This insolence to great personages became monstrous cruelty to the lower orders. In the Palace accounts, preserved in the Archives of Simancas, one meets with entries of indemnification paid to the fathers of boys caused to be beaten by D. Carlos. One day he wanted to throw his valet, Juan Estévez de Lobon, out of a window into the castle moat, after having beaten him, and he obliged a shoemaker, who had made him boots that were too tight, to eat them cooked and cut up in small pieces. Water fell on him one day from a window, and he at once sent a guard to burn the house and kill the inhabitants, and, "to satisfy him," says Cabrera de Córdoba, "the guard returned and said that the Holy Sacrament of the Viaticum was entering the house, and for this they had respected the walls."
On one occasion he shut himself up for five hours in the stables, and on leaving left twenty horses rendered useless through his ill-treatment, including a favourite one of the King's, which died two days afterwards.
He added to these cruel extravagances, the work of an unhinged mind, unkind, barefaced exhibitions of aversion towards his father, of which good proof was found in his papers afterwards.
Among these there was a blank book, with the title, written by the Prince's own hand, "The Great Travels of the King Philip II," and then on each of its pages these sneers: "The journey from Madrid to the Pardo," "From the Pardo to the Escorial," "From the Escorial to Aranjuez," "From Aranjuez to Toledo," "From Toledo to Valladolid," "From Valladolid to Burgos," "From Burgos to Madrid," and "From the Pardo to Aranjuez," "From Aranjuez to the Escorial," "From the Escorial to Madrid," etc.
In another paper, written also by him, was "The list of my enemies," and the first name that figured on it was "The King, my father." Then followed Ruy Gómez de Silva, the Princess de Évoli, Cardinal Espinosa, the Duque de Alba, and various other lords. On the other side of the paper he had written "List of my friends," "Queen Isabel, who has always been very good to me." And then "D. John of Austria, my much-loved uncle," then Luis Quijada, D. Pedro Fajardo, and very few more.
Indeed, Queen Isabel and D. John were the only two people the unlucky Prince spared in his hatred and general rudeness; and this has furnished poets, novelists and pseudo-learned persons with the supposition that between this unfortunate Prince, who never became a man, and the virtuous D. Isabel of the Peace, model of queens and wives, there existed a romantic and incestuous passion, which has served as a base for their midnight studies, calumnies to-day for those who even partially know history. Everyone in Madrid knew of and regretted D. Carlos's mad conduct, and foreign Courts also knew of it, as in their dispatches Ambassadors hastened to send the information, which has enabled posterity to know and judge all these circumstances.