richelieu defied the Spanish claims; and yet it never entered the head, apparently, either of Olivares or his master, that these terrible sacrifices were useless to Spain; except that it was a point of honour to hold the Catholic States of Flanders that had been the ancient inheritance of its royal house. Holland was really lost beyond all recovery, though the stiff-necked pride of Castile would not acknowledge it; the religious question in Germany had already practically settled itself, and had left Spain hardly an excuse for fighting for orthodoxy there. All that was needed, even now, for Spain was to eat her unavoidable leek, to recognise facts patent to all the world, and to abandon her impossible pretensions; and peace with France and Holland might have been attained with ease. But through all the suffering and stress, that if continued meant national exhaustion, there was no indication anywhere of the conviction that Spain must voluntarily humble herself or bleed to death. [Sidenote: Court diversions]