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When after sixteen months François himself died of an ear infection, Catherine took power as gouvernante de France for another meagre son, Charles IX, aged ten, nicknamed the Brat. If Catherine’s orphaned youth personified the plight of women in power families, her adulthood demonstrated the opportunities for exercising power.^*

‘I was not loved by the king your father as I wished to be,’ Catherine confided in her daughter Isabel, ‘and God … has left me with three little children and a divided kingdom where there is not one man I trust.’ Catherine believed she must compromise with the Protestants to preserve France for her sons,^* but the Guises traduced her to Philip, claiming that she was compromising with heretics. He called her Madame la Serpente. ‘Therefore, my daughter, my friend, don’t let your husband the king [Philip] believe an untruth,’ Catherine beseeched Isabel. ‘I don’t mean to change my life or my religion.’

In January 1562, Catherine appeased the Huguenots with her tolerant Edict of Saint-Germain, which disgusted Philip. That March, in a clash at Vassy, seventy-four Protestants were killed by François, duc de Guise, leading to full-scale civil war and then to the assassination of Guise. When Catherine proposed a summit with Philip, he refused to see La Serpente, sending Isabel, who defended him against her mother.^* Catherine proposed marrying her daughter Margot to Philip’s bizarre son, Don Carlos. But Philip had a new family member to promote instead of his demented son. He summoned a boy of twelve named Geronimo.

‘I was delighted to learn that he is my brother,’ Philip wrote. He was the emperor’s illegitimate son by a German serving girl, raised in obscurity. Philip asked him if he knew who his father was. ‘No,’ said Geronimo. Philip kissed him, granted him his own court and renamed him Don Juan of Austria. Don Juan was brought up with his cousin Carlos, who was exactly the same age.

But they were very different. Don Juan grew up into a competent and flashy paladin; Carlos was deteriorating into a murderous maniac. But both craved power.

PHILIP’S MURDEROUS FLAGELLATING SON AND SWASHBUCKLING BROTHER: VICTORY AND HEARTBREAK

In 1562, when chasing a serving girl whom he liked to flagellate, Don Carlos fell head first downstairs. His head swelled, he lost his sight and he feverishly asked for the fragrant body of a revered Franciscan (who was later canonized as St Didacus), which was put into his bed. Carlos slept, but his head had become infected. The physician Vesalius trepanned the skull, drained the fluid off Carlos’s brain, removing a piece of skull, and saved his life – though Philip gave the credit to the shrivelled saint’s ‘odour of sanctity’.

Philip promised Carlos the governorship of the Netherlands but gradually realized that ‘Although my son is nineteen and although other children develop late, God wishes that mine lags behind all.’ Don Juan asked permission to fight the Ottomans in the Mediterranean. Philip refused, but the dashing bastard disobeyed the king and served at sea. When he returned, Philip was impressed by his glamorous energy. But Carlos was envious; his behaviour was becoming more alarming: though he studied German and the empire, and was happy that he was now engaged to his double cousin Anne, he stormed out of a meeting of the Castilian Cortes (parliament), threw a page out of a window, set fire to a house, tried to murder several courtiers and avidly flagellated more servants.

Philip was now facing a crisis in his Seventeen Provinces (Netherlands and Belgium) which gave his mad son a chance to meddle in dangerous matters. In 1566, Philip’s aggressive enforcement of Habsburg power in the form of taxation and Catholicism provoked rebellion in the independent-minded, sophisticated and often Protestant cities of his richest territories. While kings swaggered front of stage, in most places their powers were always limited to some extent by assemblies, cities and guilds but nowhere more so than in the pluralistic Seventeen Provinces where their rights and privileges had been confirmed by the dukes of Burgundy. Philip’s governor, his half-sister Margarita of Austria, widow of the Black Medici, was conciliatory. Philip disagreed.