ss, a lively young woman of no
sense, died in the stifling atmosphere of the Spanish court, and from
the attendance of Spanish doctors. Again his advisers arranged a
marriage with Maria Ana of Neuburg. The Bavarian wife stood the strain
and survived him. Both marriages were merely political--the first a
victory for the French, and the second for the Austrian party. France
and Austria were alike preparing for the day when the Spanish succession
would have to be fought for. The king was a mere puppet in the hands of
each alternately. By natural instinct he hated the French, but there was
no room in his nearly imbecile mind for more than childish superstition,
insane pride of birth, and an interest in court etiquette. The only
touch of manhood was a taste for shooting which he occasionally indulged
in the preserves of the Escorial. In his later days he suffered much
pain, and was driven wild by the conflict between his wish to transmit
his inheritance to "the illustrious house of Austria," his own kin, and
the belief instilled into him by the partisans of the French claimant
that only the power of Louis XIV. could avert the dismemberment of the
empire. A silly fanatic made the discovery that the king was bewitched,
and his confessor Froilan Diaz supported the belief. The king was
exorcised, and the exorcists of the kingdom were called upon to put
stringent questions to the devils they cast out. The Inquisition
interfered, and the dying king was driven mad among them. Very near his
end he had the lugubrious curiosity to cause the coffins of his embalmed
ancestors to be opened at the Escorial. The sight of the body of his
first wife, at whom he also insisted on looking, provoked a passion of
tears and despair. Under severe pressure from the cardinal archbishop of
Toledo, Portocarrero, he finally made a will in favour of Philip, duke
of Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV., and died on the 1st of November 1700,
after a lifetime of senile decay.

The best picture of Charles II. is to be found in _Les Memoires de la
tour d'Espagne_ of the Marquis de Villars (London, 1861), and the
_Letters_ of the Marquise de Villars (Paris, 1868).

CHARLES III. (1716-1788), king of Spain, born on the 20th January 1716,
was the first son of the second marriage of Philip V. with Elizabeth
Farnese of Parma. It was his good fortune to be sent to rule as duke of
Parma by right of his mother at the age of sixteen, and thus came under
more inte