On July 26 the same ambassador writes to Catharine de Medici saying that the prince had died the previous day. He attributes the death entirely to his curious eccentricities of diet and hygiene. Llorente, enemy of Philip though he was, says that Carlos died a natural death. In face of this testimony it appears that Philip should be given the benefit of the doubt. In any case, the Abbé de St. Real’s romantic fictions, which have been drawn upon by so many historians, may be confidently dismissed as unworthy of any credit whatever, and Perez’s source is too tainted to be accepted. When the French ambassador notified the death of Don Carlos, he told Catharine de Medici that her daughter, the queen, was ill. The death, however, of her stepson was distinctly in her favour, as it made the elder of her two little daughters, Isabel Clara Eugenia, heiress to the crown of Spain. The queen saw this, and begged her mother to express emphatically her sorrow for the death of the prince. But the queen herself languished, crushed with the trouble that surrounded her, for Alba was drowning Flanders in blood, and her own beloved France was riven by religious disorder. In August it was announced that she was pregnant, and all Spain prayed that an heir might be born. But she was sacrificed to the unskilfulness of the Spanish doctors, and died on October 3, 1568, to the great grief of all Spain and France. The French ambassador relates the death-bed farewell of Philip and his wife, “Enough to break the heart of so good a husband as the king was to her.” And when all was over the king retired in the deepest grief to the monastery of San Geronimo in Madrid, but not before he had signed letters to the Duke of Alba and others giving the news of his bereavement. Nothing short of his own death could prevent Philip from attending to his beloved papers.