In the meanwhile, Philip was hurrying from Aragon, a prey to the keenest anxiety. At Maranchon, about fifty miles from the capital, where the King had alighted at a wretched inn, the news came that the Queen was dead. The ministers and courtiers around the King forbore to tell him for a time, out of mere pity; for the journey and anxiety had told upon him ‘and he had only just dined.’ But a few miles further on, at Almadrones, the news was broken to him in his carriage by those who accompanied him. A terrible burst of grief, and an order that he might be left alone in his sorrow, proved that Philip, for all his faithlessness, was fond of his wife; and then, rather than enter the city where the Queen’s body lay, he turned aside and sought solitude at the Pardo,[230] where he was soon joined by his son Baltasar, whilst, with the usual heavy pomp at dead of night, the body of Isabel was carried across the bleak Castilian tableland to the new jasper vault in the Escorial, which, from very dread, she had never dared to enter in her lifetime.
Three days after Isabel’s death, the sainted mystic of Agreda saw, as she asserted, the phantom of the Queen before her, asking for the prayers of the godly to liberate her from the pains she was suffering in purgatory, for the vain splendour of her attire during her life.[231] To the nun Philip’s cry of pain went up, whilst to all the rest of the world he turned a leaden face. On the 15th November he wrote—‘Since the Lord was pleased to take from me to himself the Queen, who is now in heaven, I have wanted to write to you, but the great distress I am in, and the business with which I am overwhelmed, have hitherto prevented me from doing so. I find myself more oppressed with sorrow than seems bearable, for I have lost in one person alone all that I can lose in this world: and if it were not that I know, according to the faith I hold, that God sends to us that which is best and wisest, I know not what would become of me. But this thought, and this alone, makes me suffer my grief with utter resignation to the will of God; and I must confess to you that I have needed much help from on high to bring me to bear this cross patiently. I wanted to ask you to pray to God very earnestly for me in this dire trouble, and to aid me in asking Him to grant me grace to offer up this sorrow to Him, and take advantage of it for my own salvation.’[232]