The temporary healing of the breach between Philip II and Prince Charles was ended by all this, and it widened again when the latter saw that the King was beginning to delay and put obstacles in the way of his projected marriage with the Archduchess Ana. D. Philip's reasons, however, for so doing could not have been better or more conscientious. Up till now the Prince's unfitness for marriage had only been a rumour, more or less explained, to which his looks and conduct gave an appearance of truth.

At this time circumstances occurred which made patent what previously had only been conjectured.

From that time D. Carlos began a strange life, which offered grave suspicions; he spent large sums of money, no one knew how; he went out alone every night, wearing a false beard, and with an arquebus in his hand, to all the houses of ill fame in Madrid; he came back sometimes without his shirt, at other times he had the one he was wearing burnt in his presence; in short, everything in him showed a strange intemperance, in whose muddy depths, perchance, may be found the key of the mystery which surrounds his imprisonment and death.

Because it is really extraordinary that in all the very intimate letters which Philip II, on the imprisonment of D. Carlos, wrote to the Pope, to the Dowager Queen of Portugal, Do?a Catalina, the Prince's grandmother, to the Emperor Maximilian and the Empress Maria, who were to have been his father- and mother-in-law, and to the great Duque de Alba, he hastens to clear his son from all suspicion of heresy, rebellion, disrespect to his person, or other such crimes which would justify his rigorous measures, and only makes an attempt to do this in all of them by repeating almost identically the same sentence: "In excesses which result from his nature and particular condition, which cannot be repeated for the decency of the case and the honour and estimation of the Prince."

At last D. Carlos, despairing of governing Flanders by his father's leave, and also fearing that his father was breaking off his marriage with Do?a Ana, determined to fly from Spain and go to Italy, and from thence to Flanders or Germany, as the circumstances should dictate. The most necessary thing for this was money, and he sent his attendants, Garci álvarez Osorio and Juan Martinez de la Cuadra, therefore, to borrow 600,000 ducats from among the merchants of Toledo, Medina del Campo, Valladolid and Burgos. But the credit of D. Carlos was very bad on those markets, because they all knew him to be as free in borrowing as he was faithless in paying, and the efforts of Osorio and de la Cuadra only produced a few thousand ducats.

Nothing daunted by this, D. Carlos sent Garci álvarez Osorio to Seville with twelve blank letters of credit, of which the text was: "The Prince. Garci álvarez, my attendant, who will give you this, will speak to you, and will ask you, in my name, for certain sums of money to be lent for a pressing and urgent necessity; I beg and charge you much to do it; on the one hand you will perform your obligations as vassal, on the other you will give me great pleasure. In all that concerns payment I rely on the said Osorio, that what he settles I accept as settled. Madrid, 1st of December, 1567."

And in his own hand: "In this you will please me much. I, the Prince."

He wrote at the same time to many of the Grandees of Spain, saying that he had to go on a journey of great importance, and hoping that they would accompany him and give him their aid.

These requests were answered in very different ways; some, like the Duques de Sesa, Medina de Rioseco, and the Marqués de Pescara, answered, without suspecting anything wrong, that, unconditionally, they would follow him; others, more suspicious, said that they would lend their aid to anything that was not against religion or the service of the King; and a few, like the Admiral, knowing better how the land lay, secretly sent the Prince's letter to the King, begging him to read and study it.

Meanwhile Garci álvarez Osorio returned from his journey to Seville, where he had made many good and quick negotiations on behalf of D. Carlos, who, seeing the money, thought that everything was settled, and began to make his final arrangements.

He wrote a long letter to the King, his father, full of bitter and offensive complaints, throwing on him the responsibility for his conduct, and also to the Pope, to his grandmother Queen Catalina, to all the Princes of Christendom, Grandees, Chancellors, Courts, and cities of the kingdom, explaining his flight, and attributing it to his father's tyranny and hatred.

All these letters were to have been sent to their destinations after the flight had become an accomplished fact, and meanwhile D. Carlos kept them in a steel casket inlaid with gold, which he locked up in his writing-table.

One thing which D. Carlos judged essential, as it was, he had not done; this was to consult D. John of Austria. Two months before, at the beginning of October, the King had sent for D. John to the Escorial, and had at last granted him the command of the Mediterranean galleys, as he had promised.

It was in one of these galleys, now anchored at Cartagena, that D. Carlos intended to go to Italy, and it was this indispensable help, added to the great prestige that D. John enjoyed among the nobles at Court and all over the kingdom, which made D. Carlos think, this time very rationally, that the success of his project perhaps depended on D. John's yes or no. So, on Christmas Eve, he ca............