Going on some errand on which he had no business—­there are two stories, neither of them creditable nor necessary to repeat—­Don Carlos has fallen downstairs and broken his head.  He comes, by his Portuguese mother’s side, of a house deeply tainted with insanity; and such an injury may have serious consequences.  However, for nine days the wound goes on well, and Don Carlos, having had a wholesome fright, is, according to Doctor Olivarez, the medico de camara, a very good lad, and lives on chicken broth and dried plums.  But on the tenth day comes on numbness of the left side, acute pains in the head, and then gradually shivering, high fever, erysipelas.  His head and neck swell to an enormous size; then comes raging delirium, then stupefaction, and Don Carlos lies as one dead.

A modern surgeon would, probably, thanks to that training of which Vesalius may be almost called the father, have had little difficulty in finding out what was the matter with the luckless lad, and little difficulty in removing the evil, if it had not gone too far.  But the Spanish physicians were then, as many of them are said to be still, as far behind the world in surgery as in other things; and indeed surgery itself was then in its infancy, because men, ever since the early Greek schools of Alexandria had died out, had been for centuries feeding their minds with anything rather than with facts.  Therefore the learned morosophs who were gathered round Don Carlos’s sick bed had become according to their own confession, utterly confused, terrified, and at their wits’ end.

It is the 7th of May, the eighteenth day after the accident according to Olivarez’s story:  he and Dr Vega have been bleeding the unhappy prince, enlarging the wound twice, and torturing him seemingly on mere guesses.  “I believe,” says Olivarez, “that all was done well:  but as I have said, in wounds in the head there are strange labyrinths.”  So on the 7th they stand round the bed in despair.  Don Garcia de Toledo, the prince’s faithful governor, is sitting by him, worn out with sleepless nights, and trying to supply to the poor boy that mother’s tenderness which he has never known.  Alva, too, is there, stern, self-compressed, most terrible, and yet most beautiful.  He has a God on earth, and that is Philip his master; and though he has borne much from Don Carlos already, and will have to bear more, yet the wretched lad is to him as a son of God, a second deity, who will by right divine succeed to the inheritance of the first; and he watches this lesser deity struggling between life and death with an intensity of which we, in these less loyal days, can form no notion.  One would be glad to have a glimpse of what passed through that mind, so subtle and so ruthless, so disciplined and so loyal withal:  but Alva was a man who was not given to speak his mind, but to act it.