[27] Gil Gonzalez de Avila, in his MS. _Historia de Phelipe III._, gives many admiring instances of the King's mystic communications with the heavenly powers, and of his attacks of religious panic. (Original MS. in my possession.) [28] Cabrera de Cordova, _Cosas Sucedidas a la Corte_, etc., _desde_ 1599 á 1614. [29] A full account of the crazy magnificence on the occasion will be found in _Documenios Ineditos_, lxi. [30] An unpublished account of the progress by an eye-witness is in Add. MSS. 102,36, British Museum. See also _Queens of Old Spain_, by Martin Hume, and _Documenios Ineditos_, lxi. [31] Malvezzi, _Historia de Felipe III._, Yañez. [32] Matias de Novoa, _Felipe III_. _Doctimentos Ineditos_, lxi. This writer was a chamberlain of Philip IV. and an agent of Olivares; but receiving from the latter no reward, he wrote a series of bitter attacks upon him. [33] The King's and the Prince's splendid dresses and adornments on this occasion are described fully by Porreño in _Dichos y Hechos de Don Felipe III_. [34] His recovery from this grave illness after the doctors had given up hope was ascribed to the miraculous effect produced by the dead body of the newly beatified Saint Isidore of Madrid, which was brought to his bedside at Covarrubias. The King kissed and embraced the corpse, and improved from that hour. [35] The ridiculous story, related by entirely untrustworthy French travellers, of the cause of Philip's fatal illness being the Court etiquette, which forbade any attendant but a high noble who happened to be absent to remove a brazier from too close proximity to the King, may be dismissed as a fable. Anything which exaggerated the strangeness, the romance, and the inflation of Spanish manners found ready belief in seventeenth-century France, and has done so ever since. The absurd ideas relative to Spain even at the present time are mainly due to this insistence on the part of French writers in seeing everything Spanish through the coloured medium of the romantic school. Madame D'Aulnoy's overdone "local colour" and evidently invented stories are largely responsible for this, aided by Bassompiere Saint Simon, Mme. Villars, and the later romantic school of French novelists. [36] Terrible accounts of Philip's awful deathbed are given by Gil Gonzales de Avila, his chronicler and friend, in his _Historia de Felipe III._, original MS. in my possession, in Yañez's additions to Malvezzi, and in Novoa, _Documentos Ineditos_, lxi.; all contemporaries. [37] Novoa, _Documentos Ineditos_, lxi. [38] Novoa says that when the Archbishop signed the order he broke into tears and cast away the pen he had used. [39] _Fragmentos Historicos de la Vida de D. Caspar de Guzman_, etc. Unpublished contemporary MS. biography of Olivares in my possession; the work of his partisan Vera y Figueroa, Count de la Roca. {42} CHAPTER II