LXXIX. Some historians have said that Philip the Second, caused his son Don Carlos to be strangled. Paul Piasechi, a bishop and senator of Poland, gives us to understand, that King Philip procured his son Don Carlos to be dispatched; but he speaks ambiguously, and does not explain whether this prince died of poison, or of grief at finding himself imprisoned. Saint Evremont writes, that the Spaniard who strangled Don Carlos, said to him at the time he was about it, _Have patience Sir, this is done for your good_. Nothing surely can have more the appearance of an invented falsehood than this cruel and barbarous irony. The Venetian senator, Andrew Morosini, says in his History of Venice, that Charles not having any instrument wherewith to kill himself, determined to starve himself to death; but not being suffered to do this by those who looked after him, he tried the expedient of swallowing the diamond of one of his rings; but this not having the desired effect, he was resolved to put an end to his life by one means or other; and betook himself to eating and drinking with excess, which brought on a dysentery that carried him off in a few days. Cabrera agrees with the Venetian senator; but the greatest part of historians insist, that his death was not voluntary, but directed by his father; to whom they attribute his saying, by way of justifying the act, that if he found he had any bad blood belonging to him, he had an undoubted right to let it out. It is much to be wondered at, that a circumstance of history which is of no greater antiquity, should be enveloped in such clouds and darkness. Charles ended his life on the 24th of July, 1568, at four in the morning, aged twenty-five years and fifteen days. LXXX. Isabella of France, called the Princess of Peace, on account of that which accompanied her marriage with Philip the Second, died the third of October in the same year, and two months and ten days after Don Carlos. The Spanish historians attribute her death to a mistake of the physicians, who bled her when she was pregnant: ours, on the other hand, accuse her husband of being the author of it: and Mezeray speaks of the event in the following words: We are about to relate one of the most monstrous adventures imaginable; which is, that Philip the Second having come to understand that his only son Charles had held a correspondence with the confederated lords of the Low Countries, who were endeavouring to prevail upon him to come to Flanders, caused him to be imprisoned, and deprived of life, either by slow poison or strangling him; and that a little while afterwards, on account of some jealousy he entertained, he poisoned his wife, together with the infant in her womb; as was attested afterwards by her mother queen Catherine, upon the authority of secret informations given to her by her daughter, and by the depositions of the domestics of that princess, after their arrival in France[9].