Philip hastened home as fast as relays of mules would carry him. At
Maranchon, about fifty miles from Madrid, where the King had alighted
to dine at a wretched _venta_, the courier bringing the news of the
Queen's death met him. The ministers and courtiers around the King,
knowing how he loved his wife, avoided telling him the evil tidings at
first; for the anxiety and fatigue of the voyage had told upon him,
"and he had only just dined." But a few miles farther on, at
Almadrones, the news was broken to him in his carriage by the Marquis
of Carpio and his son, the favourite Haro, and the bereaved King begged
to be left alone with his grief. Turning aside from Madrid, now a city
of mourning for him, Philip retired to the Pardo, where, with his son
Baltasar--all that was left to him now, for Maria Teresa was but a
child--for a few days he indulged his sorrow in private. Thence he
went for the official mourning in the old apartment at San Geronimo;
whilst, with the gloomy pomp traditional in Spain, the body of the
Queen was carried at dead of night across {395} the bleak Castilian
plain, with hundreds of monks and nobles following, to the gorgeous new
jasper pantheon at the Escorial reserved for Kings and mothers of
Kings, which, from very dread, Isabel had never dared to enter in her
lifetime.[18]
Three days after the Queen died her wraith appeared, it is said, before
the nun of Agreda, asking for the prayers of the godly to liberate her
from purgatory for the vain splendour of her attire during her
life.[19] Philip himself was overwhelmed at his loss, and the nun
wrote to him exhortations to resignation and patience; but it was a
month before he could gather sufficient courage to reply: his grief, as
he says, and the many calls upon him having prevented him from doing it
before. "I find myself in the most oppressed state of sorrow
possible," he wrote, "for I have lost in one person everything that can
be lost in this world; and if I did not know, according to the faith
that I profess, that the Lord disposes for us what is best, I do not
know what would become of me."
The following spring again saw Philip in the field in Aragon. Things
were going badly with him now, and he was again losing heart. To the
nun he wrote on the 25th March 1645--