the
prince of Eboli, informs us, that, "as the king had found Carlos guilty,
he was condemned to death by casuists and inquisitors. But in order that
the execution of this sentence might not be brought too palpably before
the public, they mixed for four months together a slow poison in his
food."[1515]

This statement agrees, to a certain extent, with that of a noble
Venetian, Pietro Giustiniani, then in Castile, who assured the historian
De Thou, that "Philip having determined on the death of his son,
obtained a sentence to that effect from a lawful judge. But in order to
save the honor of the sovereign, the sentence was executed in secret,
and Carlos was made to swallow some poisoned broth, of which he died
some hours afterwards."[1516]

Some of the particulars mentioned by Antonio Perez may be thought to
receive confirmation from an account given by the French minister,
Fourquevaulx, in a letter dated about a month after the prince's arrest.
"The prince," he says, "becomes visibly thinner and more dried up; and
his eyes are sunk in his head. They give him sometimes strong soups and
capon broths, in which amber and other nourishing things are dissolved,
that he may not wholly lose his strength and fall into decrepitude.
These soups are prepared privately in the chamber of Ruy Gomez, through
which one passes into that of the prince."

[Sidenote: VARIOUS ACCOUNTS.]

It was not to be expected that a Castilian writer should have the
temerity to assert that the death of Carlos was brought about by
violence. Yet Cabrera, the best informed historian of the period, who,
in his boyhood, had frequent access to the house of Ruy Gomez, and even
to the royal palace, while he describes the excesses of Carlos as the
cause of his untimely end, makes some mysterious intimations, which,
without any forced construction, seem to point to the agency of others
in bringing about that event.[1517]

Strada, the best informed, on the whole, of the foreign writers of the
period, and who, as a foreigner, had not the same motives for silence as
a Spaniard, qualifies his account of the prince's death as having taken
place in the natural-way, by saying, "if indeed he did not perish by
violence."[1518]--The prince of Orange, in his bold denunciation of
Philip, does not hesitate to proclaim him the murderer of his son.[1519]
And that inquisitive gossip-monger, Brantome, amidst the bitter jests
and epigrams which, he tells us, his countrymen lev