All these elaborate preparations being completed, Philip, with nearly 1,000 horsemen, glittering and flashing in the pitiless Castilian sun, left Valladolid on the 14th of May--not for England yet, but far down on the Portuguese frontier, at Alcantara, to meet his widowed sister, who had been forced to come out of her bitter grief to govern her father's kingdom during Philip's absence. He accompanied her five days on her journey to Valladolid, and then turning aside to take a last leave of his mad grandmother, Juana la Loca, bent his course towards Benavente, on the high road to Santiago, arriving there on the 3rd of June, covered with dust of travel, but gracious, as he could be, to those who had entertained his boy Carlos, who had preceded him. Next day there was a grand bull-fight in the plaza, which Philip and Carlos saw from Pero Hernandez's flower-decked house. The return of the Princes to Count Benavente's castle was not quite so dignified as it might have been, as one bull was so "devilish" that it refused to be killed, and held the plaza victoriously against all comers until the next morning, whereupon Philip and his son had to slip out {142} by Pero Hernandez's back door and reach the castle by a roundabout way. The day after there was a hunt and a tourney, and then after supper the Princes mounted on a high scaffold, richly dight, to see "a procession of beautiful and strange inventions." Torches blazed all round them, and each device was led by one of the neighbouring squires with twenty pikemen and drummers and fifers, each detachment in a separate livery. Elephants manufactured out of horses and pasteboard, castles with savages inside, a green tabernacle with a lovely maiden borne by savages, a model of a ship dressed with English and Spanish flags, and, strangest of all, a girl in a coffin complaining of Cupid, who came behind on horseback. When the device reached the middle of the plaza the god of love was suddenly hoisted on high by a rope round his middle, and let off fireworks, to the delectation of the crowd. As a relief to this foolery the great Lope de Rueda then represented "a sacred play with comic interludes," which, no doubt, was better worth seeing than the "conceits and fireworks" that pleased the narrator so much. The next day, after bidding good-bye to the son who was afterwards to hate him so bitterly, the Prince started in the cool of the summer night on his way to the sea.