The temporary healing of the breach between Philip II and Prince Charles was ended by all this, and it widened again when the latter saw that the King was beginning to delay and put obstacles in the way of his projected marriage with the Archduchess Ana. D. Philip's reasons, however, for so doing could not have been better or more conscientious. Up till now the Prince's unfitness for marriage had only been a rumour, more or less explained, to which his looks and conduct gave an appearance of truth. At this time circumstances occurred which made patent what previously had only been conjectured. From that time D. Carlos began a strange life, which offered grave suspicions; he spent large sums of money, no one knew how; he went out alone every night, wearing a false beard, and with an arquebus in his hand, to all the houses of ill fame in Madrid; he came back sometimes without his shirt, at other times he had the one he was wearing burnt in his presence; in short, everything in him showed a strange intemperance, in whose muddy depths, perchance, may be found the key of the mystery which surrounds his imprisonment and death. Because it is really extraordinary that in all the very intimate letters which Philip II, on the imprisonment of D. Carlos, wrote to the Pope, to the Dowager Queen of Portugal, Doña Catalina, the Prince's grandmother, to the Emperor Maximilian and the Empress Maria, who were to have been his father- and mother-in-law, and to the great Duque de Alba, he hastens to clear his son from all suspicion of heresy, rebellion, disrespect to his person, or other such crimes which would justify his rigorous measures, and only makes an attempt to do this in all of them by repeating almost identically the same sentence: "In excesses which result from his nature and particular condition, which cannot be repeated for the decency of the case and the honour and estimation of the Prince." At last D. Carlos, despairing of governing Flanders by his father's leave, and also fearing that his father was breaking off his marriage with Doña Ana, determined to fly from Spain and go to Italy, and from thence to Flanders or Germany, as the circumstances should dictate. The most necessary thing for this was money, and he sent his attendants, Garci Álvarez Osorio and Juan Martinez de la Cuadra, therefore, to borrow 600,000 ducats from among the merchants of Toledo, Medina del Campo, Valladolid and Burgos. But the credit of D. Carlos was very bad on those markets, because they all knew him to be as free in borrowing as he was faithless in paying, and the efforts of Osorio and de la Cuadra only produced a few thousand ducats.