During all this time Prince Carlos's strangeness had been increasing little by little, until it had become madness, his overbearing nature cruelty, and the aversion he showed to his father deep hatred.

It was in vain that, when the Prince was nineteen, D. Philip admitted him to the Council of State (1564), and gave him a new household, leaving Luis Quijada as Master of the Horse, but naming no less a person than Ruy Gómez de Silva, Prince of évoli, as Lord Steward, in the place of D. Garcia de Toledo, lately dead.

All D. Carlos's household were the victims of his violence and abuse, from Ruy Gómez, whom he continually threatened that, when he was King, Ruy Gómez should know it, to the lowest barber, whom he beat with his own hand for the least delay or mistake.

One day the King was consulting with his ministers about Flemish affairs; the Prince, who was very curious about the subject, went to listen at the door, with one ear at the keyhole, the Queen's ladies and pages seeing him in this ignoble position from the gallery above. His gentleman D. Diego de Acu?a hearing of it, wanted to get him away, but D. Carlos answered him by a slap in the face, which so enraged D. Diego that it was with difficulty that he restrained the impulse of plunging a dagger into the Prince's heart, and he went straight to the King and resigned his appointment. D. Philip soothed his wounded feelings by taking him into his own service, with doubled honours and salary.

D. Carlos insulted another of his gentlemen, D. Alonso de Córdoba, son of the Marqués de las Navas, in the same way, slapping his face because he did not hasten when D. Carlos called, saying that he had intended to do it for six months, and it was fair that he should at last give vent to his desire.

One day he waylaid Cardinal Espinosa, President of Castille (who had exiled an actor named Cisnero, who was on intimate terms with D. Carlos, from the Court), at the door of the Council Chamber, and rushed at him, dagger in hand, and, pulling off his rochet, cried, "Little priest! You dare to stop Cisnero coming to wait upon me? By the life of my father, I must kill you." And so he would have done, had not some of the Grandees, who hastened at the cries, released the Cardinal from him.

This insolence to great personages became monstrous cruelty to the lower orders. In the Palace accounts, preserved in the Archives of Simancas, one meets with entries of indemnification paid to the fathers of boys caused to be beaten by D. Carlos. One day he wanted to throw his valet, Juan Estévez de Lobon, out of a window into the castle moat, after having beaten him, and he obliged a shoemaker, who had made him boots that were too tight, to eat them cooked and cut up in small pieces. Water fell on him one day from a window, and he at once sent a guard to burn the house and kill the inhabitants, and, "to satisfy him," says Cabrera de Córdoba, "the guard returned and said that the Holy Sacrament of the Viaticum was entering the house, and for this they had respected the walls."

On one occasion he shut himself up for five hours in the stables, and on leaving left twenty horses rendered useless through his ill-treatment, including a favourite one of the King's, which died two days afterwards.

He added to these cruel extravagances, the work of an unhinged mind, unkind, barefaced exhibitions of aversion towards his father, of which good proof was found in his papers afterwards.

Among these there was a blank book, with the title, written by the Prince's own hand, "The Great Travels of the King Philip II," and then on each of its pages these sneers: "The journey from Madrid to the Pardo," "From the Pardo to the Escorial," "From the Escorial to Aranjuez," "From Aranjuez to Toledo," "From Toledo to Valladolid," "From Valladolid to Burgos," "From Burgos to Madrid," and "From the Pardo to Aranjuez," "From Aranjuez to the Escorial," "From the Escorial to Madrid," etc.

In another paper, written also by him, was "The list of my enemies," and the first name that figured on it was "The King, my father." Then followed Ruy Gómez de Silva, the Princess de évoli, Cardinal Espinosa, the Duque de Alba, and various other lords. On the other side of the paper he had written "List of my friends," "Queen Isabel, who has always been very good to me." And then "D. John of Austria, my much-loved uncle," then Luis Quijada, D. Pedro Fajardo, and very few more.

Indeed, Queen Isabel and D. John were the only two people the unlucky Prince spared in his hatred and general rudeness; and this has furnished poets, novelists and pseudo-learned persons with the supposition that between this unfortunate Prince, who never became a man, and the virtuous D. Isabel of the Peace, model of queens and wives, there existed a romantic and incestuous passion, which has served as a base for their midnight studies, calumnies to-day for those who even partially know history. Everyone in Madrid knew of and regretted D. Carlos's mad conduct, and foreign Courts also knew of it, as in their dispatches Ambassadors hastened to send the information, which has enabled posterity to know and judge all these circumstances.

But, although D. Carlos's physical and moral defects were so well known, there was not a Princess in Europe then who would not have been very pleased to give her hand to the heir of the most powerful monarch in the world.

So the various Courts began to present their candidates, first Queen Catherine de Medicis, who proposed for the Prince of the Asturias her younger daughter Margaret de Val............