In the midst of these public causes for anxiety Philip was overjoyed to learn that his wife, whose age was nearly twenty-one, was likely to become a mother.[[193]] The King, as usual, arranged every small detail himself of, ‘le régime dont elle devoit user pour conduire son fruit à bon port’; and his demonstrations of affection and pride for his wife, and rejoicing at his hopes for a time, even in public, overcame his natural frigid dignity. Nor was Catharine less delighted, for to her, should the child prove a son, the event was of the highest importance, in view of the growing incapacity of Don Carlos; and she also sent by M. de Saint Etienne a parcel to her daughter: ‘Où il y a tout plein de recettes, dont elle peut avoir de besoin’; and she wrote personally to the physician in attendance, urging him to make use of these recipes, which she assured him would do Isabel good.
Every day the smallest incident of the Queen’s condition were recounted by courier to her mother; and Philip could hardly tear himself from her side whilst he disposed of his usually beloved business. At length, on the 1st August 1566, a daughter was born, at Balsain, near Segovia, to Philip and Isabel. The child was christened Isabel, after the great Queen and her mother, Clara because she was born on the day of the Saint, and Eugénie, out of gratitude to the efficacious body of St. Eugène—and the sumptuous ceremony of baptism was not allowed to pass without a jealous wrangle between the Archbishop of Santiago and the Bishop of Segovia, as to which should have the honour of performing the rite, which was eventually celebrated by the Nuncio Castaneo, afterwards Pope Urban VII. It would doubtless have been more satisfactory to Philip had a son been born; but his joy and gratitude were nevertheless intense, and the French ambassador, writing to Catharine a few days afterwards, says that when he went to congratulate him, he had him (the ambassador) led to the Queen’s room: ‘Voulant que je visse la fille qu’il avoit plu Dieu lui donner, de laquelle il est tant aise qu’il ne peut le dissimuler, et l’aime, à ce qu’il dit, pour le présent mieux qu’un fils.’ This deep affection for his elder daughter lasted to the King’s dying day; and the famous Infanta, designated by him to be in succession Queen of England and France, became by his will sovereign of the Netherlands, and inherited from her father not only the ancient domains of his paternal house but his views, his methods, and his obstinacy.
The Queen lay apparently at the point of death for some days after her delivery, but as soon as her life was safe, the great project, so long discussed, of a voyage of the royal family to insurgent Flanders, was again taken in hand. Philip was for going alone, leaving, it was hoped by Catharine, his wife Regent, though Isabel herself begged hard that she might be allowed to accompany her husband: ‘Car vraiment, je serois trop marrie de demeurer par deçà après lui; je ferai ce qui sera en moi qu’il ne m’y laisse point.’ There was another who desired as ardently as she to go to Flanders with the King. This was his only son Don Carlos. The young man’s frantic excesses had grown more scandalous than ever as he became older. The struggle to obtain his hand in marriage was still going on between the Austrian and French interests; but Philip continued to put the matter gently aside on the ground of his son’s ill-health.
The afflicted father had done his best to wean the Prince from his violence and dissoluteness. He himself had been a dutiful son, ready to sacrifice everything for the task confided to him, and his grief was profound that this son of his youth should openly scandalise his court by his disobedience and insolence to his father and sovereign. Like his great-grandmother, Joan the Mad, the Prince lived in constant revolt against authority, sacred and mundane. His conduct in the Council of State, where his father had placed him to accustom him to business, had shocked every one. Apparently out of sheer wrong-headedness he had openly expressed his sympathy with the Netherlanders, who were defying the will of his father, and he had extorted a semi-promise that he should accompany the King to Flanders. Whether the Prince had entered into any communication with the agents of the Flemings is doubtful; but even if such were the case, and the ambition of Carlos to obtain an early regency of Flanders was the end he had in view, it is a mere travesty of history to represent that he seriously held reformed opinions, any more than did Joan the Mad, when she reviled the mass and the sacred symbols.
In any case, Philip abandoned his intention, if he ever really held it, of going in person to the Low Countries; and decided to send the ruthless Alba with a great army to scourge the stubborn ‘beggars’ into humble submission to his will. When Carlos heard this, and that he, too, was to remain in Spain, his fury passed all bounds. He attempted to stab Alba himself when he went to take leave; and when the Cortes of Castile petitioned the King that the heir to the throne should be kept in Spain, Carlos made an open scandal, and threatened the deputies with death.
By this time, the autumn of 1567, Isabel was again pregnant, and Philip’s hopes ran high that another son would be born to him. It is clear that the great mission to which he and his father had devoted strenuous lives could not safely be passed on to Carlos; and in September, Ruy Gomez, Philip’s only friend, told the French ambassador that if the Queen gave birth to a son, the future of Carlos as heir would have to be reconsidered. The Prince was insatiable for money, which he scattered broadcast on evil doings, he was openly insolent to his father, and the latter suspected a design to escape clandestinely to join the enemies of his State: and there is no doubt that if Isabel’s second child had been a son, he would have been placed in the succession before Don Carlos. Philip exceeded himself in tender solicitude for his wife, but at last, on the 17th October 1567, the child that all Europe was breathlessly expecting, was born—another daughter.
