By the late 1600s, the [Spanish] empire Morgan had fought was reeling; Queen Mariana had died in 1696 of breast cancer, after he doctors had given up and called in a santiguadore, a faith healer from La Mancha, the seventh son of a daughterless couple. This unlettered peasant was rumored to have miraculous powers, and he’d hurried to Madrid to work his art. But when he arrived, the man simply produced a crucifix, stood holding it over the royal patient, and chanted “I cross thee, God heal thee” over and over. The queen’s enormous, melon-size tumor showed no change, and soon she was dead. The devastated Carlos II, the last of the Spanish Hapsburg kings, was left alone.
In 1679 he’d married Marie Louise, the niece of Louis XIV, but he had proved impotent, and the deeply depressed queen ate herself to an early death, passing away at age twenty-seven. The race for an heir became even more urgent: Carlos the Bewitched had then married a neurotic German queen, Maria Ana, whom he openly hated. Their unfortunate marriage produced no heirs, and Carlos spent his last years as a weakling sitting atop a golden chest, with the great powers of Europe waiting impatiently for him to die so the spoils could be distributed.
He began to suffer from the death obsession hat ran through is family’s history, even to the point of ordering his ancestors’ bodies exhumed so that, like his father before him, he could sit and contemplate the illustrious corpses. For a Spanish king, it was not as macabre a thing to do as it would be for an Englishman or a Frenchman, and for Carlos it made a special kind of sense. In many ways his dead ancestors were the only ones who could truly understand his dilemma; even the deformed, impotent Carlos considered himself to be a divine prince, without equal on earth. Only death would release him from the monstrous body that had disgusted his wife and made a mockery of his greatness. It comforted him to know that he’ soon join his family and meet the Lord he’s striven so hard to serve.
Source:
Talty, Stephan. “Aftermath.” Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan’s Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws’ Bloody Reign. New York: Crown Publishing Group (NY), 2007. 275-76. Print.
Further Reading:
Harri Morgan / Sir Henry Morgan
Carlos II of Spain / Carlos el Hechizado (Carlos the Bewitched
Louis XIV of France / Louis le Grand (Louis the Great) / le Roi Soleil (Louis the Sun King)
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