On February 22, 1560, Carlos received the oath of allegiance from the Cortes of Castile in Toledo, and afterwards returned to the University of Alcalá, where he was supposed to be studying. His life there was violent and licentious, and in April 1562, in descending a dark stair to keep an assignation, he fell and suffered a severe fracture of the skull. The king, on receiving the news, at once set out from Madrid, his new capital, travelling through the night, full of anxiety for his son. He found him unconscious and partially paralysed; the doctors, ignorant beyond conception, treated him in a way that seems to us now to have made his death almost inevitable. Purges and bleedings, unguents and charms, ghastly quackery, such as putting a skeleton in bed with the invalid, were all tried in turn, until the Italian surgeon Vesale arrived and performed the operation of trepanning. The prince then recovered: but if he had been a semi-imbecile before, he now became at intervals a raving homicidal maniac. The prince and those around him attributed his recovery entirely to the skeleton of the monk that had been put to bed with him, and he promised to give four times his weight in gold for religious purposes. He was then seventeen years of age, and was found to weigh only 5 stone 6 lbs. It was necessary that the heir should receive the oath of allegiance of the Cortes of Aragon, Cataluña, and Valencia. The Cortes of Castile, more submissive than the Aragonese, had, though not without some murmuring, voted the supplies needed by Philip, and were at once dismissed. The Aragonese Parliament, proud of its privileges, stubborn to rudeness whenever it was convoked, had not been called together since 1552, although the king was bound by oath to summon it every three years. The very existence of representative assemblies was opposed to Philip’s dream of personal centralisation of power, and he detested the Aragonese Cortes heartily. The French ambassador at the time wrote to Catharine that the king, when he took the oath, secretly meant “to cut their claws and dock the privileges that make them insolent and almost free.” The court was therefore transferred in the autumn of 1563 to the obscure Aragonese town of Monzon, the king on his way from Madrid laying the first stone of his vast granite palace of St. Laurence of the Escorial. He found the rough Aragonese inclined to be fractious, jealous as usual at any interference of Castilians in their affairs. But Philip was pressed for money, and was obliged to dissemble. A crisis nearly occurred when the Cortes touched the mainspring of his governmental system. The members adopted a protest against the extending power of the Inquisition, and its interference with other matters than those of theology. Philip was cold and evasive; he said he would consider the matter when he returned to Castile. But the Cortes understood the rule of “grievance first” as well as the English Commons, and replied that no