Thereafter the romance of Don Carlos unfolded rapidly. Philip had been patient and longsuffering under the affliction of such a son, but he at length despaired, and his attachment to his heir gave place to antipathy and disgust: especially when his physicians had definitely assured him that his line could never be continued by Carlos.[[194]] The Prince, on the other hand, hated his father bitterly, and was morose with his aunt Joan, whom he formerly loved, and with the young Austrian Princes, though he had now been formally betrothed to their sister Anna. The only person who influenced him was Isabel: ‘Il fait semblant de trouver bon tout ce que la reyne votre fille fait et dit, et n’y a personne qui dispose de lui comme elle, et c’est sans artifice ni feinte, car il ne sçait feindre ni dissimuler.’[[195]]
Matters came to a head at the end of the year 1567. Philip and Isabel had gone to pass Christmas at the newly commenced Palace of the Escorial, when Carlos decided to make his long contemplated attempt to escape from Spain. On the 23rd December, he whispered to his young uncle, Don Juan of Austria, that he needed his help to get horses; and Juan, recognising the seriousness of the situation, at once rode the thirty odd miles to the Escorial to tell the King. As in all his great calamities, Philip remained outwardly unmoved, and though he took such measures secretly as would frustrate the flight, he did not return to Madrid until the day previously fixed, the 17th January 1568. The next day he went with Carlos to mass; but still made no sign. In the interim, the Prince had even attempted to kill Don Juan; and it was time for his father to strike, in order to prevent some greater tragedy, for Carlos had admitted to his confessor that he had an ungovernable impulse to kill a man. Whom? asked the confessor. The King, was the reply. For once Philip broke down utterly when, with Ruy Gomez and other intimate councillors, he deliberated what should be done. Late that night, when the Prince slept, the afflicted father, with five armed gentlemen and twelve guards, obtained entrance into the chamber, in spite of secret bolts and locks; and when the Prince, disturbed, sprang up and sought for his weapons, the weapons were gone. In rage and despair, he tried to strangle himself, but was restrained; and, recognising that he was a helpless prisoner, he flung himself upon his bed in an agony of grief, and sobbed out, ‘I am not mad, not mad, only desperate.’
From that hour he was dead to the world, which saw him no more. The position was a humiliating one for Philip, but he made the best of it, by explaining to all the courts that the prince’s mental deficiency necessitated his seclusion. To his own nearest relatives he did not hide his bitterness. ‘It is not a punishment,’ he wrote, ‘would to God it were, for it might come to an end: but I never can hope to see my son restored to his right mind again. I have chosen in this matter to sacrifice to God my own flesh and blood, preferring His service and the universal good to all human considerations.’ Some sort of trial or examination of the prince was held, but all professed accounts of the proceedings must be accepted with caution. Certain it is that they dragged on wearily, whilst the charges of treason, of conspiracy, of disloyalty, and perhaps of heresy, were laboriously examined in strict secrecy. Neither Isabel nor his aunt Joan was allowed to see Carlos, and Don Juan was forbidden even to wear mourning for the calamity. By all accounts the prince’s malady grew rapidly worse, as well it might in such circumstances. Like Joan the Mad before him, he would starve for days, and then swallow inedible things, he would alternately roast and freeze himself, and he attempted suicide more than once. The end came on the 25th July 1568, and the immense weight of testimony is in favour of his having died in consequence of his own mad fancies in diet and hygiene.
When Fourquevault conveyed the news of Carlos’s death to Catharine, he wrote that the Queen Isabel was suffering from fainting fits and headache; but it was her wish that great signs of mourning should be made for the Prince in France, to show the King of Spain that they (i.e., the French) were sorry for his loss; ‘as the Spanish people attach so much importance to appearances.’ Isabel in weak health, for she was again pregnant, was deeply touched by the trouble around her. The French ambassador was gleefully reminding her mother that the death of Don Carlos was a very good thing for her, and praising her beauty, which the deep Spanish mourning set off to advantage, whilst he indulged in brilliant hopes for the birth of a son to Isabel. But the young Queen’s heart was heavy, not for Carlos alone, but for the scenes of horror which were flooding Flanders with blood under the flail of Alba. Egmont and Horn had been treacherously sacrificed in Brussels, Montigny in Spain, and her own dear France was reft in twain by fratricidal war. She was a catholic as sincere as Philip himself, but that the faith should need wholesale murder for its assertion shocked and frightened her; and she languished in the atmosphere of gloomy determination which surrounded Philip.