In the five months that had passed since he had dismissed Olivares the
King had tried hard; but already his indolence was casting its
paralysing blight over him; and most of the work of the Government was
handed to Don Luis de Haro, the nephew of Olivares, who went with the
King to Aragon. This time Philip was accompanied by a modest train,
and by little of the ceremonial state that Olivares had deemed needful
for his previous voyage. He travelled slowly, nevertheless, and on the
10th July, as he approached the Aragonese frontier city of Tarazona, he
halted at the humble Convent of the Immaculate Conception at Agreda,
which in the previous few years had been founded by a lady whose fame
for sanctity and wisdom had already become wide, though she was but
forty years of age yet. Maria Coronel had written several mystically
religious books, and the convent under her rule was known for its
rigidity in an age when most cloisters had grown lax. Philip probably
visited the house and its abbess as a usual compliment and duty; but
the visit, whatever its motive, set its mark upon him for the rest of
his life.
The abbess, Sor Maria, as she was called, must have been a woman of
worldly wisdom as deep as {380} was her piety. She must have impressed
the King, moreover, powerfully as being absolutely disinterested and
free from mundane temptation. He was, as we have seen, almost in
despair at the magnitude of the tasks before him; the strong spirit
upon which he had leant since he was a boy had passed out of his life,
and he knew not whither to turn for unselfish counsel. Sor Maria,
saintly, but keen, with her sad yet half humorous face, and her shrewd,
kindly eyes, seemed to him a very rock of refuge, and in the long talk
he had with her she spoke so wisely, yet so fearlessly, of the
oppressive governance and ungodly methods of Olivares, she urged the
King so powerfully to trust to God and himself alone, to work and pray
and make his people cleanly, that he went forth from Agreda refreshed
in faith and hope, leaving with Sor Maria his command that she was to
write to him her private counsel when she listed, and to pray for him
and his unceasingly with all her saintly soul.
[Illustration: The nun of Agreda]