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.