The King’s personal habits were regular.  His delicate health made it necessary for him to attend to his diet, although he was apt to exceed in sweetmeats and pastry.  He slept much, and took little exercise habitually, but he had recently been urged by the physicians to try the effect of the chase as a corrective to his sedentary habits.  He was most strict in religious observances, as regular at mass, sermons, and vespers as a monk; much more, it was thought by many good Catholics, than was becoming to his rank and age.  Besides several friars who preached regularly for his instruction, he had daily discussions with others on abstruse theological points.  He consulted his confessor most minutely as to all the actions of life, inquiring anxiously whether this proceeding or that were likely to burthen his conscience.  He was grossly licentious.  It was his chief amusement to issue forth at night disguised, that he might indulge in vulgar and miscellaneous incontinence in the common haunts of vice.  This was his solace at Brussels in the midst of the gravest affairs of state.  He was not illiberal, but, on the contrary, it was thought that he would have been even generous, had he not been straitened for money at the outset of his career.  During a cold winter, he distributed alms to the poor of Brussels with an open hand.  He was fond of jests in private, and would laugh immoderately, when with a few intimate associates, at buffooneries, which he checked in public by the icy gravity of his deportment.  He dressed usually in the Spanish fashion, with close doublet, trunk hose, and short cloak, although at times he indulged in the more airy fashions of France and Burgundy, wearing buttons on his coats and feathers in his hat.  He was not thought at that time to be cruel by nature, but was usually spoken of, in the conventional language appropriated to monarchs, as a prince “clement, benign, and debonnaire.”  Time was to show the justice of his claims to such honorable epithets.

The court was organized during his residence at Brussels on the Burgundian, not the Spanish model, but of the one hundred and fifty persons who composed it, nine tenths of the whole were Spaniards; the other fifteen or sixteen being of various nations, Flemings, Burgundians, Italians, English, and Germans.  Thus it is obvious how soon he disregarded his father’s precept and practice in this respect, and began to lay the foundation of that renewed hatred to Spaniards which was soon to become so intense, exuberant, and fatal throughout every class of Netherlanders.  He esteemed no nation but the Spanish, with Spaniards he consorted, with Spaniards he counselled, through Spaniards he governed.